This half year seems to have been particularly heavy on the crime fiction. And what’s listed below is not even all of the crime I read – there were some that disappointed me, and as always I prefer to share enthusiasm rather than disappointment (although I am not uncritical of the books that I have chosen to review), and there were some that were perfectly enjoyable but about which I could say little other than that this was another cracking title in x series by y. I turn to crime (as it were) for tension and suspense along the way and a satisfying denouement. But of course the best crime writers (looking at you, Sarah Hilary, Jane Casey, Will Dean, Laura Lippman, Denise Mina, Abir Mukherjee, Mark Billingham, Anne Holt, Louise Penny, Elly Griffiths, Ian Rankin, Mick Herron, Ann Cleeves, Val McDermid, Lesley Thompson and Sara Paretsky, to name only those I’ve read this year) give you more than that – psychological, political, sociological insights into the why and who of crime (on both sides of the law).

If I had to pick the outstanding novels in this half-year (of course I don’t have to, it’s my blog and I make the rules here) I’d say Richard Powers’ The Time of Our Singing and Stuart Evers’ The Blind Light, not only because they took me over completely whilst I was reading, and moved me tremendously, but because both authors were new to me, and so I had no expectations and was bowled over. I also rate very highly Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, and great new stuff from Stephen King (Holly) and Sarah Hilary (Black Thorn).

Non-fiction was heavy on autobiography (Martin Amis, Angela Davis, Joan Didion, Catherine Taylor and Terri White), and biography. Two books on the US opioid crisis which has proven rather addictive as subject matter these last six months, and some grief/bereavement reading. Best/favourites? Catherine Taylor’s The Stirrings, and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

FICTION

Megan Abbott – Beware the Woman

The premiss is one which I’m sure I’ve encountered before, but it’s a fresh take on the set up – a young couple, expecting their first child, visits one of their parents, and things get a bit weird. (Get Out sprang immediately to mind, although the tensions here are not to do with race). There’s a whole lot of gaslighting going on here, the creepiness is built up gradually and cleverly, and it was all very enjoyable, but with an undercurrent that’s really rather serious.

Eleanor Catton – Birnam Wood

This is a complex and gripping thriller – it’s featured in a lot of end of year Best Of lists, not just mine – which delivers, generously, both intelligence and suspense. ‘Birnam Wood is a dark and brilliant novel about the violence and tawdriness of late capitalism. Its ending, though, propels it from a merely very good book into a truly great one.’

Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Water Dancer

Compelling narrative of slavery, with echoes of The Underground Railroad (like Whitehead, Coates takes the metaphorical and makes it literal), and with a leading role for Harriet Tubman. This isn’t just about slavery though, Coates looks more widely at capitalism, at the oppression of women, at the structures in society that require there to be a hierarchy and someone at the bottom of that who is powerless. Full of pain, inevitably, but of beauty too.

Will Dean – The Last Passenger

A cracking opening (and very different to Dean’s excellent Tuva Moodyson crime novels – I also read Wolf Pack in that series recently) . Caz is on holiday on an ocean liner with her partner, and wakes to find she is, apparently, alone on the ship. Dean pulls this off brilliantly, and every time we (and the protagonist) thinks they have begun to figure out what’s going on, we are blindsided with a new revelation – right up to the final page. It’s irresistible.

Bernardine Evaristo – Soul Tourists

An impromptu road trip for a slightly ill-matched couple which somehow leads to encounters with key figures from black European and Middle Eastern history. I don’t think it entirely worked; perhaps Evaristo was simply trying to do too much, and there are two novels in here, which don’t always mesh. Thoroughly entertaining nonetheless.

Stuart Evers – The Blind Light

A family saga, of lives lived in the shadow of the bomb, absolutely enthralling and moving. It sweeps across sixty years in the lives of its main protagonists, Drummond, Gwen and Carter, but always the focus is on these relationships, always intimate rather than letting the individuals become lost in the sweep of big events. One of my books of the year.

Robert Ford – The Student Conductor

Ford’s writing about music is wonderful, and really made me think about the role of the conductor. But the characters of Ziegler, the lead character’s supposed mentor, didn’t convince me (though he did remind me very strongly of J K Simmons’ character in Whiplash), nor did the oboist/love interest. Very mixed feelings about this one.

Abdulrazak Gurnah – Pilgrims Way

I read Gurnah’s brilliant Afterlives recently, set in what is now Tanzania in the early twentieth century. Pilgrims Way is closer to home, geographically and chronologically, and its scope is much narrower, dealing with one man, Daud, an immigrant whose life has not gone to plan, and who deals with his disappointment and disillusionment with sardonic humour and leaps of imagination. It’s often funny, but always dark and troubling.

Mohsin Hamid – The Last White Man

A fable in which a white man wakes up one morning and looks in the mirror to see that he’s no longer a white man. He has to navigate the world now as a black man, and everything is different. At this point it made me think of Arthur Miller’s novel, Focus, in which a man gets new spectacles, which make him look Jewish to some people, and those people conclude that he must be Jewish. But Hamid’s tale goes in a different direction and I found it beautiful.  

Sarah Hilary – Black Thorn

A stand-alone from Hilary, whose Marnie Rome detective novels are amongst my favourite contemporary crime thrillers. Here the focus is not on the police, who play a more peripheral role, but on a small community of people who, we learn at the beginning, have encountered some catastrophe, and we gradually learn what, how, who, why… It’s beautifully done – incredibly tense and creepy and that tension is maintained as truths emerge.

Catherine Ryan Howard – Run Time

This is gripping stuff! Layers upon layers, super tense atmosphere, the plot revolves around the filming of a horror movie, in an actual cabin in the woods…

Clare Keegan – Foster

A novella of real delicacy, beauty and heartbreak. A child goes to stay with strangers when her mother is pregnant again, and finds herself with space and time to think and breathe, as she tries to understand her new guardians, and her own mother.

Stephen King – Holly

Holly first appeared in King’s Mr Mercedes, but he clearly loved her, because her role became increasingly important, in the other two books in that trilogy, but also in The Outsider. And here she is front and centre, as the title promises. This is King at his best, conjuring up creeping unease and tension, creating monstrous human beings and monstrous deeds, without ever letting the monstrous have it all their way, because he also creates people like Holly, who will, as she has done since Mr Mercedes, stand in its way. We love her as much as King does.

Laura Lippman – Prom Mom

Lippman’s plots are as twisty as the run of the mill psychological thrillers which bill themselves as having ‘a twist that you’d never predict’. But unlike so many of those, the twists are earned by careful plotting and, most of all, by character building. Our sympathies shift as we understand the protagonists better but understanding them is key to the twists in the narrative, rather than just upturning everything we’ve previously been told. And we do feel for these people, all of them, however weak and flawed they turn out to be.

Luke McCallin – The Man from Berlin

McCallin’s protagonist is an Abwehr officer, a former policeman, who is trying to solve brutal crimes in the context of a regime which is itself brutal and criminal. It’s similar territory to Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, and whilst I have only read one of this series so far, I will follow it up because I’m fascinated to see how Gregor Reinhardt navigates this dangerous, brutal world.

Cormac McCarthy – All the Pretty Horses

McCarthy’s prose is as rich as his dialogue is spare – sometimes the former feels just a bit too much, but at best its richness is beautiful rather than indigestible. His protagonist is a 16 year old boy who’s just been turfed off his grandfather’s ranch, and decides to try his luck in Mexico, along with his best friend, and their horses. John Grady Cole is someone we quickly learn to care about – like so many at his age, he thinks he understands the world rather better than he does, but he is in many ways an archetypal Western hero, with principles and courage and loyalty. It’s a world I don’t really understand but this is a compelling and moving novel. It’s the first in a trilogy, so I may venture on to Vol. 2 (The Crossing) at some point.

Denise Mina – Field of Blood

Mina weaves a fictionalised version of a real crime, and a real case of miscarriage of justice together with her usual skill. Paddy Meehan too finds her job (as a copyboy at a newspaper) and her personal life getting dangerously intertwined. She’s an engaging character, not perfect in judgement or actions, but I will look forward to reading the other books in which she features.

Abir Mukherjee – A Rising Man/A Necessary Evil

The first two in a crime series set in India in the early 20^th century, with a British/Indian team, exploring all the tensions that creates (between the two of them, and with wider society). The context is fascinating, the writing excellent, and the voice of Wyndham, the British officer, is convincingly that of an enlightened man of his time, rather than a stand-in for a contemporary reader.

Richard Powers – The Time of our Singing

A truly immersive book, which I started off reading in short bursts until I realised that wouldn’t work. It’s a profoundly musical book – I half intend to create a playlist of all of the pieces of music that play a part in the narrative, although what I would really want would be those pieces performed by the characters in the book. It’s also brave (or foolhardy) enough to tackle race, as the protagonists are a mixed-race family (white father, black mother) in the US in the mid-twentieth century. I found it beautiful, powerful, very moving.

Anya Seton – My Theodosia

I read this, along with everything Anya Seton wrote, as a teenager, and revisited it because I was reading the biography of Alexander Hamilton (see below), who was killed in a duel by Theodosia Burr’s father. But, my god, this is an appallingly, sickeningly racist book. I wondered whether Seton was simply trying to convey the perceptions of a young woman in a society where slavery was still entrenched (although we are told that Theodosia thought slavery was wrong), but no, Seton wrote this in 1942 as a young woman in a post-slavery but pre-civil rights society, and it is impossible to escape the conclusion that these were her perceptions too. Her descriptions of any black characters are contemptuous, the n word is on every page. Of course, this is a novel of its time (and about a time when things were worse), but it made it a grim read and it was hard to care about Theodosia or her father when one had to wade through all of this. I can’t remember how I felt about the book when I first read it, but I think that, although I was more aware of racial politics than my contemporaries at school in Mansfield, having grown up in West Africa with parents who were passionately anti-apartheid, and having a keen interest in the civil rights/black power movements, I was at the same time used to encountering these attitudes and this language, unapologetically presented, in a way that we no longer are.

Elif Shafak – The Island of Missing Trees

I’ve enjoyed a couple of Shafak’s other books, and I liked a lot of things about this, but there was way too much whimsy for my taste. Whole sections are narrated by a fig tree, and whilst I can see how this connects with the history of the divided island of Cyprus, and with the stories of the main protagonists, I speed-read through these bits (sorry) to get back to the human characters, with whose stories I could more fully engage.

Khushwant Singh – Train to Pakistan

A novel about Partition, published in 1956, so not long after those events, set in a fictional village near the new border. Singh was a lawyer, diplomat and politician as well as a writer. His perspective here is to explore the cataclysmic events taking place across the sub-continent through a close focus on this small place, its dignitaries and officials and local ne’er do wells, who are portrayed with sharp wit and humour, even whilst the undercurrent of imminent tragedy is getting stronger.

Noel Streatfeild – Saplings

I’ve read many/most of Streatfeild’s children’s books, and her Vicarage trilogy but had no idea of this one’s existence until I spotted it in the catalogue of the brilliant Persephone Press. It’s the story of four children in wartime, of losses and betrayals and insecurity, and it’s a deep dive into ideas about attachment and loss and their effects on the young. If that makes it sound offputtingly theoretical, it isn’t – her novelist’s gift is to make us care about these children and what happens to them, and it’s very moving.

Marion Todd – See Them Run

Very enjoyable police procedural, set in the area around St Andrews, where I visit a couple of times a year (there’s always a peculiar fascination in reading thrillers set in familiar territory). Will read more.

