Books of the Year
Lunate contributors and friends share their favourite books of 2022
Tice Cin
I've been holding onto books this year as a means to stay mapped onto something, fixed and going. My favourite book of 2022 is fellow North Londoner Derek Owusu's latest book, poetry in narrative flow, Losing the Plot (Canongate). I absolutely loved it. It made me think of what mothers go through to look after their loved ones, and all the weights they hold behind the curtains. It was beautiful and it has these amazing translation notes that emphasise the refusal to translate that diaspora families often experience. I also adored Unexpected Vanilla by Lee Hyemi, a poetry collection translated by Soje (Tilted Axis Press) – it speaks of water and touch, the liquid that is the fine film between two lovers. I re-read Caleb Azumah Nelson's Open Water (Viking), in the new paperback this time, which made me think of mood that is tinted blue, one of the most beautiful débuts of the last five years. I also think that Hanne Ørstavik's Ti Amo (And Other Stories) moved me more than I expected; I read it at a time of feeling the fragility of life and it made me think of grief in another way. Another book that I loved in 2022 is Cursed Bunny (Honford Star), short stories by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur – sublime surreal horror fantasy intermingled. Feeling Myself by Natalie Lee (Ebury) has been an immensely helpful read, instructive and generous. Finally, I'm a Fan by Sheena Patel (Rough Trade Books) was very good and bold; it surprised and caught me.
Stu Hennigan
My novel of the year is The Trees by Percival Everett (Influx Press). It takes a special kind of genius to write a story about lynchings in the Deep South that can make you piss yourself laughing, but he pulls it off with aplomb. I loved Wayne Holloway’s Our Struggle (Influx Press) — a sprawling, brawling novel chronicling the UK’s radical labour movement in the mid- to late-20th century without a trace of artifice or pretention. This guy doesn’t fuck around at all. Industry of Magic and Light (White Rabbit) as an inevitable high point. The magician David Keenan strikes again in this playful, knowingly esoteric piece of Scottish counter-cultural arcana. One of the most consistently original and inventive writers around. Steve Hollyman’s metametametafictional mind-bender Esc&Ctrl (Influx Press) comes across like Robert Anton Wilson and Bret Easton Ellis smashing out an internet noir thriller at the end of a Baudrillard binge and is terrific fun, while dissecting the fundamental unreality of reality. The Naked Don’t Fear the Water by Matthieu Aikins (Fitzcarraldo Editions) as pick of the non-fic. Radical reportage in which he travels undercover with his best friend’s family as they flee war-torn Afghanistan. Harrowing stuff that should be read be all who think refugees are just looking for an easy route to a comfortable life. Finally, I have to mention A Working Class Family Ages Badly (Dialogue Books) by Juno Roche. A blistering memoir about class, gender, trauma and belonging that reads as a love letter to working-class mothers and women everywhere. Remarkable, inspiring stuff from a vital voice.
Elaine Chiew
A bumper crop year in terms of books but reading took a backseat for me as social life opened up again. Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go In The Dark (Bloomsbury Publishing) reminded me we’re not out of the woods yet. Prescient and imaginative, his dystopian future of a global viral pandemic included funerary skyscrapers and euthanasia theme parks. Not usually a fan of dystopian fiction, I found Jessamyn Chan’s The School for Good Mothers (Simon & Shuster) a gripping read: a brutal, unrelenting exploration of bad mothers sent to reform school with shades of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In short stories, Rubén Degollado’s The Family Izquierdo (W.W. Norton) introduced me to a new world by exploring sisterhood and Latinx masculinity in intrepid intertextuality that was also a sensitive mapping of three generations of a Mexican family living on the Rio Grande border. Reshma Ruia’s refreshing novel Still Lives (Renard Press) about diasporic Asians in the UK challenged assumptions about immigrant assimilation, aging and identity. Melissa Fu’s Peach Blossom Spring (Little, Brown) was a tender, memorable portrait of the love between a mother and son escaping the horrors of World War Two in China. We lost a literary heroine this year, and with so much that’s new on offer, I’ve come to realise that rereading is like visiting an old, dear friend. It’s been on my mind to reread Hilary Mantel’s outstanding oeuvre.
