2024 Best Reads: Olivia Ho picks Cahokia Jazz, The Ministry Of Time and Sister Snake

Top three reads

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

This

hard-boiled mystery of alternate history

hits the high notes. In a Jazz Age America that never was, indigenous royalty still holds sway in the city of Cahokia.

When a white man is found ritually sacrificed atop a government building, the city boils on the verge of racial unrest. Detective Joe Barrow, a World War I veteran who is new to the city, is tasked to solve the murder, untangling the city’s complex web of players – enigmatic royals, corrupt cops, indigenous anarchists and the Ku Klux Klan.

The world-building is astounding in its detail, from the urban design to the belief systems of the city. Shrouded in the guise of pulp fiction is a stunning exploration of ambiguous utopias, placing this as one of the finest neo-noir novels this century so far.

The Ministry Of Time by Kaliane Bradley

In

this extraordinary debut,

the British government has gained the power to time-travel. As a test, it has gone back into history and retrieved select individuals – or “expats” – who would have died in their original timelines. Among these “expats” is Victorian-era polar explorer Commander Graham Gore.

The narrator, a half-white, half-Cambodian civil servant who works as a “bridge” for the Ministry of Time, is meant to help Gore acclimatise to the 21st century – as well as monitor him for her employers, who have sinister motives for pursuing time travel.

Deftly plotted, dryly funny and devastating, the novel takes that most trite of tropes – a love so strong, it can change the course of time – and injects it with fresh, compelling urgency.

Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe

This sultry spin on the Chinese Legend Of The White Snake gets under the skin of Singapore, peeling it away to show the messier parts that do not make it to the tourist brochures.

Especially vivid are scenes set after dark in the labyrinth of Golden Mile Complex, preserving in fiction a snapshot of life in the building likely to be erased in its impending redevelopment.

Lee Koe interrogates the notion of passing – what it costs to belong and what it takes to live freely. Her tale simmers with provocation and at times rage, but it also brims with love, however difficult, for its fraught subjects.

Disappointment

The City And Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel

The beloved Japanese author revisits his 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World. Once more, the narrator enters a town surrounded by a high wall in search of a vanished sweetheart and works in the town’s library as a dream reader.

This highly anticipated return

, however, is made flat by repetitive prose and over-taxed tropes.