Miriam Toewes – Women Talking

Recently made into a rather good film (see my screen review blog). This is horrifying, all the more so because the case is real. Girls and women in a Mennonite community in Bolivia were drugged and raped by members of their own community, and despite the perpetrators being exposed and some jailed, the women were left with no redress, and no protection.  The book is, as the title tells us, women talking – and they talk about survival, about whether they should stay in the only place they know or leave and take their chances in what may be a hostile world. The tension – and it is very tense indeed – comes both from the disagreements amongst the women and the depths of trauma that they reveal, and from the knowledge that they could so easily be prevented from leaving, when the men return.

NON-FICTION

Martin Amis – Experience

I’ve only read one of Amis’s novels, and I hated it. Time’s Arrow was clever, but in a way that repelled me, and that put me off trying any of his other novels. So, in the aftermath of his death, I thought I might encounter him through his memoir. I liked him more here – he is self-critical, he can find his past self ridiculous and blameworthy, and he can be generous to at least some of the other people in his life. And in his writing about the disappearance and murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by Fred and Rosemary West, there is real heart, real grief. I still don’t want to read any of his novels though.

Anita Anand – Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

Biography of an extraordinary woman. Daughter of a Maharajah, god-daughter to Queen Victoria, and as the book’s title tells us, suffragette and activist. Absolutely fascinating. Sophia herself remains enigmatic, but her engagement with the ‘advancement of women’, and with campaigns in support of Indian lescars, Indian troops in WWI, and the cause of Indian self-determination was bold and brave, and through her we see a varied and colourful cast of characters, both Indian and British.

Jeanine Basinger & Sam Wasson – Hollywood: An Oral History

The story of Hollywood told through interviews with people who were there – directors, actors, writers, studio bosses. The interviews, held in the American Film Archives, cover all aspects of movie-making so inevitably some sections are more interesting (to me) than others, though overall it is fascinating and enlightening, and very entertaining.  

Ian Black – Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs in Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

In the wake of the 7 October Hamas attacks, and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, I wanted to understand more about why we are where we are and why this is such an intractable situation. I knew some of the story, of course, but I wanted a rigorous historical approach, non-partisan as far as is possible. Black’s book fits the bill. It is, of course, deeply depressing, but it is impossible when reading it to take a simplistic view of causes or possible solutions.

Ron Chernow – Alexander Hamilton/Mike Duncan – A Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution

I’ve grouped these two biographies together because their subjects were not just contemporaries but friends, and there are many parallels between them. Reading up on Hamilton is prep for going to see the musical in Manchester in February – when I watched it on TV I realised how sketchy my knowledge of that period of American history was, and whilst I dare say it’s not compulsory to do the reading before enjoying the music, it’s very much me… I had a better grasp on Lafayette’s story because my History A level covered the French Revolution and its aftermath, and I’ve read around the subject since. Both Hamilton and Lafayette were extraordinary men who achieved far more than anyone expected of them, at quite a young age, and these accounts bring them to life whilst providing a thorough, well-researched and readable historical context.

Angela Davis – An Autobiography

Davis was a hero of mine during my teens. I read a lot about the activists in the black power movement but was inevitably drawn to Davis – her charisma, her passion, her image. Women, Race and Class is brilliant, and so is this. It was originally published in 1974 and now has a series of prologues written for each successive edition, which shed light on how her perspectives have changed and how she responds to more recent events.

Joan Didion – The Year of Magical Thinking/Sarah Tarlow – The Archaeology of Loss: Life, Love and the Art of Dying

Two books that I was drawn to because they addressed how we live after the death of a partner. Didion’s book was recommended to me, with the caveat that I shouldn’t read it too soon – there are of course no rules as to how soon is too soon, and I think I got it about right. It was in places a very tough read – her description of her husband’s death had so many echoes of what happened to me – but her insights into the process she went through were profound and powerful (my copy of the book now has many sections highlighted so I can return to them when I need to). Tarlow ventures out further from her own experience to ruminations on how we (now and in the past) deal with death and loss, and it’s fascinating and often moving. It spoke to me less personally than Didion’s account because much of it is concerned with how she became her husband’s carer when he developed a terminal degenerative illness, and how that affected her and their family (my loss in contrast was shockingly sudden). It’s brutally frank and unsentimental about the cost and the loneliness of the carer’s role, and so whilst I was initially drawn to the book because it addressed bereavement, this topic is also vitally important and relevant.  

Eddie Glaude – Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for our Own

I have loved Baldwin’s writing since my teens, when I read Go Tell it on the Mountain, and found his voice so compelling that I read over the subsequent years all of his other novels and essays. Glaude considers Baldwin’s evolving views on race in America, and as promised draws out lessons, and he conveys both Baldwin’s despair and the hope he held on to despite everything. It’s not a hagiography, he does not treat Baldwin as a sage, but as a passionate, deeply insightful, direct and honest writer whose insights into America are as relevant as ever.

Beth Macy – Dopesick: Dealers, Doctor and the Drug Company that addicted America/Chris McGreal – American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts

See my Screen blog for the two dramas and the documentary that I watched on the topic of the US opioid crisis. I clearly became somewhat obsessed with this topic, having read Demon Copperhead and then watched the Netflix drama Painkillers… These books follow similar ground, but have a different approach. American Overdose focuses more on the politics and the perpetrators: ‘McGreal’s book reads like a white-collar The Wire, with a cast of characters determined to exact as much money as possible regardless of the human cost’. Macy foregrounds the stories of the victims and their families. Taken together they give a full and heartbreaking account that will, and should, make you angry, even whilst it breaks your heart.

Wendy Mitchell – One Last Thing: How to Live with the End in Mind

I’ve been following Wendy Mitchell for some years now, as she navigates life with early onset dementia with humour and honesty. It’s rare to hear the voices of dementia sufferers because they are so often and so quickly unable to articulate their own experience, so Mitchell’s accounts are immensely valuable. This book is different – it looks at how we approach the end of our own life, and how that end can be made more dignified, how we can have some control over when, how, and where. This is a passionate work of advocacy for assisted dying, but Mitchell recognises that the provision that exists in a number of countries generally cannot help her and others with dementia because by the time they would want to be able to check out (the point at which, for example, they are no longer able to recognise their closest family), they will not have capacity (or not be deemed to have capacity) to make that decision. It’s a huge and heartbreaking dilemma, and Mitchell doesn’t offer solutions, but makes a vital contribution to the discussion.

Anthony Seldon & Raymond Newell – Johnson at 10: The Inside Story

‘This is an authoritative, gripping and often jaw-dropping account of the bedlam behind the black door of Number 10 and it confirms that we did not really have a government during his trashy reign. It was an anarchy presided over by a fervently frivolous, frantically floundering and deeply decadent lord of misrule.’ It’s all the more powerful because the authors are far from being anti-establishment figures. It makes it clear that the picture painted by the TV drama Partygate (see my Screen blog) is entirely plausible and consistent with the culture at Downing Street under Johnson. Incredible, and appalling.

Gitta Sereny – The German Trauma: Experiences & Reflections, 1938-2001

This collection of articles from almost forty years of writing about, thinking about and remembering the Nazi era includes much that is fascinating, some that is contentious, and inevitably a vast amount that is horrifying.

Catherine Taylor – The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time

A memoir of Sheffield – of my Sheffield (Broomhill and Crosspool, the University) – was always going to interest me. Taylor is around ten years younger than me, and so she describes the Sheffield she knew as a teenager, whereas I arrived here to go to University. The shadow of Peter Sutcliffe hangs over much of her account, as it did over my life – scared to be out at night, scared even to open the back door to put the milk bottles on the window ledge, praying that Karen from next door would be on my bus so we could scurry home together along School Road, looking over our shoulders and not breathing properly until we were indoors. Taylor’s writing is brilliantly evocative, both of the place and of her own experiences and emotions. As Helen Mort puts it, this is ‘a lyrical account of what cities and their residents witness, how places shape character’. 

Dorothy Whipple – The Other Day: The World of a Child

Charming, funny account of a childhood in the very early twentieth century, from a writer whose novels I’ve discovered and loved in recent years.

Terri White – Coming Undone

This is a bleak, harrowing account of how a chaotic and abusive childhood pushed White into crisis as an adult. Her honesty is unflinching. I wondered throughout just how she was managing to function (at least to some extent) in her working life, and, at the end, how she managed to turn the corner into a more stable life. I’d have liked to understand that more, but maybe that’s about me feeling less harrowed, and actually this is exactly the book that White intended and needed to write.

This is a second half of two halves. In the first three months, my reading patterns were as normal, two or three books on the go at any one time, a mix of fiction and non-fiction, of high, low and middle brow, of different genres. On 9 October everything changed, for ever. My husband’s sudden death left me shell-shocked, devastated. I could not concentrate enough to read anything demanding – indeed, for a week or so I read nothing at all, a completely unprecedented state. When I felt able to read again I had to pick very carefully, and I started and discarded any number of books that I would normally relish. The variation in length and depth of the reviews which follow largely depends on whether I had completed and made some notes on the book before, or after.

As always, I aim to avoid spoilers but read on at your own risk. As always, my aim is to share my enthusiasms, so I’ve missed out one or two books about which I could only have said negative things. That doesn’t mean an unqualified recommendation for everything I read this year but I think it will be clear where I have major caveats…

James Baldwin – Going to Meet the Man/Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

I read the former, a collection of short stories, a very long time ago, so they seem only faintly familiar (and some of the themes and ideas obviously are in the novels too) but the joy in reading Baldwin’s prose, and dialogue, is something I will never tire of. ‘Sonny’s Blues’ is probably my favourite story – it taps into the church and musical environments which stimulated some of Baldwin’s most beautiful writing. But there is no beauty in the brilliant title story – just horror, plainly told.  Tell Me… is classic Baldwin, exploring race and sexuality with candour and courage. It is, as he so often is, deeply moving.

Laurent Binet – HHhH

This was fascinating. I can’t imagine how one could make the story of the Anthropoid mission to assassinate Heydrich boring, even if one just recounted the facts. But what Binet does is to interrogate his own processes as a writer, to tell us a story and then cast doubt on it, to question his own motives in writing about Heydrich himself (is he becoming unhealthily fascinated with this man?). I find fiction about the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities inherently problematic – why tell fictionalised stories when the real stories still need telling, and re-telling – but this confronts the problem head on, acknowledges the invention as such, but in so doing gives us a powerful and vivid account of extraordinary, tragic events.

Brit Bennett – The Vanishing Half

Not so long back I read Nella Larson’s Passing, which was my first (fictional) encounter with the phenomenon of passing for white. This powerful novel brings that to life through the portrayal of two twins, both of whom could pass, and the decisions they both make. I had absorbed from Larson’s account the constant agony of those who decided to pass, the hyperconsciousness of everything they say and do, the fear of exposure. What this account gave me, in addition, was the way in which the person passing for white is forced to identify more strongly with their white neighbours, and avoid all contact with black people for fear that they, somehow, would sense the pretence and expose them. It’s a brilliant, complex picture of racial politics at the personal level, through two generations, and it will stay with me for a long time.

Susannah Clarke – Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell/Piranesi

I’d seen the TV dramatization of JS & Mr N – which was very good – but the book was even better. And then Piranesi was on a whole other level. I don’t really know how to talk about the book before going back and re-reading it again. It is beautiful, mysterious and moving, without losing the dry humour that was so much a part of its predecessor. And I’m a sucker for labyrinths, so there’s that. Nods to Narnia, echoes of Le Guin. One of my books of the year, without a doubt. Just read it, OK?

