Best contemporary novels to read in 2024, from Wandering Souls to Hamnet
Whether you studied for a Literature degree at university or not, chances are you feel a strange pressure to read what scholars refer to as canonical texts.
Comprised of authors who have been deemed by history to have universal, philosophical relevance – the Western literary canon isn’t actually as vast and wide-ranging as a contemporary reader might hope.
While filled to the brim with numerous historical texts which can certainly be studied with a fine-toothed comb, the sheer number of books published in the UK alone year-on-year makes keeping up with ground-breaking contemporary books feel like a thankless task.
New literary talents are constantly emerging, making reconciling an interest in literature both old and new incredibly overwhelming. In the UK alone, the year 2020 saw 186,000 new ISBNs registered. Time afforded by lockdowns aside, this is still more pages than the average human brain can fathom reading in a lifetime.
Yet what constitutes ‘good’ literature anyway, and whose job is it to decide what’s worth reading? The inherently subjective nature of both fiction and
