Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Birth of a Dream Weaver; The Face; The Return; Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
I particularly loved three beautiful books of non-fiction this year: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Birth of a Dream Weaver (Harvill Secker), exquisite in its honesty and truth and resilience, and a necessary chronicle from one of the greatest writers of our time. Tash Aw’s The Face (Restless), so wise and so well done, made me wish it were much longer than it is. And Hisham Matar’s The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Viking), which moved me to tears and taught me about love and home.
Aravind Adiga
Democrats and Dissenters; Against Everything; Days Without End
Ramachandra Guha is widely considered India’s finest intellectual, and his new book of essays, Democrats and Dissenters (Allen Lane), reminds us why. The subjects are as diverse as the career of Eric Hobsbawm and the plight of India’s tribal people; the prose is exquisite. Both measured and passionate, Guha’s is the most important voice of dissent in Narendra Modi’s India. Mark Greif’s essay on the Kafkaesque nature of the modern gym, Against Exercise, is already a classic; and his new book, Against Everything (Verso), tells us it’s not just the gym, it’s also our music, our culture, our political life – everything about us, in fact – that is right out of Kafka. Many fine novels were published this year, but Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End (Faber), a gay romance set amid the bloody mayhem of mid-19th century America, was more wrenching and beautiful than anything I’ve read in a long time.
Naomi Alderman
The Underground Railroad; The Argonauts
The underground railroad that took runaway slaves to freedom was a metaphor, but by making it into a real railroad, Colson Whitehead’s brutal, tender, thrilling and audacious novel, The Underground Railroad (Fleet), turns it into a different kind of metaphor. We follow Cora on her long, terrifying journey to escape the plantation that keeps reaching out to grab her back. Freedom, for this novel, cannot be a destination but a neverending, constantly rebuilt journey. Maggie Nelson’s allusive and thoughtful memoir, The Argonauts (Melville House), is a timely meditation on gender. Her sentences are perfectly wrought, each word carefully chosen. It’s as much philosophy as life narration, and insists on the irreducible complexity of human experience, and especially our experiences of sex and gender. If I’ve made it sound dry, it’s not; it’s sexy and intense and has stayed with me all year.
John Banville
Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School; Fools, Frauds and Firebrand: Thinkers of the New Left; Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited
Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (Verso) by Stuart Jeffries may not be a title to quicken the pulse of the common reader, but this common reader found it marvellously entertaining, exciting and informative. Jeffries is no idolator of great reputations, and his treatment of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas is refreshingly breezy, though never less than serious and carefully judged. In the same general area, Roger Scruton’s characteristically titled Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (Bloomsbury) is a splendidly invigorating assault on the likes of Eric Hobsbawm, Jacques Derrida and Edward Said. For even more laughs, Philip Eade’s Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) demonstrates that Waugh’s life, already done by diverse hands, really is worth another visit.
Julian Barnes
The Return; Dying: A Memoir; Another Day in the Death of America; Summer Before the Dark
Is it a sign, or a consequence, of this dreadful year that the best books displayed stern lucidity in the face of darkness and death? Hisham Matar’s search for his “disappeared” father in The Return (note how badly British politicians come out of it); Cory Taylor’s Dying: a Memoir (Canongate), which quizzes life as searchingly as death; Gary Younge’s Another Day in the Death of America (Guardian Faber), about underage gun victims in those parts of the US that will be quite unchanged (except for the worse) by President-elect Trump; and Volker Weidermann’s Summer Before the Dark (trans Carol Brown Janeway, Pushkin), about Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth in Ostend in 1936, as the shadows darken on them.
Antony Beevor
East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity; Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany
In East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), Philippe Sands has not only woven together striking and important stories, leading from the city of Lviv to the Nuremberg tribunal, he has achieved an almost unbelievable miracle in his research. Norman Ohler, in Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany (Allen Lane), has succeeded in a remarkable scoop, by studying in detail the notebooks of Hitler’s personal doctor and demonstrating that Hitler was a far worse junkie than we had ever imagined. He has also unearthed the way that the German army did not march on its stomach, but on methamphetamine. The supposedly clean-living Nazis, who accused the Jews of corrupting German youth, were the real pushers. The book, written with delightful irony, is an eye-opener.
