2020 didn’t turn out to be the year anyone was expecting. Many people found it difficult to concentrate on reading, others, like me and Tim, found reading to be a solace and a distraction. (Not so much with the writing though.) My free little library outside my house got more use than ever over our lockdown periods and continues to do so now. I received some lovely notes from my neighbours, saying how much it helped them especially when the libraries were closed.
This is the sixth year that Tim and I have been tracking the books we’ve read over the previous year and trying to work out which ten we’ve liked the best. We rate all the books we read out of five as we read them, and of course always end up with more than ten 5-star books each. Then the discussions begin!
You can see previous year’s lists here: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.
I read 96 books this year. Here are some facts and figures about my top ten books I read in 2020:
- Two books published this year (Writers & Lovers, and The Weekend)
- The oldest published in 1976 (Bear)
- One book in translation (Youth)
- Nine books by women, and one man (The Innocents)
- Two books set in England (The world Before Us and Expectation), one in Denmark (Youth), four in America (Severance, The Hare, Writers & Lovers, A Crime in the Neighborhood), two in Canada (The Innocents, and Bear), one in Australia (The Weekend)
- One about a pandemic (Severance)
- One not published yet (The Hare)
- One winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction (A Crime in the Neighborhood)
- Three of my books are also in Tim’s list (A Crime in the Neighborhood, Writers & Lovers, and Youth)
All but one of my books are available in the UK. (The Hare is yet to find a UK publisher.) I have created a list on Bookshop.org to make it easy to buy books from my list online in the UK, here. The Hare is available here (currently pre-orders). But please also consider ordering from you local independent – they need our business more than ever. Please try not to buy your books from that other place which really doesn’t need your business – you know the place I mean.
My Best Reads of 2020
Top three (in no order)
Bear by Marian Engel
| Controversial and prize-winning, and a masterpiece. Is what I’m going to say now a spoiler? Maybe. This short novel is about a woman who has sex with a bear. There, it’s said. Avoid it, or read it, now you know. But it’s so much more than that – although these scenes are handled expertly. It’s about nature, a woman working out who she is and what she wants, falling in love (yes), feminism, loneliness, connection. Engel writes beautifully, plainly, elegantly. There is nothing lurid or salacious here; it is all part of the whole. |
The Hare by Melanie Finn
| With The Hare, Melanie Finn has written a powerful story of female perseverance, strength, and resilience. This book has rare qualities: beautiful writing while being absolutely unputdownable, and I will be pressing it into the hands of every reader I know. Teenager, Rosie meets the much older Bennett and for a while is in thrall to him, but when he leaves Rosie and their daughter in a run-down cabin to fend for themselves, Rosie toughens up and fights for her freedom and her daughter. |
Writers and Lovers by Lily King
| Don’t be put off by the cover – I thought that it was going to be whimsical, a bit too cute for my tastes, but it was almost my perfect read. (I still don’t like that jacket.) It is funny in a downbeat way, brilliantly written, and with such an engaging main character and story. Casey is grieving the death of her mother, juggling debts and gruelling shifts in an upmarket restaurant in Boston (the waitress scenes were so good). And she’s been writing a novel for six years. (All the parts about writing books were spot on.) Writers & Lovers covers the few months where she has relationships with three men and finishes her novel. It’s about creativity and commitment, work and love. |
Best of the Rest
The Weekend by Charlotte Wood
| In The Weekend three female friends in their seventies gather at the holiday home of a fourth friend who has recently died, in order to clear it out. Bitchy, grumpy, private, candid, supportive, loving, these three women are so real, so full of life, I absolutely loved them and the book. |
The Innocents by Michael Crummey
| This book starts with the death of Ada’s and Evered’s parents and baby sister, leaving the siblings aged 9 and 11 completely alone on a cold and inhospitable New Foundland shore. Ada and Evered – see what Crummey has done there – labour through the seasons only with very occasional visits from The Hope to deliver supplies and take their catch of cod. Ada and Evered know just about enough to survive (and the book is full of the work they do, and the landscape they have to submit to), but like Eve and Adam before the time of the apple, they know next to nothing about the world beyond their cove and even less about their bodies. A brilliant, visceral, evocative coming of age novel. |
A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne
| Marsha is looking back to a couple of months in the summer of 1972 when as a child her father leaves her mother for her aunt, and a boy she knows a little, and doesn’t really like, is molested and murdered in her neighbourhood. Hot days and boiling nights make everyone in the claustrophobic suburbs suspicious of strangers until the undercurrent of hysteria bubbles up into a terrible accusation. This book positively simmers. But don’t expect a crime novel; it’s more about asking why we do the things we do, and not always knowing the answer. |
Severance by Ling Ma
| This was pure enjoyment, even though it’s mostly a book about a world after a virus has killed most people off. I love a good apocalit. But it’s much more than that, and has a lot to say about immigration, consumerism, capitalism, millennial ennui, and office work. It is also an elegy to New York, or cities in general. Candace is an office worker when a deadly pandemic kills people, but not before they repeat the same routine again and again. She escapes New York and finds the scary Bob and a small team of people heading to The Facility in Chicago. The story flips backwards and forwards in time looking at how Candace ended up in New York, and her brief time in China, as well as the immigration of her parents to the US. The more I’ve been thinking about this book in the months since I read it, the more I’ve found to love. |
Youth by Tove Ditlevsen (translated by Tiina Nunnally)
| Second in Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen trilogy and from the start it was definitely going to be in my top ten reads of the year. Tove is a teenager moving from job to job, longing for love and to have her poems published. The writing is so fresh despite it being first published in 1967 and being set in 1930s. I’m not sure I’m ready to say goodbye to 20 (or so) year old Tove. |
The World Before Us by Aislinn Hunter
| How had I never heard of this book until this year? How have I never read it before? when it is exactly my kind of book. Layered, ambiguous, thoughtful, beautifully written, but with a strong narrative. When Jane was 15, Lily the child she was minding, vanished on a walk. The disappearance has haunted her into adulthood, shaped her decisions about work, relationships and study. Jane is obsessed with two things: a girl known only as N who disappears from the pages of history in a similar location, and William Eliot, Lily’s father. When Jane meets William again after more than fifteen years it doesn’t go as she has always imagined, and forces her into action. Following Jane around is a group of ghosts who talk about themselves in the first person plural and are trying to work out who they are and why they are here. If that sounds ridiculous, it isn’t – I found the ghosts very moving. |
Expectation by Anna Hope
| While the story might not be particularly new, something about the way Hope writes just pulled me in and I ended up reading this in any spare moment, even standing up cooking the dinner. The author doesn’t show herself in even the tiniest way and so it was as though I wasn’t reading at all, but walking along the London streets with these women, lying in the park in the dusk, smoking in their flat with them. Hannah, Cate and Lissa are in their mid 20s and are best friends living together in London. They have the rest of their lives ahead of them: they can be anything, go anywhere, do anything. The book skips ten years on (and back again) to see how their lives have unexpectedly turned out. For fans of Ann Tyler, Maggie O’Farrell, and Esther Freud. |
Tim’s Top Ten Reads of the Year
Tim’s Top Three (in no order)
A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne
| Tim says: Originally published back in 1998, this is amazing. As close as it comes to time travel by reading a novel as you can get. I read it and it was 1972. I read it and the sun pounded down. I read it and I was in the Boston suburbs. Great characters and so much wonderful detail. If you like your books vivid and bright, try this one. |
Burning Bright by Ron Rash
| Tim says: Raw and honest. Sometimes brutal, sometimes intimate, always just right. I’ve read tons of incredible short stories this year (see Emma Cline and Jeffrey Eugenides in my top 10), but this is something else. Brilliant. Ron Rash is new to me. Claire and I give each other books all the time. She always gets it spot on, or at least that’s what I thought. Then I found out that she asks her Twitter and Instagram friends for suggestions after briefing them on my tastes. I don’t care if that’s cheating, but if it was you who pushed her in the direction of Ron Rash, I thank you. Pushing it back. |
Love by Hanne Orstavik (translated by Martin Aitken)
| Tim says: Tense, Nordic, and beautiful in equal measure, with a bit of eerie thrown in too. Love takes place over the course of a single night. Jon is locked out of his house. He and his mother have very different journeys. I couldn’t put it down. Makes me want to go back to Scandinavia right now. How do books do that? |
Tim’s Best of the Rest
- Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg
- Daddy by Emma Cline
- Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese
- Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore
- Fresh Complaint by Jeffrey Eugenides
- Youth by Tove Ditlevsen
- Writers and Lovers by Lily King
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My fourth novel, Unsettled Ground will be published in March in the UK, and in May in the USA and Canada. Find out more here.
