My Favourite Reads of 2022

2022 was a great reading year. It shall henceforth be known as the year I discovered Barbara Pym, Annie Proulx and Barbara Comyns about a million years after everyone else. The year I tried to get into Patricia Highsmith and Virginia Woolf and ultimately decided life was too short. And also the year I devoured Graham Greene and found all the Catholic Guilt felt oddly comforting.

Whilst living in France I frequented the American Library, Nancy (a timely reminder of how brilliant libraries are). Whilst living in Belfast I spent all my spare pennies in No Alibis (which needs no timely reminder of the fact that it is the world’s best book shop). It’s also the year a bunch of use started Mexico And Below book group, (follow us on instagram @mexicoandbelow if you’d like to join in the fun), reading new work in translation from Latin America. In consequence I read a lot more brilliant books from that neck of the woods than usual this year. A huge heartfelt thank you to everyone who translates book. You lot are my heroes. (Especially you, Megan McDowell for translating approximately 10% of everything I read in 2022).

I read 287 books in total this year, and while I’m not going to pick a favourite favourite I will say that I’ve started marking time as BPD and APD so you can probably work out that Priestdaddy blew my socks off. Thanks for tolerating my incessant banging on about books. If you read anything this year, you’re amazing. If you borrowed or bought a book thank you for keeping authors in book-buying money (the publishing industry is basically the world’s biggest pyramid scheme). Read well in 2023 and do let us know if you discover something brilliant the rest of us don’t know about yet.

Here are my favourites from the year that’s just passed in the order I read them. Some are brand spanking new, some are older than me. As I always say a great book will still be a great book in twenty years’ time. They’re all first time reads for me and I’d heartily recommend every single one of them.

Five Poetry Collections I Loved

Padraig Regan - Some Integrity
Hannah Lowe - The kids
Rosamund Taylor - In Her Jaws
Hugo Williams - I Knew the Bride
Ada Limón - Bright Dead Things

Ten Novels in Translation I Loved

Maria Gerhardt - Transfer Window (Tr. Lyndy Falk van Rooyen)
Lize Spit - The Melting (Tr. Kristen Gehrman)
Alejandro Zambra - Chilean Poet (Tr. Megan McDowell)
Philippe Besson - Lie With Me (Tr. Molly Ringwald)
Veronique Olmi - Beside the Sea (Tr. Adrianna Hunter)
Selva Almada - The Wind That Lays Waste (Tr. Chris Andrews)
Fernanda Melchor - Paradais (Tr. Sophie Hughes)
Roque Larraquy - Comemadre (Tr. Heather Cleary)
Margarite Karapanou - Rien ne va Plus (Tr. Karen Emmerich)
Is Mother Dead - Vigdis Hjorth (Tr. Charlotte Barslund)

Ten Non-Fiction Books I Loved

Ta-Nehisi Coates - Between the World and Me
Ed. Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst - Writing the Uncanny; Essays on Crafting Strange Fiction
Cristín Leach - Negative Space
Patricia Lockwood - Priestdaddy
Matthew McNaught - Immanuel
Robert Boswell - The Half-Known World; On Writing Fiction
Mark Fisher - The Weird and the Eerie
Lucy Worsley - Agatha Christie; A Very Elusive Woman
Elizabeth Boyle - Fierce Appetites
James Wood - How Fiction Works