Jess's top three of 2024

December is here and it's time to round up the Lighthouse team's favourite books of 2023! As usual, the brief is simple but strict (although there are those who find creative ways of expanding it…): three books you read, although they may not necessarily have been published, this year. The publishing schedule is swift and unforgiving and we also want to share the love with all those older books we fell in love with in 2024.

These are the books that stuck with Jess:

I'm a bit surprised to discover this, but it seems this was the year I tentatively turned back to reading fiction. For a long time, fiction just hasn't felt urgent, nor direct enough for me, but I found all these three novels to go beyond the superficial 'timely' label of current events and zeitgeists, each digging deep into cutting questions about what we do with our need to tell stories when the whole world needs to change, and fast:

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright - Here is a book that urges you to trust it completely and then flies with you on endless escapades. It's by far the longest novel I've read in years and it was a strange comfort to encounter a sense of expansiveness like this, being granted time to explore history, future, community and the loss between generations in depth, as intimately experienced by the inhabitants of Praiseworthy - an Aboriginal community in northern Australia. It’s a thoroughly generous book which trusts its reader. I spoke to Alexis for Wasafiri magazine back in March and she talked about these times needing works of 'scale to match the scale' of the crises we're facing.

To read Praiseworthy is to ask some of the ultimate questions of this time, about heritage, land, whiteness, home and the future. It's left me with scenes that feel mythical in their scope and relentless in their critique, and which aren't going anywhere.

Audition by Pip Adam - I stumbled into this (recommended by Adam Ley-Lange who has described what it feels like to read it in much more effective detail, on the blog These Odd and Special Things) and it has redefined what I feel fiction can do, at the moment, in small but decisive ways. It's a science fiction novel that truly tests what fiction can do, building small utopias from the intimate space between characters and their stories about themselves, into new worlds entirely. It's a queer, abolitionist roar starting with three giants trapped in a spacecraft, whispering for their lives, and their deaths.

You can watch Pip Adam talking about fiction and abolition HERE for our Read Think Act series.

The latest book I finished was Yr Dead by Sam Sax. I’m still reeling from it, weighing opinions back and forth, but the truth is that very few books have made me feel as much this year. The novel’s voice by itself gives it a spot on this list. The writing is so sharp and cliche-free that reading it, at times, feels like taking short cuts to your own feelings, as well as to the political structures those feelings are embedded in - which I think is such a crucial element of the best writing. In 2016, the narrator of Yr Dead sets themself on fire in front of Trump Tower as a final act of protest and the event acts as a window into their life. I came away from it with questions about how much the politics - the specific societal violence that elicits such a violent act - are really explored in the novel, but it also felt very honest. Reading it, I trusted it completely.

Find more top three lists of 2024 from the team HERE