The 50 best books of the year 2022

Liberation Day by George Saunders

Known as a modern master of the form, this is George Saunders’ first short story collection since 2013’s Tenth of December, which was a National Book Award finalist. Liberation Day’s nine stories consider human connection, power, enslavement and oppression with Saunders’ trademark deadpan humour and compassion. “These stories are not only perfectly pitched; they come with enough comedy to have you grinning and enough empathy to suddenly stop you in your tracks,” writes The Guardian, while according to the Sydney Morning Herald, “Saunders is masterful, he illuminates with a fierce flame”. (RL)

The Kingdom of Sand by Andrew Holleran

Set in a drought-hit backwater of rural Florida, The Kingdom of Sand tells the story of a nameless narrator’s existence of semi-solitude, as the memories of his other, previous life come and go. The Guardian said: “Holleran renders an elegiac and very funny contemplation of not just ageing but an age… A wistful, witty meditation on a gay man’s twilight years and the twilight of America.” The  novel is “all the more affecting and engaging”, Colm Toíbín writes in the New York Times, because, in 1978, Holleran wrote the “quintessential novel of gay abandon”, Dancer from the Dance. “Now at almost 80 years of age, he has produced a novel remarkable for its integrity, for its readiness to embrace difficult truths and for its complex way of paying homage to the passing of time.” (LB)

Bournville by Jonathan Coe

An avid Europhile and chronicler of modern Britain, Jonathan Coe’s latest spans 75 years of British history through the lives of one family living on the outskirts of Birmingham near a famous chocolate factory. The novel’s events and characters cross paths with those from Coe’s trilogy that began with 2001’s The Rotters’ Club and ended with the acclaimed Middle England (2018), and, like the latter, Bournville is “a state of the nation novel,” writes the Observer, one that explores the personal and the political, and the relationship between Britain and Europe with “prose of enduring beauty”. The FT writes that Coe has, “with considerable humour, satire – and at times, acute anger – established himself as the voice of England’s political conscience”. (RL)

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver’s modern reimagining of David Copperfield is a “powerful reworking” of Charles Dickens’s most celebrated and personal novel, writes The Guardian, calling it “the book she was born to write”. Set in Kingsolver’s home region of Appalachia, it transposes Dickens’s critique of the injustices of Victorian Britain to contemporary America, where Copperhead lives in near-destitution amid the US opioid crisis. “This serious subject matter belies the sheer fun that Kingsolver has with her endlessly inventive adaptation,” writes the TLS, praising the novel’s “sharp social observation and moments of great descriptive beauty.” (RL)

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

In 1970s Belfast, a young Catholic teacher, Cushla, meets an older, married Protestant man in the pub owned by her family, an encounter that changes both of their lives for ever. As an affair between the two progresses, the daily news of the Troubles unfolds, and tensions in the town escalate. Previously the author of short stories, in Trespasses, says the Washington Post, “Kennedy has more room to flesh out her characters and dramatise their predicaments. She does so masterfully, convincing her reader of all that unfolds”. Meanwhile, The Spectator says: “This cleverly crafted love story about ordinary lives ravaged by violence tears at your heart without succumbing to sentimentality.” (LB)

The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn

When a whale washes up on the beach in Dorset near Cristabel Seagrave’s home at Chilcombe estate, the 12-year-old claims it as her own. Benignly neglected by her step-parents, who are distracted by endless parties, she and her siblings find their own way to grow up and educate themselves. Then, as war approaches and their lives take different tracks, the siblings are drawn into the conflict. “Generous, filling, deeply satisfying, funny-sad, every page crammed with life and experience,” is how the Sunday Times describes it. Quinn is “one of those writers who has her finger on humanity’s pulse. An absolute treat of a book, to be read and reread”. The Independent says: “This is a chunky novel to get lost in, full of pacy plotting and luscious language.” (LB)

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

“The most propulsively entertaining of Li’s novels,” according to the New York Times, The Book of Goose is the fifth from the Chinese-born, US-based writer. It is what The Observer calls a “deeply strange” tale of two adolescent girls in rural, post-war France who concoct a literary hoax and briefly become a publishing sensation. The Observer praises “the thrilling complexity of The Book of Goose’s relationship with the literary impulse”, while The New York Times calls it “an existential fable that illuminates the tangle of motives behind our writing of stories”. (RL)

