2024 Arts Preview: The Year Ahead in Books

Andrew O’Hagan’s first novel, Our Fathers was published in 1999. Caledonian Road is only his seventh. There’s been a lot of other writing over the years, but I’ve always thought of him as primarily a novelist, as good a one as any Scottish writer of our time. Caledonian Road is a stout, beefy book, beefy enough to warrant a cast list. I look forward eagerly to reading it.

Claire Messud’s best-known novel is probably The Emperor’s Children, published almost 20 years ago. Her new novel due out in May, This Strange Eventual History, begins in Salonica and French Algeria in the ominous year 1940. Spanning several decades and several countries, it promises to be just as enthralling.

In contrast, there some writers so prolific that readers – and reviewers – can scarcely keep up with them. Here in Scotland we have most notably Alexander McCall Smith and Alistair Moffat. Each has at least two books coming out next year. One off Moffat’s, Italy’s Paradise, a history of Tuscany is admittedly a reprint but now revised, while the other, Between Britains, is topographical, historical and, I guess, challenging. McCall Smith offers the first book in a new series, The Perfect Passion Dating Company. What next? The remarkable thing is that everything he writes is agreeably leisurely.

Donald S Murray came to writing after years of teaching and is so good and natural he invites the old question: can a duck swim? His new novel The Salt and the Flame tells the stories of members of an Gaelic-speaking community displaced in the 1920s and translated to the industrial Lowlands, England, Canada and the USA.

Some 40 years ago when I was editing a magazine, I published an article by Joseph Farrell about an Italian poet, pilot and ant-Fascist Lauro de Bosis who mysteriously disappeared after scattering anti-Mussolini papers over Rome. Now, after years of interest or obsession, Farrell tells his story in detail.

Hugo Rifkind is a newspaper columnist I always read, usually with pleasure. Now he is publishing a novel, Rabbit. If it is even half as good as his journalism it will be worth reading.

Formerly an arts journalist, Philip Miller had a success with his first novel The Goldenacre a couple of years ago, o I am eager to read his second, The Hollow Tree. I am also looking forward to A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnett, whose police procedurals are unusual, distinctive and delightful.

In this grim time here are two coming books which one is more likely to read for enlightenment rather than simple pleasure – the latter being, after all, why one mostly reads a book. The first is a Chinese novel, Tiananmen Square, by Lel Wen, centring, I suppose, on that dreadful moment in China’s dreadful history. If this seems deterrent, it’s worth adding that it comes with a recommendation from William Boyd.

The other is Autocracy Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Rule the World by Anne Applebaum who, as a journalist, has never shied away from exploring and revealing the dark horrors of the world we are condemned to live in. It won’t, I think, be published here until September. Things will likely be worse by then. Even so, Applebaum will prepare you for whatever horrors are in store.

There are no end of books about Churchill. Still, Churchill The Scottish Years by Andrew Liddle is, if minor, also bit unusual. It should have at least one fine comic moment: when he lost his Dundee seat to a teetotaller calling for Prohibition.

Finally there is Cairn by Kathleen Jamie: poems, travel, observations and reflections. Everything she writes is worth reading and everything is well made.