built me a free little library so that I can swap books with my neighbours and anyone who happens to come past. These are springing up all over the world and you can find the locations of many of them 
This is a tough but brilliant read. Vann has returned to the story of his father, this time as a complete novel covering a few days when Jim sees a therapist, and with his brother, visits various relatives and friends. We follow Jim’s most intimate thoughts, and can only watch his self destructive actions as he contemplates suicide. The story is agonising, the writing expressively perfect.
Mrs Bridge was Evan S. Connell’s debut, and it’s so damn good. Over the course of 117 chapters (some as short as a paragraph), we follow Mrs Bridge as she goes about her day-to-day life as a housewife and mother in 1930s Kansas City. She’s been brought up in a certain way, and wants to bring her children up in that way too. She can be bigoted and racist, but she knows this isn’t right, and yet she can’t seem to work out how to break out of her narrow boring existence of the country-club circle. Oh, and the ending is superb. I might be reading this again in 2020.
I can’t remember the last time I underlined as many lines, as in The Journal of a Disappointed Man, or laughed as much, or cried. Actually cried, quiet rolling tears, while my husband slept beside me in bed.
This novel is a subtle, enigmatic and beautiful elegy to a husband and marriage that ends in tragedy. De Moor’s writing is sensual and spare, whether she’s writing about love, a walk in an ice forest, or baking a cake in the middle of the night. There are layers of meaning here, which with adroit subtlety De Moor lets the reader puzzle out.
Valentine – another debut – won’t be published until June 2020, and you should definitely look out for it. A wonderful cast of female characters are living in a small West Texas town in 1976 just as an oil boom hits. The terrible event that links them together is finely woven, the thread sometimes even disappears, but it’s the women’s and girl’s lives, their hardships, that kept me reading. Beautifully written, this novel and author surely is going to go far.
I’ve come very late to this modern classic, and at first I almost put the book down because I loathed Rabbit, the main character, so much. But I’ve always said I don’t mind reading about horrible characters and then anyway Updike’s writing won me over. Utterly.
This is the story of Maeve, as told by her younger brother, Danny. Before Danny can fully remember her, their mother leaves them in the care of their father who soon remarries. They live in the Dutch House – an ornate monstrosity with huge glass windows and all the furniture and belongings that a previous Dutch family left behind, and then they are forced to leave. For a while I kept waiting for something big to happen, but once I let that go, I completely fell for this book; fell in love with the family and Patchett’s writing.
Think of a funnier Barbara Pym and you’ll be halfway there with this novel. Mrs Palfrey goes to live at the Claremont Hotel in London in the 1960s, after her husband dies. The hotel is down at heel, as are many of the aging residents. Mrs Palfrey’s grandson doesn’t come to visit her . . . until he does. I laughed out loud many times, mostly at the spot-on observations of people and growing old. Highly recommended.
This is another debut, with wonderful lucid and understated writing. It tells the story of Jack an ex-lawyer who has been living illegally in his dead uncle’s apartment in New York for fourteen years. He has compulsive tendencies – visiting Brooklyn bridge every evening, a certain secondhand bookstore, and the same diner for lunch every day. When his new landlord wants to evict him, Jack meets and becomes obsessed with the architect employed to redesign his building. Each chapter alternates between this narrative and one from a few months on when Jack has left New York and is staying in a Buddhist monastery tending their bonsai trees (poorly). I loved it.
A perfect collection of short stories all with the same main character. ‘Fuckhead’ is in his early twenties and he’s a drug addict and alcoholic. And no, a series of stories about drug-fuelled craziness narrated by this kind of man wouldn’t normally interest me, either. But the free-wheeling mind-altered narratives are so fresh and scary, and sometimes even funny. Don’t be put off by the subject matter, just read it.
