It’s that time of year again! I’ve rounded up my favourite novels from the past year, featuring some new authors, though mostly old. Stay tuned till the very end for a preview of the books I’m most looking forward to in the new year.
The Perfumist of Paris, Alka Joshi
The third and final instalment in Lakshmi’s story takes place in Paris in the 1970s. The 13-year-old sister, Radha, who ran away from her village where she was known as the bad luck girl to find her long-lost older sister in Jaipur, is now grown, married to a Frenchman and with two daughters of her own, finding her calling as a mixer of scents.
Split between India and France, this book is just as rich and colourful as The Henna Artist was. Radha’s life and marriage are turned upside down when the child she gave up for adoption when she was no more than a child herself comes looking for her in the city of light. It’s another love letter to India that Joshi evokes so well, but also deals with the theme of second-wave feminism and Radha, like her sister Lakshmi, carving out a career for herself out of something she is passionate about.
The London Séance Society, Sarah Penner
A murder mystery set in a Victorian gentlemen’s club in London and involving an acclaimed spiritualist. Lenna Wickham never believed in the occult. But her sister’s shocking and sudden death sent her across the English Channel to Paris in search of acclaimed medium Vaudeline D’Allaire, searching for answers. As the two women look for clues aided by a gentleman member of the London Séance Society, Lenna realizes the depth of her feelings for Vaudeline and learns that her sister was in with the society much deeper than she seemed. It’s evocative of a Penny Dreadful, and I devoured Penner’s sophomore novel in a single day.
The Paris Deception, Bryn Turnbull
Sophie and her brother Dietrich fled Stuttgart when they saw the Nazi party’s true colours. Now working as a fine art restorer at the Jeu de Paume in occupied Paris, determined to save the degenerate art condemned by the Nazis to flames. Working with her estranged sister-in-law Fabienne, the two women set about replacing the degenerate works of art with skillful forgeries and hiding the true masterpieces away in a countryside chateau that holds more than just a fortune in art. But how long can they keep up their deception, when the Nazis are cracking down on any form of resistance mercilessly?
Turnbull is a fine wordsmith who employs a lot of detail to make a scene jump off the page, and The Paris Deception was no different. I found her writing in this, her latest, as colourful as the works of art that lined the walls of the Jeu de Paume. I could practically feel Konrad Richter’s ice-cold fingers on my spine, and Fabienne’s deft brushstrokes. The Paris Deception was a slow start, however, it held my attention. Dietrich’s and Sophie’s backstory answered questions raised from the very beginning.
Homecoming, Kate Morton
Jess is a journalist trying to eke out an existence in London on a freelancer’s salary. When a phone call from the doctor alerts her that her grandmother, Nora, has suffered a nasty fall, she returns home to Darling House in Sydney. Truthfully, the book itself felt like Jess’s childhood bedroom, full of cobwebs and eclectic knick-knacks. It took me a little while to get invested in Homecoming because it was so heavy with detail, which for a time felt unnecessary and considerably slowed the plot. But once Jess discovered her family’s connection to the Turner Family Tragedy of 1959, I was hooked.
Christmas Eve 1959, on a blazing hot summer day Isabel Turner and her four children are picnicking in the sprawling gardens of Halycon, their summer home in the Adelaide Hills. That evening, a local man finds them all dead, and for sixty years local authorities have assumed that Isabel was not in the right frame of mind, that perhaps she was suffering post-partum depression and she committed suicide, taking her children with her. Jess discovers a connection to the tragedy, and as one family secret after another comes bubbling up to the surface, it has her questioning her own past and everything she thought she knew about the sweet old lady she calls grandmother.
The character Nora struck me as the most tragic. This woman wanted nothing more in the world than to be surrounded by a great big family, and in the end, she was left with no one. Part of it was by her own design. In her desperation to cling to the family she kept secrets and drove a wedge between mother and daughter.
The Armour of Light, Ken Follett
My favourite author once again returns to Kingsbridge, only this time the townsfolk’s lives are upended by the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.
Yellowface, R F Kuang
I completely fell into the book and only surfaced for air after turning the last page. It’s easy to read and easy to get utterly lost in, just like the unreliable narrator gets lost in her doomscrolling as her reputation disintegrates on Twitter. It reminded me a lot of a Ted Talk called “How One Tweet Can Ruin Your Life” by Ron Jonson, and it’s morbidly fascinating.
