100 Literary Favourites of 2014
THE YEAR 2014 HAS COME TO AN END. This has been another vintage year for both fiction and nonfiction. It’s literally a bumper harvest of literature. Here are my favourite reads of 2014, arranged alphabetically by authors’ names. They are not necessarily the best books of the year. What I have listed here are merely a selection of some of my favourite books that I have read this year, books that have resonated with me, books that have left an impression on me, books that I enjoyed in one way or another. This list is of course subjective because I have only read a small percentage of the books published this year. It is almost impossible to do a Top 10. I could easily add another hundred books to the list if I wanted to. Like many serious readers, I buy far more books than I can possibly read, but nothing makes me happier. As always, I look forward with anticipation to a new reading year.
1. The Incarnations (Doubleday, 2014) / Susan Barker
2. The Temporary Gentleman (Faber & Faber, 2014) / Sebastian Barry
3. Above the East China Sea (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) / Sarah Bird
4. All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner/Fourth Estate, 2014) / Anthony Doerr
5. The Girl Who Couldn’t Read (Blue Door, 2014) / John Harding
6. Dear Thief (Atavist Books, 2014) / Samantha Harvey
7. The Book of Unknown Americans (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) / Cristina Henríquez
8. The Emperor Waltz (Fourth Estate, 2014) / Philip Hensher
9. Spilt Milk (Penguin Books, 2014) / Amanda Hodgkinson
10. Neverhome (Little, Brown, 2014) / Laird Hunt
12. Remember Me Like This (Random House, 2014) / Bret Anthony Johnston
13. Euphoria (Atlantic Monthly Press/Picador, 2014) / Lily King
14. The Moor’s Account (Pantheon, 2014) / Laila Lalami
15. Florence Gordon (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) / Brian Morton
16. Winter (Fourth Estate, 2014) / Christopher Nicholson
17. Lila (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Virago/Little, Brown, 2014) / Marilynne Robinson
18. The Remedy for Love (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2014) / Bill Roorbach
19. The Architect’s Apprentice (Viking, 2014) / Elif Shafak
20. Family Life (Faber & Faber/W.W. Norton, 2014) / Akhil Sharma
22. All My Puny Sorrows (Faber & Faber/McSweeney’s, 2014) / Miriam Toews
23. Nora Webster (Viking/Scribner, 2014) / Colm Tóibín
24. The Paying Guests (Virago/Riverhead, 2014) / Sarah Waters
25. History of the Rain (Bloomsbury Publishing/Bloomsbury USA, 2014) / Niall Williams
26. A Man Called Ove (trans. from the Swedish by Henning Koch) (Atria Books/Sceptre, 2014) / Fredrik Backman
27. The Last Lover (trans. from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen) (Yale University Press, 2014) / Can Xue
28. The End of Days (trans. from the German by Susan Bernofsky) (Portobello Books, 2014) / Jenny Erpenbeck
29. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (trans. from the Italian by Ann Goldstein) (Europa Editions, 2014) / Elena Ferrante
30. The Cold Song (trans. from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland) (Other Press, 2014) / Linn Ullmann
31. Panic in a Suitcase (Riverhead, 2014) / Yelena Akhtiorskaya
32. Life Drawing (Picador/Random House, 2014) / Robin Black
33. Ruby (Hogarth, 2014) / Cynthia Bond
34. Academy Street (Canongate Books, 2014) / Mary Costello
35. A Song for Issy Bradley (Hutchinson, 2014) / Carys Bray
36. Painted Horses (Grove Press, 2014) / Malcolm Brooks
37. Shotgun Lovesongs (Thomas Dunne Books/Picador, 2014) / Nickolas Butler
38. High as the Horses’ Bridles (Henry Holt, 2014) / Scott Cheshire
39. The Enchanted (Harper/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014) / Rene Denfeld
40. An Untamed State (Black Cat/Grove Press, 2014) / Roxane Gay
42. Elizabeth Is Missing (Penguin Viking, 2014) / Emma Healey
43. Fourth of July Creek (Ecco, 2014) / Smith Henderson
44. Preparation for the Next Life (Tyrant Books, 2014) / Atticus Lish
45. The Undertaking (Atlantic Books/Grove Press, 2014) / Audrey Magee
46. Dust (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) / Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
47. After Me Comes the Flood (Serpent’s Tail, 2014) / Sarah Perry
48. In the Light of What We Know (Picador/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014) / Zia Haider Rahman
49. We Are Not Ourselves (Simon & Schuster/Fourth Estate, 2014) / Matthew Thomas
50. The Visionist (Little, Brown/Simon & Schuster, 2014) / Rachel Urquhart
