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The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2022

“reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.”.

‘Tis the season for schadenfreude. Yes, for the sixth year running, we’ve emerged from the bowels of the book review mines trailing behind us an oozing sack of pans—each one riper and more wince-inducing that the last.

Among the books being gored and devoured by feral hogs this year: Jared Kushner’s soulless work of sycophancy, John Boyne’s shameless sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas , and Hanya Yanagihara’s “anti-accomplishment” doorstopper.

So here they are, in their fabulously festering fulsomeness: the most scathing book reviews of 2022.

“It’s a title that, in its thoroughgoing lack of self-awareness, matches this book’s contents … He betrays little cognizance that he was in demand because, as a landslide of other reporting has demonstrated, he was in over his head, unable to curb his avarice, a cocky young real estate heir who happened to unwrap a lot of Big Macs beside his father-in-law … Breaking History is an earnest and soulless—Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one—and peculiarly selective appraisal of Donald J. Trump’s term in office. Kushner almost entirely ignores the chaos, the alienation of allies, the breaking of laws and norms, the flirtations with dictators, the comprehensive loss of America’s moral leadership …

This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes … Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo … The tone is college admissions essay … Kushner, poignantly, repeatedly beats his own drum … A therapist might call these cries for help … The bulk of Breaking History —at nearly 500 pages, it’s a slog—goes deeply into the weeds … What a queasy-making book to have in your hands.”

–Dwight Garner on Jared Kushner’s Breaking History: A White House Memoir ( The New York Times )

“ The Philosophy of Modern Song is a mouthful, a phrase that puts on airs. It asserts that the book is an important work, a tome that merits a place on your loftiest library shelf, up in the thin air where you keep the leather-bound, gilt-edged stuff … But the title is also a wisecrack, too puffed up and self-important to be taken at face value … As a work of prose, The Philosophy of Modern Song is relentless. It rip-snorts along, charging from song to song, idea to idea. Dylan can write what journalists call a great lede: a first sentence that detonates like a hand grenade … What does all this add up to? Not quite a philosophy of modern song, or at least not a coherent one. But coherence isn’t what you want from Bob Dylan …

You have to plow through 46 chapters before encountering a song by a female artist … Yet women loom large in his consciousness and are omnipresent in his pages—appearing in such monstrous form, evoked in language so marinated in misogyny, that, reading The Philosophy of Modern Song, I began to feel like a therapist, sneaking glances at my watch while the crackpot on the couch blurts one creepy fantasy after another … It’s a bummer, to put it mildly, to find a Nobel laureate…mixing metaphors and spouting nonsense like an elderly uncle who bulk-emails links to Fox News segments.”

–Jody Rosen on Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song ( The Los Angeles Times )

“ Moshfegh’s own sacraments involve a different orifice, so you will forgive her if her search has led her up her own ass … At first glance, Lapvona is the most disgusting thing Moshfegh has ever written…Yet Moshfegh’s trusty razor can feel oddly blunted in Lapvona . In part, her characteristic incisiveness is dulled by her decision to forgo the first person, in favor of more than a dozen centers of consciousness. This diminishment is also a curious effect of Lapvona itself … Lapvona is the clearest indication yet that the desired effect of Moshfegh’s fiction is not shock but sympathy. Like Hamlet, she must be cruel in order to be kind. Her protagonists are gross and abrasive because they have already begun to molt; peel back their blistering misanthropy and you will find lonely, sensitive people who are in this world but not of it, desperate to transform, ascend, escape …

This is the problem with writing to wake people up: Your ideal reader is inevitably asleep. Even if such readers exist, there is no reason to write books for them—not because novels are for the elite but because the first assumption of every novel must be that the reader will infinitely exceed it. Fear of the reader, not of God, is the beginning of literature. Deep down, Moshfegh knows this….Yet the novelist continues to write as if her readers are fundamentally beneath her; as if they, unlike her, have never stopped to consider that the world may be bullshit; as if they must be steered, tricked, or cajoled into knowledge by those whom the universe has seen fit to appoint as their shepherds …

It’s a shame. Moshfegh dirt is good dirt. But the author of Lapvona is not an iconoclast; she is a nun. Behind the carefully cultivated persona of arrogant genius, past the disgusting pleasures of her fiction and bland heresies of her politics, wedged just above her not inconsiderable talent, there sits a small, hardened lump of piety. She may truly be a great American novelist one day, if only she learns to be less important. Until then, Moshfegh remains a servant of the highest god there is: herself.”

–Andrea Long Chu on Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona ( Vulture )

“Reading it is like immersive theatre: one of those elaborate warehouse productions where you stumble about from tableau to tableau, trying to piece the story together … The novel is long on atmosphere and short on sense. There are slick, movie-style conversations with a private investigator, a Vietnam vet, and a trans woman; long lunches with a garrulous criminal friend; flashbacks to Alicia’s hallucinations; the obligatory bit of survivalism (would it even be a McCarthy novel without an episode involving tinned foods and roadkill?) …

James Joyce is invoked. An oblique reminder that great literature requires hard work? But McCarthy’s difficulty is perverse. The decision to open The Passenger with an impenetrable conversation between Alicia and her hallucinations; the quantum mechanics; the pinball structure; the confusing dialogue—all this just makes the novel hard to read. Nothing meaningful is gained. It’s a shame because at times these books are more interesting than McCarthy’s key works … We think these books are unflinching. Really, they are kitsch: McCarthy’s is an art of exaggeration. A con trick is being practised … That’s how you garner comparisons to Hemingway and Faulkner—when, in fact, you’re a mediocre hybrid of both .”

–Claire Lowdon on Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger ( The Sunday Times )

“With his latest treacly tome All the Broken Places— complete with title so maudlin it preempts all mockery—Boyne has gifted us with a Holocaust novel so self-indulgent, so grossly stereotyped, so shameless and insipid that one is almost astonished that he has dared … This is not literature. As a grown-up sequel to children’s trash, All the Broken Places serves two roles. First, to demonstrate that Boyne definitely did not think that the Germans were innocent, definitely knew they were ‘complicit’ and ‘guilty’ and that history is ‘complicated,’ etc, thanks very much. Second, to serve as a sort of fan fiction for those peculiar adults who long for the comfort of a childhood favorite. As to this first goal, at least, it is a consummate failure, a wildly simplified narrative that misrepresents the extent of Nazi ideology. As in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas , Boyne underestimates the family’s awareness of the Holocaust, lending his German characters an exaggerated naivety, or implausible deniability …

Boyne flaunts a teenager’s understanding of the causes and consequences of the Second World War … As with so much Holocaust fiction All the Broken Places utterly fails in its stated purpose: making the next generation slightly less likely to participate in the next genocide… Boyne’s reduction of Nazi ideology to a fringe belief, expressed in infrequent outbursts—’those filthy Jews’—is all the more absurd now that he’s writing for grown-ups …

We don’t need anyone to teach us how to recognize the barefaced devil; the danger is the insidious and gradual creep of violence into the civilised and everyday. This is what the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s dictum—’To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’—warned of: art unable to recognise the break the Holocaust represented with the past, afraid to apprehend the failure of the civilising project. With this childish drivel in which the villains and victims come labelled and sorted, Boyne yet again seems immune to its lessons.”

–Ann Manov on John Boyne’s All the Broken Places ( The New Statesman )

“99 years old, but still, still pushing out the kind of platitudes that not only can be used to excuse the most evil people in the history of the species but that are designed to do exactly that… This rhetoric-as-strategy is obvious right from this book’s cast of characters…A reader might first wonder what Konrad Adenauer is doing drawn among these heartless hinds, but eyebrows might raise at de Gaulle and even Sadat as well… A moment’s thought reveals the beady-eyed rationale behind this grouping; it’s not to pull down good men, it’s to raise up genuine fire-eyed black-pelted yellow-fanged monsters… Henry Kissinger might not be able to climb a flight of stairs anymore, but he’s still capable of telling a lie before he’s even finished his Table of Contents… As he’s winding up this ghastly, conscienceless book, Kissinger contentedly admits that his subjects weren’t always popular… Not everyone admired them or ‘subscribed to their policies’… Sometimes, in fact, they faced resistance, and their separate memories still sometimes face such resistance… Almost like there might be debate about their legacies, or something… Leadership might very well be Kissinger’s most mandarin-hateful book, even surpassing 2014’s truly odious World Power … It’s his 19th book… Here’s hoping it’s his last. ”

–Steve Donoghue on Henry Kissinger’s Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy ( Open Letters Review )

“ To Paradise is so unusually terrible that it is a sort of anti-accomplishment, the rare book that manages to combine the fey simplicity of a children’s tale with near unreadable feats of convolution . It is too juvenile to attract serious adult readers and too obtuse to aspire to popular appeal. If A Little Life dragged and self-dramatized, at least it did so via a welter of readily legible, melodramatic thrills. But soap opera fanatics will fare no better with To Paradise ’s contortions than will seasoned belletrists. There is nothing to recommend it to anyone. As I trudged through the novel’s 700 pages, I found myself nostalgic for books plagued only by quaint defects, such as confusing descriptions and characters who behave inconsistently—not that Yanagihara, who has a special gift for garbled metaphors and bizarrely specific yet impenetrable imagery, spares us such infelicities …

It is hard to summon the will to enumerate To Paradise ’s thematic or even stylistic shortcomings, for its basic construction is so irretrievably botched as to eclipse the rest of its defects. The fundamental problem is simple and devastating: the book does not make any sense … Aside from its sheer incoherence, its most notable feature is only its punishing length. On and on it goes, sprouting new subplots, amassing new contrivances. Anyone must have a brain of stone to finish it without shedding tears of relief.”

–Becca Rothfeld on Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise ( Times Literary Supplement )

“Viral success has emboldened [Taddeo] to abandon everything patient and methodical in her investigation of women’s darker appetites in favour of the literary equivalent of chasing clicks … Ghost Lover is a nine-course tasting menu that is all spice and no flavour … The main dish is always the same facile serving of female jealousy. In every effortfully flippant tale, self-conscious women compete to be the most desirable female in the room … At least the proper nouns denote actual things. When Taddeo attempts metaphor, we run into more serious trouble … Throughout, Taddeo rams words together in unexpected ways. ‘His voice turned throaty, filled with wetness and trees.’ Trees? …

Perhaps Taddeo has read Lolita and feels excited about experimenting with the English language. Only it feels more as if she has done the experimenting in another tongue, Finnish or Swahili, perhaps, then run a series of untranslatable local sayings through Google Translate … In the course of producing this Goop noir, Taddeo has abandoned any interest in women as complex, conflicted humans. Her characters are myopically focused on blow-dries, blow jobs and brow tints … Inspires depression.”

–Johanna Thomas-Corr on Lisa Taddeo’s Ghost Lover ( The Sunday Times )

“ Everything in Lessons , whose story concludes within a year and a half of its publication date, gives the impression of having been written in extreme haste . Its prose, for example, is pocked with first-order clichés, second-order clichés, dull metaphors, mixed metaphors, limp similes, oxymorons, pleonasms, catachresis, jejune diction, trivializing double entendres, pomposities, flagrant abuse of self-reflexive questions, and barely-concealed cribbings from more talented stylists like Nabokov … Within the first fifty or so pages, Roland experiences no fewer than three portentous epiphanies, none of which turn out to have any bearing on the subsequent four hundred, as though they were narrative coupons McEwan cut out but forgot to cash in …

McEwan’s novel is not so much an epic as it is three novellas in a trench coat … If this all sounds pat, it has less to do with the necessary evil that is plot summary in book reviewing, than to the didacticism with which McEwan imparts these and other praecepta in the novel itself. Yet perhaps worse than the way the book comes pre-interpreted for the reader is the way it comes pre-criticized … The trench coat is History. Draped loosely from the backs of these three narratives are hundreds of named political and cultural events, persons, and phenomena, starting with Dunkirk and ending with the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, which range from the genuinely consequential to the merely newsworthy to the unmentionably trivial.”

–Ryan Ruby on Ian McEwan’s Lessons ( The New Left Review )

“There is a good, though not excellent, short story hidden somewhere in the four hundred pages of A. M. Homes’s The Unfolding … But on balance, The Unfolding is depressingly shallow, arriving too late and with too little intelligence, humor, wit, or insight to be useful or entertaining … The plot is simple … The structure—dilating and contracting across a narrow band of time—works best in subtly paralleling personal and familial breakdowns with national upheaval, but at its worst, the form makes this novel feel interminable … Homes is dedicated to the idea of these men as so pickled by their own vice and privilege that there’s not an intelligent thought to be found among them. They remain static in their grumbling and their vague schemes, which prevents the irony from deepening or sharpening its critique. What ought to be a central driver of the plot or the evolution of the novel’s themes becomes an inert gimmick …

Homes trades away her characters’ convictions and depth for attempted comedic effect. No contrast. No pathos. These men are hollow, which makes the story itself hollow … Homes for some reason describes any surface or object that comes into contact with her characters as though she were writing about the contours of the human soul. Do we need to know what the taxi seats feel like? … I was bored by this book. By its lazy stances, its lax politics, and its rote writing.”

–Brandon Taylor on A.M. Holmes’ The Unfolding ( 4Columns )

“The institutional tone in 21st-century humor is unequipped to deal with anything that matters. In Happy-Go-Lucky , his new collection of essays about the pandemic, aging, and the slow but inevitable death of his father, David Sedaris simultaneously asserts himself as the undisputed past master of this tone and captures its fundamental weakness, applying the style he has developed for the last 30 years to a subject matter for which it is almost eerily unsuited … It is ironic, then, that relatability also turns out to be the absolute bête fucking noire of this collection, cropping up again and again to recast Sedaris not as the antsy everyman we grew up with but rather as some kind of moneyed Aspergers case …

For a different author, that would be comedy gold—or at least a bracing opportunity to try something new, to go somewhere more vulnerable and potentially less funny, but also maybe incisive and bittersweet in a way that made the late-life output of funny writers like Twain and Joan Didion so paradoxically invigorating. But Sedaris can’t seem to do it. Either he doesn’t have enough tools in the box or he just refuses to look too closely at any of these understandably difficult subjects, so instead he writes about them in the same tone he used to write about department-store Santas and being bad at French, with disastrously jarring results …

Sedaris is like the social director running around the deck of a listing cruise ship, frantically playing for laughs and doing jazz hands while the reader wonders whether he doesn’t know the ship is sinking or just refuses to acknowledge what’s going on … A man with a dozen houses confronts death, the coronavirus pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and broad cultural changes that he cannot fully understand. ‘Ha ha!’ he says. It sounds just like a laugh, just like it always has, except it does not sound true.”

