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Must Read Fiction for October 2024

From crime and suspenseful thrillers to heartfelt book club picks, check out our selection of the Must Read Fiction titles for October 2024.


Must Read Fiction Books for October 2024
Sally Rooney

An exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Tracy Chevalier

Venice, 1486. Across the lagoon lies Murano. Time flows differently here – like the glass the island’s maestros spend their lives learning to handle.

Women are not meant to work with glass, but Orsola Rosso flouts convention to save her family from ruin. She works in secret, knowing her creations must be perfect to be accepted by men. But perfection may take a lifetime.

Skipping like a stone through the centuries, we follow Orsola as she hones her craft through war and plague, tragedy and triumph, love and loss.

The beads she creates will adorn the necks of empresses and courtesans from Paris to Vienna – but will she ever earn the respect of those closest to her?

Tracy Chevalier is a master of her own craft, and The Glassmaker is vivid, inventive, spellbinding: a virtuoso portrait of a woman, a family and a city that are as everlasting as their glass.

Deon Meyer

The ninth Benny Griessel novel from ‘one of the best crime writers on the planet’ Daily Mail

Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido are languishing in Stellenbosch. Run-of-the-mill police work in the leafy university town is a far cry from their previous life in the elite HAWKS. But when a student is found dead on a mountain trail, the two detectives find themselves trying to unpick a stubbornly difficult mystery.

In the north of the country, meanwhile, a beautiful wildlife guide is recruited by a group of special forces soldiers to act as a honeytrap, part a dangerous multi-million-dollar heist that goes tragically wrong. Then back in Stellenbosch, a local businessman is found murdered in what looks like a professional hit – suffocated by fast-action filler foam sprayed down his throat. A message to keep silent – but about what?

You need a cool head to unravel it all, because sadly, the thieves and criminals are as likely to be in government – or even the police – as on the streets. You need to stay calm, focused – and sober. Benny may be sober these days, but he’s not feeling calm. Solving this puzzle is turning into a deadly race against time and there’s another date that’s coming towards him like an express train. Alexa has fixed the date for their wedding. Big trouble, on every front.

Bella Mackie

‘I was immensely grateful that despite the gruesome way my husband died, he’d done it with his clothes on.’

Anthony Wistern is wealthy beyond imagination. Fragrant wife, gaggle of photogenic children, French chateau, Cotswold manor, plethora of mistresses, penchant for cutting moral corners, tick tick tick tick tick tick.

Unfortunately for him, he’s also dead. Suddenly poised to inherit his fortune, each member of the family falls under suspicion.

And that’s when everything comes crashing down…

Graham Norton

Ireland, New York, London: Frankie is the sweeping, ambitious new novel from Sunday Times-bestselling Graham Norton

London, 2024. Frankie Howe has lived a long life, her small flat is crammed full of art, furniture – and memories. Damian, her young carer, listens as she gradually tells him parts of her story – a story that takes us into a progressive, daring world of New York artists on the brink of fame, aspiring writers and larger-than-life characters.

Always just on the periphery, looking on, young Frankie is never quite sure enough of herself to take centre stage. But the outsider holds certain advantages, sees things others don’t, can influence without drawing attention. And when the map has been lost, it’s anyone’s guess where you may end up, or the accidental choices you find you have made. Frankie discovers that life is not always the one we hope for, or the one others expect of us.

Travelling from post-war Ireland to the dazzling art scene of 1960s New York by way of London, Frankie is an immersive, decade-sweeping novel about love, bravery and what it means to live a significant life.

Gareth Rubin

Can you solve the mystery before the greatest detective of all
time?

Sherlock Holmes and his faithful friend, Dr John Watson, have been hired by actor George Reynolds. George wants them to find out why the audience who comes to see him perform every night are the same people, only wearing disguises. Is something sinister going on and, if so, what?

Meanwhile, Holmes’ archenemy, Professor James Moriarty is having problems of his own. Implicated in the murder of a gang leader, Moriarty and his second, Moran, must go on the run from the police in order to find out who is behind the set-up. But their investigation puts them in the way of Holmes and Watson and it’s not long before all four realise that they are being targeted by the same person.

