The Giants: Perhaps the most anticipated book of the year, Freedom (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Jonathan Franzen did much more than get the author a spot on the cover of Time. Franzen’s sprawling epic takes a Tolstoyan view of the dysfunctional American family, through the lives, times and elusive freedoms claimed by the Berglunds. An old-fashioned and yet very modern masterpiece.
For David Grossman, writing To The End of the Land (Jonathan Cape) was “an act of choosing life”. Grossman wrote this book, about a mother hiking in Galilee in an attempt to keep at bay possible bad news about her son, a soldier caught in the Israel-Palestine conflict, after the death of his own son in 2006. Never sentimental, always powerful, this is one of the great books of the decade.
Thirty-five years in the making, Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn (Corvus) pulled off the apparently impossible — he had something new, and essential, to say about the Vietnam War. Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge (Knopf) tries to bring to life the Hungarian Holocaust, and though it fails in some ways, it stamps her as one of the most scintillating story-tellers of her times.
David Mitchell (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Sceptre) and Jennifer Egan (A Visit From The Goon Squad, Knopf) keep the post-modern novel alive. Mitchell’s riff on the Dutch East Indies and Japan is relentlessly entertaining; Egan’s dark tales are held together by the figure of Bennie Salazar, a musician of modest talents but unquenchable passion. Roberto Bolano’s posthumous reputation continued to soar with the publication of Nazi Literature in the Americas (Picador), a pseudo-dictionary of fictional writers. Emma Donoghue may have missed a Booker win, but her Room (Little, Brown) was one of the most unsettling reworkings of the traditional crime novel, where a psychopath is seen through the eyes of the child who is his victim. And Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) raised the bar for debut novelists, offering an acrobatic overview of contemporary Filipino history and politics.
Short stories: The short story form hasn’t died; it was merely subjected to premature burial. Three collections stood out. Yiyun Li’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (Random House) confirms her rising reputation — and the bleak but riveting Kindness will stay with you for years. William Trevor’s Selected Stories was a welcome reminder of the range and depth of this Irish writer’s work: “The short story is bony, it cannot wander. It is essential art.” Rahul Mehta’s quiet debut collection Quarantine (Random House) took slight themes and built on them to explore nostalgia, sex, relationships, loneliness and much more.
Indian literature: Our poets have often outdone our novelists, and an essential book for any serious reader is the Collected Poems of Arun Kolatkar, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Bloodaxe). Kolatkar’s Bombay and his Jejuri remain indelible, and Mehrotra provides just the right perspective on his work. Two contrasting novels, Siddharth Chowdhury’s Day Scholar (Picador) and Manu Joseph’s Serious Men (HarperCollins) are evidence that Indian novelists are becoming more sure of themselves. Chowdhury’s dissection of the everyday brutalities of university life in Bihar is both funny and incisive, and Joseph’s Serious Men is a dark satire on caste and relationships in India. Both novels have enough to offer to overcome their relatively minor flaws. Read them alongside Charu Nivedita’s blistering and wildly experimental Zero Degree (Blaft, translated by Pritham Chakravarthy and Rakesh Khanna), which shifts seamlessly from phone sex to Rwanda.
U R Ananthamurthy’s Bharatipura (translated by Susheela Punitha) looks at prejudice and change, as a wealthy landowner returns to his hometown and attempts to break centuries of tradition by pushing for the entry of untouchables into the local temple. And a new translation of three novellas by Rabindranath Tagore, Three Women (Random House, translated by Arunava Sinha), explores marriage, passion, illicit love and relationships.
Genre fiction: Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay (Scholastic), the third in The Hunger Games series, is a children’s book the way Jonathan Swift was a children’s writer. This teenage epic takes on dark themes — ideology, brutal regimes and the price of freedom — and should be required reading for all adults. Besides, it’s great fun. Neil Gaiman edited one of the best anthologies of the year — Stories (Hachette) has a simple premise: what comes next after “And then what happened?” China Mieville delivered the fast-paced Kraken (Del Rey), where the disappearance of a giant squid threatens London; closer to home, Samit Basu’s dazzling Turbulence (Hachette) is a sensitive exploration of an intriguing question: what would happen if you actually had the power to change the world?
Stieg Larsson scored another goal for posthumous best-sellers with The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest (Knopf), the third in his Millennium trilogy, making Lisbeth Salander a household name. John Le Carre’s coolly elegant Our Kind of Traitor (Viking) is evidence that he is still the master of the modern morality tale. And Blaft did connoisseurs of Indian pulp fiction a major favour by publishing Surender Mohan Pathak’s crime thriller Daylight Robbery in a brisk, breezy translation — plus, they had vamps on the cover.