William Boyd
The Lost Tommies; A Group Photograph
A hundred years ago, the battle of the Somme had just ground to its sanguinary halt. How can we make what is now ancient history vivid and compelling? Two new books do exactly that, illuminating the conflict with remarkable honesty. The Lost Tommies by Ross Coulthart (William Collins) presents us with a revelatory cache of photographs recently found in a French farmhouse. These are casual images of British and empire troops of amazing quality. Their common, vulnerable humanity has never been more visible or more haunting. However, one solitary photograph forms the catalyst for Andrew Tatham’s astonishing A Group Photograph (Arvo Veritas). This is a formal portrait of some 40 officers in one battalion taken in 1915. Two decades of research have uncovered the extraordinary details and contexts of these young men: their lives, their families and their fates. My find of the year has been a proper monthly magazine, Scoop. For those of you with younger readers (aged 8-14) in your circle, it is a tremendous boon. Real words on real pages, not on a screen. A transforming experience.
Amit Chaudhuri
Known and Strange Things; Selected Poems; Pitch of Poetry; My Katherine Mansfield Project
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been writing a novel about return that fate took me to two books this year, both published decades ago – A Sport and a Pastime (Picador) by James Salter, an author belatedly recognised not long before his death in 2015, and The Moon and the Bonfires (NYRB Classics), by the great Italian novelist and poet, Cesare Pavese. Salter’s novel has to do with the sense of intimacy and strangeness emanating from a small town in France; Pavese’s with a village that the protagonist returns to from America after the war. Both narrators know the wider world, but both ask how much of that knowledge really matters when it’s the immediate border of the town that always looks impossibly distant and unpassable. From this year’s new books, Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things (Faber) made me reflect on the provenance of the sensibility contained in its pages: a possible world history of modernism of which we have only a skewed understanding, leaving out, as it does, Africa and India. Jamie McKendrick’s remarkable Selected Poems (Faber) is a reminder, in this time of Brexit, of a cosmopolitan restiveness, a sophistication, that’s also very English. Finally, I must recommend books by two of the shrewdest thinkers and artists writing now: the poet Charles Bernstein’s essays, Pitch of Poetry (Chicago), and the novelist Kirsty Gunn’s terrific extended essay, My Katherine Mansfield Project (Notting Hill).
Jonathan Coe
70s Dinner Party; The Good Immigrant; It’s the Pictures That Got Small
We all need some light relief at the moment, and the funniest book I’ve seen so far this year is Anna Pallai’s 70s Dinner Party (Square Peg). The pictures of what people used to cook to impress 40 years ago are astonishing – lurid, grotesque food sculptures which would defy the darkest imaginings of a Hitchcock or a Dalí – while the accompanying captions have a perfect deadpan wit. Part social history, part dadaist artwork. The Good Immigrant (Unbound), edited by Nikesh Shukla, is that rarest of beasts, a truly necessary book: 21 enlightening, upsetting, anger-provoking essays by BAME writers about what it really feels like to be perpetually aware of your “otherness” in Britain today. And I thoroughly enjoyed It’s the Pictures That Got Small (Columbia), a collection of Charles Brackett’s diaries, expertly edited by Anthony Slide to paint a multifaceted portrait of Brackett’s long-term collaborator Billy Wilder. This feels as close as we can get to being in the presence of Wilder’s genius, and he emerges as the cruellest as well as the wittiest of men. I especially liked the story of him receiving an anguished love letter from one of his mistresses, tearing it up in front of Brackett, then retrieving one scrap of light-grey paper from the basket: preserved so that he could show it to his wife that evening, as it was just the shade he wanted her to use to redecorate their sitting room.
Margaret Drabble
The Long, Long Life of Trees; The Tidal Zone
Fiona Stafford’s The Long, Long Life of Trees (Yale) is beautifully produced, and each chapter describes a different species, from the dark yew to the friendly apple. I particularly enjoyed the story of the willow, which told me many things I did not know, including the fact that Alexander Pope has been traditionally credited with introducing the weeping willow to Britain. A chapter a day of this deeply calming book will keep panic away. Sarah Moss’s new novel, The Tidal Zone (Granta), in contrast, is full of anxiety, mostly parental, although it is at times also very funny. I have admired and read all her works, with their double time frames and sharp eye on the strange way we live now – an adventurous and original novelist.
