As ever, I’ve listed below everything I’ve read this year — with the long overdue return to real life, there are fewer books here than in previous locked-down years. Those that surpassed my expectations are marked with *, and those that really disappointed me are marked with !
A Most Wanted Man, John le Carré
Current Intelligence, David Charlwood
The Mission House, Carys Davies
The Shelf, Helly Acton*
The Shack, William P Young
Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman
Bitter Orange, Claire Fuller
Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Demain, Guillaume Musso
Magpie, Elizabeth Day
The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober, Catherine Gray* (again!)
The Guest of Night, Lucy Underwood-Healy
Fatherland, Robert Harris*
The Party Crasher, Sophie Kinsella
The Instant, Amy Liptrot
Couples, John Updike
A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch
Open Water, Caleb Azumah Nelson
Exciting Times, Naoise Dolan
After I Left You, Alison Mercer
Treachery, S J Parris
The Ramage Hawk, John Pilkington
The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker
Death in the Andes, Mario Vargas Llosa !
When I Hit You, Meena Kandasamy
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
The Passion, Jeanette Winterson
The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey
Suez Crisis 1956, David Charlwood
The Woman in the Window, A J Finn
The Silver Thread, Kylie Fitzpatrick
The Yacoubian Building, Alaa Al-Aswany (in translation) !
Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie
The Couple at the Table, Sophie Hannah
Slow Horses, Mick Herron*
On Writing, Stephen King
The Liar’s Dictionary, Eley Williams
A Ruinous Wind, John Pilkington