Yellowface delves into cancel culture, censorship, cultural appropriation and plagiarism. June’s A-list author friend Athena Liu suddenly and freakishly dies and, having always been jealous of her success, June steals her manuscript, polishes it, and publishes it as her own work. She basks in her newfound fame as a serious author, until Athena’s ghost comes back to haunt her.
June is contemptible and pitiful. She seesaws from petty jealousy to playing the victim to justify her actions, by suggesting Athena stole from her, too, from everyone around her, from the Korean War veteran she interviewed for the basis of one of her central characters to June, who’s tearful college confession to a trusted friend she turned into a short story for a literary journal. It explores the thrill of chasing stardom, loneliness, petty jealousy, and mental health. In her acknowledgements, Kuang describes Yellowface as “a horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry.”
A Beautiful Rival, Gill Paul
Elizabeth Arden came from a poverty-stricken family in rural Ontario, now she’s clawing her way into New York high society as a cosmetic titan. Her main rival? Helena Rubinstein—a Polish immigrant with successful businesses on both sides of the pond who claims to have a medical background. But Elizabeth won’t let her get a footing in New York so easily. Through the frivolities of the 1920s and the depression of the 1930s, these two women not only grow their businesses of making women beautiful, but they also turn ugly as they escalate their rivalry to legendary proportions—copying marketing tactics, dropping rumours about each other to the press, planting spies in each other’s salons and even hiring each other’s ex-husbands.
A Beautiful Rival was similar to Paul’s last novel—The Manhattan Girls—in regards to it being about women carving out a place for themselves in a world that was not yet ready for them. Paul’s writing is breezy as ever and makes for a kick-ass sojourn through time to New York in the roaring 20s.
The Cuban Heiress, Chanel Cleeton
The blurb promises a high-stakes drama on the high seas that summons to mind a Ramón Campos soap opera like Alta Mar. The contenders? Former actress and child of the slums Catherine masquerading as a high society New Yorker. Her fiancé, Raymond, is keeping secrets of his own from her. The devilish jewel thief, Harry, she finds herself inexplicably bound to. And dead woman walking, Elena. It’s a perfect storm in the making, all on board the ill-fated Morro Castle, a luxury liner that set sail from New York in September 1934 bound for Havana. For its guests, a welcome distraction from the Great Depression.
Cleeton’s best work, in my mind, has nothing to do with the fictional Perez sisters. She’s done it again—taken a lesser-known event in Cuban-American history and spun it into a thrilling high-stakes novel. I do find Cleeton’s style of writing quite basic compared with other authors on this list. However, that’s just the sort of thing that makes for a breezy beach read.
Happy Place, Emily Henry
Emily Henry has delivered another knockout. Med resident Harriet has broken up with her longtime boyfriend Wyn, only neither of them has told their friends about it because they’re a package deal, and they don’t want to break up the group. Every year, they vacation for a week at Sabrina’s father’s holiday home in Maine. Only this year, her dad is selling the house and it’s the last time they’ll all be here together. Harriet and Wyn must keep up the illusion that they’re still a happy couple while behind the scenes they work through the trauma that led to their breakup. What I love about Henry’s romances is that they feel so real. Relationships are raw, leaving one feeling very vulnerable with their emotions, and in order to work, couples must learn to communicate. It also doesn’t hurt that Henry knows how to turn up the heat!
The Most Anticipated Books of 2024
These are the books that are current works in progress, and that I am positively squirming to read in the new year. Which books are you most excited about in 2024?
Psykhe, Kate Forsyth
A retelling of the myth of Psyche, set in the Roman Kingdom—the time before the rape of Lucrezia and the birth of the Republic. I already read Luna McNamara’s Psyche and Eros this year, and now that I know the myth I can’t wait to see how Forsyth puts her spin on it.
The Shadow Key, Susan Stokes-Chapman
The Shadow Key promises to be a similar gothic tale to Stokes-Chapman’s debut novel, Pandora, only this time it promises to be much, much darker with a heavy emphasis on the occult. Set in Georgian London, the principal character Henry Talbot (I thought I recognized that name from Downton Abbey) finds himself dismissed from his hospital post and travelling to backwater Meirionydd, Wales, in search of a new position. Belief in magic is rife, and the town views the Englishman with suspicion.
The Phoenix Crown, Kate Quinn and Janie Chang
A collab between the authors of The Rose Code and The Library of Legends, The Phoenix Crown concerns two wronged women on a quest for justice, a priceless relic of Beijing’s fallen summer palace, a sumptuous masquerade ball at the Palace of Versailles and the devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1906.