Lauren Elkin
Collected Poems; The Natashas; Known and Strange Things
When we can’t rely on our governments to defend our best interests, we have to turn to the unacknowledged legislators. Poetry, like Adrienne Rich’s – in her Collected Poems (Norton), edited by Claudia Rankine – or Rankine’s, can awaken us to the kinds of deeper truths that are unsayable in prose, and “remind us of all we are in danger of losing”, as Rich once pointed out. I can’t say enough good things about Yelena Moskovich’s debut novel The Natashas (Serpent’s Tail). The language is fresh, playful and alive; Moskovich captures what it is to be a living, desiring body in the city, as well as a body sold into the sex trade, in which life and desire flicker faintly, freakishly. Teju Cole hits it out of the park over and over in Known and Strange Things, his essay collection on photography, travel, race and being. I know I’ll be rereading and engaging with the ideas here for years to come.
Anne Enright
The Lonely City; The Glass Shore; Selected Poems
The Lonely City by Olivia Laing (Canongate) takes a great theme, solitude and the city, and uses it to open up the work of artists from Hopper to Warhol. The chapter on David Wojnarowicz is both wonderful and necessary, for gathering what we know of the early days of the Aids epidemic among the East Village avant garde. I read this in New York and felt the opposite of lonely, until I knew it had to end. The Glass Shore (New Island), edited by Sinead Gleeson, is a companion volume to last year’s anthology, The Long Gaze Back, which brought many Irish female writers back into focus. This one collects work by women from Northern Ireland – a neglected group if ever there was one. No one outside Ireland could believe (or does when I mention it) what things are like for female writers here. Selected Poems by Paul Muldoon (Faber) – how do you bring out a small book of poetry by Muldoon, whose work has been so much about being various? This personal selection by the poet himself is exemplary for showing how you can be important and playful at the same time. Reading it brings not just joy, but also a kind of relief for the way he sets language free.
Jonathan Franzen
The Portable Veblen; Private Citizens
Two of my favourite books in 2016 have been novels set in contemporary California, both of them seriously funny and extraordinarily well written. Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen (4th Estate), which has received awards attention in the US, is the story of a young woman with a hilariously difficult mother and a boyfriend who’s neck deep in the military-industrial complex. The less visibly received Private Citizens (Oneworld), by the first-time novelist Tony Tulathimutte, tracks four recent Stanford graduates as they make their way through the twin horror shows of Silicon Valley and the San Francisco hipster scene. The flaws of these novels are minor and forgivable, their virtues many.
Sarah Hall
The Tusk That Did the Damage; The Met Office Advises Caution
The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James (Harvill Secker) is one of the most compelling and unusual novels I’ve read this year. An ivory poacher, a documentary film maker and a legendary south Indian elephant called The Gravedigger combine narrative perspectives to create a fascinating story of hunters and observers, old mythical gods and modern politics. James moves with grace, intelligence and curiosity through the moral and cultural complexities of capitalism and conservation, love and ambition, and the “minds of others”. Humour, philosophy, feminism and the natural world might not necessarily make for comfortable poetry bedfellows, but Rebecca Watts’ debut collection, The Met Office Advises Caution (Carcanet), has them fitting together perfectly. The contents of wheelie bins, Zen trees, a suffragette audaciously mounting a penny farthing bicycle, athletic tracks and the fate of country moles – the poems offer levity and depth, always revealing a “clear hard road, made for going along”.
Yuval Noah Harari
Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America; Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy; The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine
Ioan Grillo’s Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America (Bloomsbury) is a gripping narrative of Latin America’s new crime wars. It challenges our basic concepts of politics, economics and even religion, recounting how criminality mutates into warfare, how drug cartels mutate into multinational corporations, and how gangsters mutate into politicians and even into religious prophets. Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Allen Lane) is a fascinating and deeply disturbing book. O’Neil explains how authority is shifting from humans to big data algorithms, which now decide whether to give you a loan, offer you a job or even lock you in jail. The algorithms promise scientific objectivity, but they have their own built-in biases, which often cause even greater harm than old-fashioned human prejudice. Ben Ehrenreich’s The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (Penguin) is a heartbreaking account of the brutal and often surreal realities of life under the Israeli occupation. After reading it, you don’t know whether to despair at the callousness and self-righteousness of human beings, or to wonder at their resilience and creativity.
