Material Witness

My favourite books of 2022: Part 2, non-fiction

My reading resolutions for 2022 included reading more non-fiction, and it's been a hugely rewarding experience. The 11 - up from two last year! - all opened new worlds, from the 17th Century English Republic to the Moorish history of Spain - and all showed that story-telling isn't just for novelists.

The 2022 reading was turbo-charged in the summer when a friend was appointed to the non-fiction Bailie-Gifford Prize judging panel and I started picking books out of the long and short lists, which proved to be an absolute treasure trove.   

Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott

Meet Dasani Coates, the unforgettable protagonist of Andrea Elliott's extraordinary journey into the hidden shame of New York City, where poverty, violence and narcotics blight countless lives.  NYT journalist first encounters Dasani as an 11-year-old child living with her mother and partner, and her seven siblings, step- and half- siblings in a single room in a Brooklyn homeless shelter. Dasani is strong and smart and resilient and she needs every ounce of her inner will because what follows is an extraordinary journey through an adolescent life that would likely smash all hope and lifefrom most. With parents in and out of rehab, stuck in a system that often seems designed to compound rather than address their problems, Dasani fights to stay above water and find a route, through education, out of the poverty that has afflicted her family. It's a spell-binding story, at times unbelievable but all too real. It speaks about love and courage and the crsuhing oppression of systemic poverty as experienced by black people in the world's richest and most glamorous city. Elliott deservedly won a Pulitzer for her work.   

The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland

No matter how much I read about the Holocaust, such is the scale of the evil and horror that every time I read something new about it, it always has the emotional intensity of reading about it for the first time. This incredible story brings that intensity over and over again as it recounts the tale of Rudolf Vrba, who in 1944 became the first Jewish inmate to escape Auschwitz, alongside his friend Fred Wetzler. Vrba's intimacy with the Auschwitz killing machine helps to deliver a detailed description of life within the camp, as he uses the Nazis predictability and adherence to order to help to plot his escape. This is thrillingly told - it's non-fiction written as a novel - and the aftermath, when Vrba and Wetzler struggle to persuade the world outside to accept the truth of the camps and to act, is quite extraordinary.    

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

For anyone who enjoyed Dopesick - either Beth Macy's brilliant book, or the television adaptation - Empire of Pain is mandatory reading. Radden Keefe's meticulous, detailed but thrilling history of the dastardly Sackler family and their destructive influence on US society through the opioid epidemic is magnificent and every bit as compelling as any novel I read this year. The story starts with the migration of Isaac Sackler from the Ukraine to New York in the early 20th Century and finishes with the law suits against his descendants' company for its role in the misery, chaos and death caused by the painkiller OxyContin. The middle is an astonishing story of the rise and fall of an American dream. It's brilliant and deservedly earned Radden-Keefe the 2021 Bailie-Gifford prize. 

Restless Republic by Anna Keay

Just as the new Carolean age began in September of this year, I was cast into this history of the events that separated his two eponymous predecessors. England's only period without a monarch in a millennium. The history I was taught in school covered a handful of key Civil War battles, a regicide and the Restoration, with very little detail of what happened in between. Anna Keay fills this gap with a very human history of the English Republic that artfully builds a story around the activities of a handful of influential and extraordinary figures. These range from William Petty, the doctor who surveyed Ireland for Cromwell, to Charlotte Stanley, Countess of Derby, who led one of the last holdouts against the new regime on the Isle of Man. It's brilliantly constructed book, full of vivid detail that brings the story to life as well as sharp insights into the political and social turmoil of the Republic. 

España by Giles Tremlett 

The closer we get to leaving Spain, the more urgent my need to make better sense of all we've seen and experienced here. This concise story of the country provides fascinating insight into how both its history and geography has shaped modern Spain. It's a country apart, separated from Europe by the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees and with long and profound influence from the Moors to the South and Hispano America to the west. Tremlett covers everything from Trajan to Velazquez and Colón to Franco in a successful quest to bring insight and context to the story of this beguiling and elusive country. I also thoroughly enjoyed Spain by Jan Morris, a travelogue first published in the 1960s. 

