January 2017 Highlights

NOVELS
1. Enigma Variations (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017) / André Aciman
2. Dark at the Crossing (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017) / Elliot Ackerman
3. A Harvest of Thorns (Thomas Nelson, 2017) / Corban Addison
4. Selection Day (Scribner, 2017) / Aravind Adiga
5. The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping (trans. from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green) (Schocken Books, 2017) / Aharon Appelfeld
6. The Golden Legend (Faber & Faber, 2017) / Nadeem Aslam
7. 4321 (Faber & Faber/Henry Holt, 2017) / Paul Auster
8. Days Without End (Viking, 2017) / Sebastian Barry
9. The Sleepwalker (Doubleday, 2017) / Chris Bohjalian
10. The Stolen Child (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 2017) / Lisa Carey

11. Dragon Springs Road (William Morrow, 2017) / Janie Chang
12. Transit (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017) / Rachel Cusk
13. Dalila (Jonathan Cape, 2017) / Jason Donald
14. All the News I Need (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017) / Joan Frank
15. Swimming Lessons (Fig Tree, 2017) / Claire Fuller
16. The Night Brother (The Borough Press, 2017) / Rosie Garland
17. Different Class (Touchstone, w2017) / Joanne Harris
18. Confessions (trans. from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu–Zeid) (W.W. Norton, 2017) / Rabee Jaber
19. Human Acts (trans. from the Korean by Deborah Smith) (Hogarth, 2017) / Han Kang
20. The Traitor’s Niche (trans. from the Albanian by John Hodgson) (Harvill Secker, 2017) / Ismail Kadare

21. The Signal Flame (Scribner, 2017) / Andrew Krivak
22. The Fall Guy (Jonathan Cape, 2017) / James Lasdun
23. Who Killed Piet Barol? (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017) / Richard Mason
24. The Crossing (Europa Editions, 2017) / Andrew Miller
25. A Cup of Rage (trans. from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler) (New Directions, 2017) / Raduan Nassar
26. Adventures in Modern Marriage (Quercus, 2017) / William Nicholson
27. Welcome to Lagos (Faber & Faber, 2017) / Chibundu Onuzo
28. The Horseman (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017) / Tim Pears
29. Behind Her Eyes (HarperCollins/Flatiron Books, 2017) / Sarah Pinborough
30. Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St Martin’s Press, 2017) / Kathleen Rooney

31. Class (Little, Brown, 2017) / Lucinda Rosenfeld
32. Lucky Boy (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2017) / Shanthi Sekaran
33. The Chosen Maiden (Doubleday Canada, 2017) / Eva Stachniak
34. Her Every Fear (William Morrow/Faber & Faber, 2017) / Peter Swanson
35. The Vanishing (Simon & Schuster UK, 2017) / Sophia Tobin
36. No Man’s Land (Nan A. Talese, 2017) / Simon Tolkien

FIRST NOVELS
1. The Bear and the Nightingale (Del Rey, 2017) / Katherine Arden
2. Miss Treadway and the Field Stars (4th Estate, 2017) / Miranda Emmerson
3. Little Deaths (Picador/Hatchette Books, 2017) / Emma Flint
4. History of Wolves (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017) / Emily Fridlund
5. Montpelier Parade (Harvill Secker, 2017) / Karl Geary
6. Rockadoon Shore (John Murray, 2017) / Rory Gleeson
7. Swallowing Mercury (trans. from the Polish by Eliza Marciniak) (Portobello Books, 2017) / Wioletta Greg
8. Homegoing (Viking, 2017) / Yaa Gyasi
9. West Virginia (The Unnamed Press, 2017) / Joe Halstead
10. The Dry (Little, Brown/Flatiron Books, 2017) / Jane Harper

11. The Nix (Picador, 2017) / Nathan Hill
12. The Keeper of Lost Things (Two Roads, 2017) / Ruth Hogan
13. English Animals (Little, Brown, 2017) / Laura Kaye
14. The Transition (4th Estate, 2017) / Luke Kennard
15. Sirens (Doubleday, 2017) / Joseph Knox
16. The Patriots (Spiegel & Grau, 2017) / Sana Krasikov
17. Ancient Tillage (trans. from the Portuguese by K.C.S. Sotelino) (New Directions, 2017) / Raduan Nassar
18. Under the Udala Trees (Granta Books, 2017) / Udala Okparanta
19. Savage Theories (trans. from the Spanish by Roy Kesey) (Soho, 2017) / Pola Oloixarac
20. The Evenings (trans. from the Dutch by Sam Garrett) (Pushkin Press, 2016) / Gerard Reve

