After a year of reading, Bookends has culled a list of books across different genres that have intrigued, in some way.

To make the cut, as is the usual case, the books had to be published in 2024 and made a decided impact, keeping us buried in the world the authors built between the pages.

Bookends shares the list of eight books of 2024 that we loved and that we think would make great stocking-stuffers this holiday for the readers in your life.

FICTION:

The House of Plain Truth, by Donna Hemans

Jamaican-born Hemans has produced a lyrical, lush work of fiction about a fractured Jamaican family and a daughter determined to reclaim her home.

Upon news about her ailing father, Pearline leaves Brooklyn for her childhood home in Jamaica. But she isn’t prepared for a tense reunion with her sisters or for her father’s startling deathbed wish that she repair their long-broken family legacy and find the sister and two brothers no one has seen in more than 50 years.

MEMOIR:

Wild Flavours, by Chris Tufton

Tufton, Jamaica’s minister of health and wellness, gives a gripping account of the country’s fight against COVID-19, from the arrival of Passenger Zero, giving a backstage pass to all the behind-the-scenes activities that fuelled the Government’s strategic response. The prose moves fluidly cataloguing events that may have been forgotten, straight up until the end of the crisis three years later. You’d be mistaken to dismiss it as a book designed only for medical professionals (even if it is dedicated to the country’s front-line public health workers). It is decidedly not. Tufton is very approachable in his writing style. Told with engaging and deft prose, his book brims with intrigue that results in a must-read memoir that reads like best-selling literary fiction that nobody will soon forget.

FICTION:

Sweetness in the Skin, Ishi Robinson

Thirteen-year-old Pumkin Patterson lives in a tiny house in Kingston, with her grandmother who wants to improve the family’s social standing, her Aunt Sophie who dreams of a new life in Paris for her and Pumkin, and her mother Paulette who’s rarely home. When Sophie is offered the chance of a lifetime to move to France for work, she seizes the opportunity and promises to send for her niece in one year’s time. All Pumkin needs to do is pass her French entrance exam so she can attend school there. But when Pumkin’s grandmother dies, she’s left alone with her volatile mother. Then things get stickier when Pumkin’s estranged father turns up and the household’s fortunes take a turn for the worse.

CRIME/THRILLER:

The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore

Musician-turned-author Liz Moore (Long Bright River) has been consistently building sterling bona fides for being a kinetic American crime novelist. The arrival of her books is eagerly anticipated, and none more so than this her latest, an expertly paced thriller, which has been receiving major acclaim.

A teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp in 1975. Young Barbara Van Laar isn’t just any 13-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. (Cue the Law & Order SVU duh-duh sound effect!) But wait, it gets even more intriguing. This isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished 14 years ago, never to be found. A panicked search begins, and a thrilling drama unfolds, unearthing secrets about the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community in its thrall. A must-read for mystery junkies like us at Bookends.

FICTION:

Becoming Somebody, by Anne Crick

Sandra grew up desperately poor and mistreated in Jamaica until she met her formidable grandmother who was determined that she would become the one from the family who ‘made it’. At first Sandra thinks that education, marriage and a solid career will make her somebody, but she finds that she wants more. And she gets more whilst she circumvents barriers of race, class and gender to acquire wealth and prestige, eventually becoming an international success in her own right. Her story is one of countless Caribbean women who struggle to escape the natural limitations of Caribbean life and find their place in the sun, and it reflects the questions that they ask as they make their way. The author, Jamaican Anne Crick, definitely knows (read: understands) women from the region.

FICTION:

The Silence of the Choir, by Mohamed Sarr

Senegalese writer Sarr created a beautiful symphony of language in this book that landed on many ‘Best of 2024’ lists this year. Examining the timely themes of immigration and identity, his moving novel relates the story of 72 male immigrants/refugees who arrive in the middle of the Sicilian countryside in Italy where they’re called the ragazzi, the “guys”, and whom the Santa Marta Association have taken responsibility for. In the small town, their arrival changes life for everybody, including the Italians who have to deal with how they really feel about them and contend with what it really means to encounter people whom they know absolutely nothing about. While they wait to know their fate, the ragazzi encounter all kinds of people: a strange vicar who rewrites their pasts, a woman committed to ensuring them asylum, a man determined to fight against it, an older ragazzo who has become an interpreter, and a reclusive poet who no longer writes.

FICTION:

All Fours, by Miranda July

This book was recently named a National Book Award finalist, and with good reason. It’s irreverent, funny, sexy, all while being remarkably tender as it tells the story of a 45-year-old woman, an unnamed multimedia artist no less (not unlike July herself, who is also a film-maker, queer and married to a man, also a creative type, and raising a non-binary child ), and who upends her life when she announces her plan to drive cross-country and ends up exiting the freeway 30 minutes into the trip and spontaneously checking into a motel, having left her husband and child back home. What unfolds is true quirky July territory when, in her quest for freedom, she embarks on an altogether different kind of journey, as she experiences what perimenopause and sexuality truly mean to her.

NON-FICTION:

Rockhouse: The Book

Celebrating the iconic Jamaican boutique hotel’s 50-year anniversary, Rockhouse hotel owners have created a dynamic coffee table book to commemorate the milestone. At 208 pages, the book brims with over 170 stunning images, including archival photos, as well as historical details from the hotel, and Negril in general, throughout the years.

Prior to officially opening to the public as one of the first hotels on the country’s west end in Negril in 1974, the Rockhouse property was already a silver screen staple with movies like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and No Place Like Home featuring its jagged coast and watery caves. In 1994, Chairman Paul Salmon and his partners would purchase and set about expanding the lodging. Since then, Rockhouse has expanded to include a foundation, which began in 2004, and is committed to well-needed community engagement, partnering with six schools in the area, as well as the Negril Community Library.

International reggae artiste Shaggy contributes to the foreword whilst writers Brigid Ransome Washington, Summer Eldemire, Peter Jon Lindberg, and Paul Salmon weave the love story that ties it all together.

Rockhouse: The Book is a wonderful coffee-table book for anyone who loves Jamaica and its rich history, which is captured here in stunning photos.