2023: The Year In Books

Another year-end, another look back at the books I’ve read this year. For old time’s sake, I will use my five-star rating system, but having grown increasingly sceptical of ratings of late, here’s the key, which is entirely subjective: five stars mean I enthusiastically recommend this book to all; four stars mean I recommend it, subject to your genre preferences; three stars means I did like it, but just check the blurb and the reviews to see if it piques your interest! And less than that…

A few notes about this list. I don’t count books that I’ve read strictly for academic purposes, or for my academic work (the list would be quite unmanageable if so!). I’ve also not counted books that I re-read this year, mainly for our Delhi Science Fiction Reading Circle, such as Iain M. Banks’ Look to Windward. (this is not based on any principle, only that I didn’t log re-reads into Goodreads, and so have lost track).

I haven’t been able to find the time to write on this blog the past year, but I haven’t given up my critical non-fiction writing. I’ve put my 2023 critical essays on this twitter thread, for anyone who might be interested.

I write more frequently (in fact fortnightly) about what I’m reading, on my Substack newsletter, Words for Worlds. So if you want something more frequent than an annual update, that’s the place to go to! It’s also where I’ll be sharing information about my third SF novel – due out in July/August 2024 (!) – so head on over there if you want to keep up with that.

Now, to the list…

A. SF/Fantasy

1. Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (*****): Finally got around to reading this because of our Delhi Science Fiction Book Club, and I’d waited too long. Tchaikovsky’s evolutionary-SF-crossed-with-space-opera is wonderful, and I’d never thought I’d love reading about spiders in space!
2. The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler (*****): A candidate for my book of the year. Evolutionary-SF-meets-climate-change, and a beautiful, moving depiction of first contact between humans and a race of sentient octopi. The communication parts of this were particularly brilliant.
3. House of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds (*****): This is probably my favourite Reynolds, and I love almost all of his work. That sense of awe inspired by deep time – spanning a million years or more – and the deepest of space. This really put the “opera” in space opera.
4. Victory City, by Salman Rushdie (****): Somewhere between historical fiction and historical fantasy, Rushdie’s story of the founding of the Vijaynagara Empire is a reminder that when he eschews the temptation to be didactic, he still very much has it.
5. Vagabonds, by Hao Jingfang (***): Another book club choice. A Dispossessed-style premise (with Mars being that egalitarian ambiguous utopia, but let down a bit by what seemed a somewhat stodgy translation.
6. The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera (****): A fabulous secondary-world fantasy set in a near-Sri Lanka, with themes of Empire and State power at the forefront. For a longer review, see my piece in Himal Mag.
7. Meru, by S.B. Divya (***): Another interesting post-scarcity utopian SF novel, with a terraforming theme complicating matters.
8. Worlds of Exile and Illusion, by Ursula Le Guin (***): This is a collection of Ursula Le Guin’s first three novels, and it’s just so interesting to see that unique style – SF, but with the prose and feel of fantasy – that she would go on to perfect in later years, having its beginnings here.
9. Caged Ocean Dub, by Dare Segun Falowo (****): An enjoyable collection of weird fiction, which is not always my thing; reviewed in Interzone.
10. The Salvage Crew, by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (****): I read this for my Himal review piece on Sri Lankan SF (see above); a first-contact story with Solaris echoes, a lot of intertextuality, and some AI poetry!
11. Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhao (****): From the metcha fantasy genre: superbly paced and gripping (finished it in a single setting), but a little too on the nose on occasion.
12. Translation State, by Ann Leckie (****): Ancillary Justice was genre-changing, and Translation State reflects some of the same radical imagination that makes every Leckie book a unique genre experience.
13. The Red Scholar’s Wake, by Aliette De Bodard (****): I read this for my review of the Clarke Award finalists (see here). Featuring your classic Bodardian themes of sentient spaceships and queer love, in the context of far-future space pirates.
14. Plutoshine, by Lucy Kissick (****): Also a Clarke Award finalist. Terraforming on near-future Pluto, gripping till the end, but the ending was a bit of a let-down.
15. The Anomaly, by Herve Le Tellier (****): Another Clarke Award finalist, and the Clarke’s annual left-field pick – a mainstream literary fiction novel from France! The premise – that a time-loop creates two sets of people who were on board a certain flight – is simply brilliant, and the execution matches up, albeit a little unevenly.
16. Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beuman (****): The deserved Clarke Award winner, in my view. One of the most grimly humorous and accurate genre takes on the climate crisis and the extinction of species.
17. Metronome, by Tom Watson (***): This blend of post-apocalyptic destruction and personal violence (also a Clarke Award finalist) didn’t really do it for me.
18. Coral Bones, by E.J. Swift (***): The last of the Clarke Award finalists, and another one that I couldn’t really get into.
19. Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh (**): This was a book club pick, and you can bet we regretted it. I don’t know what Cherryh thought she was doing here, but 700 pages of intricate political maneuvering on a far-future planet was … hard going.
20. Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds (*****): The first of the Revelation Space novels. Five stars, no notes.
21. The Algebraist, by Iain M. Banks (***): I decided to try a non-Culture novel by Banks. It had its moments – and the premise was fantastic – but it didn’t quite come together for me, at the end.
22. Feersum Endjinn, by Iain M. Banks (***): See above.
23. Blindsight, by Peter Watt (****): You read this, and you understand why its canon. A story of First Contact, but the things Watt does with concepts of bodily modifications, artificial intelligence, telepathy, and so on, reminds you of that quote you often read on the blurb of a Philip K. Dick novel: he makes the “avante garde” look like navel gazers in a cul-de-sac.
24. Foundryside, by Robert Jackson Bennett (****): Another one of those forever-on-the-TBR books that I finally cleared this year. I’ve loved Bennett’s City of Stairs series, and Foundryside was excellent too: perhaps the best work that takes an SF concept (AI), and deals with it in a fantasy setting: this is darn hard to do.