50. The Great Glass Sea (Grove Press, 2014) / Josh Weil
51. The Emerald Light in the Air (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Granta Books, 2014) / Donald Antrim
52. Stone Mattress: Nine Tales (Nan A. Talese/Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014) / Margaret Atwood
53. Young Skins (Jonathan Cape, 2014) / Colin Barrett
54. The Redemption of Galen Pike (Salt Publishing, 2014) / Carys Davies
55. Noontide Toll (Granta Books, 2014) / Romesh Gunesekera
56. Infidelities (Faber & Faber, 2014) / Kirsty Gunn
57. The Other Language (Pantheon, 2014) / Francesca Marciano
58. Thunderstruck and Other Stories (The Dial Press, 2014) / Elizabeth McCracken
59. The American Lover (Random House, 2014) / Rose Tremain
61. Bright Travellers (Jonathan Cape, 2014) / Fiona Benson
62. All One Breath (Jonathan Cape, 2014) / John Burnside
63. Moontide (Bloodaxe Books, 2014) / Niall Campbell
64. From Elsewhere (The Gallery Press, 2014) / Ciaran Carson
65. Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Carcanet Press, 2014) / Louise Glück
66. Corridor (Graywolf Press, 2014) / Saskia Hamilton
67. Fire Songs (Faber & Faber, 2014) / David Harsent
68. Second Childhood (Graywolf Press, 2014) / Fanny Howe
69. The Stairwell (Jonathan Cape, 2014) / Michael Longley
70. This Blue (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014) / Maureen N. McLane
70. Digest (Four Way, 2014) / Gregory Pardlo
70. Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014) / Claudia Rankine
70. An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet, 2014) / Karen McCarthy Woolf
71. Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Atlantic Books, 2014) / Scott Anderson
72. Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (Alfred A. Knopf/The Bodley Head, 2014) / Karen Armstrong
73. Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) / Sven Beckert
74. Updike (Harper, 2014) / Adam Begley
75. Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (Bloomsbury Publishing/Bloomsbury Press, 2014) / James Booth
76. Moral Imagination: Essays (Princeton University Press, 2014) / David Bromwich
77. Joan of Arc: A History (Faber & Faber, 2014) / Helen Castor
78. Loitering: New & Collected Essays (Tin House Books, 2014) / Charles D’Ambrosio
79. The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014) / Meghan Daum
80. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) / David Brion Davis
82. Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts (Yale University Press, 2014) / Robert M. Dowling
83. The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2014) / Greg Grandin
84. Gandhi Before India (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) / Ramachandra Guha
85. Eleanor Marx: A Life (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014) / Rachel Holmes
86. Ten Cities that Made an Empire (Allen Lane, 2014) / Tristram Hunt
87. Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre (Princeton University Press, 2014) / Jonathan Israel
88. The Empathy Exams: Essays (Graywolf Press, 2014) / Leslie Jamieson
89. Midnight’s Descendants: South Asia from Partition to the Present Day (William Collins, 2014) / John Keay
90. Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas (W.W. Norton, 2014) / Adam Kirsch
91. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Bloomsbury Publishing/Henry Holt, 2014) / Elizabeth Kolbert
92. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (Bloomsbury Circus/W.W. Norton, 2014) / John Lahr
93. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) / Hermione Lee
94. Berlin: Imagine a City (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/St Martin’s Press, 2014) / Rory MacLean
95. Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood: A History in Thirteen Centuries (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 2014) / Justin Marozzi
96. Other People’s Countries: A Journey into Memory (Jonathan Cape, 2014) / Patrick McGuinness
97. My Life in Middlemarch (published in the U.K. as The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot) (Crown/Granta, 2014) / Rebecca Mead
98. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014) / Evan Osnos
99. The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (Viking, 2014) / Michael Pye
100. The Novel: A Biography (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2014) / Michael Schmidt
100. Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) / Jan Swafford
posted by Eric Forbes at 5:03 PM
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