2022 A Year in Books – by Alexia Wdowski

Looking back at 2022, it has been a bumper year for my reading pile. Books are booming and TBR lists are groaning, so to add to the literary abundance here are my best and most favourite reads of 2022, almost like doing a yearly tax return, but for books. These are the books that have stayed with me, taught me, enchanted me and resonated deeply. 

We are now beginning February, another month of cruel winter beauty, where lying low, recuperating and reading seem like some of the most sensible activities a bookworm can do. So join me and make like a hibernating dormouse, but with a drier nest and an excellent selection of books both old and new. 

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim. 

Originally published in 1922 making it an unbelievable 100 years old, this engaging novel starts in dreary London, where it is raining and fish suppers are being eaten on the same dull day every week, and wives are expected to be good, and a ‘nest egg’ of savings is never to be spent, and other’s needs always have to come first. I really felt this in my bones at the beginning of the year after another dark winter, so when the MC Lottie looks longingly at a newspaper advert for spending April in a small medieval castle in Italy, that she can’t afford and her husband Melersh wouldn’t allow her to go to anyway, I was like, Lottie – do whatever it takes, get to that castle, and also take me there with you now and describe every beam of light and garden terrace and every warm stone wall now.

Spoiler alert – they do go to the castle, and Elizabeth Von Arnim does describe everything. Our four strangers, ‘lovely ladies’, with their own middle-class lady problems spend an enchanted April in the castle and start to resolve their issues. And the whole novel is just that, a blissful hangout at the castle with descriptions of gardens and a gentle bit of comedy of manners thrown in. There is also a lot of life wisdom in the way the characters are deeply affected by their time away and are each worked on by the ‘magic of San Salvatore.’ The book does have some dated brits-abroad humour that hasn’t travelled its 100 years well, but all the enchantment is definitely worth withstanding a bit of ‘oh no but of its time’ embarrassment. 

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Continuing the theme of escaping, lol okay only just noticing this obvious theme as I write these, ‘The Midnight Library,’ published in 2020, is based on a pretty much flawless ‘what if’  idea which I want to be real so much - What if there was a magical midnight library between life and death which lets you escape your regrets about roads not taken and try out an infinity of other versions of your life. The main character Nora comes to the midnight library at the ripe old age of 35 after a suicide attempt. She feels like all the threads that keep her moored to life are cut one after the other and she is drowning in regrets. She loses her job, is estranged from her family and friends, even her neighbour doesn’t need her to run boring errands anymore and to top it off – her cat dies in a horrific hit and run accident.

When she tries to kill herself unfortunately/fortunately for her she ends up in a philosophical experiment instead. ‘The Midnight Library,’ where her own personal librarian, her actual librarian from school, guides her in hopping from life to life through the books on the shelves, each life a result of a road not taken in her root life, and each life fulfils a regret, or gives her a chance at a dream left behind or a friendship or romance lost. Pulls at the heartstrings already, right? This idea is used to explore philosophical questions about regret, choices, family and friendships, work, and what makes a good life and we adventure through each life, living her choices right alongside the MC. I love my books to come with a pinch of added wisdom as I need all the wisdom I can get, and this dealt with the suicide theme in a sensitive and hopeful way. It was poignant without ever becoming too depressing or repetitive and explored the library concept in an engaging way. The MC was sympathetic and I was rooting for her (and her root life) which was handy as you are with her for the whole of the book. Contains cats (both alive and dead), philosophy, suicidal ideation, libraries, romance and humour. You can’t really go wrong with that. 

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

This book has a first-person narrative from the POV of an melancholy and philosophical fig tree so that really is enough alone to make me love it, but it also brought me on a sweeping journey from London to Cyprus and back again, with young lovers separated, a family isolated from each other, and an island divided by the Greek/Turkish war. The book was Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2022 and Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2021 and is dedicated to ‘immigrants and exiles everywhere, the uprooted, the re-rooted, the rootless, and to the trees we left behind, rooted in our memories’ and I read this timely exploration of exile and belonging while the war raged in Ukraine and refugee families started arriving in the UK.