B. Crime Fiction

1. Malice, by Keigo Higashino (*****): I discovered Higashino in late-2022 with The Devotion of Suspect X, and that made every other Higashino novel an insta-buy. Malice brings literary rivalry and artistic insecurities into the crime fiction context (think Amadeus, but crime fiction). In some ways, as good as The Devotion of Suspect X.
2. Salvation of a Saint, by Keigo Higashino (****): Japanese crime fiction is less about the “who” and more about the “how” and the “why”, and in terms of the “how”, this was one of the most intricately and brilliantly plotted stories I’ve read.
3. A Death in Tokyo, by Keigo Higashino (****): This was a little bit about the “who”; perhaps the Higashino novel with the most emotional depth.
4. Newcomer, by Keigo Higashino (***): A rare forgettable one by the Master; I don’t think the mosaic novel format plays to Higashino’s main strength of building up tension to an absolute breaking point!
5. The Devil’s Flute Murders, by Seishi Yokomizo (****): A non-Higashino crime fiction novel! I really enjoyed this – I think it’s my favourite by Yokomizo, and better than his other more well-known novels. This was a who-dunnit, where the who was a genuinely terrifying and brilliant reveal.
6. The Inugami Curse, by Seishi Yokomizo (***): Much like The Honjin Murders and The Village of Eight Graves, while I enjoyed this, I felt that some of the resolutions were a little too quick; and there’s a vein of misogyny underlying a lot of Yokomizo’s work that makes it a little difficult to enjoy.

C. Continent: Latin America

1. The Maniac, by Benjamin Labatut (*****): I loved the wildness of Labatut’s previous novel, When We Cease to Understand the World, and this one was just as good. A thinly fictionalised account of the life and times of John von Neumann, warts and all. Parts of it will have you wiping your eyes.

