From a study of sexuality to a wry satire, it’s been a great year for books. Keeping up with all of the latest must-read books can quickly turn into an overwhelming endeavor — finish one, add five more to the pile, and the cycle wears on until it’s simply too unbearable to pay attention anymore. Here’s another solution: Leave the sorting of what’s good and what’s bad to us, dedicated readers of impeccable taste. We’ll be regularly updating this list of the most exciting titles from 2019 — join us on this literary journey, won’t you?
Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
Lisa Taddeo crossed the US for eight years talking to women about their sexual desires, and the result of her mission is a best-seller and one of this year’s most talked-about non-fiction books. In it, Taddeo focusses on three women in particular, and through their stories, explores the question of how female sexuality works. “Three Women is a literary account of the sex lives of three Americans, already hailed as a feminist classic,” writes Emma Jacobs in the Financial Times. “Like the #MeToo movement, it illuminates themes of pain and power imbalances… It is meticulously, deliciously graphic without being titillating.”
I Never Said I Loved You by Rhik Samadder
In his memoir, actor and newspaper columnist Rhik Samadder reflects on the complex experiences of his life with warm humour. “This is one of the most eccentric and uplifting memoirs I have ever read,” says Kate Kellaway of the Observer. From sexual abuse to eating disorders and self-harming, the experiences described are devastating. He traces the role of depression in his life, attempts to understand it, and also offers advice. With chapter titles that begin ‘How to’, it is as much a manual as a memoir. “It is indecently entertaining,” writes Kellaway. “There are moments one feels guilty for enjoying the writing so much.
My Friend Anna by Rachel Deloache Williams
The story of Anna Delvey, aka Anna Sorokin, went as viral as things come when New York Magazine dropped a major exposé on her shady financial track record of stiffing everyone from hotels to her closest friends that eventually led to her arrest for larceny. The whole thing spun out into summer 2018 being dubbed the Summer of the Scam — but that lighthearted fun excluded the very people at the end of this long con, namely Rachel Deloache Williams, at the time a photo editor for Vanity Fair and Anna Delvey’s best friend. Her memoir recounts the intimate details of Delvey we never got in the press, including a record of their texts and emails and how Williams became the reluctant catalyst in taking her down, making for an engrossing read you’ll blow through in a day.
Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane
The multi award-winning author Robert Macfarlane takes the reader on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet in his hit book Underland, which is one of the most widely-acclaimed non-fiction works of the year so far. From Greenland’s glaciers to Bronze-Age burial chambers and Arctic sea caves, Underland is a voyage through our planet’s past, present and future. His “chiselled prose” is astounding, writes William Dalrymple in the Guardian: “At its best, this has an epic, incantatory quality. There is a rare gift at work here… With Underland he has written one of the most ambitious works of narrative non-fiction of our age, a new Road to Oxiana for the dwindling twilight of the Anthropocene.”
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in the Strange World by Elif Shafak
Longlisted for the Booker prize, Elif Shafak’s novel is told from the point of view of Tequila Leila in the still-conscious moments after her death. Each minute brings a rich, sensual memory that recalls a friend she made at each key moment in her life. “Elifa Shafak has always been the most compassionate of writers,” says Francesca Segal in the Financial Times. “This is a novel that gives voice to the invisible, the untouchable, the abused and the damaged, weaving their painful songs into a thing of beauty.”
The Lady from the Black Lagoon by Mallory O’Meara
Why it’s a great book: A ton of important history has no doubt been lost due to good ol’ fashioned sexism. For Hollywood monster movie fans, one of the most heinous of these crimes is that Milicent Patrick was written out of her own history as the real creator of the titular monster from Creature From the Black Lagoon. Here, O’Meara reverses this injustice, and then some, with her own investigative reporting into Patrick’s entire life, from how her father was one of the chief architects on the Hearst Castle to her trailblazing career in animation as one of the first female animators at Disney to the forces that kept her from claiming the rightful credit to the monster. (Surprise! It was men.) Equally enlightening and infuriating, O’Meara wrote the posthumous biography Milicent Patrick deserved to have many, many years ago.
Coventry by Rachel Cusk
According to Mia Leith in the Financial Times, Rachel Cusk’s voice “resonates loud and clear” in her new collection of essays, Coventry. “In light of the polarised reactions to her previous memoirs,” writes Leith, “a non-fiction collection could be considered a dare.” The book is largely about the function of narrative, particularly women’s narrative. As Cusk writes in Coventry: “It is as though I was born imprisoned in a block of stone from which it has been both a necessity and an obligation to free myself.” It’s a feeling, she says that “works well enough, I suppose, as a paradigm for the contemporary woman’s struggle towards personal liberty.”
Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison, Nobel-and Pulitzer prize-winner, and one of the most celebrated and revered writers of our time, died in August. Her non-fiction collection, Mouth Full of Blood, published earlier in the year, spans four decades of essays, speeches and meditations – all questioning our world. The book is in three parts, The Foreigner’s Home, God’s Language and Black Matter(s). US history, politics, race, religion, gender and globalisation are all themes, along with the role of the press and the artist. As Henrietta McKervey puts it in the Irish Times: “It’s vast. It’s deep. It’s superb.”
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
A fictional Florida reform school in the Jim Crow era is the setting of The Nickel Boys by the Pulitzer prize- and National Book Award-winner Colson Whitehead. Widely acclaimed, it tells the story of black teenagers sent to the academy, which claims to provide “physical, intellectual and moral training”. In reality, the Nickel Academy is a hellish place full of sadistic staff and corrupt officials, where any boy who resists is likely to disappear “out back”. Jane Ciabattari describes the novel as “spare and haunting” on BBC Culture.
The Spirit of Science Fiction by: Roberto Bolaño
Why it’s a great book: This posthumous release from the Chilean master of fiction, translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, was finished around 1984 and is seen as a sandbox for the ideas that would later coalesce into Bolaño’s 1998 epic of aimless poets in Mexico City, The Savage Detectives. A brief novel that meanders through poetry workshops and unreturned letters to science fiction masters until finding its stride on the back of a motorcycle, The Spirit of Science Fiction reads like an early draft of an accomplished novelist finding his footing with a clear path to something that will eventually be great.
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