Harlan Coben – Win

Jonathan Coe – Mr Wilder and Me

What a delight. For anyone who enjoys Coe’s writing, for anyone fascinated by cinema, or who’s ever seen a Billy Wilder movie. I knew a bit about Wilder’s life and have seen several of his films, including Fedora, which is at the heart of the narrative, and this casts a fascinating light on him and his sidekick Iz Diamond. A warm, humorous and touching novel.

Abigail Dean – Girl A

I was afraid this was going to be a harrowing account of abusive parenting and I guess it is but it is far more the account of the aftermath, of how one learns – tries to learn – to live again, to love oneself and other people, to trust, through the account of ‘Girl A’. Reminders of Room, though it’s structured very differently, going back to the awful past, and then to the aftermath of escape, and then to the present.

Len Deighton – Berlin Game

Having nearly run out of unread Le Carrés, I thought I’d revisit Deighton, by whom I’ve read a fair few over the years, but not this series. Thoroughly enjoyable, will read more.

Philip K Dick – The Man in the High Castle

I do love a bit of alt. history, especially WWII related. I’m surprised therefore that I never read this, during my sci-fi phase in my late teens/early 20s, but I think I only ever read Do Androids…. This was excellent – the depiction of the alt. US is thoroughly thought through and convincing and the ending turns everything inside out. I haven’t seen the TV adaptation, but I suspect it’s very different. Might give it a watch at some point.

Eva Dolan – After You Die

The fourth in the gripping, Peterborough set Zigic & Ferreira series, set in a Hate Crimes unit.

Avni Doshi – Burnt Sugar

A powerful, uncomfortable read. None of the characters are exactly likeable, but they are convincingly drawn and the narrative plays with, if not our sympathies, at least our willingness to be convinced by them.

Margaret Drabble – Pure Gold Baby

I hadn’t read any Drabble for about 30 years. That was a re-read of The Millstone, and I recall it vividly, sitting in our garden, and reading about the protagonist’s experience of having a sick child in hospital and being excluded from being by her side. I’d just been through that, the first part of that, but I’d been cared for by the hospital, and had been able to be with my son throughout (I also had a partner, unlike Rosamund). This new book shouts out to The Millstone – its central character is a single parent, with a child who has some learning/developmental disability, never clearly defined. At one point, she recalls the way in which she was expected to think about her child, as a ‘millstone’. She doesn’t, the child is her pure gold baby. We follow Jess and her daughter through the decades as the narrator, a close friend, shares not only what happened, but the debates and discussions that the group of friends had about mental health and women’s lives and love and parenthood. I loved it.

Helen Fields – Perfect Prey

I’ve been reading these in entirely the wrong order, but this is the second in the DI Callanach series.

Jo Furniss – The Last to Know

I’ve read the previous two of Furniss’ books, the post-apocalypse All the Little Children, the psychological thriller The Trailing Spouse, and now this one, which has a very strong Gothic flavour about it. The set up is familiar – a married couple return to his family home, and the wife feels immediately an atmosphere of threat which leads her to doubt everything she thinks she knows about her husband. It’s nicely, and not too predictably, worked out, and Furniss builds up the tension very effectively.

Amitav Ghosh – Flood of Fire

Final volume in the Ibis trilogy which was just fantastic, exhilarating, teeming with characters and landscapes and plot and historical detail, and sweeping the reader along with the narrative.

Lesley Glaister – Blasted Things

Glaister never lets me down. Most of her novels have a contemporary setting but this one pitches us right into the horrors of a WWI field hospital, and then the conventionality of a 1920s middle-class marriage. The brutality of the first and the claustrophobia of the second are skilfully conveyed, and the characters are vivid and multi-dimensional. At times I thought I could see where the plot was leading but I was invariably wrong. I’d like to re-read this to savour the writing, as my concentration is still shot and I have a tendency to race through books to get the plot.

Winston Graham – Ross Poldark/Demelza/Jeremy Poldark/Warleggan/Black Moon

Post-bereavement binge reading. I’d never read the Poldark series, but was content to revisit the plot familiar to me from the recent TV series, and to conjure up mental images of the Cornish coastline.

Elly Griffiths – The Midnight Hour

The latest Brighton mystery, with police and private detectives working together to solve a crime. As always, Griffiths’ novels are a delight.

Susan Hill – A Change of Circumstance

The latest Simon Serrailer novel.

Nick Hornby – Juliet Naked

I did feel ‘seen’, as they say, whilst reading this. Musical obsessions, the kind that make one track down an alternative mix or a rare bootleg live recording because it has an extra few notes from the object of one’s obsession, yes, thank you, we know about that. Very funny, and rather touching too.

Katherine Ryan Howard – 56 Days

Writing about the pandemic is tricky, given where we are now. I’ve seen TV programmes take various tacks – ignore, nod to it with the occasional shot of masked shoppers or whatever, or set something in the build up to ‘all this’ (see Series 2 of This Way Up). This one goes for it – the narrative starts in mid-pandemic but darts back to the days when we were talking about it but with no idea of what was to come – and really uses the ideas of lockdown and isolation to drive the plot forward. Very intriguing and tense and took me by surprise at a number of points.

Stephen King – Billy Summers

King, it would be pretty uncontroversial to say, is on a roll. His recent books are amongst his very best, and his embrace of the crime genre (even when he turns it to his own purposes) has helped to overcome the one problem with his fiction, the endings. This one is completely gripping throughout.

John Lanchester – The Wall

I had no idea what to expect of this, having downloaded it on the strength of Capital. We’re in a future Britain, changed irrevocably because of climate change (the past events which have created this new version of the world are only touched upon lightly, we have to accept this world as it is, with its rules and structures).

John le Carré – The Tailor of Panama

This was the book I was reading at the point when my life changed completely. I bear it no particular grudge, but would need to re-read before reviewing its place in the Le Carré oeuvre.

Laura Lippman – Dream Girl

Lippman possibly channelling King here (I won’t say which King, because that might be slightly spoilery). As always, superbly written.

Megha Majumdar – A Burning

This one is a heartbreaker. Majumdar gives the reader hope and then snatches it away, over and over. Beautifully done, and the three voices that we hear are clear and convincing, however flawed their characters and perspectives.

Jennifer Makumbi – Manchester Happened

A fascinating collection of short stories about migration, specifically between Uganda and Manchester, that illuminate many different perspectives. I was particularly taken with the first story, set in the early 50s, as I’ve been doing a PhD on a novel written at that time, and set in Manchester (Passing Time – I may have mentioned it once or twice)

Klaus Mann – Mephisto

This isn’t a fun read – it’s bitter, cynical, despairing. How could it be other, written as it was by an exile from Nazi Germany, in 1936? It is based very much on real people (Goering, Goebbels and their wives, future Hollywood star Elisabeth Bergner, and many others), and got Mann into difficulties when the model for central character Hendrik Hofgens objected vigorously to Mann’s portrayal of him as someone who made a pact with the devil, in exchange for fame and success…

Denise Mina – The End of the Wasp Season

Mina’s crime novels are always unsettling and this is no exception. She wrongfooted me several times during this narrative, but not just for the sake of it.

Erich Maria Remarque – Arch of Triumph

I read a lot of Remarque during my teens (starting in the obvious place with All Quiet, but particularly enjoying his novels set between the wars, Three Comrades, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, A Night in Lisbon. This one powerfully conveys the life of people who’ve ended up in Paris in those precarious days, without documents. Coincidentally, it reminded me that I had the remnants of a bottle of Calvados at the back of a pantry shelf. I no longer have those remnants.

C J Sansom – Heartstone/Lamentation

Two Shardlake historical detective novels. I enjoy these, although sometimes the style grates (too much ‘he said sadly/she said quietly/he said grimly’ and a bit too much of people telling each other the history)

Elif Shafak – 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World

A strange one, this. The narratives of our protagonist, who is dead when we first meet her, but whose memories take 10 minutes, 38 seconds to fade, and she shares them with us, as she passes from one world to another, and of her loyal friends, all of them people who for one reason or another are on the margins, are powerful and moving. The tone changes in the final act, becomes almost comedic, which is strange.

Ali Smith – How to be Both

It took me a while to get into the rhythm of this, with the shifting tenses and then the shifting timeframes and perspectives, but as with all of Ali Smith’s work, it’s worth the effort, and will be worth re-reading.

Zadie Smith – Swingtime

I still haven’t quite come to terms with Zadie Smith, but I enjoyed this one more than NW. There was something troubling about the portrayal of Tracey and her mum though, a hint of snobbery?

Cath Staincliffe – Running out of Road

Not for the first time, Staincliffe made me hold my breath for long stretches of narrative.

Stuart Turton – The Devil and the Dark Water

A vividly written historical thriller, set on the high seas, with a supernatural (is it or isn’t it?) thread. Very vividly written

Nicola Upson – Sorry for the Dead/An Expert in Murder/Angel with Two Faces/Two for Sorrow/Fear in the Sunlight/The Death of Lucy Kyte

Post-bereavement binge reading of a series in which the real-life crime writer/dramatist Josephine Tey is the protagonist in various fictional murders.

Sylvia Townsend Warner – Lolly Willowes

Dorothy Whipple – High Wages

I loved this, my second Whipple. A resourceful young woman as our hero, and the crushing weight of social conventions at the time (written in 1930).

Chris Whitaker – We Begin at the End

An absolutely gripping and moving crime thriller, with a compelling young female hero.

Non-Fiction

Enjeela Ahmadi-Miller – The Broken Circle: A Memoir of Escaping Afghanistan

Carole Angier – Speak Silence: In Search of W G Sebald

The first biography of W G Sebald, hampered somewhat by its author not having the cooperation of Sebald’s wife or daughter. This does mean that a lot of it is very speculative and dependent on sources whose reliability we might reasonably question. There’s lots of new information here, however, and some useful insights.

James Baldwin – The Last Interview

Anthony Burgess – Obscenity & the Arts

Ciaran Carson – Belfast Confetti

I discovered this poet accidentally through my PhD researches, which brought up a remarkable poem, ‘Turn Around’, about maps and labyrinths.

Kate Clanchy – Some Kids I Taught and What they Taught Me

Oh boy, where to start. I read this having already seen some of the negative comments on Twitter, but also having read many of the poems that Clanchy has posted from the young poets she’s worked with, and found them very striking, and moving. She is trying, I think, in Some Kids, to let us see the diversity of these young people in all its glory, but there’s something very off-key about the way she describes them, and ultimately it was a very uncomfortable read.

Teju Cole – Known & Strange Things: Essays

Dan Davies – In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile       

If I say that this is the one book I’ve read so far this year that made me feel physically sick, it is no reflection on the author or the writing. It’s a response to his subject. I felt a sense of hopelessness in reading it, at the opportunities to stop him that were missed, through bad luck or deliberate blindness, or corruption. It’s a shocking read, rightly so.

Grant Graff – The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

An extraordinary account of 9/11, built from the words of those who experienced it, directly or vicariously as they waited to hear from people they loved, including the transcripts of phone calls from the planes and other emergency calls. It’s fascinating, often heartbreaking, and sheds new light on an event that we might all feel we know, because those images are so ubiquitous and burned into our memories.