D. Continent: Africa

1. When We Were Fireflies, by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (****): I really enjoyed Season of Crimson Blossoms by this writer, and his second book repeated some similar themes around love, betrayal, and social expectations in contemporary Nigeria, with the same degree of emotional intensity.
2. Sanya, by Oyin Olugbile (***): One of the Masobe Books publications I read this year, a fun fantasy/historical fiction cross about a girl whose hair gives her magical powers, which enables her to navigate a patriarchal secondary-world.
3. Measuring Time, by Helon Habila (****): Another classic that I came a little late to, but glad that I finally did; eternal themes of memory and love intersect in this coming-of-age novel.
4. River Spirit, by Leila Aboulela (****): I picked up this highly-rated book in a bookshop in Nairobi. This is historical fiction done very well: Sudan during the time of the Mahdi rebellion and at the cusp of colonialism. The use of portraiture as a form of racial power reminded me a lot of Yvonne Owuor’s Dust, and Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King.

E. Continent: Asia

1. The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa (***): A world-famous book, and one that I should have loved, given how brilliant the premise is: a Professor whose memory stops at a particular date, and every day is a new day. Something about the story, though, just felt a little flat.
2. Manaschi, by Hamid Ismailov (****): Read this one in Uzbekistan, by the writer who is banned in Uzbekistan! I love all of Ismailov’s work, and this one was reminiscent of Ismail Kadare in its intersection of myth, poetry, nationalism, and borders.

F. The Middle-East

1. Enter Ghost, by Isabella Hammad (****): I loved Hammad’s first novel, The Parisian, set in Palestine on the turn of the 20th century. Enter Ghost – which is about performing Hamlet in the Occupied West Bank – is just as good, although considerably bleaker and darker. And a particularly relevant read, given the times we are in.

G. Indian Fiction

1. Marquez, EMS, Gulam and Others, by Benyamin (****): Possibly my favourite Indian writer. This book of short stories is a treat, and the eponymous story – about a man who wakes up convinced he is Gabriel Garcia Marquez – is deliciously intertextual, and quite Borgesian.
2. The Light at the End of the World, by Siddhartha Deb (***): Alt-historical fiction, flipping different eras, from 1857 to the present, and in between.
3. The Sickle and the Scalpel, by Volga (****): A novel about the Telangana revolutionary movement, told through the eyes of Dr Komarraju Acchamamba, one of the first women doctors of independent India; a story of both the revolutionary movement, and gender in the revolution. Like all work by Volga, deeply moving.

H. Travel Writing/Memoir

1. The White Mosque, by Sofia Samatar (*****): It turns out that Sofia Samatar writing prose is just as good as Sofia Samatar writing fiction. I got particularly lucky in that The White Mosque – in which Samatar traces her Mennonite ancestors’ journey from Russia into Uzbekistan – came out a few months before my own trip to Uzbekistan; reading Samatar’s descriptions of Khiva, Samarkand, and Bukhara, while in those cities, was a privilege.
2. The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto, by Pico Iyer (****): I’m only going to say, if you’re ever in Kyoto, it would be criminal to walk the streets and not read this book.
3. Not Yet Uhuru, by Jaramogi Oginga Odinga (****): The autobiography of one Kenya’s most prominent Independence leaders, and later, its most prominent opposition leader. Paints a really vivid picture of the struggle, and then of the momentous decisions immediately after Independence that sent Kenya down a certain path. It was published in 1969, and so much of it feels prescient.