A Beer in the Loire by Tommy Barnes

For a complete change of pace, this funny and enjoyable tale of a disillusioned London marketing exec packing it all in and reinventing himself as a craft brewer in the Loire is great fun. Barnes documents his often disastrous attempts to bring great beer to wine country with a charming self-deprecating humour, all the while testing the patience of his wife, his neighbours and his murderous dog Kurt. 

 

 

 

My favourite books of 2022: Part One, fiction

What a year it's been. Great books everywhere, and for once some time to read! This post usually comes at the end of December, but seeing as everyone's out there buying Christmas presents now, this seems to be the moment for the best of list. 

With a month to go, I've read (or listened to) 79 books, and probably with more variety than many previous years. This blog is nominally still dedicated to crime fiction, and there's still quite a bit of that, but also a lot more non-fiction than usual, historical fiction, spies, thrillers and literary fiction, whatever that is. And about 50/50 between men and women. Most of the books listed here were published recently, but I've still enjoyed dipping back into time. 

Still Life by Sarah Winman 

There is something incedibly special about this book, and I've been recommending and buying it for loads of people. Back in January, it transported me straight to the Piazza Santo Spirito in Florence, and if I'm honest I didn't really want to come back. As I wrote then in this review, "I cannot recall the last occasion a novel held me so spellbound and was so successful at evoking a time and a place, creating a canvas so vivid. I wish I could read it again for the first time". Simply magical and if you haven't discovered it yet, I envy you. I also delved into Winman's back catalogue and thoroughly enjoyed both Tin Man and A Year of Marvellous Ways. And as the year closes, I'm now listening to Winman's own reading of the book, and it's captured me entirely once again.

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

A new novel from Kate Atkinson is always a cause for celebration, and she never disappoints. This rollicking tale of the roaring twenties, of night clubs and gangsters, of coppers and dancers, is marvellous. Atkinson has a particular gift for writing wonderful female characters, and here is one of her best, Gwendolen Kelling, a courageous, smart and straight-talking librarian turned sleuth who goes to London from Yorkshire in search of a pair of missing girls. She finds herself mixed up with the after-party empire of club owner Nellie Coker and her fabulously dysfunctional family. Atkinson creates a vivid, sparkling London with a seedy underbelly and a cast of characters to match. Great fun and with the beautiful linguistic flourish you come to expect from her.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

There is hope for all of us aging aspiring novelists in the triumphant form of Bonnie Garmus who has delivered a shining and memorable debut with this effervescent tale of Elizabeth Zott, aspiring scientist turned television cookery phenomenon.  In August's review I found Lessons in Chemistry, "so well conceived, so beautifully written, so charming, clever, funny and moving that the hesitancy (to review it for fear of not being able to do it justice) was overcome by an urgent need to tell everyone to read it. Read it!" Apparently Apple has a dramatization in the works, and I can't wait. 

The Overstory by Richard Powers

This is something very different, but very powerful, hugely moving and important. A tale of trees, and their power and their central role in vital ecosystems, but also their vulnerability and expendability in the face of capitalism's destructive logic. I found The Overstory, which is a story of eco activism, strangely mesmeric, with its slightly off beat rhythm and unconventional approach to its story. It packs a massive punch, delivering its message of our hopeless inaction in the face of the climate and biodiversity crises. Reading this book makes it much easier to understand how people gravitate to groups like Extinction Rebellion. 

Flashman at the Charge by George MacDonald Fraser

This is my third time round the Flashman novels, and they're no less entertaining with each reading. Here the newly minted Colonel Flashman, toady, coward and cheat, finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time yet again, participating in the famous Charge of the Light Brigade in Balaklava during the Crimean War. Flashman's colourful and no holds barred account doesn't spare the lash from the army's hapless commanders and MacDonald Fraser's combination of history, satire and adventure delivers as ever. 