–Dan Brooks on David Sedaris’ Happy-Go-Lucky ( Gawker )

“Even if you’re unfamiliar with this tradition of stories about race transformation, you’ll suspect what’s coming … Tone above all distinguishes Hamid from these precursors. Whereas most of these writers bend race transformation toward satire, offering us topsy-turvy and hysterical tales, Hamid is deeply earnest about his conceit. The novel is that wan 21st-century banality, a ‘meditation,’ and it meditates on how losing whiteness is going to make white people feel. Mostly sad, as it turns out … The sex improves; the prose does not … The novel evinces the worst of Hamid’s style …

As in his earlier novels about social mobility and immigration, romance supplies the plot and casts an aura of ‘love’ over the politico-speculative gimmick … This is the novel’s cure for white despair over the loss of whiteness: Keep calm and carry on … What exactly is being born—or rather, borne? Darkness in The Last White Man is an ordeal. Those who were already dark have little presence and no internal life in the novel … If Hamid’s novel were a self-aware satire of this ideology of whiteness and its violent effects, it would be pitch-perfect. But The Last White Man ’s structure affords us no way to know if this is what Hamid intends: It includes no higher judgment, no specific history, no novelistic frame against which to measure the reliability of the narration, no backdrop across which irony can dance …

The Last White Man feels like a primer for mourning whiteness, not a critique of it … It’s one thing for a character to be afflicted with blurred vision or the race ‘blindness’ that grants Oona a ‘new kind of sight’; it’s another for the novel to suffer the same confusion of perspective.”

–Namwali Serpell on Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man ( The Atlantic )

“… surely the nastiest Trump administration memoir yet, and possibly, given Conway’s track record, the most flagrantly dishonest … in 500 pages packed with more score-settling than a Quentin Tarantino movie, Conway gives free rein to her contempt for Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Brad Parscale, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, and countless other unnamed male Trump staffers … let no one call this book meticulously edited … When she can’t confuse a discussion with arguments as tangled as a pailful of eels, Conway simply avoids it … feels most alive when she’s seething at the ‘overrated, underachieving men who had ridiculed and dismissed me for years’ …

Can be read as the delusional account of a woman blind to the shortcomings of the powerful man who gave her a shot. But it can also be read—will be read, by those who matter—as an advertisement for her own consultancy business. She’s such a skilled prevaricator that I found myself wondering if she really hates all those male GOP consultants so virulently—or is she just taking out the competition? Furthermore, the ease with which she burns her bridges with Kushner while buttering up her one-time client Mike Pence make clear who she thinks her party’s next candidate will be. Only a fool would trust her, but only a bigger fool would write her off.”

–Laura Miller on Kellyanne Conway’s Here’s the Deal: A Memoir ( Slate )

“ John Irving’s 15th novel is 11 shy of 900 pages long. And boy, did I feel every one of those pages … a baffling amount of weak literary explication and juvenile political opining … The most notably shoehorned element (and there are many, including the ghosts that irritatingly scamper throughout) is the inclusion of excerpts of Adam’s film script—so unnecessary and ill-advised in this already flabby book, it’s difficult not to wonder if this might have been a rejected love-project of Irving’s …

The truly discomfiting aspect of this book, though, has to be the hyper-sexualisation of the female characters therein. Early on, a young woman’s loud orgasm is described or referenced, by my count, 16 times. Yes, Irving could argue that this is told from a teenage boy’s perspective, and thus that focusing on all things arousing is only natural. But these leering and, again, endlessly repeated descriptions, read more like the errant mental wanderings of a horny older man than the thoughts of a pubescent boy … There is so much more I could’ve written, but thankfully, unlike Irving, I have a word count to consider.”

–Sweeney Byrne on John Irving’s The Last Chairlift ( The Irish Times )

“As an avant-garde firebrand in the 1960s, Handke wrote an ‘anti-play’ titled Offending the Audience, but now his strategy has shifted perilously close to Boring the Audience to Tears . Much like the narrator imagining the character of the fruit thief, I kept trying to envision a subset of readers who genuinely find this stuff delightful. Lacking most of the elements that draw people to fiction—insight, suspense and so on—it falls to either the language or the narrative material itself to make the novel worth the reader’s while. Although both have their moments—a mad speech in the final pages, an interlude at an inn that takes on the lighting and atmosphere of old European folk tales—the meal served up by this deeply eccentric novelist is spare and saltless, with no wine and no dessert. I suspect it’s the destiny of such an uncompromising writer as Peter Handke to end up writing basically for an audience of one. His most loyal readers, perhaps, adopt an attitude of veneration, hushed and solemn and more or less bored, the way many people attend Mass.”

–Rob Doyle on Peter Handke’s The Fruit Thief ( The New York Times Book Review )

Hungry for more harsh critiques? Reacquaint yourself with The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2017 , 2018 , 2019 , 2020 , and 2021 .

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Worst of 2022: The Books

Posted January 18, 2023 by Casee in Features | 2 Comments

It’s that time of year again. The time where we come together and look over the books that we’ve read over the course of 2022 and list our favorites. Today’s list will include our least favorite books of 2022. Thanks for joining us on our 2022 reading journey these past few weeks!

The Viper ( Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #3 ) by J.R. Ward : This book was not for me. I generally like or feel ambivalent when it comes to JRW. Still–I read every book that she releases. I really regretted reading this one. It was a waste of time.

Free ( Chaos #6 ) by Kristen Ashley : The whole ending to the Benito Valenzuela was just lame. It was just too much.

Shadow Music ( Highlands’ Lairds #3 ) by Julie Garwood : I decided to try to reread this book (on audio). Unfortunately I couldn’t finish it. The heroine was just about unbearable.

Dream Chaser ( Dream Team #2 ) by Kristen Ashley : I DNFed this at 55%. Both Ryn & Boone were awful. I don’t know what they saw in each other because I saw nothing.

Annihilation Road ( Torpedo Ink #6 ) by Christine Feehan : This book was just okay. It was part of a duo within the series & after reading this one, I didn’t read the next.

A Farewell to Charms ( Mystic Bayou, #6 ) by Molly Harper : I usually love Molly Harper’s books and this series in particular, but A Farewell to Charms was painful to read. Alex crossed a serious line in the beginning and I was never able to move past what he did.

All Is Faerie in Love and War ( Fangs and Feathers, #2 ) by Isla Frost : The terrible things the MC did and the way they were addressed in this book ruined my reading experience. I’m sad about it since I enjoyed the first book.

Heart of Hope by Lucy Score : I really enjoyed a lot of books by Score this year, but while the premise of this one was interesting, the execution left a lot to be desired. The secret he kept and her reaction to it kind of killed the story for me. Plus, the whole organ donor thing was a little cheesy.

The Purveli ( Aldebarian Alliance, #3 ) by Dianne Duvall : This is the third book in the Aldebarian Alliance series. If it had been book 2 I think I would have enjoyed it more. As it is, literally every single aspect of it, save one, was spoiled in book 2. There were no surprises or intrigues because we learned everything there was to know about this book in the previous one. It was a total disappointment to read.

Black Moon ( Alpha Pack, #3 ) by J.D. Tyler : I ended up DNF’ing this book. I just couldn’t connect with Kalen or Mac. They both acted immature and weak. I thought about powering through, but honestly nothing worked for me and I didn’t see a point in continuing.

Who were your worst reads of 2022?

2 responses to “ Worst of 2022: The Books ”

The book that disappointed me the most was Eve Dangerfield’s VELVET CRUELTY. I think in part because I was expecting an “Eve Dangerfield” book full of her trademark heat, heart, and humor, not yo mention self-aware heroines who function with autonomy. Instead, I got a very dark reverse harem romance with an innocent 18-year-old heroine and four heroes (all awful in different ways). So disappointing. I’m not even interested in reading the next book in the series. I wish Dangerfield would have spent her time finishing her Silver Daughters series rather than jumping on the dark romance bandwagon—which is a sub-genre obviously not for her.

I did not finish many books that I started last year, but I’ve put all the details out of my mind! Here’s hoping for some wonderful books in 2023 for us all.

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The Best and Worst Books of 2022

Readers love the “Best and Worst Books of the Year” lists. I enjoy waking up on a winter morning and (virtually) rustling the newspaper pages for “Best of” lists. I prefer the lists, meant for Christmas shopping, to the actual holidays.

The lists are published earlier every year, however. A few newspapers and magazines published their “Best of’s” before Thanksgiving, which is much too early. The amateurs – Goodreads reviewers, bloggers, and vloggers – are usually more traditional and wait till December. For the first time, I saw a few bloggers and vloggers posting their lists before Halloween!

And that is a huge turn-off.

That said, I have posted my “Best and Worst Books of 2022” list appropriately- in December. I posted links to my reviews at Thornfield Hall and Thornfield Hall Redux , and, in a few cases, Goodreads.

THE BEST AND WORST BOOKS OF 2022!

BEST NEW NOVELS

1. Elizabeth Finch , by Julian Barnes.

2. French Braid , by Anne Tyler

3. The Exhibitionist , by Charlotte Mendelson

4. The Book of Mother , by Violaine Huisman

5. Free Love , by Tessa Hadley

BEST NEW “GENRE” BOOKS

1. Termination Shock , by Neal Stephenson

2. Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman , by Lucy Worsley (A biography of a genre writer!)

3. A Restless Truth , by Freya Marske

BEST OLDIES

1. The Matchmaker , by Stella Gibbons

2. Rule Britannia , by Daphne du Maurier

3. The Malayan Trilogy , by Anthony Burgess

4. How Green Was My Valley , by Richard Llewellyn

5. The Revolt of the Angels , by Anatole France

BEST CLASSICS

1. Bleak House , by Charles Dickens

2. Life and Fate , by Vasily Grossman

3. The Captain’s Doll , by D. H. Lawrence

4. Lady Susan , by Jane Austen

5. Katherine Mansfield: Letters and Journals

THE WORST OF THE YEAR

1. The Bloater , by Janet Tonk

2. The Half Sisters , by Geraldine Jewsbury

Happy Holidays! You can go to the LargeHearted Boy blog for links to more Best of the Year lists.

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Book Reviews

Ranking All the Books I’ve Read in 2022 (so far)

July 4, 2022

We’re halfway through 2022! We did it.

Today I’m breaking down almost all of the books I’ve read in the past six months and ranking them from best to worst via a highly scientific methodology, the results of which have been peer reviewed by both of my dogs. Be amazed.

Although I am a reader who uses numeric ratings, this Highly Official Ranking System is different. So here’s your nifty guide:

God Tier : new favorite, bookish perfection, something to screech about, etc.
Really Good : enjoyable, memorable, would read again without hesitation, “not your average book” kind of book
Good : a solid read, would recommend, probably wouldn’t read again for whatever reason
Fine : is it awful? no. is it something I want to have living on my shelf for the next decade? also no.
Bad : it’s not a good book, Susan, it’s just not
Horrible : jail for book! jail for One Thousand Years!!!
It’s Complicated : books I maybe enjoyed but have difficulty categorizing due to problematic stuff

AKA: new favorite, bookish perfection, something to screech about, etc.

SISTERSONG by Lucy Holland — magical alt history folktale retelling featuring a trans prince (!!!)

THE QUEER PRINCIPLES OF KIT WEBB by Cat Sebastian — the ultimate “be gay, do crime” romance novel

ONCE UPON A QUINCEÑERA by Monica Gomez-Hira — everything that is wonderful and messy about being 18

HUNT THE STARS by Jessie Mihalik — A perfect meld of romance and sci-fi.

Really Good

AKA: enjoyable, memorable, would read again without hesitation, “not your average book” kind of book

WE WERE RESTLESS THINGS by Cole Nagamatsu — literary magical realism for the youths

OLGA DIES DREAMING by Xochitl Gonzalez — colonialism, family dysfunction, political thriller *chef’s kiss*

WEATHER GIRL by Rachel Lynn Solomon — an excellent workplace romance

THE FIFTH SEASON by N.K. Jemisin — is there anything to say? we all know this is good.

WINTER’S ORBIT by Everina Maxwell — political thriller sci-fi with strooooong romantic elements

THE WOLF DEN by Elodie Harper — Roman Empire, but about the lower classes outside of Rome itself

GIRL GONE VIRAL by Alisha Rai — the Platonic ideal of a bodyguard romance

SOMETHING FABULOUS by Alexis Hal l — utterly absurd and utterly gay

GET A LIFE, CHLOE BROWN by Talia Hibbert — unique and wholesome contemporary romance

DELILAH GREEN DOESN’T CARE by Ashley Herring Blake — excellent romance with a lot of realistic family complications

WHEN BLOOD LIES by C.S. Harris — this is my favorite series, my favorite couple, etc.

ALL MY RAGE by Sabaa Tahir — a very uncomfortable book to read but also very very good

NIGHTCRAWLING by Leila Mottley — a nonsensationalized glimpse into police corruption, poverty, racism, etc. (and Mottley is nineteen! )

THE DEGENERATES by J. Albert Mann — highly informative story about girls who were institutionalized as part of eugenics policies

THE WAGES OF SIN by Kaite Welsh — Victorian England was about more than pretty dresses and dukes; here’s a book to make you hopping mad @ the patriarchy

AKA: a solid read, would recommend, probably wouldn’t read again for whatever reason

THE HALF-DROWNED KING by Linnea Hartsuyker — exciting plot + excellent research into Viking society

BEASTS OF A LITTLE LAND by Juhea Kim — beautifully written, bittersweet intergenerational saga set in 20th century Korea

A LADY’S GUIDE TO MISCHIEF AND MAYHEM by Manda Collins — more of a mystery than a romance, but enjoyable

THE RIGHT SWIPE by Alisha Rai — good, but development of hero’s character was lacking

HOW HIGH WE GO IN THE DARK by Sequoia Nagamatsu — innovative hybrid between a novel and a short story collection

RENEGADE LOVE by Ann Aquirre — solid “morality chain” alien romance

THE DEATH OF VIVEK OJI by Akwaeke Emezi — very pretty and bittersweet

PACHINKO by Min Jin Lee — well-written, but becomes too episodic by the end

NO BEAUTIES OR MONSTERS by Tara Goedjen — if Stranger Things was a book, basically

THE FALLING GIRLS by Hayley Krischer — toxic murdering co-dependent cheerleaders (!)

NEVER LOOK BACK by Lilliam Rivera —interesting Greek myth retelling set in the Bronx

THE SCHOOL OF MIRRORS by Eva Stachniak — slowish story about women during the final days of the French monarchy

SO THIS IS EVER AFTER by F.T. Lukens — what happens after you save the world?; AKA “two idiots in love”

WHEN WE LOST OUR HEADS by Heather O’Neill — rich girls in Montreal as a metaphor for the French Revolution (I guess???)

FIREBREAK by Nicole Kornher-Stace — post-climate crisis dystopia in which megacorporations rule the world

BOOK OF NIGHT by Holly Black — solid urban fantasy featuring a heist and interesting magic

THE DRAGON’S BRIDE by Katee Robert — not as sexy as I wanted, but a good “captive” romance that heavily emphasizes mutual consent

AKA: is it awful? no. is it something I want to have living on my shelf for the next decade? also no.

