My Top 10 Books of 2016

The geeky act of making lists of favourite books is a pleasure I don't think we should deny ourselves. What better way to get a snap-shot of someone's reading tastes and pick up on recommendations for great books you might have missed over the year. I read 112 books this year, many of them newly published in 2016 and many of them highly enjoyable. However, these ten books all show great craft but also feel personally significant to me. Click on the titles below to read my full reviews of each book. You can also watch my BookTube video talking about these ten books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7x_TPKvl7I&t=71s

The Man Without a Shadow by Joyce Carol Oates

Anyone who knows how Oates is my favourite author might think it is an obvious choice for me to put a new novel by her on my list, but this is truly an excellent book. The more I think about it the more layers it yields about the meaning of personality and romance. An unusual love story between a man with short term memory loss and scientist Margot that explores the elusive mechanics of the mind.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

I can't ignore the significance of this novel coming out in an American election year when a campaign fuelled by racism and anti-immigration helped a politically-inexperienced misogynist enter The White House. This story about an escaped slave named Cora who travels a physical underground railroad to arrive in different states of racism America says something so significant about the times we live in.

The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

The state of loneliness is a curious psychological phenomenon which seems natural to the human condition, but one which is only increasing in an age of so-called online connectedness. Laing's incredibly personal and well-researched non-fiction book looks at the lives and work of many great queer artists to see how loneliness manifests in different ways. This is an incredibly touching and moving book.

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack

Although it may seem daunting to read a novel that is one continuous sentence it comes to seem quite a natural thing as you enter the consciousness of its Irish protagonist. It's a significant reflection of the times we live in as much as it is as a moving story of family and the working life. Reading it is an electrifying experience.

Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

Great survival stories are both thrilling and heartening. This is a tale of a girl who survives a brutal civil war only to discover that her natural desire to love women goes against the religious beliefs of her family and community. She faces a very different kind of challenge to survive as she's pressured to settle down into marriage with a man and gradually assert what she really wants in life. It's a brutally honest and inspiring story which suggests strategies for unifying disparate communities which are bitterly embattled.

Dinosaurs on Other Planets by Danielle McLaughlin

Creating finely constructed short stories that give the impact of a full-length novel is a difficult challenge. But this is something McLaughlin accomplishes consistently and beautifully in this memorable and significant debut collection. Even though I read it at the very beginning of the year many of these stories about people across all levels of Irish society have remained clear in my mind. You can watch me discussing this and other great books of short stories from 2016 here.

The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain

Tremain's tremendous artistry for plucking an uncommon story from history and making it come alive is unparalleled. Here she writes about two boys in Switzerland in the time immediately following WWII, but moves backwards and then forwards in time to show the repercussions of political neutrality and hidden love. This is a beautifully accomplished novel.

Autumn by Ali Smith

There's no writer more daring and inventive than Ali Smith. Not only has she bravely planned a quartet of novels based around the seasons, but she's reflecting in them what's happening in society now. This novel focuses on the country's mood in the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit vote and an uncommon friendship between young Elisabeth and a mysterious old man Daniel. In doing so she addresses the meaning of nationality, the state of the modern world and the nature of language. She does this with great flair, humour and passion.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien

Music has played a large part in many great novels this year – from Rose Tremain's novel to Julian Barnes' most recent novel “The Noise of Time” - but Thien skilfully shows how the art of composition and the compositions themselves fare under fifty years of living under the Maoist government. A girl follows her family's history in this complex, absorbing story which culminates in a depiction of the infamous student protests in Tiananmen Square. It's an epic novel.

The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss

It's always an immense pleasure to discover an incredibly talented author I've not read before and one of this year's great finds for me is Sarah Moss. This novel takes a potential family tragedy and expands the story to explore the messiness of ordinary life in such a tender and poignant way. It also reflects back to the past to consider the meaning of loss using such a disarming style of narration which totally gripped me.

Have you read any of my choices? Which are you most interested to read? Let me know some of your favourite books of the year. I'm always eager to hear about books I might have missed reading.

The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss

When you experience a personal tragedy it fills your whole world. You’re aware and empathize with the suffering other individuals have experienced in the past and continue to experience all over the world. But this knowledge is more likely to colour your daily existence rather than saturate it. How do you contextualize your personal loss without turning it into just another story like the many stories of heartache we read about every day in the news? Sarah Moss’ new novel “The Tidal Zone” has an astounding way of looking at a potential personal tragedy within one household and simultaneously shows how it is situated in the expansive tapestry of human experience. She does this writing in a way which is poetic, profound and filled with wry humour, but it’s also a story firmly grounded in the small details of real life.

