Books of the Year

Lunate contributors and friends share their favourite books of 2021

Susan Barker

Great Circle (Doubleday) by Maggie Shipstead is probably the most dazzling and entertaining novel I read this year. About the life of fictional pilot, Marion Graves, and her 1950 attempt to fly longitudinally around the world, it’s brilliantly written in terms of its grand, sweeping narratives, but also at a sentence level, where the prose glimmers and shines. It was a pure immersive pleasure. Notes From Deep Time (Profile Books) by Helen Gordon is a truly fascinating book about geology and the history of the Earth. She’s an incredible writer, and the sheer scope of her exploration — taking in fossils, volcanoes, plate tectonics, geological epochs and the Anthropocene — is impossible to capture here. Most of all, she reminds the reader of just how infinitesimally brief all of human existence is. The Secret to Superhuman Strength (Jonathan Cape), a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel about her lifetime devotion to exercise, struck a chord with me. I’m nowhere near Bechdel’s level of fitness fanaticism, but I related to all her endeavours to chase endorphins/outrun mortality/distract oneself from problems/feel productive/obliterate the self. Bechel’s graphic novel is funny, philosophical, and existential — as much a spiritual journey as a physical one. I had a tightness in my throat when I read My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley (Granta), so excruciatingly painful is her depiction of fractured family relations. What happens when you were raised with negligible parental empathy? How is the adult relationship supposed to work? It all plays out here in Riley's undramatic, dry and distinctive style.

Rónán Hession

For someone who reads a lot of fiction, I was surprised to see so many memoirs at the top of my end-year list. Li Juan is as outside of the literary mainstream as it’s possible to be but her memoir Distant Sunflower Fields (ACA Publishing), translated by Christopher Payne, was a vivid portrayal of life in the remotest reaches of Xinjiang, near the Gobi desert in Northern China. Bette Howland has been rediscovered thanks to A Public Space, a Brooklyn-based literary magazine, with her books now being published in the UK for the first time. The memoir of her stay in a mental hospital after a breakdown, W-3 (Picador), was funny, perceptive and unsentimental. It was a real treat to read The Other Jack (CB Editions) by Charles Boyle, a wry and mischievous collection of Charles Boyle’s musings on books, reading, writing and publishing. I read it on holiday and am possibly the only person ever to have read Charles Boyle outside Boyle Sports in Boyle, County Roscommon. Joanna Walsh is a mesmerising interviewee — her genius shines through in the way she discusses her vision and her method. Her latest novel Seed (No Alibis Press) inhabits the mind of a 1980s adolescent girl with almost VR levels of realism in the way she makes the reader think and feel. It was another exciting year for Irish debut writers with Line (Tramp Press) by Niall Bourke, Iron Annie (Bloomsbury Circus) by Luke Cassidy and Boys Don’t Cry (Faber) by Fíona Scarlett — I see great things ahead for each of those writers.

Linda Mannheim

I found 2021 to be a very good year for books — there were so many that changed my ideas of what fiction can be and shifted my perspective in general. Am I in the Right Place? (Boiler House Press), Ben Pester’s debut short story collection, is as haunting and dislocating as the title sounds. In a series of surreal and surprising tales, Pester manages to convey the scariness of everyday life — especially work life. Everyone should read Man Hating Psycho (Influx Press) by Iphgenia Baal, not only because one of the stories in it powerfully exposes the nepotism and negligence that led to the Grenfell Tower fire, but also because Baal conveys what it is to be shaped by a city that’s slipping away from you and beautifully breaks rules about what a short story can be. This One Sky Day (Faber), by Leone Ross, is a novel that also defies the usual constructs of fiction. In the Caribbean archipelago Popisho, people deal with heart break, complex family dynamics, and political corruption but magic is everywhere: eating moths gets you high, auspicious storms involve sweet rain, and everyone has their own special power. Two very short books (under 100 pages) had a very big impact on me. Catherine McNamara’s Love Stories for Hectic People (Reflex Press) is a collection of flash prose pieces that left me thinking about the before and after of each character’s life. Natasha Brown’s debut novel Assembly (Hamish Hamilton) brought me into the consciousness of her narrator as she prepared for a party held by her boyfriend’s family at their stately home and depicted the way Britain’s colonial legacy shapes the trajectory of our lives here and now.

