My 70 Favourite Books of 2010

Novels
1. Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber & Faber/Alfred A. Knopf, 2010) / Peter Carey
2. The Betrayal (Fig Tree, 2010) / Helen Dunmore
3. The Memory of Love (Bloomsbury, 2010) / Aminatta Forna
4. Faithful Place (Penguin, 2010) / Tana French
5. The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury, 2010) / Howard Jacobson

6. Father of the Rain (Grove/Atlantic, 2010) / Lily King
7. Great House (W.W. Norton, 2010) / Nicole Krauss
8. The Surrendered (Riverhead, 2010) / Chang-rae Lee
9. The Wilding (Faber & Faber, 2010) / Maria McCann
10. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (Sceptre, 2010) / David Mitchell

11. Ghost Light (Harvill Secker, 2010) / Joseph O’Connor
12. The Hand That First Held Mine (Headline Review/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) / Maggie O’Farrell
13. Private Life (Knopf Doubleday/Faber & Faber, 2010) / Jane Smiley
14. Man in the Woods (HarperCollins Publishers, 2010) / Scott Spencer
15. Trespass (Chatto & Windus, 2010) / Rose Tremain

First Novels
1. The House on Salt Hay Road (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010) / Carin Clevidence
2. The Spider Truces (Myriad Editions, 2010) / Tom Connolly
3. Saraswati Park (Fourth Estate, 2010) / Anjali Joseph
4. The Butterfly Cabinet (Headline Review, 2010) / Bernie McGill
5. Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (W.W. Norton, 2010) / Maaza Mengiste

6. Black Mamba Boy (HarperCollins, 2010) / Nadifa Mohamed
7. A Life Apart (Constable & Robinson, 2010) / Neel Mukherjee
8. The Invisible Bridge (Knopf Doubleday, 2010) / Julie Orringer
9. Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (Bloomsbury/Random House, 2010) / Helen Simonson
10. The Temple-goers (Viking, 2010) / Atish Taseer

Translations
1. The Twin (trans. from the Dutch by David Colmer) (Harvill Secker, 2010) / Gerbrand Bakker
2. Three Sisters (trans. from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin) (Telegram Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) / Bi Feiyu
3. Madame Bovary (trans. from the French by Lydia Davis) (Penguin Classics, 2010) / Gustave Flaubert
4. The Blind Side of the Heart (trans. from the German by Anthea Bell) (Harvill Secker, 2009/Vintage, 2010) / Julia Franck
5. To the End of the Land (trans. from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen) (Alfred A. Knopf/Jonathan Cape, 2010) / David Grossman
6. I Curse the River of Time [trans. from the Norwegian, Jeg forbanner tidens elv (2008), by Charlotte Barslund] (Harvill Secker, 2010) / Per Petterson

Stories
1. If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (Picador, 2010) / Robin Black
2. Mattaponi Queen (Graywolf Press, 2010) / Belle Boggs
3. Wild Child and Other Stories (Viking, 2010) / T.C. Boyle
4. The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador, 2010) / Deborah Eisenberg
5. Waiting for the Evening News: Stories of the Deep South (Sceptre, 2010) / Tim Gautreaux

6. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (Random House, 2010) / Yiyun Li
7. Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories (Jonathan Cape, 2010) / Thomas Lynch
8. Burning Bright (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2010) / Ron Rash
9. The Empty Family (Viking, 2010) / Colm Tóibín

Poetry
1. Human Chain (Faber & Faber, 2010) / Seamus Heaney
2. Small Hours (Faber & Faber, 2010) / Lachlan Mackinnon
3. The Wrecking Light (Picador, 2010) / Robin Robertson
4. The Best of It (Grove/Atlantic, 2010) / Kay Ryan
5. Rough Music (Carcanet Press, 2010) / Fiona Sampson

6. Of Mutability (Faber & Faber, 2010) / Jo Shapcott
7. Sandgrain and Hourglass (Bloodaxe, 2010) / Penelope Shuttle
8. Break the Glass (Copper Canyon, 2010) / Jean Valentine
9. White Egrets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) / Derek Walcott
10. New Light for the Old Dark (Jonathan Cape, 2010) / Sam Willetts

Nonfiction
1. Rebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town (Penguin, 2010) / Christopher de Bellaigue
2. Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010) / Frank Dikötter
3. Travels in Siberia (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010) / Ian Frazier
4. The Thirties: An Intimate History (Harper Press, 2010) / Juliet Gardiner
5. A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (Windmill Books, 2010) / Elena Gorokhova
6. The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps (trans. from the French by David Fernbach) (Verso, 2010) / Eric Hazan

7. Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford University Press, 2010) / Anthony Julius
8. Red Dust Road: An Autobiographical Journey (Picador, 2010) / Jackie Kay
9. Encounter (Faber and Faber, 2010) / Milan Kundera
10. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Penguin USA, 2010) / Diarmaid MacCulloch
11. A Reader on Reading (Yale University Press, 2010) / Alberto Manguel

12. What To Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness (Jonathan Cape, 2010) / Candia McWilliam
13. Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir (HarperPress, 2010) / Basharat Peer
14. Molotov’s Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History (Faber & Faber, 2010) / Rachel Polonsky
15. Driving Home: An American Scrapbook (Picador, 2010) / Jonathan Raban
16. Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (Picador/W.W. Norton, 2010) / Graham Robb

17. Cleopatra: A Life (Little, Brown, 2010) / Stacy Schiff
18. Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl (HarperPress, 2010) / Donald Sturrock
19. This Party’s Got to Stop (Granta, 2010) / Rupert Thomson
20. Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume I (University of California Press, 2011) / Mark Twain
21. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (Random House, 2010) / Isabel Wilkinson