ARSENIC AND ADOBO by Mia P. Manansala — mediocre mystery with a decent “hook”

THE RAVEN TOWER by Ann Leckie — queer fantasy Hamlet with second-person narrator and sentient rocks

DAUGHTER OF THE MOON GODDESS by Sue Lynn Tan — too long, plot is disorganized

THE SIREN OF SUSSEX by Mimi Matthews — working class Victorian romance but author doesn’t follow-through on attempts to explore oppression

MASTER OF POISONS by Andrea Hairston — climate disaster fantasy where author’s vision lacked clarity

SERPENT & DOVE by Shelby Mahurin — decent fantasy romance, but read like the stuff that was coming out 10 years ago

THE BEHOLDEN by Cassandra Rose Clarke — fun quest/adventure fantasy with a simple storyline more suited to middle grade than adult

THE VERIFIERS by Jane Pek — predictable and tropey mystery novel

THE IVORY KEY by Akshaya Raman — just okay; too many narrators, too much going on

FOLLOW ME TO GROUND by Sue Rainsford — lots of vibes, no real substance

THE ONES WE’RE MEANT TO FIND by Joan He — overly concerned with complex plot structure

MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER by Oyinkan Braithwaite — the title says it all

A FAR WILDER MAGIC by Allison Saft — solidly readable, but I have Thoughts about the world-building

YELLOW WIFE by Sadeqa Johnson — would have been great if the narrative climax didn’t occur off-page (wtf?)

THE PERFECT CRIMES OF MARIAN HAYES by Cat Sebastian — understanding the plot is wholly reliant on the companion novel, which is not the point of romance series

DEAD SILENCE by S.A. Barnes — cursed space Titanic is a great idea, but it needed to decide if the narrator is crazy or not (instead, author left it vague and confusing)

ALL THAT’S LEFT IN THE WORLD by Erik J. Brown — pretty good, but plot structure was all over the place

AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS by Rivers Solomon — had it brief moments of brilliance, but the world-building and even the action were often too vague

FIRST COMES LIKE by Alisha Rai — this was weird and not very romantic

AKA: it’s not a good book, Susan, it’s just not

THE WOLF AND THE WOODSMAN by Ava Reid — bad plotting, illogical conclusion, world-building was aggravating as hell

NIGHT THEATER by Vikram Paralkar —intriguing, but author could not find a focus within the story

STRANGE BEASTS OF CHINA by Yan Ge — great concept but too slow/sleepy/vague to fully pull it off

THE VALLEY AND THE FLOOD by Rebecca Mahoney — dear white people: this is not how magical realism works

GOOD GIRL COMPLEX by Elle Kennedy — 2012 is calling and would like her poorly written “not like other girls” new adult romance back

IN A GARDEN BURNING GOLD by Rory Power — your cool concept is meaningless if it’s not back up by actual human emotion

I’M SO (NOT) OVER YOU by Kosoko Jackson — the love interest dumps the narrator TWICE with no explanation and takes no accountability for his actions: garbage

PERSEPHONE STATION by Stina Leicht — not enough world-building, character depth, or initial exposition

DAUGHTERS OF A DEAD EMPIRE by Carolyn Tara O’Neil — massively oversimplifies Russian politics to make the Romanovs virtuous martyrs

A THOUSAND STEPS INTO NIGHT by Traci Chee — weirdly juvenile storytelling

WITHIN THESE WICKED WALLS by Lauren Blackwood — a retelling of Jane Eyre which doesn’t actually communicate with the source text

THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone — nope

CAN’T RESIST HER by Kianna Alexander — so poorly written that the romance plot didn’t even register

A BOTANIST’S GUIDE TO PARTIES AND POISON by Kate Khavari — everyone in this book is so stupid (the protagonist poisons herself in order to prove the murderer didn’t use poison)

AKA: jail for book! jail for One Thousand Years!!!

A PALE LIGHT IN THE BLACK by K.B. Wagers — propaganda in favor of the American military industrial context, with queer people for set dressing

BITE by K.S. Merbeth — badly written, but also: the love interest sexually assaults the main character

RAMÓN AND JULIETA by Alana Quintana Albertson — the author really thought writing about a gentrifying CEO billionaire was a good idea

GOLD MOUNTAIN by Betty G. Yee — one of the worst written books I’ve ever read (great concept though!)

MR. WRONG NUMBER by Lynn Painter — misogynist hero + jerk heroine + bad writing = not good

CHEROKEE AMERICA by Margaret Verble — a book about “good slaver owners”!!!!!

WE ALL FALL DOWN by Rose Szabo — in which the white protagonist falsely accuses a gay Black man of murder

SILK FIRE by Zabé Ellor — tone-deaf and clumsy story about a man getting revenge against an evil, oppressive matriarchy (also, author appears to be a misogynist)

It’s Complicated

AKA: books I maybe enjoyed but have difficulty categorizing due to problematic stuff

THE MAID by Nita Prose — breezy read but the depiction of autism was so concerning

IF YOU ASK ME by Libby Hubscher — I might have liked this if it had not been FALSELY REPRESENTED as a romance novel (it is not)

SET ON YOU by Amy Lea — this was a great romance…until halfway through it became women’s fic about the heroine’s individual journey (the hero was neither a participant nor a spectator)

PLACES WE’VE NEVER BEEN by Kasie West — it was good but WHY WERE THE ADULTS SO ABUSIVE?!

That was a lot of books. 😳

Let me know in the comments if you have any scientific disagreements with my Highly Official Ranking System (if you dare)!

Did you like this post.

Reader Interactions

July 16, 2022 at 3:47 am

I love this post, such a great way to show off all the books you’ve read so far (and that’s a LOT, I admire you SO much, wow!). I’m so sad that A Thousand Steps Into Night wasn’t that great. I loved Traci Chee’s The Reader series and have been curious about that one. But I’m SO glad to s eethat you’ve read The falling girls, I really liked this book as well! 🙂 Happy reading!! 🙂

adventures of a bibliophile

The worst books i read in 2022, they can't all be winners... here are the losers.

December 15, 2022

It is time… for the post you have all been waiting for. Today, we are talking about the worst books I read in 2022. Which is honestly one of my most popular posts every year. And hopefully this year’s isn’t too disappointing, because I didn’t read very many books I didn’t like. But I do have a list of six books that I look back on with regret. (Not really, because sometimes it’s more fun to blog about bad books. But you get what I mean.)

Even though this list isn’t long, it makes up for it by containing some of the worst books I’ve read in quite a while. But enough intro, let’s get right to the (bad) books! Here are the worst books I read in 2022, in order from “not that terrible” to “the thought that this got published still makes me mad”:

Comfort Me With Apples by Catherynne M. Valente

I already talked about this one in my most disappointing books of the year list because I really thought I’d enjoy it. And while I didn’t hate it, I was really disappointed and kind of sad after I read it. It’s a thriller that sounded a lot like The Stepford Wives , which I am a fan of. It’s about a woman who lives the perfect life with her perfect husband in their perfect little neighborhood. She knows she was made for him. But strange things start happening and she starts to question just how perfect their world really is. If this reminds you a bit of Don’t Worry Darling , it’s kind of like that.

And I really enjoyed the creepy tone and the mystery in the beginning. But then we started to get clues about where it was going. And I was really hoping it wouldn’t go where I thought it would. But then it did. Basically, it’s a really dark biblical allegory. I wasn’t a huge fan of it. The ending ruined the book for me because not only did I not like it, it was really predictable. When I read weird thrillers, I want to be surprised, I want a good twist. Instead, I spent half the book really wishing it wouldn’t go where I thought it was going. Overall, I wasn’t a huge fan of this one.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw

I read this book for a post where I read the lowest rated books on my TBR. I ended up scraping the post, but not before getting through this book. To be fair, ti was already on my TBR – I think I just liked the cover. And honestly, I didn’t go into it prepared to not like it just because it has a low rating on Goodreads. I’ve been known to really enjoy some books that other people hate. But this was not one of those books.

I was interested in the idea of a thriller based on Japanese folklore (I’ve been really into Japanese literature for the past couple years). But I think this book tried to fit so much folklore into such a short book that, as someone unfamiliar with the topic, I got kind of lost. I also hated a lot of the characters. Which is fun for a thriller, because then you get to root against them. But this book killed off the least annoying characters. Not going to lie, I was a little disappointed. It also just wasn’t really suspenseful, which is kind of what I look for in horror novels. I did not enjoy it, but it’s definitely not the worst book on this list.

I Love You, But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins

June was a bad reading month. It gets to claim two of the books on this list, and they’re right next to each other. So you know it wasn’t great. I picked up the next book on this list because of its cover. But this one, I grabbed because of its title. I always hope that the books I give a chance despite having heard nothing about them are good. This one was really not.

It’s supposed to be about womanhood and a woman who leaves her family to go find herself or something. But it’s just chaotic and I had no idea what was going on for most of this book. It spends a lot of time talking about how the main character’s dad was in the Manson cult. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a point to that, if I remember correctly. Oh, and the main character has the same name as the author. Which just made this book feel extra weird. I don’t remember too much about this book except that I was thinking “WTF is happening?” the entire time I was reading it.

Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin

This was my other terrible book of June, and definitely one I very much regret reading. I talked about it a lot already in my last post . But this book deserves to be on this list, too. Because it was really not good. I was excited to read a dystopian novel with some kickass trans protagonists. But I had so many issues with this book. The fact that the writing wasn’t great was the least of them.

Basically, I thought this book was full of unnecessary violence towards women. It was a lot, and it was very graphic and brutal. I do think violence in books can be used to make a point, but I felt like this author used it so much that it went way beyond just making a point. No book – ever – needs as many rape scenes as this book has. Just no.

I thought the premise of this book was so interesting, but the author completely massacred it with gratuitous violence against women. Even as I’m writing this, I can feel my face morphing into a major look of disgust because that’s how I feel about this book. It says a lot that there are still two books to go on this list.

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi

What do I say about this book? It was probably my most disappointing read of the year because I was really looking forward to this book. I’m a fan of Akwaeke Emezi, and the title of this one definitely drew me in. I wasn’t fully aware that it was a romance book going in, but that’s fine. I like reading romance novels occasionally. But I did not like reading this book.

I really disliked the storyline. There are certain things I hate in romance novels, and this book added to that list. The main character is kind of a terrible person, and the only character development she gets is learning to be okay with being an asshole for the sake of love. I was a little bit let down when her best friend stopped reminding the main character that she was acting like an ass. The sex scenes made me uncomfortable, and I overall kind of hated this book.

But there is one book I hated even more…

Her Heart for a Compass by Sara Ferguson

I do look back on this book with fond memories, so I was a little bit conflicted about where it should go on this list. But any and all enjoyment I derived from reading this book came from writing an entire blog post trashing it . Now, that was fun! This book, though, was just a mess. It’s a five-hundred-plus-page romance novel. Which is not a good start to begin with. Then there’s the fact that Fergie wrote this about her ancestor. And is it just me, or does the idea of that feel a little bit icky?

Not only does Fergie write this about her great-something, but she makes the protagonist an entitled, whiny, helpless, idiot. Like, if you saw an adult acting like this today, you’d wonder how they managed to function before realizing it was because they’re just wealthy and get away with dumb shit. Then there’s the trashing of freaking Queen Victoria, which I am not here for. Lest we forget, this was written by a former member of the royal family. As in, she was married to Queen Victoria’s great-great-great-grandson. Oh, and to make it even worse, the love interest’s name was Donald. I don’t care if it’s historically accurate or whatever, I never again want to read a romance book about a Donald.

Nothing is known about the woman this book is based on except that she existed, got married, had children, and died. So this book is pure speculation. She could have been a secret genius for all we know. I’m just mad this book even got published, and we all know its because they knew a book with a royal’s name on the cover would sell. Which is exactly how I ended up with a signed copy. I’m a sucker.

And we are done with the worst books of the year! Next week, we’ll start getting into all of my favorites, which thankfully outnumber the books on this list. What was the worst book you read this year?

And check out my bookshop , where you can buy books and also shop my curated collections of my personal favorites AND all of the books I’ve read for my reading eperiments. Or you can just buy whatever books you want to. I get a small commission at no extra cost to you, and you get to support your choice of indie bookstores – it’s a win all around!

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cozy romance & Black History Month reads

my best reading month in a LONG time!

to read in the Year of the Rabbit

3 responses.

I’m going to have to look back over my 2022 reads soon. Usually, I’m decent at finding books that I love but for some reason I didn’t do great 2022. I think the bad might end up outweighing the good. So, I have too many disappointing books to list right now lol.

Oh no! I’ve definitely had years like that. Hopefully 2023 is better!

The BEST and WORST Books I Read in 2022

Updated: Mar 19, 2023

*I have excluded my favorite fantasy books of 2022 from this list because they will be appearing in next week’s blog.

