Review

Five of the best translated fiction of 2024

This article is more than 11 months old

An indigenous epic, macabre short stories from Spain, Aztec adventures and more

John Self 

6 December 2024

Aednan
Linnea Axelsson, translated by Saskia Vogel, Pushkin
This award-winning novel set in northern Sweden (the title means both “the land” and “my mother”) is subtitled “An Epic”, but its form – spare, haiku-like verse – means the pages breathe freely. The impressionistic style is matched by the structure, which shifts back and forward, covering a century from 1913 to 2015 in the lives of two indigenous Sámi families. They face the arrival of Swedish settlers and the destruction of their culture, including the building of a dam on Sámi land. One woman regrets her own failure to resist – “The Swedish / language grew / along my thoughts // The Sámi since long / asleep in the body / of shame // obedience overlaid” – and wonders of her children, “How am I to / explain to them // that the ruin / is in my voice.” The result is indeed epic, but also intimate and powerful.

Sally Rooney to Percival Everett / The 24 best books of 2024 27 December 2024 Rebecca Laurence and Lindsay Baker

 

Simon & Schuster/ Faber/ Doubleday

From an intense tale of two brothers to a stunning Booker winner – the very best fiction of the year.

Sally Rooney to Percival Everett: The 24 best books of 2024

27 December 2024

Rebecca Laurence and Lindsay Baker

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Launched late in the year to the feverish fan hoards was the fourth instalment in the so-called "Rooneyverse". In a slight departure from the norm, Intermezzo's protagonists are two men: Peter, 32, a talented but troubled barrister, and his 22-year-old chess-prodigy brother, Ivan, both working through grief and family tensions following their father's recent death. Elsewhere, however, there were plenty of Rooney's familiar beats to be enjoyed – tangled relationships, frequent sex, philosophical debates and deceptively simple but assured prose. "Intermezzo is perfect – truly wonderful" writes The Observer, "a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney's richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements." Its review concludes by asking: "Is there a better novelist at work right now?" While The New York Times' critic was enchanted, writing: "Intermezzo is Sally Rooney with a bit more butter and cream. Yes, please, waiter. Call me a fool for love, but this oft-jaundiced reader found this meal to be discerning, fattening, old-school and delicious." (RL)

Review

The best fiction of 2024

This article is more than 1 month old

From Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo to Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, Percival Everett’s James and a host of inventive debuts – this year’s highlights in fiction

Justine Jordan

Saturday 7 December 2024

In a year of surprises – a posthumous fable from Gabriel García Márquez, a superhero collaboration between China Miéville and Keanu Reeves – the biggest news, as ever, was a new Sally Rooney novel. Intermezzo (Faber) landed in September: the story of two brothers mourning their father and negotiating relationships with each other and the women in their lives, it is a heartfelt examination of love, sex and grief. With one strand exploring the neurodiverse younger brother’s perspective, and a conflicted stream-of-consciousness for the older, it opens up a more fertile direction after 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You.