Opinion: Five of this summer’s best fiction reads

Looking for a great read to take on holiday with you? We had our experts review some of the hottest books of 2024. From love stories to tales of murders and food, there’s something for every fiction lover.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

How do we make meaning out of death, especially when it is violent and senseless? This question preoccupies Cyrus Shams, the protagonist of Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, Martyr!.

Cyrus is trying to make sense of the death of his mother, Roya, in an aeroplane shot down by US military forces over the Persian Gulf. In the wake of her death, Cyrus and his father Ali move from Iran to the US, where this question eventually leads him to work on a book about historical martyrs – “people whose deaths mattered” – from Joan of Arc to a terminally ill Iranian artist who has decided to make her decline and death a performance exhibit in the Brooklyn Museum.

In chapters alternating between different characters’ perspectives, Akbar’s writing is wry, funny and totally absorbing. It’s a profound novel about intergenerational trauma, the immigrant experience, alcohol addiction, and ultimately how we “make a death useful”.

By Alice Kelly, assistant professor of literature and history

Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Translated by Polly Barton)

Asako Yuzuki’s Butter melts uneasily in your mind. Descriptions of food, sex and violence become transcendent, almost detached from anything physical. The prose is intense and immersive, but also clear, never dense or heady.

Journalist Rika conducts prison interviews with murderer Manako Kaji, a woman who lured lonely men with her delicious and deadly gourmet meals. As Rika talks with this strange woman, she finds herself drawn deeper into her world, fascinated by Kaji’s obsession with physical pleasure. This is something that impacts all aspects of Rika’s life, from relationships with friends and family to her own body and childhood memories.

Butter makes sharp critiques of misogyny and violence in modern Japan. This darkness is balanced out by its focus on female friendship and human intimacy.

By Jane McBride, PhD in liminality in urban and digital contexts

Funny Story by Emily Henry

Readers looking for escapist fun are in safe hands with Emily Henry. She is the acclaimed author of bestsellers like Book Lovers, Beach Read and You and Me on Vacation – titles which virtually demand to be packed in your holiday suitcase. Her latest novel Funny Story is a tale of tangled love and heartbreak.

Daphne and Miles become roommates after their respective partners fall in love. To get their own back they fake their own affair – unsuprisingly, things get complicated…

The prose is crisp and pacey, and the plot is skilfully deployed. And what’s not to love about a break-up rom-com?

Funny Story is the literary equivalent of a perfect poolside negroni, and it seems churlish to wish for a little more asperity in the mix. Yet I’d have liked to feel more emotion, and although the story centres on betrayal, the tone is tirelessly upbeat. I hurtled through this sprightly feel-good novel knowing that things would turn out even better in the end.

By Sally O'Reilly, honorary associate in creative writing

James by Percival Everett

James is an incredible re-writing of Mark Twain’s 1884 American classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin that tells the story from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. Just like the original book, it is set in the pre-Civil War plantation South. It’s 1861, war is brewing, and when the enslaved James hears that he may be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his family, he goes on the run as “Jim”, with the resourceful young white boy, Huck Finn.

Everett has reclaimed James from the peripheries and urges the reader to listen to his story.

This is a literary, writerly and scholarly novel. Everett expertly weaves black literary criticism and theory into his narrative, as well as making artful allusions to the books that came and shaped American scholarly and literary traditions. This weaving, however, is done with a light touch.

Read this book and listen carefully to James’s story. It will change you. You will start to question all the other classic novels you’ve read and wonder whose story is being suppressed and why. What if, you’ll ask yourself, they could be fleshed out and heard properly? It would, perhaps, be a much richer tale to tell.

By Emily Zobel Marshall, professor in postcolonial literature

Parade by Rachel Cusk

Parade is a searching book written against conformity. It is an exploration of the role of gender in the genesis and reception of art – a novel in which selfhood, creativity and family relations are submitted to unflinching analytical scrutiny.

Cusk’s examination of these subjects is conducted through a kaleidoscope of narratives, told from different points of view, in which the same themes crystallise and dissolve again and again.

The book’s four chapters focus on the lives of artists, each of whom is referred to as “G”. The Stuntman tells the story of an artist who, “perhaps because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down”. The Midwife tells the story of an artist who paints “horrible, pornographical and gleeful” works as a visceral response to her parents’ disapproval and neglect.

In its themes and forms, Parade is a daring and difficult book, one in which Cusk embraces abstraction, pursuing formal innovations which she knows risk alienating readers on a quest for less-demanding narratives. Yet the challenges of Parade appear to be a matter of principle.

In the opening chapter, the first-person narrator ponders “the virtues of difficulty”, observing “how far people have been prepared to run the risk of not being understood”. This is a risk which Cusk, in this taut, haunting, exalting book, shows herself willing to take.

By Scarlett Baron, Associate Professor in Department of English Language and Literature at UCL

This article originally appeared in The Conversation on 12 July 2024.

Links

• Original article in The Conversation
• Dr Scarlett Baron's academic profile
• UCL English
• UCL Arts & Humanities