Tom Conaghan
Apparently publishing houses like short story books to be themed. But doesn’t this make the book a bit samey, and forgettable? My favourite books of the year – mostly story collections – are the ones that feel like an array, a conjuring of that “drunkenness of things being various.” Probably my favourite title this year was The Consequences by Manuel Muñoz (Indigo Press) – a book of exact, lyrical short stories centring on Mexican American communities living in California. The stories hold onto the different lives tightly, rendering their diverse dramas with a quiet intensity and passion. Another collection linked by geography is Wendy Erskine’s Dance Move (Picador). Her talent (genius?) is to orchestrate fully formed human characters in all their self-justifying wrongheadedness within exhilarating, beautiful comedy/tragedies. The lightness of touch, the wish to listen to characters not crush them with understanding, to allow plot to meander not resolve – I spoke to Wendy about how she does it (in Reverse Engineering II, Scratch Books) but still think it’s sheer alchemy. Am I allowed to include books I helped publish? I can? Lovely. Thread Ripper by Amalie Smith (Lolli Editions) – translated from the Danish in sparse, precise English by Jennifer Russell – has been a revelation. The sense of the separating and weaving of textiles resonates through both the pattern and fabric of the novel. The different threads are poised and colourful and left agley for us to stitch in rich and delightful ways. This book has taught me a great deal about how we are entangled in the threads of narrative.
Gary Kaill
I would be surprised if I read more than half a dozen books this year. My 2022 was lived largely in the shadow of loss, defined by an almost unshakable grief and the low-level anxiety that surrounds it like a stiffening wind. Reading, I found, unlike, say, music or television, was too close for comfort to being a wholly inward exercise. And so, my gig count began to return to pre-lockdown levels, my Letterboxed diary bulged, and a rewatch of The Sopranos proved unexpectedly revivifying… but the books just piled up. Yet two provided something approaching solace at the start and at the end of the year. Naimh Campbell’s second novel We Were Young (W&N), a thinly plotted account of rootless photographer Cormac’s unthinking shagging and drinking around his home town of Dublin, was conjured from a beguiling, angular poetic sensibility. I re-read pretty much every page several times as I went, finding a deep joy in Campbell’s sentence-level ambition. Mystifying, some of those little mid-paragraph flashpoints: words chosen with guile and arranged to form delightful schema, the methodology not always easy to deconstruct. The book has so much to say about how men and women connect, and how they more often than not don’t, and I loved it for it for daring to be both unsparing and kind about its characters. Miki Berenyi made her print debut with Fingers Crossed (NineEight), a memoir characterised by both fearless candour and a powerful gift for storytelling. Those of us who were entranced by shoegaze provocateurs Lush, and who knew Berenyi as a deeply connective artist, weren’t surprised in the slightest to see her emerge here anew as a distinct prose stylist. Considerably heftier than your common-or-garden pop star tell-all, Fingers Crossed has much to say about the casual cruelty of the music industry, about growing up in an almost comically dysfunctional family, and the resourcefulness required to survive both. A book both inspirational and wise, it caused me to be thankful, and reminded me that as long we’re blessed with love, and maybe a little luck, we can try to carry on.
Nataliya Deleva
There were a couple of books published this year that stuck with me, both exploring a cancer diagnosis narrative albeit from two very different perspectives. I was stunned by the way Senka Marić depicts the relationship between the narrator and her body in the months following a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment in her novel Body Kintsugi (Peirene Press), translated by Celia Hawkesworth. Elegantly written in second person, the poetic prose is delicate and intimate, and draws the reader into the harrowing experience of going through multiple surgeries and treatment options, each one fragmenting the body by removing a part of it away. Told in short vignettes, like pieces of broken ceramics, Marić skilfully stitches childhood memories into the present narrative: episodes that expose the way the narrator was made to dislike her body and feel ashamed of her sexuality. Marić masterfully laces the Kintsugi techniques into the novel, gluing gently the explorations of illness, self-love and recovery, exposing the scars – physical and emotional – and the way they can be beautiful, when we know how to accept them. Ti Amo (And Other Stories) by Hanne Ørstavik, translated by Martin Aitken, is a sensual and honest exploration of love and getting to terms with the impending death of a loved one. It reads as a permission to start grieving before the parting in those days and weeks when the knowledge of death is locked between two people and forms the fabric of their daily routine.