James Clammer

From an egg ‘about the size of an unused roll of kitchen paper’ a strange and ill-defined creature hatches and comes to dominate the lives of a group of office workers. More than dominate — the narrator of ‘If Yes, please explain your answer’ becomes a piece of wadding crammed into a wound that’s been inflicted by the creature itself. Who happens to be named Tritty. It's one of the standout stories in Ben Pester’s collection Am I In the Right Place? (Boiler House Press); another features the grand narrative of a wooden spoon. Urban melancholy, paranoia, dreamlike passivity, unexpected interfaces — here I detect someone working in the tradition of Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka. It’s wonderful stuff. On a prelapsarian note, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (Allen Lane) compacts new findings in archaeology and anthropology to challenge received ideas about Homo sapiens’ transition from hunter-gathers to sedentary farmers, willing (apparently) to accept social hierarchy and kingship. The arguments aren’t entirely successful and the authors never quite escape from the shadow of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who they profess to repudiate, but it’s still a valiant attempt to combat the rise of neo-Hobbesians like Stephen Pinker. And where the theories and speculations don’t always work, well, the high quality anthropological gossip more than makes up for it.

Claire Carroll

This year, as in 2020 (and probably all years, come to think of it), I stuffed my face with short fiction collections both old and new. I suspect I won't be alone in choosing Ben Pester's Am I in the Right Place? (Boiler House Press) as one of 2021’s stand-out examples of this form. The dark humour, ruptured reality and quiet tenderness of that collection felt as though it struck a chord with many of us during such a weird year. Similarly, Uschi Gatward’s English Magic (Galley Beggar Press) stayed with me long after reading. English Magic conjures a very specific atmosphere, at once comforting and unsettling. Gatward’s stories ‘Beltane’ and ‘Samhain’ felt as though they were inviting the reader to meditate on their own relationship to ancient traditions, something that feels especially resonant as we move towards the winter solstice and the end of the year. Both Gatward and Pester have performed some magic of their own, in creating collections that offer the reader something greater than the sum of their parts. This year, my own writing and research has led me to writers who consider the human relationship with the natural world, and I’ve found these themes have been prevalent in much of this year’s new poetry and non-fiction too. Nina Mingya Powles’ essay collection Small Bodies of Water (Canongate), which was the 2019 winner of the Nan Shepherd Prize, showcases Powles’ skill as a poet as she uses water as a point of departure to weave together themes of home, family and cultural identity. Samantha Walton’s Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure (Bloomsbury) is a timely engagement with the relationship between nature and health, and draws together history, science and literary critique to radically examine the symbiosis of humans, health and nature in a time of accelerating climate emergency and social injustice. This intersection of these urgent themes was also captured beautifully in the poetry anthology Out of Time (Valley Press), edited by Kate Simpson, who brings together a selection of poets from across the contemporary landscape — including Ella Frears, Mary Jean Chan, Gboyega Odubanjo, and Daisy Lafarge — in response to the climate crisis.

Elaine Chiew

2021 has been a year when I’m more attuned to harbingers of climate change, coupled with an awareness of our fragile bodies, and Welsh author Manon Steffan Ross’ novel The Blue Book of Nebo (Firefly Press) (translated from Welsh into English by Ross herself) brilliantly explores barebones survival in spare and elegiac prose, linking the devastation of the Welsh hinterlands to Welsh as a disappearing language, where the act of translation highlights the fragility not just of civilisations, but also bodies and memories, and also our language. Speaking of fragile culture or language, Kit Fan’s debut novel Diamond Hill (Dialogue Books) coupled his poetic flair with lashings of Cantonese and Mandarin, adding an intertextual dimension to this romp through a shantytown neighbourhood once known for its movie studios and the making of Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury. In creative nonfiction, Nina Mingya Powles’ Small Bodies of Water (Cannongate) centres questions of displacement versus belonging, highlights the splendour and fury of nature, and how solace is found in swimming. With so much death around us this year, swimming seems an apt metaphor for how we navigate grief and life with equal portions of grace and balance, searching for small joys. I was blown away by Farah Ali’s soulful short story collection People Want to Live (McSweeney’s), set in Pakistan, where small joys are wrested and fought for amidst bleak lives, and hope is to be found through clinging onto dreams, as modest as the ambition to be ‘a driver of a bulletproof bus’, as told in one of her stories. Family has never been more important this year as the trapeze net that buffers all the shocks of life, and Torrey Peters’ Detransition Baby (Serpent’s Tail), and Michelle Zauner’s affecting memoir Crying in H Mart (Picador), a eulogy to her mother, as well as a search for cultural roots and identity, show us that family is not who, but how we make it.