My best books of 2022, 1. razorblade tears by s. a. cosby (adult thriller), what it’s about:, after their two sons (who were married) are murdered buddy lee and ike, who never accepted their sons’ sexualities when they were alive, team up to avenge them., why it’s the best:, i tend to be drawn to morally grey characters and both buddy lee and ike fit that description perfectly. the guilt and grief the two experience feels palpable and cutting. the way their alliance morphs into a genuine friendship captured me. these two also grew so much as characters throughout the story, overcoming their prejudices. this novel has break neck pacing and leaves you dizzy but the raw emotion is never lost. this is a very heavy novel with a lot of trigger warnings (including racism, homophobia and transphobia, misogyny, and violence) but none of it is out of place. still, i do caution you to think carefully before picking up this book. as amazing as it is i don’t think it’s for everyone., 2. carrie soto is back by taylor jenkins reid (adult historical fiction), retired tennis champion carrie soto returns to the game to defend her title from up and coming star nicki chan., i have always given jenkins reid’s historical fiction novels 5 stars. i wondered if this one would be the expectation as i am not a sports person and so the subject matter didn’t interest me one bit. this is a character driver story, though, and so i still found myself being invested. carrie is an abrasive protagonist as she’s cocky, cold, and often cruel. jenkins reid is such a talented writer, however, that she managed to make me root for her still. this is due both to her amazing character arc but also getting to read about her backstory which helps the reader to better understand her. a character doesn’t have to be nice to be well written, after all. the other characters shine as well. i in particular want to shout out love interest bowe who makes carrie a better person and rival nicki who is the only one capable of standing her ground against carrie., 3. we deserve monuments (ya contemporary), avery anderson’s family moves to bardell, georgia to care for her ailing grandmother. while there she falls for local simone but things are complicated by the fact that simone isn’t out., this novel covers a wide variety of topics from racism to generational trauma to grief and sexuality. it manages to juggle all of these well with all the time and care they deserve. there is pain and darkness in this novel but there is also healing and hope. avery is a character that i imagine many young readers will find relatable as she struggles to redefine herself after a bad breakup and a move to a new town. her relationship with her grandmother, mama letty, is the beating heart of this story. i no longer read much ya contemporary, but i will be picking up whatever this author writes next (this is her debut)., 4. the charm offensive by alison cochrun (adult romance), a disgraced tech genius (charlie) becomes the star of a reality tv dating show in order to revamp his image. he ends up falling in love with crew member dev., accurate mental health representation is so important and to get to see two well rounded characters who had the same conditions as me (anxiety disorder and depression) meant the world to someone like me. i was so emotional reading this book because for so long i believed i couldn’t have love in my life because i would be a burden to a partner. this book speared through those insecurities. charlie and dev’s love story is so beautiful because it is filled with passionate moments, dramatic ones, and ones where they are supporting each other through their struggles. this is a book for all those who never get to see themselves in romance books because the truth is we deserve these stories too., 5. the resting place by camilla sten (adult thriller), eleanor has prosopagnosia (face blindness) which renders her incapable of identifying her grandmother’s murderer despite seeing them. she and her boyfriend travel to her grandmother’s estate which her grandmother left her, but they may not be alone there., when it comes to mysteries and thrillers the number one thing that can draw me in is a spooky setting. in particular, i look for houses/manors that have that haunted feeling to them. it’s great if you like to be unsettled and on edge but not outright scared. this book also features the common but for a good reason trope of isolation (there’s a snowstorm trapping them at the estate). something i only recently discovered this year is how i also like unreliable narrators. eleanor has ptsd and this leads to a sense of disquiet and unreality in her pov. the icing on the cake was the ending which had my jaw dropping. i definitely didn’t see it coming, my worst books of 2022, 1.the overnight guest by heather gudenkauf (adult thriller), while writing in an isolated farmhouse during a storm, wylie lark discovers a child whose been in an accident. she brings the child inside but it soon becomes clear someone is after them., why it’s the worst:, this novel is genuinely the most disturbing book i’ve ever read. i should have dnf’d it because it left me feeling sad and disgusted upon finishing it. the past timeline follows a traumatized child who discovers the bodies of her family members and that is not what i signed up for. even if you could look passed all of that then there still isn’t anything worth reading here. the plot and character identities were predictable and wylie’s decisions made no logical sense for her character., 2. reckless girls by rachel hawkins (adult thriller), lux and her boyfriend are hired to take two girls on vacation to a deserted island. when they arrive they find another couple already there. things devolve when a body is found. is there a murderer on the island with them or is one of them the killer, the premise sounds so good, right an isolated setting with a haunting history, strangers, dead bodies. the problem lies with the fact that there is very little of anything that could remotely be considered actual plot to be found in this book. about 90% of the book is shallow characters drinking, relaxing, and partying on a beach. there was none of the tension and mystery and unsettling scenes that i was anticipating. i was bored reading the book and that isn’t how one should feel reading a thriller., 2. they never learn by layne fargo (adult thriller), dr. scarlett clark kills a man who sexually assaults/abuses women on her college campus every year. student carly becomes obsessed with revenge after her roommate is sexually assaulted at a party., in my experience the thriller genre is in the dark ages when it comes to mental health representation. oftentimes they perpetuate that idea that those with mental illness are all dangerous. scarlet, a killer, is portrayed as growing up an awkward outsider with society anxiety. this is so harmful to the mental health community and sickens me. this novel also tries to paint feminism in a very twisted light that is far from favorable. additionally, there are unnecessary scenes of women being assaulted and abused. i understand what fargo’s intentions were, but she missed the mark big time., 3. hench by natalie zina walschots (adult sci-fi), anna is a hench, which means she works for supervillains. when she is fired from her job after a work-related injury she soon finds employment with the most dangerous villain there is., the concept of this book had so much promise and i liked how anna took her pain and turned it into her power. yet somehow anna was the most boring main character ever. she’s bland personality wise and is sidelined during the climax of the novel. the pacing is too meandering and the world building is lacking. finally, the novel’s conclusion was too open ended for a book that is supposed to be a standalone., 5. shadowsong by s. jae-jones (ya fantasy), after her time in the underground falling in love with the goblin king in wintersong, liesel has returned to the surface in this sequel. the underground might not be ready to let her go, though, as the barrier between above and below ground is breaking down., liesel was the least compelling character in this story. in the first book, she is not always likeable but still had her redeeming qualities. her bad qualities much outweigh her good ones in this book, though. the romance was a main part of the plot of the first book but that’s nonexistent here. the goblin king as a character doesn’t really have much of a role at all in this sequel. the overall plot is also just quite boring despite having such promising material to work with. for as much as i liked the first book this wasn’t a good sequel and series conclusion., recent posts.

Taking a Break

As mentioned in a previous blog - My Body is a Battleground (My Journey of Ovarian Surgeries) - I am having surgery to remove a growth that is suspicious for malignancy this month. While I am praying

Here We Go Again by Alison Cochrun (book review)

GENRE: Adult Romance LENGTH: 353 pages PLOT English teachers Logan Maletis and Rosemary Hale are former childhood best friends turned enemies. Their old teacher/father figure Joe Delgado is dying and

My Body is a Battleground (My Journey of Ovarian Surgeries)

While this is primarily a book review blog, I occasionally share my poems here as well. My poetry is how I process the things that happen to me. This one is inspired by the nightmare that began three

Book reviews: 47 of the best novels of 2022

New releases include The Singularities by John Banville and Saha by Cho Nam-Joo

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1. The Singularities by John Banville

2. saha by cho nam-joo (trans. jamie chang), 3. bournville by jonathan coe.

4. Molly & the Captain by Anthony Quinn

5. Darling by India Knight

6. the passenger by cormac mccarthy, 7. demon copperhead by barbara kingsolver, 8. liberation day by george saunders, 9. lucy by the sea by elizabeth strout, 10. the romantic by william boyd, 11. the marriage portrait by maggie o’farrell, 12. carrie soto is back by taylor jenkins reid, 13. lessons by ian mcewan, 14. the ink black heart by robert galbraith, 15. haven by emma donoghue, 16. trust by hernan diaz, 17. the last white man by mohsin hamid, 18. a hunger by ross raisin, 19. acts of service by lillian fishman, 20. the twilight world by werner herzog, 21. the exhibitionist by charlotte mendelson, 22. vladimir by julia may jonas, 23. to paradise by hanya yanagihara, 24. joan by katherine j. chen, 25. the house of fortune by jessie burton, 26. the seaplane on final approach by rebecca rukeyser, 27. the young accomplice by benjamin wood, 28. the sidekick by benjamin markovits, 29. nonfiction: a novel by julie myerson, 30. you have a friend in 10a by maggie shipstead, 31. very cold people by sarah manguso, 32. trespasses by louise kennedy, 33. elizabeth finch by julian barnes, 34. the candy house by jennifer egan, 35. companion piece by ali smith, 36. young mungo by douglas stuart, 37. sell us the rope by stephen may, 38. french braid by anne tyler, 39. good intentions by kasim ali, 40. the school for good mothers by jessamine chan, 41. pure colour by sheila heti, 42. a previous life by edmund white, 43. a class of their own by matt knott, 44. our country friends by gary shteyngart, 45. scary monsters by michelle de kretser, 46. free love by tessa hadley, 47. the fell by sarah moss.

As the author of three trilogies, John Banville is “no stranger to using recurring characters”, said Ian Critchley in Literary Review . But The Singularities takes this to extremes: so stuffed is it with “old Banville protagonists” that it is close to being a “literary greatest-hits collection”. The setting is Arden House – the crumbling Irish country house from Banville’s 2009 work The Infinities . Various characters from that work are joined by William Jaybey (from The Newton Letter ) and Freddie Montgomery (from The Book of Evidence ), among others. One doesn’t begrudge Banville his “game with his readers”: The Singularities is a “pleasure to read”.

With its “assembly of characters” and country house setting, this novel seems to have the “makings of a whodunnit”, said Tom Ball in The Times . But “no one dies”, or even falls out; and, in fact, little of consequence happens. Fortunately, “you don’t read Banville for his taut plots”. You read him because, every few pages, there’s a sentence “so perfectly contrived it stops you for a moment, achingly, like a beautiful stranger passing in the street”.

Knopf 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

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The South Korean writer Cho Nam-Joo is best known for her 2016 novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 , said Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The i Paper . A story of “everyday sexism”, it sold more than a million copies in South Korea and sparked a national conversation about the status of women. Cho’s latest novel, Saha , is “just as political” – though this time the focus is on class. Set in a dystopian future, the novel follows a disparate group of characters who live in some dilapidated buildings on the outskirts of “Town”, a fiercely hierarchical “privatised city-nation” where all aspects of life are tightly controlled. Offering a powerful critique of “plutocracy, systemic inequality” and “gendered violence”, the novel is “utterly captivating”.

Cho’s dystopia is “not particularly original”, and her plotting can be “surprisingly loose”, said Mia Levitin in The Daily Telegraph . But the novel’s characterisation is “touching” – and its themes are certainly powerful. At a time of rising global inequality – South Korea’s economy is dominated by “mega-corporations” – this is a book that “resonates widely”.

Scribner 240pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

“Few contemporary writers can make a success of the state-of-the-nation novel,” said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman . But one who can is Jonathan Coe. His latest charts 75 years of British history, following the lives of a single family, headed by matriarch Mary Lamb, who live on the outskirts of Birmingham, near the Bournville factory. Coe covers so much ground in just 350 pages by alighting only on key moments: VE Day in 1945; the Queen’s coronation; the 1966 World Cup; the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The result is a “piercing” satire on Englishness that is “designed to make you think by making you laugh”. This is a warm and comforting book, said Melissa Katsoulis in The Times – like a “mug of hot chocolate”.

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The final section, set during Covid-19, is very moving, said J.S. Barnes in Literary Review . But much of this novel is “flat and formulaic”. The use of hindsight is clunky: when Mary visits The Mousetrap in 1953, she thinks: “I imagine it will be closing before very long.” It feels like a “procession through well-worn territory”, rather than something designed to “excite or entertain”.

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4. Molly & the Captain by Anthony Quinn

Anthony Quinn is a “fine prose stylist, able to evoke the past with vivid immediacy”, said Alex Preston in The Observer . His ninth novel is a sweeping epic that consists of three interlinked sections. In the 1780s, Laura Merrymount – daughter of the Gainsborough-esque portraitist William Merrymount – strives to escape from her father’s shadow and become a painter herself. In Chelsea a century later, we meet the young artist Paul Stransom and his sister Maggie – who abandoned her own dreams of becoming an artist to care for their dying mother. And finally, in 1980s Kentish Town another artist, Nell Cantrip, suddenly acquires late-career fame. Marked by its “intricate”, immaculate plotting, this novel is a “rollicking read”.

I found the plotting a bit predictable, and the characterisation heavy-handed, said Imogen Hermes Gowar in The Guardian . But the book has interesting things to say “about women’s work and talent, and the life cycle of art”; and it is deftly put together by a writer who delights in the “granular details of an era”, while also understanding its broad sweep.

Abacus 432pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

India Knight’s new book is a “contemporary reimagining” of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love , said Christina Patterson in The Sunday Times . Updating “such a beloved novel” certainly isn’t easy – but Knight has pulled off the task with aplomb. In her version, the four Radlett children – Linda, Louisa, Jassy and Robin – are not the progeny of an English lord, but of an ageing and reclusive rock star. Desperate to protect his children from “modern life”, he has purchased a “vast Norfolk estate” – and it’s there that we first encounter Linda and her siblings, through the eyes of their cousin Franny. The narrative tracks their passage to adulthood, and their romantic entanglements – centred on “Linda’s pursuit of love”.

Darling works because, as in Mitford’s original, the details are so “bang on”, said Emma Beddington in The Spectator . Sometimes, Knight artfully tweaks them: she replaces hunting with swimming, and gives her adult characters jobs (Linda runs a café in Dalston). Mitford “diehards can rest easy: your blood vessels are safe with this faithful, fiercely funny homage”.

Fig Tree 288pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Cormac McCarthy’s first novel in 16 years explores “the very boundaries of human understanding”, said Nicholas Mancusi in Time . Investigating a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico, diver Bobby Western discovers that one passenger is missing; soon he is being harassed by government agents. But the pretence that this is a thriller doesn’t last long: chapters in which Bobby discusses the meaning of life alternate with ones in which his maths genius sister Alice experiences schizophrenic hallucinations. It’s a deeply weird book, held together by “chuckle-out-loud” humour. A companion novel, Stella Maris , focusing on Alice, does little to explain it – but together they are “staggering”.

Sorry, said James Walton in The Times , but I can’t remember a recent novel so wildly indifferent to what its readers might enjoy, or even understand. The conversations that make up the bulk of it, ranging from nuclear physics to Kennedy’s assassination, are a complete ragbag. McCarthy’s gift for description and dialogue remains undiminished, but there’s no escaping the sense that The Passenger is “a big old mess”.

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Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel is a retelling of David Copperfield , transposed to the “valleys of southwest Virginia at the height of America’s opioid crisis”, said James Riding in The Times . Demon Copperhead, the “rambunctious hero”, is “born in a trailer to a teenage single mother”, and grows up in a world of neglectful child protection services and dubious guardians. The characters are all recognisable from the Dickens novel – but appear in new guises: “Steerforth becomes Fast Forward, a pill-popping quarterback; Uriah Heep is U-Haul, a football coach’s errand boy”. Daring and entertaining, Demon Copperhead is “shockingly successful” – “like Dickens directed by the Coen brothers”.

It’s a promising premise, not least because in its extreme inequality, post-industrial America resembles Victorian England, said Jessa Crispin in The Daily Telegraph . Yet while Kingsolver closely cleaves to the story of the original, she “breaks the most important rule of working in the Dickensian mode”: the need to “show the reader a good time”. Hers is a retelling “beset by earnestness” – and as a result it falls flat.

Faber 560pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Besides being a Booker Prize winner with his only novel, Lincoln in the Bardo , George Saunders is “routinely hailed as the world’s best short story writer”, said James Walton in The Daily Telegraph . The American’s dazzling new collection – his first since 2013’s Tenth of December – shows why he garners such acclaim. As is customary in a Saunders collection, quite a few of the tales are “deeply strange”: in the title story, three people are kept permanently “pinioned to a wall”, enacting scenes from American history; another story is set in a theme park that has never received any visitors. Around half the tales, however, explore “recognisable social and political dilemmas”: two employees clashing at work; a mother’s despair about the state of America after her son is pushed over by a tramp. And whether Saunders is engaging with contemporary reality, or “taking us somewhere else entirely”, he never forgets that the most important duty of a writer is to make his work “winningly readable”.