I’m Sorry You Feel that Way by Rebecca Wait

“Desperately sad – and extremely funny,” is how iNews describes Rebecca Wait’s fourth novel, I’m Sorry You Feel that Way. “Its exquisitely detailed examination of interpersonal relationships allows it to become furtively compassionate, generous even to the worst offenders and one of the richest explorations of family dysfunction I’ve read.” The novel explores the intricacies of family relationships, as sisters Alice and Hanna face a challenging upbringing with a dominant mother, absent father and disapproving older brother. As adults, they must deal not only with disappointments in love and work, but also ever-more complicated family conflict and tensions. It is “razor-sharp”, says The Observer. (LB)

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

According to The Atlantic, Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, published in 2022, along with its follow-up, Stella Maris, are “the richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career,” and represent a genuine publishing event. The 89-year-old writer of No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006) is considered one of America’s greatest living novelists, and these typically apocalyptic, bleak books could well be his last. The Passenger, writes The Irish Times, is “among McCarthy’s most quietly reflective novels, recalling the moments of serenity amid scenes of devastation that made The Road so haunting.” (RL)

Darling by India Knight

A 21st-Century retelling of Nancy Mitford’s classic The Pursuit of Love, India Knight’s novel Darling transposes the original to the bohemian household of Alconleigh farm in Norfolk. Our narrator is Franny, and teenage Linda Radlett lives with her rock-star father Matthew, ethereal mother Sadie, and her many siblings. It is an ambitious idea but, according to The Guardian, “Knight rises to that challenge with aplomb… Darling is a very human book, full of feelings and heartbreak and humour and joy”. Meanwhile, iNews says that the characters are depicted with an “enveloping warmth”, and the novel is “an absolute hoot”. It concludes: “This is a gorgeously bittersweet portrait of growing up, where happiness is only ever fleeting.” (LB)

There are More Things by Yara Rodrigues Fowler

In 2019, following her debut novel Stubborn Archivist, Yara Rodrigues Fowler was named by the Financial Times as “one of the planet’s 30 most exciting young people,” and the author’s follow-up has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political fiction and the Goldsmiths Prize. There are More Things tells the story of Catarina – who grows up in a well-known political family in Olinda, Brazil – and Londoner Melissa. When the two women meet, as political turmoil in Brazil and the UK unfurls, their friendship intensifies. The novel is “an enriching read”, says The Irish Times. “From the chaotic London riots and Brexit to the dark era of Brazil’s military dictatorship, this novel paints a stirring portrait of the legacy of violence.” (LB)

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux

“The quality that distinguishes Ernaux’s writing on sex from others in her milieu is the total absence of shame,” writes The Guardian of this memoir of a torrid, 18-month love affair between Ernaux and a married Russian diplomat that began in Leningrad in 1988 and continued in Paris. Getting Lost (which is published in translation this year) is the second book of Ernaux’s to be inspired by the affair – the first, a slight, memoir-like novel, was Simple Passion (1991). Recently awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, Ernaux – now in her 80s – is a huge literary celebrity in France. Her writing on sex is spare and direct, explicit and subversive. Getting Lost is, writes The New York Times, “a feverish book… about being impaled by desire, and about the things human beings want, as opposed to the things for which they settle.” (RL)

Fairy Tale by Stephen King

Written during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, King’s latest is a world-hopping fantasy whose hero is Charlie Reade, a talented 17-year-old who has lost his mother in a car accident and is caring for his grieving, alcoholic father. When Charlie befriends the reclusive Mr Bowditch and his ancient German Shepherd dog, Radar, he discovers underneath Bodwitch’s shed a portal to the kingdom of Empis, where the people – who have a disfiguring illness called “the grey” – are facing a terrifying evil. Described as “a multiverse-traversing, genre-hopping intertextual mash-up” by the New York Times, Fairy Tale is, according to The Guardian, “vintage, timeless King, a transporting, terrifying treat”. (RL)

Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley

At 20 years old, Leila Mottley became the youngest ever nominee when Nightcrawling was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and the novel was an instant New York Times bestseller. The story is based on a true crime in 2015, involving sexual exploitation, corruption and brutality in the Oakland police department. The novel’s central character is 17-year-old Kiara Johnson, a protagonist who is “one of the toughest and kindest young heroines of our time,” says the Guardian. “Restlessly truth-seeking, Nightcrawling marks the dazzling arrival of a young writer with a voice and vision you won’t easily get out of your head.” Nightcrawling is, says iNews, “an extraordinarily moving debut”. (LB)

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Told in a series of vignettes, After Sappho reimagines the lives of a group of notable feminists, artists and writers of the past. Among them are Colette, Josephine Baker, Virginia Woolf and Sarah Bernhardt, each of them facing obstacles and battling for liberation and justice. According to the Irish Times, After Sappho “delivers on its own promise with great stylistic power and verve“. The Guardian says:”[With] sentences crisply flat yet billowing easily into gorgeous lyricism… [After Sappho] is a book that’s wholly seduced by seduction and that seduces in turn.” (LB)

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

From the author of the 2017 bestseller, Little Fires Everywhere, this dystopian novel is set in a post-crisis US of surveillance and book-banning, where children are forcibly separated from their parents, and people – particularly Asian-Americans – are condemned for “un-American” activities. Twelve-year-old Bird lives with his father, a talented linguistics professor forced to stack books in a library, while Bird’s mother – a prominent Chinese-American poet – has disappeared three years’ previously. Bird’s quest to find her leads him to an underground network of librarian resistance-fighters, and towards the fate of the taken children. “Ng’s own masterful telling of this tale of governmental cruelty and the shadow armies of ordinary citizens who both facilitate and resist is its own best testimony to the unpredictable possibilities of storytelling,” writes NPR, while Vogue called Our Missing Hearts “an unwaveringly dark fairy tale for a world that has stopped making sense”. (RL)

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida tells the magical story of a war photographer who has woken up dead, apparently in a celestial visa office. In the afterlife, surrounded by ghouls, he has seven moons to contact the man and woman he loves most. The novel “fizzes with energy, imagery and ideas against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars” say the Booker judges. The Guardian says the novel “recalls the mordant wit and surrealism of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls or Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita… Karunatilaka has done artistic justice to a terrible period in his country’s history.” (LB)

The Colony by Audrey Magee

“The Colony contains multitudes – on families, on men and women, on rural communities – with much of it just visible on the surface, like the flicker of a smile or a shark in the water,” writes John Self in The Times. The novel portrays one summer on a small island off the coast of Ireland. Two separate visitors – an artist and a linguist, both seeking to capture the truth and essence of the place – force the islanders to question their own values and desires. “Austere and stark,” writes the Financial Times, “The Colony is a novel about big, important things.” (LB)

The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid

From the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and the Booker-shortlisted Exit West (2017), Hamid borrows a clever conceit from Kafka’s Metamorphosis to imaginatively consider race and racism through the character of Anders, a white man living in a small US town, who wakes up one morning to find his skin has turned dark. As Anders begins to face conflict in his life and relationships; and as more and more people follow suit, violence and unrest erupts on the streets. “For a novel that explores the functions and presumptions of racism, The Last White Man is a peculiarly hopeful story,” writes The Washington Post. The Last White Man is “a short novel of very long sentences” that is, writes The Guardian, “[a] strange, beautiful allegorical tale… compellingly readable and strangely musical, as if being recounted as a kind of folktale to future generations.” (RL)

Trust by Hernan Diaz

“A genre-bending, time-skipping story about New York City’s elite in the roaring ’20s and Great Depression,” is how Vanity Fair describes Trust by Hernan Diaz, who was a Pulitzer finalist for his 2017 novel In the Distance. A legendary New York couple has risen to the top of a world of apparently endless wealth – but at what cost? Diaz’s novel puts competing narratives into dialogue with each other, resulting in a puzzle that explores how power can manipulate the truth. Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Trust is a “surprising, engrossing and beautifully executed novel,” says the Irish Times, that “confirms Diaz as a virtuoso of storytelling”. (LB)

Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie

The seventh novel from the acclaimed Pakistani-British writer of A God in Every Stone (2014) and 2017’s bestselling Home Fire, Best of Friends explores the intricacies of friendship through the lives of two very different women, lifelong friends Zahra and Maryam. The novel opens with them as teenagers in 1980s Karachi; later, they are successful forty-somethings living in London with deeply conflicting political views. When troubling events from their past resurface, their friendship is put to the test. “It’s the deep-rooted and complicated bond between the two women that keeps us turning the pages,” writes The Spectator. The Observer called it: “an epic story that explores the ties of childhood friendship, the possibility of escape, the way the political world intrudes into the personal, all through the lens of two sharply drawn protagonists.” (RL)

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler

The story of six siblings and an injustice that shatters their close bond, Booth is the Booker-shortlisted novel by Karen Joy Fowler, author of the bestselling We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. The Booth brothers and sisters grow up in 1830s rural Baltimore as civil war draws closer, each with their own dreams and battles to fight. One of them, Johnny, makes a decision that will change the course of history – the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. “In its stretch and imaginative depth, Booth has an utterly seductive authority,” says The Guardian. The novel, says The Literary Review, “captures with enthralling vividness a country caught in the grip of fanatical populism, ripped apart by irreconcilable political differences and boiling with fury and rage… An unalloyed triumph”. (LB)

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread (later Costa) prize for her first novel, 1995’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum. She has since published several novels – two of which also won Costa prizes – including the acclaimed Life After Life (2013), which was adapted into a BBC TV series this year. Set amid the dancers, drinkers and gangsters of “Roaring” 1920s London, Shrines of Gaiety is chock-full of sex, intrigue and vice coalescing around the figure of Nellie Coker, a notorious entrepreneur who presides over a series of Soho nightclubs. Shrines of Gaeity is, according to The New York Times, “a cocktail of fizz and melancholy, generously poured,” while Atkinson is “a keenly sympathetic observer of human foibles, one who can sketch a character in one quicksilver sentence”.  The novel is “a marvel of plate-spinning narrative knowhow,” writes The Observer. (RL)

Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley

Best-selling New York Times essayist Sloane Crosley has combined themes of love, luck and hipsterism to create a New York City anti-rom-com that is also a satire on internet millennial life. Publishers Weekly describes Cult Classic as “a witty and fantastical story of dating and experimental psychology in New York City… Thoroughly hilarious [and] sharply perceptive… Crosley has found the perfect fictional subject for her gimlet eye”. The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, says: “Crosley’s writing is as funny as ever, with a great line or clever observation on nearly every page… Her fascinating conceits – entertaining and compelling in their own right – are the engines of the narrative, but her insights into contemporary life are the fuel.” (LB)

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Douglas Stuart, the author of the Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain (2020), has won rapturous praise once again for his second novel, a heartbreaking queer love story between Protestant Mungo and Catholic James, who come together across the divided landscape of a Glasgow council estate in the post-Thatcher era. “Young Mungo is a suspense story wrapped around a novel of acute psychological observation. It’s hard to imagine a more disquieting and powerful work of fiction will be published anytime soon about the perils of being different,” says Maureen Corrigan, book critic of NPR’s Fresh Air. “If the first novel announced Stuart as a novelist of great promise, this confirms him as a prodigious talent,” writes Alex Preston in The Observer. (RL)

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

In Jennifer Egan’s 2011 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, Bix Bouton featured as a minor character. Now he is back as a tech visionary at the opening of The Candy House, as CEO of internet giant Mandala who is in search of his next “utopian vision”. Bouton’s invention, Own Your Unconscious, is the catalyst for the novel’s exploration of the end of privacy in the digital age and how tech turns the world upside down. Meanwhile, the underlying temptation metaphor of Hansel and Gretel’s “candy house” permeates the book. It is an “exhilarating, deeply pleasurable” novel, says Prospect, while The New York Times calls it “a spectacular palace built out of rabbit holes”. (LB)