Garnethill by Denise Mina 

I worry sometimes that Denise Mina is unfairly overlooked in the pantheon of great modern crime writers, because I see less buzz about her than so many others. Maybe it's because the books are rarely straightforward and ask the reader to enter a world of moral ambiguity when it's so much more comfortable to see things in black and white. So it is here in a 1998 novel that I have somehow overlooked (I know, I know) that takes us into an uncompromising story in an uncompromising city, Glasgow. Maureen O'Donnell, abuse survivor, isn't easy to love. After she finds her boyfriend dead in her flat and herself the prime suspect she embarks on a quest for a combination of vengeance and justice that upsets plenty of carts along the way. There's a rawness and honesty to the writing that I really admire and feel drawn to. And for those who don't recognise the name, I also recommend Mina's Alex Morrow detective series, one of the most underrated in the genre. 

Queen High by CJ Carey

October, the month after burying one Queen, was a good time to read about another and think more about the purpose and direction of our monarchy. Queen High is CJ Carey's follow-up to the brilliant Widowland, set in her meticulously crafted alternate world in which Britain is a vassal state of Nazi Germany. It's 1955 and Wallis Simpson has been installed on the throne by the de facto occupying power - although sold to a weary and downtrodden nation as an alliance. Where there is hope it lies in the form of the absent Princess Elizabeth, who may or may not be alive. Too much to say about this book here, so you'd best read the review of "a terrific thriller, taut with tension and drama throughout. It's a feminist novel with important messages about the role of women in society. It also has much to say about literature and poetry and their roles in our private and public affairs".  

V for Victory by Lissa Evans

This is a world we know better: London in the late stages of the war, with the same weary populace driven to distraction by the murderous lottery of the V2 rockets raining death and destruction on their battered city. Lissa Evans brings an originality to the scene with a novel that draws a series of intimate portraits of Londoners trying to survive the onslaught. V might represent the rocket, or perhaps Vera, the north London landlady bringing up the precocious and sensitive Noel, a 15-year-old she is passing off as a nephew. It is around Vera's dinner table, where her tenants pick at the meagre offerings, that much of the story takes shape. There and in the home defence command centre where Winnie, short of stature but huge of heart, takes control of her wardens. The story is told with charm and a great deal of wit and wisdom, and the writing and characterisation is sharp and incisive. It's rare I read out full paragraphs to those in earshot, but this wonderful novel demanded it on numerous occasions. I later discovered it is the third part of a "loose trilogy". Good news. 

A Killing in November by Simon Mason

All the while I was reading A Killing in November, I was thinking, this shouldn't work, and wondering how much anxiety it brought its writer, Simon Mason. But it does work, and spectacularly, this odd couple Oxford police procedural featuring one Balliol-educated high flier and a shabby barely-even-working-class detective from the wrong side of the tracks. And if you're thinking of Thames Valley Police's more celebrated odd couple, well so was I when I wrote this review, and frankly comparisons that start there should end well. 

Bad Actors by Mick Herron 

It's a joy to have Gary Oldman back on the screen in Season Two of Slow Horses, his Jackson Lamb helping to full the long gao before Mick Herron's next novel appears. Keeping fresh a series that has been as consistently excellent as this one can't be easy, but Herron has been helped to a degree by the sheer 'you couldn't make it up' awfulness of the current shambles of a government in the UK. In this, the eighth installment of the series, Downing Street has been all but taken over by the Prime Minister's special advisor who relies on the wisdom of a superforecaster - really what could go wrong? The writing is as biting and acidic as ever, and so what if the targets are now too easy, Herron hitting them dead centre is as satisfying as ever. 

I could have included a dozen more books here, but the line needs drawing somewhere. I also resisted going back over the Bailie