Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 2012
In April 2012 the Pulitzer board read three shortlisted novels and gave the fiction prize to none of them. Six months later Hilary Mantel took the Booker for the second time, with a sequel, and the following January the Costa as well — a clean sweep on one side of the Atlantic while the other side declined to name a book at all. Underneath the prizes the business moved faster than the books: the Department of Justice sued Apple and five publishers over the price of an e-book, Bertelsmann and Pearson agreed to fold Random House and Penguin into one company, Encyclopaedia Britannica stopped printing after 244 years, and the three best-selling books of the year had started life as self-published fan fiction. These eight are the ones from that year I still hand to people.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · All first published in 2012
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Gone Girl
On the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary Nick Dunne’s wife Amy disappears from their house in North Carthage, Missouri, and by the end of the day he is the one the police are looking at. What follows is a novel told in two voices, each of which turns out to be less reliable than it first appears. Flynn constructed something genuinely new here — a thriller that uses the conventions of domestic fiction as a weapon, and a portrait of a marriage in which both parties are performing versions of themselves for each other and for the reader. It is one of the most discussed novels of the decade and one of the best.
What makes Gone Girl worth reading now, over a decade later, is not the twist — which everyone knows — but the architecture underneath it. Flynn is writing about performance, expectation, and the gap between who we are and who we present to our partners. The unreliable narrator is a technical device, but here it is also the subject. This is the book that made the domestic thriller a serious literary genre.
Mastery
Greene examines the lives of historical and contemporary figures — Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Marcel Proust — and argues that mastery is not a product of innate genius but of time, attention, and a specific relationship to apprenticeship and failure. Those four are part of a list of sixteen that also runs from Mozart and Keats to John Coltrane and Glenn Gould, and alongside them Greene puts nine living masters he interviewed himself — among them the boxing trainer Freddie Roach, the architect Santiago Calatrava and the roboticist Yoky Matsuoka. He traces the paths they took and the habits of mind that separated them from their peers. It is a long book that earns its length.
I have this on my shelf and return to it regularly — not for motivation, but for the structural argument it makes about how depth happens. Greene is not interested in shortcuts. He is interested in what it actually looks like when someone commits entirely to a field and what they discover there. In an era of productivity advice that promises results in ninety days, Mastery is a useful corrective.
Bring Up the Bodies
The second volume of Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy follows Cromwell through the fall of Anne Boleyn and the manoeuvres that bring her to execution. It won the Man Booker Prize on 16 October 2012, making Mantel the first woman and the first British author to win the prize twice, and the first to win it with a sequel. She was the third author to win twice: J.M. Coetzee had done it in 1983 and 1999, Peter Carey in 1988 and 2001. In January she took the Costa Book of the Year as well, which no Booker winner had managed in the same year. The prose is written in the third person and the present tense, and the unusual thing is the pronoun: “he” means Cromwell unless the sentence says otherwise. Readers of Wolf Hall objected that they could not always tell who “he” was, and the clarifying tag “he, Cromwell” turns up far more often in this second book — a repair that keeps you inside a man whose inner life history has largely left blank. It is one of the finest historical novels written in English in the last fifty years.
Read Wolf Hall first, then this. Mantel does something that few historical novelists attempt: she makes the past feel genuinely foreign rather than like a costume drama. Cromwell’s world has its own logic, its own emotional grammar, and Mantel never lets you forget that its people did not know how the story would end. The result is a kind of dramatic irony that builds across four hundred pages until it becomes almost unbearable.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Boo reported from Annawadi from November 2007 to March 2011, a slum on the edge of Mumbai’s international airport, and produced a book that reads like a novel — driven by characters, scenes, and dialogue — but is entirely reported. It follows the lives of several families in a community where aspiration and corruption exist in a proximity that makes both comprehensible. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2012, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award the year after.
This is the book I recommend most often to people who want to understand what poverty looks like from inside it rather than from outside. Boo is not sentimental and she is not distant — she found a way to write about people whose lives are structurally invisible that makes them structurally impossible to ignore. The methodology note at the back of the book is worth reading for what it reveals about how the reporting was done.
NW
Smith’s fourth novel follows four people from Caldwell, the same northwest London council estate, whose lives have diverged in ways they did not anticipate and cannot entirely explain. It is formally ambitious — each section uses a different narrative mode, from stream of consciousness to fragmented lists — and is one of the most honest novels written about class, aspiration, and the gap between where you come from and where you are trying to go. It is a harder read than White Teeth and a more interesting one.
Smith is asking a question that does not have an answer: what do you owe to the place that made you when the place that made you is not somewhere you can afford to stay? NW is not comfortable and it is not resolved, which is precisely what makes it accurate. The formal experimentation is not decoration — the fragmentation of the prose is the fragmentation of identity that the novel is about.
