Books of the year – New Statesman

Hilary Mantel

In the 1990s Musa Okwonga was a Ugandan scholarship boy at Eton, the school that turned out scores of politicians as well as Bertie Wooster and Captain Hook. His memoir, One of Them (Unbound), sheds light on the present disconnect between those who govern and those who suffer the consequences.

Claire Keegans novel, Small Things Like These (Faber & Faber), wastes not a word in its depiction of a small Irish town guilty of collective blindness about the nuns who run a training school for young women. Keegan is an exquisite writer, who can enclose volumes of social history in one luminous phrase.

Ian Rankin

Hyde by Craig Russell (Constable) is set in 19th-century Edinburgh, where a detective called Hyde must hunt a ghoulish, possibly occult serial killer while wrestling with demons of his own, including mood swings and blackouts. Its an ingenious slice of gothic that does something newwith the Jekyll and Hyde trope. Hyde is the bestScottish crime novel of 2021, according to the McIlvanney Prize, but I wont hold that against it

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In The Beresford by Will Carver (Orenda Books) a maze-like boarding-house becomes a scene of carnage as the tenants are dispatched in grisly fashion one by one. What is going on and who can bring an end to the bloodshed? Carver writes in the tradition of the Theatre of the Absurd, but with added grue. Shocking, compulsive and persuasive. Its one hell of a ride for those of a mind to jump aboard.

Bernardine Evaristo

Joelle Taylor has produced one of the most astonishing and original poetry collections of recent years. C+nto & Othered Poems (Westbourne Press) is a partly autobiographical exploration of the lives of butch lesbian counterculture. It challenges imprisoning notions of womanhood by celebrating and foregrounding those who face a hostile society when they are only being true to themselves.

Also taking us into new literary territory are two impressive debuts. Poor by Caleb Femi (Penguin) zooms in on the lives of young black men on the south London housing estate of his own childhood; while Caleb Azumah Nelsons first novel, Open Water (Viking), is a short, poetic and intellectual meditation on art and a relationship between a young couple, which also has Peckham and south London as its primary backdrop.

Ed Smith

I read Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages by Dan Jones (Head of Zeus) and The World According to Colour by James Fox (Allen Lane) in tandem it was like watching two great and complementary half-backs in rugby. Jones drives his story upfield. Empires come and go, religions form and break up, ideas clash and mingle 1,100 years, 16 sweeping chapters, 700 pacey pages, and. . . hes done it, arms aloft, hes scored under the posts. Masterly, muscular and direct Gareth Edwards in full flow.

In contrast, Fox glides into intellectual spaces; colour becomes a philosophical feast astrophysics, the origins of civilisation, a palette of moral associations. Though dazzling, everything has a point: when Fox shoots, he scores. You never see it coming, then suddenly all the pieces fit together as though they were meant to be Barry John, running into space.

Philip Pullman

In 2009 Iain McGilchrist published The Master and His Emissary, a densely researched and entirely thrilling examination of the difference between the two kinds of thinking typical of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Now comes his new book, The Matter with Things (Perspectiva Press), which takes that basic idea much further and demonstrates, with an immense range of learning and beautifully clear prose, how important it is to be aware of the whole and not merely the parts, how analysis should come after insight and not before it, how right-hemisphere thinking, with its openness to experience, is a better guide to reality than the narrowly focused, rule-based way the left hemisphere regards the world.

I have spent a decade absorbing the vision of McGilchrists previous book; I shall be happy to spend the rest of my life with this one, and still be learning things when I get to the end.

Damon Galgut

Most of my reading is retrospective, which is to say I dont read a lot of stuff thats been recently published. I like to wait for the dust to settle. But Claire Keegans new novella, Small Things Like These (Faber & Faber), is absolutely exquisite. Her work is exceptional.

I really liked Burntcoat by Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber). I think shes a marvellous writer. She used the scenario of an unnamed plague and the lockdown it sets up to create a psychological mystery. Were probably going to get a whole new genre of Covid fiction opening up, and Hall is right at the vanguard.

