The Best Books I Read in 2022 🎆
1. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (2006)
Sent to investigate the disappearance of two little girls Camille finds herself reluctantly installed in the family mansion, reacquainting herself with her distant mother and a precocious thirteen-year-old half-sister she barely knows. Haunted by a family tragedy, troubled by the disquieting grip her young sister has on the town, Camille struggles with a familiar need to be accepted.
But as clues turn into dead ends Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims and realises: she will have to unravel the puzzle of her own past if she's to survive this homecoming.
2. Earthlings by Sayaka Murata (2020)
As a child, Natsuki believed she was an alien, a different species to her earthling family and classmates. She hoped a spaceship would come down and take her home. Now, she lives quietly in an asexual marriage, pretending to be normal.
But the buried horrors of Natsuki's past are pursuing her. As she flees the suburbs for the Nagano mountains and a reunion with her beloved cousin Yuu, she wonders, what will it take to escape the earthlings?
3. Can You Hear Me? by Elena Varvello (2017)
1978. Ponte, a small community in Northern Italy. An unbearably hot summer like many others.
Elia Furenti is sixteen, living an unremarkable life of moderate unhappiness, until the day the beautiful, damaged Anna returns to Ponte and firmly propels Elia to the edge of adulthood.
But then everything starts to unravel.
Elia's father, Ettore, is let go from his job and loses himself in the darkest corners of his mind.
A young boy is murdered.
And a girl climbs into a van and vanishes in the deep, dark woods...
4. Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (2017)
Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed and observant. A student in Dublin and an aspiring writer, at night she performs spoken word with her best friend Bobbi, who used to be her girlfriend. When they are interviewed and then befriended by Melissa, a well-known journalist, who is married to Nick, an actor, they enter into a world of beautiful houses, raucous dinner parties and holidays in Brittany. But when Frances and Nick get unexpectedly closer, the sharply witty and emotion-averse Frances is forced to honestly confront her own vulnerabilities for the first time.
5. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (2009)
In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, its owners -mother, son and daughter - struggling to keep pace.
But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how disturbingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.
6. The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock (2011)
We follow a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s . There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.
7. September [Original French Title: Septembre] by Jean Mattern (2015)
The Israeli Olympic team is held hostage during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. A young BBC reporter has found the perfect place to watch the developments live. But there is something -someone- else in his mind, and it is hard for him to focus on the tragedy of the situation at hand.
8. The Paradise Bird Tattoo (or, attempted double-suicide) by Chokitsu Kurumatani (2010)
Ikushima lives as a drone, slaving away for an advertising company that neither values him nor cares about his existence. He flees the city to become a vagabond, catching local trains to anywhere, eventually finding a miserable job skewering refuse animal organs for a local restaurant in Amagasaki, a town riddled with gangs and miscreants. He settles into a routine in the city, and through his brief and accidental encounters with his deeply troubled neighbors–the evil-worshipping tattoo artist, his former-prostitute-cum-Madame employer, an unclaimed child, and the fleetingly striking Ayako–he bridges the gaps in his social world and inadvertently begins to live. With this newfound, yet unacknowledged, passion for life, Ikushima embarks on a love affair with Ayako, which leads to dangerous consequences and threatens to tear through the barriers he has partitioned around his existence for so long.
🔚
And now it's your turn! What was the best book you read in 2022?
Comments
Post a Comment