NotesOnDawn's 2024 Wrap-Up: My Top 5-Star Reads
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you click on these links and make a purchase, we may earn a commission. This commission helps us to keep the site running and provides you with more helpful content. However, this does not influence our reviews, which are always honest and unbiased. We only recommend products or services that we believe will be of value to you.
Amazon UK Site - Julie Armfield - Private Rites
Amazon UK Site - Nina Mingya Powles - Small Bodies of Water
Amazon UK Site - Ray Nayler - The Mountain in the Sea
Amazon UK Site - T. Kingfisher - The Hollow Places
Hello, MsBrowns readers! NotesonDawn here.
Many of you know me from my contributions here, and some of you might have seen my 2024 Wrap-Up short over on YouTube. If you saw it, you'll know that 2024 was... a bit of a year. I had the most one and two-star reads I've ever had in my entire life, and honestly, I don't want to talk about them!
Today, as promised, I want to talk about my absolute favourites. My top five-star reads. The books that saved my reading year. I want to give them the love they deserve, and a 60-second video just doesn't do them justice.
So, for my wonderful MsBrowns audience, I wanted to sit down and really expand on why these books blew me away. Let's get into it.
1. Private Rites by Julia Armfield
Okay, let's start with this masterpiece. I said "I love this Diva so much," and I meant Julia Armfield. After she emotionally wrecked me in the best way with Our Wives Under the Sea, I would have followed her anywhere. Private Rites not only met my expectations; it completely reset them.
In my short, I mentioned it's set in a "near-dystopian future where the rains keep raining and the Earth is slowly succumbing to water." This isn't just a backdrop; it's a suffocating, omnipresent character. The dampness gets into everything. The world Armfield builds is so tangible you can almost feel the mould growing on the walls.
At the centre of this drowning world are "three estranged sisters" who are forced back together by their father's death. And what a father. He was a cruel, revered architect, and the grand, strange glass house he built for them is where they must now sort through the wreckage of his life—and their own.
When I said this book is about "human behaviours," this is what I meant. It's a speculative King Lear. You have three sisters, a dark inheritance, and a world falling apart. But Armfield is far too clever for a simple retelling. She uses the climate disaster to amplify the personal. How do you grieve a monster? How do you re-learn sisterhood when the world is literally dissolving around you?
This book is queer, it's claustrophobic, and it's deeply, unsettlingly weird. As the old world drowns, "arcane rituals" and strange, forgotten beliefs start to creep back in. It's this blend of the mythic and the mundane—of family trauma and folk horror—that I just found intoxicating. It explores what we cling to at the end of all things. It's a profoundly human, feminist, and terrifying novel. "So good, so good," indeed.
2. The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
This was the book that "blew me away" on a purely intellectual level, whilst also being a white-knuckle thriller. As I said, it's my "more sci-fi" pick, and it's one for those of you who like your science fiction to ask enormous questions.
The premise is incredible: a species of octopus has been discovered in a remote Vietnamese archipelago. A species that has developed its own language, culture, and symbols. They are, without a doubt, a second intelligent species.
This is the "intelligence in creatures" I was talking about. But the book is so clever because it doesn't stop there. It gives us three models of consciousness to compare.
Humanity: Represented by Dr. Ha Nguyen, the marine biologist who desperately wants to communicate with the octopuses, but also by the ruthless corporation, DIANIMA, that has sealed off the island to exploit them.
Artificial Intelligence: In the form of Evrim, the world's first android, who is on the island as both a minder and a translator, all whilst grappling with his own emerging sentience.
Alien Intelligence: The octopuses themselves—a consciousness so radically different from our own (distributed, short-lived, environmental) that the very act of communication seems impossible.
This is what I meant by "what happens when we're not" the only ones. The book is a pressure-cooker. How do these three forms of intelligence interact? With violence? With curiosity? With greed? I mentioned the "religious perspective" because the book genuinely explores what it means to have a soul, or what constitutes a "person."
It asks, "what makes someone human?" and then, more profoundly, "why do we think being human is the benchmark?" It's a spectacular debut, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.
3. Small Bodies of Water by Nina Mingya Powles
I'm still emotional about this one. My "oh my God" was 100% genuine. This book found me at the exact right moment. As I said in the video, "I picked this up when I moved to London." I was feeling untethered, and my best friend passed it to me.
I am not an essay person. I often find them too academic or too disconnected. But this... this was different. This collection is lyrical, it's poetic, it's personal. Nina Mingya Powles, who is Malaysian-Chinese and Pākehā, writes about what it means to live between worlds, between cultures. And that was the "topic so familiar to me."
She uses swimming—those "small bodies of water"—as the thread to stitch her life together. From the wild coasts of New Zealand to the Ladies' Pond on Hampstead Heath (which is just down the road from me now!), water is her "anchor point." It's where she goes to belong, to think, to connect to her family and her heritage.
But it's not just about swimming. It's about food, and language (she weaves Chinese characters through the text), and art, and what "home" means when it's not a single place. It's a fragmented, gentle, and profoundly beautiful book about finding your space in the world. It’s no surprise it won the Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing.
It's a book to be savoured. I said it's "probably a better summer read," but honestly, I read it in the grey of a London autumn, and it felt like a warm, glowing coal. I cannot recommend it enough, especially if, like me, you're not "usually" an essay reader.
4. The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher
This was my favourite "journey" with a book all year. As I admitted, when I first started it, I was "underwhelmed." T. Kingfisher's (the pseudonym for Ursula Vernon) prose is so... normal. It's chatty, it's funny, it's full of down-to-earth characters who react to things in a way you or I would.
Our protagonist, Kara (or 'Carrot'), has just gotten divorced and moves in to help her eccentric Uncle Earl at his "Wonder Museum." And the museum is just a collection of weird, creepy junk. The tone is set. It feels "simple," as I said. It feels cosy.
And then Carrot finds a hole in the wall. A hole that shouldn't be there. And it leads to... somewhere else.
This is where my "retrospectively... that simplicity made it so good" comes in. The reason I was "so terrified" is because the characters are so normal. When they're confronted with mind-bending, cosmic, Annihilation-level horror, they don't become eloquent heroes. They basically say, "Oh, hell no. What is that? This is awful. I need a coffee."
This contrast between the cosy, relatable narrator and the sheer, abject wrongness of the "hollow places" on the other side of the portal is what makes this book so effective. It's a world of fog, willows, and bunkers, and it operates on a nightmare logic that I found genuinely chilling.
That's why I said it's for "a fan of Annihilation but it was kind of a bit much and you wanted something more low key." It's that perfect "kind not cozy" read. It's a book you can "curl up in an afternoon and read," as I said, but you'll be side-eyeing your walls for weeks.
My Final Word
So there you have it. My absolute standouts. "I'm sad how little there are of them," as I said at the end of my short, but it just makes me cherish these four books even more. In a lacklustre year, they were a reminder of what reading is all about.
I hope that gives you a little more insight into my 2024 favourites. Now, I want to hear from you! What were your five-star saviours last year? Did you read any of my picks? Let's talk in the comments below.
Thanks for reading, - NotesonDawn
Amazon UK Site - Julie Armfield - Private Rites
Amazon UK Site - Nina Mingya Powles - Small Bodies of Water