Marina Warner

As we lived isolated in lockdown, I found Kazuo Ishiguros Klara and the Sun (Faber & Faber), about an Artificial Friend destined for a slow fade, uniquely poignant as well as prescient. The pandemic cut short the run of The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree (Camden Arts Centre London), but the curators, Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clark, produced a feast of a book exploring the visionary tradition across continents and centuries. In Swirl of Words/Swirl of Worlds: Poems from 94 Languages Spoken Across London (Peer), the poet and editor Stephen Watts draws us into hear the citys magnificent hubbub.

David Hare

Ninth Street Women (Back Bay) is 700 pages long, so you need lots of time not just to read but also to think. Mary Gabriel recreates that extraordinary moment in the 1950s in Greenwich Village when Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner were all young painters who came upon unforeseen fame and fortune. The book is both entertaining and inspiring.

Raven Leilani, in her debut novel Luster (Picador), makes fun of super-smart people being perverse. Im not sure I wholly understood her intent, but oh my goodness, the writing is beautiful.

John Gray

The book that engrossed me the most this year was Continents of Exile (Penguin Modern Classics), the 12-volume memoir of the Indian-born writer Ved Mehta (1934-2021), who lost his sight at the age of three after suffering from meningitis and went on to try to live as far as possible as a fully sighted person. The series seems to me one of the supreme works of modern autobiography. Much of it has to do with a sense of homelessness, but Mehtas story is full of the joy of life. I followed him through his early years with his family in India to a school for the blind in Arkansas, then to Pomona College in California, Balliol College, Oxford, Harvard and his 33 years as a writer for William Shawns New Yorker. Mehtas turbulent romances and years of psychoanalysis, his travails building a house on an island off the Maine coast and the hidden side of his father that came to light at a New York party complete an absorbing account of an astonishing life.

Mark Cocker

Great field guides are a rare species but at their best they are portals to a richer relationship with the rest of life. It is exceptional that two such groundbreaking books have appeared in a single year. Europes Birds: An Identification Guide by Rob Hume, Robert Still, Andy Swash and Hugh Harrop, and Paul Brocks Britains Insects: A Field Guide to the Insects of Great Britain and Ireland (both Princeton University Press) are models of compression, synthesising a mountain of fresh data in an easy-to-use format. But they are also beautiful to hold and to ponder and each is a glorious piece of political advocacy for its chosen organisms.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

I was proud of the shortlist we judges chose for the 2021 International Booker Prize, but there were books I loved that didnt make the cut. Among them were A Perfect Cemetery (Charco Press) a collection of haunting, witty stories by the Argentinian writer Federico Falco and Philippe Claudels Dog Island (Maclehose Press), a parable about modern migration that is also the kind of detective story that Mikhail Bulgakov might have written: visionary and darkly humorous.

My favourite novel of the year, though, is a re-issue, Elspeth Barkers O Caledonia (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). A book as outrageous and clever as its teenaged heroine, it is fiercely gothic, constantly surprising and wildly funny.

Mark Haddon

Ive been unwell for the past year and reading has been often impossible. Consequently I am more than usually grateful to the few books that drew me in and held me. The Prophets by Robert Jones Junior (Riverrun) is a gripping, luminous novel about the many tangled lives on a Louisiana plantation, centring on two enslaved teenage lovers, Samuel and Isiah. Reviews invoking Toni Morrison were absolutely justified.

The Idea of the Brain by Matthew Cobb (Profile) is a thrilling history of our rapidly expanding understanding of the brain, made even better by having no theoretical axe to grind. It also explores the fundamental role of metaphor in neuroscientific theory the brain is a system of hydraulics! The brain is a telegraph network! and the unique challenges faced when trying to understand an object that is like nothing else in the universe.

Jason Cowley

I admired the cool, restrained style of Katie Kitamuras Intimacies (Jonathan Cape), which probes the tangled emotional life of a young unnamed American-Japanese woman working as a translator at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. It is less a novel than an exercise in self-erasure, mysterious and compelling.

I loved Jonathan Bates Bright Star, Green Light (William Collins), a deeply romantic exploration of the work and parallel lives of John Keats and F Scott Fitzgerald, both destined to die young and both enraptured by beauty and beautys inevitable loss.

