Girl by Edna O'Brien
“I was a girl once, but not anymore,” is the opening line of Edna O’Brien’s acclaimed novel Girl. The book’s theme is lost girlhood – it is an imagined tale of one of the Nigerian schoolgirls who, in 2014, were kidnapped by Boko Haram. Girl is, says The Independent “a devastating read”, but “it’s told with a spare economy; never sentimentalised, nor sensationalised”. It is a major change of direction for the Irish author, who based the novel on interviews and research trips to Nigeria. It is also, adds the Independent, “an astonishing act of imaginative empathy on O’Brien’s part”. (Credit: Faber & Faber)
The Wall by John Lanchester
In The Wall, UK novelist and journalist John Lanchester imagines a near-future dystopia where the world has experienced a climactic event, known as the ‘Change’. Movement between countries is forbidden, and the UK is walled and patrolled by young conscripted guards. This fable for the modern age is the author’s follow-up to the acclaimed Capital, and was long-listed for the Booker. “It’s a clever, clairvoyant concept,” says The Guardian. “Lanchester reveals with slow, steady control the cruelties of his strange new world and then socks you with their philosophical implications.” (Credit: Faber & Faber)
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo
The joint winner (with Atwood’s The Testaments) of the 2019 Booker Prize is a novel full of characters which the judges described as “a must read about Britain and womanhood… her style is passionate, razor-sharp, brimming with energy and humour”. The lead character is Amma, a successful black theatre director in her 50s, who is faced with anxieties around her newfound privilege. “There’s a looseness to her tone that gives this novel its buoyancy,” says the New York Times. “Evaristo has a gift for appraising the lives of her characters with sympathy and grace while gently skewering some of their pretensions.” (Credit: Hamish Hamilton)
Grand Union by Zadie Smith
In Zadie Smith’s first collection of short stories, the UK author covers a lot of ground, from a dystopian scenario in Meet the President, to the so-called ‘cancel culture’ in Now More Than Ever. “Smith is at her best in a number of evocative, propulsive stories that spend time with compellingly flawed characters,” says the New Statesman, pointing to the story Kelso Deconstructed – which imagines the last day of Kelso Cochrane, the Antiguan immigrant murdered in London in 1959 – as the “most significant”. (Credit: Hamish Hamilton)
An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma
The second novel by Chigozie Obioma, was, like his first, shortlisted for the Booker. An Orchestra of Minorities is a contemporary re-telling of Homer’s Odyssey, as told by the spirit of a farmer, Chinonso. Switching between English, Igbo and Nigerian pidgin, it is, says The Atlantic, “a wrenching study of the sacrifices made for love.” Obioma writes with “an exigent precision that makes An Orchestra of Minorities at once timely and speculative,” and he “compels the reader to root for [Chinonso], to see the poor chicken farmer’s story as epic.” (Credit: Little Brown)
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s much-anticipated sequel to her dystopian masterpiece The Handmaid’s Tale, and is set 15 years later. The story is told from the point of view of three different narrators – Aunt Lydia, Agnes who lives in Gilead, and Daisy who lives in Canada. “Atwood’s prose is as powerful as ever, tense and spare,” says BBC Culture. “Her word games are ingenious. She forces you to think about language and how it can be made to lie.” The Observer declares The Testaments to be a “plump, pacy, witty and tightly plotted page-turner that transports us straight back to the dark heart of Gilead”. (Credit: Penguin/ Random House)
Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
A hugely popular summer read this year has been the debut novel by New York Times feature writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a sharply satirical look at modern marriage and divorce, split into two parts. Toby Fleishman is going through a bitter divorce from his wife Rachel, who has left their two children with Toby and vanished. “Fleishman studies women, but it also studies relationships,” writes Katy Waldman in The New Yorker. “Brodesser-Akner prods the form of the marriage novel as though it were a sleeping lump on the other side of the bed.” (Credit: Headline)
Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell
The latest book by the author of the best-selling Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, this is a masterful collection of short stories. The Pulitzer finalist creates strange predicaments in her vivid tales. Russell is a “short-story master,” says Jane Ciabattari on BBC Culture, who “spins intricate sentences and pulls off head-spinning shifts, pushing language to its limits. Each of these eight stories offers up an indelible universe.” (Credit: Knopf)
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
A fictional Florida reform school in the Jim Crow era is the setting of The Nickel Boys by the Pulitzer prize- and National Book Award-winner Colson Whitehead. Widely acclaimed, it tells the story of black teenagers sent to the academy, which claims to provide “physical, intellectual and moral training”. In reality, the Nickel Academy is a hellish place full of sadistic staff and corrupt officials, where any boy who resists is likely to disappear “out back”. Writing for BBC Culture, Jane Ciabattari describes the novel as “spare and haunting”. (Credit: Doubleday)
Phantoms by Christian Kiefer
Phantoms is a panoramic exploration of war, layered with family secrets. It centres on Ray Takahashi who is returning home to the US from the battlefront of World War Two, and decades later, in an overlapping story, John Frazier, a Vietnam veteran who is also reeling from war. BBC Culture’s Jane Ciabattari highly recommends Phantoms: “Told in vivid lyrical prose, Kiefer’s novel reveals the sorrows and lingering guilt of wartime, and the dangers of forgetting.” (Credit: Liveright)
Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane
The multi award-winning author Robert Macfarlane takes the reader on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet in his hit book Underland, which is one of the most widely-acclaimed non-fiction works of the year so far. From Greenland’s glaciers to Bronze-Age burial chambers and Arctic sea caves, Underland is a voyage through our planet’s past, present and future. His “chiselled prose” is astounding, writes William Dalrymple in the Guardian: “At its best, this has an epic, incantatory quality. There is a rare gift at work here… With Underland he has written one of the most ambitious works of narrative non-fiction of our age, a new Road to Oxiana for the dwindling twilight of the Anthropocene.” (Credit: Penguin)
Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry
Kevin Barry is a “clairvoyant narrator of the male psyche and a consistent lyrical visionary,” writes Alan Warner in the Guardian. Barry’s latest novel tells the story of ageing Irish gangsters Charlie and Maurice, who are keeping vigil at a ferry terminal in southern Spain, in search of Charlie’s 23-year-old daughter Dilly. “Here is a meticulous, devastatingly vivid portrayal of serious crime and its real consequences,” writes Warner in his review. “The prose is a caress, rolling out in swift, spaced paragraphs, a telegraphese of fleeting consciousness... Barry’s sensibility is eerie; he is attuned to spirits, to malevolent presences, the psychic tundra around us.” (Credit: Canongate)
Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
Lisa Taddeo crossed the US for eight years talking to women about their sexual desires, and the result of her mission is a best-seller and one of this year’s most talked-about non-fiction books. In it, Taddeo focusses on three women in particular, and through their stories, explores the question of how female sexuality works. “Three Women is a literary account of the sex lives of three Americans, already hailed as a feminist classic,” writes Emma Jacobs in the Financial Times. “Like the #MeToo movement, it illuminates themes of pain and power imbalances… It is meticulously, deliciously graphic without being titillating.” (Credit: Bloomsbury)
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino
Trick Mirror is a collection of essays by The New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, and is one of the most talked-about books of the year. Tolentino’s insights on identity, feminism and the internet are explored through various subjects, including religion, drugs, the wedding industry and celebrity culture. “Tolentino is a classical essayist along the lines of Montaigne,” writes Laura Miller on Slate. “Threading her way on the page toward an understanding of what she thinks and feels about life, the world, and herself.” (Credit: Random House)
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in the Strange World by Elif Shafak
Longlisted for the Booker prize, Elif Shafak’s novel is told from the point of view of Tequila Leila in the still-conscious moments after her death. Each minute brings a rich, sensual memory that recalls a friend she made at each key moment in her life. “Elifa Shafak has always been the most compassionate of writers,” says Francesca Segal in the Financial Times. “This is a novel that gives voice to the invisible, the untouchable, the abused and the damaged, weaving their painful songs into a thing of beauty.” (Credit: Viking)
Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant: Essays by Joel Golby
Full of wry observation and stark self-reflection, Joel Golby’s writing for Vice has already brought him a following. The first book by the millennial favourite is a collection of new and newly expanded essays, and has been warmly received. It includes his musings on death, alcohol, friendship, loss – and sociopathic buy-to-let landlords. Among the essays featured is the widely-read hit Things You Only Know When Both Your Parents Are Dead. “Using a blend of insightful self-deprecation and almost lovable braggadocio, Golby tackles subjects big and small with the same forensic thinking and enthusiasm,” writes Adam Kay in the Observer. (Credit: Penguin/ Random House)
Coventry by Rachel Cusk
According to Mia Leith in the Financial Times, Rachel Cusk’s voice “resonates loud and clear” in her new collection of essays, Coventry. “In light of the polarised reactions to her previous memoirs,” writes Leith, “a non-fiction collection could be considered a dare.” The book is largely about the function of narrative, particularly women’s narrative. As Cusk writes in Coventry: “It is as though I was born imprisoned in a block of stone from which it has been both a necessity and an obligation to free myself.” It’s a feeling, she says that “works well enough, I suppose, as a paradigm for the contemporary woman’s struggle towards personal liberty.” (Credit: Faber)
The Flight Portfolio by Julie Orringer
The Flight Portfolio is a novel loosely based on the true story of US journalist Varian Fry who travelled to Vichy, France in 1940, risking his life to help imperilled artists, writers and others escape the Nazis. “It’s classic storytelling through a transgressive lens,” writes Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly. “Portfolio offers a testament to something nicely old-fashioned, though, too: the enduring transformative power of art, and love, in any form.” While Jane Ciabattari writes on BBC Culture: “The Flight Portfolio is filled with distinctive characters, close calls, tragic losses, and the horrifying incremental drumbeat of the impending Holocaust.” (Credit: Knopf)
Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison, Nobel-and Pulitzer prize-winner, and one of the most celebrated and revered writers of our time, died in August. Her non-fiction collection, Mouth Full of Blood, published earlier in the year, spans four decades of essays, speeches and meditations – all questioning our world. The book is in three parts, The Foreigner’s Home, God’s Language and Black Matter(s). US history, politics, race, religion, gender and globalisation are all themes, along with the role of the press and the artist. As Henrietta McKervey puts it in the Irish Times: “It’s vast. It’s deep. It’s superb.” (Credit: Chatto and Windus)