With lives on the line, not just their own, they must form an uneasy alliance in order to unmask the true villain. With clues leading them to a hotel in Switzerland and a conspiracy far greater than any of them expected, who can be trusted and will any of them survive?

Joël Dicker

The murder of Alaska Sanders was quickly solved. Within days, two suspects were identified. One died, the other pleaded guilty. Case closed.

But, eleven years later, the death of another woman in a fast-food parking lot changes everything. Marcus Goldman, celebrity author and amateur investigator, picks up a thread that will unravel not only an open and shut case, but the very fabric of his best friend’s life.

Sergeant Perry Gahalowood, who led the original investigation, is hell bent on setting the record straight. Teaming up with Marcus, he seeks redemption in most the intricate and testing case of his career.

In this sequel to the phenomenal worldwide bestseller The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair, Joël Dicker delivers the last word in slow-burn police procedurals. Clue by clue, witness by witness, question by question, his characters solve an unguessable puzzle that could only have been set by the master of the plot twist.

Translated from the French by Robert Bonnono

Nicholas Sparks

The brand new captivating love story by the internationally bestselling and beloved author of The Notebook.

Tanner has spent his whole life moving from place to place, belonging nowhere. So when his dying grandmother reveals the name and location of the father he never knew, he plans to visit Asheboro to lay the past to rest, then move on – just as he always has.

Kaitlyn knows exactly where she belongs. In Asheboro, she’s built a life for herself and her kids that she’s proud of, especially after the turmoil of divorce. But when she meets lone wolf Tanner, she can’t help but feel something has been missing until now.

Jasper will never belong again. He had everything – and he lost it all. Now with only his old dog Arlo for company, he lives quietly, haunted by the tragic accident that took place decades before.

Three strangers’ worlds are about to collide, changing the trajectory of all their lives. Because some paths cross, some merge, and others guide you home…

From the much-loved bestselling author of The Notebook comes a brand-new emotional and powerful novel about the journeys we take and those who touch our hearts along the way.

Ana Huang

The new must-read steamy sports romance from Ana Huang, the bestselling author of the Twisted and Kings of Sin series.

She’s the only woman he wants . . . and the only one he can’t have.

Asher Donovan is a living legend – the darling of the Premier League, the (arguably) greatest footballer in the world.

But his reckless antics and recent team transfer have caused much controversy, and when his feud with his rival-turned-teammate costs them a championship, they’re forced to ‘bond’ during off-season cross-training.

Surviving the summer shouldn’t be hard . . . until Asher meets their new trainer. She’s beautiful, talented, and no matter how hard he tries, he can’t take his mind off her.

The only problem? She’s his rival’s sister – and completely off limits.

Christine Dwyer Hickey

An epic literary novel which follows two Irish characters over 40 years in London.

In the vast and often unforgiving city of London, two Irish outsiders seeking refuge find one another: Milly, a teenage runaway, and Pip, a young boxer full of anger and potential who is beginning to drink it all away.

Over the decades their lives follow different paths, interweaving from time to time, often in one another’s sight, always on one another’s mind, yet rarely together.

Forty years on, Milly is clinging onto the only home she’s ever really known while Pip, haunted by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, traipses the streets of London and wrestles with the life of the recovering alcoholic. And between them, perhaps uncrossable, lies the unspoken span of their lives.

Dark and brave, this epic novel offers a rich and moving portrait of an ever-changing city, and a profound inquiry into character, loneliness and the nature of love.

Will Self

A brilliant portrait of motherhood, sublimated desire and the reverberations of the Cold War in a novel that investigates and reimagines the life of the author’s mother.

Standing by the mailbox in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic, inside her house and wonders is this it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life.

Based on the intimate diaries Will Self’s mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer’s attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent’s interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, Elaine shows Self working in an exciting new dimension, utilizing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.

Attica Locke

The final book in the award-winning Highway 59 series from the author of Bluebird, Bluebird and Heaven, My Home

Texas Ranger Darren Mathews has handed in his badge. A choice made three years before, which served justice if not the law, means that he may now stand trial. And his mother – an intermittent and destructive force in his life – is the cause of his fall from grace.

