With a bit of time and space, I’m finally able to subjectively rank my favourite books I’ve read in the past year. These books are impossible to compare to each other given they include fantasy, speculative short stories, Young Adult fiction, a real Russian novel, a not-real Russian novel, and more. Something I didn’t realise until ending this list is that most of these books take place in non-Western European or Western European-inspired settings, which is exciting! I recommend Piranesi and the two stories from Exhalation without reservation to all my readers – for the others, see what piques your interest.
- Piranesi
Piranesi is a book difficult to explain without spoiling, but it is a short book, and so if the first bit confuses you I recommend reading onward. The narrator is delightful, with a hopeful naiveite that makes one see the world in a better light. The setting is exquisite: an infinite house with statues, some enormously large, and tides that flood the halls, bringing debris and sustenance to our narrator and the birds. Beyond that, I cannot say much. Piranesi is the only book I read three times this year, and thus takes the top spot. I read it in late December, and upon completion paged immediately back to the front and reread it – unlike some of the books on this list, I recommend it to absolutely all my readers. - War and Peace
War and Peace! For a book mostly known for being long, it’s a remarkably good beach read – it’s a soap opera that covers multiple decades and loads and loads of characters. The novel centres around three main characters, who start off as: Pierre, a somewhat aimless illegitimate son of a count, Andrei, an angsty soldier prince, and Natasha, a naïve young girl who falls in love with everyone she sees. The characters change so much over the course of the novel, being thrown into social intrigues and, of course, the Napoleonic wars – I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so much for characters in a book, by turns sympathetic, by turns in awe, by turns annoyed to the point I was shaking the book like “Natasha, why are you doing this thing!” The Kuragins are also fantastic villains, I was glued to the page whenever they showed up; pretty much all minor characters are wonderfully drawn and you can see their analogues in the present day, like Nikolai and Boris the dudebros.
You should read this Guardian guide/review if you don’t mind some minor spoilers – it captures the core of what I felt upon reading the novel, except more eloquently. Some personal points: I didn’t enjoy the War parts as much as the Peace parts, but I do agree you have to read them. My personal favourite character was Princess Marya, I love women in 19th-century novels who are angsty and intelligent. I read the Pevear and Volkhonsky translation. - Deathless
Deathless is a retelling by an American author of a Russian folktale, accomplished by setting the folktale within the historical background of the 1920s-1940s and twisting it. It’s the same folktale that the Firebird suite is based on. It’s the story of Marya Morevna (my second favourite Marya of the year), who sees her sisters suited by birds who turn into men, and then is courted herself by the Lord of Death, becoming harder and more ruthless over the novel’s course, moving from otherworld war to historical World War II. The writing style is marvelous, and some of the lines still haunt me a year after reading. “Poring over his pale gold” … “Who would I have been if I had not seen the birds?” – the latter of which I’ve repeated many times to myself over the past year, except I’m not quite sure what the birds are.
I debated placing Deathless second on this list. Along with Piranesi, it’s one of the two books I finished and then immediately started reading again. However, it just felt wrong to place it above an actual Russian novel. I’ll also warn you it wasn’t universally well-received by friends I recommended it to. You need to read it not as a love story, I think: if you read it as a love story, it is disturbing, but if you read it as a disturbing story, it is lovely. - Exhalation
I recommend Exhalation for two stories, although the rest are good too as short stories go. They are speculative fiction stories, but really about humanity, so would recommend even to people who dislike sci-fi. The first is the first story in the book, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, about how the past influences the present. It is perhaps the only satisfying time-travel story I have read. The second is the second-to-last story in the book, The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling, about the power of memory and writing. It is perhaps the best short story I have ever read. - The Poppy War trilogy
The Poppy War trilogy, for the first half of the first book, is a novel about Rin, a girl from a poor province who is trying to make it at a military boarding school dominated by elites. For the last 2.5 books, it’s a brutal story about military tactics and the cost of war – if you want a sense of the tone, the main character is a female and superpowered version of Mao Zedong and the first book includes an uncensored version of the rape of Nanjing. There are a number of memorable characters, who through the course of the book grow and change and not only for the better: Rin, her close friends from school, their families, shamans, and the group of people in charge of the country. The magic system is excellent, on the mysterious, costly side.