David Hare
Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain; Television: A Biography
I had recently re-read Raymond Williams’ Border Country (Chatto & Windus), by now the most enduring novel of the 1960s, so I was primed for the idea that much of what’s deepest in British literature is regional. Barney Norris’s debut Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain (Doubleday) is about the lives of five people briefly linked by a motor accident in Salisbury. The technical command and emotional weight would be impressive in a writer who had written 20 books, not one. Lovers of cinema desperately miss David Thomson’s weekly column about film in the Guardian, but now he’s moved on to tackling a whole new medium in Television: A Biography (Thames and Hudson). It’s full of unexpected insights, it’s learned and beautifully produced. It’s also tremendous fun.
Philip Hensher
The Invention of Angela Carter; James Joyce and Italo Svevo: The Story of a Friendship; India’s War; Swing Time; Transit; All That Man Is
The best biography of the year was Edmund Gordon’s luminous The Invention of Angela Carter (Chatto & Windus). He beautifully drew the best from Carter’s friends and acquaintances, and the result will become a classic. Stanley Price’s James Joyce and Italo Svevo: The Story of a Friendship (Somerville) was a simply adorable book; I was chuckling for days afterwards whenever I thought of the absurd fairytale ending, as both his heroes, against all likelihood, gained immense international fame. I hugely admired Srinath Raghavan’s India’s War (Allen Lane); his energy and rigour told a story only familiar (to most of us) in patches. The best novels of the year were Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (Hamish Hamilton) – the chapters about childhood sang off the page with truth – Rachel Cusk’s fascinating Transit (Jonathan Cape), and David Szalay’s glorious All That Man Is (Jonathan Cape).
Alan Hollinghurst
All That Man Is; The Return; Cain
David Szalay’s All that Man Is was a revelation to me – not only of a brilliantly inventive and observant writer, whose three previous novels I then immediately consumed, but of new possibilities for the novel as a form. Just one weak link in Szalay’s sequence of unrelated stories would have ruined the effect, but he writes with equal calm command of his nine disparate men, from an InterRailing student to a retired civil servant, each in a different European location. The magic is that the stories prove not to be unrelated, but form a mysteriously resonating whole. I can’t stop thinking about it. A masterpiece of a different kind is Hisham Matar’s The Return, an unstintingly truthful account of his protracted attempts to discover the facts about the disappearance of his father, a prominent opponent of Muammar Gaddafi. The book has an involvingly complex time scheme, rich in a sense of what might be and what might have been, and the natural delicacy of Matar’s writing, its concision and reserve, only heighten the power of a gripping and agonising story. I was dazzled by Luke Kennard’s Cain (Penned in the Margins) – its central sequence of 31 prose-poems, each an anagram of the same few verses of Genesis, is the cleverest and funniest thing I’ve read this year.
Kazuo Ishiguro
The Invention of Angela Carter; Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow; Days Without End
Edmund Gordon’s The Invention of Angela Carter takes a fascinating journey through layers of English and Japanese bohemia while triumphantly bringing us closer to the brilliantly wayward personality and mind of one of the finest, most original writers of the last 50 years. Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Harvill Secker) sets out with enviable (and alarming) lucidity the massive challenges now facing our species as genetic technologies, AI and robotics alter forever our relationships with one another and with other species. It’s even more readable, even more important, than his excellent Sapiens. My favourite novel this year remains Sebastian Barry’s magnificent Days Without End – a lyrical, sometimes savage, often achingly tender western about two young gay Irishmen adrift in the American west before, during and following the civil war.
Margo Jefferson
Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems; Black Deutschland
Inquiry, elegy, lyric, abstract narrative: Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems by Robin Coste Lewis (Knopf) probes the brutalities, contradictions and ecstasies of race, sexuality and gender. Each poem is a controlled yet passionate exploration of history and aesthetics. “A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?” Robert Musil posed the question; Darryl Pinckney’s Black Deutschland (Farrar Straus & Giroux) is a fascinating answer: a dramatic and essayistic novel. Its restless narrator, Jed, moves from Chicago’s black bourgeoisie, with its wary pride, to west Berlin, with its watchful arrogance. Every civilisation and psyche here is imperilled, and in thrall to its discontents.
Olivia Laing
Autumn; Christodora; Darling Days
The novel of the year is obviously Ali Smith’s Autumn (Hamish Hamilton), which managed the miracle of making at least a kind of sense out of post-Brexit Britain. I also fell hard for Tim Murphy’s Christodora (Picador), out now in the US and in the UK next year. A sprawling account of New York lives under the long shadow of Aids, it deals beautifully with the drugs that save us and the drugs that don’t. Sticking in Downtown, I missed an unprecedented two subway stops because I was so engrossed in iO Tillett Wright’s East Village memoir Darling Days (Virago). A riveting story about growing up trans with a mentally ill mother, it will make you fall for the precocious, streetwise iO.
