Reviewing my 2022 reading, I found I’ve read fewer books this year than in almost a decade, in part due to general life events occupying time and headspace, but partly, I suspect, because I’m still struggling to recover my pre-pandemic levels of focus. So many things fractured in 2020, and it feels as though those ripples are continuing to work their way outwards in ways we are still at the edge of comprehending. When I consider the books that stood out for me this year, they are in different forms, but perhaps unsurprisingly, exploring themes of breakage and connectivity.
I began the year diving into the mycelial world with Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (2020). This is wonderfully engaging non-fiction, and an important book in nature writing, shining a light on a living dimension of our shared world which is little known, under-researched, and which we are barely beginning to understand. It is also one which has the potential to radically reshape ideas from how we make pharmaceutical drugs and package our goods, to philosophies of identity and selfhood.
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan (2021) was a searing read, brutal and beautiful in equal measure, Flanagan’s prose like a burning torch. The novel explores our relationships with each other and with the more-than-human world, using allegory to depict the biodiversity crisis and sixth mass extinction. At its centre, in the relationship between Anna and her mother Francie, is the terrible proximity of cruelty and love.
Maror by Lavie Tidhar (2022) was an epic ride spanning multiple continents and four decades of Israeli history. Tidhar’s superb skills as a short fiction writer are clearly in evidence as the novel dares you to invest in its large cast of sometimes recurring, perpetually imperilled characters, whilst the enigmatic detective Cohen is a constant, menacing presence at the centre. There are shades of Roberto Bolaño and James Ellroy in this masterful fragmented narrative about ideology, politics, power, and corruption.
The Movement by Ayisha Malik (2022) stood out for the care, nuance, and complexity with which its characters are drawn, exploring with devastating wit and panache how we (often fail to) navigate societal networks which are at once increasingly intersecting and polarised, both online and in person. It’s not often I come across a novel that makes me laugh as much as it makes me think. After finishing, I immediately looked up Malik’s earlier novels and thoroughly enjoyed This Green and Pleasant Land towards the end of the year.
Early in the year I read and admired Katie Kitamura’s The Separation, but it was her most recent novel Intimacies (2021), read in the autumn, which has really stayed with me. The personal and political collide in this deceptively slim and sparely written novel about an interpreter working in The Hague’s international criminal court. Kitamura is a master in what remains unspoken, shimmering between the lines, exploring the limitations of language and narrative to make sense of our world.
Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet (2021) was a hugely entertaining read. Set in the 1960s and presented as a mixture of diary and biography, the novel follows a young woman who believes that a notorious psychiatrist, Collins Braithwaite, is responsible for her sister’s suicide. Exploring shifting identities and the nature – and societal constructions – of sanity, the novel is at once darkly comedic and increasingly unsettling, before offering a final, delicious twist at the close.
I spent the final days of the year immersed in Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat (2021). Hall is one of my favourite writers and this fierce, sensual, poetic novel about love, art, intimacy, grief and the intensity of lockdown is quite simply a stunning piece of work. As ever, I can’t wait to see what Hall writes next.
On the writing side, in September 2022 I published my fifth novel The Coral Bones with Unsung Stories, a book I had been working on since 2016. I’m hugely grateful to the readers, reviewers and writers who have engaged with the book and been kind enough to share their thoughts. I go into the new year with the inkling of a new project, hoping to be directing more time, headspace and energy to both reading and writing.
Here’s to the new year and the lightening days – wishing you entertaining and inspiring reading, health and happiness in 2023.
E. J. Swift 