10 booksellers share their personal favourite reads of 2022
Below 10 booksellers share which books stand out as exceptional amongst everything they’ve read this year.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, and The Colony by Audrey magee
My favourite reading experiences this year have all come courtesy of Irish women – Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, The Colony by Audrey Magee, and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Each of these novels engages with Ireland’s complicated political past with intelligence, insight, subtlety, and compassion; each packs an emotional wallop; each features truly stunning prose. In their own way, each novel also contains everything that you need to know about the human experience.
– Joanna Di Mattia
The Trees by Percival Everett
This is an incredible novel, told mostly through dialogue, as murders occur throughout the United States, beginning in the small town of Money, Mississippi. Money is where Emmett Till was lynched in 1955, and this story is a fantastic imagining of a revenge fantasy. A very clever book that I could not put down!
– Clare Millar
The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li
This book took me by so much surprise and has cemented Yiyun Li as an author I will always admire and revere. It is best to go into this one without knowing much about the plot, but it is truly one of the most intelligent, complex and fully-realised novels I’ve read in recent memory.
– Tracy Hwang
Faithless by Alice Nelson
My favourite book of the year would have to be Faithless. It is the most eye-opening, gorgeously written book about the love and devotion we are capable of giving, even if the recipient doesn't wholly deserve it, and looking at its cover still pulls at my heartstrings. I really must thank Alice Nelson for not letting Faithless be just an idea in her head.
– Aurelia Orr
The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty
‘On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only 18 years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen. The agony is sweet, as the mystics promised ... but no angel appears to Blandine. There is, however, a bioluminescent man in his fifties, glowing like a firefly.’
Welcome to the opening sentences of The Rabbit Hutch, an astonishingly original debut novel by Tess Gunty that is one of the best things I’ve read in a long time. Set in the fictional town of Vacca Vale, Indiana, Blandine is a one-time foster child who has ‘aged out’ of care and is now sharing a flat with three other ‘aged out’ guys in an affordable housing complex called La Lapineire (locally known as The Rabbit Hutch). On the hot and steamy night of Wednesday July 17, the intersection of various Vacca Vale lives culminate in an event that you will never in a million years guess at. The character of Blandine is whip smart and funny, and so is the author who created her.
– Gabrielle Williams
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
Priestdaddy ripped me out of my reading funk in early 2022 with its absolutely outrageous premise and the sharp, loving, hilarious portraits Lockwood draws of her family, neighbours and enemies. I honestly didn't know you could be this funny in a book. While some sombre truths about Catholicism, patriarchy and America do develop across the story, they artfully sneak up on you – Lockwood is in total control.
And if I'm allowed an honourable mention for 2022: When I Sing, Mountains Dance, by the talented Catalan artist and writer Irene Solà. Amid another tough year of political conflict and environmental destruction, this story about an isolated mountain village was a reassuring balm. Not because Solà avoids hardship. Instead, it's that her remarkable narrative – told from the perspective of animals, mushrooms, villagers, a tempest and even the ghosts of executed witches – puts suffering, beauty, death and chance in perspective, as part of a story with much deeper and longer roots than any one human person.
– Ruth McHugh-Dillon
Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
Since I finished reading Lucy By the Sea by Elizabeth Strout, I have not stopped thinking about how refreshing it was to read a pandemic story that remained true to the fear and disbelief felt while remaining optimistic and kind. Beautifully woven through tales of American politics and world changes is a solid, sweet love story about forgiveness and differences. The novel deals with personal demons, but also with love. It hit the mark for me.
– Chris Gordon
Runt by Craig Silvey
Annie Shearer and her sheepdog, Runt, are two of the most earnest and endearing characters you could ever hope to meet between the pages of a book, and I utterly adored them. As they fight to save the family farm (even though, as Annie's grandma so wisely points out, it's not the roof above you but rather those below it who are the most valuable), and take on some truly dastardly villains, you will be hoping against hope that these little Aussie battlers come out on top. (Spoiler alert: they do and I couldn't stop smiling!)
Truly delightful, this book might be aimed at ages 7-12 years, but I think it is perfect for anyone who can remember what it was like to be a child with hopes and dreams, and a furry best friend.
– Kate McIntosh
The Progress of Love by Alice Munro
The Progress of Love was my fourteenth book by Alice Munro, and the last one I had left to read. She’s my favourite writer and it was a bittersweet moment, though mostly sweet because now I get to start rereading her.
Her short stories are difficult to encapsulate, and Margaret Atwood herself couldn’t pin down what goes on in her work, who wrote: 'What should we call the combination of obsessive scrutiny, archaeological unearthing, precise and detailed recollection, the wallowing in the seamier and meaner and more vengeful undersides of human nature, the telling of erotic secrets, the nostalgia for vanished miseries, and rejoicing in the fullness and variety of life, stirred all together?' I don’t know what to call it, but I know it reaches me emotionally and intellectually in a way that little else can, and it’s a source of intense pleasure.
– Baz Ozturk
Unnecessary Drama by Nina Kenwod, The Trees by Percival Everett, How to Tackle Your Dreams by Fiona Hardy, and I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O'Farrell
It's impossible to tell you my absolute favourite book that I read in 2022! Young adult, fiction, kids and nonfiction favourites will have to do.
Was it Nina's Kenwood's marvellous second novel Unnecessary Drama, which made me feel like I'd had my skull cracked open and my every internal thought and personal neurosis laid out on the page in exquisitely funny detail? Or was it Percival Everett's astonishing Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Trees, which I read in one huge gulp. Perhaps it was Fiona Hardy's charming book How to Tackle Your Dreams, which – as is typical of Hardy's books – was delightfully full of heart and wit and amazing characters. Or maybe even Maggie O’Farrell’s divinely-written memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, which reads like a thriller and pierced me straight through the heart, leaving me sobbing by the end.
– Lian Hingee