It's the summer of 1943 and young men all over the US are being drafted for the war in Europe and the Pacific. Danny Boles, still a year away from draft eligibility, is recruited to join a minor league baseball team out of Georgia called the Highbridge Hellbenders. His speech impediment (a stutter that occasionally flares up into full-blown muteness) gets him paired up as roommate to the team's other outcast, "Jumbo" Hank Clerval, who is hideously ugly and seven feet tall, but also well-read, polite, and one hell of a first baseman. The two strike up a friendship over the course of the Hellbender's 1943 season, culminating in... well...

Here's the thing. You wouldn't know it by that description, but Brittle Innings is a sci-fi novel, and those elements don't reveal themselves until the book's second half. Normally I am not one to encourage the avoidance of spoilers, but I make an exception here, not because I think the story is better for not knowing, but because the turn it takes seems so absurd on paper that some folks might never give it a shot. And that's a damn shame, because Brittle Innings has emerged as one of my absolute favorite novels in the genre. 

I don't think it's quite perfect (the ending stumbles a bit, and the love story feels a little perfunctory), but the audacity of it is incredible, and that it delivers on that audacity is some kind of miracle. I also want to point out that Bishop's command of voice is excellent, both in the narrator (who always feels like a person with an opinion on what he's reporting), and in characters having speech patterns that feel unique and alive, to the degree that you can often tell who is talking without ever being told. 

This was the best book I read in 2024.