Our Favourite Books of 2022

I'm Sorry You Feel That Way by Rebecca Wait

Rebecca Wait’s witty tragicomedy is a piercing tale of sibling rivalry and family dysfunction. First we meet Alice, a socially anxious over-thinker in her early thirties. She is sensitive to everyone’s discomfort, eager to please and keenly observant. She is funny, too, although her thoughts are rarely voiced to those around her. Her sister, Hanna, is all rebellious bravado. Their brother is distant, their mother difficult and acerbic. Mental illness hangs like a pall over the family. The aunt suffered with schizophrenia; Hanna fights her own mental health demons. All long for what they don’t have and must ultimately pick their way through life's disappointments to find some comfort in the chaos. But threaded through the drama is great warmth and wit. Wait has a talent for bringing a crackle to a scene.

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When I sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà

People, mushrooms, clouds, dogs, witches, ghosts of the Spanish Civil War; all have a story to tell in this richly descriptive book set in the Pyrenees. Everything centres around a single family, who form the human heart of this polyphonic masterpiece. The father – a poet and farmer – is killed in the first few pages, struck by lightning as he frees a trapped calf. (This opening chapter is told from the point of view of the storm that kills him.) His isolated wife must cope without him, raising the children and caring for her nearly mute father-in-law. The story rolls on and the children must find their own way in the wild world of folk tales and ghosts.

With great literary dexterity, Irene Solà builds a world of incredible richness. Everything bristles with restless energy. The buried traumas of war stir beneath the soil; the dead still have much to say for themselves. But this is a celebration of life, too, of the fragility of existence and deep the interconnectedness of all things.

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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida won this year’s Booker Prize. Wry and unflinching, this is a work of astonishing dexterity. It is the late 1980s and Maali Almeida, a ‘photographer, gambler, slut’, wakes up to find himself in a jostling queue in what appears to be a tax office, except everyone around him is bloodied and battered. He believes he’s having a bad trip – an LSD fuelled fever dream – but is soon forced to come to terms with the fact that he is dead. Maali is told by a fellow soul, who has taken up a bureaucratic position in this waiting room to the afterlife, that he now has seven moons – a week – to see to his unfinished business before he must forget his life. Maali knows exactly what he must do. Beneath his bed is a box of photographs that exposes the true extent of the violence raging in Sri Lanka’s civil wars. He must contact his friends, so that the evidence can come to light, while trying to discover who killed him from a very long list of suspects.

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The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

Maggie O'Farrell's lauded follow-up to Hamnet is nearly impossible to put down. Art, poetry, myth and historical record come together in a richly evocative tale of murder, sex and dynastic ambition. We are plunged from the first pages into a mystery that has endured for centuries. In 1561, 16-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici died less than twelve months into her marriage to Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. The cause of death was recorded as a fever, but rumours soon started to circulate that her husband killed her.

Lucrezia's likeness survives in portraits from the period, portraits that inspired Robert Browning to write the poem, My Last Duchess. O’Farrell’s takes these sources and spins a Lucrezia that is wild and unsettled - a friend to the beasts that her father houses in his menagerie. She is intuitive, too. From the very beginning of the book, she suspects her days are numbered. This is historical fiction at its most gripping and imaginative.

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Femina by Janina Ramirez

The Middle Ages, (also known as the Dark Ages) stretched from the late fifth century, as the Romans retreated from Britain, to the late fifteenth century, the dawn of the Renaissance. It was a period of incredible change in Europe. And yet, as is so often the case, the history of this millennium of invasions, plagues, religious expansion and cultural development is almost void of female voices.

Dr Janina Ramirez sets out to prove that women were shaping this world as much as men, that they were adding to the literature, fighting the wars and shaping the shifting kingdoms. The title of this book is taken from the annotation scribbled alongside texts known to be written by women, indicating they were disposable, unimportant. What Ramirez succeeds in doing, is to give these forgotten voices a chance to speak again, to demonstrate their influence and strength. And so these pages recount the lives of the warriors, slaves, writers and rebels, whose stories have survived through remarkable means.

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A Line Above the Sky: On Mountains and Motherhood by Helen Mort

This beautifully poetic memoir from Helen Mort explores the tensions that exist between the world of motherhood and a life lived chasing mountains. It is a book about strength and why we take risks. A consummate novelist and poet, Mort is also an experienced climber. Her prose is seamless, lyrical. It speaks of competing desires and society’s expectations of mothers. “The more grounded I feel, the more my body softens with motherhood, the more I seek images of freedom and peril,” she writes. She is not alone in this. Her book is peppered with stories of women throughout history who have experienced the same desire to have a child, while still craving the thrill of adventure.

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​Otherlands: A World in the Making by Thomas Halliday

If you know someone fascinated by natural history, deep time, dinosaurs or the Ice Age, this is the book for them. Through vividly evocative descriptions, Dr Thomas Halliday takes us tumbling back through the eons, via the windswept tundra of Alaska and the dense forests of Antarctica, until the version of Earth we find ourselves in is almost beyond our imagining. In these pages we meet creatures strange and familiar, journey through alien landscapes and witness epoch-ending catastrophes. This is a natural history book that reads almost like a JG Ballard novel, so bizarre and captivating are the worlds described.

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The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

This is the story of Agnès and Fabienne, two peasant girls living in provincial, post-war France. Together they conspire to write a novel. Fabienne is the more bombastic of the two, the driving force; Agnès becomes the ‘face’ of the book, the mouthpiece. With the help of the local postmaster, their dark novel is a brief success among the fashionable Paris set. And so, Agnès’s life changes dramatically. Lauded as a child prodigy, she is sent to finishing school in England, while Fabienne remains in France. The book opens with Agnès writing from America about Fabienne’s death many years later and with mixed feelings. This is a novel about writing as much as it is about the intense, life-defining relationship of two girls. But it is also about rivalry, manipulation and, in the end, becoming oneself.

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