Instead of getting into the fine distinction between “best” and “favourite”, I’ll just point you in the direction of my editor Pete Hoskin’s recent eloquent musings on the subject. Let’s just say that the 10 books I’ve selected here are the newly published fiction that’s most impressed, haunted, intrigued and delighted me over the past 12 months. The shortest is only 64 pages, while the longest stretches to over 800. They include two novellas, four debuts, and a so-called “lost classic”. Only one title is from this year’s Booker shortlist; and it’s a glaringly female-centric collection—eight of the books are written by women, and only two by men—so make of that what you will. All of this undoubtably says much more about my own personal reading proclivities than the state of publishing today!
Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks (Faber, £9.99)
First published in America back in 1953, it’s taken until now for this incredible novella to appear in a UK edition. It’s the much-admired American poet’s only work of prose and tells the story of one black woman’s life in mid-century Chicago by means of a series of vignettes. Given Brooks’s talents it’s not surprising that her sentences are so luminous, but she works magic on each and every page, transforming these commonplace episodes into a truly extraordinary and moving portrait of a life.
Tiepolo Blue by James Cahill (Sceptre, £14.99)
This 1990s-set story of a disgraced Cambridge don elicited comparisons to novels by both Alan Hollinghurst and Iris Murdoch. No, Cahill’s leading man isn’t caught in flagrante; instead, he comes a cropper following a very public, ill-considered attack that he makes on a prominent piece of contemporary art. He’s then forced to start over as a curator at a small London museum. Already a compelling psychosexual story about beauty, desire and art, Tiepolo Blue is all the more interesting because it hits notes of such strangeness.
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt (New Directions, £12.99)
This is a short, sharp sliver of a story—only 64 pages—but every single word is pitch perfect. Seventeen-year-old Marguerite—who’s been raised in the utmost luxury and taught by her mother the importance of avoiding anything mauvais ton—finds herself sorely tested when she comes up against an unscrupulous, grasping band of New York literary agents, editors and their lawyers. Think of it as the literary equivalent of a shot of ice-cold vodka—Belvedere or Grey Goose only, of course.
The Trees by Percival Everett (Influx Press, £9.99)
This is an absolute riot, which seems an odd thing to say about a book that’s full of grisly murders and wrestles with the legacy of some of the most horrific racially motivated violence in recent American history. The small Mississippi town of Money—the site, 65 years earlier, of the now infamous murder of Emmett Till—is rocked by a series of brutal slayings. The victims are white townsfolk, but found by each body is a second corpse: a black man who looks a lot like Till… Think Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn and Child meets Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, and you’re on the right track.
We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart (Tinder Press, £9.99)
At first glance, this looks like just another story of transgressive desire between a younger female student and a college professor, but it’s actually a refreshingly different take on a forbidden campus romance. The object of Hart’s protagonist’s affection isn’t an older man, but a woman, and the relationship that develops between the two of them is subtle and complex—yes, it’s sexual and deeply erotic, but there’s a different kind of desire here, too, one linked to emulation and loneliness. This is a sensitive, slow-burning novel that really got under my skin.
The Love Songs of WEB Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Fourth Estate, £20)
This time last year, I was hearing only excellent things from across the pond about this debut. Thankfully, it didn’t disappoint on its publication here in the UK back in January. Focused on the central figure of a young black female historian—who grows up in the north, but spends all her summers in the small Georgia town where her family has lived since her ancestors were first brought to the US by slavers—it’s a sweeping, multi-generational saga. It comes in at nearly 800 pages, but don’t let that put you off. Once I’d started, I didn’t want it to end.
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (Picador, £14.99)
On paper, this novel couldn’t have been timelier: a well-respected academic at an American liberal arts college is dealing with the fallout from sexual harassment accusations that have been levelled against her professor husband by a handful of his former students. In the end, though, the set-up had little to do with the book’s excellence, not least because it didn’t go at all where I was expecting. The scorned wife’s mounting obsession with a younger colleague—the titular Vladimir—makes for quite the wild ride, and the writing is clean, crisp and impressively self-assured.
The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li (Fourth Estate, £16.99)
This captivating story of an intense and brooding friendship between two young girls is a mid-20th-century period piece. Raised together in the French countryside, Agnès and Fabienne find the intimate world that they’ve created threatened by outside forces when one of their games gets out of hand. Inspired by the real-life incident of a celebrated teenage author, and with strong echoes of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, Li’s novel is an unsettlingly strange and spiky beast of a book.
Fight Night by Miriam Toews (Faber, £12.99)
Like many, I’ve loved everything that the Canadian author Miriam Toews has published. After much deliberation, however, I think this has to be my favourite of her novels. It’s a charmingly boisterous portrait of the joy, love, anger and pain of three generations of women. It also features what has to be one of the greatest, most memorable literary grandmothers ever created; a woman who fills her granddaughter’s life with laughter and adventure, but who also prepares her for anguish and suffering.
Wayward by Dana Spiotta (Virago, £8.99)
This is a novel that will speak volumes to anyone who’s ever stepped back, taken a good, long hard look at their life and just wanted to burn the whole thing down. It’s also a searingly authentic—by which I mean, believably messy—exploration of middle-age female rage and claustrophobia. Set in the aftermath of Trump’s election, 52-year-old Sam leaves her perfect suburban life behind her (and with it her husband and teenage daughter) and moves into her dream home, an Arts and Crafts fixer-upper in downtown Syracuse. Her husband isn’t a monster. Her life isn’t that bad. She loves her daughter. Perhaps she’s made the wrong decision, but it was still the decision she had to make.
