Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1924
1924 is a year of long-delayed arrivals. E.M. Forster, after years of false starts, finally publishes the novel about British colonial India he had been struggling to finish since before the First World War. Thomas Mann completes a sprawling, philosophically ambitious novel he began in 1913, interrupted for over a decade by the war and its aftermath, set almost entirely inside a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium where a young engineer arrives for a short visit and somehow stays for seven years. And in a research library at Columbia University, a scholar going through a box of family papers stumbles across a substantial, completely unknown manuscript by a writer who had been dead for over three decades, a story Herman Melville left unfinished on his desk in 1891 that will turn out to be one of the most important things he ever wrote. The year also belongs to the quieter, more domestic side of literature: a former vaudeville performer’s debut novel about a market gardener’s daughter outsells nearly everything else published that year.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Fiction & Poetry · Updated June 2026
A Passage to India
Dr. Aziz, an Indian physician, befriends Cyril Fielding, a British schoolteacher sympathetic to Indian self-determination, and organises an expedition to the Marabar Caves for two visiting Englishwomen, a trip that ends with one of the women accusing Aziz of assault inside the caves, an accusation that exposes, with devastating clarity, the deep mutual suspicion and structural racism underlying British colonial rule in India regardless of any individual relationship of genuine goodwill. Forster had begun the novel before the First World War, drawing on his own travels in India, and struggled for years to finish it before its eventual publication. The novel was immediately recognised as a major work and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction the same year it appeared.
A Passage to India remains one of the most clear-eyed fictional accounts of how colonialism corrupts even the individual relationships that might otherwise transcend it: Aziz and Fielding’s friendship is genuine, but the novel insists that genuine personal goodwill cannot, by itself, overcome a political structure built on fundamental inequality and racial suspicion. The Marabar Caves themselves, vast, echoing, resistant to any stable interpretation, become the novel’s central symbol for everything colonial rule refuses to actually understand about the country it governs. Forster’s famous closing line, suggesting Aziz and Fielding’s friendship cannot yet exist on equal terms, remains one of English fiction’s most devastatingly honest endings.
The Magic Mountain
Hans Castorp, a young German engineer, travels to a tuberculosis sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin for what he intends to be a short stay, only to discover symptoms of the disease in himself and remain at the sanatorium for seven years, immersed in lengthy philosophical debates between two fellow patients, the humanist Settembrini and the nihilistic Naphta, while the world below the mountain moves inexorably toward the First World War. Mann began the novel in 1913 and was repeatedly interrupted by the war itself, which reshaped both his own political views and the eventual meaning of the book he had started writing as something closer to a satirical novella. The completed novel runs to well over a thousand pages and is widely considered one of the major achievements of twentieth-century German literature.
The Magic Mountain is a novel that uses the sealed, timeless world of the sanatorium, where illness, death, and lengthy intellectual debate replace ordinary productive life, as an extended metaphor for the spiritual and political condition of pre-war European civilisation, sick with ideas it has not yet learned to act on. Hans Castorp’s gradual education, moving between the competing intellectual positions Settembrini and Naphta represent without fully resolving into either, mirrors Mann’s own complicated journey from political ambivalence toward eventual democratic commitment. This is a long, demanding novel that rewards genuine patience, and its closing return to the war the entire book has been suspended above lands with real force.
Billy Budd, Sailor
Billy Budd is a strikingly handsome, almost innocent young sailor impressed into service aboard a British warship in 1797, whose accidental killing of the ship’s vindictive master-at-arms, John Claggart, after a false accusation of mutiny, forces Captain Vere into an agonising decision: he recognises Billy’s lack of genuine criminal intent, but believes naval law in a time of feared mutiny requires him to sentence Billy to hang regardless. Melville left the manuscript unfinished and in considerable disarray at his death in 1891, and it remained completely unknown until 1918, when the Columbia scholar Raymond Weaver, researching the first Melville biography, discovered the manuscript among family papers held by Melville’s granddaughter. Weaver’s hastily transcribed edition, published in 1924, was immediately hailed by critics including D.H. Lawrence as a masterpiece, taking its place second only to Moby-Dick among Melville’s works.
Billy Budd, Sailor is one of the most psychologically and morally complex short novels in American literature, built around a question that refuses any comfortable resolution: what happens when an institution’s law, applied with complete procedural correctness, produces an outcome that is recognised by everyone involved, including the man enforcing it, as a fundamental injustice. Captain Vere’s anguish is the novel’s true subject, and Melville refuses to let the reader simply condemn him for following the law rather than his own clear moral perception. That this novel sat completely unknown and unpublished for over three decades after Melville’s death, only to be discovered by accident, is one of the most remarkable stories in American literary history.