Ali Smith

Its quite hard to get hold of a copy of Eileen Agars memoir A Look at My Life (Methuen). It was published in 1988 and I read it this year when I couldnt get to London to see the Whitechapel retrospective of her work. But what a book. Spirited, funny, candid, as irreverent, textured and cornucopic as her art. It begins: Head first I tumbled out of my mother in December 1899. It ends: I hope to die in a sparkling moment. Agar makes a fleeting appearance, too, in Jennifer Higgies brilliant The Mirror and the Palette (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), which reveals an until-now hidden history of womens self-portraiture and is pretty cornucopic itself, a gift that keeps on giving.

But my book of the year is a debut, a slim collection of poetry called Forty Names (Carcanet) by the young Afghani poet Parwana Fayyaz. No one ever wanted to know/what the real story was. As clear as unruined water, as courageous as a poet can be in these times, as haunting as the brutal history it records and as marvellously summoned as the lives it celebrates, its a calm reclamation and a tour de force.

Nicola Sturgeon

Spanning the globe and a century, Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead (Doubleday) is an epic tale of daring and adventure. The character and determination of two fearless women, living in different times but connected by fate, is as inspiring as it is entertaining. I hugely enjoyed this novel.

I love everything Colm Tibn has written and The Magician (Viking) is another masterpiece. The rise of Nazi Germany and the horrors of the Second World War are viewed through the eyes and experiences of the complicated and multilayered writer and Nobel prize winner Thomas Mann. Historical fiction at its best.

Preti Taneja

Niven Govindens Diary of a Film (Dialogue Books) a novel about cinema, age, gender, fame and creativity infused with the spirit of Federico Fellini and Luca Guadagnino stole my heart this year. Set during an international film festival as a jaded director is about to launch his masterpiece and told in the first person as an extended conversation over a few nights it captures a sense of the fragility and intimacy of human endeavour, but also the silence and resilience needed to survive as a woman, a man, as lovers and as artists in a market-driven world. Lola Olufemis Experiments in Imagining Otherwise from the independent Hajar Press is also an extraordinary book written with compassion, fearlessness and determination to imagine a more equal world into being. A joy to read and to think with.

Jim Crace

William Palmers In Love with Hell (Robinson) is a masterful insiders account of how alcohol ruined and sustained the careers of 11 writers, including Kingsley Amis, Dylan Thomas and Jean Rhys (with whom I endured an intoxicating lunch in 1974). It is a both sad and joyful reminder of why the British pub is such a lure but also why, once trapped inside, it is mostly wise to stick to just a single pint. It also led me to the works of the greatest of all celebrants of bars and booze, Patrick Hamilton. Is there a kinder, wittier, sharper, tipsier novel than his wartime masterpiece, The Slaves of Solitude?

Alan Johnson

Its amazing how eruditely Robert Douglas-Fairhurst manages to illuminate our history through a microscopic focus on one brief period. The Turning Point (Jonathan Cape) transports us to 1851. The books principal subjects are Charles Dickens as he embarks on Bleak House, and the Crystal Palace, first assembled in all its sparkling glory for that years Great Exhibition.

Since the publication of Failures of State (Mudark) in March the governments maladroit handling of Covid-19 has been exposed by Dominic Cummings (willingly) and Matt Hancock (less so). No account can match this forensic analysis by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnot, who have presented us with a disturbing first draft of history.

David Reynolds

In Devil-Land: England under Siege, 1588-1688 (Allen Lane) Clare Jackson offers a bracingly revisionist view of our history in the century after the Armada. Viewed from across the Channel, Angel-Land during this century of succession crises, religious turmoil, civil wars, regicide and republican government looks like a failed state teetering between comedy and tragedy. You may not buy the whole argument, but after reading Devil-Land this sceptered isle and demi-paradise is unlikely to look quite the same ever again.

Paul Collier

The book that members of the Labour Party most need to read is The Dignity of Labour by Jon Cruddas (Polity). He understands why Labour has lost the trust of the working class: why isnt he in the shadow cabinet? Turning from politics to ideas, the new book that I have found most insightful for my current research is Matthew Cobbs The Idea of the Brain (Profile). It recounts how analogies between the brain and the fashionable technology of the era ours being the brain as a computer have repeatedly sent neuroscience down rabbit-holes.

