After the Funeral and Other Stories
by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape)
The fourth collection of short stories by the master literary stylist are melancholic but emotionally satisfying and hew to earlier themes, exploring transgressions between siblings, parents and spouses and burrowing into life’s many disappointments and consolations.
Be Mine
by Richard Ford (Bloomsbury)
In the fifth Frank Bascombe novel, one of the US’s best stylists narrates the road trip the now septuagenarian Frank takes with his 47-year-old dying son to Mt Rushmore. Wry, rich, full of quiet sadness.
The Bee Sting
by Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton)
Shortlisted for the Booker is this novel from the Irish author of Skippy Dies, a tragicomedy about the Barnes family. Absorbing, surefooted, with engaging prose, it is both deeply funny and deadly serious.
Cahokia Jazz
by Francis Spufford (Faber)
A murder-mystery set in 1920s America, with jazz and speakeasies, but where a pre-Columbus multiracial civilisation has continued to thrive by the Mississippi River. An immersive, pleasurable world, with plot and action to burn.
The Covenant of Water
by Abraham Verghese (Grove Atlantic)
This old-fashioned, beautifully written, 700-page family saga set on south India’s Malabar Coast follows a family suffering an affliction where, in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning.
Cuddy
by Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury)
The many afterlives of Cuddy, or St Cuthbert, after the death of the bishop and unofficial patron saint of England’s northeast in 687AD, told in multiple voices and viewpoints through time.
Day
by Michael Cunningham (Fourth Estate)
Sensitively written novel from the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of The Hours circles a fragmenting family in Brooklyn, a couple and her beloved younger brother, and their growing children, as they navigate crises and trauma across the pandemic years.
The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa
by Stephen Buoro (Bloomsbury)
Astute debut that upends the typical coming-of-age story – of one Andrew Aziza, a black Nigerian teen who loves blondes – thanks to its lightness of touch, virtuoso evocation of his protagonist and abiding sense of humour.
The Fraud
by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
Zadie Smith’s first historical novel, a 19th-century tale told with wit and Smith’s singular voice, is scaffolded on the trial of an Australian butcher who claimed to be heir to a British aristocratic title and fortune. It’s also a meditation on storytelling and being believed.
The Guest
by Emma Cline (Chatto & Windus)
Razor-sharp satire, wrapping in a character study and psychological thriller, of excess and power in America’s Hamptons elite seaside towns as seen through the eyes of a young female freeloader, who’s losing her edge.
Julia
by Sandra Newman (Granta)
The author of The Heavens and The Men ingeniously reimagines the world of Orwell’s 1984 through the eyes of “prim, grim” Winston Smith’s lover, Julia.
Kala
by Colin Walsh (Atlantic)
In expat Irish writer Walsh’s novel debut, three old friends meet in a town on Ireland’s west coast 15 years after one of their wider group went missing. It’s a suspenseful literary thriller that delivers strong characterisation and atmospheric prose.
The Librarianist
by Patrick deWitt (Bloomsbury)
Sweet and beguiling story of Bob Comet, a retired librarian who begins to volunteer at an old folks home. The life and character of a seemingly ordinary individual are revealed, simply, wittily and with great warmth.
The Mountain in the Sea
by Ray Nayler (Hachette)
Top-drawer speculative fiction about the possibility of superintelligent animals, with lyrical writing and fresh new ideas and reflections on intelligence and consciousness.
North Woods
by Daniel Mason (Hachette)
Epic, original novel about a house in New England, as told through the lives of those who live in it through the centuries. Captivating, despite its piecemeal nature, beautifully paced and often moving.
Prophet Song
by Paul Lynch (Oneworld)
Terrifying near-future thriller in which Ireland has been overtaken by an authoritarian party. A mother must endure a dangerous journey across a city to find her son.
The Seventh Son
by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson Heinemann)
Ideas-filled, fluidly written and often unpredictable speculative fiction, in which a talented young American academic agrees to carry a child for a British couple, only for a billionaire entrepreneur to monstrously meddle.
The Shards
by Bret Easton Ellis (Swift Press)
The provocative master of paranoid zeitgeist-channelling and the luridly weird in a return to form and subject: alienated teens in 1980s LA. This time, there’s a serial killer on the loose, and Ellis delivers a gripping, seductive, darkly satirical horror novel.
Soldier Sailor
by Claire Kilroy (Faber)
A tender, often darkly funny novel, taut and skilled in the telling, of first-time motherhood with an emotionally distant husband, incorporating all the joy, exhaustion and shock of leaving one’s autonomous professional existence.
Stone Yard Devotional
by Charlotte Wood (A&U)
An unnamed atheist goes to live in a monastery in rural NSW after her parents’ deaths, launching a novel that brilliantly stitches together the daily tribulations of a confined life, her thoughts, memories and digressions, until outside events intrude.
The Wren, the Wren
by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
The Irish Booker winner has written on the complex family relationships – creating a rich, stylish, portrait across three generations – of Nell, her mother Carmel, and Carmel’s father, a famous poet gifted in language and betrayal.
Yellowface
by Rebecca F Kuang (Blue Door)
Thrilling, nuanced, insightful black comedy in which a young white writer of middling success steals, and passes off as her own, the unpublished manuscript of her more successful Asian former classmate.
Be in to win 10 books
For a chance to be the lucky winner of 10 books, email your name and address to listenergiveaways@aremedia.co.nz with ‘Best Books’ in the subject line by midday on December 1. We’ll be running The Year in Books throughout the next week so look out for hot picks for lovers of fiction and non-fiction stories alike.
The 100 Best Books was compiled with the invaluable assistance of Chris Baskett, Helena Brow, Catherine Chidgey, Sue Copsey, Kiran Dass, Nik Dirga, Greg Dixon, Elisabeth Easther, Brigid Feehan, Charlotte Grimshaw, Kirsty Gunn, Linda Herrick, David Hill, Stephanie Johnson, Anne Kennedy, Elizabeth Kerr, Rachael King, Graeme Lay, Eileen Merriman, Chris Moore, Kelly Ana Morey, Emma Neale, Jenny Nicholls, Jeremy Rees, Sue Reidy, Catherine Robertson, Anna Rogers, Josie Shapiro, Tina Shaw, Craig Sisterson, Elizabeth Smither, Gill South, Rebecca Styles, Fiona Sussman, Andrew Paul Wood and others.
