The best books of 2020 : tips from Bernardine Evaristo, Lionel Shriver, Carlo Rovelli and more
Avni Doshi , author of Burnt Sugar, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize
Like the rest of the world, I was waiting for The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante (Europa, £20). Like her other novels, this one left me breathless on multiple occasions. I have to stop myself from reading Ferrante too quickly. The place and time in her novels feel familiar to me now, but the urgency in her writing hooks me every time, and I find I am always ready to be led back to Naples.
Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other
Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (Zed Books, £14.99) by Minna Salami is a ground-breaking book that makes an important intervention into feminism for the twenty-first century by drawing on what Salami calls Africa-centric knowledge and traditions. Drawing on art, popular culture, philosophy and her own experiences as a woman of Nigerian, Swedish and Finnish heritage, Salami re-positions our understanding of knowledge so that both its intellectual and emotional components are valued equally. I loved how it shifted my world-view away from Euro-patriarchal ideology towards ideas more suited to all women.
Carlo Rovelli, author of Seven Brief Lives on Physics
Cosmological Koans: A Journey to the Heart of Physics by Anthony Aguirre (Penguin, £10.99) I find that in the novel perspectives that physics is opening on our understanding of reality there is something that touches us deeply and personally. Nobody makes clear why this is so as well as Anthony Aguirre. In this book he offers us a unique mixture of insight into modern science, its achievements and limitations and the open questions it leaves suspended, which he combines with a profound attention to our concerns as humans.
Lionel Shriver, author of The Motion of the Body Through Space
Lawrence Osborne goes from strength to strength. In The Glass Kingdom, (Hogarth, £16.99), he once again displays a feel for the Westerner abroad in an alien culture, where misunderstandings can prove deadly. The author has lived for years in Bangkok, whose seediness runs deeper than the superficially icky red light district most foreign writers take on. Great characters, plenty of suspense, and a killer ending.
Rachel Johnson, author of Rake's Progress: My Political Midlife Crisis
My book of the year was first published in 1982 and republished this year but couldn’t be more on the money. It’s called The Virus (Black Spring Press, £9.99) and uncannily predicts the world in the hopeless grip of a lethal virus, an ambitious president, a horny epidemiologist, a dead girl, the dead girl’s sister, and a tribe of green monkeys - and it’s by Stanley Johnson, who should be better known, not as the PM’s dad but as the author of cracking thrillers. Hhe also wrote The Warming many decades before climate change suddenly became fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House
Louise Erdrich is my favourite writer, and her latest, The Night Watchman (Corsair, £20), is my favorite Louise Erdrich novel, so how could this not be a cause for celebration? This book contains so many threads, so many indelible lives - Thomas Wazhashk, the night watchman in a jewellery factory who stays awake all night in order to fight against the termination of tribal lands, and Pixie, who must leave those tribal lands in order to save her sister. No one is better than Erdrich at creating an entire world and all the people who live there, past, present, and future.
Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize
Elaine Feeney’s As You Were (Harvill Secker,£13.99) is a revelation about the secret shame and everyday pain that women keep hidden. It manages to be funny, sad and absolutely irrepressible all at the same time. It is bursting with tenderness in these wonderful moments of unguarded intimacy between the three Irish women who are stuck on a hospital ward together. It’s a real pleasure to hear the jostling Galway craic. It’s a book that will stay with me for a long time.
Diane Cook, author of The New Wilderness, shortlisted for the 2020 Book Prize
A Children’s Bible (WW Norton, £13.99) by Lydia Millet begins in a crumbling mansion where a group of bored, surly, privileged teens are spending the summer sequestered with their ne’er do well parents. Just as it begins to seem like a summer teen romp, the story takes a dramatic turn in the shape of a cataclysmic storm. What follows is brilliant - and feels both inevitable and strangely magical. How those teens tell the story, which transforms this climate emergency into a brutally honest, funny and moving indictment of the generations leaving a broken world for them to inherit, is especially refreshing.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Young Stalin
Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh. This thrilling, magisterial, superb biography, full of new material, tells the extraordinary swashbuckling, bloodspattered, inspirational life of Toussaint, brilliant leader of the Haitian slave revolt against France that terrified French, American, British slaveowners, launched the revolution that, with those of America and France, changed the world; and gave birth to the first free republic of the Americas – but was destroyed by Napoleon. This up to date work is essential reading, hopefully soon to be joined by modern biographies of the neglected titans, Toussaint’s rivals Dessalines, and Christophe who founded Haiti - and became its emperor and king.
Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize
Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Bloomsbury, £16.99) is set during some of the most brutal years of German colonialism in East Africa, is a magisterial refusal to let this history go unnoticed. In Gurnah’s masterful hands, the novel balances a direct gaze at the dehumanizing consequences of that violence with a tender examination of those East Africans who live, and love, in the world they’ve carved out for themselves. Spanning generations, and told through different voices, Gurnah asks what we carry forward out of the debris of bigotry and oppression. His characters: Khalifa, Afiya, Ilyas, and Hamza, each provide their own powerful answers. In a year where it was often difficult to concentrate, this book held me rapt.
Ian Thomson, author of Bonjour Blanc: A Journey Through Haiti
Everyone ought to read Sudhir Hazareesingh’s superb history of the Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture, Black Spartacus. In January 1804, two centuries ago, the French West Indian island of Haiti became the world’s first black republic. The Africans toiling on the sugar-rich plantations overthrew their French masters and declared independence. Hazareesing, a Mauritius-born historian, tells how Louverture became an emblem of slavery’s hoped-for abolition throughout all the Americas. To this day, Haiti’s is the only successful slave revolution in history. Stirring stuff.
Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Rodham
I’ve recommended Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life (Simon & Schuster, £12.93) by Lulu Miller to several friends, for different reasons with each person because it contains multitudes. Miller is a public radio host in the U.S, and at first the book seems like it’s 85% a quirky biography of 19th century ichthyologist and Stanford University president David Starr Jordan and 15% a memoir of Miller muddling through her twenties. But the narrative takes several surprising twists, opening up and expanding in complicated and enthralling ways.
John Lanchester, author of Reality, and Other Stories
I had Covid-19 back in April, and several people I’m close to have had it too. There aren’t many upsides to Covid, but it does at least make you think about what’s really important to you. Andrew O’Hagan’s novel Mayflies (Faber, £14.99) is the new book which has meant most to me this year. It’s a novel about the really important things: the transformative power of music and good times, friendship, love and loss.
Claire Allfree, book critic
Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers (W&N, £14.99) The muted colours of 1950s England form the background to this carefully written novel, which pivots on the case of a supposed virgin birth experienced ten years earlier by a Sidcup mother after a stay in a German sanitorium. An unmarried journalist living with her mother is tasked with uncovering what really happened, yet the novel’s charms lie less in its sensational subject than in the journalist’s tentative efforts to escape the drab horizons of her daily existence. Quietly perfect.
Marcus Field, book critic
I’m with Tolstoy in my grim fascination for unhappy families, so topping my list is Robert Kolker’s groundbreaking Hidden Valley Road (Quercus, £20). The Galvins of Colorado had 12 children between 1945 and 1965, and six of their sons developed schizophrenia. Kolker uses his prodigious journalistic skills to balance his darkly riveting tale of the family’s implosion against shifting attitudes to the treatment of this devastating condition. Debates of nature versus nurture, and psychotherapy versus medication are rigorously explored, with conclusions that finally offer hope.
