The best books of 2024: Allan Massie picks his highlights

Writer Andrew O'Hagan | Picture: Jon Tonks/PA Wire

Long Island, by Colm Tóibín (Picador) This sequel to Colm Tóibín’s most popular novel Brooklyn begins strikingly, with a challenge that is both practical and moral. Eilis, heroine in both novels, opens the door to an Irishman who tells her that her husband Tony has got his wife pregnant and that he proposes to bring the baby to her doorstep. Sometimes painful, often amusing but always compelling.

​Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan (Faber & Faber) Set in contemporary London, this is an enthralling novel in the grand Victorian manner. Campbell Flynn is an art historian and critic, a Glasgow working-class boy who has married into the aristocracy. All is not sunshine however. A sitting tenant in the basement of his fine house is the bane of his life and one of his students, Milo, will introduce him to the darker mysteries of the internet.

​The Highlands and Islands of Scotland by Alistair Moffat (Birlinn) Taking in the whole sweep of human history north of the Highland Line, this book will both inspire curiosity and invite argument. I would advise reading it straight through, then returning to dip in again and again.

​This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud (Fleet) This wonderfully enjoyable novel may be called a family saga, the family being the author’s own. It spans more than a hundred years, beginning in June 1940 in Algeria, where a small boy, Francois, is writing to his father, Gaston, a naval officer, currently an attache in Salonica.

The Drowned by John Banville (Faber & Faber) A loner who has been fishing in the sea and comes upon a car abandoned in a field, the passenger door open. Then a man emerges from the rocky beach, saying his wife has been drowned. Detective inspector Strafford of the Gardai is called upon to investigate, and it soon becomes apparent that all is not as it seems. Why is Banville so good? Perhaps because he is not a crime writer, but rather a novelist in whose books crime happens.

Lesley Glaister

​A Particular Man by Lesley Glaister (Bloodhound) Set in the wretchedly poor and battered England of 1945-6, this novel about a soldier returning home from a Japanese prisoner of war camp throbs with loss. There is nothing extravagant here, nothing fanciful – just well-imagined characters, a convincing setting and a good and often moving story.

​The Wild Men by David Torrance (Bloomsbury) In this thoroughly-researched and very readable account of Britain’s first Labour government, David Torrance offers rich character sketches and takes us through the often difficult history with exemplary skill. A scholarly book, but one which will appeal to the general reader.

​Rabbits by Hugo Rifkind (Polygon) After too many parties, too much drink and too many drugs Tomo’s youth slips away and he finds himself living in London, “a Burns-Night Scot”. Sometimes sad, often funny, this coming-of-age story shows that, while the past may be a foreign country, it is never altogether lost.

​Blood Sacrifice by Douglas Jackson (Canelo Set in Warsaw during the Second World War, Douglas Jackson’s novel finds his resistance fighter Jan Kalisz attempting to smuggle weapons into the ghetto. This is art which is true to life at its worst but also at its most heroic.

​That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz by Malachy Tallack (Canongate) Shetlander Jack Paton is well on in his sixties and lives a solitary existence that suits him, but when his way of life meets a challenge the question is how he meets it, and whether he will allow others into his protected space. A beautifully written novel, imaginative, understanding and sympathetic.