Top Books of 2021

I always wait until New Year’s Eve to compile my best reads of the year, because you never know when something brilliant will sneak in, do you? As it happens, this year has had lots of Very Good Reads, and even some Very, Very Good Reads, but nothing that is likely to enter my all-time favourites pantheon. So I love all twelve of the books on the list, and a good many that didn’t quite make it, but I didn’t have a life-changing book this year.

But, as I say, these 12 books are all wonderful! As usual, I have excluded re-reads and can only include an author once. The links take you back to the original reviews…

12. The Familiar Faces by David Garnett (1962)

I haven’t read the first two volumes of Garnett’s autobiography – I went straight for the one where he becomes an author, because that is the stage of his life I am most interested in. As it happens, and as the title perhaps implies, this is more about portraits of people he knew, often very gossipy, including Dorothy Edwards, T.E. Lawrence, and George Moore.

11. The Painful Truth by Monty Lyman (2021)

When my friends publish books, I try to read them – or at least buy them. But it’s no hardship when they are as brilliant as my friend Monty’s. His previous book was about the skin; this one, on pain, is even better. Which four-letter word ending in ‘in’ will be next?? Vein? Shin?? Anyway, Monty writes about a wide range of issues to do with pain that are fascinating and, above all, compassionate. I don’t read much popular science, but if more of it was like this then I would.

10. Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell (1928)

Rachel and I read a couple of Persephones for an episode of Tea or Books?, and it helped me get Brook Evans off the shelf where it’s been for many years. I love Glaspell’s spare, insightful prose, and the way she shows us a moral dilemma that works it’s way through three generations of a passionate, unhappy family.

9. Ignorance by Milan Kundera (2002)

The first of several Top Books that I read during A Novella A Day in November – I wrote ‘Like most of Kundera’s novels, the plot is a simple thread through the centre of the book – but what makes the book so wonderful are the tangents, the reflections, the aleatory connections between fictional characters and moments in time.’ Translated by Linda Asher, this is another Kundera success for me.

8. Murder Included by Joanna Cannan (1950)

It was great fun to race through a murder mystery in a single day. This is on here partly because it was fun and pacy, with an enjoyable irritating detective, but also because it has a beautifully simple and clever twist in its solution.

7. Three To See The King by Magnus Mills (2001)

You never quite know where you are with Mills, and never more so than with this parable(?) about a man living in a tin house in a desert, miles from his nearest neighbour. His life starts to change when a friend of a friend turns up and moves in – and then rumours come of a charismatic man changing lives in the distance. Mills is so brilliant at making something eerie without being at all evident why it feels that way.

6. Love in the Sun by Leo Walmsley (1939)

This autobiographical novel tells of a man and his partner who have left Yorkshire for Cornwall, escaping some sort of ignominy. They have almost no money and craft a makeshift life in a rickety house in a cove. Walmsley writes about this corner of Cornwall with such tender love and clarity, and the novel is a slow-paced, winding joy.

5. The Invisible Host by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning (1930)

A reprint from Dean Street Press that is getting a lot of love, The Invisible Host is curiously close to the premise of Agatha Christie’s later And Then There Were None. A group of strangers have been beckoned to a penthouse, each believing that a party is being thrown in their honour – whereas, in fact, they are going to be killed off, one-by-one, while a gramophone gives them instructions and warnings. The mechanics can be a little graceless, especially compared to Christie’s book, but it is still a brilliant read.

4. The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson (2021)

I didn’t get around to blogging about this one, which I listened to as an audiobook, but I do encourage people to seek it out. Casey Wilson is one of the funniest people alive, and stars in my favourite ever sitcom, Happy Endings. I’ve followed her work ever since, and was so delighted when she came out with a collection of essays – they are enormously funny, about bizarre moments in her life to date, but also very poignant: the loss of her mother, and Wilson’s grief, are front and centre.

3. Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava (2015)

Ahava’s novel won the EUPL prize a few years ago, and I read a translation by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah. It’s about people who experience extraordinary events – whether an ice berg falling from the sky, winning the lottery multiple times, or being struck repeatedly by lightning. I wrote, in my review: ‘the prose and characters that Ahava has created seem both dreamlike and vividly real – I don’t really understand how that combination is achieved, but it is done with astonishing consistency and assurance. I loved spending time in this world, and the way Ahava balances genuine pathos with a fairytalesque surreality is truly wonderful.’

2. Miss Linsey and Pa by Stella Gibbons (1936)

The beginning of my year had a lot of books but not all that many brilliant ones, which is perhaps one of the reasons I was so blown away by Gibbons’ novel, which I read for the 1936 Club. Miss Linsey and her father move to be nearer relations – rather reluctant relations – but the short novel encompasses enormous amounts more, with my favourite bit being a satire on Bloomsbury parents. There’s also a lot of heart, particularly in one character’s memories of a wartime romance.

1. The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson (2006)

Finally, here is an ode to keeping books on the shelf for years – and then discovering how wonderful they are. I bought this well over a decade ago, and its moment came in 2021. This novel of a farming community in Ontario in the 1930s and 1950s is beautifully immersive, and deserves comparison to Marilynne Robinson’s work. Lucky me, there are still a couple of her books I haven’t read – and I predict at least one of them will be a contender for next year’s best books list.