The books of the year

Here are our favourite works of fiction we read this year, from the Man Booker Prizewinner set in an unnamed Northern city to a boxer struggling to be a contender

Skin Deep by Liz Nugent (Gill)

Liz Nugent’s third thriller had the critics likening her to Patricia Highsmith. Opening with a gruesome murder by the main character Cordelia/delia, it is followed by a lavish party at the Hotel Negresco in Nice before slipping into the past. From a cocaine-andchampagne lifestyle of 1980s London as a financier’s wife, to being a drug moll in Morocco and an art dealer in the south of France, Delia is a master of reinvention and deception. Utterly compelling, Skin Deep is Nugent’s best yet, a storyteller at the height of her powers creating a truly dark monster. (Janice Butler)

Trajectory by Richard Russo (Allen & Unwin)

Richard Russo’s superb collection (three short stories and a novella) traces the trajectory of various lives and how a moment in time can change everything. The opening yarn, ‘Horseman’ has a female professor confronting a student plagiarist; ‘the novella ‘Voice’ has another academic on a two-week cultural vacation in Venice; and ‘Intervention’ is an elegantly layered portrait of everyday getting-by. Russo, perhaps best known for the novels Nobody’s Fool and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls, casts a warm eye on life in all its knottiness in a masterly work that hits the bulls-eye. (Donal O’donoghue)

The Break by Katherena Vermette (Atlantic)

This brilliant debut is told from the point of view of ten characters, with each getting a chapter apiece. It opens with a girl who has been attacked and raped, a crime witnessed by a sleep-deprived mother, in a deserted, snow-covered field called The Break in northern Winnipeg. Many of the key characters are related or intertwined and while you strive to guess what happened on the night in question, this book delivers much more than that.

It’s a tale of women, their relationships, fears and heritage. And that’s what makes this a gem. (Janice Butler)

Don’t Skip Out On Me by Willy Vlautin (Faber)

Willy Vlautin sure can write and Don’t Skip Out On Me is his finest novel yet. Set among the hardworking folk of hardscrabble America, it charts a young man’s dream of becoming a champion boxer. It is a tale of modern America, but also an empathetic portrait of the universal condition of loneliness, whether you are tending sheep in the hills or living in the heart of Vegas. It’s unlikely that you will read a novel with more heart and soul this year, or one that will leave you as emotionally floored. (Donal O’donoghue)

Lullaby by Leila Slimani (Faber), translated from the French by Sam Taylor

The hype-peddlers called it the next Gone Girl but

Lullaby, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, is far better written and with much deeper roots. Like all good horror stories, it is set in the everyday; in this case, a damp and broken Paris. In taut prose, Lullaby opens with a frightening tableau: two young children have been butchered by their nanny, a woman with impeccable credentials. In this world, evil is banal, the slide into madness all too real, and that is the most terrifying thing of all. (Donal O’donoghue)

Travelling in a Strange Land by David Park (Bloomsbury)

‘Bringing up a child isn’t like driving this car’ is one of many lines that resonate in David Park’s moving and eloquent novella, which follows a man on an epic road trip to rescue his sick, snowbound son. It’s close to Christmas, with snow falling on the living and the dead, making roads treacherous, closing airports and resurrecting painful memories. Tom is driving from Belfast to Sunderland where his son, Luke, is marooned in a student flat in a novel that stays with you long after the final pages have melted away. (Donal O’donoghue)

From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan (Doubleday)

The story of Farouk, a Syrian refugee who washes up in Ireland, opens a book that reaches into the lives of two other men. Surer on home ground, Ryan charts the plight of Lampy, a young man who lives with his mother and grandfather, a tough old campaigner. The third tale, more a confessional, is of a man in his twilight years, recalling a bad thing he once did. All three stories come together in a final tattoo of very brief chapters, like a delta of tributaries running into each other before flowing into the sea.

(Donal O’donoghue)

Transcription by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday)

A very clever spy thriller, Transcription vividly recreates an MI5 cell in London during the early months of WWII and at its dark heart is a protagonist, Juliet, with many aliases. Transcription, with its spies, Nazi sympathisers and fifth columnists, is meticulously researched but mostly wears its learning lightly, sucking you into a world of surveillance and subterfuge where no one can be trusted. Towards the end, a character says “We’re not approaching the end of a novel” and in that meta-moment we realise who has been ‘played’ all along. (Donal O’donoghue)

Milkman by Anna Burns (Faber)

In an unnamed city paralysed by sectarian strife, paramilitary control and the forces from ‘the country over the water’, all is hostage to the fortunes of a poisonous ‘war’.

Set in the 1970s in a city that may be the author’s home town of Belfast, this ‘surprise’ winner of the Man Booker Prize is narrated by Middle Sister (no names here), a girl in her late teens. Middle Sister attracts the unwelcome attention of Milkman, a member of the local paramilitary, who takes a shine to her and becomes a menacing, phantom-like presence in her life. (Donal O’donoghue)

The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow by Danny Denton (Granta)

Set in a violent future Ireland, where it never ever stops raining, Danny Denton’s first novel is a breakneck ride into a post-apocalyptic world. The author describes its many voices as polyphonic, but against the background music of rain drumming on the plastic tarps that cover people, buildings, the entire drowned old city of Dublin, it’s more often a cacophony – a lovely one, mind. The story comes in fragments, but at its heart is the

Kid in Yellow, a teenage boy from the Croke Park Flats who runs errands for the Earlie Gang. (Stephen Meyler)