10 outstanding books you may have missed in 2024

Before our final rundown of the year's best books, we wanted to give a flavour of some of this year’s most outstanding releases which, for one reason or another, didn’t quite garner the attention they deserved.

2024 has been an enormous success for Irish writers in particular, and in the run-up to Christmas we’ve decided to throw out some ideas for stocking fillers for the discerning reader in your life. Here are ten of the best reads you may have missed this year.

Paul Muldoon – Joy in Service on Rue Tagore

You may have missed this new collection from Ireland’s greatest living poet, simply because Muldoon has been so prolific in recent years. Indeed, what makes Joy in Service especially worth your time is that it harkens back to the acerbic wit of the poet’s early work; taking aim at everything from the demagoguery of Vladimir Putin, to considered reflections on the sectarian infrastructure on which the Northern Irish statelet was founded. The maestro returns… (Faber)

For fans of: John Ashbery’s Planisphere, Seamus Heaney’s Station Island and WS Merwin’s The Shadow of Sirius

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Maurice Casey – Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism's Forgotten Radicals

Simply the most exciting, novelistic, well-researched and engaging Irish popular history book in recent memory. Maurice Casey’s account of three radical émigré women in 1920s Moscow is a must-read for anyone interested in the emergence of revolutionary intersectionality, demonstrating the importance of Queer feminist thought in the development of European socialism and how—for a time at least—all roads led to Moscow (Footnote Press)

For fans of: Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety and China Miéville’s October

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Annie Ernaux & Marc Marie – The Use of Photography

Even before her 2022 Nobel Prize win, the publication and translation of Annie Ernaux's back catalogue into English caused a sensation. Her forthrightness on everything from the state of contemporary France to sexual liberation breathed new life into the autobiographical artform, and with The Use of Photography she continues to scale new heights. Ostensibly an artistic collaboration with her former lover, photographer and journalist Marc Marie, the result is a poignant insight into the mechanics of sexual intimacy, the trappings of literary fame and Ernaux’s own battle against breast cancer in the early aughts. (Fitzcarraldo Press)

For fans of: Sinead Gleeson’s Constellations, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Susan Sontag’s On Photography

Mícheál McCann – Devotion

This tender debut from one of Ireland’s most promising new poets has the Queer domestic at its core. McCann’s control of form, sharp imagery and mythological allusion belies a collection that is by turns devastating, heart-warming and ultimately life-affirming. Many of the poems’ initial quietudes reveal hidden depths on repeated reading and are guaranteed to stay with you long after placing the book proudly back on your shelf. (The Gallery Press)

For fans of: Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Complete Poems, Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency and Paul Stephenson’s Hard Drive

Charlotte Wood – Stone Yard Devotional

Perhaps the most overlooked entry on this year's Booker shortlist, Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional deserves more attention than it has received to date. The Australian novelist’s tenth book deals with an unnamed narrator’s disillusionment and alienation from the modern world, leading her to take sanctuary in a rural convent in New South Wales. Her former life, however, catches up with her in a variety of bizarre, quasi-mythological ways and she soon discovers that even in solitude, the world has a habit of making itself known. (Hodder Sceptre)

For fans of: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, Catherine Lacey’s Nobody is Ever Missing and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive

Mike Jay – Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind

Ever craved an objective history of drug use in the arts and sciences? Ever wondered how certain psychoactive substances came to be classified as narcotic while everything else came to be called medicine? This might be the book for you. Taking the reader all the way back to the 17th Century discovery of Nitrous Oxide, Jay's meticulously researched Psychonauts delivers an interesting and above all objective account of recreational drug use in the modern world. (Yale University Press)

For fans of: Andy Letcher’s Shroom, Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind and Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life

Seán Hewitt – Rapture’s Road

I doubt whether anyone can match Seán Hewitt on sheer literary output. In the last four years, he has published a debut poetry collection in Tongues of Fire, edited the 300,000 Kisses anthology on Queer Literature, released an award-winning memoir in All Down Darkness Wide, and now looks set to publish his—no doubt brilliant—first novel Open, Heaven in 2025. It’s understandable, therefore, that even the most ardent of Hewitt’s fans may have missed his second poetry collection Rapture’s Road; released at the beginning of this year and, to my mind at least, the clearest distillation yet of the author’s wry, mystic, naturalistic and beautiful tone of voice. (Penguin)

For fans of: Jorie Graham's To 2040, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Sonnets of Desolation and Richard Scott’s Soho

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Jan Carson – Quickly, While They Still Have Horses

Jan Carson is perhaps the only other writer in Ireland who can lay claim to Seán Hewitt’s level of productivity. In little over a decade she has published seven books and with her latest, Quickly, While They Still Have Horses, she once again demonstrates that with each new book she scales new heights of originality. With unparalleled wit and compassion, Carson trains her eye on the stranger side of Northern Irish life: unintentional faith healers, the ghosts of second-hand car owners, children disappearing in interdimensional tube slide portals. Carson is the primary flag-bearer for modern Irish weird fiction. (Transworld)

For fans of: Roberto Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth, Jack Fennell’s [Ed.] Your Own Dark Shadow and George Saunders’ Civilwarland in Bad Decline

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Hari Kunzru – Blue Ruin

The final instalment in Hari Kunzru’s three-colours trilogy—following White Tears (2017) and Red Pill (2020)—Blue Ruin is the strange tale of conceptual artist Jay encountering his ex-girlfriend Alice quite by chance one morning in upstate New York. Ostensibly a pandemic novel, Blue Ruin quickly veers into the territory of love triangles, fleeting fame and caustic takes about the unholy swindle of the modern art scene. In typical Kunzru fashion, our protagonist never quite knows where he stands, but when the twist comes we are at once gripped and horrified by the notion that we have been swindled all along. (Simon & Schuster UK)

For fans of: Hernan Diaz’s Trust, Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick and Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X

Lucy Caldwell – Openings

Any new short story collection by Lucy Caldwell is cause for celebration and with Openings, she once again she reminds us of why. Balancing her prose along the careful knife-edge of narrative restraint and extraordinary bursts of lyrical flourish, the overarching theme of the stories contained in Openings has to do with the struggle for modern women to make themselves heard among the ongoing pressures of motherhood, career advancement, social isolation and shifting family dynamics. Caldwell interrogates the slippery concept of home and rewrites the domestic as a powerful new frontier. (Faber)

For fans of: Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object and Richard Yates’ Eleven Kinds of Loneliness