It looks at the secrets families keep and how moving and migrating affect different generations in different ways. How can we belong to a place we have never been? What can we bring with us for our new lives and how can we build lives for our children? What would we rather forget but can’t? What are we both running from and longing for when we move somewhere new, severing geographical ties with friends and family? It explores grief and the trauma of war, but also love and passion, friendship, food, and the quiet acceptance of daily life. Expect night-blooming chocolate flowers, blackened beams, acts of bravery, tavernas, honeysuckle and the extended metaphor of the fig tree that stands for all our interconnected links, losses and tragedies, both human and ecological. 

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier

Gave this a bit of a reread part way through the year on a whim and my goodness I’m glad I did. This 1952 corker is a warning to all first-person male narrators with a few quid trying to figure out a mysterious and attractive woman while feeling a bit poorly. Who is the alluring and experienced yet so delicate and beautiful Cousin Rachel? Our sheltered hero Phillip goes to Italy to find out what happened to his proxy father figure Ambrose after he receives a letter saying Ambrose has married a woman called Rachel, and then he promptly up and dies. We go on a journey of discovery through Phillip’s eyes as he goes looking for answers but is fated to never escape his own perceptions. The book is constantly questioning who we are looking at, and are we ever seeing the truth? The male gaze trips itself up time and time again here in a humdinger of a psychological plot where twist after twist left me guessing right up to the end. Enjoy the immersive gothic atmosphere of menace and suspense and for all the writers out there this book is a masterclass of how to get your dear readers screaming at the page, loving and hating the decisions of your MC, while understanding exactly why they are acting this way!

The Fish by Joanne Stubbs

This was my first foray into the genre called Cli-Fi or Climate Fiction and is a gripping Lit Fic exploration of the effects that walking fish appearing on beaches and in bath tubs and starfish hanging out on kitchen windows have on three characters in different parts of the world. Published in 2022 This intriguing debut describes our world but pushed a bit further into a future where the sea levels are rising and planting rice paddies in your garden in Cornwall becomes a viable idea. I read this right at the height of a bout of eco-anxiety and was reassured to find characters trying to find hopeful ways of living through a world facing unprecedented times. Weirdly, this book was also a way of reading about the pandemic without having to actually read about the pandemic, even though it was written before covid, as so many of the ways the characters and world adjust to a ‘New Normal’ felt so familiar, I especially recognised they way conspiracy theories and ‘cod science’ abound, and psychologically, how the different characters react to a world in upheaval. Margaret questions her faith, others sit deeply in denial and spread misinformation, and in Cornwall Effie wonders about the morality of becoming a mother. The friendship between Ricky and Kyle was also surprisingly touching and reminded me how great and supportive male friendships can be. This is a vivid and familiar world, despite the fish doing their creepy, scaly thing, it might make you pop down to the climate café, or never look at your goldfish in the same way again. I ate it up like fish and chips on a Friday. 

Klara and The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Oh Klara! I just loved being with this character, her worldview was so kind and strange and on a technical level everything she paid attention to ended up having resonance with the plot, I felt like I was deep in the hands of a master writer at work who will look after me and show me around this world. Again, a world like our world but not quite. I love being in familiar strange worlds that make me look sideways at our everyday lives and this book, like ‘The Fish,’ shows us a world that is us but not quite, not yet, a possible world. This book has a shiny surface and dark undertows, we never quite get to know the full dystopian scope of the society Klara exists in but there are many hints that things ain’t all roses. Her understanding is limited as her memories start from when she was made, and like our ancestors she worships the sun. Why wouldn’t she? It’s a ball of fiery magnificence. Klara sits in the shop window, waiting to be taken home, she is a commodity with consciousness, something we can all relate to lol. She is also AI under capitalism, here to serve her human purchasers, she is also a little girl’s friend and a mother’s strange ally. This book is edged with sadness and longing as the characters struggle to connect and maintain friendships and relationships within the rules and systems of their world, a theme that runs through so much of Ishiguro’s work, but this is never dreary or hopeless, the characters have heart, and it even has a bit of a dark twist that I enjoyed and the subject of AI and our relationship with them/it is endlessly interesting. I would have loved more development of the world, especially the decisions the parents are making for their children, but this complaint is only because I liked it so much that I wanted more of it. Makes you want to ring up an old friend, make lengthy small-talk in the supermarket, and tell your family you love them. 