Jess Moody
Eloghosa Osunde’s VAGABONDS! (Fourth Estate) was stunning in its surety: a tale-of-tales, holding contemporary Nigeria to account on behalf of its queer citizens, its women, its unseen. Thread Ripper (Lolli) was a formally playful ‘dual narrative’ on technology and women’s fates from Amalie Smith (tr. Jennifer Russell). Three books explored sons and fathers in crisis: Okechukwu Nzelu’s Here Again Now (Dialogue), Jarred McGinnis’ The Coward (Canongate), and John Vercher’s After the Lights Go Out (Pushkin), each looked at fractured lives through their unique lenses and manifestations of tenderness. Selva Almada’s Brickmakers (Charco, tr. Annie McDermott) was an exacting exposition of feuding masculinities. Bel Olid’s collection Wilder Winds (Fum d’Estampa, tr. Laura McGloughlin) blew sharp, short, and poignant. Nell Stevens’ Briefly, a Delicious Life (Picador) intoxicated with hauntings, cigar-smoke, and untuned Nocturnes. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (Picador) was a pitch-perfect portrait of grief, love, and transformation. In poetry, Andrés N.Ordorica’s At Least This I Know (404ink) was a sensuous homecoming, and Padraig Regan’s Some Integrity (Carcanet) rich with ekphrasis, food, and mourning. Space Baby (Nine Arches) by Suzannah Evans was a witty delight, Tania Hershman’s Still Life With Octopus wriggled its forms, and Jessica Mookherjee’s Notes from a Shipwreck entranced with intertextual intelligence. Finally, yell “merciful kumquats!” for Nettleblack (Cipher). Nat Reeve was clearly having an awfully good time actually in their debut; teasing language and articulation, while recognising the hush, and the blush, and the fierce certainty of loving as the person you truly are.
Linda Mannheim
Wendy Erskine’s new short story collection, Dance Move (Picador), was even more electrifying than I’d hoped it would be, evoking grace alongside absurdity and devastation. A housecleaner who discovers an abandoned child, A middle-aged woman adjusting to a new life after decades in a cult, and a former pop singer grappling with the terribleness of his long-time fans are some of the characters who are still haunting me. The characters from Saba Sams’ collection Send Nudes (Bloomsbury) are haunting me too: a girl daunted by her angry stepsister on a family holiday, a foster child who knows that her world will change soon, and (in the title story) a woman pressured by an online correspondent to send nudes. Lola Akinmade Åkerström’s In Every Mirror She's Black (Apollo) showed me Stockholm in a way I hadn’t seen it before, through the eyes of three Black women from very different walks of life: marketing executive Kemi, former model Brittany-Rae, and office cleaner Muna who arrived in Sweden as a refugee. Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent (Verso) is the book I didn’t know I was waiting for, shaking up beliefs most of have had that really really needed to be shaken. In Ghost Signs: Poverty and the Pandemic, Stu Hennigan (Bluemoose), delivering food parcels during lockdown, not only introduces to people to Leeds’ most desperate communities – he also shows us how much we’ve already forgotten about the weeks when Covid first hit.
Trahearne Falvey
On New Year’s Day 2022, I sat in a cafe and read Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais (Fitzcarraldo Editions, translated by Sophie Hughes), a horrible little book about horrible teenage boys that is simultaneously a pacy thriller and a searing interrogation of class, race and gender in contemporary Mexico. I must have read the whole thing there and then because, like Melchor’s English language debut Hurricane Season, the long sentences and breathless pace made it impossible to put down. I loved Nell Stevens’ Briefly, A Delicious Life (Pan MacMillan) about the relationship between novelist George Sand and composer Frederic Chopin, mediated by the furious, hilarious ghost of a teenage girl named Blanca who lives within a monastery in Mallorca. Concerned with the pleasures of reading, writing, sex, food and music, Stevens’ novel is funny, erotic and sensual. If I can sneak in a book that was published in 2022 but won’t arrive in the UK until January next year, Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch (Daunt Books) is a marvel. Capturing the life of Sonia, a horse trainer, in a series of precise, startling vignettes, Scanlan made me think about horses and humans and life in new ways. She is a remarkable writer; like Lydia Davis or Diane Williams, she seems to redefine what is possible at the level of the sentence and the paragraph.