Naoki Higashida – The Reason I Jump

Leo Marks – Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War, 1941-1945

The memoir of a man who was key to the code-setting and code-breaking activities during the war, and who knew most of the SOE operatives who were sent into France. It’s self-deprecating, with a wry humour, but Marks speaks movingly and powerfully of the tragedy of what happened to those young men and women.

Ben MacIntyre – Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II

An account of one of the more improbable seeming exploits of British intelligence during the war – a corpse, bearing apparent secrets that were meant to deceive the enemy.

Caitlin Moran – More than a Woman

Ridiculously funny, but also very moving when Moran talks about her daughter’s eating disorder. It doesn’t always resonate with me – for starters, I’m much further ahead on that journey than Moran or probably much of her intended readership – but when it does, it really does.

Mary Oliver – American Primitive

I chose ‘In Blackwater Woods’ for my husband’s funeral ceremony. ‘To live in this world / you must be able / to do three things: / to love what is mortal; / to hold it / against your bones knowing / your own life depends on it; / and, when the time comes to let it go, / to let it go’.

Kavita Puri – Partition Voices: Untold British Stories

First hand accounts from the Partition of India and Pakistan. Harrowing and haunting.

Philippe Sands – The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive

Reads like a thriller, the account of a senior Nazi who escaped arrest after the war, but it never loses sight of what Otto Wachter was responsible for, and Sands draws out the connections between Wachter and the fate of his own family.

Kate Vigurs – Mission France: The True History of the Women of SOE

SOE again. I’ve been fascinated by these stories since I was a teenager, watching old black & white films – Odette, and Carve her Name with Pride. This is a much less romanticised account than those films gave, and doesn’t shy away from the extent to which naivety or over-confidence led to some of the tragedies which befell the agents.

Isobel Wilkerson – The Warmth of Other Sons: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

I thought I knew nothing about the Great Migration, but reading this gripping account, I realised that everything I’ve read about the African-American experience in the 20^th century, fictional and non-fictional, has had this at the core. Fascinating.

Reading has always been my solace as well as my inspiration. It will be again, even if for now I’m reluctant to tackle anything too challenging, or anything which might come too close to my own grief and loss.

My two novels of the year are Jon McGregor’s Lean, Fall, Stand, and Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi.  In non-fiction, I’ll pick Rachel Clarke’s Breathtaking, an account of the early months of the pandemic, and Rebecca Clifford’s Survivors, about child survivors of the Holocaust. (Both are reviewed in my half-time report.)

Thank you to all of the writers whose work has entertained, comforted, amazed, intrigued and in whatever other ways enriched me in 2021.

I do appear to have read quite a lot of books in the first half of 2021… And this isn’t quite everything – I’ve left out one or two re-reads, one or two very academic books that I read solely for purposes of my thesis, and one or two that were just such a waste of time to read that I couldn’t be bothered to waste further time saying how rubbish they were. Not that everything I list here was marvellous, but there is a difference, I would say, between noting my issues with, e.g., Ian McEwan’s Solar, and slating a random thriller that I got for 99p off Amazon. I’m reasonably discriminating in my acquisitions, so it’s rare that there are more than a couple of utter duds. And ultimately, the reason I write about what I read is to share the good stuff, to infect other people with my own enthusiasms, and big up the writers who’ve given me pleasure and enlightenment.

I’ve split fiction and non-fiction. Fiction is in strictly alphabetical author order, not grouped by genre. Non-fiction is grouped, very roughly, by topic. I’ve included links to reviews where they’re not too spoilery but as always, caveat lector.

FICTION

Eric Ambler – The Mask of Dimitrios. A cracking thriller, set in the tense period before the outbreak of WWII, and pitting a writer of detective novels against an international network of crime, from Istanbul to Paris. Ambler was hugely influential, particularly on Graham Greene, and his perspective is politically informed and leftist.

James Baldwin – Another Country/Just Above my Head. I read the former as a teenager, and it is just as bleakly powerful half a century later. The latter is new to me, and I gather is not regarded as one of his best but I loved it, loving the rhythms of the prose and the dialogue, the elegiac tone, the immersion in the church and in music. I’ve been absorbed in Baldwin’s life and work over the last couple of years, his essays and novels, an excellent biography (see below), and Raoul Peck’s remarkable film, I Am Not Your Negro. Plus he cropped up in a Radio 4 programme hosted by Clarke Peters, about the 1987 performance of his play, The Amen Corner. Everything I read, hear, watch makes me admire and love Baldwin more. 

Belinda Bauer – Exit. I’ve been a fan of Bauer’s sharp, off-beat crime novels for several years now, and this is terrific. It’s very funny, in a dark way, and it keeps on surprising the reader without resorting to the kind of twists for twists’ sake that too many thriller writers employ in lieu of convincing characterisation and intelligent plotting…

Mark Billingham – Cry Baby – another excellent crime writer. This is a Tom Thorne novel, but a prequel, going back to the time before the start of the series (Sleepyhead). Thorne is a not a rookie here though, he’s already got ten years (and associated traumas) under his belt, and this case is a brute.

William Boyd – Ordinary Thunderstorms. One never knows what to expect with Boyd. This starts off in seemingly very familiar territory – in fact, we’re in The 39 Steps territory. From there on we go all over the shop really, big pharma conspiracies, London’s marginalised communities of illegal migrants, sex workers and the homeless, hit-men and a good man on the run. It doesn’t entirely hold together, but it’s a great read and – being Boyd – beautifully written.

Geraldine Brooks – Year of Wonders. Historical fiction this time, and the setting is a village in Derbyshire, in the year of the Great Plague. It’s based (at least in the set-up) on the true story of Eyam, familiar to anyone who grew up in Notts/Derbyshire/South Yorkshire, the story of the vicar who persuaded his parishioners to quarantine themselves after a case of plague in the village. This is dramatic and remarkable enough but Brooks then takes the plot in even more dramatic and unexpected directions… Oddly, one of the reviews seemed to be saying that the Eyam story was itself melodramatic and improbable. Clearly didn’t go to school in our neck of the woods…

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Anthony Burgess – Nothing Like the Sun. Fascinating to read this so soon after reading Orlando (see below), as it connects so powerfully with the Elizabethan section of the latter. The language is exuberantly, extravagantly Shakespearian, but it subtly evolves over the life of the writer, who as a boy plays with language that goes beyond his understanding, but learns its power, and the limits of that power.

James Lee Burke – A Private Cathedral. I’ve really enjoyed the Dave Robicheaux series but this one was odd. It all got a bit supernatural, and whilst there’s always been that undercurrent, with Robicheaux having dream-like visions of the past, this takes it to another level and I’m not sure I’m convinced…

Jessie Burton – The Miniaturist. Another one that didn’t quite convince me. The historical setting and detail were great, but, as with the Burke, there was a supernatural element that didn’t quite work (for me) and the way the feminist/gay/racial strands of the plot were handled felt anachronistic and a bit artificial.

Michel Butor – Passing Time. Of course I’ve read this book this year, as I have every year for the last 15. I’m including it this time because I’ve unusually spent a lot of time immersed in the English translation, which I’ve been helping to revise for a new edition, out now…

Peter Carey – True History of the Kelly Gang. I’ve read most of Carey’s novels, and I love them. The language of this one took a bit of getting into (though no more than Illywhacker, say) because it is all in Ned Kelly’s voice, but once I was comfortable with that, it was a riot. It’s ‘true history’ but one should note that there is no definite or indefinite article in the title, which alerts us that Carey, as always, tells stories that are ‘playful, shape-changing’. The story is remarkable enough, as is Ned himself, who as we are constantly reminded in the narrative, is just a boy, and Carey makes it vivid and viscerally immediate.

M R Carey – The Girl with All the Gifts. Excellent – whenever you think the ‘zombie’ idea has been done, as it were, to death, there’s a new take on it that creates new possibilities not just for drama but for emotional heft.

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Candice Carty-Williams – Queenie. Funny, perceptive, heartbreaking. My daughter is Queenie’s age, and that undoubtedly made my emotional response more intense – I wanted to hold that girl and keep her from harm, keep her from harming herself.

Jane Casey – The Killing Kind. A stand-alone thriller by one of my favourite contemporary crime writers, it had me gripped from the start, and kind of scared too, that prickling feeling at the back of the neck, that sense of unease was pervasive, and not entirely resolved at the end of the novel…

Harlan Coben – The Boy from the Woods/The Stranger. Coben’s thrillers are reliably slick page turners, even if one doesn’t look to them for in-depth characterisation (and it does sometimes grate that all of his protagonists are both rich AND gorgeous…). I do like to have one or two on my Kindle to turn to between more demanding reads.

Jonathan Coe – The Rain before it Falls. Beautiful and moving. I’ve read several of Coe’s including his trilogy (The Rotters’ Club/The Closed Circle/Middle England) and he writes with warmth, understanding and compassion about even the less sympathetic of his characters, as well as incisively and with humour about the world we live in. Here we are taken back into the past life of an elderly woman through the series of cassette tapes she leaves for the benefit of an elusive legatee, a story told through a series of photographs. This is clever stuff, but it’s never merely clever. It is, as the Guardian reviewer said, ‘a brief, sad, often very moving story of mothers and daughters, of pain passed on through generations, and of deep and abiding loneliness’.

Suzanne Collins – The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. I knew this was linked to the Hunger Games trilogy, but hadn’t twigged that it was a prequel so was mightily confused for a while… Once I’d grasped that it was the origin story of Coriolanus Snow, that obviously coloured the way I understood the protagonist, but not so much that it destroyed any suspense, and not so much that one didn’t occasionally sympathise with him (to a point). The book wasn’t necessary in any way, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Jeanine Cummins – American Dirt. This attracted some controversy, which I don’t think was entirely fair. OK, Cummins relied on research rather than shared experience or background to create the world of the refugees, but isn’t that what novelists do? Should they only write what they know? And Cummins is very aware of this issue, and it is clear that her migrants are not presented as being representative, that this is one story, albeit one that touches on a lot of other stories. I found it a totally compelling read, had to keep reminding myself to breathe…

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Tsitsi Dangarembga – Nervous Conditions/The Book of Not/This Mournable Body. I read these in the wrong order by mistake (1, 3, 2…)! Nervous Conditions was the first novel by a Zimbabwean woman to be published in English, and This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker. The novels explore the intersections between race, colonialism and gender in a way that’s engaging and moving.

A A Dhand – Streets of Darkness. Bradford set crime novel, the first in a series. I loved the setting, but found the plot a tad melodramatic, and the over-use of ‘dark secrets from the past’ a bit wearisome. Will give it another go, this had a lot to recommend it even with those caveats.

Charles Dickens – Mugby Junction. I thought I’d read all Dickens but I’d missed this short story, part of a collection, featuring a few by Dickens and then stories by other contributors. I haven’t yet tracked down an edition with all of the stories, so read this primarily for Mugby Junction itself. The opening sequence, a man arriving at a railway station late at night, got me hooked, though the plot subsequently veered towards Dickens’ more sentimental side.  

Louise Doughty – Black Water. The setting is Indonesia, in 1965 and 1998, and it is a tense political thriller, rooted in character and tackling head-on the complex moral dilemmas of those times. Doughty may be best known for Apple Tree Yard, which is excellent, but her work is incredibly varied – I would always put Fires in the Dark, a harrowing and important novel that addresses the Romani Holocaust, as my top Doughty but I also loved the recent Platform 7 which was different again. 

