My Top 10 Books of 2024 – Part Four

Here are my favourite ten books of 2024 Part Four, not counting audio books. Quite a disparate selection for a change.

The Portrait Girl by Nicole Swengley

I had no idea what to expect when I started reading The Portrait Girl. What we know is that Freya’s mother has just died and Freya needs to clear out her cottage and then decide whether to sell it, rent it out or keep it. Unfortunately, the jewellery business she ran with her husband failed and it also saw the end of their marriage. She is now on her uppers, and it appears her ex-husband sold one of her designs without crediting her or paying her a fee.

While going through her mother’s things, Freya discovers a portrait miniature, but she has no idea who the subject is or what it has to do with her family. Determined to discover its secrets, she finds herself drawn into the world of art collector Ralph Merrick and his ‘salons’. Merrick invites his friends and colleagues to take part in Victorian evenings, where everyone dresses up and becomes a character. For the evening Freya is known as Emily Meadowcroft, and everyone seems to know her.

For my full review click here

Moral Code

I’m not a SciFi fan but Moral Code has nothing to do with Star Trek, Star Wars or rockets going into outer space and finding other solar systems. Thank goodness. I think it needs its own genre.

Even if you know nothing about artificial intelligence, robotics, nanites or moral operating systems, you will still enjoy this book. It asks so many questions. I’ve been on the ‘readalong’ where we’ve attempted to answer some of them. Can an AI replace human interaction? The jury’s still out. Just because we can build something, should we? Think atomic bomb or cloning humans? No. Cloning my beloved Jack Russell (we lost her three years ago) would be tempting – where’s the harm? Because one thing leads to another and we’ll be cloning humans next.

For my full review click here

The Enlightenment Club by Chris West

It’s 1971 and I’m doing my A levels at the local tech. I apply for Bristol University to read English and – yes you guessed it – Philosophy. I even get as far as a group interview where a load of Old Etonians discuss a load of old you know what. I don’t get in, so I do a foundation year at the Art College instead, followed by Fashion Writing at The London College of Fashion. We have a blast. Go to shows, drink Bucks Fizz at eleven in the morning, while an over-tanned Judith Chalmers does the commentary. So I ‘get’ Stella, though I never got thrown out or tipped a bowl of soup over anyone’s head.

For my full review click here

The Night Counsellor by L K Pang

The Night Counsellor opens in 1953 where Counsellor Jane Galloway, has been hired by the Beaumont lunatic asylum (they still used that term) to try and help Patient ‘A’ to regain her speech. But Jane is getting nowhere and time is running out as the police believe Patient ‘A’ is linked to the death of another woman, whose body was found nearby. They don’t know who either of the women are.

Then we go back to 1952 and Georgina is married to Charles who takes her away from London to live in his huge house in Yorkshire. It’s right next door to his mother Lillian, who comes and goes as she pleases with her own key. They have tried to start a family, but she miscarries every time and she soon finds herself severely depressed. She self-harms and becomes anorexic, and this is where Charles brings in Alexander to ‘help’, while he swans around Europe selling luxury cigars, allegedly.

For my full review click here

The Wonder Drug by Susanna Beard

Imagine this happening to you. There you are, minding your own business, when someone thrusts a folder into your hands and tells you to hide it. Or give it to someone in the media. He gives you their card. Sorry it has to be you, he says. It will probably change your life forever, may even get you killed, but hey ho, I had no choice. Then he disappears. His name was Lars, that’s all you know.

It’s not a prank. It’s for real. What do you do? You’re just an ordinary middle aged woman with no experience of industrial espionage or secrets or whatever this is. At this point I may have given it to someone else and said ‘you deal with it. I’ve only been here five minutes and I’m just covering maternity leave.’

For my full review click here

The Price of Dormice by Steve Lunn

Another book set in a part of the country I know pretty well. I live in Cheltenham, which is mentioned a couple of times in the story. We often visit Oxford, taking the granddaughters to the ‘Nat Hist’ as our accidental hero Mick Jarvis calls it, and the Pitt Rivers with its shrunken heads.

But The Price of Dormice isn’t about the past. It’s about the future, and the price we pay for allowing green belt land to be turned into a massive housing development. The natural world is shrinking thanks to us, and a group of unscrupulous developers are going to make loads of money from it. And I mean LOADS.

For my full review click here

Anywhen by Beth Duke

I hope the author won’t mind, but I am going to approach this review in a slightly different fashion. There will be thousands of reviews in the future, so here goes with mine, based on some of Beth’s bookclub discussion topics.

But firstly let me say that I am in the UK, so I obviously didn’t attend Woodstock in 1969 (I was 16 and had just finished my O levels). I did, however go to the Isle of Wight Festival where Bob Dylan was the headline act, along with The Who. Memories of the toilets are the same as Woodstock, disgusting and overflowing. I can’t believe we were allowed to go when we were so young.

For my full review click here

Broken Madonna by Anna Lucia

What an emotional read. From an orphanage in the poverty-stricken Apennine Mountains of Italy in 1949, to both Italy and England in 1999, this book will leave you in tears, at least it did me. Adelina, aged 15 and 11-year-old Elizabetta are best friends. Fragile and deeply religious, Elizabetta looks to Adelina for support.

When Elizabetta claims to see the Madonna by the River Mollarino, Adelina is sceptical. She thinks her friend is too easily overcome with emotion. But when injured soldier Giulio is ‘healed’, the whole town flocks to see her. She becomes known as The Barefoot Flower Girl of Atina. Her fame spreads and she becomes yet another child to have been ‘visited’ by the Virgin Mary. These appearances are known as the Marian Apparitions, the best known of which is probably Our Lady of Fatima.

For my full review click here

The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali

I confess I cried and not just at the end. Real tears running down my face. I found this book so emotional, even more so because much of it actually happened. The two main characters – Ellie and Homa – are fictitious, but their struggles are real. I remember well when the Ayatollah Khomeini took power from the Shah, and the large numbers of Iranians who came to the UK.

Ellie’s family are wealthy, but when her father dies, she and her mother are forced to move downtown, where she meets Homa at her new school. Homa is brave and feisty, but Ellie’s mother doesn’t approve of the friendship, because of Homa’s lower status. Then Ellie’s circumstances change and she is back in the privileged world of her early childhood.

For my full review click here

Happy Bloody Christmas by Jo Middleton

This was hilarious. At times the body in the larder was almost incidental. Who killed Colin was largely irrelevant – he was a smarmy d*”k anyway – except that it gave Anna, husband Oli and best friend Jennie something to focus on apart from the potatoes and the tablescape (whatever that is). The book is often just Anna’s rant against all things Christmas, her snooty, judgemental mother-in-law, ridiculously high expectations, and many other things.

I’m not Anna’s generation. I’m the mother-in-law, the grandmother and the babysitter, but there was still so much I could identify with. I’m a list maker, obsessively so. I think the more times I make a list and write it down, the more chance I will remember what’s on it and even do stuff without referring to it. Fat chance. Luckily I’ve never had to make a list of potential murder suspects.

For my full review click here