The best books of 2024 – recommended by Ian Rankin, Mick Herron, Mary Beard and others | UK | News

Sir Ian Rankin, above, whose 25th Rebus novel Midnight And Blue (Orion) was one of the smash hits of the autumn, says: “White City by Dominic Nolan (Headline) features postwar, but pre-groovy London in all its gangland glory as communities and individuals clash and race tensions reach boiling point. A hard-hitting novel with a very human heart. Missing Person: Alice by Simon Mason (Quercus) sees a detective specialising in finding people long disappeared methodically searching for a young woman. Hints of Georges Simenon here though the story is set in contemporary England. It’s lean, tense, gripping.”

(Image: Orion)

Tessa Hadley, above, whose latest novella, The Party (Jonathan Cape) is out now, says: “Someone put Tom Lamont’s Going Home (Hodder) in my hand the other day and I was soon involved in his lovely, exact sentences and perceptions, building a poignant and generous story about some men looking after a baby. It chimed with another book I’ve loved this year, Father Time (Princeton University Press) by brilliant evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, about the long history of male nurturing.”

(Image: Jonathan Cape)

William Boyd, above, whose latest novel, Gabriel’s Moon (Penguin) is a taunt espionage tale, says: “I was absolutely fascinated by Nicholas Shakespeare’s magisterial biography of the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man (Vintage). Shakespeare knows Fleming’s world intimately and the intricate portrait of this complex individual is unsurpassable. Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, Our Evenings (Macmillan), is another delight: a whole life revealed in carefully wrought episodes – limpid, elegant, fastidiously well written.”

(Image: Penguin)

Historian Patrick Bishop, above, whose latest unmissable book, Paris ’44 (Penguin), examines the liberation of the French capital, says: “I loved Undefeatable: Odesa in Love & War (Scotland Street Press) by Julian Evans, which told me more about the people and character of Ukraine than anything I’ve read, based on its author’s deep knowledge and affection for the country. Pamela Harriman, the ex-wife of Winston Churchill’s ghastly son Randolph was quite a gal – high-class courtesan, wartime schemer and international mover and shaker – and Sonia Purnell’s page turner, Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Seduction, Intrigue and Power (Little, Brown), does her full justice.”

(Image: Penguin)