As the end of 2024 draws near, we highlight some of the most important fiction books released this year…
Although some of these fiction books will appear on our Advent calendar of 2024’s Best Books, we won’t say that these are the 12 BEST fiction books — just that they are important ones that should be widely read and discussed…
We feature our novel of the year first, and after that the remaining book are in alphabetical order by the author’s last name….
View all our fiction award winners
as an Amazon list
The Blackbird and Other Stories
Sally Thomas
(Wiseblood)
In these nine stories, the human condition presents itself in dramas of loss, betrayal and breakage, the shortcomings and strangeness of love in a fallen world. In scenes that shift from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the West Tennessee countryside, from the otherworldliness of the Great Salt Lake to the mercurial waters of the Alabama Gulf Coast, families fray and fragment and whistle in the dark. Mothers mourn their lost children. Children flounder in the backwash of their parents’ chaos and despair. Old lovers take stock of each other. While married couples offer each other thin comfort in grief, divorced couples circle each other warily, aware that despite their separation, their lives remain forever entangled. Psychologists take refuge in therapeutic language, even as that language fails to articulate the very truths the heart cries out to confront. Although houses figure as places of refuge and repositories of memory, they offer only fragile shelter. Stored-up memories lie in ambush. Characters bent by the weight of the past work out their tangled futures against the backdrop of a large, mysterious universe, shining with a presence which signals itself in storm, birdsong, mysterious footsteps, and the evocative smoke of distant wildfires, whose smell brings hidden things to light.
“These are quiet, introspective, poetic fictions that have the intimacy of secrets. Sally Thomas’s characters are familiar, faith-filled, likable, and unextreme, each exhibiting the minor heroism of doing the best they can.”
—Ron Hansen, author of the short story collection Nebraska, the novel Mariette in Ecstasy, and many more
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