Rachel Farmer

Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water (Grove Atlantic) combines exquisitely precise, poetic language with a knotty subject matter that is an expert blend of serious and playful — all in under 150 pages. I can’t believe this is a debut! Another slip of a novel that nonetheless packs a punch is The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg (translated by Frances Frenaye), which was reissued this year by Daunt Books Publishing. In the opening pages, we learn that a young woman has shot her husband between the eyes. The riveting narrative that follows slowly unravels the motivations and state of mind that led her to that moment. Finally, with his trademark subtlety and pinpoint insight, Kazuo Ishiguro steals the show for me this year with Klara and the Sun (Faber), a multi-layered piece of speculative fiction that examines, through an intensely subjective lens, what it means to be human. A quiet and thoughtful book, but I still found it incredibly gripping. One of those books that I would gladly recommend to anyone and everyone.

Natasha Randall

The book that blew me away this year was Lavinia Greenlaw’s memoir Some Answers Without Questions (Faber), a book about how a voice emerges from silence. It isn’t a life story, but it is a demonstration of how Greenlaw came to being able to speak, write and sing — but the book itself goes through some kind of metamorphosis as you read, as though you are gradually hearing her more clearly, more authentically. It feels like truth! The other book that really blew my socks off was a collection of short stories by the Russian writer Teffi called Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints (Pushkin Press). Teffi is the most underrated of twentieth century Russian writers and yet her prose is startling, vivid, funny and heart-breaking — especially in this new collection where the house spirits of folk Russia arise within domestic scenes. She reminds me of Gogol when he’s being spooky and also Chekhov when he shows us real people doing real things.

Elodie Barnes

A Wonderland-esque journey through the Balkans of the past and present, through memory and landscape and the ‘living, tangible darkness’ of a metaphorical rabbit hole, Lana Bastašić’s Catch the Rabbit (Picador) (translated by the author) is one of the year’s best novels in translation. Also setting the translation standard high are two collections of short stories from Lolli Editions. After the Sun (Lolli Editions) by Jonas Eika (translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg) is a wonderfully unsettling experience, turning what we think of as reality on its head in language that is by turns both lyrical and brutal. Emilio Fraia’s Sevastopol (Lolli Editions) (translated by Zoë Perry) is equally as unsettling but deceptively gentle: using place almost as an absent character, Fraia weaves his stories around journeys his protagonists have taken, are taking, and will never take. A young woman recalls her obsession with climbing Mount Everest; a Peruvian-Brazilian vanishes into the Brazilian countryside; a writer attempts to produce a play about the city of Sevastopol. Place haunts these stories, while the characters encounter madness, obsession, desire, and loss. And finally, something a little bit different - Claudia Roden’s Med: A Cookbook (Ebury Press) is a wonderful compendium of recipes, stories, and photographs from around the Mediterranean, from Cairo (her birthplace) to Nice, Istanbul to Genoa. The beauty of any Claudia Roden cookbook is that behind every recipe there is history: Jewish history, travel history, family history, history history. Combined with the coffee-table style presentation, this means it’s as much a book to read on the sofa as a book to cook from.

Rosie Garland

In 2017, three friends (Ailsa Holland, Jo Bell & Tania Hershman) were discussing the multitude of sites based around the ‘On This Day in History’ format and asked the question: where are all the women? The result was the Twitter page @OnThisDayShe. Their mission: ‘to put women back into history, one day at a time’. Full disclosure — I know one of the writers. But this is not log-rolling. I love the book. Hundreds of forgotten and famous, overlooked and hidden women later, their book — cunningly entitled On This Day She — has been published (John Blake Publishing). It features 366 women, one for every day of the year. Rather than simply birth or death dates, it focuses on dates that were important to the women, when they actually did something. Yes, many of those chosen are s/heroes or inspiring — but not all. The authors also include infamous murderers. After all, if women are truly equal, they can be equally unpleasant. Spanning the globe as well as history, you’ll find scientists, artists, politicians, singers, scholars, campaigners, explorers, librarians, astronomers, musicians, radicals, filmmakers, writers, mathematicians and engineers. And that’s just January.

Cath Barton

Two incisive and hugely enjoyable novels which look at life, relationships and the world today through the prism of a ‘a day in the life of’ a working man: in James Clammer’s Insignificance (Galley Beggar Press) ‘the man Joseph’ is a plumber, in Rachel Trezise’s Easy Meat (Parthian Books) Caleb Jenkins works in a slaughterhouse; in both the close details of the manual work they do, and its difficulties, serve as an essential counterpoint to the men’s interior struggles. Co-incidentally, the events of Juan Emar’s Yesterday (Peirene Press) also take place over the course of a single day, at the end of which, as a fly lands on the edge of a urinal, the meaning of the universe and everything is, for the book’s narrator, tantalisingly close. This first English translation from the original Spanish (first published in 1935) reveals it as a compelling surrealist masterpiece.

