100+ Literary Favourites of 2016

HERE’S A LIST of my 100+ favourite books of 2016 (though I have 200 favourite books). These are the books that I have read and enjoyed in the 2016 reading year. Almost all of them I read simply for pleasure.

NOVELS
1. Enchanted Islands (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2016) / Allison Amend
2. The Muse (Picador/Ecco, 2016) / Jessie Burton
3. The Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Michael Joseph, 2016) / Alexander Chee
4. Transit (Jonathan Cape, 2016) / Rachel Cusk
5. The Fortunes (Sceptre/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) / Peter Ho Davies
6. The Crime Writer (Sceptre, 2016) / Jill Dawson
7. The Dark Flood Rises (Canongate Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016) / Margaret Drabble
8. LaRose (Harper, 2016) / Louise Erdrich
9. Wedding Bush Road (Counterpoint Press/Brio, 2016) / David Francis
10. The Trespasser (Hodder & Stoughton/Viking, 2016) / Tana French

11. Wintering (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) / Peter Geye
12. Forty Rooms (Putnam, 2016) / Olga Grushin
13. Heat and Light (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2016) / Jennifer Haigh
13. Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown, 2016) / Adam Haslett
14. News of the World (Harper.William Morrow, 2016) / Paulette Jiles
15. The Good People (Picador/Panmacmillan Australia, 2016) / Hannah Kent
16. Hot Milk (Bloomsbury USA/Hamish Hamilton, 2016) / Deborah Levy
17. Mercury (Harper, 2016) / Margot Livesey
18. Nutshell (Jonathan Cape/Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2016) / Ian McEwan
19. The Book of Harlan (Akashic Books, 2016) / Bernice L. McFadden
20. The North Water (Scribner UK/Henry Holt, 2016) / Ian McGuire

21. Commonwealth (Harper/Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016) / Ann Patchett
23. Everybody’s Fool (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) / Richard Russo
24. Three Daughters of Eve (Viking, 2016) / Elif Shafak
25. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Allen & Unwin, 2016) / Dominic Smith
26. Mothering Sunday (Scribner UK/Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) / Graham Swift
27. Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Knopf Canada/Granta Books/W.W. Norton, 2016) / Madeleine Thien
28. The Gustav Sonata (Chatto & Windus/W.W. Norton, 2016) / Rose Tremain
29. Miss Jane (W.W. Norton/Picador, 2016) / Brad Watson
30. The Underground Railroad (Doubleday/Fleet, 2016) / Colson Whitehead

Translated Novels
31. Human Acts (trans. from the Korean by Deborah Smith) (Portobello Books/Hogarth, 2016) / Han Kang
32. War & Turpentine (trans. from the Dutch by David McKay) (Harvill Secker/Pantheon, 2016) / Stefan Hertmans
33. The Unseen (trans. from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw) (MacLehose Press, 2016) / Roy Jacobsen
34. Thus Bad Begins (trans. from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) / Javier Marías
35. Reputations (trans. from the Spanish by Anne McLean) (Bloomsbury Publishing/Riverhead Books, 2016 / Juan Gabriel Vásquez

FIRST NOVELS
36. Fallen Land (St Martin’s Press, 2016) / Taylor Brown
37. Grace (Counterpoint, 2016) / Natashia Deón
38. Over the Plain Houses (Hub City Press, 2016) / Julia Franks
39. What Belongs to You (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Picador, 2016) / Garth Greenwell
40. Homegoing (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) / Yaa Gyasi
41. The Outside Lands (Picador, 2016) / Hannah Kohler
42. In a Land of Paper Gods (Tinder Press, 2016) / Rebecca Mackenzie
43. Golden Hill (Faber & Faber, 2016) / Francis Spufford
44. The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko (St Martin’s Press, 2016) / Scott Stambach
45. A Quiet Life (The Borough Press, 2016) / Natasha Walter
45. Foxlowe (Fourth Estate, 2016) / Eleanor Wasserberg

Translated First Novels
45. Echoland (trans. from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett) (Harvill Secker, 2016) / Per Petterson
45. The Gardens of Consolation (trans. from the French by Adriana Hunter) (Europa Editions, 2016) / Parisa Reza