I. History

1. God’s Chinese Son, by Jonathan D. Spence (****): A gripping account of the mid-19th century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in human history. Narratively tight, the only struggle was a few moments where it was bogged down by excessive names and dates (inevitable for a history book!). A really good read about a not-frequently-discussed historical era.
2. The Quest for a Socialist Utopia: The Ethiopian Student Movement, c. 1960-1974 (****): I got interested in contemporary Ethiopian history after reading Hiwot Teffera’s The Tower in the Sky, and this was a really informative account of the attempt to build socialism in Ethiopia after the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie, and how those attempts ended in bloodshed and a one-party dictatorship. Read it just for the ideals and the dreams that, at one point, genuinely appeared to herald the coming of another world.
3. A History of Modern Ethiopia, by Bahru Zewde (****): See above – thorough and well-written. A solid primer.
4. Anarchy or Chaos: MPT Acharya and the Indian Struggle for Freedom, by Ole Birk Laursen (****): Indian anarchist history is so underwritten, and this is a welcome change. A riveting account of a truly rich personality, and best read alongside some of the descriptions of the life and times of “Chatto.”
5. The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789, by Robert Darnton (*****): If you’ve read the riotous The Great Cat Massacre, you know what Darnton is about. Here, he traces the history of ideas that coelesced together into what he calls a “revolutionary temper” on the eve of the French Revolution. There is a lot of fascinating stuff in here, but the one I loved was how, when the Finance Minister Necker first made the budget public, it was a revolutionary act; until then, it was not even imaginable that matters of state finance could be discussed and scrutinised by the public. But once he did, the genie was out of the bottle, and could not be put back in: what happens next is history.
6. Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions, by Maurizio Isabella (****): Just about got this in before the close of the year. A fascinating – if somewhat dense – account of the constitutional revolutions that took place in southern Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, in the early 1820s. It was so interesting to see some of those classic ideas around federalism and limited government, play out in such a proto-form.

J. Politics

1. Radius: History of a Feminist Revolution, by Yasmin El-Rifae (*****): A really challenging and difficult book about sexual violence in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, and how a group of protesters in Tahrir Square tried to combat it in an organised way. Essential, if depressing.

K. Miscellaneous Non-Fiction

1. Five Women Who Loved Love: Amorous Tales from 17th-Century Japan (****): The title says it all. I read this during my summer visit to Japan.
2. The Book of Tea, by Kakuzo Okakura (****): I’m not even a tea-drinker, but this was a delightful excursion through the history of the tea ceremony in China, Japan, and Korea, with some wisdomous life-lessons to boot.
3. In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology (****): A good representative collection of the writings of one of the most enigmatic and tragic figures of the 20th century. I didn’t know Pasolini wrote poetry!
4. All These Worlds, by Niall Harrison (****): A great snapshot of the last ten years of the SFF genre, by one of its foremost critics. If you’re interested in how science fiction and fantasy have evolved in the last ten years, within the longer arc of genre history, this book is for you.

2020 In Books

This year saw a significant shift in my reading, triggered by the fact that I published my debut science fiction novel, The Wall, and spent most of the year working on its sequel. Being a genre writer shapes your reading preferences in a very specific way: you begin to actively look out for, and read, novels that share the stylistic or narrative commitments of your own, and you also find yourself reading more broadly in the genre, to gain a sense of what it looks like. So, in 2020, a large part of my reading was science fiction and fantasy, and I feel it ended up becoming a little too skewed. That’s something I’ll try to correct in 2021. Because of writing commitments, I also read less than in previous years, and hardly blogged all year. With the sequel – and the duology – set to be completed in ten days, that’s another thing to correct in the coming year.

Here, as always, the books I read this year, with the usual flawed rating system. I’ve talked about my SFF reading separately as well, in my Slack newsletter. You can find links to all the books on my Goodreads Page.

Africa

1. Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King (****): A memorable and haunting re-telling of the WW2-era Ethiopian war of independence from colonial Italian rule, from the perspective of its women participants.
2. Jennifer Makumbi, The First Woman (*****): A beautiful and searing coming-of-age story set in 1970s Uganda, following its protagonist, Kirabo, as she makes her way through childhood, school, and then college, in a changing and often hostile world. One of the stand-out reads of the year.

The Middle East

1. Isabella Hammad, The Parisian (****): Hammad’s novel takes us to pre-nakba Nablus, and is a very vivid story about Palestine in the 1920s – an era that has been relatively unwritten about.
2. Ibtisam Azem, The Book of Disappearance (****): Azem’s novel – in which all the Palestinians presently living in Israel and Palestine literally vanish overnight – could also be called speculative fiction, but I’m including it here to avoid front-loading that category even more.
3. Adel Kamel, The Magnificent Conman of Cairo (***): The title is a good guide to the novel. This is a classic of Egyptian literature. It didn’t always land for me, but there were moments of darkly comic brilliant, and you can see why it was as influential as it was.