Mark Lawson
The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End; You Will Not Have My Hate; A Horse Walks into a Bar
In a year that contained an unusual number of notable cultural deaths, The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End by Katie Roiphe (Virago) combined close reading with even closer family access to describe how authors including John Updike, Susan Sontag and Maurice Sendak faced mortality: readers will dream of a future volume that takes in David Bowie and Leonard Cohen. Setting on the page the life and death of someone unknown until its publication, You Will Not Have My Hate (trans Sam Taylor, Harvill Secker) is a desperate but precise account by Antoine Leiris of the death of his wife, Hélène, in the terrorist attack on the Bataclan in Paris: sadly, in every sense, a book for our times. Unless pop lyricists have the lock on the Nobel prize in literature from now on, then a leading future candidate must be David Grossman, whose A Horse Walks into a Bar (trans Jessica Cohen, Jonathan Cape) is a daring tragicomedy about an Israeli standup comic who struggles to keep standing as the gig goes on. It contains a joke about a parrot that tops the Monty Python one.
Deborah Levy
Transit; Flâneuse; Hands: What We Do With Them and Why; My Katherine Mansfield Project
Rachel Cusk’s innovation in Transit (Jonathan Cape) is to invent a novelistic form to give voice to an almost absent (or societally erased) female narrator, who seamlessly creates (via the stories of others) a lucid, connecting conversation about the demolition of one sort of life and the rebuilding of another. Lauren Elkin’s part memoir, part cultural History, Flâneuse (Chatto and Windus) is an uplifting, gender-bending critique of how women (past and present) negotiate public space. Elkin describes the flâneuse as “a determined, resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk”. Darian Leader’s scholarly and entertaining Hands: What We Do with Them and Why (Hamish Hamilton) riffs on examples from modern technology, psychoanalysis, popular culture and child development to investigate how our hands often do the talking for us. Finally, Kirsty Gunn’s My Katherine Mansfield Project (Notting Hill) remains one of my top books for every year. This is a magnificent stretch of intimate writing on modernism, Mansfield and migration. Also, the design of the book itself is as beautiful as the mind of the author.
Graeme Macrae Burnet
At the Existentialist Café; Marie; Infinite Ground
Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café (Chatto & Windus) has a lot more heft than its breezy title suggests. The author successfully juggles history, biography and weighty philosophical ideas, all the while maintaining a tone which suggests she might be chatting over apricot cocktails at the famous Café de Flore in Paris. One of Bakewell’s protagonists, Simone de Beauvoir, was a fan of Madeleine Bourdouxhe and the latter’s 1943 novel Marie (reissued by Daunt Books, trans Faith Evans) is an existential novel par excellence, telling the story of its young protagonist’s quest for freedom from domestic and marital life. It’s clear-eyed and austere, and more than a match for the novels of Bourdouxhe’s more renowned contemporaries. Finally, Martin MacInnes’s debut Infinite Ground (Atlantic), ostensibly a detective story, is a dazzling novel of ideas, brimming with passages of jaw-dropping brilliance.
Paul Mason
How Will Capitalism End?; The Levellers’ Revolution
As the economic gloom deepens to the pitch-black night of geopolitical crisis, in the economics departments of the world there can still be heard the confident chuckle: “but capitalism always survives”. Based on empirical evidence it is true: the capitalist system has survived every major period of depression by mutating – from the child labour capitalism of the early 19th century to the skilled labour capitalism of the 1860s; from free trade to monopolies and state control after 1900; and through massive state intervention after 1945. Wolfgang Streeck’s book How Will Capitalism End? (Verso) is an extended riff on the possibility of the mainstream economists being wrong. Streeck, emeritus director of the Max Planck institute in Cologne, synthesises the various strands of left crisis theory into a convincing proposal: “a diagnosis of multimorbidity, in which different disorders exist and, more often than not, reinforce each other.” Streeck’s insight is as strong psychologically as it is on economics. Published before Brexit, Corbyn or Trump, it describes the result of capitalism’s unaddressed failures since 2008 as a period “in which unexpected things can happen any time … due to long-valid causal relations having become historically obsolete”. For Streeck, declining growth, rising inequality and debt point to the possibility of yet another global crisis. But the structural crisis that could kill capitalism lies beyond this: in the plunder of society’s wealth by oligarchs; the plunder of the public domain by privatisation and monopoly power – plus rampant corruption and anarchy replacing geostrategic order. In The Levellers’ Revolution (Verso), John Rees, a former SWP leader and figurehead of Stop the War, has written a profound and scholarly account of the Levellers – the nonconformist republican radicals who clashed first with the monarch and then with Oliver Cromwell himself. The book combines the military-political history of the English revolution with an account of the social and ideological struggles that produced, out of the backstreets of 17th-century London, one of modernity’s first revolutionary social movements.