Sebastian Faulks – Engleby. We’re not left in any doubt that our eponymous protagonist is odd, an outsider, but as we see things through his eyes (until late in the novel), we don’t entirely realise who he is and what he is capable of. Our sympathies gradually detach from him as we see him more clearly, and Faulks lets us hear what others say about Engleby through diary entries etc. I doubt that any reader would be shocked and amazed by the major plot development, of which I will say nothing, however, in case I am mistaken.

Helen Fields – Perfect Silence. Book 4 in her DI Luc Callanach series, tense and well plotted.

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Nicci French – Frieda Klein series. I binged these over Christmas/New Year. Eight books, starting with Blue Monday and ending with Day of the Dead. Proper edge of the seat stuff, though I had some plot issues, about which I can say no more without spoilers.

Tana French – The Searcher. A stand-alone from the author of the superb Dublin Murders series. Rural Irish noir with an ex-Chicago cop as protagonist, and a host of references to the Western genre. Very enjoyable, if not quite French’s best.

Amitav Ghosh – Sea of Poppies/River of Smoke. Books 1 and 2 of the Ibis Trilogy, and book 3 will feature in my end of year list, as I am looking forward to it enormously. Ghosh’s canvas here is vast – the setting is early 19^th century, and the story ranges across India, Mauritius, Canton and Hong Kong, as a cast of diverse and fascinating individuals are drawn together directly or indirectly by the opium trade, and the ship, the Ibis, on which they all find themselves at some point. There is a Babel of different languages, not just the native languages of the Bihari, Bengali, Parsi, Cantonese, English and Americans, but the nautical languages, the ‘pidgin’ languages developed to enable trade between these diverse peoples. It’s glorious and exhilarating.

Isabelle Grey – Out of Sight. This is a stand-alone novel from the author of the DI Grace Fisher series, and it was actually her fictional debut. It’s a psychological thriller, which builds the emotional tension with great skill.

Elly Griffiths – The Night Hawks. The latest Ruth Galloway and another highly enjoyable read. Griffiths is great at creating atmosphere and tension, and her characters (both the familiar ones, who are old friends now, and the new characters) are fully real.

Sophie Hannah – Haven’t They Grown. Psychological thriller that presents us right at the start with something impossible, even crazy, that the protagonist – and the reader – have to try to figure out. It’s very twisty, and I couldn’t see how on earth Hannah was going to resolve it all, but she does, and it’s all hugely enjoyable.

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Jane Harper – The Survivors. Harper’s four crime novels are all exceptionally strong on landscape and location. Here the setting is a coastal community in Tasmania, far from the scorching heat of The Lost Man, where storms at sea are part of the local history whilst resonating in the present. There’s real tragedy here, coming from human frailty and fear rather than from evil.

Sarah Hilary – Fragile. A stand-alone thriller from the author of the Marnie Rome series. This is not just about secrets and lies (without secrets and lies there would be very little fiction of any genre, after all), it’s about responsibility and guilt and how even when everything is known, there is no absolute truth, and no complete absolution. The sense of place is potent, and the characters subtly drawn, with compassion and understanding.

Joe Hill – NOS4A2. Son of King. And this is very King, which is not a criticism, because I love King, though on the strength of this I would say that ‘son of’ shares not only the best qualities but also some of the flaws of his father. No matter, this was a cracking read, with real terror, and an excellent protagonist, a teenage girl whose life becomes entangled with evil.

Dorothy Hughes – In A Lonely Place. This is noir, very noir. (There’s a 1950 Nicholas Ray film based on the book, which, however, changes the central premise.) It’s brilliant, and I’m baffled as to why Hughes is not better known. (Well, perhaps not entirely baffled, but it’s a grave injustice in any case.)

Kazuo Ishiguro – The Buried Giant. Ishiguro wrongfoots his readers once again, with this venture into the historical/mythical Dark Ages, with giants and dragons and Arthurian knights, through which he explores old age, memory, loss, love and war, and a huge ethical question about forgetting and healing.

Peter James – Dead Simple. The first in the DI Roy Grace series, recently televised with John Simm in the lead role. A great plot, though I was less taken with DI Grace himself – I will persevere and hope to warm to him a little more (I might watch the TV one – if John Simm doesn’t win me over it’s probably a lost cause).

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Stephen King – Later. The latest in his Hard Case Crime series. There is crime, but as King reminds us from time to time, this is horror. Sometimes King loses his grasp of plot and things get a bit baggy and muddled but not here – it’s taut and tense and gripping. As the Washington Post reviewer said, ‘The next time you see a dog look twice at a bench, or watch a baby cry for no obvious reason, this novel will be right there behind you, its hand on your shoulder, its whisper so close to your ear you might cringe a little, and then smile, because you’re in the hands of a master storyteller’.

John le Carré – A Most Wanted Man. Only a few more unread le Carrés, sadly. Hari Kunzru in The Guardian called it ‘one of the most sophisticated fictional responses to the war on terror yet published, a humane novel which takes on the world’s latest binarism and exposes troubling shades of grey’.

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi – The First Woman. A coming-of-age story from Idi Amin’s Uganda, which moves back in time to explore the lives of earlier generations of women, with diversions into feminist origin myths, as the protagonist tries to navigate a complicated and feud-ridden family life. There’s lots of humour and warmth here, and it is ultimately celebratory, with a final scene that gave me goose-bumps and a huge lump in my throat.

Val McDermid – Killing the Shadows/The Grave Tattoo/Still Life. Three very different McDermids. Killing the Shadows is a highly ingenious serial killer story, with a twist, that the killer is targeting crime writers. It’s done very cleverly, and with self-aware dark humour. The Grave Tattoo gives us a crime that connects with 18^th century history and literature. These two are both stand-alones, and in neither case is the protagonist a detective. The third, Still Life, published in 2020, is book 6 in the excellent Karen Pirie series

Ian McEwan – Solar. Hmm. Sometimes acerbically funny, sometimes merely farcical. None of the characters was particularly convincing, and I found it wearying to see yet again the trope of a male protagonist who is made as unappealing (physically and morally) as possible and yet still pulls attractive, younger women. Yaawwwnn. I also was a bit gobsmacked by the reviewer who claimed that McEwan had ‘swotted up to PhD level in Physics’ for the purposes of this book. Even if he had started off with a strong scientific background, I cannot see how he could have done this on any plausible time frame. So, it had its moments, but overall it was too annoying to be enjoyable.

Jon McGregor – Lean Fall Stand. Fiction book of the year (so far, but it will take quite something to dislodge it). McGregor is possibly my favourite contemporary novelist – each of his books has had quite an extraordinary impact on me, subtle and delicate and brutal and compelling. Reviewers tended to all praise the first section but then to favour one or other of the other two sections.  I can see why – I felt a sense of regret as each section ended and I realised that the perspective, and the style, had shifted, but then was quickly won over by the brilliance and beauty of the writing. I read it, as I read most things, in too much of a rush and immediately started again at the beginning, taking it slow, savouring it.

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Dervla McTiernan – The Scholar. Sequel to The Ruin and featuring the same detective, Cormac O’Reilly. It’s even better than its predecessor, I would say, and I very much enjoyed The Ruin – well-drawn characters, a very clever and thoroughly worked out plot with a lot of tension.  

Maaza Mengiste – The Shadow King. Set in Ethiopia in 1935, during the Italian invasion. It’s a very intense read, violent and dark, absolutely fascinating, with a focus on the women soldiers who fought to defend their homeland against the invaders.

Denise Mina – The Less Dead is a crime novel which wants to challenge the way we tell the stories of the victims of crime, particularly those whose chaotic lives make them both more vulnerable to violence and more likely to be blamed for their own demise, marginalised in both life and death. The story in itself was powerful and of course it chimed with one of last year’s reads, Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five, and with The Thirteen too…

Sarah Moss – Summerwater.  I love Sarah Moss’s books and this one will repay an early re-read to appreciate its subtleties (see my remarks re Jon McGregor). There is, throughout, a sense of unease, something not quite right, that the occupants of these loch-side cabins are not as they appear through the eyes of their neighbours or even to their closest family.

Thomas Mullen – Midnight Atlanta. The third in a superb series along with Darktown and The Lightning Men, set in Atlanta in the 1950s with racial politics absolutely at the heart of the action.

Andrew O’Hagan – Mayflies. The invulnerability of youth, friendship, aging and mortality. The first half was gloriously funny, the second broke me.

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Caryl Phillips – Crossing the River. Fragments of the history of the African diaspora, linked by a (not literal) familial connection. We start on a West African shore as a man acknowledges his guilt and grief over his children, sold into slavery. We join those lost children in Liberia, as a freed slave endeavours to take the gospel and ‘civilisation’ back to Africa, in Colorado as a slave, freed after the Civil War, dreams of finding her own lost child, and some kind of real freedom, and in Yorkshire where a black GI and a local woman recognise each other’s lostness. And we have the journal of the man to whom those lost children were sold. The chronologies do not make sense, historical plausibility is not the priority here. They are powerful narratives, different voices persuasively rendered, moments that stay with you.

John Preston – The Dig. Lightly fictionalised version of the Sutton Hoo dig. It’s the people that interest Preston, rather than their discoveries, and not those who are most prominent in the official narrative but those who were overshadowed, due to their own natural reticence or the prejudices of others. A lovely, poignant read.

Ian Rankin – A Song for the Dark Times. The latest Rebus. Rebus is still splendidly Rebus and has not allowed his retirement to in any way constrain his mission to annoy the hell out of the establishment.

C J Sansom – Tombland. I was slightly disappointed with the last one I read in the Shardlake series due to some clunky writing but thoroughly enjoyed this, partly because the setting was very different – we’re in Norfolk, at the time of Kett’s Rebellion, and it’s a gripping story (there’s a murder mystery here, but the context is just as compelling as the crime).

Francis Spufford – Light Perpetual.  A wonderful book. The opening is a tour de force, and that force propels us through the lives of five children, lives that might not have been. The Guardian calls it ‘both a requiem and a giving of life’. And it’s profoundly musical too, whether in its subject matter or in the way that these five lives interweave in harmony or dissonance.

Elizabeth Strout – Olive Again. Olive Kitteridge is, I think, Strout’s finest creation. She’s not a comfortable person, she’s abrasive and clumsy. But she’s utterly convincing, and fascinating. As is Strout’s usual approach, she gives us a series of short stories, with recurring characters, so that we see some of the same events from different perspectives. Olive Again is unflinching in its portrayal of ageing, its indignities and regrets, but it is somehow hopeful, that we can still change, still love.

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Graham Swift – Here We Are. This is kind of magical. The Guardian said: ‘This is a beautiful, gentle, intricate novella, the kind of book that stays with you despite not appearing to do anything particularly new or special. In fact, perhaps that’s what makes it so very good: Here We Are smuggles within the pages of a seemingly commonplace tale depths of emotion and narrative complexity that take the breath away.’

Antal Szerb – Journey by Moonlight. This is the great Hungarian novel, and it’s quite something. Written in 1937, its author was murdered by the Nazis during the last months of the war. The book is hard to describe – it reminded me at times of Sebald and at others of Ishiguro. This fascinating article describes it as ‘a brief reprieve from the logic according to which happiness and sadness are opposed to one another’. What that quote doesn’t convey perhaps is that it’s often very funny.

Sylvia Townsend Warner – The Corner that Held Them. Warner is a most intriguing writer. About this novel, published in 1948 and set in a convent at the time of the Black Death (I know…), she apparently said, ‘I am still inclined to call it People Growing Old. It has no conversations and no pictures, it has no plot, and the characters are innumerable and insignificant’. This curiously compelling, and often drily humorous novel is about history as ‘a tangle of events’; about a community, rather than about the individuals who comprise that community.  