Europe

1. Victor Serge, Conquered City (***): I love Victor Serge to bits, but this one – about a Soviet city torn apart very soon after the revolution – just didn’t do it for me. I felt bogged down at various points, and the momentary flashes of brilliance didn’t make up for that.
2. China Mieville, October (****): Mieville’s fictional reconstruction of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of spectacular – this is thrilling narrative prose, brilliant characterisation, and a deeply moving ending.

India

1. Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, My Father’s Garden (****): A deeply enjoyable and humorous set of three inter-connected short stories, set in small-town India, with its protagonists coming to terms with the world, and with their own sexuality.

Non-Fiction/History

1. Pyotr Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution (*****) : The legendary anarchist’s look back at the French Revolution, a hundred years on, is a ride and a half. His acerbic, drily witty style is an absolute delight to read, and his central thesis – that the revolution’s radicalism was repeatedly betrayed by an ascendant middle class – holds up well.
2. Eric Hazan, A People’s History of the French Revolution (****) : I am a long-time fan of Hazan – his political-geography Paris books were my guides when I was in the city – and this is a characteristically excellent account, albeit far too easy on Robespierre.
3. Kavita Punjabi, Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women’s Movement (*****): A brilliant feminist oral history – in the mold of Alessandro Portelli – of the forgotten Tebhaga movement, where – at the cusp of independence – farmers in Bengal demanded two-thirds of the produce. Another stand-out of the year.

Poetry

1. Nazik al-Mala’ika, Revolt Against the Sun (trans. Emily Drumsta) (*****): I’ve loved Nazik al-Mala’ika ever since I read the poem Love Song for Words, and here, finally, is a collection of her translated poems. Emily Drumsta’s Introduction is a jewel – she contextualises al-Mala’ika’s life, her poetic and political preoccupations, and the larger context of a woman writing poetry in Iraq in the mid-20th century. The Introduction also does to a tee what all great Introductions do: it makes you understand and love the poems even more.