This Is How You Lose Her
Nine stories about love, loss, and infidelity, eight of them narrated by Yunior — the character who runs through Díaz’s fiction, and who does not narrate “Otravida, Otravez” — as he accounts for the damage he has done to the women in his life and tries to understand where it comes from. The prose mixes Spanish and English, street slang and literary reference, in a way that feels entirely natural and is technically very difficult to pull off. Díaz is writing about masculinity and its failures from inside it, which is rarer than it should be.
This is a book about the stories men tell themselves about why they behave as they do, and what it costs the people around them. Díaz does not let Yunior off the hook, and he does not explain him away. The self-awareness in the narration — Yunior knows what he is, which does not stop him — is one of the most honest portraits of a particular kind of self-destruction that fiction has produced.
The Round House
Thirteen-year-old Joe Coutts’s mother is attacked near their reservation in North Dakota and refuses to say what happened or who did it. The novel follows Joe’s attempt to find out, and in doing so becomes a book about justice, sovereignty, and the specific ways in which the American legal system fails Native women. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2012, her first, over a shortlist that included This Is How You Lose Her. Erdrich has been writing about the Ojibwe people and the land they occupy for decades, and this is among her very best.
Erdrich writes about injustice without making it abstract. The Round House is a coming-of-age story and a legal thriller and a meditation on what happens when the law does not protect the people it is supposed to protect — and how children understand that before adults are willing to say it. The anger in the book is precise and the grief is specific, which makes both more affecting than they would otherwise be.
Dear Life
The last collection Munro published. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year, on 10 October 2013, as a “master of the contemporary short story”. She had already said, that June, that she was probably finished writing. Fourteen pieces about women in small-town Ontario, about the decisions that define a life and the accidents that alter it, about what remains unsaid between people who have known each other for decades. The final four pieces sit under their own heading, “Finale”, with a note from Munro in front of them: they are “not quite stories”, and they are “autobiographical in feeling” rather than in fact. It was not a new mode for her — The View from Castle Rock had worked her own family history in 2006 — but these four are among the most moving pieces she ever wrote.
Munro is the writer I return to when I want to remember what the short story can do that no other form can. Dear Life is her final word, and it is measured and exact and quietly devastating. The autobiographical stories at the end — in which she writes directly about her mother and her childhood — read as a kind of summation, not of the stories, but of what the stories were always trying to say.
Where to begin with the best of 2012
If you want the most gripping read
→ Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. It goes down in a sitting, and the trick it pulls is worth meeting without knowing it is coming.
If you want the best nonfiction of the year
→ Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo. Three and a half years of reporting in one settlement, written like a novel and invented nowhere.
If you want the most literary book on the list
→ Dear Life by Alice Munro, or Bring Up the Bodies if you have already read Wolf Hall. Read them in that order and you will see two writers doing the opposite thing with a sentence.
If you want the book most relevant to work and ambition
→ Mastery by Robert Greene. I have it on my shelf and still open it.
If you want the one that is hardest and worth it
→ NW by Zadie Smith. Four people from one estate, four different ways of writing a life, and no resolution at the end of any of them.
Books first published in 2012
Twenty more books whose first publication genuinely falls in 2012, for when you want breadth rather than a recommendation.
The Orphan Master’s Son
Pulitzer Prize 2013
Adam Johnson · Random House, January
A North Korean orphan becomes kidnapper, soldier and impostor. It took the Pulitzer a year after the board refused to give one at all.
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
National Book Critics Circle Award
Ben Fountain · Ecco, 1 May
An Iraq squad paraded at a Dallas Cowboys halftime show. His first novel, after a story collection in 2006.
Far From the Tree
National Book Critics Circle Award
Andrew Solomon · Scribner, November
Ten years of interviews with parents whose children are unlike them — deaf, autistic, prodigies, criminals.
The Black Count
Pulitzer Prize 2013
Tom Reiss · Crown, 18 September
The life of General Alex Dumas, born to an enslaved woman in Saint-Domingue, and the father of the novelist.
Devil in the Grove
Pulitzer Prize 2013
Gilbert King · Harper, 6 March
Thurgood Marshall and the Groveland Boys: four young Black men accused in Florida in 1949.
The Passage of Power
National Book Critics Circle Award
Robert A. Caro · Knopf, 1 May
Volume four of the Lyndon Johnson biography: the humiliation of the vice-presidency, and then Dallas.
Wild
Cheryl Strayed · Knopf, 20 March
Eleven hundred miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, alone, after her mother’s death. Not a debut — her novel Torch came in 2006.
Quiet
Susan Cain · Crown, 24 January
The case that Western working life is built for the third of people it suits least.
The Signal and the Noise
Nate Silver · Penguin Press, 27 September
Why predictions fail, published weeks before he called all fifty states.
The Fault in Our Stars
John Green · Dutton, 10 January
Two teenagers with cancer, and the book that carried a generation of readers into young adult fiction.
Wonder
R.J. Palacio · Knopf, 14 February
A boy with a craniofacial difference starts mainstream school. Her first book; she had been a book-jacket designer.