Dorothy Whipple – Greenbanks. I’d not even heard of Whipple until the last year or so (I do apologise to her) but during the plague times I think many people turned back to some of the literature of the interwar period (this is from 1932), and Whipple’s name just kept coming up in recommendations from friends and acquaintances. So, I have now Whippled and I will assuredly do so again, because Greenbanks was lovely. And by that I don’t mean it was all cosy comfort, far from it. It leaves the younger of the two main protagonists with much about her life and future happiness unresolved, and its male characters are portrayed incisively, their ‘pretensions and presumptions’ exposed and punctured. The writing is absolutely delicious.

Christa Wolf – Cassandra. Published in 1983, this is a retelling of the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of the woman cursed to prophesy and not be believed. There are many resonances with life in the GDR, and the book was censored when first published. It’s also got a strong theme of the marginalisation of women’s lives, the lack of choice and agency (even for the daughter of a King).

Virginia Woolf – Orlando. I’d been meaning to read this for years, having tried and failed to read other Woolf novels. This was the one to break that pattern, it’s quite extraordinary, a wild ride through the centuries, through English literary history, with a male protagonist who quite suddenly becomes a female protagonist, albeit one who presents as male when it suits her purposes, and who takes male and female lovers. Glorious.

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Peter Jones – Little Piece of Harm. I read poetry a lot less often than I intend to. What tempts me to go there is usually a new publication from Longbarrow Press, and this one was a gem. It’s ‘a narrative sequence that focuses on 24 hours in the life of a city that has been shut down in the aftermath of a shooting. As this act of violence ramifies outwards, the sequence explores the geographical reach of Sheffield – its urban settings and its rural landmarks – and eavesdrops on the city’s conversations.’

Non-Fiction

David Leeming – James Baldwin. A wonderful biography, from someone who knew Baldwin well. I was immersed in this, so much so that I felt quite overwhelmed at his death, as if he was someone I’d known. This isn’t a hagiography – Baldwin was a complicated and often difficult man, who fell out with a lot of people over the years, a man who never worked out how to love himself, who saw himself as ugly, who never found the true love that he wanted. But he’s a towering figure, his vision and passion are so powerfully articulated in his fiction and essays as well as in interviews. Charisma and intellect in such abundance.

W E B Dubois – The Souls of Black Folk. Dubois’ work obviously influenced Baldwin, as it did all of the writers who’ve talked about race in the twentieth century, and into our own. Dubois’ style seems a bit florid (it is of its time, 1903) but nonetheless it is clear and lucid and passionate. He talks about the veil between the black and white worlds, he talks about how it feels to ‘be a problem’. He says it so well that it is no wonder that by the time Baldwin is saying similar things, in a very different style, 60-70 years later, he is angry and weary that they still need saying. They still do.

David Baddiel – Jews Don’t Count. Baddiel follows his powerful documentary on Holocaust denial with this passionate, funny, angry account of how Jews are somehow omitted from consideration so often when racial prejudice is under discussion. It’s quite shattering – so many things that I had seen out of the corner of my eye, in a way, but not confronted, in my own thinking about race and in the way it is written and spoken about. Groundbreaking.

Alexandra Wilson – In Black and White  Wilson came to attention with a piece in the Guardian, recounting a day in which she, a barrister, on three separate occasions had to persuade court officials that she was not, in fact, the defendant… This sets those incidents in the context of her career in the law, and of the way in which race and class affect the way in which people fare in the legal system.

Susi Bechhofer – Rosa’s Child. The account of a child of the Kindertransport, who came to England with her sister, was fostered with a couple who tried to erase all memory and knowledge of their previous life, and who only discovered the fate of her mother in middle age. W G Sebald used (without her permission) many elements of her story in Austerlitz.

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Rachel Clifford – Survivors. Clifford’s study of child survivors of the Holocaust (specifically, those who were in camps, or in hiding, or who otherwise lived out the war in Europe) is fascinating, particularly in its exploration of how understanding of trauma developed over the post-war period.

Miriam Darvas – Farewell to Prague. Somewhat breathlessly written (perhaps for a YA readership), it’s nonetheless a gripping and powerful story.

Hadley Freeman – The House of Glass. A meticulously researched and emotionally powerful family history, driven by the need to understand her grandmother, and to know what happened to the wider family, who survived the Holocaust and how, who didn’t and why.

Saul Friedlander – The Years of Extermination. Volume 2 of Friedlander’s history of Nazi Germany and the Jews. What can one say – it is exhaustive and relentless, and as always one is struck by the sheer mad obsession of that hatred, that led the Nazis to continue searching for, rounding up and transporting Jewish men, women and children to their deaths, even as the Allies were closing in on Berlin.

Lillian Furst – Random Destinations.  A study of various fictionalised accounts of the lives of those who escaped the Holocaust, and how these narratives could face some of the darker aspects of those lives, marked by trauma, struggling with their own sense of identity, with their Jewishness, with their exile, aspects that have sometimes been neglected due to the focus on the successes of the more prominent survivors.

Anna Hajkova – The Last Ghetto. A detailed and fascinating study of Theresienstadt, the town that became a ghetto prison, and then a Potemkin village to delude the Red Cross into believing that the occupants were well looked after, a place where many died of disease and from which many more were deported to Auschwitz. Hajkova talks about the way in which the ghetto was organised, the hierarchies and power balances between the inhabitants, putting the brief episode with the Red Cross into context rather than making it the centre of the narrative.

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Michael Rosen – The Missing. Like Freeman, Rosen set out to find out what happened to the ‘missing’ members of his family. This account is aimed at children/young adults, but does not pull its punches. Rosen incorporates poems and source documents to help readers understand both the facts and their emotional weight. It’s a moving read for adults who feel they know this stuff already, too.

Anne Applebaum – The Twilight of Democracy. I read a while ago Applebaum’s Iron Curtain, which was excellent. This one is different, because it is intensely personal, as well as being rigorously analytical. It’s the account of how, at the start of the millennium, she and her friends (in the US, the UK, in Poland and elsewhere in Europe) were in broad agreement about the future of democracy and how, in the years since, many of those friends have moved so far to the nationalist right that she and they no longer speak.

Adam Hothschild – King Leopold’s Ghost. The horrific story of the exploitation of the Congo Free State (which included the whole of what is now DRC) by King Leopold II of Belgium between 1885 and 1908. Leopold exploited the land and its natural resources, but most appallingly its people, who were treated as entirely expendable, and who were, in vast numbers, mutilated, tortured and killed. Those who want to defend colonialism will argue that this is an extreme case, and it is, but the mentality behind it – greed, combined with the deep rooted belief that the African people were inferior beings – can be seen in even the most benign colonial regimes.

Barrack Obama – Promised Land. Volume 1 of his presidential memoirs and it’s huge… I have to admit that some of the detail lost me – I don’t have quite sufficient grasp of the mechanics and structures of the US system to follow it all – but it was (as one would expect from Obama) beautifully and lucidly written, and critical as much of himself as of others.

Shirley Williams – Climbing the Bookshelves. A very engaging memoir that I reached for from my TBR pile when I heard of her death. I’ve always liked and admired Williams, though her politics and mine don’t entirely align – she was always a tad to the right of my natural position, though that would not preclude major areas of agreement. Most of all, she was a politician of complete integrity and that’s a rare and valuable commodity these days. We need more of her ilk.

Andrew Biswell – The Real Life of Anthony Burgess. Highly entertaining – a rambunctious literary life, and a seriously unreliable autobiographer – as Biswell sifts reality from contradictory self-mythologising and explores the work itself. It makes me want to read more Burgess (but selectively).

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Richard Coles – Fathomless Riches/Bringing in the Sheaves/The Madness of Grief. The fascination of Volume 1 of this trilogy of memoirs is Coles’ involvement in the music scene, with the Communards, but it is particularly powerful on the AIDs epidemic, to which he lost many friends. He is very honest, self-deprecating and often extremely funny. Vol. 2 covers his life in the church and is very oriented around the church year – I did find this harder to enjoy, although he is a lovely writer and person, as although I was brought up as a Christian, my experiences were in Methodist and ‘charismatic’ church communities, very different to the higher end of the CofE, and it felt quite alien. My atheism remains unshaken. Vol. 3 is about the death of Coles’ husband and it is a heartbreaking and, again, brutally honest account. I loved the bit about the group of widows who saw him in a café and embraced him, physically and with comforting chat, from the perspective of those who know what it is to lose one’s other half and yet go on.

Pamela des Barres – I’m With the Band. I’d always been intrigued by this and it was quite a surprising read. Obviously, a lot of sex was had. But mostly what comes across is the breathless romanticism of des Barres: she isn’t so much adding notches to her bedpost as falling in love with one after another of the rock gods she encounters, each time of course facing disillusionment as they move on to another town and other girls. She does care a lot and know a lot about the music – it isn’t just the fame that turns her on.

Jackie Kay – Bessie Smith. Not a straight biography, more a prose poem. It’s thoroughly researched, but feels as much personal as it is scholarly. The Guardian describes it is ‘a joyous and formally daring undertaking. … an act of intimate witnessing, a biography about a black, bisexual, working-class American artist by a celebrated Scottish poet who first recognised her own blackness and queerness in Smith’s songs, her wild mythos and “beautiful black face”.

James Young – Nico: Songs They Never Play on the Radio. An account of the author’s travels with Nico on various UK and European tours in the years leading up to her death. Often grim, and often grimly funny.

Rachel Clarke – Breathtaking. Having read Dear Life, I knew Clarke could write beautifully about mortality and compassion, and here she covers the Covid pandemic and the experience of the medics called upon to take huge risks and work beyond exhaustion to try to keep people alive in those deadly days (days we hope we won’t see again). I also read Dominic Pimenta’s Duty of Care – like Clarke, Pimenta was taken out of his normal work to treat Covid patients, and to help organise resources to deal with the crisis. Both of them are at times incandescent with anger about the failure of government to recognise what needed to be done and to act quickly, to protect NHS staff with adequate PPE, to protect the vulnerable in care homes and in hospital wards.

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Daniel Levitin – The Changing Mind. Levitin argues that, contrary to what we’re often told, we don’t lose the capacity to learn and change as we age. We’re likely to get worse at some things, but potentially better at others, and exercising our minds (not just by doing sudokus) has huge benefits in keeping us well into old age.

Bessel van der Kolk – The Body Keeps the Score, is a fascinating study of how trauma is realised physically, and what that means for therapeutic solutions.

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I may not have travelled much in the last six months IRL, but I’ve crossed continents and centuries through the books I’ve read. As always, I am so very grateful to the writers who have taken me to all of these times and places, who have moved, entertained, enlightened and informed me.

I do this to share the good stuff, as I said at the beginning. I hope some readers will find things here that they go on to enjoy, maybe to discover a new writer or to venture into a different genre. If you do, I’d love to know. If you have recommendations for me, feel free to share them. If you hate something I love, fair enough, but I take no responsibility…

I will wait until I’ve got a full year’s reading under my belt before I pick any ‘Best of’ but Jon McGregor’s Lean Fall Stand will be a tough act to beat…

Reading has taken me out of lockdown, out of Tier 3, out of my own postcode. As a quick perusal of the titles below will show, it’s hardly been six months of escapism – that’s not the point. The point is that as life closed in, books were always there to take me to different places, different times, where I could hear different voices telling fresh new stories, or old, old stories in a new voice. I’ve been in Ancient Greece, in Finland at the start of the twentieth century, and in the dustbowl of Oklahoma. My fascination with WWII has taken me to besieged Malta, to the Burma railroad, and to the home front and the Blitz. I’ve travelled to India, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, West Africa, the Caribbean, postwar Vienna and Prague. I’ve listened to a diversity of voices and a diversity of ideas. I’ve read for pleasure and diversion, and for enlightenment, and I’ve found plenty of both (often in the same books).