Science Fiction/Fantasy

1. Guy Gavriel Kay, A Brightness Long Ago (***): In my early 20s, I probably knew entire dialogues from GGK novels by heart. It’s probably a sign of how much taste can change that his latest – which, in theory, I should have loved, as it took us back to the same setting as the brilliant Tigana – did very little for me. Nothing wrong with the novel – it’s vintage GGK – but I guess I’ve just moved on.
2. Nancy Kress, Sea Change (***): An interesting cli-fi novel(la), focused on the agribusiness and food security aspect of it; the heavily US-centric nature of it was probably why I didn’t enjoy it as much as I otherwise would.
3. Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (*****): Yes, I finally read this. What else is there to say?
4. Fonda Lee, Jade City (****): The first book in the Green Bone saga, centred around the clash between rival clans for control over jade, and its political economy. Jade City has received rave reviews across the board, and it is a very solid work of fantasy – world-building, pacing, characters, action sequences – all of it is delivered with great competence.
5. Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant (*****): I waited far too long to read this book, and when I did, it went straight to the top of my all-time list. I’ve raved about this everywhere, but one final time: epic fantasy focused on the political economy of colonialism and empire, and featuring the best darn slow-burn romance you will ever read.
6. Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant (*****): The sequel. See above.
7. Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (****): Book 3 kinda slipped in parts, but the ending was solid enough to get things back on track and set up a spectacular finale.
8. Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth (*****): Another extraordinary novel, the kind that comes along rarely (and I read Baru and Gideon back to back). “Lesbian necromancers in space” is how it’s billed, but of course it is a lot more than that – I think it’s the sheer, unabashed wickedness of the writing that really gets you.
9. Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth (***): I’ll be absolutely honest and admit that I did not understand what was happening in the sequel.
10. Samit Basu, Chosen Spirits (****): A best-of-all-possible dystopias with a sliver of hope, set in a near-future Delhi (always a draw!).
11. Berit Ellingsen, A Tale of Truths (****): A fun fantasy novella that involves the discovery of the heliocentric model of the galaxy!
12. Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and other Stories (****): A collection of excellent short stories from Ken Liu that shows why he continues to be one of the most highly-regarded voices of the genre right now.
13. Yoon Ha Lee, Phoenix Extravagant (****): I am a huge fan of Lee’s Hexarchate SF series. Phoenix Extravagant is an altogether softer novel, and its fantasy, loosely modeled on the Korean/Japanese war. I especially loved how art – and artists – were at the centre of this novel, something you don’t always see in fantasy.
14. Yoss, Red Dust (****): Yoss is back! The Cuban biochemist punk rocker SFF writer – and an eternal favourite – has another crazy romp through the galaxy, and you can bet that biological absurdities abound in this book whose main character is called… Raymond Chandler.
15. Kate Elliott, Unconquerable Sun (****): Gender-swapped Alexander the Great in space, a compulsive read (finished it in two 3AM sittings), and excellent military SF all around.
16. Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline (****): A really unique time-travel novel where the central premise involves rescuing women’s right to abortion.
17. Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Gods of Jade and Shadow (****): Dark-ish fantasy set in 1920s Mexico, and involving a lot of god-like stuff. The prose style – a kind of Gothic with a LatAm touch – was especially compelling.
18. Iain M. Banks (***): The opening novel of the Culture series is probably also my least favourite. Incredibly tedious in parts, brilliant in parts.
19. Lavanya Lakshminarayan, Analogue/Virtual (****): A set of inter-connected vigenettes set in a dystopic near-future Bangalore divided into its two halves, the virtual and the analogue.
20. R.B. Lemberg, The Four Profound Weaves (****): A delightful little novella with an atmospheric prose style, featuring trans elders and weaving.
21. Susanna Clarke, Piranesi (****): A book that’s polarised opinion. I didn’t quite know what to make of it. The middle part was outstanding. The beginning and end were a little… unintelligible.
22. Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Doors of Eden (*****): Possibly the best genre novel I read all year. The novel is lyrical, haunting, and has an arc that literally spans the universe. Read this.
23. Rebecca Roanhorse, Black Sun (****): A solid and enjoyable fantasy novel set in pre-Columbian America.
24. Essa Hansen, Nophek Gloss (*****): A pretty scintillating hard-SF debut, set in a deliciously imagined multiverse, and featuring a truly memorable protagonist.
25. Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons (****): The third Culture novel. It starts to get better.
26. Zelda Knight & Ekpeki Donald, The Dominion Anthology: Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora (****): A solid collection. Some familiar names, some new ones, and some of the stories – like Eugen Bacon’s – will stay with you for a long time.
27. Andres Eschbach, The Hair-Carpet Weavers (****): My last read of 2020. I have many mixed and complicated feelings about this novel, a German SF classic. You’ll hear about them in the newsletter!

Have a happy 2021, filled with books!

2015: The Year in Books

It’s been another year of fascinating literary discoveries. I’ve been able to re-engage with my first love, fantasy and science fiction (seeking out a mix of the canonical and the contemporary). I’ve tried to read more non-fiction (essays) than usual. In some ways, this has been compelled: taking up a day job that requires long periods of non-stop work, interspersed with sudden and unexpected breaks, has necessarily shaped the kind of reading I’ve been able to do – one that is amenable to jerky stop-start bursts. This was certainly why I was unable to finish Cities of Salt, the kind of novel that requires painstaking continuity – and also perhaps why I’ve been able to review less than I’d have liked, since it’s been so difficult to find those uninterrupted three hours that one needs to think through, structure, and write a review. One of the resolutions for 2016 must be to find those pockets of time!

Picks of the year :Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty is a Wound, Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, and Jo Walton’s The Just City.

