Read on for my twelve favourites.
Fresh off the press
Amazing Grace Adams by Fran Littlewood is a lovely novel about motherhood and the dreadful repercussions of buried trauma.
The Fire by Daniela Krien, translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch and published by MacLehose press, featuring a middle-aged couple whose marriage is at a crossroads is a beautiful and intelligent story of attachment and transgenerational trauma.
Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie, published by Bloomsbury, is a profoundly moral story of corruption and compromise, loyalty and individuality, and the unconscious motivations that can lead us astray.
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell, published by Vintage, is tale of cruelty, captivity and creativity featuring a teenage bride who must battle for survival in Renaissance Italy.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, published by Faber and Faber, brings Dickens’ David Copperfield to contemporary South Virginia in a story of inequalities, addiction, child protection failures and a love of community and land.
21st-century fiction
A Burning by Megha Majumdar, published by Scribner, is a powerful and page-turning novel about injustice and political corruption, showing how an innocent young woman can be convicted of a terrorist offence.
Spring by Ali Smith, published by Penguin in 2019, is a powerful state-of-the-nation novel about contemporary immoralities: the prioritisation of sensation over honesty and the cruelty of Britain’s treatment of migrants.
Fox Fires by Wyl Menmuir, published by Salt, is a quirky coming-of-age story about secrets and entrapment and finding your own way out.
The New Woman by Charity Norman is the poignant and warmhearted story about a family’s adaptation to the discovery that one of them is transgender.
Unless by Carol Shields is about the impact on a family, and especially the mother, when the eldest child drops out of university to spend her nights in a homeless hostel and her days begging on the streets.
I also gave five-star ratings to Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and Life after Life by Kate Atkinson, but I didn’t find – or make – time to review them on my blog.
My 12 favourite reads of 2022
My 12 favourite reads of 2021
My 14 my favourite reads of 2020