In The Premonition (Allen Lane) Michael Lewis, the American journalist I love best, pays raging tribute to the US epidemiologists no one would listen to as COVID-19 came surging in. Helen Garner highlights the work of American journalist Michael Lewis.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel is Klara and the Sun (Faber). Jonathan Coe’s Mr Wilder and Me (Penguin) is a beautifully elegiac novel told by a young woman in 1970s Greece hired as an interpreter for the great Billy Wilder as he struggles to make what he suspects will be his final film, still haunted by the horrors of 20th-century Europe that he fled decades earlier. Her story collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (Granta), is filled with damaged adolescents craving love and shelter in an Argentina whose nominally comfortable surface can’t suppress a frightening underbelly of savage inequality and the legacy of the junta years. My big discovery this year was the brilliant, disturbing, supernatural-infused fiction of Mariana Enriquez. Kazuo Ishiguro was impressed by Mariana Enriquez’s The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Hannah Kent’s latest novel is Devotion (Picador). Both of these continue to haunt me in the best way imaginable. Norman (UQP), ghost stories that queer and disrupt the Western gothic tradition. But my two standout books of 2021 were Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (Bloomsbury), an ecstatic literary hallucination, and Permafrost by S.J. I enjoyed the profanity of Melissa Broder’s sex and food-drenched Milk Fed (Bloomsbury), and the discomfiting ambiguities explored in Diana Reid’s debut, Love & Virtue (Ultimo). In this ongoing time of uncertainty, perhaps I have been seeking out the off-kilter. My year of reading has been filled with fever-dream books that have left me in odd states of rapture and disquietude. Hannah Kent remains haunted by Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi and S.J.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger.

Despite the turmoil of global events, the publishing world still managed to produce many great books for our delight.Īs we enter the last weeks of 2021 - and with the summer holidays looming - we asked a selection of writers from home and abroad to tell us about the books they enjoyed most this year, those that eased their worries over the state of the world or lifted their spirits in what has been a trying time.ĭon’t forget to tell us about your favourite reads of the year in the comments section. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size

Cassandra's Sister by Veronica Bennett