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Well, where to start with this. Published in 2013, by a writer who is also a Buddhist monk – we definitely need more of those, 'A Tale for the Time Being' slots right into my fave themes for my 2022 reads, suicide, philosophy, life advice, regrets, living in the now, a world that is like our world but not quite! This book also has Nao ‘the now!’ as one of its MCs. I enjoyed Nao almost as much as I enjoyed Klara, she is a 15 year old Japanese schoolgirl who buys a notebook within the covers of a Proust novel without knowing much about him, and secretly starts to write inside. That’s right – a secret diary people! One of my most favourite things to read. This book jumps back and forward between Nao’s dairy, which immediately made me want to go to Tokyo, like now, despite the books descriptions of bullying, suicide and rampant sexual deviance, and academic Ruth, living a precarious half-life on a lonely Canadian island with her husband. The diary is found in a literal message in a hello kitty lunchbox, and past, present and future play and intertwine with each other as Ruth starts to read the diary, and like us, becomes both enchanted with and eventually afraid for Nao. This book contains quite graphic scenes, unlike the midnight library where suicide is depicted once and then we are onto the magic, this book doesn’t shy away from making bad things happen to it’s characters and exploring the results. This is where its wisdom comes from, and it touches on so many big subjects, Kamikaze Pilots, 9-11, depression, suicide, family secrets, the 2011 tsunami, ghosts, Buddhist approaches to living, and is filled with so many colours of light as well as shade, but it is a heavy, full read because of that. This is such a smart, full novel from a daring writer at the top of her game and with Nao she has created a character to really love and root for. 

How to Kill your Family by Bella Mackie

Just thought I’d change tack here because after so much angsting about how to live a good life, and living in the now, and appreciating your loved ones and acceptance yadayada, it’s a cool drink of water to spend time with a character who just doesn’t give a F*8@. This is another ‘secret diary novel’ I know, fabulous innit. Published in 2021 this novel is still going strong thanks to the MC a funny, snarky, cunning, ambitious, imprisoned murderer, sitting in jail with a most annoying cell-mate after being tried and arrested for the one murder she didn’t commit – how’s that for bad luck eh? I have to be honest the title of this book did put me off as, despite it being pink I still thought it would be a bit grisly and, well, murdery, but I reckoned without the first person voice of the MC, full of wit, social descriptions, observations and a whole load of judging everyone, and well yes, a few murders, and even a sprinkling of star-crossed lovers too. Revenge has never been so sparkly. 

My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Finishing with another fictional lady murderer, one shortlisted for the 2019 Woman’s Prize for Fiction and the winner of the 2020 British Book Award for Crime Fiction Book of the Year no less, ‘My Sister the Serial Killer’ is another unusual take on the crime genre. I picked this up right after reading Bella Mackie set off a taste for the macabre, only this time we are in Nigeria and the MC isn’t the killer but is the elder sister of a habitual murderer (who has now been promoted to official serial killer after completing three murders). It is the sister’s dubious boyfriends who seem to have a habit of ending up dead and the book asks the question, would you turn her in? Or would you resentfully protect her by helping her clean up afterwards, incriminating yourself in the process, despite being a dab hand with the bleach? The book follows downtrodden Korede, a woman of very few boundaries, as she tries to cover up crimes, thwart the not amazingly intelligent police, and stop the man she loves being killed when her murderous sister, who is also way hot, and like most psychopaths, is pretty charming and pretty mean, starts to date him. Do these men deserve their fate? Who is attacking who first? Again, dark subject, but the offbeat humour in the tone keeps it effervescent. Warning to all Men - beware dating hot people with knives in their handbags. 

And that’s it folks! My top treats of 2022! Hopefully you have reached the end of this reading round-up with a few ideas about books to read that will show you how to live better through literature, or failing that, how to embrace your inner psychopath. All these books are available to buy on our website and are guaranteed to help smooth out any bumpy entries into 2023. 

Happy reading! 

Alexia