Val McDermid
His Bloody Project; Anatomy of a Soldier; The Improbability of Love
Being a writer turns one into a critical reader; it’s harder to get lost in a book. But there are always a few every year that make me forget myself. His Bloody Project (Contraband) by Graeme Macrae Burnet sucked me in from the first page with its compelling narratives about a triple murder in the Scottish Highlands in the 19th century. A series of convincing but unreliable voices circles the central event and left me breathless. Another narrative carried by different voices was the surprising and daring Anatomy of a Soldier (Faber) by Harry Parker, where inanimate objects tell the story of a soldier’s catastrophic tour of Afghanistan and its aftermath. It sounds odd but it’s entirely engaging, thought provoking and moving. And for lighter relief, The Improbability of Love (Bloomsbury) by Hannah Rothschild – a tale of art, love, coincidence told with warmth, insight and humour.
James Meek
Everyone Is Watching; Memoirs of a Medieval Woman: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe
My cooking, cleaning and driving hours have been filled with Hillary Huber reading Elena Ferrante’s Naples quartet (trans Ann Goldstein, Europa/Blackstone). Not all writers adapt well to unabridged audiobookery; Ferrante, translated, does. The insouciant audacity of Megan Bradbury’s Everyone Is Watching (Picador) took me by surprise. It has darknesses but its spirit of joy and the sheer sense of purpose of the famous characters lifted me in this bleak year. A book written 600 years ago, the memoir of the King’s Lynn mystic Margery Kempe reminded me of Jeanette Winterson and Eimear McBride in the way its protagonist faces into the flow of the immanent forces of existence.
Pankaj Mishra
A World of Struggle: How Power, Law and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy; Humanitarian Invasion; Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan; Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance and Daily Life in Occupied Paris; Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary and the Crisis That Shook the World
This has turned out to be one of those years when old assumptions, moral as well as political and economic, collapse, and we are ushered into a new epoch. It will take time to even understand the implications of this transformation, which reach deep into the literary and cultural realms, let alone figure out where we are headed. In the meantime, we must look for writing that illuminates the era that has just ended. David Kennedy’s A World of Struggle: How Power, Law and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy (Princeton) can hardly be bettered as a description of how the world has been run and why it is so difficult to change its dysfunctional ideologies and institutions. Timothy Nunan’s Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (Cambridge) is a groundbreaking study of a little understood experience of modernity in what used to be called the third world. Finally available in an English translation, Jean Guéhenno’s Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris (trans David Ball, Oxford) is eerily resonant with the dilemmas of writers in many neofascist countries today. In Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary and the Crisis That Shook the World, Alex von Tunzelmann shows why she is one of our most skilful and resourceful young historians. I was also fascinated by Joel Whitney’s ingeniously researched Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers.
Blake Morrison
The Return; Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey; Solar Bones
Hisham Matar’s The Return recounts the author’s search to find the truth about what happened to his father Jaballa, a prominent opponent of the Gaddafi regime last heard of in the Abu Salim prison in Libya in 1990: a haunting and terrifying story, told with courage, anger, dignity and unswerving determination. The letters and interviews in Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (trans Ann Goldstein, Europa), reveal all you ever need to know about the author of the Neapolitan Quartet, apart from the trifling matter of her identity. At a time when Irish fiction has never been so fertile, I was pleased to discover a novel right up there with those of Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright and Eimear McBride: Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (Tramp), which transforms the circumscribed and seemingly commonplace – a few hours in the life of a middle-aged engineer – into something universal.