Tenth of December was a “marvellous” collection, but unfortunately Liberation Day doesn’t hit the same heights, said Charles Finch in the Los Angeles Times . Although “the standard of Saunders’ writing remains astronomically high”, there are times here when he seems almost on auto-pilot, reprising themes and situations he has previously explored. It’s true that if you’ve read Saunders before, then parts of Liberation Day will sound “like self-parody”, said John Self in The Times . But then again, “it’s churlish to knock a true original for repeating himself”. When he’s at his best, Saunders’ “oblique, farcical, tragic” view of the world still has the ability to “take the top of your head off”.

Bloomsbury 256pp £18.99; The Week bookshop £14.99

“Elizabeth Strout is writing masterpieces at a pace you might not suspect from their spaciousness and steady beauty,” said Alexandra Harris in The Guardian . Lucy by the Sea is the third sequel to her acclaimed bestseller My Name is Lucy Barton . It takes place early during the pandemic, when Lucy and her ex-husband, William, leave New York for a friend’s empty beach house in Maine – for “just a few weeks”, he says. It is “a study of a later-life reunion between a man and woman who married in their 20s”. It isn’t “a tender tale”, as William isn’t an easy man to like, but it is “as fine a pandemic novel as one could hope for”.

Over the course of three Lucy Barton books, Strout has “created one of the most quizzical characters in modern fiction”, said Claire Allfree in The Times . Still, even this “avid fan” found herself wondering whether this instalment is “surplus to requirements”. This, sadly, is a novel that “mistakes simplistic observation for subtle insight, bathos for pathos”, and Lucy herself is “downright annoying”. I disagree entirely, said Julie Myerson in The Observer . Lucy by the Sea is a wonderful evocation of lockdown life. It is “her most nuanced – and intensely moving – Lucy Barton novel yet”.

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William Boyd’s 17th novel – his first set in the 19th century – is an “old-fashioned bildungsroman” that follows its “hero, Cashel Greville Ross, through a long and peripatetic life”, said Lucy Atkins in The Sunday Times .

After growing up in Ireland and Oxford, Cashel “impulsively joins the army” and finds himself “facing the French bayonets at the Battle of Waterloo”. He subsequently “hangs out” with Byron and Shelley in Italy, spends time in east India and New England, and becomes an opium addict, an author and a diplomat. Although the authorial winks can be groan-inducing – “Shelley can barely swim”, a friend of the poet declares – it is a “masterclass” in narrative construction and its ending is “genuinely poignant”.

Boyd is “as magically readable as ever”, said Jake Kerridge in The Daily Telegraph . But amid the non-stop action and “endless verbal anachronisms”, Cashel never quite emerges as a fully rounded character. Compared with Boyd’s previous “whole life novels”, such as Any Human Heart and Sweet Caress , The Romantic feels “glaringly synthetic”.

Viking 464pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Maggie O’Farrell’s last novel, the brilliant Hamnet , “fleshed out” the lives of Shakespeare’s children, said Elizabeth Lowry in The Daily Telegraph . Her latest brings another neglected historical figure into the light – the noblewoman Lucrezia de’ Medici. In 1560, a 16-year-old Lucrezia left Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso d’Este, heir to the Duke of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio. “Within a year, she was dead”; it was rumoured Alfonso had killed her. Taking these “suggestive details” as inspiration (as Robert Browning did in his famous poem My Last Duchess ), O’Farrell “constructs a convincing human drama”.

O’Farrell is a master of visual description, said Claire Allfree in The Times . A tiger moves “like honey dripping from a spoon”; through a window, the sound of sobbing drifts upwards “like smoke”. Yet the “headily perfumed” prose proves oddly dulling: rather than “springing forth messily alive”, Lucrezia seems “trapped beneath the weight” of the “relentless” description. Although it sets out to bring Lucrezia back to life, it ends up being a “bloodless book”.

Tinder Press 438pp £25; The Week Bookshop £19.99

Taylor Jenkins Reid is a TikTok phenomenon, said Marianka Swain in The Daily Telegraph . Thanks in part to BookTok – the social media app’s books community – her novels about glamorous women finding fame and fortune have sold in their millions. Continuing with that “winning strategy”, her latest centres on a “hotshot American tennis pro”.

Carrie Soto is a former world No. 1, who has won a record 20 grand slams. Now in her late 30s, she mounts an “unlikely comeback”, prompted by the emergence of a new star, Londoner Nicki Chan. This is a “compulsive, soapy page-turner” with “more substance than the average beach read”. In short, it’s an “ace” of an “escapist romp”.

Jenkins Reid has a “nose for a cultural moment”, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times . And so this book’s appearance so soon after the retirement of Serena Williams – clearly an inspiration for Carrie – is “coincidental but not surprising”. Don’t expect “psychological depth”; “fundamentally, this is a sports story”, with whole chapters devoted to single matches. But it’s certainly very “fun to read”.

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Ian McEwan’s novels are often “lean, controlled enquiries” into specific historical moments, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The New Statesman : 1950s Germany in The Innocent ; the Thatcherite 1980s in A Child in Time . But his 18th is very different – “baggier and more protean” than any of its predecessors. It’s also, “to my mind, McEwan’s best novel in 20 years”. His protagonist, Roland Baines, is a baby boomer who bears a strong resemblance to his creator, were his creator “not a hugely successful novelist”. Roland spends his childhood in Libya, then “attends a state-run boarding school” in England. And like McEwan, he discovers as an adult that he has a long-lost brother. Yet his life is notable for its lack of direction: he “scratches out a living as a hotel lounge pianist, an occasional tennis coach and a hack”. Humble and wise, Lessons is “an intimate but sprawling story about an ordinary man’s reckoning with existence”.

As is often the case for McEwan’s protagonists, Roland’s life “hinges” on a single traumatic episode, said Edmund Gordon in the TLS . Aged 14, he begins an affair with his piano teacher, Miss Cornell – a relationship which, while he “isn’t exactly a reluctant participant”, nonetheless wounds him. A second trauma follows in his 30s, when Roland’s German-born wife, Alissa, abandons him and their baby son to pursue her ambition of becoming a novelist, said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times . While Roland is left a single parent, Alissa – somewhat implausibly – becomes “Germany’s greatest writer”. As the decades pass, the “social and domestic cavalcade of Roland’s life” plays out against the backdrop of “momentous global happenings” – from 9/11 to the Covid lockdowns. A “vividly detailed lifetime chronicle”, Lessons is a “tour de force”.

Yet it has its problems, said Claire Lowdon in The Spectator . This is a novel full of dropped storylines and non sequiturs, and McEwan can’t resist those “overbearing news bulletins” that have peppered his recent work (“The Profumo affair was only a year away” etc.). Still, Lessons is consistently enjoyable, and there’s something to be said for the “novelty” of reading a McEwan novel that feels more like “a Jonathan Franzen”. At the age of 74, his desire to try new things is impressive. “Despite the rambling and the rushed patches, here is a whole, unruly life between the covers of a single book: a literary feat of undeniable majesty.”

Cape 496pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

This new crime novel by J.K. Rowling, using her Robert Galbraith pseudonym, has Cormoran Strike, her Afghan-War-veteran-turned-private detective, getting to grips with the world of online trolls, said Joan Smith in The Sunday Times .

Strike and his partner Robin are called to investigate the stabbing to death of a woman named Edie. She was the co-creator of a YouTube cartoon featuring “ghoulish” characters cavorting in a cemetery, and the finger of suspicion falls on a gamer known as “Anomie”, who had subjected Edie to a “torrent of lurid accusation” after claiming that she’d ripped off his ideas.

While the novel works as a “superlative piece of crime fiction”, its subject matter also feels highly pointed: Rowling has herself faced accusations of plagiarism, and she has been subjected to savage online abuse for arguing that aspects of trans ideology lead to the “erasure of the word ‘woman’”.

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Emma Donoghue’s latest novel is set in early 7th century Ireland, and centres on a trio of monks who build a monastic community on a tiny island, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post . The men set out in their “precarious boat” after their leader Artt – a “legendary holy man” – has a “vision of an island in the western sea”. When they reach a “large rock” covered in “birds, guano and little else”, Artt is convinced it’s the place from his dream – and resolves that he and his companions will never leave. Haven may sound like a work that “few readers have been praying for”, but it proves “transporting, sometimes unsettling and eventually shocking”.

There are some “striking formal similarities” between this novel and Donoghue’s 2010 bestseller Room , inspired by the Josef Fritzl case, said Paraic O’Donnell in The Guardian . Both are works of “radical minimalism”, about people who “struggle to preserve their humanity in utter isolation”. Although Haven is “created in a muted palette”, this is a work of impressive “narrative sustenance” – and is “crowded with quietly beautiful details”.

Picador 272pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated first novel, In the Distance, centred on a “penniless young Swedish immigrant” in California, said Jonathan Lee in The Guardian . His second concerns a “character at the other end of the economic scale” – a “Gatsby-like tycoon in 1920s New York” named Andrew Bevel. Rather than tell Bevel’s story straight, Diaz embeds it in four “interconnected narratives”: a fictionalised novel based on Bevel’s life; Bevel’s unfinished autobiography; a memoir by his ghostwriter; and fragments from his wife’s “long-withheld diary”. It sounds tricksy, but it’s surprisingly readable – like a “brilliantly twisted mix” of Borges and J.M. Coetzee, with “a dash” of Italo Calvino.

The “knotty ingenuity” of this novel makes it deserving of its place on this year’s Booker longlist, said Lucy Scholes in The Daily Telegraph . It is “destined to be known as one of the great puzzle-box novels”. I doubt that, said John Self in The Times . Parts are “original and surprising”, but overall it’s “well behaved and dull”, and consumed by its own cleverness. Like the tycoon at its centre, it’s “all smart, no heart”.

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Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel begins with a transformation, said Alex Preston in The Observer : Anders wakes up one morning to find his skin has changed from white to black. This metamorphosis is not explained; instead, the focus is on its impact on the people around Anders. When he goes out, he feels “vaguely menaced”; his boss tells him he’d have killed himself had it happened to him. But then Anders finds that similar transformations are taking place across the US, until eventually there is “just one white man left”. Written in “incantatory” sentences, The Last White Man is a “strange, beautiful allegorical tale”.

Mysterious transformations can be “fertile terrain” for fiction, said Houman Barekat in The Times : one thinks, most obviously, of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. But while that work resists easy interpretation, Hamid’s aims are all too obvious: this is “yet another liberal parable” about the “psychic underpinnings of racial prejudice”. Ultimately, it’s a book that says more about the “publishing industry’s anxious scrabble for topicality” than about “the human condition”.

Hamish Hamilton 192pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

Most books billed as telling us “what it means to be human” really do no such thing, said John Self in The Observer . Ross Raisin’s A Hunger is an exception. The tale of a London “sous chef in her mid-50s”, this is the fourth novel by this talented writer – and it is his most “ambitious” yet, encompassing “work and family, desires and appetites, responsibility and identity”.

Raisin has always excelled at portraying working lives, said Alexandra Harris in The Guardian : Waterline , his second novel, centred on a Clyde shipbuilder; A Natural , his third, was about a lower league footballer. Here, he captures the rhythms of kitchen life so skilfully that it “makes one realise the degree to which work is still under-charted territory in literary fiction”. Yet the novel is about much more than cooking: Patrick, Anita’s husband of 30 years, has recently developed early-onset dementia, forcing her to combine the stresses of her job with a new role as a carer “changing incontinence pads”. The result is a “deeply thought out and beautifully unshowy” novel about the “conflicting demands of work and care”.

I wasn’t impressed, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . Although Raisin’s gifts for “startling descriptive prose” are evident – notably in a bravura opening set in a walk-in fridge – the novel overall is let down by “wooden dialogue”, characters who don’t seem real, and a clumsy structure in which Anita’s present-day travails are juxtaposed with “rushed and skimpy” scenes from her early life. It may not be perfect, but this is a deft exploration of “the guilt that accompanies female ambition”, said Amber Medland in the FT . Daring in what it sets out to achieve, A Hunger is equally “impressive in its execution”.

Jonathan Cape 464pp £18.99; The Week bookshop £14.99

Lillian Fishman’s debut is one of the most “searching and enthralling” novels about sex I’ve read in years, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The New Statesman . “Eve is a 28-year-old barista from Brooklyn in a long-term relationship with Romi, a paediatrician.” Although Eve considers herself a lesbian, she has fantasies about sleeping with a “wild number of people”. When she posts nude pictures of herself online, they catch the attention of an artist called Olivia – who proves to be acting on behalf of a “tall, wealthy man in his 30s” named Nathan, who makes Eve his sexual “toy”. “Part erotic Bildungsroman, part melancholy comedy of manners”, Acts of Service is “startlingly accomplished”.

Well, I found it thoroughly tedious, said Jessa Crispin in The Times – less a novel than a crude allegory. Nathan is “basically Christian Grey from Fifty Shades rendered in marginally better prose”. Fishman’s reflections on the corrupting effects of “patriarchy” and “capitalism” have been far better expressed elsewhere. Overhyped and unoriginal, this is a disappointing addition to the “library of endless want”.

Europa Editions 224pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

For 29 years after the end of the Second World War, a Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda held out on a small island in the Philippines, believing his comrades were still fighting, said Anthony Gardner in The Mail on Sunday . Now the great film director Werner Herzog, who befriended Onoda in 1997, has written an imaginative reconstruction of his experiences. Steeped in the atmosphere of the jungle, it’s an “enthralling” novel that explores the nature of time and warfare with great mastery.

Onoda’s single-minded intransigence makes him an archetypal Herzog hero, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph , and this “Hemingwayesque” novella is highly cinematic, with short chapters and vivid scene-setting. But its refined prose gives it a sculptural quality too: its descriptions of the natural world are radiant. Herzog manages to inhabit the soldier’s mind, and to create a “visionary” narrative, said Peter Carty in The i Paper. Moral issues – Onoda killed a number of islanders – are somewhat sidelined, but this beautifully crafted book is a “literary jewel” nevertheless.

Bodley Head 144pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Charlotte Mendelson’s “riotous, prize-winning novels” tend to be about messy, dysfunctional families, said Leyla Sanai in The Spectator . Her fifth centres on a “monstrous” artist named Ray Hanrahan and his downtrodden wife, Lucia. Narcissistic, abusive and controlling, Ray has “quashed” Lucia’s own artistic ambitions for decades, forcing her to minister to his needs and look after their (now grown-up) children.

With an “ostentatious private view” of his work about to open, he has summoned friends and family to their north London house. The result is a “glorious ride” of a novel – one in which “Mendelson observes the minutiae of human behaviour like a comic anthropologist”.

There is a lot going on in this novel – “at times, too much” – but the overall “effect is exhilarating”, said Susie Mesure in The Times . Moving between perspectives, Mendelson cranks the drama up to a “fiery climax”. There’s a “hint of HBO’s Succession ” in this tale of a “family in thrall to a despotic patriarch”, said Madeleine Feeny in The Daily Telegraph . Mingling “eroticism, absurdity and pathos”, it’s “electric”.

