THE PROMISE by Damon Galgut
No arguments about this year’s Booker winner, centred on a white family’s broken pledge to their black housekeeper in post-apartheid South Africa.
A sobering allegory, to be sure, but also a giddy pleasure, thanks to Galgut’s restlessly acrobatic narrative voice, which darts and zooms unpredictably around the action.
HARLEM SHUFFLE by Colson Whitehead
Whitehead followed his breakthrough hits The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys with this zesty gangster epic. It is set amid the racial divisions of 1950s New York, where an ambitious black businessman is seduced by the prospect of quick gains in the city’s criminal underworld.
LOVED AND MISSED by Susie Boyt
For emotionally astute storytelling that rings messily true to life, look no further than this tender but steely novel. It’s about a North London teacher who finds herself suddenly in charge of a newborn after her drug-addicted daughter, long since AWOL, turns up out of the blue with news.
KLARA AND THE SUN by Kazuo Ishiguro
Can you imagine falling in love with a robot? And, if so, what might that say about the human soul? Ishiguro may have missed out on the Booker, but he distills the big questions of the day in this deceptively simple fable about the friendship between a desperately ill teenage girl, her terrified mother and an artificial friend.
OH WILLIAM! By Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout continues the story of the eponymous novelist we first met in My Name Is Lucy Barton in her latest miniature masterpiece.
Lucy is grieving her second husband David but still good friends with her first, William, when he asks her to accompany him on a trip to Maine to track down a newly discovered step-sister. A terrific novel about loss, self-knowledge and the impact of time passing.
IRON ANNIE by Luke Cassidy
The flow of Irish literary talent continues apace with this electrifying debut which follows Aoife, a small-town drug dealer, and her untamable girlfriend Annie on a doomed trip to England to offload 10kg of cocaine.
Cassidy excels at combining antic storytelling and vernacular lyricism with piercing observations of parochial Irish life.
A blast.
BURNTCOAT by Sarah Hall
Sex, death and art are the three pillars of Hall’s searing post-pandemic novel. When we meet her, famous sculptor Edith Harkness is about to complete her last commission, but at the centre of the book is her intense lockdown affair with a chef, described in visceral, indelible detail.
CROSSROADS by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen’s giant slab of a family saga (just the first instalment) is perfect for getting lost in this Christmas, not least as its opening section takes place over Advent.
Juicy dilemmas abound as the Hildebrandt clan, headed up by recently humiliated pastor Russ, agonise over how — and indeed whether — to be good.
BEWILDERMENT by Richard Powers
This may not be Powers’s strongest novel, but it deserved its Booker shortlisting.
Centring on widowed astrobiologist Theo and his Greta Thunberg-like neuro-diverse son, it engages head-on with the environmental catastrophe that presents an existential threat to us all — and manages to be utterly absorbing.
