Seven short-term moves in the first five months of the year, including three static caravans, weren’t ideal reading conditions. But finally we moved into our new home in May, and I was reunited with my books, many of which had been in boxes since 2016.
Amid all the upheaval, I found myself tackling trilogies, quartets, and even quintet, that I’d long put off. Doris Lessing’s five-book Children of Violence sequence covered similar ground to her single volume The Golden Notebook. I prefer the latter. Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet was initially hard going, but then I became hooked. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy was everything I hoped it would be, and added a vast imaginative world to the static caravan I was confined to at the time. Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy vividly evoked a world in flux. I zipped through Len Deighton’s Game, Set, Match trilogy, and also five of Chester Himes’s Grave Digger Jones & Coffin Ed Johnson mysteries – a charity shop bounty.
As a teenager in Gaborone, Botswana, in the early 80s, my visits to the main bookshop were always fraught with the fear of bumping into Bessie Head. She was one of the great writers of the 20th Century, but also a troubled soul, battling alcohol and mental illness. Gillian Stead Eilersen’s biography, Bessie Head: Thunder Behind Her Ears, is a sympathetic portrait of a remarkable talent. Off the back of that, I read a couple of Head’s novels, and reread her engaging non-fiction social history of Serowe, the village that became her adopted home after her exile from South Africa. Serowe was also a refuge for Bessie’s friend, Patrick van Rensburg, another campaigner who fled apartheid. Guilty Land was his clarion call for international action. Alfred Hutchinson, a black activist, also fled South Africa, and his classic book, Road to Ghana, is an account of the perils he encountered during an epic journey up through colonial Africa en route to exile in Ghana. AS Mopeli-Paulus writes of an earlier era in The World and the Cattle, which chronicles his childhood as a chief’s son in quasi-independent Basutoland (later fully independent as Lesotho), and his service with the British Army’s ‘Grave Unit’ during WWII, which included having to collect the corpses after El Alamein.
My most fortuitous charity shop find this year was Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys. He was an author barely on my radar, but I soon discovered he was born just four miles from my new home. It’s a massive novel. By happy coincidence, while I was falling under its spell, Matthew Sweet hosted a radio discussion that affirmed that I’m far from the first person to be knocked off kilter by it: BBC Arts & Ideas: John Cowper Powys
As ever, Backlisted podcast had an impact on my reading choices. I especially enjoyed Winifred Holtby’s South Riding and the Joseph Heller-esque Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt.
Throughout my teens, I was intent on an acting career. I got into drama school, but had to wait a year to be old enough to take up the place. I worked in a zoo, which led to a stint as a park ranger in Africa, and then to travel writing. I haven’t acted for 30 years, but the compulsion is still bubbling under. One of the books I enjoyed most this year was Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries, which includes – via Maggie Smith – the definitive description of Miriam Margolyes: “[L]ike a Sherman tank in sequins.” While Russia was gearing up to invade Ukraine, I was reading The Method by Issac Butler. The first chapter, detailing Russian history, contains many striking parallels with current events. Then the book gets down to its main business, describing how the ‘Method’ transformed American acting. With so many classic films now instantly accessible, I was able enhance the reading experience by watching many of the ground-breaking performances described. It’s my book of the year.
The Full List
- Suder by Percival Everett
- The Shadow-Line by Joseph Conrad
- Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn
- A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler
- Greenmantle by John Buchan
- The Tobacconist by Robert Seethaler
- Birth of a Dream Weaver by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
- Dreams in a Time of War by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
- My Life in Dire Straits by John Illsley
- The Last Gift by Abdulrazak Gurnah
- The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier
- Transit by Anna Seghers
- The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
- When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut
- The Four-Gated City by Doris Lessing
- Olivia Manning by Deidre David
- Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau
- Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter
- South Riding by Winifred Holtby
- The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
- They by Kay Dick
- Kontakion For You Departed by Alan Paton
- The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler
- Ravelstein by Saul Bellow
- Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park
- The Good Angel of Death by Andrey Kurkov
- Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
- All About Me! by Mel Brooks
- The Alexandria Quartet 1: Justine by Lawrence Durrell
- Double Indemnity by James M Cain
- Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Leger
- The Day of the Locust by Nathaneal West
- Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi
- The Alexandria Quartet 2: Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell
- The Alexandria Quartet 3: Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell
- I, Claudius by Robert Graves
- The First Man by Albert Camus
- The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg
- Gormenghast 1: Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
- If an Egyptian Cannot Speak Engish by Noor Naga
- The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight
- A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes (R)
- Gormenghast 2: Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
- De Profundis by Oscar Wilde
- The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes
- Gormenghast 3: Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake
- All Shot Up by Chester Himes
- Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes
- The Heat’s On by Chester Himes
- Companion Piece by Ali Smith
- Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell
- A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
- Adam Bede by George Eliot
- Last Letter to a Reader by Gerald Murnane
- Border Districts by Gerald Murnane (R)
- Cimino by Charles Elton
- Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut
- Heaven’s Command by Jan Morris
- From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe
- Balkan Trilogy 1: The Great Fortune by Olivia Manning
- The Twilight World by Werner Herzog
- Berlin Game by Len Deighton
- Balkan Trilogy 2: The Spoilt City by Olivia Manning
- Mexico Set by Len Deighton
- Balkan Trilogy 3: Friends and Heroes by Olivia Manning
- London Match by Len Deighton
- Peterley Harvest: The Private Diary of David Peterley by Richard Pennington
- Remember, Remember by Winifred Holtby
- Exit Stage Left: The Curious Afterlife of Pop Stars by Nick Duerden
- I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour
- Bessie Head: Thunder Behind Her Ears by Gillian Stead Eilersen
- After Leaving Mr Mackenzie by Jean Rhys
- Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
- The Warden by Anthony Trollope
- The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah
- Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
- Hard Times by Charles Dickens
- Trust by Hernan Diaz
- When Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head
- The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens
- Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
- Maru by Bessie Head
- Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt
- The Trees by Percival Everett
- Congo: The Epic History of a People by David van Reybrouck
- Oh William by Elizabeth Strout
- Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet
- The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton
- Treacle Walker by Alan Garner
- After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
- The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
- Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
- Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung
- Where Angels Fear to Tread by EM Forster
- The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov
- The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk
- Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk
- Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin
- The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
- Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
- The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- Madly, Deeply: Diaries by Alan Rickman
- Autopsy: A Forensic Pathologist in Africa by Ryan Blumenthal
- Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
- Happening by Annie Ernaux
- Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux
- A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux
- The Last Colony: Britain’s Colonial Legacy by Philippe Sands
- Ragtime by EL Doctorow
- Liberation Day by George Saunders
- Billy Bathgate by EL Doctorow
- Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys
- Wild: The Life and Times of Peter Beard by Graham Boynton
- The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
- Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (R)
- At War with Waugh by WF Deedes
- Foster by Claire Keegan
- A Season in Sinji by JL Carr
- Welcome to Hard Times by EL Doctorow
- The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury
- Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind by Bessie Head (R)
- Guilty Land by Patrick van Rensburg
- The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger
- Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson
- Slow Horses by Mick Herron
- Dead Lions by Mick Herron
- Real Tigers by Mick Herron
- Road to Ghana by Alfred Hutchinson
- A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley
- The World and the Cattle by AS Mopeli-Paulus