Gary Kaill

A deeply compassionate portrait of young lives both enlivened and fractured by the world around them, Anna Wood's debut Yes Yes More More (The Indigo Press) is my favourite short story collection of the year. No one in 2021 allowed their characters to do quite so much living. Two novels confirmed their authors’ mastery of form. The peerless Helen McClory presented her long-awaited Bitterhall (Polygon) as a Rashomon-style triptych: three narrators, three increasingly divergent narratives. Thematically weighty and richly poetic, as you'd expect from McClory, and spiced with a delicious sense of irony, this is the ghost story given a 21st century shake-down. Georgina Harding returned with Harvest (Bloomsbury), the conclusion of a trilogy that began in 2016 with The Gun Room. Not that you'd know it — neither Harvest nor its predecessors reference the other books. This apparent modesty seems fitting: the quietly told story of troubled lovers Kumiko and Jonathan makes perfect sense in isolation, but the scale of the over-arching story helps lend Harvest invigorating context. Harding plays deftly with time and memory, and she depicts her setting (the brooding lowlands of Norfolk as a hot summer fades) with painterly grace. There is much to admire here, not least how Harding challenges perspective norms, but it is the conclusion of this epic tale that offers those who’ve stayed the course the greatest reward, as one character finally has revealed to them a bitter truth the reader has been aware of all along. I was impressed by the generosity and understated ease of Jonathan Walker's storytelling in Angels of L19 (Weatherglass Books): an unsettling but compassionate tale of teenagers and their faith in mid-80s Liverpool ‘soundtracked’ by the best alt-pop of the era. In poetry, To Star the Dark (Dedalus Press) by Doireann Ní Ghríofa deserves all of its many accolades. The exquisite ‘Brightening’ haunts me still: ‘If brigade bells sang, they sang in vain, for flames / were already spilling up the drapes, licking / every hand and face from their gilt frames’. A voice to treasure.

Han Clark

2021 has been a year caught between hope and despair and maybe the constant existential uncertainty has contributed to my desire to seek refuge in stories that are uplifting, humorous, and set in places that feel soft around the edges, a little removed from our own world. What You Can See From Here (Bloomsbury) by Mariana Leky is a novel that examines the human heart with a tenderness and humour that is reminiscent of a wise and beloved grandmother’s hug. Set in a small, fictional German village, and spanning several decades, its characters are eccentric and charming in equal measure. This book will make you believe, however briefly, that everything will be okay. Another glorious novel that sprawls through lifetimes is Sorrow and Bliss (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) by Meg Mason. It is a story that weaves back and forth through time, examining the touchstone memories of the witty and acerbic narrator, Martha, as she considers the life she has lived, manages to look the lived legacy of mental illness straight in the eye and be at once sensitive and deeply funny, whilst offering the promise of hope for better days. Grown Ups (Pushkin Press) by Marie Aubert follows Ida, who has just turned forty, as she faces the possibility that the life she imagined for herself is drifting out of view and it might be too late to stop it. Set in Norway, the story takes place across a weekend at a family cabin. Hilarious and painfully honest, this slender novel examines sibling rivalry and modern motherhood with unflinching candour. If a novel feels too much to contemplate, I cannot recommend Safely Gathered In (Comma Press) by Sarah Schofield enough. A collection that thrums with madcap energy and compassion, this impressive debut will leave a lasting impression.

Eleanor Updegraff

Transporting the reader to an England both surreal and familiar, Uschi Gatward’s English Magic (Galley Beggar Press) is a luminous collection of short stories. Detail-rich and often stylistically experimental, her prose is haunted by a bittersweet sense of loss — nostalgia for a world we may never have had. Loss, too, weighs heavy in Kazuo Ishiguro’s much-anticipated and beautifully realised Klara and the Sun (Faber), a novel that lives not from setting, but from character. The unforgettable Klara is Ishiguro at his narratorly best: innocent yet wise, packing a dizzying array of themes into a deceptively simple framework that purports to be about AI, yet turns out to concern the human heart. Book of the year, however, must be awarded to Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds (Fitzcarraldo Editions) — a genre-bending memoir that uses the lens of language to ask deeply moving questions about identity. Philosophical, intelligent and uniquely structured to fit its theme, it both conveys a remarkable personal experience and manages to make its reader feel heard. In literature and translation, we can surely ask for nothing more.