Either/Or by Elif Batuman

A sequel to her 2017 Pulitzer-Prize nominated debut, The Idiot, Batuman’s semi-autobiographical second novel continues the adventures of Selin Karadag, a Russian literature student in her sophomore year at Harvard University in 1996. Using Kierkegaard’s classic philosophical work as a starting point, Soren ponders the meaning of life through the Danish philosopher’s theory of the choice between morality and hedonism, using her literature syllabus as her guide. “Either/Or is a sequel that amplifies the meaning of its predecessor while expanding its philosophical ambit,” writes Charles Arrowsmith in The Washington Post, while Sophie Haigney in The New Republic praises Batuman’s “brilliant, funny observations.” (RL)

Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson

In her follow-up to 2015’s Negroland, Margo Jefferson blends criticism and memoir, recalling personal experiences and family members she has lost, as well as jazz luminaries, artists and writers she admires. The veteran critic draws on a rich life full of cultural experience, as well as new thinking about the part race has played in her life, and addresses the core theme of black female identity. “Her approach is an almost poetic presentation of fragments of her experiences as they ricocheted off artists whose work and lives she has found meaningful,” says The Washington Post. “It’s an extraordinary reading experience – the first book I recall wanting to reread immediately after reaching the end.” Or, as The Observer puts it: “It is impossible not to be stirred by her odes to fellow black American strivers of excellence.” (LB)

In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Amy Bloom

Described by Hephzibah Anderson in The Guardian as “a courageous howl of a memoir” In Love… is the story of novelist and psychotherapist Bloom’s journey to aid her husband to end his life, after a 2019 diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s. The narrative jumps back and forth, documenting the frustrations and administrative red tape Bloom encounters and the ethical considerations involved with assisted suicide, while drawing a vivid picture of her husband, the architect Brian Ameche, with wit, compassion and dark humour. The memoir acts as a powerful testament to the couple’s “stickily close” and tender relationship, as Bloom, writes Salley Vickers, also in The Guardian: “has written about him [Brian] with all the brave-spirited, undaunted love to which the book bears stupendous witness.” (RL)

Love Marriage by Monica Ali

The tragicomic novel Love Marriage tells the story of Yasmin, junior doctor and dutiful daughter, who, as her wedding day draws closer, begins to dismantle her own assumptions about the people around her. Both her and her fiance’s family face an unravelling of secrets, lies and infidelities, and Yasmin must ask herself what a “love marriage” really means. Monica Ali’s 2003 novel Brick Lane was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and this is her most acclaimed book since then. It is a “rich, sensitive and gloriously entertaining novel – her fifth, and possibly her best,” says the TLS, and “juggles so many questions and plot lines that we keep expecting one of them to break free and become detached… yet everything remains utterly coherent and convincing.” The Spectator praises the novel too: “It dares to be deliberately funny,” it says, and is “absolutely terrific… genuinely touching.” (LB)

Tiepolo Blue by James Cahill

Don Lamb is a repressed 40-something Cambridge art historian working on a monograph about the the paintings of the eponymous 18th-Century Venetian master. It’s 1994, the contemporary art world is rapidly changing, and after an embarrassing faux pas, Lamb is removed from Cambridge to manage a South London gallery, where he encounters Ben, a young artist who introduces him to the capital’s hedonistic nightlife and a reckoning with his sexuality. Tiepolo Blue combines “formal elegance with gripping storytelling,” writes the FT. “[Its] delicious unease and pervasive threat give this assured first novel great singularity and a kind of gothic edge,” writes Michael Donkor in The Guardian. (RL)

Fire Island: Love, Loss and Liberation in an American Paradise by Jack Parlett

In his meditative look back at the famous queer party island in New York, Jack Parlett adds his own autobiographical asides. The result is a place-based memoir about hedonism, reinvention and liberation that has been widely acclaimed. The New York Times says: “[Parlett’s] concise, meticulously researched, century-spanning chronicle of queer life on Fire Island captures, with a plain-spoken yet lyric touch, the locale’s power to stun and shame, to give pleasure and symbolise evanescence.” Populated by the mid-century literati – WH Auden, James Baldwin, Patricia Highsmith all make appearances – the book explores the culture and hierarchies of Fire Island’s communities. “Utopias tend to be flawed in revealing ways,” says the TLS, and this “sets the tone for an island history that’s deeply felt and keenly judged.” (LB)

Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

A follow-up to her 2018 novel Motherhood, Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour is billed as “a book about the shape of life, from beginning to end,” and combines the real with the abstract and surreal in its story of Mira. An aspiring art critic, she meets and falls in love with Annie, who opens up Mira’s chest to a portal with her enormous power. Later, when her father dies, Mira transforms into a leaf for a long section. Pure Colour is “simultaneously wise and silly, moving and inscrutable” writes Lily Meyer in NPR. “The apocalypse written as trance, a sleepwalker’s song about the end of all things… Pure Colour is an original, a book that says something new for our difficult times”, writes Anne Enright in The Guardian. (RL)

Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St John Mandel

The prescient 2014 novel Station Eleven – a dystopian story of a devastating pandemic – was a hit for Emily St John Mandel, winning the Arthur C Clarke award, and also spawning a TV series. Her new book, the time-travelling story Sea of Tranquillity, begins in 1912, with a listless young British immigrant starting a new life in Canada who, when wandering in the woods, experiences an incomprehensible paranormal event. The narrative moves forward to the present day, and then to two futuristic time zones, weaving together disparate threads. The novel has “intellectual heft”, says The Scotsman, and “St John Mandel is an intelligent, acute and sympathetic writer”. Sea of Tranquillity is, says the Guardian, “hugely ambitious in scope, yet also intimate and written with a graceful and beguiling fluency.” (LB)

Memphis by Tara M Stringfellow

“A rhapsodic hymn to black women,” writes Kia Corthron in the New York Times, of poet, storyteller and former lawyer Stringfellow’s first novel, which spans 70 years and three generations: Hazel, daughters Miriam and August and granddaughter Joan. Memphis is, Stringfellow says, “an ode to my city and the black women living here in it… full of mystery and magic and humour and grit.” The Irish Times praises Stringfellow: “Her women are vivid, formidable and funny, exposing the legacy of racial violence not just within the microcosm of family or the titular city, but nationally,” while The Washington Post writes: “With her richly impressionistic style, Stringfellow captures the changes transforming Memphis in the latter half of the 20th Century.” (RL)

Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong

In his second poetry collection, written in the aftermath of his mother’s death, Ocean Vuong contemplates personal loss, the meaning of family, and tenderness in the face of violence. The episodic poem Dear Rose addresses his dead mother about her journey as an immigrant from Vietnam to the US. “Because Vuong plays with time by the millisecond – slowing down or speeding up old memories or conversations – he uncovers new enlightening details that have a life of their own,” says The Guardian. Artfuse describes Time is a Mother as a “dazzling investigation of love and loss, inspiring both nostalgia and release”, and says the poet’s language, “recognises the trauma of death, but also revels in the glory of life”. (LB)

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

Much of Nagamatsu’s debut novel was completed before 2020, and its themes will strike readers with their prescience. Set in the near-future, a team of scientists in Siberia discover a mummified pre-historic female corpse they name “Annie”, which holds a disease that sets off a catastrophic pandemic named “the Arctic Plague”. Nagamatsu focuses on the human side of the crisis, leaping forward 6,000 years to reveal a society that has commercialised death, and the long-reaching legacy of past decisions. Expansive and genre-defying, it is told through discrete stories that slowly coalesce. “Like a Polaroid photograph, How High We Go in the Dark takes time to show its true colours. When they finally appear, the effect is all the more dazzling,” writes the Guardian. It is, writes the New York Times, “a book of sorrow for the destruction we’re bringing on ourselves. Yet the novel reminds us there’s still hope in human connections, despite our sadness.” (RL)

Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood

Now in the seventh decade of her remarkable literary career, Margaret Atwood has written her third collection of essays that, says the i newspaper, “brims with enthusiasm and verve”. Broadly looking at events of the past two decades, the range of subjects is wide – from censorship and Obama, to #MeToo and zombies. And there are insights into her own craft and the function of fiction. As the i puts it: “Atwood always makes the idea of big questions a little more digestible. You find yourself asking: what can fiction do? What can we do, generally?” The essays are full of a “droll, deadpan humour and an instinct for self-deprecation” says the Guardian. “Atwood remains frank, honest and good company.” (LB)

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire

This is Warsan Shire’s long-awaited, first full-length poetry collection, after two pamphlets, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011) and Her Blue Body (2015). It arrives nearly six years after the Somali-British poet shot to world-wide fame collaborating with Beyoncé on the latter’s ground-breaking visual albums, Lemonade (2016) and Black is King (2020). The poems in Bless the Daughter… draw from Shire’s own experiences, bringing to vivid life black women’s lives, motherhood and migration. “Shire’s strikingly beautiful imagery leverages the specificity of her own womanhood, love life, tussles with mental health, grief, family history, and stories from the Somali diaspora, to make them reverberate universally,” writes Dfiza Benson in The Telegraph. (RL)

In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante

In the Margins is a collection of four essays in which the best-selling, pseudonymous author of the Neapolitan Quartet articulates how and why she writes – and her inspiration, struggles and evolution as both a writer and reader. Ranging from philosophical to practical, the essays give the reader an insight into the enigmatic author’s mind, and include an exploration of what a writer is – less an embodied entity, she says, than a stream of “pure sensibility that feeds on the alphabet”. As the New York Times puts it: “For those who wish to burrow gopher-like into the author’s mind, Ferrante has prepared a tunnel.” (LB)

Moon Witch, Spider King by Marlon James

The Booker Prize-winning novelist returns with part two of his Dark Star fantasy trilogy, after 2019’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which the author initially described as the “African Game of Thrones” (he later insisted this was a joke). A female-centric counternarrative to the first novel, Moon Witch, Spider King follows Sogolon, the 177-year-old antihero, and Moon Witch of the title, on an epic and characteristically violent journey. “Like an ancient African Lisbeth Salander,” writes the FT, “she dedicates her lonesomeness to meting out lethal rough justice to men who harm women.” Praising the novel in The New York Times, Eowyn Ivey writes, “the Moon Witch lit my path and showed me how a woman might navigate this dangerous, remarkable world”. (RL)

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez

Identity, elites, race and capitalism are the areas explored in this multi-layered novel, the first by Xochitl Gonzalez. This “impressive debut”, says the Observer, is “deeply satisfying and nuanced… a tender exploration of love in its many forms”. Set in New York City in the months around a devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico, Olga Dies Dreaming follows the story of wedding planner Olga and her congressman brother Prieto. Family strife, political corruption and the notion of the American dream all feature in this “irresistibly warm yet entirely uncompromising” novel, says The Skinny. (LB)

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo

NoViolet Bulawayo became the first black African woman – and first Zimbabwean – to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for her 2013 debut, We Need New Names. Nine years later, Glory is an Orwell-inspired fable set in the animal kingdom of Jidada, which satirises the 2017 coup that toppled Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe (Bulawayo has explained that Glory began its life as a non-fiction account of this history). As a fierce but comedic allegory, Glory can be seen as a companion piece to Wole Soyinka’s 2021 satire of Nigerian society, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth. “By aiming the long, piercing gaze of this metaphor at the aftereffects of European imperialism in Africa, Bulawayo is really out-Orwelling Orwell,” writes the New York Times. “Glory,” writes the Guardian, “with a flicker of hope at its end, is allegory, satire and fairytale rolled into one mighty punch”. (RL)

French Braid by Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler’s 24th novel is “an extraordinarily rich portrait of a family in flux,” according to the Evening Standard. “Tyler’s set pieces seem undramatic, but her rhythms are masterly.” The novel tells the story of the Garrett family across six decades, and like most of Tyler’s works, is an ensemble piece that spans the generations, set in Baltimore. The story starts with a lakeside family holiday, where rifts emerge that are largely unvoiced, and that unravel in the lives of each family member as the years progress. It is “thoroughly enjoyable,” says the Guardian, “and at this point any Tyler book is a gift”. French Braid is “funny, poignant, generous… it suggests there’s always new light to be shed, whatever the situation, with just another turn of the prism.” (LB)