Melissa Harrison

Literature lovers like me are fond of saying that reading promotes empathy; it feels true, though you might struggle to prove it. However, The Devil You Know (Faber & Faber) by the forensic psychiatrist Gwen Adshead with Eileen Horne has permanently recalibrated my empathy dial. As she helps offenders understand and take responsibility for their actions in the wake of terrible crimes, Adshead quietly, humanely shows us that people remain people, despite their actions.

In its aftermath I read Gordon Burns unforgettable Happy Like Murderers (Faber & Faber), about Fred and Rose West, and thought about the professionals tasked with working with them. I hope they were supported in turn.

Geoff Dyer

Harald Jahners Aftermath (WH Allen) is a transfixing account and subtle analysis of Germany after the Second World War has ended. A scrupulous investigation of the past, it reads, constantly, like a prelude to what is still unfolding. But the greatest joy this year has come from my belated discovery of the dark, light, unexceptional and exquisitely twisted world of Elizabeth Taylor, starting with A Game of Hide and Seek and Angel and continuing apace. A shame that the pretty and bland covers of the latest Virago reissues of this perennially under-rated writer do little to lure new readers into the skewed delights within.

Sue Prideaux

Locked down, I craved perilous adventure. Julian Sanctons The Madhouse at the End of the Earth (WH Allen) delivered. The Belgicas 1897 South Pole expedition is pure horror. Clueless captain, rat-infested ship frozen into the ice, scurvy, darkness, hunger, insanity. Last-ditch escape! Young crewmember Roald Amundsen assumes captaincy and dynamites a channel through the ice! No wonder he stuffed Scot. Terrific stuff.

So is Looking for Trouble (Faber & Faber), the memoir of the trailblazing war correspondent Virginia Cowles. Taking tea with Hitler, gossiping with Winston Churchill, eating reindeer with Finnish guerrilla skiing squads, reporting on everything objectively. Her writing is sparkling; her life, seen from envious lockdown, completely thrilling.

Rowan Williams

For me the choice is already made in any year in which a new book by Alan Garner is published. Treacle Walker (Fourth Estate) is very much in Garners late style spare and allusive (a wealth of folkloric hinterland), luminous and understated. Its about seeing and healing; any more by way of summary would be useless. Nigel Tubbss Socrates on Trial (Bloomsbury) is also about these things, and is also built mostly through dialogue. Its an impassioned challenge to the stupidities of current educational practice from the UKs best educational philosopher, and it nails the basic problem as lying in our obsession with property the myth of knowledge as something we own and trade. Human freedom is the liberty to learn, and, in the process, to be dispossessed of this fiction. Tubbs argues this with astonishing subtlety and nimbleness.

Colm Tibn

Derek Mahons The Poems 1961-2020 (Gallery Books), published a year after his death, displays a rich talent, formalist and casual, witty and melancholy, minimalist and expansive. Claire Keegans Small Things Like These (Faber & Faber), written with precision and rhythmic care, is a story about an ordinary life in a small place and slowly becomes a brave and piercing exploration of a most difficult public matter. The Works of Guillaume Dustan Volume 1 (Semiotext) contains three short, engrossing novels that centre on sharp and accurate descriptions of gay sex, the sensibility and inner world of the protagonist emerging richly, by implication. This is a great book for gay boys on winter nights.

Gary Younge

Nadifa Mohameds The Fortune Men (Viking) is an elegant portrayal of life in the racial, cultural hub of Cardiffs Tiger Bay in the early Fifties. Eschewing a simple morality play for complex vivid characters, it centres on the plight of Mahmood Mattan, who finds himself in the shadow of the hangmans noose for a murder he didnt commit. Amelia Gentlemans The Windrush Betrayal (Guardian Faber) sat on my shelf for far too long because I thought I knew the story. I didnt. At least, I had not sat with it beyond the news cycles for the length of time necessary to witness the full scale of the injustice unfold in a single narrative thread. A book that keeps you informed and makes you angry.