Jessie Jones
The most surprising book I read this year, fiction or otherwise, was Robin McLean’s Get ‘em Young, Treat ‘em Tough, Tell ‘em Nothing (And Other Stories). This short story collection surveys an innate Americanness with flare, uncanniness and a profound disaffectedness. McLean spans a plethora of states, identities, and time periods, with a mystery and sense of the (almost) unbelievable. There’s both grand, folkloric tales and a story entirely taking place in the mind of a man stuck in a tree; she’s truly a master of the form. Lara Williams’ second novel The Odyssey (Penguin) was a resounding success. She’s been quite outspoken about its influences, specifically David Foster Wallace’s essay ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’, and this legacy shows in the work. There was something slightly darker here, and no less masterful, in the way that one of the novel’s most prominent characters was the space in which it takes place. Though wildly different in style, form, and the majority of content, something reminded me of J.G Ballard’s High Rise or Charlie Kaufman’s film Synecdoche, New York, in which a space slowly deteriorates alongside its inhabitants, without ever being explicitly addressed. A cruise ship worker finds herself embroiled with its cult-leader captain, slowly unravelling along with the ship’s organisation and ability to hold onto its guests - what’s not to love?
Thomas McMullan
For one reason or another I’ve been reading a lot of poetry this year. Unexhausted Time (Faber) is Emily Berry’s third collection and I’d strongly recommend it; a collection full of dreams, sleep, slippages. Lots of rooms. Moments of dark humour. One poem begins: ‘In this house the white walls display/ their scars, which are the stories/ moths tell when I crush them to death/ with my fingertip. The stories I make/ them tell.’ I really liked When My Brother Was an Aztec (Faber) by Natalie Diaz, which was published in the US in 2012 but only came out in the UK this year. Social and family politics run through its Mojave landscape, focused in particular on the speaker’s brother and his drug addiction. One of my favourite things about it, however, is the dizzy mythic romance in Diaz’ imagery. Read ‘I Watch Her Eat the Apple’ from that collection and tell me it doesn’t stir you. Emblem (Prototype) by Lucy Mercer is a rich exploration of the uncertainties between text and image, the ‘emblemata’ of allegorical illustrations in square boxes surrounded by words. It is also an evocation of the love for a child, how it can make itself known in blackout curtains and a thermometer’s light. Final shoutout for England’s Green (Faber) by Zaffar Kunial, elegant and meditative in its dissections of the names and symbols of the English pastoral, and even makes space for a spooky riff on Spirited Away.
Rónán Hession
Peirene Press is an exciting independent publisher of translated fiction, specialising in short novels, or as they put it, novels that can be read in the time it takes to watch a film. They have published some gems over the years, and I often turn to their catalogue when I’m looking for something different; something to surprise me. At the start of 2022, Peirene sent me an advance copy of the book that I would spend the rest of the year raving about. Marzahn, Mon Amour about a woman in her forties who abandons her failing career as a writer to retrain as a chiropodist. Marzahn is a Berlin suburb that was once the GDR’s largest prefabricated housing estate, and the book is a homage to the everyday lives of its quirky inhabitants. Told as a series of vignettes, each chapter provides a character study and abridged life story of a Marzahn resident, many of whom are elderly and have seen changing fortunes after the fall of the Berlin wall. It’s a warm and funny book, full of life and colour. The chiropodist’s stool becomes both a vantage point and a confessional. The intimacy of caring for elderly feet is almost a symbol of the care and groundedness with which the characters are depicted. This is the first time that author Katja Oskamp’s work has been translated, and it’s a wonderful job by debut translator Jo Heinrich. Hopefully we’ll a lot more work from both of them.
Adam Farrer
I fell in love with lots of books this year. Wyl Menmuir’s lovingly handled exploration of the sea and the people who forge a relationship with it, The Draw of the Sea (Aurum). Jennette McCurdy’s extraordinary and profoundly exposing memoir that delves into fame, family and eating disorders, I'm Glad My Mom Died (Simon and Schuster). Jon Ransom’s bewitching and graphic exploration of love and loss in a small coastal town, The Whale Tattoo (Muswell Press). The list goes on, but I have a 250-word limit, so I wanted to focus on three nonfiction titles that I have frequently, and understandably, heard being referred to as ‘important’ and ‘vital’ this year: Ghost Signs: Poverty and the Pandemic (Bluemoose) by Stu Hennigan, The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy by Andy West, and Juno Roche’s A Working-Class Family Ages Badly (Dialogue Books). The important and vital labels highlight the need for challenging books like these, but also makes them seem like arduous, teeth-gritting reads. This does all three a disservice, because what they are overflowing with is heart, a surprising amount of humour and act as very effective portals into experiences that some people might naturally turn away from. You may not be familiar with prison, trauma, recovery or extreme poverty but, thanks to the deftly written, approachable styles of these books, you will find yourself intimately engaging with these experiences. These books are important and vital by nature of their existence, but their scope and eloquence marks them out as examples of truly great writing.