Zoë Somerville

Two books that came out this year stand out for me. One from the beginning of the year and one from near the end: Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual (Faber) and Sarah Moss’ The Fell (Picador). Both novels are full of love for their settings. For Spufford it is a fictional borough of South East London and for Moss, the titular fells. Both are polyphonic, going close into the consciousness of each of their third person narrators and giving readers a privileged window into the minds of the characters. Light Perpetual, though, is sweeping, jumping fifteen years at a time, telling the stories of lives in all their tragedies, failures and joys, but with the kick that we know from the start that these are lives that would never have been because the characters died in a bomb strike in 1944. In contrast, Sarah Moss’ novel is set on one fateful night in last November’s bleak lockdown. Many people have talked about how it’s too soon for a pandemic novel but she writes so well about enduring, timeless human frailties and concerns that the novel transcends its era. This simple story of a woman breaking lockdown rules to go for a walk that goes wrong does address issues that have been thrown up by our recent times - self and state control, hysteria and responsibility, but for me it is the moments of sudden pathos that linger. Both these novels are intense in their deep empathy for what it is to be a flawed human and both made me cry!

Rose Ruane

Ben Pester’s Am I In The Right Place? (Boiler House Press) uses the humdrum and human to conjure weird and eerie short stories which unfurl like the finest films. His realities are at once alternate and utterly of the mundane and everyday. Set in workplaces and at social gatherings, the crippling politeness and ambivalence of his protagonists carry them deep into ridiculous and claustrophobic predicaments where the reader wishes them to draw back from the precipices towards which they’re being led while simultaneously savouring the dread. Dread casts a pall over all the stories in this collection, and yet each appears to contain the promise of escape of a sort – transportation or transformation. The corporate jobs and saddening relationships in which Pester’s characters reside are often already so strangling and depersonalising that their willingness or lack of unwillingness to surrender to the absurd and unknown make sense. His acute eye for what is human, his flair with pathos and sheer brilliance with language make this book a rich treat on a sentence level and in each story hilarity and devastating tenderness exist cheek by jowl, ensuring that the unexpected is always present in both the scenarios and his descriptions of them. I can’t think of many sentences which have surprised and delighted me as much as “One day I picture a spectacular coot, all butch and florid, getting up in your face” and this book left me feeling like I had watched and experienced it as much as read it, so completely did it absorb with its absolute singularity, albeit a singularity which is in the business of parallel universes. An enjoyable paradox which encapsulates the essence of the book.

Thomas McMullan

My Phantoms (Granta) was my first time reading Gwendoline Riley, and I’ve rarely come across a writer with such skill in cutting to the heart of characters in so few, unwavering strokes. A gesture here, a glance there. There’s an actorly approach to the dissection of the protagonist's mother and father. A different kind of parental influence runs through the hot spool of thought that makes up Checkout 19 (Jonathan Cape) by Claire-Louise Bennett, which I liked for the way it speaks about books as landmarks for the self, the body as the place of reading. There are bodies too in The Employees: A Workplace novel of the 22nd century (Lolli Editions) by Olga Ravn. Strange bodies, or maybe they’re objects. Told over a series of statements to a bureaucratic committee, the crew of a spaceship detail the events that follow when a series of sublime, fleshy artefacts are brought onboard. I liked the way Asylum Road (Bloomsbury) by Olivia Sudjic brought political territories into play with the territories of bodies and relationships. Finally, I greatly enjoyed Lorem Ipsum (Prototype Publishing) by Oli Hazzard, built from one long sentence (yada yada) but transcending the gimmick because it leans into its aimlessness and is rich with the honesty of thoughts allowed to wander. I read it in hospital before my son was born.

Nataliya Deleva

A beautifully calibrated blend of memoir and essays, Gargoyles (Dead Ink) by Harriet Mercer is a meticulously structured work which looks at the female body in relation to pain, chronic illness, and loss. One of the first things that struck me was the sumptuous language: beautifully crafted sentences, luminous, poetic writing. Lucia Osborne-Crowley touches upon similar themes in My Body Keeps Your Secret (The Indigo Press). In her powerful book, abuse and transmitted shame take central place. She voices out the testimony from women and non-binary people about their experience of identity and inflicted shame, and what it means to live with a chronic illness in a female or non-binary body. A bold, intimate and fascinating read that will stay with me for a long time. Moving on from the pain locked in our bodies to the way society imposes trauma. Natasha Brown’s Assembly (Hamish Hamilton) draws a sharp incision into the society we live in and surfaces themes such as racism, identity, capitalism, misogyny, tokenism and choice. Albeit a slim book, it demands the reader’s attention from the first page. Another significant book for me this year was Whereabouts (Bloomsbury), which is Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel written originally in Italian — a fact I couldn’t ignore since we both share our love for writing in an adoptive language. Presented in a lyrical prose and organised stylistically as vignettes, Whereabouts is imbued with a feeling of loneliness. With each fragment, the unnamed narrator seems to be drifting further apart from the urban life and finding solace in her own solitude.