As always, the few things I read that weren’t up to much I have simply ignored – I want to share the good stuff, to enthuse other people about the books that have enthused me. I’ve linked to reviews where they’re not too spoilery, but click with care! I may come back to this after I’ve published it, to add on whatever I read between publication and midnight on 31 December – there’s a fair bit of reading time between now and then. I hope that something on this list might inspire you to read and enjoy. Do tell me, if so. (If you read something on my list and hate it, I do apologise, but don’t feel you have to tell me…)

FICTION

Ben Aaronovitch – I’ve continued to devour the Rivers of London novels, and have kept up with the series this autumn/winter by reading October Man (a novella), False Value, and a very tasty collection of short stories, Tales from the Folly.

Arvand Adiga – The White Tiger. Booker Prize winner from 2008. I didn’t love this, but I was gripped by it. I found it difficult to engage with the narrator – not that I always have to identify with, let alone like, the protagonist – but it was vivid and visceral and compelling.

Claire Askew – What You Pay For.  A thriller in which the fact that we know or can work out early on some of the twists and turns of the plot doesn’t matter, because the strength of it lies with the two interweaving voices through whom it is told. An excellent follow-up to All The Hidden Truths, featuring the same detective but a very different story, focusing on a school shooting.

Nadeem Aslam – Maps for Lost Lovers. This is remarkable. It’s profoundly melancholy, sensual, full of colours (the fabrics, the birds and butterflies), smells of perfume and spices, sounds (jazz, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn). We’re in an English town, called Dasht-e-Tanhaii, at least by the Pakistani communities who live there, and who’ve given the streets their own names too. It’s their home but they don’t feel at home there, constantly reminded that they do not belong. The book does not shy away from the brutality of the harsh orthodoxy that means everyone lives in fear of transgression, but, as Kamila Shamsie says, ‘love never steps out of the picture’.

Margaret Atwood – The Penelopiad. A funny, dark, feminist retelling of the story of Odysseus, from the point of view of the wife who waited – and the handmaids who were hanged on Odysseus’ return…

Oyinkan Braithwaite – My Sister the Serial Killer. One of my top crime books. Described as ‘a morbidly funny slashfest’ by the Guardian’s reviewer, which is fair enough. One of the best openings of anything I’ve read for a while.

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Jane Casey – Silent Kill. A Maeve Kerrigan novella, from the perspective of one of the secondary characters in the main series. Nicely done – as well as standing alone from a plot point of view, for afficionados of the series it sheds light both on the main protagonist here but on many of the other characters who we’ve not seen from this angle before.

Christopher Cleave – Everyone Brave is Forgiven. I wept my way through this. It took me by surprise, firstly because the two books I’ve read (and loved) by Cleave have had contemporary settings, and this one is WWII, secondly because at first I thought the clipped and brittle dialogue might become wearing. But the setting was beautifully described and the way the characters spoke was as revealing as it was meant to be concealing. It got under my skin and the more passionately I cared about those characters, the more I longed for them to be safe and happy and the more I grieved when bad stuff happened. (Spoiler: it did)

Ann Cleeves – I had a major catch-up with her Vera and Shetland series, and binged all the ones that I’d not read yet over the course of a week or so. I’ve also discovered and binged the Inspector Ramsey books, published in the 1990s and recently revived as e-books. Ramsey rapidly grew on me – one reviewer described him as ‘quiet, puzzled, human’, which is quite right.

Kit de Waal – My Name is Leon. I read The Trick to Time last year, and loved it. This was brilliant too. The voice is that of what we would now call a ‘looked-after’ child – never sure if that is a euphemistic term, or just a naively optimistic one… It’s another book that I wept through and hardly dared to read on at some points, as I so badly wanted Leon to be OK. It’s compassionate and warm and based in real knowledge of the care sector. It’s hopeful too, although de Waal noted in a recent interview (for Sheffield’s Off the Shelf festival) that we leave him aged nine, with his most turbulent years to come and the odds are stacked against him.

Elizabeth de Waal – no relation to Kit, to the best of my knowledge. Elizabeth was part of the Ephrussi family, who lived in the eponymous palace in Vienna until the Anschluss. Their story forms part of Elizabeth’s grandson Edmund de Waal’s enthralling The Hare with the Amber Eyes. The Exiles Return is full of melancholy, and of humour. It was unpublished in Elizabeth’s lifetime, and has been brought out by Persephone Press, and is as beautiful to look at as all of their publications.

Helen Dunmore – The House of Orphans. I honestly thought I’d read all of Dunmore’s fiction, so it was a very welcome surprise to find this one. It isn’t my favourite of hers, but it was a compelling read and the setting was new to me (Finland in 1902)

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Esi Edugyan – Washington Black. I read Half-Blood Blues a few years back and this is even better. The horrors of the plantation were familiar territory from other reading (Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, to name but two recent reads, but going back to Alex Haley’s Roots), but Edugyan’s narrative takes off (literally) from there. It’s extraordinary, breathtaking and audacious.

Lissa Evans – V for Victory/Their Finest. I discovered Evans earlier this year, and had already read Spencer’s List, Old Baggage and Crooked Heart. I was waiting eagerly for V for Victory and it did not disappoint, funny and moving and beautifully written. As was Their Finest. Both, as the titles suggest, are set in WWII and paint a vivid picture of the home front, with the kind of sharp observation that is totally convincing. But most of all, the characters live and breathe and stay with you long after the book has ended.

Bernardine Evaristo – Girl, Woman, Other. Richly deserving of its awards, this is a glorious polyphony, the voices weave in and out of each other’s stories, each having its moment in the spotlight, so that we see the people we meet from different points of view, including their own.

Richard Flanagan – The Narrow Road to the Deep North. A harrowing read. The descriptions of life in the PoW camps and the building of the Burma railway are hard to cope with. But truly, where one’s heart breaks is in the lives that the survivors have afterwards, the weight they have to carry from their experiences, the impossibility of anyone actually understanding.

Aminatta Forna – Happiness. I’d previously only read Forna’s memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water, in which she writes of her childhood and the fate of her father, a political prisoner in Sierra Leone. This is a wonderful novel, which makes us see the night time Londoners that are so often invisible to us, whether that’s the urban foxes or the migrant security staff and bin men. All of the characters are in some way exiled, displaced or nomadic (a Ghanaian specialist in PTSD and an American wildlife biologist are at the heart of it). It’s beautiful and hopeful and melancholy.

Robert Galbraith – Troubled Blood. I wish it were possible to review this without any reference to Rowling’s views on trans rights. She made it impossible, by including a character who dresses as a woman to seem unthreatening to women he intends to kill. As many reviewers have said, that is tone deaf at best, and tends to reinforce the feeling that she has become sadly obsessed with this aspect of the trans issue. For the record, I disagree profoundly with her. However. This is a gripping – albeit very long – crime thriller, which kept me on tenterhooks to the end, and continues the development both of Strike and Robin’s characters and of their relationship.

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Amitav Ghosh – Gun Island is about climate change, about human and animal migration. The Guardian said that it ‘brims with implausibility; outlandish coincidences and chance meetings blend with ancient myth and folklore, tales of heroism and the supernatural.’ I wasn’t sure at first, but decided to go with the flow, and I loved it.

Isabelle Grey – The Special Girls/Wrong Way Home/Shot through the Heart. I began this excellent series, featuring DI Grace Fisher, with Good Girls Don’t Die earlier this year, and binged these later titles more recently.

Elly Griffiths – The Postscript Murders. Sequel to The Stranger Diaries, featuring DS Harbinder Kaur. This is a delight, albeit a delight with a high body count…

Mohsin Hamid – Exit West. Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, blends fable and realism (there are moments when I thought of The Underground Railroad) in its account of refugees – what drives them to flee, what becomes of them.

Kazuo Ishiguro – A Pale View of Hills. Ishiguro reckoned that this, his debut, didn’t quite work. ‘I do think it’s too baffling. The ending is almost like a puzzle. I see nothing artistically to be gained by puzzling people to that extent. That was just inexperience—misjudging what is too obvious and what is subtle. Even at the time the ending felt unsatisfactory.’ Nonetheless, it is compelling, and very unsettling (something Ishiguro is rather good at – I was completely discombobulated by The Unconsoled, as if I was trapped in an anxiety dream).

Tayari Jones – An American Marriage.  In some ways this is a contemporary take on James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk – the young married couple, the wrongful arrest, the judicial system weighted against him, the long wait. And speaking of the waiting wife, oddly and by pure coincidence, the book I picked up after this was Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad… The narrative is constructed through the voices of the husband, the wife, and later on, the friend, so we see the same events from those different perspectives, which adds depth and nuance. Compelling and moving.

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Meena Kandasamy – When I Hit You. This was another tough read, an autobiographical account of domestic violence, ‘a meditation on the art of writing about desire, abuse and trauma’.

Philip Kerr – Hitler’s Peace. I’ve read most of Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels, so was interested in this slice of alt history. As always with Kerr, it’s scrupulously researched – the scenario is startling but robustly established, and there’s that same sense of impossible moral choices that pervades the Gunther series. Gripping, and troubling.

Heda Margolius Kovaly – Innocence. Kovaly is fascinating – earlier this year I read her memoir Under a Cruel Star, which records her life through the Holocaust and Stalinist repression in post-war Czechoslovakia. She later became a translator, with a particular fondness for Raymond Chandler, which feeds into this crime novel set in Prague in 1951, and drawing on her own experiences.

Nella Larsen – Passing. I’d seen her name but had never realised she was an American writer of colour. The clue is in the book’s title – it’s about those who can ‘pass’ as white, and what it does to them, the insecurity, the fear of the consequences should their identity be exposed. Will explore her work further. Passing was published in 1929, and Larsen is one of the leading writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

John le Carré – Agent Running in the Field. Le Carré never fails me. Elegantly satirical writing, taut plotting, and a dash of righteous indignation. This is his most recent novel, from 2019.

Postscript

And as it turned out, it was his last. He’d said as much in a October 2019 interview, but there was no reason to suppose he might not go on for years. His recent novels were elegiac in tone, and often raging (about Brexit, Trump, the calibre of the current crop of political leaders), as sharp as ever, as funny as ever, as gripping as ever. I started reading him in my early teens, and never really stopped. I’ve five more to read, and then I think I will start again at the beginning, and our introduction to George Smiley, in Call for the Dead.

Laura Lipmann – The Power of Three. One of Lipmann’s earlier stand-alones, from 2005. Secrets, friendships, betrayals…

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Attica Locke – Bluebird, Bluebird/Heaven my Home. Having read the two Jay Porter novels (Black Water Rising and Pleasantville) I turned to the two Highway 59 titles. The protagonist is a black Texas Ranger, and race is the tension that’s humming away constantly, relentlessly, in everything that happens. Brilliantly done.