I debated placing it this high because it is not for everyone. It was probably not for me, honestly. If you’d told me all the content warnings before I read the book, I probably wouldn’t have read it. But I read these three doorstoppers three nights in a row (maybe four or five?) staying up until 3 am because I wanted to see what happened next. What’s good storytelling? One article I read said – you want to see what happens next! The Poppy War achieves this to great measure. - Black Water Sister
This book is about a recent college graduate who gets possessed by the spirit of her grandmother to settle an old feud. If this doesn’t draw you in, the book probably isn’t for you, but let me try to sell you on a highly funny narrator (and grandmother), fast-paced plot, and immersive setting – a Malaysia full of ghosts and gangsters.
Black Water Sister is a highly personal pick, one of those books I read at exactly the right time and place. I read it when I was living with my relatives in Hawaii, and to not spoil either the book or real life, there were a lot of things that made this relatable and simply fun. Chinese ghosts are also a favourite trope of mine because of how they’re tragic, sometimes funny, just like alive family – The Ghost Bride, also set in Malaysia, was one of my favourite books of the previous year. - The Palace of Illusions
This is a feminist(ish) retelling of the Mahabharata from Draupadi’s perspective. Readers of this blog will thus either already know the plot or pretty easily be able to find it out via Wikipedia – I’m not sure if spoilers count as spoilers for historical epics, but I also don’t need to tell you what happens. As a novel, it’s well-paced and well-written; the story, is of course, time-testedly gripping.
If you, like me, were not raised on Mahabharata stories and want to get a good sense of its plot without putting the time (yet) into reading it (you think War and Peace is long?) or watching the really long series from the 80s, then this, in my uninformed opinion, is pretty good. Reading Wikipedia summaries isn’t a good substitute for hearing a story, and perhaps I have gotten a skewed view of the plot or some of the characters, but I have a more memorable idea of one of the greatest epics of human history. Next holiday read: Mahabharata. - Strange the Dreamer duology
The Strange the Dreamer duology is two quite different books. I recommend not even reading descriptions of the second book because it’ll either confuse you or give away what happens at the end of the first one, but the two books flow seamlessly into each other. The first is about a young man who leaves his hometown with a group of travelers to visit a city that is constantly shrouded in darkness. As with Piranesi – although the books are very different – saying what he finds there would be a spoiler.
This book is, to me, the pinnacle of what YA fantasy should be: lush prose, well-drawn characters – especially family relationships, and a plot that kept me reading until the sun came up. However, being YA fantasy with the constraints of the genre, it cannot in my opinion (I write YA fantasy, so this is not to crap on the genre) tackle things at quite the same level as some of the adult fiction I’ve put higher on this list. Lazlo Strange, as good a character as he is, cannot be – and nor does he try to be – Pierre Bezhukov. - Trail of Lightning
This book is about a no-nonsense killer of monsters who goes around post-apocalyptic North America, well, killing monsters, while trying to reconcile with her past traumas. The setting is gripping, the plot is gripping, and the characters who populate this desolate landscape are some of the most memorable I’ve read: from the main character’s old teacher with whom she has a conflicted relationship, to her grandmother, to her grandfather-figure, to her love interest, to the tough family running a side-of-the-road café, to Coyote.
I might’ve been surprised while reading Trail of Lightning that it would make my top 10 for the year. When I was looking over books, I think there were books I liked more while I was reading them. But I remembered every single plot point and the entire setting of this book I read ~6 months ago – I remembered my heart racing at different places, and details of about ten different characters. Roanhorse is a masterful plotter and worldbuilder, and I suspect that if I had given this list more time to marinate this book would’ve risen even further (addendum, I actually did raise it one place since originally making this list as I rode around the American West in a train). - I’ll Give you the Sun
This is a story about two siblings, about family relationships, art, and first love. As with Trail of Lightning, if you’d asked me right after I read it, I’d have been a bit surprised this book made the list. I didn’t love all of the subplots or characters, although I did think the characters were well-drawn, and I’m not a big fan of YA contemporary given my high school experience was not great. But, I remembered above all the prose and how this book made me feel – it made me nostalgic for a high school experience I had never had, both more lovely and more tragic and more complex. The book really does feel like the sun.