Whitcoulls Recommends: The best in fiction for 2024

To mark the end of the year, Joan MacKenzie has outlined her favourite fiction books for 2024.

Her top five consists of:

The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S.Berry 

Moscow X by David McClosky 

Time of the Child by Niall Williams 

Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey 

Southern Man by Greg Iles 

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talk SEDB.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Joan mackenzie, Good morning, Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas to you too.
You have brought so many books to our attention throughout
the year, and I know it's been really hard for
you to sum them up and give us five of
your favorites, really great potential sort of Christmas gift ideas.
This week we're going to finish off with fiction and
it's quite a.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
List, yes it is. It's a purely subjective list. These
are the books that I've loved, yep, so I get
to talk about them again.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
I love it. Let's start with The Peacock and the Sparrow,
which is just a great name, great title.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
Peacock and the Sparrow by I S. Berry. We haven't
done on your show because the stock arrived so late
that I didn't have a chance to fit it in,
but we have it now. This one and the next
one I want to do, which is called Moscow X
by David McCloskey, which I loved excellent. These are two brilliant,
brilliant spy thrillers. And if you're listening and you like

(01:04):
books like that, or you know someone who does, then
no further than these two. I say that these two
authors essentially could be twins because they both worked for
the CIA, they both know the inner workings of it,
and they've both done extraordinary thrillers about agents for the CIA,
operatives in the field and how that all works. And
I just I loved them both.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Nile Williams is sitting beside my bed. Time of the
child I'm looking forward to in the book. The book
is yeah, it's not my Christmas.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
Time, Williams. This is a thing of beauty. He's an
Irish writer. It's set in a small town in Ireland
in the nineteen sixties when a baby is found abandoned
and handed over to the local doctor and his daughter,
who it is imagined they will find the right place
to send this child, but in fact they can't bear

(01:55):
to give it up. And it's the story of a
man and his unmarried daughter who lives with him. He
feels that he's somehow responsible for the fact that she's
never found happiness in her own life. And then this
baby arrives and it changes the household completely. This book
is so good that I had to read a lot
of sentences two or three times just to.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
Absorb, just to it. Yeah, wash over you look, I
haven't heard about Our London Lives? What is that book
this year?

Speaker 3 (02:22):
Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey is the story
of two Irish misfits essentially, who move from Ireland down
to London in the nineteen sixties. They have a brief fling,
they meet in London, have a brief fling, and then
they don't see each other for many, many years. But
they're never out of mind even though they're out of sight,

(02:43):
and it follows the course of their lives over forty
years in London, with London as the most extraordinary backdrop
for the story. And all I can tell you is
that I just loved it. If you like a really
good epic relationship story, then this is for you.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
And look two more on the list. Southern Man.

Speaker 3 (03:00):
Southern Man by Greg Isles. He wrote the Natchez trilogy.
His books are all set and Natches, Mississippi, as is
this one. All I can say is it's almost a
thousand pages, I think, and I couldn't put it down.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
And Kayleen Bradley's The Ministry of Time. I love this
book as well.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
Which is time travel, which I simply don't ever do,
but in this case she's almost made it plausible. It's
about how the British government has decided to invest in
trying to bring people from previous centuries into the modern
day and they do that with a few of them,
and the backstories of those people, and how they suddenly
find themselves living in modern England where you can have

(03:40):
mixed flatting, or you've got Spotify, or you've got all
sorts of the Internet, things that they could never have imagined.
It's absolutely brilliant.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Joan, thank you so much for your contribution this year,
all your recommendations to the Sunday Session. We really appreciate it.
Merry Christmas and to you, thank you.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
For more from the Sunday Session with Francesca Rudkin. Listen
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