Mantle 336pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

At first glance, this debut novel seems to be yet another post-#MeToo book “dissecting sexual trauma and queasy power dynamics”, said Laura Hackett in The Sunday Times . At a US liberal arts college, John, a senior English professor, finds himself accused of sexual impropriety by “seven students with whom he has had affairs”. But rather than adopt their perspective, the novel is narrated by John’s wife – who is anything but sympathetic towards them. She laments the fact that young women today seem to have “lost all agency”, and admits to having “enjoyed the space” that her husband’s infidelities provided. With its bracing take on sexual politics, Vladimir is an “astonishing debut”.

In its second half, the novel becomes primarily about “female appetite”, as the narrator develops an obsessive crush on a “gorgeous new junior professor”, said Lucy Atkins in The Guardian . May Jones’s “quietly captivating” voice dazzles until the end, when the novel is let down by a “heavy-handed denouement”. Still, in its willingness to tackle “complex”, provocative themes, this is “an engrossing and clever debut”.

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Hanya Yanagihara’s latest novel is the “keenly awaited” follow up to A Little Life , her “devastating story of irreparable human damage”, said David Sexton in The Sunday Times . It consists of three sections all set in the same New York building and taking place, respectively, in 1893, 1993 and 2093.

Part one re-imagines 19th century New York as a “liberal breakaway nation in which gay marriage is normal”. Part two, set in the “time of Aids”, focuses on a wealthy white lawyer and his young Hawaiian lover. Part three envisages an America that has been ravaged by “successive waves of viruses, every few years from 2020”. While a “less bludgeoningly powerful” work than A Little Life , it’s still “highly affecting”.

This is in many ways a “wantonly strange” work, said Claire Allfree in The Times : the convoluted narrative can be “frustratingly opaque”, and there’s a complete absence of humour. Yet there’s no denying Yanagihara’s skill at immersing us in the “emotional world of her characters”. For all its flaws, To Paradise is “frequently magnificent”.

Picador 720pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

The story of Joan of Arc – a 15th-century peasant girl from northeast France who became a national heroine – has been told many times before, said Marianka Swain in The Daily Telegraph . But in her second novel, the American writer Katherine J. Chen offers a “fresh and utterly enthralling take”. Her Joan is not a religious icon – “gone are the visions” – but primarily a “woman of action”: she’s a child of remarkable physical gifts who, through a series of “serendipitous events”, becomes a key ally of the dauphin (later King Charles VII), helping to lead his armies against the English. “Vivid, visceral and boldly immediate”, the novel has already earned comparisons with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy.

At once a “mystic, martyr and war hero”, Joan is a largely “incomprehensible” figure today, said Jess Walter in The New York Times . Chen, however, has a “lively stab” at making her seem relevant – in part by imagining her as an “abused child” who uses her anger to become an “avenging warrior”. “Rich” and “visceral” in its descriptions, Joan is “stirring stuff”.

Hodder & Stoughton 368pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

In 2014, Jessie Burton’s debut novel The Miniaturist – about 18-year-old Nella Oortman’s coming of age in 17th century Amsterdam – became a global bestseller, said Gwendolyn Smith in The i Paper . Now Burton is back, with a “beguiling, tender sequel”, set 18 years later. Nella, now 37, is a widow (The Miniaturist climaxed with her husband’s execution for sodomy), who still lives in the “same grand address on Amsterdam’s Herengracht canal”. A “cold, austere place” in the previous book, the house is now suffused with “warmth and familiarity” – though it still “thrums with secrets”. “Wise and fabulously immersive”, this book, if anything, surpasses its predecessor.

I disagree, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph . Burton remains a “lovely writer”, who can craft “startlingly sculptural” sentences. But “where The Miniaturist was alive with spooky mystery”, this book lacks an “animating spirit”: characters, events and even the language seem contrived. “In seeking to bring more life to the characters in The Miniaturist, The House of Fortune somehow diminishes them instead.”

Picador 400pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

The Seaplane on Final Approach by Rebecca Rukeyser

Set in the Alaskan wilderness, Rebecca Rukeyser’s “wistful and sardonic” first novel is part adventure story, part coming-of-age tale, said The Irish Times . Seventeen-year-old Mira is working for the summer at a guest house run by a married couple, Stu and Maureen, alongside two other girls and a troubled chef. Much of her time is spent fantasising sexually about a boy she met the year before. Rukeyser’s descriptive prose is assured and elegant, and the story becomes increasingly tense, as Stu’s predatory behaviour towards the girls becomes apparent.

Mira’s adolescent yearning is well captured in this quirky, wry debut, said Siobhan Murphy in The Times . Rukeyser provides a “deftly juggled” mixture of merciless judgement and gentle compassion for her characters’ failings. There’s also plenty of comedy, said Cal Revely-Calder in The Sunday Telegraph, though the story becomes more “mature and melancholy” as it progresses. The Seaplane on Final Approach is about how “desire ruins everything”. And when the finale arrives, it is “catastrophic” – but it also provides “lengthy, gruesome fun”.

Granta 288pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

“Few people outside the literary world” have heard of 41-year-old novelist Benjamin Wood, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . That’s a shame, because he’s “wonderful”. Already the author of “three richly layered novels”, he has now written a fourth, The Young Accomplice , which is “his most original yet”. Set in the 1950s, it centres on Arthur and Florence Mayhood, “childless architects in their 30s” who, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, dream of creating a communal-living project on their Surrey farm. To help them realise this ambition, they invite a pair of borstal leavers – brother and sister Charlie and Joyce Savigear – to live with them; unsurprisingly, things go wrong.

Compared with Wood’s previous novels, which blended “storytelling punch with literary sensibility”, this book at times feels muted, said John Self in The Times . Wood spends a lot of time in his characters’ heads; you wish for a bit more action. Still, there are compensations: the characters feel like “real people”, who you miss when they’re gone. This is a book that “digs its claws into you and sticks there”.

Viking 368pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Benjamin Markovits’s latest novel is a “compelling account of relative failure”, said Joseph Owen in Literary Review . Brian, the narrator, is a “big fat slow” Jewish kid from Austin, Texas, who becomes childhood friends with Marcus Hayes, his high school’s basketball star. Marcus is black, and from a broken home – for a while he lives with Brian’s family – but in adulthood, when Marcus becomes an “NBA superstar”, Brian is merely a “semi-successful” sportswriter. The novel convincingly portrays Brian’s “inhibited world-view”, which is “tainted by jealousy” of his friend. The result is a “bleak, amusing, ultimately absorbing read”.

This is a novel with the “topography of a classic American story”, said Stuart Evers in The Spectator : “sport as a metaphor for the fracture of the US; friendship as a microcosm of race relations”. It feels a little dated – a bit “male and white” – and the “detailed descriptions of basketball” could put some people off. In the final act, though, when Markovits unveils “his A-game”, the novel “ignites into something compelling and emotionally resonant”.

Faber 361pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

In 2009, the novelist Julie Myerson found herself at the centre of a media storm after publishing a non-fiction account of her eldest son’s addiction to marijuana, said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer . The episode, she has said, drove her to a “kind of breakdown”, and she has never directly addressed it in her writing. Except that now, in a way, she has. This, her 11th novel – entitled Nonfiction – is all about “teenage drug addiction”. The narrator is a once “happily married” writer, who is looking back on her attempts to save her heroin-addicted daughter “from self-destruction”. Given her own backstory, Myerson is risking a lot with such a novel – but “the results are nothing less than incandescent”.

The title is confusing, and deliberately so, said Alex Peake-Tomkinson in The Spectator . This is Myerson’s “squarest attempt so far at autobiographical fiction”. Yet in other ways, it seems a typical work: she has always explored “her worst fears in her novels”. Although I hope she will “look beyond her own life” in future, I found this a “satisfyingly propulsive” read.

Corsair 288pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

You Have a Friend in 10A by Maggie Shipstead

Maggie Shipstead’s “thrilling” historical epic, Great Circle , not only earned her a place on last year’s Booker shortlist, but also “proved a huge hit with readers”, said Lucy Scholes in the Financial Times . So it’s “savvy” of her publisher to bring out this collection of her short stories, written over the past 13 years. The tales vary widely in tone and setting – they transport us “from the catacombs of Paris, via an Olympic Village, to a guano island in the middle of the Pacific” – but taken together, they forcefully illustrate the “remarkable scope of Shipstead’s imagination and talent”.

While one or two of these stories seem a bit “too self-conscious”, most are superb, said Lizzy Harding in The New York Times . In the “sure standout”, “La Moretta”, a young couple’s honeymoon in Romania “transforms into folk horror à la The Wicker Man ”. Shipstead has an “unnerving ability to capture a character’s inner life in a few choice phrases”, said Stephanie Merritt in The Observer . “It’s a rare writer who can create a world as convincingly over a few pages as in a 600-page novel.”

Doubleday 288pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

This “creepy coming-of-age tale” unfolds like a “darker version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda ”, except with “no Miss Honey coming to the rescue”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Observer . Set in an “icy” Massachusetts town in the 1980s, it is narrated by Ruthie, an only child whose family is “on the edge of poverty”. Ruthie is an assiduous cataloguer of “everything she sees” – her mother’s lumpy body, her awkward dinners with richer school friends – but she doesn’t always understand the significance of what she sees. Marked by its “pitiless, minutely observed prose”, Very Cold People is a work that “will stay with me for a very long time”.

Manguso is especially good at evoking the “constraints and cruelties” of Ruthie’s home life, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times . So successfully does she portray “boring old daily pain” that it almost seems redundant when “more dramatic plot-turns arrive” towards the end of the book. Very Cold People is at its best simply as a “compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived”.

Picador 208pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

The Irish writer Louise Kennedy only began writing aged 47, but her rise has been meteoric, said Madeleine Feeny in The Spectator . The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, her debut short story collection, was “fought over” by nine publishers. And now, with this first novel, she has written what promises to be another hit. Plot-wise, Trespasses doesn’t break new ground, said Kevin Power in The Guardian: set near Belfast in 1975, it’s about a young Catholic primary school teacher who falls in love with a posh Protestant barrister. What distinguishes it is its “sense of utter conviction”. This is a story “told with such compulsive attention to the textures of its world that every page feels like a moral and intellectual event”.

Kennedy is a superbly visual writer, and her “idiomatic dialogue gives her prose real verve”, said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer : the protagonist’s mother, catching sight of Helen Mirren on a chat show, describes her as a “dirty article”. Combining “unflinching authenticity” with a “flair for detail”, this is a “deftly calibrated” and ultimately “devastating” novel.

Bloomsbury 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Julian Barnes’s latest is that “old-fashioned thing, a novel of ideas”, said John Self in The Times . It is narrated by Neil, a former actor, but is really all about Elizabeth Finch, the “lecturer on a course on culture and civilisation that Neil took decades earlier”. Finch, who is “probably inspired” by Barnes’s friend, the late novelist Anita Brookner, is remembered as an inspirational teacher, someone “who obliged us – simply by example – to seek and find within ourselves a centre of seriousness”. Neil recalls their sort-of friendship – they occasionally met for lunch – and describes his quest, in the present day, to find out more about Finch in the wake of her death. Very much a “thinky” novel, Elizabeth Finch may be “rather less fun” than most of Barnes’s books, but it “offers plenty to chew on”.

“Part of the challenge of rendering a brilliantly inspirational teacher is making them sufficiently brilliant and inspirational,” said Sameer Rahim in The Daily Telegraph . Despite Neil’s insistence on Finch’s originality, “what she actually says tends to fall flat”. “She told me that love is all there is. It’s the only thing that matters,” a classmate of Neil recalls. The novel is further let down by its baffling middle section, which consists of Neil’s “stolid student essay” on the fourth century Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, whom Finch regarded as a kindred spirit, said Sam Byers in The Guardian .

It all adds up to a “work stubbornly determined to deny us its pleasures”. I disagree, said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times . As a teacher, Finch “blazes with vividness”, and Neil’s essay is a “bravura exercise in nimbly handled erudition”. Elizabeth Finch “celebrates the cast of mind” – subtle, sceptical and ironic – that “Barnes most prizes”.

Jonathan Cape 192pp £16.99; The Week bookshop £13.99

Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a “sibling novel” to A Visit From the Goon Squad, her bestselling 2010 novel about rock music, “Gen-X nostalgia” and the “digitalisation of everything”, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times . Consisting of interrelated short stories which zigzag about in time, it resembles its predecessor in structure – and features many of the same characters. But at its centre is a new figure: the “Mark Zuckerberg-like” Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, has created an “implausible” device known as Own Your Unconscious, which lets users upload their own and other people’s memories, and “watch them all like movies”.

The sci-fi aspects of the book are neither new nor “particularly fully realised”, said Andrew Billen in The Times : memory uploads have been tackled better elsewhere. But this is essentially a book of short stories, and most of them are excellent and “brain-stretching”. What “really astounds is the visual brilliance of Egan’s writing across these disparate tales”. She won a Pulitzer for A Visit From the Goon Squad; I hope this book “wins another”.

Corsaid 352pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Ali Smith’s first novel since her “extraordinary Seasonal Quartet ” has a fitting title, said Alex Preston in The Observer , as it “springs from the same source as its predecessors”. Like them, it was “written and published swiftly”, to cram in recent events. It’s 2021, and Sandy, an artist, is “struggling through lockdown”. Her father is in hospital following a heart attack – and she “only has his dog for company”. Smith skilfully evokes the grim monotony of pandemic life, said Catherine Taylor in the FT – from the “regularity of testing” to “the exhaustion of medical staff”.

Much of the plot concerns Sandy’s “renewed acquaintance” with an old university friend Martina, who gets in touch to tell her about her recent interrogation by UK border police, said Philip Hensher in The Daily Telegraph . This leads to Sandy meeting Martina’s twin daughters, Eden and Lea, who are full of “millennial” rage and entitlement. Covering a “lot of contemporary ground”, Companion Piece offers an entertaining portrait of the “world we live in, by the most beguiling and likeable of novelistic intelligences”.

Hamish Hamilton 400pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Douglas Stuart’s debut, Shuggie Bain – the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize – was a “bleak autobiographical novel about a young boy caring for his alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . His follow-up is “cut from the same cloth”.

Fifteen-year-old Mungo lives with his mother and two older siblings in Glasgow’s East End. “His brother, Hamish, is a Faginesque Protestant gang leader; his sister, Jodie, is a do-gooding fallen angel; and their mother, Mo-Maw, is a woman ruined by alcohol.” As the novel opens, Mungo is shooed off by his mother on a fishing trip with two menacing strangers from her Alcoholics Anonymous group, who promise to teach him “masculine pursuits”.