Richard Mathieson – I am Legend. I’d seen the Will Smith movie, but the book is very different, both in the initial premiss and the way the plot unfolds. Mathieson’s vampires are not only unlike those in the movie, but unlike those in the Buffy universe, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, and the daddy of them all, Dracula. They don’t work to the same rules. His protagonist is utterly alone and utterly lonely, working out not only how to survive but how it all works, and applying a ruthlessly scientific approach to the process.

Denise Mina – Conviction  Never know quite what you’re going to get with Mina. This one is a very twisty thriller, described by The Scotsman as almost Hitchcockian in its evocation of paranoia and doubt.

Abir Mukherjee – Death in the East. I dived into the Sam Wyndham series with the most recent title, but will go back and read its predecessors with great enthusiasm. This one is a classic locked room mystery, a case that began in Whitechapel in 1905 and resurfaces unexpectedly in India in 1922. The racial politics of immigrant London and colonial India are vividly and often uncomfortably conveyed.

Joyce Carol Oates – A Book of American Martyrs. Two men, two families and the fall-out from a crime, the killing of a doctor by an anti-abortion fundamentalist. The focus moves from the killer and the victim to the wives and the children, struggling to work out who they can be without the men who have defined them. There was a fascinating synergy between this and Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (see above).

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor – Dust  A poetic, complex novel of contemporary Kenya. ‘At the core of Owuor’s novel … is a moral concern to forgive past wrongs. … Dust is a fine, compassionate novel that relishes the complexity of human relations. It is written in a language that is often beautifully observant, and is alert in its insight and sympathy.’

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Laksmi Pamuntjak – The Birdwoman’s Palate. This is a strange one! It’s about an epidemiological investigation (avian flu), and a culinary road trip. I’m not completely convinced that it all fitted together, but even if it didn’t, both elements were interesting and attractively written (Pamuntjak is a poet and a food writer)

Sara Paretsky – Indemnity Only/Body Work. I’ve read a few V I Warshawskis over the years, in no particular order, but not these two – turns out Indemnity Only is the very first in the series. Lots more in that series for me to enjoy.

Sally Rooney – Conversations with Friends. Admired rather than loved. I preferred Normal People, I think. I found the protagonists here frustrating, opaque even whilst so much of their inner and external lives was laid out for me.

Liz Rosenberg – The Laws of Gravity. I nearly stopped reading this when I realised that cancer was going to be a major driver of the plot. That made it a tougher read, this year of all years, than it would otherwise have been – but Rosenberg’s writing is warm, compassionate, empathetic, and unsparing.

Sunjeev Sahota – The Year of the Runaways. The precariousness of a life on the margins, a life in which the most minor misfortune can be catastrophic, and in which choice is an illusion, a luxury. The ‘runaways’ have all ended up in Sheffield, which is where we first meet them, for a variety of reasons which we then discover. Some are in more desperate straits than others but the gulf between the life they live and the life they hoped for is vast and unbridgeable. ‘Sahota moves some of the most urgent political questions of the day away from rhetorical posturing and contested statistics into the realm of humanity.’ 

Kamila Shamsie – Home Fire/Burnt Shadows. Both excellent. But the take on Antigone in Home Fire passed me by somewhat, and Burnt Shadows is the one that stays with me, from the opening sequence in 1945 Nagasaki onwards, as it sweeps across countries, continents and decades. As Shamsie says, ‘History had blown them all off course, no one ending – or even middling, where they had begun’, and that’s turned out to be quite a theme of this year’s reading.

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Ali Smith – Autumn. Whenever I read Ali Smith I remind myself I must read more Ali Smith. For some reason, I hadn’t embarked yet on her seasonal quartet and at a few pages in, already I was saying to myself that I must read everything Ali Smith has written.

Zadie Smith – NW. My first Zadie Smith, and I wasn’t quite sure about it. It seemed jumpy, fragmented, and whilst some sections or voices were convincing others weren’t quite. Adam Mars Smith’s review said that the real mystery of the book is that ‘it falls so far short of being a successful novel, though it contains the makings of three or four’. However, I will certainly read more of her work – when it works it works astoundingly well.

Cath Staincliffe – Quiet Acts of Violence. Staincliffe doesn’t deal in baroque serial killers, but in messy lives and messy crimes. Her speciality perhaps is the way in which the ripples from the crime spread out and touch other lives, and she tells these stories with humanity and compassion, whilst maintaining a powerful sense of tension. The crime is investigated by DI Donna Bell and DC Jade Bradshaw, who were introduced in Girl in the Green Dress and who I’m delighted to meet again here.

John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath. Yes, I know it’s a classic and I should have read it decades ago but hey, there are a lot of books out there, and I just hadn’t got round to this one, OK? I found the dialogue took quite a lot of concentration before I could ‘hear’ it in my head, but the narrative is relentless and powerful. Maybe I should read some other Steinbeck…

Lesley Thomson – The Detective’s Secret. The third in the Detective’s Daughter series, whose protagonists are untypical, to say the least – a cleaner (the detective’s daughter herself) and a train driver, both of them drawn into the investigation of crimes through a mix of chance and compulsion. The plot is complex and skilfully constructed, and, as with the earlier volumes in the series, it’s gripping stuff. Perhaps it’s a series best read in order as the back story of the two main characters is complex in itself.

Sylvia Townsend Warner – English Climate. Stories of England in wartime – the Home Front, gossip and judgement and boredom, Mothers’ Union and knitting circles, ordinary lives made extraordinary. Another Persephone publication. ‘Funny, brilliantly written, at times utterly heart-breaking, delightfully sharp, dry, intelligent and full of memorable characters’

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NON-FICTION

Akala – Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire.

Jeffrey Boakye – Black, Listed: Black British Culture Explored

Afua Hirsch – Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging

I’m grouping these three together because I read them in fairly quick succession, and found that they were exploring quite similar territory, albeit with very distinct voices – the experience of being black and British, the stereotypes and prejudices (explicit and implicit) they’ve faced. Hirsch and Boakye both have Ghanaian heritage, Akala Caribbean. All three reflect on gender, and how that intersects with race. All three tell their stories and make their arguments with humour, grace and passion.

Jackie Kay – Red Dust Road. Poet Jackie Kay has a somewhat different story to tell, that of an adopted child with a Nigerian father, growing up in a deeply loving and warm white family and needing, as an adult, to find her birth parents. It’s beautiful, and moving without ever being merely sentimental.

Nikesh Shukla – The Good Immigrant. Shukla brings together a collection of 21 short reflections by black, Asian and minority ethnic writers working across literature and the media on ‘what it means to be a person of colour’ in Britain today.

James Baldwin – Selected Essays. Some of these I read back in my teens when I was immersing myself in the literature of the civil rights movement, some are new to me. His writing is so compelling – having just seen the film I Am Not Your Negro I can see and hear him as I read.

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Kamala Harris – The Truths we Hold: An American Journey.  Read whilst waiting for news of the US election result to emerge, waiting, and hoping… That Harris will shortly become the first woman VP, the first woman of colour at the highest level of US politics, the first South Asian-American… and so on, and so on, is inspiring and wonderful. For Bonnie Greer it is even more deeply significant than Obama’s presidency.

Margot Lee Shetterley – Hidden Figures. This fascinating account gives far more depth to the remarkable Afro-American women ‘who helped win the space race’ than the film was able to do. It also gave much more weight to the science, which in the film came across as a kind of magic (inevitably, I guess).  

Rachel Clarke – Dear Life: A Doctor’s Story of Love and Loss. Why on earth did I choose to read a book about death, about the end of life, in the year that my darling kid brother died of cancer? Well, perhaps there was method in my madness. It is a very honest book, tough and unsparing. But it’s also tender and loving – the love is both for the dying and for those who are close to them (and for the doctors and nurses who help them in those last days and hours). It’s not just about dying, but ‘about living, loving, learning how to say goodbye’. And thus it is supremely life-affirming.

Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. That’s it, the subtitle says it really. What follows is a whole series of examples, taken from all sorts of environments which show not only that women have been invisible to planners, designers and policy makers, but that designing for the ‘default male’ results not only in annoyance and frustration but puts women’s physical and mental health at risk, whether from PPE that simply doesn’t fit the female shape, or from the misdiagnosis of heart failure because it presents differently in women. Some of the examples are relatively familiar, others startling. All are enraging.

Hallie Rubenhold – The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. Inevitably, as I read this, I thought of other women, victims of another so-called Ripper. I could not have guessed that soon after I finished this brilliant, rigorous and compassionate account, the death of that other Ripper would have triggered news reports and analyses, many of which did try at least to right the wrongs done to the murdered women, by saying their names, and telling their stories. It was about time. Rubenhold’s account gives a richly detailed account of the life and precarious times of each of the ‘canonical’ Ripper victims, showing how their lives might have been different, as well as how and why things went wrong. It’s a vital, heartbreaking piece of work. I hope, some time, for another volume that restores to ‘the thirteen’ the stories of their lives, not merely of their deaths.

Daniel Trilling – Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe.  So many of the novels I read this year (and in recent years) have been preoccupied with migration, with the forces that make individuals take huge risks in search of a better life (whether that is better economically or simply the chance of survival). Trilling visits the places where ‘the “fault lines” in Europe’s asylum system are clearest’ and talks to refugees and those who work with and try to help them, and his account is both thoroughly researched and compellingly human.

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Rowena Edlin-White (ed.) – Exploring Nottinghamshire Writers. This goes way beyond the usual suspects (Byron, Sillitoe, Lawrence). From Walter Hilton, b. 1340, to writers still very much with us and publishing in a variety of genres. The accounts of their lives and works give us some fascinating social history of the region, and whilst some of the writers may be of historical interest only, others would seem well worth tracking down.   

Rob Hindle – The Grail Roads. From my favourite poetry publisher, Longbarrow Press, whose virtues include not only an excellent and varied collection of contemporary poetry, but also books that are beautiful to behold as well as to read and a delivery system that (for those of us in the right postcodes) involves the publisher arriving at one’s front door, seemingly only hours after the order is placed, and handing over a package with the book and a handwritten thank you. This volume blends first hand accounts from WWI soldiers with Arthurian myth, and it’s a powerful piece of work, one that I know I will return to.

Owen Booth – What We’re Teaching our Sons. I don’t know how to categorise this book, so I won’t. I’ll just say that it is funny, observant, and touching. The Irish Times reviewer commented: ‘With the emotional depth of a novel mixed with the breezier form of a parenting manual, Booth has written a remarkable debut whose profound documenting of family life is achieved in less than 200 pages.’

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You can find my account of the first half of 2020 here.

Postscript: Obviously, I didn’t stop reading once I’d posted this, so here’s what I read during the remainder of 2020.

Louise Penny – The Nature of the Beast and A Great Reckoning: two more from her always readable and engaging Inspector Gamache series

Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo – Roseanna, the first in their Martin Beck series. I’ve seen the TV adaptation but hadn’t read anything by them before – I was prompted to after a friend commented on their absence from my 100 top crime novels list!

Two more John le Carrés – The Russia House and The Secret Pilgrim.

Lee Jackson – The Welfare of the Dead, a Victorian-set crime novel by a new author to me.

Val McDermid – Place of Execution. Excellent stand-alone, completely gripping and very cleverly plotted.

Arnold Bennett – These Twain. The third in the Clayhanger trilogy (though it turns out there’s a fourth). Much less interesting than its predecessor, Hilda Lessways.

Nicci French – Blue Monday and Tuesday’s Gone. The first two in the Frieda Klein series.