Laetitia Erskine
Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This (Bloomsbury Circus) blew me away with its inventiveness and tonal range. The whole text is infused with the style and manner of what it is to live through the internet, or ‘the portal’ – fragmented, self-referential, yo-yoing from trivia to tragedy in scant characters. Mordantly observant and often very funny, what makes the novel even more remarkable is the way this surface, that might have been tricksy, is interlaced with a story arc exploring the inflammatory (and sadly timely) subject of foetal rights, without judgment but with enormous heart. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (Faber) is immersive in a completely different way. The shortest work ever shortlisted for the Booker, it unfolds across 116 pages with an atmospheric fireside quality, chiefly exploring one man’s heart as he grows from his uncomfortable role as an out-of-wedlock servant’s child under the wing of the mistress of the house, towards relative success as a tradesman with a family of his own. Layered through this is his creeping knowledge of his own and his mother’s good fortune, even in the marginal status they occupied – as compared to the girls he begins to piece together are held under abusive conditions in the Laundries. This last is a story I was not sure I needed to revisit in fiction – given the vivid contours of its horror – but Fuller resists emotional gore to give us a beautiful, psychologically nuanced and humane work of art.
Cath Barton
This year I did not want to read books about the pandemic, but I found myself seduced by the brutal but never self-pitying honesty of Ed O’Loughlin’s memoir The Last Good Funeral of the Year. In the realm of fiction, it’s stories of obsession that have held me most strongly, notably fear of nuclear contamination in Philippa Holloway’s gripping book The Half-Life of Snails (Parthian), and the devotion to God that drives men to extremes of land and spirit in Emma Donoghue’s Haven. More than any other novel, though, I loved Louise Kennedy’s deftly-told story of love across the sectarian divide in 1970s Northern Ireland, Trespasses (Bloomsbury), it spoke to me on a visceral level. In Liberation Day (Bloomsbury), the new collection from the master of the short story, George Saunders, the final story, the simple and beautiful ‘My House’, expresses something of the essence of human experience and is as near to perfect an example of the form as I have ever read.
Sarah Schofield
With seasonal prudence, rather than an overindulgent smorgasbord, I have made myself choose just one novel, one short story anthology and one poetry collection this year. The novel first: this is perhaps a cheat, as They, ‘a sequence of unease’ as the author Kay Dick referred to it, was first published in 1977. It slipped quietly out of print shortly after publication but, joyously, was rediscovered recently and reprinted this year by Faber Editions with a foreword from Carmen Maria Machado. It is a hauntingly prescient exploration of a world where art and literature are silently yet persistently undermined and destroyed, and creativity violently punished by an enigmatic collective power. It is thought provoking, timely and challenging read. A stand-out anthology this year is All Walls Collapse, edited by Sarah Cleave and Will Forrester (Comma Press) which gathers international writers and translators creatively responding to real barriers and walls designed to keep people firmly in, out or hidden from sight. Some of these walls are familiar, others less so. But the fictional pieces in this collection gave me a deeply moving context beyond the patchy news coverage we might otherwise see. Finally, a delightfully funny poetry collection, Ignore it all and Hope it Goes Away, by Nic Aubury and illustrated by Moose Allain. Tapping into the nuanced insecurities of modern-life adulting and the micro challenges we all face, these observational poems are witty, clever and the kind of thing you will want to share with certain friends with a knowing nod.