Joan Bakewell

The Gun, the Ship and the Pen by Linda Colley (Profile) is an account of how constitutions have come about through history and is written with Colleys usual erudition, insight and style. She transforms what sounds like the dry matter of paper documents into an enthralling account of how warfare, national identity and colonial exploitation follow each other in the emergence of constitutions across the world. A work of thrilling scholarship.

Spike: The Virus vs the People by Jeremy Farrar with Anjana Ahuja (Profile) tells how the news of Covid-19 first reached the worlds scientists, how the pandemic unfolded and how governments reacted and failed to cope. It reads like a thriller.

Colin Kidd

How many serious books on politics are pitch-perfect comic classics? Until this year I could think of only two: Edward Luttwaks Coup dEtat: A Practical Handbook and Christopher Hoods analysis of buck passing, The Blame Game. But these are now joined by Michael Wolffs Landslide (Bridge Street Press), an account of the last days of the Trump presidency. The humour in Luttwak and Hood derives from the authors wry subtlety of approach. Wolff, by contrast, is the vessel into which the Trump White Houses chaotic, Marx-brothers cast of panicked but competitively craven staff and hangers-on copiously leaks. Amid the anarchic din, however, Wolff demonstrates exquisite Groucho-like timing.

Frances Wilson

Two bespoke studies of literary prophets stand out this year. Alex Christofi describes Dostoevsky in Love (Bloomsbury) as a reconstructed memoir in which he blends Dostoevskys autobiographical fiction with his fantastical life. Crafted with novelistic skill, it is a book to fit the vast complexity of the man and his work. In William Blake vs the World (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), John Higgs argues that we have absorbed Blake into our national consciousness without having the faintest idea of who he was or what he believed in. Higgss mission, to return to the cockney visionary and his essential strangeness, is Blakeian in its singularity.

Ian Leslie

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders (Bloomsbury) consists of close commentaries on short stories by Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev and Nikolai Gogol, based on a creative writing course he teaches. Saunders approaches the stories as a fiction writer, not a critic, gently illuminating their mechanics without diminishing their magic or mystery and crucially, the stories themselves are included. Saunders is warm, playful and acutely perceptive, and even when I disagreed with him I was grateful to him for making me pay such close attention to these inexhaustible works.

This year I re-read White Noise by Don DeLillo (Picador) and marvelled at its uncanny blend of ironic commentary on our media-saturated world with deeply felt lyricism about marriage and family. Above all, it made me laugh; few great novels are as funny.

Sandeep Parmar

Three books that redefine what life writing means this year are Stephanie Sy-Quias Amnion (Granta), Fred DAguiars Year of Plagues (Carcanet) and Preti Tanejas Aftermath (Transit Books, to be published in the UK by And Other Stories in 2022). Sy-Quias bold Knstlerroman mesmerisingly transports us across continents and through the longing of diasporas, arriving in England, a deep bone-knowing country/Albion. DAguiars electric prose vividly recounts a cancer diagnosis and treatment in the Covid year, a private suffering amid a collective one. Tanejas brave and haunting retelling of the terror attack at Londons Fishmongers Hall in 2019 intermingles a clear-eyed understanding of the roots of terror with personal stories of those involved.

Im also deep in Polina Barskovas Air Raid (Ugly Duckling Press), translated by Belarussian-American poet Valzhyna Mort, which retells the Siege of Leningrad with breathtaking interventions into history, silence and the violence between

Peter Wilby

David Kynastons On the Cusp (Bloomsbury), the latest volume in his marvellous series on post-1945 Britain, recalls the state of the nation in 1962 when the country was outside the EU but aspired to join. He skilfully captures the sense of new horizons being glimpsed as Britons struggled to escape the long shadow of the Second World War. And the state of the nation now? For that, I turned belatedly to Jonathan Coes novel Middle England (Penguin), published in 2018. Nothing has yet surpassed Coes evocation of the sour, restless, resentful mood that, in contrast to the spirit of the 1960s, led Britain to turn inwards.

Elif Shafak

Hassan Akkads Hope Not Fear (Bluebird) is an extraordinary story that deals with the urgent issues of our era, including the Syrian War, systemic torture and dehumanisation ongoing in countries where authoritarianism has taken hold. Akkad also takes on the tragedy of the refugee crisis, the pandemic and its social repercussions, and the layers of xenophobia, racism and inequality in societies. But it is also a story about resilience, renewal and humanism.