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

Yanagihara’s highly-anticipated third novel follows her bestselling, Booker Prize-shortlisted 2015 breakthrough, A Little Life. To Paradise, which was released in January to both rapturous acclaim and cries of dissent, is, like its predecessor, lengthy (at 720 pages) and dwells on deep suffering rather than joy, which has drawn criticism in some parts. Multi-form, and spanning three centuries, it is a compelling and wildly ambitious work, offering no less than an alternate retelling of the US, through 1890s New York, Hawaii and a dystopian, late-21st Century. “Resolution is not available here, but some of the most poignant feelings that literature can elicit certainly are,” writes Vogue, while the Boston Globe calls it “a rich, emotional, and thought-provoking read.” (RL)

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

Frida Liu is a working single mother in a near future who makes the mistake of leaving her child alone at home for a couple of hours one afternoon. Authorities are summoned by the neighbours, and her daughter Harriet is taken from her. Frida is given the choice to either lose her child permanently, or to spend a year at a state-run re-education camp for mothers where inmates must care for eerily lifelike robot children, equipped with surveillance cameras. Calling this novel “dystopian” doesn’t feel quite right, says Wired. “Near-dystopian, maybe? Ever-so-slightly speculative? This closeness to reality is what turns the book’s emotional gut punch into a full knockout wallop.” The School for Good Mothers is, says the New York Times, “a chilling debut”. (LB)

The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson

The Hanrahan family gather for a weekend as the patriarch Ray – artist and notorious egoist – prepares for a new exhibition of his art. Ray’s three grown-up children and steadfast wife, Lucia, all have their own choices to make. This fifth novel by Mendelson has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize, and has been highly praised. The Guardian points to the author’s “succinct specificity of detail,” and “a precision of observation that made me laugh frequently and smile when I wasn’t laughing”. According to the Spectator, Mendelson excels at “vivid, drily hilarious tales about messy families”. The Exhibitionist is “a glorious ride. Mendelson observes the minutiae of human behaviour like a comic anthropologist.” (LB)

Free Love by Tessa Hadley

Described by The Guardian in 2015 as “one of this country’s great contemporary novelists,” British writer and academic Hadley has been quietly producing works of subtly powerful prose for two decades. Like her recent novels, The Past (2015) and Late in the Day (2019), Free Love – Hadley’s eighth – explores intimate relationships, sexuality, memory and grief, through an apparently ordinary-looking suburban family. But, Hadley writes, “under the placid surface of suburbia, something was unhinged.” Set amid the culture clash of the late 1960s, the novel interrogates the counterculture’s idealistic vision of sexual freedom, in, writes the i newspaper, “a complex tale of personal awakening and a snapshot of a moment in time when the survivors of war were suddenly painted as relics by a new generation determined not to live under their dour and hesitant shadow.” NPR writes, “Free Love is a fresh, moving evocation of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” (RL)

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

A debut novel, Black Cake tells the backstory of an African-American family of Caribbean origin, and two siblings who are reunited after eight years of estrangement at their mother’s funeral where they discover their unusual inheritance. The plot is driven by an omniscient narrator, dialogue and flashbacks. It is, says the New York Times, full of “family secrets, big lies, great loves, bright colours and strong smells”. The themes of race , identity and family love are all incorporated, says the Independent, “but the fun is in the reading… Black Cake is a satisfying literary meal, heralding the arrival of a new novelist to watch.” (LB)

Auē by Becky Manawatu

Told through several viewpoints, Auē tells the story of Māori siblings who have lost their parents, with each sibling telling their tale, and later their mother, Aroha, also telling hers from the afterlife. The novel has already won two awards in New Zealand, and is now gaining wider praise. “The plot reveals are masterful,” says The Guardian. “Auē has done well because it is expertly crafted, but also because it has something indefinable: enthralling, puzzling, gripping and familiar, yet otherworldly.” (LB)

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