Eleanor Updegraff
This year, my reading has been ruled by non-fiction. Pressed into my hands by an impassioned bookseller in a serendipitous moment, CJ Hauser’s The Crane Wife (Viking) is a collection of witty, direct and heartfelt essays on family, relationships and how to be human. More cerebral in tone and thematically wide-ranging, Putin’s Postbox by German author Marcel Beyer, translated by Katy Derbyshire (V&Q Books), and My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is by Paul Stanbridge (Galley Beggar Press) are challenging yet beautiful, often strangely meditative texts that look thoughtfully at the act of writing and how language can help us make sense of the world. Without doubt, however, my standout title of 2022 is Matthieu Aikins’s The Naked Don’t Fear the Water (Fitzcarraldo Editions). A fearless, moving and exquisitely composed work of reporting, it follows the author as he joins a group of refugees trying to make their way on foot from Afghanistan to Europe. Besides laying bare the horrifying conditions they encounter on their journey, Aikins’s writing is suffused with extraordinary compassion, taking in the depths of both despair and hope. The paradox at the heart of this illuminating book is that, of course, we can never truly understand what it is to be another – and yet, as Aikins so powerfully conveys, perhaps our most important obligation is simply to try. With the world on a knife-edge and crises seemingly everywhere we turn, this is writing of the utmost significance.
Lucie McKnight Hardy
2022 has been a generous benefactor of weird, unsettling, and disturbing books. Jackdaw by Tade Thompson (Cheerio Publishing) is a wild and febrile romp through the author’s brilliant imagination. This is a fever dream of a book which depicts an unsettling, absurd and sometimes comedic transgression of social norms and an ascent to the glorious echelons of madness. A novella which is dark and weird and very funny. Johnny Mains is another writer with a vivid and unique imagination, and this is put to extraordinary use in his novel A Man at War (TK Pulp). It is the highly complex character study of the thoroughly damaged Russell Stickles, told through the form of three interlinked novellas which cover key stages in the protagonist’s life. This is a tale that is as brutal and chilling as it is elegantly told. Mark Morris has a well-deserved reputation as one of the best editors in British Horror, and his latest anthology only serves to reinforce this. Close to Midnight (Flame Tree Press) is the third volume in an annual, non-themed horror series of entirely original stories and showcases some of the best writers of short horror fiction from the UK and elsewhere. Other disturbing delights I read this year were Where I End by Sophie White (Tramp Press), and Eastmouth: a new – and eagerly anticipated – collection of short stories by Alison Moore (Salt Publishing).
Rose Ruane
It seems apposite to have to attempt describe the indescribable in talking about the exquisite Wunderkammer of ideas and images which Isabella Streffen has created with How It Begins (Ma Biblèotheque). Described as “an experiment in close reading” centred on the philosophy of myth, it is unafraid to demand close attention from the reader in return; a smart retort to the old saw of attention seeking so often deployed to dismiss women and the products of their artistic labours. It is a sumptuous and enticing hybrid text, a work about beauty and art which employs both those things to dizzying effect while all the time critiquing them; as if one hand embroiders while the other unpicks. Shot through with a lame of playful wit and lucid rage, it centres the feminine and celestial while employing the earthy, bodily and terrestrial to construct an intricate filigree of glimpses and fragments which catch the reader in their weft. Part mythopoesis, part artwork and part literary analysis is defies categorisation, offering instead a singular, shimmering experience which acts equally on the intellect and senses and which left me, by its end, feeling as though I had surfaced from a dream. And an Honourable mention for Is Mother Dead (A Novel) by Vigdis Hjorth (Verso), a taut thriller about art and memory and mothers, breath-taking, in the same way that being slapped is. Its tense narrative and provocations reverberate long after the final page.
Harriet Mercer
In Currowan: The Story of a Fire, Bronwyn Adcock (Dead Ink) chronicles one of the most insidious of the bushfires that swept Australia in 2019 when it ravaged 5,000 km square of her coastal community. It’s written with the pace and suspense of the grittiest of thrillers, leaving us to question whether the villain is indeed the fire itself, or the politicians who chillingly ignored the scientists who predicted the catastrophe. But it’s Aldcock’s timing and tone in her gradual piecing together of perspectives in this polyphonic narrative that creates a unique balance of suspense and compassion. In the midst of soaring temperatures, impending climate disaster and political inaction, Adcock’s work is a stunning warning to the world. Derek Owusu’s latest work, Losing the Plot (Canongate), imagines what life was like for his eighteen-year-old mother when she arrived in London from Ghana in 1989. Although described as a novel, it is poetry annotated with sidenotes that read like WhatsApp voice notes left for the reader, their tone personal, fam. The intricate layering of form and language, and the blur of the author and his mother’s life with that of their fictional counterparts, reflects the complexity of identity and memory. Owusu cuts exquisite shape from the most harrowing of fabrics: Diaspora, history and self are stitched seamlessly yet worn so lightly.
