It’s half way through 2015 and time for a literary stock take of my year so far. The bare statistics underpinning six months of reading pleasure are: total number of books – 55 books consisting of 50 novels, three works of non-fiction, one book of poetry and one play. The gender breakdown was 33 women writers and 22 male, drawn from 13 countries, with the largest number coming from Australia and Great Britain. Below are my ten favourite books (so far), not in any particular order as just selecting the ten was hard enough. One of Us by Asne Seirstad, Waiting for the Past by Les Murray and The Eye of the Sheep by Sofie Laguna deserve a special mention because they would have been on the list if the Top 10 was actually a Top13.
- Station 11 by Emily St John Mandel
- Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty
- Snow Kimono by Mark Henshaw
- The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck
- River of Fire by Amitav Ghosh
- The Truth and Other Lies by Sascha Arango
- One Life by Kate Grenville
- The Bees by Laline Paull
- The Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock
- Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Full list:
| JANUARY | ||
| Patrick Modiano | Suspended Sentences | |
| Jacqueline Yallop | Malford | |
| Haruki Murakami | The Strange Library | |
| Catherine Lacey | Nobody is Ever Mssing | |
| Maria Duenos | The Heart Has Its Reasons | |
| D.A.Mishani | A Possibility of Violence | |
| Ben Lerner | 10:04 | |
| Michael Faber | The Book of Strange New Things | |
| Tom Rachman | The Rise And Fall of Great Powers | |
| FEBRUARY | ||
| Paula Hawkins | The Girl on the Train | |
| Celeste Ng | Everything I Never Told You | |
| Keigo Higashino | The Devotion of Suspect X | |
| Mark Henshaw | The Snow Kimono | |
| Keigo Higashino | Salvation of a Saint | |
| Andrew O’Hagan | The Illuminations | |
| Anne Tyler | A Spool of Blue Thread | |
| MARCH | ||
| Joyce Carol Oates | The Sacrifice | |
| Donna Tarte | The Goldfinch | |
| Ayelet Tsabar | The Best Place on Earth SS R | |
| Emma Healey | Elizabeth is Missing | |
| Maxine Beneba Clark | Foreign Soil SS | |
| Timothy Brook | Mr Selden’s Map of China | |
| Alison Moore | He Wants | |
| Emily St John Mandel | Station Eleven | |
| Emily Bitto | The Strays | |
| Colm Toibin | Nora Webster | |
| Sofie Laguna | The Eye of the Sheep | |
| Ellen van Neerven | Heat and Light SS R | |
| APRIL | ||
| Liane Moriarty | Big Little Lies | |
| Jo Nesbo | Blood on Snow | |
| Jane Schemilt | Daughter | |
| Atticus Lish | Preparation for the Next Life | |
| Laline Paull | The Bees | |
| Naja Marie Aidt | Baboon SS R | |
| Jenny Offill | Dept. of Speculation R | |
| Sascha Arango | The Truth and Other Lies R | |
| Jim Shepard | The Book of Aron R | |
| John Misto | The Shoe-Horn Sonata | |
| MAY | ||
| Sebastian Barry | The Temporary Gentleman | |
| Asne Seierstad | One of Us | |
| Amitav Ghosh | Flood of Fire | |
| Seni Glaister | The Museum of Things Left Behind | |
| Sonia Hartnett | Golden Boys | |
| Elizabeth Harrower | The Watch Tower | |
| JUNE | ||
| Jenny Erpenbeck | The End of Days | |
| Rosamund Lupton | The Quality of Silence | |
| Sara Novic | Girl at War | |
| Les Murray | Waiting for the Past | |
| Kate Grenville | One Life | |
| Donna Leon | Falling in Love | |
| Natascha Solomon | The Song Collector | |
| Alex Hammond | The Unbroken Line | |
| Christine Piper | After Darkness | |
| Anna Funder | The Girl With the Dogs | |
| Benjamin Johncock | The Last Pilot |
Comments are closed.