From delicious Singaporean street food to everything you’ve ever wanted to know about capers

Dinner: 120 Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes
Meera Sodha, Fig Tree
Relief was the first emotion I felt on opening this book. Greed was the second. Dinner – Meera Sodha’s fourth recipe collection – opts out of the stress of hosting, focusing instead on the satisfaction of making one easy but delicious vegan or vegetarian dish for your evening meal. Finding herself in a state of overwhelm, Sodha realised she needed to scale down her idea of what cooking should be. The result is a joyous rundown of mostly one-pot or one-tray dinners, many of them Asian. It would make a great present for everyone from students finding their bearings to busy people wanting to eat more exciting midweek meals. Sodha’s recipes have a rare kind of magic: she somehow manages to conjure deliciousness without resorting to long ingredient lists or fancy techniques. The butter paneer cooked in the oven is already on permanent rotation in my house.

Salman Rushdie’s account of his near-fatal stabbing, a 360-degree view of Queen Elizabeth II and Al Pacino’s rags to riches career are among this year’s most compelling personal histories

There are myriad ways to tell the story of a life, as shown by this year’s best biographies. Craig Brown’s doorstopper A Voyage Around the Queen (4th Estate), about the reign of Elizabeth II, dispenses with linear storytelling in favour of a patchwork of diary entries, letters, vignettes, second-hand anecdotes and even dreams (the writer Paul Theroux once dreamed of being nestled in Her Majesty’s bosom). The result is an unorthodox and wonderfully irreverent book which, alert to the absurdities of the monarchy, reveals as much about how others saw the Queen as the woman herself.

Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman (Virago) is a rich and riveting portrait of another seemingly unknowable aristocrat. The daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill, Harriman was, says Purnell, a canny diplomat who exerted remarkable influence on mid-20th-century politics through her three marriages and numerous affairs with powerful men (her lovers included a prince, a shipping magnate and a celebrated US broadcaster). Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz (Scribner) is a luminous joint biography of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, inspired by newly unearthed correspondence between the two writers that reads like “a lovers’ quarrel”. Anolik traces both women’s lives and their fraught friendship in the late 60s and early 70s, which fell apart after Didion was hired to edit Babitz’s first book. Reader, she fired her.

From stories of queer artists reshaping the pop landscape to an insider’s view of Tupac and Biggie, the highlights of a tuneful year

The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Performers Shaped Pop Culture 1955-1979
Jon Savage, Faber
From his definitive punk history England’s Dreaming to his forensic examination of mid-60s pop culture 1966 , Jon Savage’s work has long represented the gold standard of music writing. This may well be his masterpiece : an epic of meticulous research and analysis that’s fascinating in its unearthing of a frequently buried history. Beautifully written – its 800 pages absolutely fly by – it alternates between enthusiasm and righteous anger, and is utterly convincing in its relocation of queer artists to the dead centre of pop culture’s formative years. The Secret Public is brilliant on everything from Elvis Presley’s upending of traditional male stereotypes to the career of Dusty Springfield and the slow but inexorable rise of disco. The final paragraphs, which lovingly depict the audience at a 1979 Sylvester gig in San Francisco, partying “with no thought of what is to come”, are a quietly devastating testament to Savage’s understated skills as a prose stylist.

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

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.

Hungry for What
María Bastarós, translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn, Daunt
We’re never far from danger bursting out in this brisk collection of stories, the first to appear in English from Spanish writer Bastarós. A young girl, who believes her mother was “split in two” after her father’s death, tries to be grown-up by making dinner (Chipsticks and garlic are on the menu) but is powerless to change her mother’s eccentric whims. A woman who is stuck between her husband and her father, each worse than the other, finds that things turn nasty when they insist she declares which of them she loves best. There is ugliness here, given and received (“She wishes she’d inherited her mother’s knack for violence but the genetics didn’t pan out”), but it’s the freshness of the details and relentlessness of Bastarós’s vision that make this such an enthralling read.

Get lost in a fox’s quest; plus snowman magic, a wily genie and cookery from around the world

From uplifting picture books to absorbing nonfiction, comic adventures to colourful fables, 2024 has produced a wealth of wonderful writing for children. Twenty years after Oliver Jeffers’s picture-book debut, How to Catch a Star , he has produced a playful, touching sequel, Where to Hide a Star (HarperCollins), in which the small protagonist voyages to the North Pole in search of his stellar pal and makes an unexpected new friend along the way. Featuring crowd-pleasing appearances by several beloved characters, it’s a delightful reminder of the author-illustrator’s unique talents.