STORIES
46. Multitudes (Faber & Faber, 2016) / Lucy Caldwell
47. Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (Ecco Press, 2016) / Kathleen Collins
48. A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press, 2016) / Brian Evenson
49. Rotten Row (Faber & Faber, 2016) / Petina Gappah
50. The Pier Falls and Other Stories (Jonathan Cape/Doubleday, 2016) / Mark Haddon
51. Fen (Jonathan Cape, 2016) / Daisy Johnson
52. The High Places (Penguin Australia/Sceptre/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016) / Fiona McFarlane
53. Heartbreaker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016) / Maryse Meijer
54. Light Box (Daunt Books, 2016) / K.J. Orr
55. In the Land of Armadillos (Scribner, 2016) / Helen Maryles Shankman
55. All That Man Is (Jonathan Cape/Graywolf Press, 2016) / David Szalay
55. You May See a Stranger (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2016) / Paula Whyman
55. Dog Run Moon (The Dial Press/Granta Books, 2016) / Callan Wink
55. Legoland (Picador, 2016) / Gerard Woodward

Translated Stories
55. So Much for That Winter: Novellas (trans. from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra) (Graywolf Press, 2016) / Dorthe Nors

POETRY
56. Measures of Expatriation (Carcanet Press, 2016) / Vahni Capildeo
57. Nothing to Declare (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016) / Henri Cole
58. The Blind Road-Maker (Picador, 2016) / Ian Duhig
59. Certain Magical Acts (Penguin Books, 2016) / Alice Notley
60. Falling Awake (Jonathan Cape/W.W. Norton, 2016) / Alice Oswald
61. At the Foundling Hospital (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016) / Robert Pinsky
62. Jackself (Picador, 2016) / Jacob Polley
63. The After Party (Jim Duggan Books/Crown Publishing, 2016) / Jana Prikryl
64. Say Something Back (Picador, 2016) / Denise Riley
65. The Remedies (Picador, 2016) / Katharine Towers
65. Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016) / Ocean Vuong

NONFICTION
66. Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-49 (St Martin’s Press, 2016) / David Cesarani
67. Known and Strange Things: Essays (Random House/Faber & Faber, 2016) / Teju Cole
68. The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th-Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece (Chatto & Windus/Scribner, 2016) / Laura Cumming
69. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown Publishing, 2016) / Matthew Desmond
70. The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria (Bloomsbury Publishing/Liveright, 2016) / Janine di Giovanni

71. The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976 (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016) / Frank Dikötter
72. White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World (Canongate/Pantheon, 2016) / Geoff Dyer
73. The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (Penguin Press, 2016) / Ben Ehrenreich
74. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright, 2016) / Ruth Franklin
75. The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography (Chatto & Windus, 2016) / Edmund Gordon
76. Vietnam: A New History (Basic Books, 2016) / Christopher Goscha
77. Against Everything: Essays (Pantheon/Verso, 2016) / Mark Greif
78. Travels with Henry James (Nation Books/Avalon Publishing Group, 2016) / Henry James
79. Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (The Belnap Press/Harvard University Press, 2016) / Gareth Stedman Jones
80. Beryl Bainbridge: Love by All Sorts of Means: A Biography (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016) / Brendan King

81. The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Picador USA/Canongate Books, 2016) / Olivia Laing
82. The Outrun (Canongate Books, 2016) / Amy Liptrot
83. Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World (Viking, 2016) / Thomas F. Madden
84. The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between (Viking/Random House, 2016) / Hisham Matar
85. Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill (published in the U.K. as Hero of the Empire: The Making of Winston Churchill) (Doubleday/Allen Lane, 2016) / Candice Millard
86. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press, 2016) / Viet Thanh Nguyen
87. Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds (Harper, 2016) / Pamela Rotner Nakamoto
88. Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) / Cynthia Ozick
89. Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live (Catapult, 2016) / Peter Orner
90. The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present (Henry Holt, 2016) / John Pomfret

91. India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South India (Basic Books, 2016) / Srinath Raghavan
92. Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (The Bodley Head, 2016) / Lyndal Roper
93. The Romanovs: 1613-1918 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) / Simon Sebag Montefiore
94. Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Macmillan, 2016) / Douglas Smith
95. Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel (Viking, 2016) / John Stubbs
96. Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship (Bloomsbury Circus, 2016) / Anjan Sundaram
97. Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Bloomsbury Publishing/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016) / Frances Wilson
98. The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India (PublicAffairs/Perseus Books, 2016) / Jon Wilson

Translated Nonfiction
99. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (trans. from the Russian by Bela Shayevich) (Random House/Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016) / Svetlana Alexievich
100. Hitler: A Biography: Volume I: Ascent, 1889-1939 (trans. from the German by Jefferson Chase) (The Bodley Head/Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) / Volker Ullrich