Ben Pester

I haven’t read a book I didn’t like this year, so I feel very lucky. I’m sharing highlights, but everything was good! Short stories first: I loved the nostalgia and super saturated colour and life of Yes Yes More More (The Indigo Press)by Anna Wood. I joined the ever swelling ranks of people mesmerised by the brilliance of Vanessa Onwuemezi’s Dark Neighbourhood (Fitzcarraldo Editions), and sat in a kind of wonderful shock while reading the tales in Trouble by Philip Ó Ceallaigh (The Stinging Fly). Each of these collections seemed to link themselves to the others for me — somehow stories that set characters out on an absolute limb, had me half loving and half being terrified of their journey. It felt good to be able to trust the energy and power of these stories and their protagonists. Nonfiction highlights were White Spines (Salt) by Nicholas Royle, which had a serenity and simple brilliance that kept me going back over chapters, intentionally losing my place and re-reading, just to keep the experience of going book shopping with Nicholas R. I loved the Nora Lange memoir Notes from Childhood (‎And Other Stories) — translated by Charlotte Whittle. Jack Underwood’s Not Even This (Corsair) is a constant companion. My novel of the year was A Shock (Picador) by Keith Ridgway. This book finds ways into its characters’ lives that feel like hidden doors, the shared proximity to their physical space, emotional landscape, and reality puts it on a level with my all time favourite books. I also loved Tice Cin’s Keeping the House (And Other Stories), Ghosted (Sceptre) by Jenn Ashworth, Lean Fall Stand (Fourth Estate) by Jon McGregor, and The Bass Rock (Vintage) by Evie Wyld. There are more! I loved so many books this year.

Lucie McKnight Hardy

Cockfight (Influx Press) is the brutal, grotesque and strangely beautiful debut collection of short stories by Ecuadorian writer María Fernanda Ampuero (translated by Frances Riddle), which shines an unrelenting light on religion, class, feminism and exploitation through an horrific lens. Profoundly unsettling and fully engaging, these stories are ones which claw at your throat and refuse to be ignored. Sure to feature on many end-of-year lists is Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless (Cipher Press), a startling depiction of fascist, transphobic Britain which puts a unique spin on the haunted house trope. Bold and utterly unflinching, Rumfitt’s debut novel has established her as a new and important voice in horror. In Jenn Ashworth’s novel Ghosted (Sceptre), we meet Laurie, whose train of thought flits butterfly-like as she narrates what is at once a love story and a (sort-of) ghost story, and tries to navigate her life after the abrupt disappearance of her partner. Flashes of dark humour abound, but there are moments of devastating darkness, and an underlying sadness to this story of trauma and the effects of grief, absence and loss. The result is a powerfully observant and moving novel. Burntcoat (Faber) by Sarah Hall is the first novel of hers I have read, having been awed by her ability as a short story writer. This slim book is a vast achievement — ambitious and searing yet intimate. A story in which a pandemic is pivotal, yet also peripheral to the love story which unfolds against it and where suffering — mental, physical and artistic — are depicted with visceral power in Hall’s trademark exquisite prose. Immersive and remarkable.

Jess Moody

The year breathed in and then out with two novels which shone with confidence in writing complex lives and epic histories. Robert Jones, Jr’s The Prophets (Bloomsbury) brought us beauty and lyricism: a dozen people whose lives radiate around one couple’s love, surrounded by enslavement, colonialism and faith. While Jones Jr uses circular themes and forms to create patterns of prophecy in antebellum US, in the UK Tice Cin’s Keeping the House (And Other Stories)teased out splintering threads of family, crime, and generational trauma: Cin is a stunning, intelligent new talent. For our world of shifting certainties, Ben Pester’s short story collection Am I in the Right Place? (Boiler House Press) was a perfectly weird and witty slice of unease. Over in verse narrative, it’s been a year of playful innovation. Maria Dahvana Headley’s fierce feminist interpretation of Beowulf (Scribe) as a ‘bloke boast’ was a triumph, and Harry Josephine Giles’ Deep Wheel Orcadia (Picador) built a haunting deep-space meditation using Orkney dialect and queer intimacy. Lewis Buxton’s poems in Boy in Various Poses (Nine Arches Press) sang of delicate masculinities: pool-hall peers, painted nails, and fathers running ahead on the Pennine Way. To end the year with joy and abandon though, we must visit Last Night at the Telegraph Club (Hodder), Malinda Lo’s young adult novel of lesbian love in San Francisco’s 1950s Chinatown is a tender and necessary history: the cover-art alone, from FeiFei Ruan, a gift worth celebrating.

