SO WHICH BOOKS WILL HAVE SANTA HOOKED THIS CHRISTMAS?
Our critics select the pick of the year’s novels
WHO THEY WAS by Gabriel Krauze (Fourth Estate €15.99)
I’VE had more conversations about this novel than any other this year. Drawn on the author’s troubling past as a university student running with London gangs, it’s thrillingly visceral and endlessly rich. Longlisted f or this year’s Booker, it should have been shortlisted.
MONOGAMY by Sue Miller (Bloomsbury €18.20)
THIS US writer isn’t as well known here as she should be — if you like Anne Tyler or Elizabeth Strout, check out this wise, witty pageturner about the wife of a secretly philandering bookseller who suddenly drops dead after ditching his latest mistress.
REPRODUCTION by Ian Williams (Dialogue Books €21.10)
I HAD a ball with this extremely funny Canadian debut about the decades-long fallout from an illadvised hook-up between a young Caribbean student and an older white businessman, each grieving the loss of a parent. Pure pleasure, line after pitch-perfect line.
AUGUST by Callan Wink (Granta €17.55)
THIS outdoorsy coming- of-age debut, written by a fly fishing guide from Montana, has been on my mind ever since I devoured it this summer. Beautifully understated, it charts the growing pains of a farmer’s son in post-9/11 America.
STEPHANIE CROSS SHUGGIE BAIN by Douglas Stuart (Picador €17.99)
A WORTHY Booker prize winner, this 1980s, Glasgow- set novel belongs not to the titular character, but his mother: the porcelaindentured, mink coat-wearing alcoholic Agnes. Be warned, her rollercoaster addiction makes for harrowing reading. But she’s a toweringly magnificent creation.
THE FIRST WOMAN by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (Oneworld €22.95)
KIRABO, the heroine of this rangy, Ugandan-set novel, was the character I most enjoyed spending time with this year. We first meet her aged 12 in 1975, desperate to find her absent mother — who has her own dramatic t ale. Makumbi braids Ugandan feminism, history and folklore into an utterly absorbing story.
WHAT’S LEFT OF ME IS YOURS by Stephanie Scott
(W&N €16.99) THIS ticks every Christmas mustread box: totally transporting, with oodles of haunting atmosphere and an original, page- turning plot. Set in Japan, it’s the story of trainee lawyer Sumiko and her quest to understand the murder of her mother; it’s also a riveting insight into the world of Japanese professional marriage ‘breaker-uppers’.
DJINN PATROL ON THE PURPLE LINE by Deepa Anappara (Chatto €18.20)
WHEN children start to go missing from an Indian shanty town, nineyear- old Jai and his pals turn amateur sleuths. But what begins as a game turns deadly serious. Former journalist Anappara brings her setting’s smog- choked lanes and teeming bazaar brilliantly to life in a terrific debut.
CLAIRE ALLFREE A THEATRE FOR DREAMERS by Polly Samson (Bloomsbury €19.60)
SAMSON’S sun-saturated novel set on the Greek island of Hydra might be just the escapism you need right now. Leonard Cohen, his lover Marianne Ihlen and a bunch of other boozy creatives lived on Hydra in the 1960s and Samson captures the darkness, emerging fractures and the beauty of their lives in a sharply feminist novel.
LOVE by Roddy Doyle (Cape €18.95)
TWO men, old school friends, meet for a drink or seven one night in a Dublin pub, and talk. Love, regret, fatherhood, friendship, mortality: it’s all covered in a tangled and mesmeric novel that consists entirely of conversation which is all about the things that don’t need to be spoken and the things that can’t be said.
THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS by Elena Ferrante (Europa Editions €20.30)
FERRANTE once again gets under the skin of a 12-year-old girl on the cusp of adulthood in 1990s Naples. Little in her family is what it seems, while Naples is a city teeming with seemingly irresolvable contradictions. This doesn’t have the finesse of the My Brilliant Friend quartet but few probe the seething mess of female adolescence so forensically as Ferrante.
SISTERS by Daisy Johnson (Cape €15.99)
TWO sisters, almost unnaturally close, are holed up with their mother in a dilapidated Suffolk coastal cottage. Something awful happened at school and their mother has taken to her bed, so the girls become feral. Told from the perspective of the younger sister, this is a haunting, emotionally acute novel with a terrific twist.