Reviews, author conversations and the books worth making time for.
The year’s most talked-about novels moved between the planetary and the personal, as climate fiction and intense interiority dominated literary conversation.
Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, a novel set on the International Space Station, won the Booker Prize, praised as an extraordinary meditation on the Earth seen from above.
The Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Han Kang, honouring her ‘intense poetic prose’ and making her the first South Korean writer to win.
Penguin’s Famous Classics imprint broadened its celebrated reissue programme in 2024, a publishing bet that old books could win new audiences in the digital age.
New independent bookshops opened across the United Kingdom in 2024, reversing two decades of closures as communities rediscovered the local bookseller.
Efforts to remove books from American schools and libraries reached new heights, making literary censorship one of the central political battlegrounds of 2024.