21. The Second Mrs Hockaday (Algonquin Books, 2017) / Susan Rivers
22. A Word for Love (Riverhead Books, 2017) / Emily Robbins
23. Idaho (Random House, 2017) / Emily Ruskovich
24. The Fractured Life of Jimmy Dice (Tinder Press, 2017) / Ronan Ryan
25. Fever Dream (trans. from the Spanish by Megan McDowell) (Riverhead Books, 2017) / Samanta Schweblin
26. Spring Garden (trans. from the Japanese by Polly Barton) (Pushkin Press, 2017) / Tomoka Shibasaki

STORIES
1. Doctorow: Collected Stories (Random House, 2017) / E.L. Doctorow
2. The Man Who Shot Out My Eyes Is Dead (Ecco, 2017) / Chanelle Benz
3. Signals: New and Selected Stories (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017) / Tim Gautreaux
4. Difficult Women (Grove Press, 2017) / Roxane Gay
5. Bad Dreams (Jonathan Cape, 2017) / Tessa Hadley
6. The Burrow (trans. from the German by Michael Hofmann) (Penguin Classics, 2017) / Franz Kafka
7. Record of a Night Too Brief (trans. from the Japanese by Lucy North) (Pushkin Press, 2017) / Hiromi Kawakami
8. Always Happy Hour (Liveright, 2017) / Mary Miller
9. Homesick for Another World (The Penguin Press, 2017) / Ottessa Moshfegh
10. Heritage of Smoke (Dzanc Books, 2017) / Josip Novakovich

11. Tumbleweed (Esplanade Books/Véhicule Press, 2017) / Josip Novakovich
12. The Burning Ground (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017) / Adam O’Riordan

POETRY
1. Illuminate (Salmon Poetry, 2017) / Kerrie O’Brien
2. The Burning Ground (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017) / Adam O’Riordan
3. Moon for Sale (Carcanet Press, 2017) / Richard Price
4. Falling Ill: Last Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017) / C.K. Williams

NONFICTION
1. The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017) / Daniel Beer
2. The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables (Particular Books, 2017) / David Bellos
3. The Men in My Life: A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan (Harper, 2017) / Patricia Bosworth
4. The Long-Winded Lady (Stinging Fly Press, 2017) / Maeve Brennan
5. Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation (Simon & Schuster, 2017) / Alan Burdick
6. The Correspondence (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017) / J.D. Daniels
7. Bears in the Street: Three Journeys Across a Changing Landscape (St Martin’s Press, 2017) / Lisa Dickey
8. African Kaiser: General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and the Great War in Africa, 1914-1918 (Caliber, 2017) / Robert Gaudi
9. Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love (Harper, 2017) / Brad Gooch
10. Once Upon a Time in the East: A Story of Growing Up (Chatto & Windus, 2017) / Xiaolu Guo

11. Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films (Yale University Press, 2017) / Molly Haskell
12. Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017) / Bethany Hughes
13. Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum (4th Estate, 2017) / Kathryn Hughes
14. Island People: The Caribbean and the World (Canongate, 2017) / Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
15. The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis (Liveright, 2017) / Patrick Kingsley
16. Nothing But a Circus: Misadventures Among the Powerful (Allen Lane, 2017) / Daniel Levin
17. A Mother’s Tale (Mad River Books, 2017) / Phillip Lopate
18. Age of Anger: A History of the Present (Allen Lane, 2017) / Pankaj Mishra
19. The Pen and the Brush: How passion for Art Shaped Nineteenth-Century French Novels (trans. from the French by Adriana Hunter) (Other Press, 2017) / Anka Muhlstein
20. Lara: The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago (Ecco, 2017) / Anna Pasternak

21. The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Harvard University Press, 2017) / Alexis Peri
22. Molly Keane: A Life (Virago, 2017) / Sally Phipps
23. The Holocaust: A New History (Viking, 2017) / Laurence Rees
24. Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea (Oxford University Press, 2017) / Jan Rüger
25. Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes (Bloomsbury USA, 2017) / Michael Sims
26. The New Book of Snobs: A Definitive Guide to Modern Snobbery (Constable, 2017) / D.J. Taylor
27. Taking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America’s Lingua Franca (Bellevue Literary Press, 2017) / John McWhorter

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