Interspersed with this “gruesome excursion” are chapters set a few months earlier, detailing Mungo’s first love affair, with a Catholic neighbour called James. Although this “alternating timeline” feels forced at times, this is still a “richly abundant” work packed with fine writing and “colourful characters”.

It may be felt – with some justification – that Stuart has written the same book twice, said Nikhil Krishnan in The Daily Telegraph . Yet he “makes small differences count”. Because Mungo is older than Shuggie, he is able to see in his sexuality “not just a source of difference and alienation, but a possible route to escape and emancipation”. And Stuart widens his focus beyond family life, taking in the “Jets and Sharks world” of Glasgow’s sectarian politics.

Like its predecessor, this “bear hug of a new novel” has a “yeasty whiff of the autobiographical” about it, said Hillary Kelly in the Los Angeles Times . If you adored Shuggie Bain , this book “will please you on every page”.

Picador 400pp £16.99; The Week bookshop £13.99

Joseph Stalin “never spoke or wrote” about the two months he spent in London in the spring of 1907, attending the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, said Alasdair Lees in The Daily Telegraph . Into this “psychological aperture” steps Stephan May, whose sixth novel is an “openly confected” retelling of those “few overlooked weeks”.

It begins with a 29-year-old Stalin – then known by his nickname, Koba – landing at Harwich, fresh from “a campaign of terror and banditry” in his native Georgia. In London, he stays in a dosshouse in Stepney, while better-off attendees – including Lenin – lodge in Bloomsbury. May’s Stalin is a “figure of fascinating contradictions” – an “idealist and a thug” – and the novel a “captivating thought experiment”.

Sadly, it often falls “disappointingly flat”, said Simon Baker in Literary Review . There are “samey descriptions” of London’s “awful” pubs, and May makes too much use of summary. Despite having the makings of an “exciting political thriller”, the novel isn’t convincing enough for May’s story to really grow.

Sandstone 288pp £8.99; The Week Bookshop £6.99

Anne Tyler virtually created the “family novel” genre, but has “strayed into more diverse territory recently”, said Melissa Katsoulis in The Times . Fans will be delighted by the 80-year-old’s 24th novel, which marks a return to type. Set, almost inevitably, in Baltimore, it’s a multi-generational saga spanning six decades, about a “comfortingly average” family. Mercy and Robin Garrett “enjoy a smoothly conventional life” running a hardware store and raising their three children. But theirs is a family in which “certain things must never be said”, and as the decades pass, this creates division. French Braid is “Tyler at her most Tyler-ish: pleasant and inoffensive, yet surprisingly deep and moving”.

Near its end, the novel does take an unexpected turn, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . Its final chapters are set during Covid – a topic Tyler suggested she’d never write about. Typically, however, she emphasises not the pandemic’s harrowing side, but its “potential to occasion reunion and reconnection”. This book may fall short of her best work – but “at this point any Tyler book is a gift”.

Chatto & Windus 256pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

This “eagerly awaited” debut is being hailed as “part of a wave of novels by young men of colour exploring race, romance and mental health problems”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . Nur, a 25-year-old online journalist from Birmingham who regularly suffers panic attacks, has been with Yasmina for four years. But he has yet to tell his Pakistani parents about the relationship: Yasmina’s family is Sudanese, and Nur has never got over his “mother’s disgust when she saw him hanging out with a black girl at school”.

On the surface a “poignant romance” about the barriers standing in the way of two young lovers, Good Intentions gradually reveals itself to be a deeper novel – about how an obsession with vulnerability can “make you forget your responsibility to others”.

Ali’s characters are “well-drawn”, and “what a tonic” to have a book about race in Britain set outside the capital, said Siobhan Murphy in The Times . Unfortunately, though, the unnecessarily complex structure necessitates a lot of darting “between points on the timeline” – and this, alas makes the novel rather “confusing”.

4th Estate 352pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

Jessamine Chan’s “crafty and spellbinding” debut is set in a terrifyingly plausible dystopian America, said Molly Young in The New York Times . Frida Liu is a 39-year-old single mother with an 18-month-old daughter and a stressful job. One day, in a “spell of insomnia-induced irrationality”, she leaves her daughter unattended at home while running a work errand.

Neighbours hear the toddler crying, and alert the police. Frida is sentenced to a year in an “experimental rehab facility”, where women are moulded into better mothers by practising their parenting skills on AI dolls. The school continually berates Frida for her actions: her kisses, instructors tell her, “lack a fiery core of maternal love”.

It’s no surprise that this book has been “making waves” in the US, said Madeleine Feeny in The Daily Telegraph : “questions of how we define and evaluate motherhood pervade contemporary culture”. Beautifully lucid and elegantly written, this is a “must-read” novel, said India Knight in The Sunday Times – “a Handmaid’s Tale for the 21st century”.

Hutchinson Heinemann 336pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

The Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s latest is “an original”, said Anne Enright in The Guardian . It’s a short novel about grief in which plot often gives way to “mystical” digressions that are “earnest, funny and sweet” – “a bit mad”, but in a good way.

Mira, a solitary woman in midlife, falls in love with Annie, a fellow student at their school for art criticism. Then Mira’s father dies, and his spirit joins her own inside a leaf, where they converse about “art, God, love and the transmigration of souls”, before Mira returns to “the pursuit of love”, her faith in “family and tradition” strengthened.

Billed as “a philosopher of modern experience”, Heti is known for her auto-fictional novels such as How Should a Person Be? (2010). Pure Colour is more like a fable, said Mia Levitin in the FT , in which God is an artist, and this world is his “first draft”, now “heating up in advance of its destruction”. Sadly, the book’s “meditations on grief” left me cold, and I found the prose “clunky” and “perilously close to kitsch”, with a naive, fairy-tale quality ill-suited to a story about middle age.

Harvill Secker 224pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Edmund White’s novels “forever enlarged what gay writing might do”, said Neil Bartlett in The Guardian . His latest book – “his 30th, by my count” – is an “elegant, filthy” work that “crackles with a heartfelt insistence that the old and hungry” still have much to tell us about “the dynamics of sex”.

In the year 2050, a married couple in a remote Swiss chalet decide to entertain each other by recounting their “previous sexual careers”. Constance, in her early 30s, is an “African-American orphan”, while Ruggero, her husband, is an elderly bisexual Sicilian aristocrat who is “legendarily well-connected (not to mention well hung)”.

As you’d expect, this novel is “elegantly written”, and contains many “arresting images”, said Peter Parker in The Spectator – but it’s fairly “preposterous”. The leap forward in time is merely a device allowing Ruggero to reminisce about his affair 30 years earlier with the now-forgotten writer Edmund White, then old and infirm: a “fat, famous slug”, he calls him. It is, however, all very entertaining.

Bloomsbury 288pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

Unsure what to do after graduating, Matt Knott alighted on tutoring as an “easy way to make money”, said Georgia Beaufort in The Daily Telegraph . He duly joined an agency that specialised in finding “study buddies” for the children of the super-rich. With his “Cambridge degree and his floppy hair”, Knott proved a big success – and in this “very funny memoir”, he recounts his three years in the job.

His first assignment was in a house in Mayfair, where each day he sat in a “holding pool” of tutors waiting to see if he’d be picked to help a five-year-old with his homework. Other families were considerably friendlier: half servant, half family member, Knott accompanied his charges on various exotic holidays.

This amusing book sheds light on a ridiculous world of “butlers in very tight trousers” and “helicopter trips from Tuscan villas to smart restaurants in Rome”, said Roland White in the Daily Mail . In this milieu, five-year-olds eat lobster tempura for supper, and “PJs” stands for private jets instead of pyjamas. With his pleasing turn of phrase (these days he works as a screenwriter), Knott is a witty, observant guide.

Trapeze 336pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Gary Shteyngart’s fifth novel is set during the far-off-seeming “early days” of the Covid pandemic, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . Sasha Senderovsky, a successful Russian-born US novelist (like his creator), has retreated to his large house in upstate New York, accompanied by a group of friends. Their plan is to ride out lockdown together but, predictably, things go wrong.

Various housemates fall out with one another; “plenty of partner-swapping” occurs. If the basic conceit owes a lot to Chekhov, the novel’s boisterous, madcap comedy owes at least as much to A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Shteyngart has brilliantly captured the “almost maniacal aliveness” of the early pandemic. If anyone writes a funnier lockdown novel, “I will eat my face mask”.

There’s so much going on in this somewhat “messy” novel that at times it’s exhausting to read, said John Self in The Times . A “little more stillness” would have been welcome. Still, it exhibits Shteyngart’s trademark “feverish energy” – and the result is “often funny” and “sometimes moving”.

Allen & Unwin 336pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

“Michelle de Kretser’s slyly intelligent sixth novel pairs two first-person narratives,” said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . One is set in “dystopian near-future Melbourne” and follows Lyle, an immigrant who works for a sinister government agency created to deport immigrants. The other is set in 1981, and follows Lili, a 22-year-old Australian, during a carefree sojourn in the south of France. The link between the two narratives is mysterious – and even the order you read them in is “up to you”, on account of the book’s “reversible, Kindle-defying two-way design”.

The publisher has been “fastidious” in cooperating with de Kretser’s conceit, said Sam Leith in The Daily Telegraph : there are two front covers, two copyright pages, two sets of acknowledgements, and so on. “It’s sort of magnificent, and it’s also sort of gimmicky” – and it left me unsure if I was actually reading a novel, or simply two novellas yoked together. Perhaps, though, it doesn’t really matter. Filled with “apt quick literary brushstrokes and the gleam of humour”, both halves are equally “terrific”.

Allen & Unwin 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Tessa Hadley is justly lauded for “elevating the domestic novel to literary fiction” in her stories about the “shifting geometries” of middle-class families, said Mia Levitin in the FT . Free Love , her eighth novel, “adds a Sixties twist to Anna Karenina ”. Set in 1967, it centres on 40-year-old Phyllis Fischer, a well-off suburban housewife married to Roger, a senior civil servant. One summer night, twenty-something Nicky – the son of a family friend – comes to supper. He and Phyllis steal an “illicit kiss” – and embark on an affair. Leaving home without a forwarding address, Phyllis swaps her cosy life with Roger for “then-bohemian Ladbroke Grove” (where Nicky occupies a squalid bedsit). Hadley’s style is as “sumptuous” as ever, and her characterisations are superb. While this isn’t perhaps her best novel, its publication is a “cause for celebration”.

Hadley has been criticised for the “narrowness of her social concerns – her incorrigible preoccupation with Cecilias, Harriets and Rolands”, said James Marriott in The Times . So it’s gratifying that in this “beautiful and exciting” novel, she contrasts the bourgeois world with the “supremely undomesticated” 1960s counterculture.

Yet there’s a problem, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times : Hadley is far more at home among herbaceous borders than in the “pot-smoking” milieu of Nicky and his friends. Her depictions of the Swinging Sixties rarely rise above cliché – and “when she tries to capture the life of a black nurse whom Phyllis befriends, the writing becomes laboured”. You sense Hadley “itching to get back to the bourgeois suburbs” – and as this disappointing novel progressed, I wished I was back there with her.

Jonathan Cape 320pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Sarah Moss’s 2009 debut novel, Cold Earth , imagined an out-of-control virus, said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer . She returns to similar terrain with her latest novel – only this time with less need for invention. Set in November 2020, The Fell centres on Kate, a forty-something single mum, who “finally snaps” during a two-week quarantine period, and goes for a solitary walk in the Peak District. It’s “destined to be an ill-fated expedition”: the night draws in, Kate doesn’t return – and her absence is noticed by her teenage son Matt. With its vivid sense of “accumulating dread”, this is an “intense time capsule of a tale”.

Moss moves “gracefully” between various perspectives, said Sarah Ditum in The Times : that of Alice, an elderly neighbour; and Rob, a member of the mountain rescue team. Elegantly written and concise, The Fell is a “close-to-perfect” novel. Even though Moss has said it was written fast, the prose here feels “precision-tooled”, said Roger Cox in The Scotsman . Remarkably, in only 180 pages, she has captured “all of lockdown life”.

Picador 180pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

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A nighttime photograph of Samuel Locklear, who is wearing a long navy blue jacket and grinning while holding a larger man, Leonard Francis, who is standing on a chair. Francis is smiling with his mouth agape and holding up a glass of red wine.

Bribing the Navy Is Easier (and More Entertaining) Than You Might Think

In “Fat Leonard,” Craig Whitlock investigates one of the worst corruption scandals in U.S. military history.

Rear Adm. Samuel Locklear III, left, pretending to lift Leonard Francis off the floor at a dinner party in 2003. Locklear has denied having any involvement in Francis’ misdeeds and was cleared of wrongdoing by the Navy. Credit... NCIS-DCIS

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By Nicolas Niarchos

Nicolas Niarchos is a freelance journalist whose writing on military matters has appeared in The Nation and The New Yorker. He is at work on a book about the supply chain for battery metals.

May 13, 2024
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FAT LEONARD: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy, by Craig Whitlock

In ports throughout the Western Pacific, the brave officers of the United States Navy gulped down lobster thermidor , truffle royale, Osetra caviar, white asparagus custard and kombou seaweed jelly; they guzzled gallons of Cristal and Dom Pérignon; they puffed boxes of Cohiba cigars.

Near the end of a meal, they sometimes received what Leonard Glenn Francis , the venal military contractor who was picking up the tabs, called “oriental dessert”: an “armada” of sex workers hired to flash their breasts and perform intimate acts.

An attendee described one of Francis’ dinners as a “Roman orgy.” At one of Francis’ most sordid parties, in Manila in 2007, a replica of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s corncob pipe was used as a sex toy. At least one of Francis’ dinners cost more than $3,000 a head. In return, Navy officials looked the other way as his companies charged far above the regional rate to service American vessels.

In “Fat Leonard,” a masterly investigation into one of the Navy’s worst scandals in modern times, the Washington Post journalist Craig Whitlock brings to bear 10 years of research to show how Francis came to be known as Leonard the Legend, Mr. Make-It-Happen, Fat Bastard, and, most of all, as Fat Leonard.

Francis rose from fairly comfortable origins on the Malaysian island of Penang and followed his father into the family business in the 1980s as a “husbanding contractor,” providing services like food and water delivery, bilge pumping, tugboat hiring and a whole manner of other prosaic but important logistical tasks that fleets need to operate.

His plan, Whitlock writes, was to become the Malaysian Aristotle Onassis. He learned early that the captains of merchant ships, “after weeks at sea, gladly accepted his offers to get drunk and meet women” in return for “all sorts of favors.” When the U.S. Navy came into the equation, in the early 1990s, Francis went into overdrive. “The Navy’s byzantine accounting policies made it easy for Francis to jack up his prices with minimal resistance,” Whitlock notes. (While no one knows exactly how much Francis stole, he has admitted to making at least $35 million off the U.S. taxpayer.)

