Our Favourite Books of 2022

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver’s homage to David Copperfield, this too is a defiant battle cry to shine a light on the appalling plight of many children still. In Demon she has created the most wonderful, fully realised character and narrator I’ve read in a long time. Despite everything he endures, he does it with such a singular relentless determination and unshakeable sense of self. While it can be utterly harrowing in places, there is a humour, warmth and wisdom to Demon that you can’t help but fall in love with. 

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. A small, but perfectly formed gem of a book. It packs an emotional and literary punch well beyond its compact novella size. A spare, quiet and beautifully written example of how less can be oh so very much more. – Tiff

I can’t remember the last time I inhaled a book as quickly as I did Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down.  It’s the story of Maggie, a young girl who is forced into the foster care system after her sole living parent is sent to jail.  The book is a horrifying glimpse into a reality that’s all too easy to ignore, that of children and young adults who are repeatedly failed by a system designed to protect them.  One of my all-time favourite books is White Oleander by Janet Fitch, and Bodies of Light addresses similar issues.  Also relevant is the disturbing memoir The Prettiest Horse in the Glue Factory by Corey White. – Ava

My measure of enjoyment of a book is by how much it moved me. Even though it was released in February, Son of Sin by Omar Sakr has held strong in my heart for the duration of the year. This is Sakr’s first novel and his poetic roots shine through. It reads like an epic, a saga, a tale I can imagine being sung in previous centuries. With beauty and pain he tells the story of Jamal, coming of age as a queer Muslim in Western Sydney. An intoxicating atmosphere I gladly inhaled — more should be said but I fear I cannot do it justice. Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart deserves a mention here too. His debut Shuggie Bain was my favourite of 2020 and his sophomore novel is an equally impressive follow up. There is a particular scene where young lovers eat pies together in the bath, and it is such a tender depiction of first love that it still makes me smile to recall it. – Ange

I think it would have to be Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. I read this book while isolating with covid and I couldn’t put it down. The narrator is a young boy who has a very tough start in life, but he also seems to have been born with a good moral compass, luck and a great sense of humour. Throughout the tragic unfolding of his life – I found myself laughing out loud! Barbara Kingsolver has done it again for me. This time, she looks into the horrific world of addiction to prescription pills and the great divide between the haves and have-nots in today’s society.

I also adored Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout. I just love Lucy. When I read about her, I feel warm and comfortable and I love the way Strout weaves characters from previous books into each new book. This is Lucy’s covid story, but it could be anyone’s. Her observations and questions about life in a pandemic are the same as everyone’s around the world I suspect. One of my all-time favourite writers. – Victoria

Speculative fiction has always been a favourite genre of mine, and this year delivered some excellent reads. Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker is a hilarious, dark, perfectly realised world of extinction, exploring a near future where companies and governments pay to eradicate species. An entire economy of extermination blooms, altering political landscapes and moral boundaries. We follow an animal cognition specialist, grappling with existential grief, and a mining company executive as they hunt down a peculiar and ugly species of fish – the venomous lumpsucker. They are forced to go on a desperate dash across the landscapes of this dystopian future – a nature reserve of toxic waste; a floating city in a storm of dead gnats; the hinterlands of a totalitarian state – hunting for a surviving lumpsucker population. As they do, they unravel vast conspiracies and the mysteries behind an unprecedented terrorist attack. Devastating in its insight. Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony is bizarre and horrifying in turns. Cities of flesh,  middle-aged businessman as a school girl’s pet, love, sex, cannibalism. Her stories are taut, exquisitely crafted, and illuminate the intricate and warped nature of humanity. – Tilda

This was a year of weird and dystopian books for me. As a longtime vegan Augustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh spoke to me. It’s the book for when you want a shocking dystopia and also to have your love of animals affirmed. By simply replacing animals with humans in slaughterhouses, “game” enclosures and laboratories, Bazterrica creates an uneasy reminder of what it is to eat meat and to use animals for various other ends. She also touches repeatedly on what these massive helpings of brutality and death do to our minds — how they in turn brutalise us. Loved it. Devoured it in two sittings. The other favourite was just a bizarre swirling read. First-time author, Missouri Williams’ Doloriad is just some weird shit! A bleak apocalypse. An abandoned city. An incest cult. Deformed bodies. A white light burning away the world. A strange VHS moral theology following the panaceas of a hero named Aquinas. Williams’ claustrophobic blocks of long paragraphs and maze-like sentences — is this really another coma? — evoke the dying, maddening world closing inexorably in around legless Dolores and her siblings. You sit in these disturbing passages and wonder if you ought to turn away, try to eek out meaning, or just experience them. – Jonathon