Sarah Schofield

Autumn this year brought three remarkable collections of short stories. Vanessa Onwuemezi’s Dark Neighbourhood (Fitzcarraldo Editions) demands to be read aloud and re-invents what short stories can do. The title story opens with one of the best lists I’ve ever read (I love lists!) Next, Lucie McKnight Hardy’s darkly horrifying Dead Relatives (Dead Ink) is several kinds of wonderful; I urge everyone to read it. Sinister, gloriously unsettling stories. To feed my unfulfilled travel cravings this year, The Book of Barcelona edited by Zoë Turner and Manel Ollé (Comma Press) is superb. A diverse exploration of the city behind the tourist façade. My favourite story: Carlota Gurt’s ‘Atoms Like Snowflakes’, about an old woman who atomises herself. Novel-wise, I adore Ali Smith’s finale to her seasonal quartet, Summer (Penguin). Smith’s challenge to write, edit and publish a series of seasonally orientated novels, one a year, creatively responding to the present moment is audacious and Summer, written as Covid-19 spread globally, examines lockdown from a sidelong perspective. Carys Bray’s When the Lights Go Out (Penguin) is timely and authentic. I love this book because Bray is exceptional at depicting the nuance of relationship, capturing thoughts and feelings that often feel just beyond reach. Non-fiction delights. Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (‎Vintage), making complex mycology accessible, changed the way I think about fungi. And finally the outstanding On This Day She (John Blake Publishing) from Jo Bell, Tania Hershman and Ailsa Holland, drawn from their excellent project, ‘putting women back into history, one day at a time’ is a compelling, empowering read.

Adam Farrer

During 2021, I consumed dozens of books, in part to avoid overeating, COVID restrictions having transformed food into a replacement for entertainment. But walking home from Cinnabon one day with a box full of heart-stopping cakes, I questioned my purchase. I could have bought a new book for the same money and with no impact on by blood sugar. So, I began redirecting that greedy energy into book buying, filling my TBR pile with the same enthusiasm I’d previously applied to loading a buffet plate. Whenever I got an urge for a biscuit, I’d reach for a book. Along the way, I wolfed Jenn Ashworth’s compelling relationship analysis Ghosted (Sceptre), Horatio Clare’s memoir about breakdown and recovery, Heavy Light (‎Chatto & Windus), and JA Mensah’s spellbinding debut novel Castles from Cobwebs (Saraband). Signed up for 404 Ink’s Inklings series, allowing a regular flow of bite size nonfiction editions to fly through my letterbox, replacing the endorphin hit previously provided by JustEat. Devoured The Muslim Problem (Atlantic Books), Tawseef Khan’s examination of Muslim life in Britain, Séamas O’Reilly’s affecting comic memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? (Fleet), Richard Smythe’s captivating North Sea coast novel The Woodcock (Fairlight Books) and Lucie McKnight Hardy’s pleasantly disturbing short story collection, Dead Relatives (Dead Ink). And just like attending a buffet, it’s not always easy to highlight one favourite dish. All I know for certain is that I’m a better writer for having read so much and so broadly, and that the waistband of my favourite jeans is no longer cutting off the circulation to my legs.   

Harriet Mercer

Tariq Shah’s visceral, debut novel Whiteout Conditions (Dead Ink) is a funereal, blizzard-hit road trip across the Midwest — where grief and loss drift like snowbanks themselves — and hefts a punch that belies its brevity. Shah’s writing is a wire-walk of suspense and poetry nuanced with dark humour that culminates in a bloody, heart-wrenching twist of an ending. Rad, as his protagonist Ant might say. Another slender spine that’s left a memorable imprint is Jillian Halket’s memoir, Blade in the Shadow (Guts Publishing). Halket’s is a courageous, brutally honest account of harm-themed OCD that dispels some misplaced preconceptions surrounding the condition. Descriptions of her unwelcome, violent thoughts make for uncomfortable reading but are balanced with sublime storytelling. Also disquieting is the body of testimonies presented by Lucia Osborne-Crowley in My Body Keeps Your Secrets: Dispatches on Shame and Reclamation (The Indigo Press). Osborne-Crowley explores the unfathomable to make it almost fathomable, providing refuge to readers who may find the secrets all too familiar and a certain understanding to those who have not endured such abuse. From behind the confines of Broadmoor, Forensic Psychotherapist Dr Gwen Adshead and Eileen Horne offer similar compelling insight into the incomprehensible with their collaborative The Devil You Know: Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion (Faber). The case-studies are truly mind-opening and, as Adshead says, gaining insight into experiences that are alien to us is transformative.