Claire Carroll
It has been another exciting year for British and Irish short fiction. We saw the inception of Scratch Books, a new independent publisher of short fiction, whose two Reverse Engineering (Scratch) anthologies bring together short stories from writers across the contemporary landscape. These are presented alongside author interviews that offer unique insight into their process and passion for the form. Elsewhere, there have been some memorable debuts, such as Send Nudes by Saba Sams (Bloomsbury), Sheila Armstrong’s How to Gut a Fish (Bloomsbury) and We Move by Gurnaik Johal (Serpent’s Tail), whose brief and beautifully tender story ‘Arrival’, which opens the collection, won this year’s Galley Beggar Prize. We were also treated to new collections from established luminaries of the form. Naomi Booth’s Animals at Night (Dead Ink) is the first collection from an established novelist whose short fiction has appeared in anthologies and prize lists for some time now. Animals at Night is visceral and haunting, with stories that draw poignant attention to our relationship with the non-human world. 2022 also saw the release of Dance Move (Picador), the eagerly awaited second collection from Wendy Erskine. Sharply observed, with prose laden with the author’s signature Chekhovian pathos, Erskine’s stories usher the reader around contemporary Belfast, opening windows on the lives of its inhabitants. Despite variations in style and form, what all of these writers have in common is a skill for presenting a palpable, vibrant world of human emotion and experience, demonstrating that the short story will no doubt be continuing its ascendant journey into 2023.
Phoebe T
It was a year of hopeful reading for me. A year of, in Lola Olufemi’s words, ‘experiments in imagining otherwise’. In spring I read We Move, Gurnaik Johal’s stories of movement and interconnectedness (Serpent’s Tail); In the Seeing Hands of Others (Profile Books), Nat Ogle’s story of care and cruelty ; and Our Wives Under the Sea (Pan Macmillan), Julia Armfield’s meditation on deep, slippery love . For Lunate, I read Sam Johnson-Schlee’s Living Rooms (Peninsula Press) – a close interrogation of the objects in a home . Staying within the Johnson household, I read Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires (Pushkin Press), whose writing about apron-tying and sauce-stirring is mesmerising. In autumn, I read Jennifer Croft’s Homesick (Charco Press). Croft’s use of language is exact and gentle; and sickness, siblinghood and secret languages shade her snapshots of sisters Amy and Zoe. Flecked with similarly beautiful meditations on a shared girlhood, Yara Rodrigues Fowler’s there are more things (Little, Brown) leaps between London and Brazil, brimming with revolutionary desire. I enjoyed Cristina Bendek’s multilingual novel, Salt Crystals (Charco Press), which is a grappling with past suffering and future possibility. Such grappling with was even more visceral in Eloghosa Osunde’s ‘Vagabonds!’ (Harper Collins), a novel built of interlocking stories set in Nigeria, in which the dead are able to share their narratives. Osunde’s stories are laced with a kind of twisting, hopeful, magic.
Naomi Booth
Two of my most memorable reads this year were short, dark, surprising novels: Percival Everett’s The Trees (Influx Press) and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (Faber). I’ve never read anything quite like The Trees—hilarious, compulsive and deeply unsettling. Everett brings the darkest of histories to light, documenting lynching in the US with a wit that sometimes feels almost diabolically compelling. This novel made me look at things I’d instinctively turn away from, insisting on horror alongside the life-force of invention and humour. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These has the finely-wrought intensity of the best short fiction: one man’s world is compressed into these pages, and we’re given a window onto the suffering of a woman held captive in a Magdalene laundry. The final understated sentence of this novel hit me hard in the chest and has stayed with me ever since, making me question what it is to ‘legitimately believe’ in a future that is better than the past. Other books I’ve enjoyed this year include Nell Stevens’ debut novel, Briefly, A Life Delicious (Picador)—I fell in love with Stevens’ ghostly narrator, and her ravenous depiction of the relationship between Frédéric Chopin and George Sands. This is a queer love story full of joy and music and the pain of creativity. I greatly admired Tom Benn’s debut novel, Oxblood(Bloomsbury)—a novel that glitters with the dark energy of its characters. I also loved second novels from Lara Williams and Jessica Andrews: Williams’ The Odyssey (Penguin) is a wickedly funny satire of luxury cruising, the service-industry and self-improvement; Andrews’ Milk Teeth (Sceptre) is a sticky, sensuous exploration of female desire and appetite.