At The Breakfast Table by Suman Defne. Great grandmother’s 100th birthday brings family together durning the Summerholidays. On one of the Princess Islands a ferry ride away from Istanbul. Secrets and unacknowledged Events that go back in time and influence the actions of the characters. Another eyeopener of historical political events that were not told in my history classes at school. Loved it! Also:

The Silence of Scheherazade by Defne Suman The novel  is dedicated to those who have been exiled from their homeland. It opened my eyes to a historical event I was completely  ignorant about. It’s timely in the face of the events in all conflict zones.  A multicultural society thrives until… – Anna

All that’s left unsaid by Tracey Lien. A moving tale of  love,loss  and the complicated struggle of first generation offsprings of refugees. The duty of being a child to make your parents proud and the longing for freedom of being yourself. All that on the backdrop of shattered dreams of your elders and conflicting cultural  values. The fear and misunderstandings that can lead to tragic results.It makes your heart ache and still fills you with hope that reconciliation is possible. It does expand the capacity to have empathy with those whose lives are a struggle we know nothing about. – Anna

Losing Face by George Haddad Easily, my favourite novel of the year (so far). I could bang on about this being an exploration of what it is to be disenfranchised etc., but I won’t. This is a story about family, about the secrets families keep, and the damage those secrets do. Set in Sydney’s west, this is an evocative portrayal of place. How free are we to choose a new way, when everything around us dictates who we should be? Teenager, Joey, is adrift and gets mixed up with a bad crowd. Meanwhile, his doting grandmother spends every cent on the pokies. Haddad presents his characters with such love and respect, that you can’t help but take them to your heart, as they battle the challenges life throws at them. When I finished this book, I knew I was going to miss having this crazy, dysfunctional family in my life. Trigger warning: contains a scene of sexual assault. – Nick

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (and Wolf Hall Trilogy by Hilary Mantel). I was late to the party, but I must mention The Wolf Hall Trilogy by Hilary Mantel, which I devoured, one time after the other, earlier this year. However, because everything that can be said has been said about these books, I will direct you to an equal favourite this year: Klara and The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s the story of an innocent robot (an Artificial Friend) who has wonderful and innocent observational qualities of the world and the people she encounters, especially the young girl she is purposed to befriend and look after. It’s a wonderful tale, which Ishiguro, as usual, does so well. – Scott V

This year, my favourites have been Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, and The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane, but I also really enjoyed The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid. Like his earlier and much-loved Exit West, the novel gets to the crux of the matter, with all its complications, using a poetic device. “One morning, Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” How he, his work colleagues, his family, his community and the wider world respond to this infiltrative phenomenon is the subject of the story. But it is Anders and his friend Oona who carry
us to the heart of the racist absurdity. Mohsin Hamid has written another supremely humane
novel, almost a fable. Perhaps the world’s experience of the covid pandemic has made us particularly open to the truth about fear of the other, fear of infection. – Judy

Limberlost by Robbie Arnott and Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart For me, it was a year for the hankie. I was blindsided by just how much both of these novels moved me.  Limberlost is a simple conceit; a young boy in remote Tasmania immerses himself in the restoration of a sailing boat. His father and sister are both distracted, terribly and dreadfully, by the absence of the boy’s brothers ( it is nearing the end of WW2). This could have been a hot mess of cloying and sentimental cliche but it is unutterably beautiful.  And the same could be said of Young Mungo – the sophomore effort that avoided every suspected pitfall.  2022 was also the year I discovered Claire Keegan (thanks Jack!) but I will play hardball with the rules and resist nominating All the Small Things as this superlative long story was first published last year.  – Andrew

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus is a book that I would shove into people’s hands and say ‘READ IT!’ Bonnie Garmus is a terrific novelist and her protagonist Elizabeth Zott is the role model I wish I had
growing up. – Aks

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux 2022 nobel prize winner, a victory for sad girls everywhere. – Toyah

Two novels, one from each end of the year. I didn’t think that Douglas Stuart could successfully revisit the world of Shuggie Bain, deserved 2020 Booker winner, set in the grim, hard-scrabble c world of 80’s Glasgow tenements. But in Young Mungo he has, I think, written something more compelling, assured and dark, than his first novel. And in language that leaps off the page. It’s quite beautifully written. Fiona McFarlane’s The Sun Walks Down is a triumph, on a few levels. And while I’m at it, BIG thumbs up for Ian McEwan’s Lessons and the wise and wonderful Lucy By the Sea – David  

 My pick is Unraveller by Francis Hardinge. Reminiscent of Diana Wynne Jones, Hardinge is an extraordinary world-builder with a gentle touch of humour and heartbreak. What an excellent fantasy novel! What a writer! Recommended for 12+ (Keep an eye on the gleebooks_kids Instagram account for all our children’s specialist’s favourites of 2022)” – Elissa