The best books of 2018 – and what to read in 2019

Rupert Hawksley shares his five favourite reads of 2018, and rounds up some of the most exciting titles set to hit shelves in early 2019 that you need to add to your New Year’s reading lists

When Anna Burns won the Booker Prize in October for her highly original, challenging novel,

Milkman, chair of the judges Kwame Anthony Appiah compared the experience of reading it to scaling a mountain. “It is definitely worth it because the view is terrific when you get to the top,” he said.

It wasn’t long before the backlash began, though. In The Times, James Marriott wrote that “the judges have confirmed the tendency to see novels as status-markers rather than joyful, life-changing entertainments”. Journalist Sarah Shaffi posted a much-shared thread on Twitter, complaining that “literary fiction is not better than other types of fiction”. Elsewhere, Milkman was dismissed as “odd” and “hard work”.

It is dispiriting that so many people seem to equate a novel’s merit with its accessibility. Clearly, a novel does not have to be demanding to be worthwhile (many of the novels I have flagged up for the next year are unlikely to vex the reader). But nor should readability be celebrated above all else. By turning our back on experimental novels, we risk finding ourselves in a flat literary landscape, one that is no doubt full of entertaining morsels, but bereft of anything truly nourishing.

Besides, sales of Milkman, which is set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland and told from the perspective of a girl forced into a relationship with an older man, have been exceptional. It went straight to the top of the Amazon UK book chart after the Booker Prize was announced and its publisher,Faber, has been forced to print a further 120,000 copies to meet demand. Critics underestimate – and patronise – the public if they believe we can’t cope with novels such as Milkman.

Elsewhere, there was a glut of very fine novels – some challenging; others less so – published in 2018. So many, in fact, that in a piece for The Guardian, American novelist Jonathan Franzen was moved to ask whether “we’re living in a literary golden age”. What a shame it would be if people were put off reading some of these wonderful novels for fear of being overworked. Dive in; the rewards are endless.

By turning our back on experimental novels, we risk finding ourselves in a flat literary landscape