Gemma Seltzer

This year, I started to read in the mornings. I’d wake, make tea, light some candles, and sit with a book in my sleepy state. Sometimes, I only managed a page or two before restlessness or emails started pressing at the edges of my mind, but sinking into a story or poem at sunrise has meant I’ve read much more, and also led to some bright new creative ideas. So, what have I loved this year? Hazel Press produced mesmerising poetry pamphlets, responding to nature and the turning of the seasons. I adored Anna Selby’s Field Notes (Hazel Press) written by and in water on waterproof notebooks, and Katrina Naomi and Helen Mort’s collaboration Same But Different (Hazel Press). The latter is a tender, insightful conversation told in poems the pair exchanged during lockdown. One of my favourite poems, ‘The Hare’ begins ‘Something rare is vanishing / into moorland’ and closes with a sense of the poets’ work of trying to capture the sighting: ‘my lines are winter tree, leaning into silence / in a snow field.’ Beautiful. I read Lauren Elkin’s No 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute (‎ Les Fugitives) in one sitting. Written in iPhone notes during bus journeys, it captures how a city influences, disrupts and inspires women’s lives. A pocket-sized book by Les Fugitives, it reminds us of the importance of paying attention, how we connect to others and the wonder to be found in our ordinary experiences. Small Bodies of Water (Canongate Books) by Nina Mingya Powles is a book to be read slowly, because every word matters and every detail is evocative, beautiful and poignant.⁠ Each chapter explores different bodies of water and takes in ideas about food, family  and friendship, the natural world, language and memories.  "Where is the place your body is anchored?” Nina writes. “Which body of water is yours?"⁠   

Jess McKinney

2021 has been an incredibly strange year and like many others I have clung to books like rafts amidst the weirdness. Here are a selection of titles I particularly enjoyed from the last 12 months: Auguries of a Minor God (Faber) by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe. Cheryl's Destinies (Penguin) by Stephen Sexton. Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press) by Victoria Kennefick. Glass by Emily Cooper (Makina Books). In the Garden: Essays on Nature and Growing (Daunt) by Various. Of Sea (Penned in the Margins) by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett. Redder Days (Doubleday) by Sue Rainsford. The Manningtree Witches (Granta) by AK Blakemore. Thirty-Two Words for Field (Gill Books) by Manchán Magan. Thin Places (‎Canongate) by Kerri ní Dochartaigh. Thinking with Trees (Carcanet Press) by Jason Allen-Paisant. Weird Fucks (Peninsula Press) by Lynne Tillman. Why We Swim (Penguin) by Bonnie Tsui

Naomi Booth

This year, I’ve been astonished by the power and inventiveness of the debuts I’ve read. Chouette (Virago), the debut novel from Claire Oshetsky, tells the story of a new mother, Tiny, who gives birth to an owl-baby. It’s a novel unlike any other — weird, savage, darkly funny and also full of love. Larger than an Orange (Chatto & Windus), Lucy Burns’ first book, is part diary, part-prose poem, and it tells the story of an abortion in painstaking detail. It’s a revelatory work exposing a widespread failure of care, as well as a work of great literary inventiveness. Sammy Wright’s first novel, Fit (And Other Stories), haunted me after reading: Wright is a secondary school teacher and brilliantly describes a cast of young characters who are ingenious, irreverent, intoxicated, traumatised, grieving, violent, vulnerable. He presents a picture of contemporary life in the north of England that is both tender and deeply unsettling. Natasha Brown’s debut novel, Assembly (Hamish Hamilton), took my breath away: this short, acute work of fiction describes the life of its main character — and the racialised violence embedded so widely in UK society —w ith shattering precision and vividness. I was hooked by Isobel Wohl’s debut novel, Cold New Climate — which is also the debut title from new press Weatherglass Books. Wohl’s prose is compulsively sharp, and this novel takes you to entirely unexpected places. I’m still reeling from its ending.