Also from HarperCollins, by the bestselling Rob Biddulph, comes the entrancingly wintry I Follow the Fox . When a child drops his beloved Little Fox in the park, he’s desperate to find his toy; then, following a real fox into the snowy night, he helps her perform a thrilling rescue before the dawn reunites him with his lost friend. Soft, hypnotic rhymes and a tingling sense of after-hours exploration infuse this story with seasonal wonder.

The joy of house parties, an email to an estate agent, tales from a billionaire’s dolls and more

In 2024 politics has been inescapable for many poets, a retreat from the world impossible, particularly from the Israel-Gaza war. This has been especially true for the Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah , whose [...] (Out-Spoken) suggests the impossibility of fully articulating the effect of the pain and destruction, but also a yawning absence now and in the future: “From time to time, language dies. / It is dying now. / Who is alive to speak it?” Meanwhile, in Bluff (Chatto & Windus) Danez Smith delivers an “anti poetica”, grounded in the protests after the murder of George Floyd, exploring the limits of poetry to effect real change.

Rachael Allen’s second collection , God Complex (Faber), uses the twin poles of a relationship breakdown and environmental collapse to paint a picture of a crumbling Britain, where “sense slides into oblivion”. Joe Hill Makes His Way Into the Castle by Katy Evans-Bush (CB Editions) is focused in its anger. She refashions the words of American countercultural poet Kenneth Patchen, an inspiration of the Beats, into blasts against the depredations austerity has caused, while also finding redemption amid the chaos.

Tales of Ohio hoop dreams, Joseph O’Neill’s football-accented new novel and the effect of the climate crisis on sport

There’s Always This Year
Hanif Abdurraqib (Allen Lane)
The latest book from US poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib can take its place proudly alongside the Spike Lee movies that the author loves. As a young basketball player growing up in one of the poorest areas in Columbus, Ohio, Abdurraqib had plenty of heroes, from the University of Michigan’s Fab Five to LeBron James – but much of the talent never made it out of the hood. This cultural reflection “on basketball and ascension” blends his own story with the narrative of James’s stellar career: it asks heartbreaking questions, and answers them with the profound intelligence and breathtaking poetry you’d expect of this MacArthur “genius grant” recipient.

Richard Dawkins’s greatest hits, the diaries of a sociopath and a history of the gut

Richard Dawkins’s The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie (Bloomsbury) relates a delightful gallimaufry of stories about the evolution of everything from camouflaged frogs to “weakly electric fish” as though the emeritus zoologist were holding forth from a lightly distressed leather armchair. In mellow mood, Sir Richard revisits his own greatest hits (The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype), while toying with curious conjectures, such as the idea that with careful experimentation you could “breed a race of pigeons who enjoy listening to Mozart but dislike Stravinsky”.

Hippos, relates Dawkins, are more closely related to whales than to any other land animals. They also, along with dwarf elephants, used to roam the island of Cyprus, one of many pleasing facts in Alex Christofi’s Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of Cyprus (Bloomsbury). Blending millennia of history with modern-day travelogue, the author covers the island as both the birthplace of Stoicism and a centre of the war trade, from the forging of Alexander the Great’s favourite sword to its present use as a platform for RAF jets. Did Jesus’s friend Lazarus even move to Cyprus after being raised from the dead? We can’t rule it out.

A choice of whodunnits, a return for le Carré’s Smiley, and dark, disturbing encounters in the woods

This year the trend for cosy crime novels with added bells and whistles has continued unabated, offering everything from metafiction to ghosts who solve their own murders. Bella Mackie’s second novel, What a Way to Go (Borough), is one of the best . Hedge fund boss Anthony Wistern is universally loathed, so when he dies mysteriously there are plenty of suspects. The narrative baton is passed between his widow Olivia, the obsessive crime blogger Sleuth, and Anthony himself – who, from the dingy limbo of a “processing centre”, must figure out how he perished in order to transition to the afterlife. It’s a delightful blend of whodunnit, Succession-style family infighting, and Jilly Cooperesque social comedy.

There’s more fun to be had with irredeemable characters in Jonny Sweet’s debut The Kellerby Code (Faber). Edward Jevons is in self-hating thrall to his posh, entitled university friends. He’s in love with Stanza, but his already fragile mental state is undermined by the discovery that she and Robert – to whom Edward has repeatedly confessed his adoration – are an item. As events at Stanza’s ancestral home spiral out of control, the pressure becomes unbearable. Very dark and very funny: perfect for fans of Saltburn.