Here goes – impressionistic grades out of five, and one-sentence summaries, as ever:

European Fiction:

1. Sandor Marai, Embers (****): An explosive novel about memory and desire, in the background of pre-War and inter-War Europe stifled by social conventions. Reminiscent of Ismail Kadare, in its atmospherics.
2. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (****): Classic Kundera, savage, uncompromising, darkly funny.
3. Ismail Kadare, The Fall of the Stone City (***): Vintage Kadare, with a few twists. Not as convincing as the rest of his work.
4. Colm Toibin, The South (****): Gossamer-silky story of love, solitude, and loss, moving between Barcelona and Ireland (two places I’ve never been to, but dream of all the time)
5. Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles (***): Surreal group of short stories (the precursor of magic realism, it is said), with some painfully sharp imagery.
6. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (****): Finally got around to reading this classic, and absolutely loved this. Perhaps one of the first instances of meta-fiction; and definitely, a keen and acute sense of gender politics.
7. Ismail Kadare, Spring Flowers, Spring Frost (***): Another Kadare novel about honour, death and the Kanun in mountainous Albania. Not quite as powerful as Broken April.

Asian Fiction:

1. Eka Kurniawan, Beauty is a Wound (*****): One of my picks of the year. A sprawling novel about 20th Century Indonesian history, sprinkled with a dose of magic realism and a topping of dark humour. Reminiscent of Llosa at his best.

2. Orhan Pamuk, A Strangeness in My Mind (**): Sruggled with this for 150 pages, and then dropped it. Heretical thought: maybe Pamuk has run out of things to say.

Latin American Fiction:

1. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (****): Llosa’s sheer versatility never ceases to amaze. This novel is pure jouissance, with a single-minded focus on the erotic that reminded me of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, but much more, er, palatable.

2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Of Love and Other Demons (****): I’m not a great fan of Marquez, but this was my favourite out of the ones that I’ve read. Taut and tightly-paced, with some truly memorable characters.

North Africa/Middle East/Arab Fiction

1. Ahdaf Souief, The Map of Love (***): A riveting politico-love story set during the heady days of 19th century Egyptian anti-colonialism; tended to get a little too descriptive towards the end, and could have been shorter.

2. Latifa Zayyat, The Open Door (*****): Set in the Egypt leading up to Nasser’s revolt, often called the first Arab feminist novel; depicts events that were contemporaneous with the setting of Mehfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, but from a very different lens. One of my stand-out reads of the year.

3. Kamel Daoud, The Merseult Investigation (****): A brilliant story, told from the perspective of the brother of the unnamed Arab shot dead in Camus’ Stranger. In the tradition of post-colonial reclamation of memory and humanity, such as Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest. Read this through the lens of Edward Said.

4. Abdul Rahman Munif, Cities of Salt (***): The canonical novel about the tragedy that befalls an Arab oasis-village after oil is discovered beneath their land. I must confess, I had to abandon this novel half-way. It is clearly a vital and essential work, but the dense description, after a point, made it very difficult to sustain, especially with my stop-start reading schedules.

African Fiction:

     1. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (***): Finally got around to reading this canonical work, for a book club. Did not resonate with me as much as Anthills of the Savannah, or his book of essays, but I can sense how it was pathbreaking for its time and place.

2. Nuruddin Farah, Crossbones (***): A harrowing novel about journalism in war-torn Somalia. Tended to get a little too descriptive at times, but an essential read.

Indian Fiction:

1. Perumal Murugan, One Part Woman (***): I bought this out of a sense of political solidarity, as much as anything else. It felt like a great book bogged down by (what I thought was) an uninspired translation.
2. Aditya Sudarshan, The Persecution of Madhav Tripathi (***): An eerie politici-fantastical thriller, with some acute observations about urban Indian society, but an unsatisfactory ending.

Fantasy and Science-Fiction

1. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, The Time Wanderers (*****): The Soviet duo have probably written some of the greatest science-fiction in the history of the genre, but continue to be relatively unknown. The Time Wanderers is less popular even within their oeuvre, but I found it absolutely brilliant (especially the premise, and the ending).

2. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Hard To Be A God (****): Translated for the first time directly from Russian, I reviewed this for Strange Horizons (here). The premise is utterly brilliant, the execution not always so. Still very much word a read. The Paris Review also carried an article on this earlier this year (here).

3. Robert Jackson Bennett, The City of Stairs (****): Good, old-fashioned, thrill-a-minute, stay-up-till-4AM-reading epic fantasy involving Gods, heroes, and a city of stairs.

4. Anthony Trevelyan, The Weightless World (***): An interesting debut SF novel set in Maharashtra (!). I reviewed it for Strange Horizons (here)

5. Karel Capek, RUR and War With the Newts (****): The author who coined the word “robot”. This classic of SF comes with a sharp, brilliant introduction by Adam Roberts.

6. M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart (**): I utterly loved Viriconium. I was expecting more of the same from this one, but it failed to convince. Seemed to be trying too hard, at times.

7. Samuel R. Delaney, Babel-17 (*****): The canonical SF novel from the 60s is worth its fame. Brilliant exploration of the link between language and the construction of reality, set in the background of thrill-a-minute space opera.

8. N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (***): Had heard a lot about it, so approached it with very high expectations – which, perhaps inevitably, it did not live up to. Still, an enjoyable epic-fantasy novel with a strong female protagonist, and some vivid imagery.

9. Salman Rushdie, Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (**): Takes itself too seriously, is too self-conscious about its politics, and didn’t really work (for me).

10. China Mieville, Three Moments of an Explosion (**): Definitely heretical, but I think China Mieville should stick to novels (which he’s brilliant at).

11. Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last (***): A reliably consistent SF novel from Atwood. I reviewed it for Strange Horizons here.

12. Monica Byrne, The Girl in the Road (***): I have very conflicted feelings about this SF novel, set in India and Africa fifty years hence, in a world in which India and China are competing in a new “scramble for Africa”. One of the protagonists is an Indian woman – rather rare in SFF! I participated in a Strange Horizons Book Club discussion about the novel here.

13. Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria (***): Lovely, dense, old-school fantasy writing, with intricate world building, layered histories and myth, and conflicted characters. Almost too dense at times, if that makes sense.

14. Jo Walton, The Just City (*****): Beautiful SF novel about Athena’s attempts to recreate Plato’s Republic on an island out of space and time. The kind of novel that is stark in its simplicity, but haunts you for long after.

Miscellaneous Non-Fiction

1. Colm Toibin, Love in a Dark Time: and Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature (****): Toibin’s portrait of eight writers, whose identities were at least partially shaped by their sexuality, is a beautiful read, albeit a little inconsistent.

2. V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (N/A): Orientalist, racist, and unreadable.

3. Greg Grandin, Empire of Necessity (*****): Technically, this is an academic work of history, but is written so lucidly and simply, that it reads like a story. The account of a slave rebellion on board a ship of the West coast of South America is a powerful and moving tale. A must-read.

4. Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni and Other Essays (****): Six essays that typify Calvino’s ethereal, feather-light touch.

5.  Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (*****): Read this twice – once in March, and then a second time while wandering in Mexico City and Chiapas. Paz’s epistle to Mexico is a thing of beauty.

6. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (***): Fell in love with this the first time I read it, three years ago. Now, in light of all the reading I’ve done in the intervening years, no longer sounds quite as impressive. In particular, the construction of a “Europe” seems essentialist and ahistorical, and the omission of Empire in the historical account of the development of the novel, particularly glaring.

7. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (***): Beautiful, apart from the extended theological musings.

8. Colm Toibin, On Elizabeth Bishop (*****): I’ve always enjoyed Bishop. Toibin makes her look like an unvarnished genius. Beautiful set of reflections by one of the finest writers alive today, on a very talented poet.

9. The Edward Said Reader (*****): Collection of essential Edward Said writings across his life and career. One of the seven or eight books always by my bedside table.

Bring on 2016!