Andrew Motion
The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1966-1989; Guilty Thing; The Poem Is You
The fourth and final volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1966-1989 (Cambridge), edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, brings to an end one of the most impressive editorial feats of recent times, and preserves a marvellous word-hoard. Bleak yes, often, but also always pointed and arresting, and sometimes – in Beckett’s inimitably self-aware way – extremely funny (“I’d give up if I hadn’t.”) Frances Wilson’s sympathetic, clever and well-wrought biography of Thomas De Quincey, Guilty Thing (Bloomsbury) makes him start and startle as never before. Anyone wanting a guide across the expanses of contemporary American poetry should turn to Stephen Burt’s The Poem Is You (Harvard), which offers cogent summaries of large tendencies, and brilliant readings of individual poems.
Ottessa Moshfegh
You Are Having a Good Time; Among Strange Victims
My favourite book of 2016 was You Are Having a Good Time by Amie Barrodale (FSG Originals). In this debut collection of short stories, Barrodale proves to be a talent beyond measure, and her genius for capturing our complex and hilarious humanity is refreshing and staggering. Another book I’d recommend full-heartedly is Among Strange Victims (trans Christina MacSweeney, Coffee House) by the Mexican writer Daniel Saldaña París. MacSweeney’s brilliant English translation of this odd, Kafkaeque and conniving novel is not to be missed.
Susie Orbach
Human Acts; Tea With Winnicott; A New Therapy for Politics?
It is hard not to put Han Kang’s Human Acts (trans Deborah Smith, Portobello) at the top of the list. Her way of telling about the events of a 10-day insurgency in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1980 and its psychological, spiritual and political aftermath opened my eyes to the cruelty and viciousness perpetrated on the youth of that city. Her writing is spare and yet clotted with emotion. I had to stop, and then I had to carry on. Looking at human acts from another perspective, I greatly enjoyed Brett Kahr’s Tea with Winnicott (Karnac), an imagined encounter with the psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott, after his death. Formal yet playful with beautiful drawings by Alison Bechdel – a brilliant present for anyone interested in the life and work of this great clinician and thinker. In light of the US election, a read of Andrew Samuels A New Therapy for Politics? (Karnac) wouldn’t go amiss.
Sarah Perry
Missing, Presumed; Golden Hill; Reunion
I am an indefatigable reader of crime novels, and Susie Steiner’s Missing, Presumed (Borough) is the best I’ve read in a very long time. It has everything one could ask, and more: it’s stylish, witty and compelling; has an infuriating yet likable lead detective; and is also terribly good at skewering contemporary class anxieties and manners. Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill (Faber) is every bit as superb as everyone says. As a reader, I was in a delighted swoon at the verve and prose; as a writer, I had a fit of infuriated envy that anyone could be so outrageously good. I read Fred Uhlman’s novella Reunion (Vintage) for the third time this year. It is, quite simply, a perfect work of art. With the utmost delicacy and care, Uhlman distils all the rage and tragedy of the second world war into one brief childhood friendship, and the final line is the most shattering of any novel I know. It is one of those books that is an unfailing test of character: if you give it to someone, and they don’t like it, you should sever all ties, and possibly call the police.
Ian Rankin
His Bloody Project; Chain of Custody; The Last of Us
Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project was a welcome surprise on the Booker shortlist, a brilliantly written story of rural hardship, fractured community and eventual, inescapable bloodshed. Anita Nair uses the whodunit to explore social, political and economic issues in present-day India. Chain of Custody (Bitter Lemon) concerns child slavery in Bangalore and is both brutal and sympathetic, with an all-too-human (and not entirely likable) cop hero. In Rob Ewing’s The Last of Us (Borough), set in a dystopian present, a plague has killed off all the adults on a Scottish island. Do the surviving children cooperate and thrive, or do they descend into tribalism? Gripping and utterly believable.
Chris Riddell
Geis: A Matter of Life and Death; How to Find Gold; One
Two of my favourite illustrators have produced wonderful books this year. Alexis Deacon draws with a grace and fluency that instantly pulls the viewer in. With his masterly graphic novel, Geis: A Matter of Life and Death (Nobrow), Deacon has reached a new peak. This 18th-century parallel universe fantasy has touches of Jonathan Swift and Mervyn Peake but is uniquely Deacon. It is the first part of a trilogy charting the troubled succession struggles that follow the death of the great chief matriarch. I can’t recommend it highly enough. My second choice is the utterly charming How to Find Gold (Walker) by Viviane Schwarz, one of the most innovative and creative picture-book makers we have. Anna and Crocodile are on the hunt for gold and we follow their progress through eyecatching illustrations and wonderfully funny dialogue. Finally, the incomparable Sarah Crossan’s free verse novel One (Bloomsbury) took my breath away. Ever since reading this exceptional YA novel, my pencil has been itching to decorate its beautifully sparse pages.
