Editor’s note:BBC cultureLists the ten most worth reading books this year. The New Year is coming, I look forward to meeting you.
10. Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
In her artfully written first novel, Gyasi follows two half-sisters born of the same mother on Africa’s Gold Coast. She creates an unforgettable cast of characters as she follows seven generations of this family through the dislocations and continuing repercussions of slavery on both continents.
9. Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Caféé
Sarah Bakewell tracks the growth of Existentialism through the work of Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and others, and shows how its emphasis on authenticity and freedom are relevant today.
8. Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
Shirley Jackson was best known for literary suspense in the tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and Henry James. But her unique contribution, writes Franklin, was“her primary focus”on the lives of her generation of women who were raised in the mid 20th Century.
7. Liz Moore, The Unseen World
Moore captures the powerful ties between father and daughter as she unspools a string of compelling scientific and personal mysteries.
6. Ben H Winters, Underground Airlines
Winters’timely new work of speculative fiction is set in an alternative US: Lincoln never became president, the Civil War never happened, and there are still slaves in the certain states. Winters, an Edgar award winner, has crafted a fast-moving thriller with a contemporary ethical framework.
5. Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things
Cole shows a breathtaking range in his splendid new collection of 55 essays. He begins with pilgrimages to Leukerbad in Switzerland, where James Baldwin wrote his 1953 essay Stranger in the Village about being black in an all-white village, and to WG Sebald’s grave at St Andrew’s church in Framingham Earl in the UK:“There he is…the teacher I never knew.”
4. Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone
Imagine Me Gone is a powerful story of loss and love. We’ve come to know intimately the joys and struggles of each member of a troubled family by its heart-wrenching conclusion.
3. Ann Patchett, Commonwealth
Patchett, winner of the 2001 Orange Prize for Bel Canto, opens her brilliantly structured new novel with a christening party for Fix and Beverly Keating’s second daughter, Franny. Betrayals and forgiveness are at the center of this complex and memorable family drama.
2. CE Morgan, The Sport of Kings
Morgan’s ambitious and epic tale of a racehorse bred to win the Triple Crown of elite US thoroughbred contests spans several centuries. Morgan’s scope is Faulknerian, her language hypnotic as she immerses us in the stories of these three characters, and the legacies and passions that overwhelm them. The finale of this Kirkus Prize winner is breathtaking and tragic.
1. Dana Spiotta, Innocents and Others
Spiotta raises questions about truth, reality and how the digital world is affecting us all in her mesmerising new novel. Meadow, who claims as a teenager to have had a months-long tryst with Orson Welles, and her best friend Carrie are raised in the shadow of Hollywood. Both become film-makers. Meadow’s first film, an eight-hour video of her boyfriend, wins a jury prize, and she draws further acclaim for a 1992 documentary called Kent State: Recovered. Carrie creates features with a genre twist, and her comedies win Golden Globe nominations. Meadow’s penchant for documenting ambiguity and raw emotion draws her into telling the story of Jelly, a woman who seduces powerful men through phone conversations. Mid-career, Meadow stops making films–and only Carrie knows why.
