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.