Many people will be challenging themselves to read more books in 2024 with there being no shortage of great novels set in or based on Birmingham to choose from.
Just reading one more book than last year will achieve your goal and might even motivate you to pick up more books depending on how much you enjoy what you have read.
We've put together a list of great novels which reflect the city that every Brummie should have read at some point.
Here's our pick of nine of the best for you to enjoy this year.
1. The Rotters Club
Set in Birmingham during the 1970s, the Rotters' Club is a 2001 novel by British author Jonathan Coe. It focuses on a romantic musician and writer called Ben Trotter who has fallen for the most beautiful pupil at the adjoining girls' school in Birmingham. It largely follows three teenage friends grow up in 1970s Birmingham watching their lives change as their world gets involved with IRA bombs, progressive and punk rock, girls and political strikes. The book was also turned into a tv series later on
2. The Bells of Bournville Green
Set in 1960s Bournville, the book by Annie Murray tells the story from the thinking of Greta, a 17-year-old teenage girl who ends up marrying a man she doesn't love simply to escape Ruby her mother
3. What Was Lost
What Was Lost is the 2007 début novel by Catherine O'Flynn. The novel is about a girl who goes missing in a shopping centre in 1984, and the people who try to discover what happened to her twenty years later. What Was Lost was rejected by 20 agents and publishers before being accepted for publication by Tindal Street Press, a small Birmingham publisher
4. The News Where You Are
Set in Birmingham, another brilliant novel by Catherine O'Flynn is The News Where You Are. It tells the funny, touching story of Frank, a local TV news presenter. Beneath his awkwardly corny screen persona, Frank is haunted by disappearances: the mysterious hit and run that killed his predecessor Phil Smethway; the demolition of his father’s post-war brutalist architecture; and the unmarked passing of those who die alone in the city.