So Big
Selina Peake DeJong is a young woman from a cultured Chicago background who marries a Dutch truck farmer in the rural market-gardening community outside the city, and the novel follows her decades-long struggle to maintain both genuine joy in life and a thriving farm after her husband’s early death leaves her to raise their son largely alone, while that son grows up determined to pursue safe, respectable wealth rather than the kind of meaningful, difficult life his mother actually modelled for him. Ferber, who had worked as a journalist and vaudeville performer before turning to fiction, was the best-selling American novelist of 1924, and So Big went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel the following year.
So Big endures because Selina DeJong is a genuinely compelling protagonist whose resilience never curdles into simple sentimentality, and because Ferber’s central argument, that her son’s safe, conventional pursuit of wealth represents a genuine failure of imagination compared to his mother’s much harder, much richer life, gives the novel real moral substance beneath its popular appeal. The market-gardening setting outside Chicago is rendered with the same specific, lived-in detail Ferber would later bring to her more famous Show Boat and Giant. Read it as proof that the best-selling novel of a given year and a genuinely substantial piece of fiction are not always mutually exclusive categories.
When We Were Very Young
A collection of children’s verse, illustrated by E.H. Shepard, drawing directly on Milne’s observations of his young son Christopher Robin and the imaginative games they played together, two years before Milne would introduce the same boy and the same nursery toys, including a bear named after a real zoo animal, in the prose stories that became Winnie-the-Pooh. The poems move through a child’s-eye view of ordinary domestic life, the changing of the guard, going up and down stairs, talking to imaginary friends, in verse that is technically more sophisticated than its deceptively simple, sing-song surface suggests. The collection sold extremely well on publication and established the partnership between Milne’s verse and Shepard’s illustration that would define the entire Pooh canon.
When We Were Very Young is the collection that established, two years before Winnie-the-Pooh itself, the entire visual and tonal world that would make Milne’s children’s writing so distinctive: Shepard’s gentle, precise illustrations, Milne’s genuine attentiveness to how a small child actually perceives the world rather than how an adult assumes they do, and a quality of melancholy underneath the whimsy that never tips into mere cuteness. Several poems in this collection, including “Halfway Down” and “Vespers,” remain genuinely moving rather than merely charming. Read it as the overture to everything that followed.
The Green Hat
Iris Storm is a glamorous, scandal-trailing woman moving through London’s fashionable interwar society, narrated by an admirer who gradually uncovers the genuinely tragic history, a first husband’s suicide on their wedding night, a string of subsequent affairs conducted with a kind of defiant, performative recklessness, that lies beneath her carefully maintained surface of fashionable decadence. Arlen, an Armenian-British writer who had reinvented himself thoroughly as a fixture of London’s smart set, wrote the novel in a deliberately stylish, epigrammatic prose that captured the specific glamour and underlying emptiness of the era’s fashionable bohemia. The novel was an enormous commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic and made Arlen, briefly, one of the most fashionable novelists of the decade.
The Green Hat is a less enduring literary achievement than several other books on this list, but it remains historically significant as one of the most precise period documents of a specific kind of glamorous, exhausted 1920s decadence, the same milieu Fitzgerald and Waugh were independently examining from different angles the same decade. Iris Storm’s combination of genuine tragedy and performed scandal captures something real about how that era’s fashionable set used decadence as a defence against grief it could not otherwise express. Read it as a snapshot of exactly the kind of brittle glamour the decade’s more lasting literature would eventually dismantle.
Where to start
If you want the most morally serious novel of the year
→ Read A Passage to India. Forster’s account of a friendship destroyed by colonial suspicion remains one of the most clear-eyed novels ever written about what empire actually does to the people living under and within it.
If you want the novel discovered decades after its author’s death
→ Read Billy Budd, Sailor. Melville left it unfinished in 1891. It sat completely unknown for over three decades before a researcher found it by accident. It is now considered second only to Moby-Dick among his works.
If you want proof that a bestseller can also be genuinely substantial
→ Read So Big. Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer-winning novel about a market gardener’s widow outsold nearly everything else published in 1924, and it remains genuinely worth reading on its own terms.
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“And the sky said, ‘Why not?’” — E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
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