Notable Novels of Fall 2024

What are the novels everyone is talking about in Fall 2024?

Well, the most obvious answer to this question is Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo. Every Rooney book is a major publishing event, and this latest offering—which centres on the fraught relationship between two Irish brothers—has received rave reviews almost across the board. NPR called it “her most moving novel yet”; The Guardian said it was “perfect – truly wonderful – a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements.”

Intermezzo is set in Dublin, 2022, and unfolds over a period of around six months. Peter is a lawyer in his thirties; Ivan, his younger brother, is a chess player and data analyst in his twenties. Each has, as one might expect from a Rooney novel, a complicated love life. Peter’s unfolds as a triangle between himself, his former partner Sylvia, and a younger student, Naomi, who dabbles in sex work. Ivan falls for an older woman who fears the social repercussions of being seen together. “Is there a better novelist at work right now?” asked the Guardian reviewer, in exhausted admiration: “Rooney, author of four books in just seven years, has at this point already created more enduringly memorable characters than most novelists ever manage.”

Rooney fans may also be interested in her recent interview with The New York Times, a relatively rare opportunity to hear her discuss her work at length. “With this ,” she explains of the novel’s stream-of-consciousness passages, “as soon as I conceived of Peter, the older-brother character, I wrote down what is now the first page of the novel almost instantly, and it has hardly changed. It was a fragmented, fluid way of trying to grapple with his interiority, and it started like that and basically went on like that.”

Already on my list. Anything else unmissable out this season?

Speaking of literary buzz, many bookshops are opening at midnight to celebrate the launch of is Haruki Murakami’s The City and its Uncertain Walls, translated by Philip Gabriel, on November 19. It’s his first new novel in six years. Expect “DJs spinning jazz records and spaghetti bars,” says Publisher’s Weekly. “And in New York City, Christina Tosi, CEO of the Brooklyn-based bakery Milk Bar, is creating Murakami-themed muffins—Murakuffins—for local release parties.”

Well, sure. But tell me more about the book itself.

It’s about a teenage boy whose girlfriend mysteriously disappears. He never gets over it, and finally finds her working in a dream library in a shadowy parallel world. But she doesn’t remember him at all. The publisher describes it as: “a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them [and] a parable for these strange times.” All that is to say: expect magical realism, dream logic, and plenty of Easter Egg surprises for longtime Murakami fans.

What novels are on your own personal wish-list in Fall 2024?

Thanks for asking. I’ve just picked up a copy of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake. I loved—loved—her earlier novel of strip bars and women’s prisons, The Mars Room, which fizzed with life and humour despite its sometimes bleak subject matter. This new novel follows a female American spy as she infiltrates a French eco-terrorist group, was an instant New York Times bestseller on its release in September, and it has already been shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. “Rich with secrets and dense with vibe, you could say that all of Kushner’s novels are spy novels, exposés from someone on the inside,” observed the Los Angeles Review of Books. “So, what happens when she writes an actual spy novel? Everything you might expect—espionage, intrigue, heart-racing action sequences—and something you might not: an authentic ethical awakening.”

I’ve also got my eye on The Hotel, a creepy new short story collection by Daisy Johnson (Everything Under, Sisters); Ali Smith’s newest novel, Gliff, which is out 31 October in the UK, but not until spring in the US; and the long-awaited new novel, Our Evenings, from Alan Hollinghurst (The Line of Beauty). 

Plus there is Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s English-language translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s deliciously titled The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story. The Nobel Prize-winner returns with what has been described variously as a “satirical take” and a “feminist twist” on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. In Tokarczuk’s version, an engineering student retires to a sanatorium for tuberculosis sufferers, in  Silesia, 1913. Every evening, the residents gather to drink the local hallucinogenic liquor and debate life, the universe, and everything. But there’s something unsettling going on in the woods outside the walls. “Happily, all the various unlikely strands come together in the closing chapters,” declares the Times Literary Supplement. “The eerily majestic finale is haunting, cathartic and gleeful – a zany confection that could only have come from this unpredictable, unique writer.’

Anything else you’d like to highlight from the crop of Fall 2024 novels, while we’re here?

Yes, let me make a quick shout out for Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, author of the magnificent, passionate Cleanness. In Small Rain, a poet is struck down with a rare disease and finds himself confined to an intensive care unit. The Chicago Tribune described it as “one of the most profound reading experiences I’ve ever had,” adding: “A novel about a man stuck alone in a hospital bed should be inert, but Small Rain is anything but.” The Observer reviewer agreed: reading it, “you feel as though you were holding a single grain of rice in your hand which, upon examination under a microscope, reveals itself to be engraved with the history of the world.” Small Rain is a “vivid, generous” novel that “will provide sustenance.” All very promising. It’s just out, and there’s a copy sitting on my bedside table waiting to be read.

What’s on yours? We love to hear from Five Books readers. Let us know which titles you’ve been waiting for by sending us a message on social media.