I also recommend Burning the Books by Richard Ovenden (John Murray), the director of the Bodleian Library. This fascinating and moving book should be read at schools and translated into languages all around the world. In a digital age that abounds with snippets of information, this is a glorious celebration of physical libraries and nuanced knowledge

Alexander McCall-Smith

A scientific meal this year: Richard Dawkins writes with admirable clarity and Jana Lenzov illustrates in much the same way. Their collaboration bears fruit in Flights of Fancy (Head of Zeus), a masterly investigation of all aspects of flight, human and animal. This is a beautifully produced book that will appeal across age groups. And as a second course, Madelaine Bhmes Ancient Bones (Greystone) is a gripping account of how early hominids may have evolved in Europe: a controversial thesis, but one that could change our ideas of where we came from.

Stuart Maconie

I began listening to Susanna Clarkes Piranesi (Bloomsbury) on audiobook at bedtime but soon found that it was simply too mesmerising, funny and strange to ever lull me to sleep. What begins as fantasy becomes, in a series of hints and echoes and rug-pulling revelations, a detective story, a satire and a witty take on male egoism. Daring and dazzling stuff.

Paul Morleys writing has been delighting and exasperating me since his NME work in the late 1970s. His biography of Anthony H Wilson TV presenter, music entrepreneur and evangelist, provocateur From Manchester with Love (Faber & Faber) is by far his best book; the narrative of the mans life keeps Morleys wildly digressive style taut(ish). It is not just a biog but the story of a citys history and culture and a unique and disappearing figure: the engaged working-class intellectual challenging the dominance of entitlement and privilege with wit and aesthetics.

Johanna Thomas-Corr

It was a wonderful year for novels about ugly mother-daughter relationships. Gwendoline Riley specialises in savage emotional reckonings and in My Phantoms (Granta) we hear the story of Bridget, who has been keeping her perpetually disappointed mother, Hen, at arms length ever since she left home. The dialogue is superb theres always a tragi-comic gap between what is being said and whats really going on. I love Rileys merciless wit. Jeremy Coopers Bolt from the Blue (Fitzcarraldo) breathes new life into the epistolary novel, with postcards charting 30 years of fraught relations between an earnest artist and her estranged mother, who is miles more interested in sex than art. Very little actually happens in either book and yet I was gripped by the way each depicts the psychological battlefield of mother-daughter relationships.

Daisy Johnson

Burntcoat by Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber) is a slim and beautiful masterpiece exploring art and relationships in a pandemic. I felt it surging over my head, lingering in my dreams, troubling me even when I wasnt holding it. Hall has always had my heart when it comes to writing about sex and isolation, but here she surpasses even herself.

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson (Viking) is another slight book which wrestles with relationships and art. The voice of the narrator feels almost Mrs Dalloway-esque as it moves around London, fluid and swift. Nelson has, with this novella, put down a new, exciting marker for what fiction can achieve.

William Dalrymple

Alex Rentons Blood Legacy (Canongate) is a moving, timely, well-written and strikingly thoughtful book that makes an important contribution to the growing debate about the horrors that accompanied Britains empire-building. Rentons remarkably honest analysis of his own familys slave plantation papers and the darkness they contain highlights our continuing failure to acknowledge the extreme toxicity of so much of our imperial history. It makes a good counterpart to Sathnam Sangheras brilliant Empireland (Viking) and, like it, reminds us how deeply impregnated the British present still is with our half-forgotten imperial past.

Better to Have Gone by Akash Kapur (Scribner) is a forensic reconstruction of two deaths set against the background of the flawed tropical utopia of Auroville. It is beautifully written and structured, deeply moving, and realised in wise, thoughtful, chiselled prose. In River Kings (William Collins), the Scandinavian archaeologist Cat Jarman writes about the Vikings with great skill, clarity and narrative drive. Rather unfashionably, Jarman likes her Vikings violent, and her tale replete with witches, human sacrifice, Greek fire and funeral orgies is at least as lively as any Netflix Viking romp, and a great deal more intellectually satisfying.

Philippe Sands

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Books of the year - New Statesman