And yet it is his mother’s reappearance that may also be his salvation. A black girl at an all-white sorority at a nearby college is missing, her belongings tossed in a dumpster. Her sorority sisters, the college police, even the girl’s own family, deny that she has disappeared, but Sera Fuller is nowhere to be found. A bloodstained shirt discovered in a woodland clearing may be the last trace of her. And Darren’s mother wants her son to work the case.

Disillusioned by an America forever changed by the presidency of Donald Trump, Darren reluctantly agrees. Yet as he sets out to find a girl whose family don’t want her found, it is his own family’s history that may be brought painfully into the light. And a reckoning with his past may finally show Darren the future he can build.

Olivia Isaac-Henry

A chilling and uncanny folk suspense in a novel of twisted sisterhood and dark secrets.

Some places are cursed.
An isolated village
A twisted sisterhood
A dark secret that festers in silence

When teenager Rina Pine is abandoned by her hippy mother in the isolated village of Sorrow Spring and forced to live with her elderly aunt, she quickly realises no one is coming to rescue her.

Rina finds herself trapped amidst a community of women beholden to the past, who believe in the protective powers of the local spring. When a child goes missing and a young mother is killed, she is drawn into the dark and sinister truth flowing through the sacred waters that give the village its name.

Rina is about to learn what it truly means to be a daughter of Sorrow Spring…

Vince Flynn

Mitch Rapp faces an old foe bent on destabilising the Middle East in the new thriller in Vince Flynn’s #1 New York Times bestselling series

April 2011: On a remote mountaintop overlooking the remains of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, Azad Ashani witnesses a Quds Force demonstration of a capability meant to upend America’s war in the Middle East. Ashani, director of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security and Irene Kennedy’s former back channel to the Iranian government, recognizes the demonstration’s true significance, and the nation-ending conflict it will provoke. Alone, Ashani stands no chance of preventing this rush to madness.

But with the help of one man, he just might.

In Washington, DC, CIA director Irene Kennedy briefs the president that the operational window to kill or capture Osama bin Laden at his recently discovered compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan is rapidly closing. But before he’ll authorize a commando raid on Pakistani soil, the president demands irrefutable proof of bin Laden’s presence.

Proof he trusts just one man to provide.

Preventing a looming war in the Middle East while delivering justice for the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on 9/11 would be a big ask for anyone.

Mitch Rapp isn’t just anyone.

J.D. Robb

The brand-new crime thriller from Sunday Times bestselling author, J, D. Robb.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer

On a hot August night, Lt. Eve Dallas is called to a downtown club, where a joint bachelorette party full of love, friendship and laughter has taken a darker turn and ended in a crime scene. One of the brides has been garroted in a private room and lies dead in a pool of blood.

The brutal murder scene was just seconds from the packed dance floor but despite the dozens of people present, useful witnesses prove hard to come by. Someone must know something but no one is talking.

On the surface the two brides had a supportive, tightknit group of friends but when Eve starts to dig below the surface she discovers that everything may not be quite as it seems…

Nuzo Onoh

A powerful Nigeria-set horror tale of possession, malevolent ghosts, family tensions, secrets and murder from the recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement and ‘Queen of African Horror’. For readers of Octavia Butler, Ben Okri and Koji Suzuki.

Bata, an 11-year-old girl tormented by nightmares, wakes up one night to find herself standing sentinel before her cousin’s door. Her cousin is to get married the next morning, but only if she can escape the murderous attack of a ghost-bride, who used to be engaged to her groom.

A supernatural possession helps Bata battle and vanquish the vengeful ghost bride, and following a botched exorcism, she is transported to Ibaja-La, the realm of dead brides. There, she receives secret powers to fight malevolent ghost-brides before being sent back to the human realm, where she must learn to harness her new abilities as she strives to protect those whom she loves.

By turns touching and terrifying, this is vivid supernatural horror story of family drama, long-held secrets, possession, death – and what lies beyond.

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