The narrator Adam Goldschmidt is a stay-at-home Dad whose domestic routine is abruptly interrupted when he receives a call that his eldest daughter Miriam has stopped breathing. She’s been resuscitated, but the doctors don’t fully understand what went wrong with her body. The novel follows the tense aftermath of this incident when Adam has become hyperaware of the fragility of life, yet the ongoing ordinariness of daily existence continues on regardless. There is dinner to make, clothes to iron, his younger daughter Rose to pick up from school and cleaning to do. All this must continue even while his teenage daughter Miriam impatiently waits in the hospital for weeks while being monitored.

Sarah Moss writes powerfully about how the physical space of a hospital is flooded with emotion: “Hospitals have their own gravitational field, their own atmosphere; you can feel it from the car parks.” Anyone who has spent any length of time in a hospital knows this sensation of all thought and feeling being intensely focused on the immediacy of what’s happening and that life is at stake. There are glancing encounters with the trauma other people experience and there are periods of excruciating boredom while waiting for tests and procedures to be conducted. This reminded me of the wonderfully rendered account of a couple’s vigilance over their sick child in the hospital in Lucy Caldwell’s recent short story ‘Multitudes’.

Meanwhile, Adam’s thoughts also frequently roam to an account of the WWII bombing and subsequent reconstruction of the Coventry Cathedral which he is researching and writing about for a walking tour. He considers how when the city was being bombed people had to carry on with their daily lives and that “Domestic routine takes priority over political violence until the very last minute.” His intense engagement with the stories of people’s fate in wartime shows on a macro level the feelings of uncertainty and heartache he’s experiencing on his own micro level. So when he ruminates upon the strategies and plans the designers of the reconstructed Cathedral take it’s almost as if he’s planning how he can also rebuild a stable household for his family following their intense brush with tragedy.

Adam wants his home to be capable of containing the messiness of ordinary life while also not living in a state of constant emergency where he must be constantly vigilant about his children’s health. He wants them to live in that state of blissful ignorance about the daily dangers and fragility of life while also being aware of the gift of a relatively happy and healthy existence: “may we heal enough to take for granted sky and water and light”. He’s aware of how these points of view are all filtered through the stories we narrate to ourselves and each other about the past and our present lives. He remarks how “You think you want a story, you think you want an ending, but you don’t. You want life. You want disorder and ignorance and uncertainty.” He’s aware of the ability stories have to drain the lifeblood out of existence and not faithfully represent the feeling of experience. At the same time he knows that “Stories have endings; that’s why we tell them, for reassurance that there is meaning in our lives.” How to live fruitfully without the need for constant reassurance?

Most people look to religion, but Adam resolutely states: "I'm not a believer. I trust that's already clear." Inspiration comes from Adam’s father who never allowed himself to be confined within the story that was written for him. He spent years travelling the world and living in intentional communities. Living with groups of other people, they tried to rewrite the rules by which our personal lives are played out under the regulations of larger society. Many of these communities weren’t able to sustain themselves in the long term and Adam’s father is very attentive to their shortcomings: “My generation screwed up all right, just like the one before, but we had ideas. Yes, also like the one before.” He doesn’t have a rose-tinted view of where they went wrong, but at least they tried to conscientiously create a better way of life rather than conforming to the standards laid out for them by their parents. Adam gleans from this a strategy for his family to live in a way which doesn’t confine them to a humdrum existence. Incidentally, I really appreciated getting this balanced perspective about a post-war generation’s experiments with intentional communities after reading the rather one-sided view in Kate Atkinson’s otherwise magnificent novel “A God in Ruins.”

Coventry Cathedral tapestry: "His tapestry Christ in Glory, stood the full height of the building, its solid colours and softness a counterpoint to the brilliance of stained glass, gazing down the length of the nave at the ruins behind."

There are many more admirable details contained in this beautiful novel than I can possibly recount in a brief review. It meaningfully points out shortcomings in our current society such as lack of employment opportunities, the shortcomings of academic institutions and the NHS and our own inertia watching cooking shows: “we’re all obsessed with obesity and weight loss and also fucking baking.” But it never comes across like the author is whinging; it’s more like she’s articulating and relating to the frustrations many of us feel living within a problematic society. She’s also highly attentive to the positive things about it in the people and systems which do respond to the needs and welfare of individuals. As well as considering these larger social issues, this is a poignant novel about a marriage with a hardworking wife in full time employment, the gender stereotypes Adam challenges as a househusband and the changing dynamics of the relationship between siblings.

“The Tidal Zone” magnificently captures the real grit and poignancy of daily life while framing it within a bigger picture. It’s an emotionally affecting read with realistic and relatable characters that will keep you gripped worrying what will happen to them. This is the first novel by Sarah Moss that I’ve read, but I’m now eager to read more of her books.

Have you read anything else by this author? If so, let me know which book by her I should pick up next.