Philippe Sands
Two Thousand Years; Human Acts; Le Roi René
At a dark moment of identity politics and resurgent nationalism, the books that have left the deepest impression have been those that offer a sense of what we might learn from times past. Nothing I have read is more affecting than Mihail Sebastian’s magnificent, haunting 1934 novel, Two Thousand Years (trans Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Penguin), now available in English (and best read with his Journal 1935-1944). Han Kang’s Human Acts is no less piercing: an exquisite, painful and deeply courageous account of the 1980 Gwangju massacre. On a lighter note, Le Roi René (Odile Jacob) recalls the extraordinary life of the great jazz pianist René Urtreger, who played with Miles Davis, disappeared, and is once more going strong, at 82. Agnès Desarthe’s enthralling biography evokes another age, and deserves an English edition, with soundtrack!
Ali Smith
Everyone Is Watching; The Lauras
I loved Megan Bradbury’s debut novel, Everyone Is Watching, a book ostensibly about a century or so of life in New York, but really about how cities themselves are works of communal action and art, and about how, even in the most draconian and reactionary of times, the vibrancy of these two things will light, reveal, challenge and reshape the fabrics of where and how we live. It’s a beating heart of a novel. And Sara Taylor’s The Lauras (William Heinemann) just persuaded me even more that Taylor is a writer of real gravitas and potency. It feels, to read her, uncanny – a bit reminiscent of reading early Atwood three decades ago. She’s a writer whose talent, a fusion of sure-footed, calm and uncompromising, is both quiet and prodigious.
Andrew Solomon
What Belongs to You; Soul Machine; Modern Families
Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You (Picador) is a lyrical contemplation of desire, love and identity, a chronicle of the relationship between the protagonist, a gay American teacher, and a Bulgarian hustler. Written in meditative, generous prose, it is at once formally accomplished and intimate, high-minded but personal, witty but substantive. It’s the best first novel I’ve read in a generation. Soul Machine (Norton) is George Makari’s examination of the way we moved from conceptualising our core humanity in terms of a soul to conceptualising in terms of a mind. It’s a history not of psychiatry but of consciousness, magisterial and pellucid and often wise. Joshua Gamson’s Modern Families (NYU) is a gleeful romp through the changing notions of what constitutes family: single mothers by choice, gay families, complex adoption narratives. It finds the point of contact between emotional and legal strictures, and points towards an encouraging new liberalism.
Madeleine Thien
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being; The Way to the Spring
The book that will live on in me from this year is Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke), on living in the wake of the catastrophic violence of legal chattel slavery. In the Wake speaks in so many multiple ways (poetry, memory, theory, images) and does so in language that is never still. It is, in part, about keeping watch, not unseeing the violence that has become normative, being in the hold, holding on and still living. I have also been thinking a great deal about Ben Ehrenreich’s The Way to the Spring. I think both books take a long time to absorb, they are profoundly powerful not only in their observations and stories, but in how courageously and carefully they speak to our present moment.
Jeanette Winterson
Falling Awake; Let Them Eat Chaos; Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body; The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation
First, Falling Awake by Alice Oswald (Cape). I fell in love with Oswald’s work in 1996 when her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-stone Stile, made the hairs rise on the back of my neck. She says that poetry is what happens when language becomes impossible. If you’ve never read her – get this collection now. Kate Tempest’s Let Them Eat Chaos (Picador) is this year’s antidote to Brexit and Trump. Across genre, across politics, across imagination. Rapper. Ranter. Run-a-way. Runway. Every wondered why you haven’t got a tail? Sara Pascoe’s Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body (Faber) covers sex, makeup, feminism, men, pubic hair – it’s a very funny and secretly serious look at being a real woman in a plastic world. Lastly, The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation by Ian Cobain (Portobello). If you think that we are just at the start of a post-truth world, read this terrifying account of politics and coverups since the 1889 Official Secrets Act. Spin? This is dizzying, disturbing stuff.
