The Irish Times books of the year: Writers and critics pick their favourites of 2021
-
Loading... - Daniella Chapman
- 29 Dec 2021
- 413 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
ANNE ENRIGHT
Amia Srinivasan’s essays in The Right to Sex are so contemporary, they seem almost prescient, not least for the way she places compassion at the centre of feminist thinking. Perhaps this is why her work manages to bridge generations – no mean feat in these shouty times.
It was (it is always?) a great year for the Irish short story: along with Louise Kennedy’s terrific debut, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac, I liked the smart, nuanced and sometimes heart-stopping Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell. Finally, Burntcoat by Sarah Hall is a novel that feels more triggered by the pandemic than caused by it: visceral and intuitive, the prose is also nonstop glorious – a hymn to the physical and fragile nature of existence.
Anne Enright’s latest novel is Actress
JOHN BANVILLE
There are not many biographical masterpieces, but in Revelations, the life of the Irish-born painter Francis Bacon, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan have produced one. At nearly 900 pages it may seem daunting but it is an utterly thrilling read. Bacon was a monster but by the close of the book we admire him for his honesty, his tenacity, and artistic probity. Julia Parry’s The Shadowy Third: Love, Letters and Elizabeth Bowen, reads like one of Bowen’s own novels. Beautifully written and deftly organised, it is based on a found cache of letters between Bowen and her lover, Humphry House, Parry’s grandfather. John le Carré was a master storyteller to the end, and if his last spy novel, Silverview, is not among his greatest, it is still a marvellous farewell to a form that he perfected.
John Banville’s latest novel is April in Spain
SARAH MOSS
Claire Keegan was a new discovery for me and I loved Small Things Like These and immediately started on her backlist. Her writing is invariably elegant and sharp at the same time, and she handles Irish social history with oblique precision. I recommend Norwegian writer Jan Grue’s I Live a Life Like Yours, a memoir of growing up and beginning professional life after a childhood diagnosis of spinal muscular atrophy. The writing and translation by BL Crook are strong and spare, very different from Knausgaard’s account of a Norwegian youth but similarly shaped by immersion in philosophy, cultural history and literary criticism.
I enjoyed Catherine Menon’s Fragile Monsters, a novel about a mathematician visiting her grandmother in rural Malaysia. It opened up a history and landscape I didn’t know as well as I should and the characters stayed with me, but I read fiction mostly for the sentences and they are beautiful. As a recent arrival, I’m always looking for reflections and explorations of Irish society and I found Derek Scally’s The Best Catholics in the World fascinating and nuanced. I need more of my Irish friends to read it so we can talk about it!
Sarah Moss’s latest novel is The Fell
