If it’s good for young adults (older teens) it’s probably good for adults, too, and vice-versa. So, these are the adult fiction books I really enjoyed in 2024. (Links are to reviews here at Semicolon)

• Joy in the Morning by P.G. Wodehouse. I read this one for Cindy Rollins’ summer course. Wodehouse is always good and funny and just all-around delightful.
• Flambards, The Edge of the Cloud, and Flambards in Summer by K.M. Peyton. I’ve wanted to re-read these British young adult romance/horse books for a long time, and I finally found copies this year and read them. Just about as good as I remembered them to be.
• The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope. I read a lot of Trollope in 2024, and I’m reading another book by Trollope now in the first days of 2025. Almost as good as Dickens and Thackeray.
• Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope.
• Stateless by Elizabeth Wein. Pair this book about the early days of aviation with the Flambards trilogy. They are all good.
• The Swedish Nightingale: Jenny Lind by Elisabeth Kyle. A lightly fictionalized biography of the famous singer.
• Girl With a Pen: Charlotte Bronte by Elisabeth Kyle. Another fictionalized biography, but mostly factual. And clean. And not iconoclastic or deconstructionist.
• Pastures of the Blue Crane by H.F. Brinsmead. An Australian classic.

That’s it. I read a lot of thrillers by Ruth Ware and by Susan Hill (Simon Serraillier series) and by Ann Cleves and by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series), but I can’t really recommend any of them. They were all to some extent gritty with bad language and horrific crimes and bad language. I think it’s time I gave up on that genre.