The word “farce” comes from the French word for “stuffing” and originally referred to the stuffing of comedies into serious religious plays. Whitlock’s book is a farce of the highest order, as richly stuffed as the liver of a foie gras goose. His reporting is astonishingly detailed, thanks to the “several terabytes” of leaked government data he was able to obtain. Reading “Fat Leonard,” you almost feel sick at the amount of consumption that Francis visited upon the U.S. sailors who became his lap dogs in exchange for champagne, sex and cash.

By 2013, he was on a first-name basis with captains and admirals and even had the power to redirect U.S. Navy ships to ports where he could make the most money off them. As Francis became wealthier, his weight ballooned to almost 500 pounds. Whitlock tracks this detail with perhaps too much glee, but he also usefully makes clear that the magnate’s girth was yet another tool in his box: Francis repeatedly used tales of his gastric bypass surgery to show his vulnerable side and build a rapport with officers.

Whitlock is particularly good at revealing the way that Francis profited from the “entitlement” of Navy officers who seemed to think that they had a God-given right to accept freebies in return for wasting U.S. government funds and leaking classified information, including ship schedules. In 2011, a captain’s wife returned a Versace handbag she was gifted by Francis not because of ethics concerns but because the gold lettering was cracked. Before a dinner in 2007, an officer wrote that rather than having one type of champagne, he’d “like to compare”: “Dom Pérignon, Cristal and Bollinger’s.” At another party, that same officer poured champagne off the top of a skyscraper in Singapore, just to show that he could.

Unsurprisingly, Francis led a squalid existence. As Whitlock notes, he “treated women as expendable objects,” rotating between multiple mistresses and sequestering one of his partners away from her children.

In 2015, two years after Francis was finally arrested, he pleaded guilty to bribery and conspiracy charges and faced up to 25 years in prison. He eventually managed to barter and charm his judges and prosecutors into letting him live in a luxury mansion in San Diego while he awaited sentencing. He even hired his own guards, Pablo Escobar-style. Francis made a mistake, however: He escaped to Venezuela, where he was captured and used as collateral in a 2023 prisoner exchange with the United States.

In many ways, Francis is the antihero of Whitlock’s book, with the Navy and its officers filling the role of villains. Francis collected kompromat on his clients, photos of officers carousing and signed dinner menus, but he doesn’t seem to have needed to use much of it while he was in business, so willing were his marks to receive gifts.

After Francis’ arrest, the Navy stymied scrutiny and tried to protect culprits, despite the serious national security implications of the leaks that Francis was able to extract. As one of Whitlock’s sources tells him, “Leonard Francis would have made a wonderful intelligence officer.”

In the end, scores of Navy top brass were let off lightly while lower ranks were thrown under the bus. Francis is set to be sentenced soon , but, as Whitlock makes clear, the culture of entitlement he exploited has gotten off scot-free.

FAT LEONARD : How One Man Bribed, Bilked and Seduced the U.S. Navy | By Craig Whitlock | Simon & Schuster | 460 pp. | $32.50

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The Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, who died on May 14 , specialized in exacting short stories that were novelistic in scope , spanning decades with intimacy and precision.

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Bridgerton Season 3's Anthony & Kate Story Is What We Were Denied In Season 2

Bridgerton has all but confirmed season 4 will be benedict's story, bridgerton season 3 can finally make the bridgertons' forgotten sibling important.

Warning! SPOILERS about the Bridgerton book series ahead.

The Bridgerton book series follows the Bridgerton siblings on their quest for love from 1813 to 1827.
Each book details a different sibling's journey towards love, with unique obstacles and character growth.
Some Bridgerton books are action-packed and filled with romance and scandal, making them rank higher than other Bridgerton books.

Netflix’s Bridgerton famously adapts the book series of the same name by Julia Quinn – here are the eight books, ranked worst to best. Following the Bridgerton family from 1813 to 1827, Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton book series tells the story of the Bridgerton siblings looking for love like Violet and Edmund’s relationship taught them to instead of just marrying to take their place in society. Each Bridgerton book follows a different sibling and their intended , detailing their individual growth as characters and their often tumultuous love story. Bridgerton ’s first book was released in 2000, with the last being published in 2005.

The main action in the Bridgerton books is recounted chronologically, with the first The Duke and I detailing the romance that brought to the first Bridgerton sibling getting married, Daphne, until the last, On the Way to the Wedding , retells Gregory’s story, the last Bridgerton to get married in 1827. Although two anthologies, one graphic novel, Julia Quinn and Shonda Rhimes’ collaboration Queen Charlotte and the second epilogues collection The Bridgertons also take place in the Bridgerton world, they won’t be included in the ranking, not being part of the original book series, which solely focused on the Bridgerton siblings.

Bridgerton Season 3 New Cast & Returning Character Guide

The third season of Netflix’s Bridgerton brings a mixture of characters that audiences know and love, and brand new faces to learn more about.

8 To Sir Phillip, With Love

Eloise & phillip crane are initially paired out of convenience.

Recounted in the fifth Bridgerton book, Eloise’s story partially overlaps with Colin and Penelope’s as she decides to run away to Gloucestershire from the ball when Colin announces Penelope as Lady Whistledown, missing his iconic revelation. The main reason why To Sir Phillip, With Love deserves the last position has to do with the reasons bringing the two protagonists together , which don’t include well-formed feelings. Indeed, Eloise only ran away to see if a possible relationship with Phillip had any potential after a year-long epistolary exchange, motivated by how she would have remained a spinster alone as Penelope married Colin.

Eloise and Phillip's poor reasons for pursuing a relationship, their faltering feelings and their blink-and-you-miss character development make To Sir Phillip, With Love rank lower than any other Bridgerton book.

Similarly, Phillip’s inability to connect with his twins Oliver and Amanda after his wife’s death prompted his search for a wife, taking Eloise’s surprise arrival at his door as the perfect opportunity, wanting Eloise first as a mother for the twins. While they eventually manage to connect and feelings develop, there isn’t a palpable character development for Eloise and Phillip , with the two going on with their lives as they did before, only together, except for Phillip’s better handle on his grief after losing his wife.

7 The Duke And I

Daphne & simon basset’s story introduces readers to the bridgerton world.

Like Bridgerton season 1 with Daphne and Simon’s story , The Duke and I introduces readers to the Bridgertons and the ton, with the book perfectly setting up the dynamics among the tight-knit family. Daphne and Simon’s fake courtship leading to real feelings, almost a scandal and a hurried wedding make for an entertaining read, but the most growing together the couple does is at the end of the book when they decide to be open with each other. Even Simon’s realization that he actually wanted children only happens at the very end, with him welcoming their firstborn in the epilogue.

While Simon’s changes are substantial and lead him to overcome his problems with his late father, Daphne only faces the problems of marriage, for which Violet had left her unprepared, leading Daphne to have to deal with them but not necessarily changing her wishes or views. Coupled with their union being forced after Anthony discovered them and their reconciliation only happening toward The Duke and I ’s end, there isn’t a consistent exploration of their changing feelings throughout the story , making the story lack a similar character development for both protagonists and a steadily-developed romance.

6 The Viscount Who Loved Me

Anthony & kate sheffield’s romance embodies the enemies to lovers trope.

Anthony and Kate’s story follows a path similar to Daphne and Simon’s in The Viscount Who Loved Me , with their rushed wedding happening after Violet, Portia and another mama found them in a compromising position after Anthony became scared for Kate’s well-being because of a bee. Like Simon, Anthony also had to overcome a problem relating to his father, specifically his death, convinced as he was that he couldn’t have outlived Edmund, not feeling worthy of it and afraid to put his future wife through the pain Violet felt when Edmund died.

Anthony and Kate's storyline in season 3 of Bridgerton will bring to light something that was denied to audiences in season 2 and expand on it.

However, unlike Daphne and Simon, Anthony and Kate perfectly embodied the enemies-to-lovers trope, giving them many miles to cover before they could meet halfway and get the other’s point of view. In addition, Kate’s story still involved her in getting to feel part of the Sheffield family even if she was her father’s daughter from his previous marriage, making her character development more noticeable than others’ despite most of her and Anthony finally coming to terms with their feelings also happening toward their book’s end.

5 When He Was Wicked

Francesca & michael stirling’s love faces various obstacles before triumphing.

When He Was Wicked is the only book where a Bridgerton sibling remarries, and the fact that the love story on which the book mostly focuses is the one leading to Francesca’s second marriage sets it apart from all the other Bridgerton romances . While the other books saw the Bridgerton protagonists as debutantes or rakes who never had any knowledge of love and marriage, Francesca had already found someone she loved in John Stirling. His sudden and unexpected death simultaneously convinced Francesca that she couldn’t be as lucky as to find love twice, but also gave her a widow’s freedom.

Francesca coming to terms with needing to follow the ton’s rules if she wanted to find another husband who could give her a child already guaranteed she would have to accept how much her life would have to change. However, Michael’s strong feelings for her from when his cousin John and Francesca met and married were the reason he went to India, eventually leading him to get malaria, because he couldn’t pursue his cousin’s widow. Their rollercoaster of romance thus guarantees both a relationship steadily growing throughout the story and a great deal of character development for the two.

4 Romancing Mr. Bridgerton

Colin & penelope featherington’s feelings grow along with their character development.

Colin and Penelope’s Bridgerton story in Romancing Mr. Bridgerton unites action-packed events with their steadily blossoming love story, despite Colin fully realizing his feelings only halfway through the book. With Romancing Mr. Bridgerton including both Cressida’s blackmail of Penelope and Colin's reveal of Penelope as Lady Whistledown, the book has multiple threats hanging over its protagonists' heads, making it a more entertaining read than various other Bridgerton novels . Although Penelope was always aware of her feelings for Colin, Colin’s feelings take some time to develop, with his marriage proposal stemming from a mix of lust and friendship.

Colin finally realizing his feelings for Penelope because of how much he craves her opinion on his writing also permanently connects their romance to finding his purpose, dreaming of being published only as a result of Penelope’s appreciation of his writing. With Penelope going on a parallel journey affirming her confidence in wanting her life’s work – Lady Whistledown’s papers – not being attributed to her mortal enemy, both protagonists simultaneously have personal journeys and a tumultuous love story, making Romancing Mr. Bridgerton one of the most eventful Bridgerton novels .

3 On The Way To The Wedding

Gregory & lucinda abernathy’s story is full of action-packed twists & public love confessions.

Another unusual setup for Bridgerton stories is the beginning of Gregory’s, the last Bridgerton to find love in the last book in the series, On The Way to the Wedding . Coming after seven successful love matches, Gregory is sure he will find love, and he believes to have found it after falling for the debutante everyone fawns over, Hermione Watson. However, in a bid to win her heart, he often finds himself in the company of her best friend Lucy Abernathy, eventually falling in love with her and realizing the difference between true love and a mere infatuation.

The Bridgerton season 3 sneak peek event's updates about Benedict's path in the upcoming season hint at his being Bridgerton season 4's protagonist.

On the Way to the Wedding includes two headstrong protagonists, one sure enough of his love for both of them and the other determined to pursue previously arranged matches, no matter her growing feelings for Gregory. An accusation of treason looming over Lucinda’s past, some characters getting shot and others being tied to water closets turn On the Way to the Wedding into one of the most action-packed Bridgerton novels, which nevertheless doesn’t skim over romance , as Gregory and Lucy have the chance to discover their feelings on the annual Bridgerton get-together at the Viscount and Viscountess’ countryside house.

2 An Offer From A Gentleman

Benedict & sophie beckett’s romance defies the ton & culminates in a jail-based race against time.

Another hard-fought romance, Benedict and Sophie’s love story in An Offer from a Gentleman also sets them apart from other Bridgerton couples, with their story including gentle moments between the two that give them the chance to get to know each other and fall for one another and shocking developments calling for a trip to jail. Sophie being the illegitimate child of a ton member made her sure she could have never married into the ton, transforming her into a hardworking worker part of the staff at ton members’ houses.

The multiple difficult situations Sophie and Benedict find themselves in let An Offer from a Gentleman stand out, making their romance truly overcome impossible hurdles , even with the help of a dedicated Violet Bridgerton ready to confront another ton member bent on seeing Sophie hanged for theft. With Sophie also encouraging Benedict’s passion for painting, they truly bring the best out of each other, making An Offer from a Gentleman a story from which Benedict and Sophie come out better characters both as individuals and for their tumultuous love story bordering scandal, bringing them to live away from the ton.

Benedict and Sophie's romance including action-packed developments and two similarly stubborn characters who grow individually and together only to defy the ton and pursue their love match makes An Offer from a Gentleman one of Bridgerton's most entertaining books.

1 It's In His Kiss

Hyacinth & gareth st. clair’s story involves decade-long mysteries, changing them for the better.

The second-to-last Bridgerton book to be published, It’s In His Kiss is the first to include Lady Danbury as a central character, with her meddlesomeness contributing to making Hyacinth and Gareth St. Clair’s story come out on top. It’s In His Kiss not only includes personal developments , leading Hyacinth to realize what she wants from her life and Gareth to break free of his evil father’s hold over him, but it also introduces a proper mystery that could solve the St. Clair family’s financial problems were Gareth’s grandmother’s hidden jewels to be found.

Romancing Mr. Bridgerton, on which Bridgerton season 3 is based, details much more than Colin & Pen's love story, also focusing on another Bridgerton.

Hyacinth ending up as the Bridgerton sibling showing the most agency and Gareth overcoming his family problems and finding a new family with the Bridgertons all contribute to making their story one of the most interesting to read because of how well-matched and each other’s equal Hyacinth and Gareth truly are. Coupled with their story including night-time excursions culminating in breaking and entering and a mystery treasure to find with the help of a diary needing a translation, It’s In His Kiss becomes the most difficult Bridgerton book to set down and the most complete one.

Bridgerton season 3's part 1 releases on Netflix on May 16, with part 2 following on June 13.

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From Shondaland and creator Chris Van Dusen, Netflix’s Bridgerton is based on the romance novels of the same name by author Julia Quinn. The series follows the eight Bridgerton siblings, Anthony, Benedict, Colin, Daphne, Eloise, Francesca, Gregory, and Hyacinth, as they search for love during the social season and navigate life in Regency-era England.

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I posted links to my reviews at Thornfield Hall and Thornfield Hall Redux, and, in a few cases, Goodreads. THE BEST AND WORST BOOKS OF 2022! BEST NEW NOVELS. 1. Elizabeth Finch, by Julian Barnes. 2. French Braid, by Anne Tyler. 3. The Exhibitionist, by Charlotte Mendelson.
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Bridgerton Season 3's Anthony & Kate Story Is What We Were Denied In Season 2

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8 To Sir Phillip, With Love

7 The Duke And I

6 The Viscount Who Loved Me

5 When He Was Wicked

4 Romancing Mr. Bridgerton

3 On The Way To The Wedding

2 An Offer From A Gentleman

1 It's In His Kiss

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