Umbrella
Booker shortlist
Will Self · Bloomsbury, 16 August
One unbroken stream of consciousness around a woman with encephalitis lethargica.
The Lighthouse
Booker shortlist
Alison Moore · Salt Publishing, 15 August
A separated man walks the Rhine in circles around his own past — a Booker shortlisting for a tiny independent press.
Redshirts
Hugo Award 2013
John Scalzi · Tor, 5 June
Expendable starship crewmen work out that they are inside a badly written television series.
Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome
Prix Goncourt
Jérôme Ferrari · Actes Sud, 22 August
A Corsican village’s slow collapse, read through Augustine. In French; the English translation came later.
Building Stories
Chris Ware · Pantheon, 2 October
Fourteen printed things in a box — a broadsheet, a board, small books — telling the lives inside one Chicago building.
The Casual Vacancy
J.K. Rowling · Little, Brown, 27 September
Her first novel for adults: a parish council seat falls vacant and an English town opens up.
The Yellow Birds
Kevin Powers · Little, Brown, 11 September
A soldier’s return from Al Tafar, written by a machine gunner who served there. His first book.
Beautiful Ruins
Jess Walter · Harper, 12 June
An Italian fishing village in 1962 and Hollywood now, fifty years apart.
Flight Behavior
Barbara Kingsolver · Harper, 6 November
Monarch butterflies, displaced by a warming climate, land on an Appalachian sheep farm.
First books published in 2012
Seven writers who arrived in 2012 — and the difference between a first book and a first novel, which is where most lists go wrong.
The Yellow Birds
Kevin Powers
His first book of any kind. The poems, Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, came in 2014.
Wonder
R.J. Palacio
Her first book.
The Snow Child
Eowyn Ivey
Her first book. Reagan Arthur, 1 February.
The Age of Miracles
Karen Thompson Walker
Her first book. Random House, 26 June.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Rachel Joyce
Her first book but not her first work: she had written radio plays for years, and this one was a radio play first.
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Ben Fountain
His first novel, not his first book — the stories of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara came in 2006.
Narcopolis
Jeet Thayil
His first novel, not his first book — he had already published poetry. Booker shortlist.
2012 in books, in short
- Nobel Prize
- Mo Yan, announced on 11 October 2012, “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”. See every Nobel winner
- Man Booker Prize
- Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel, announced on 16 October 2012. The shortlist also held The Garden of Evening Mists (Tan Twan Eng), Swimming Home (Deborah Levy), The Lighthouse (Alison Moore), Umbrella (Will Self) and Narcopolis (Jeet Thayil)
- Pulitzer, fiction
- None. The jury sent up three finalists — Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell and the posthumous The Pale King by David Foster Wallace — and the board chose none of them. None of the three came out in 2012, so none belongs on this page in any case
- National Book Awards
- The Round House by Louise Erdrich for fiction and Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo for nonfiction, at a ceremony on 14 November 2012. Both are books of that same year
- Orange Prize
- The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller, announced on 30 May 2012 — for a book published in 2011. It was the last year Orange sponsored the prize; the company withdrew weeks before the ceremony
- Costa Book of the Year
- Bring Up the Bodies again, announced on 29 January 2013. No book had taken the Booker and the Costa in the same year before
- Prix Goncourt
- Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome, Jérôme Ferrari, announced on 7 November 2012 at Drouant on the second ballot
- Best seller
- The three Fifty Shades books, which in August overtook Harry Potter as Amazon UK’s best-selling series ever. They are not on this list because the trilogy began as self-published fan fiction in 2011, two volumes before the year this page covers
- And one merger
- Bertelsmann and Pearson agreed on 29 October 2012 to combine Random House and Penguin. It completed the following July
The prize year is not the publication year, and 2012 is the year that is easiest to get wrong in both directions. The Pulitzers handed out in 2012 all went to books of 2011 — and the fiction prize went to nobody at all. The Pulitzers handed out in 2013 went to three books of 2012, which is why The Orphan Master’s Son and two works of nonfiction are on the list below rather than up here.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 2012
What were the best books published in 2012?
The most acclaimed books of 2012 include Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Booker Prize and Costa Book of the Year), Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo and The Round House by Louise Erdrich (both National Book Award winners), Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, NW by Zadie Smith, Dear Life by Alice Munro and Mastery by Robert Greene. It was a particularly strong year for both literary fiction and narrative nonfiction. This list covers the titles that, in my reading, best rewarded the time spent with them.
What book won the Booker Prize in 2012?
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker Prize on 16 October 2012. It made her the first woman and the first British author to win the prize twice, after Wolf Hall in 2009, and the first to win with a sequel. She was the third author to win twice overall: J.M. Coetzee won in 1983 and 1999, Peter Carey in 1988 and 2001. In January 2013 the same book took the Costa Book of the Year, which no Booker winner had done in the same year.
Who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012?
Nobody. The Pulitzer jury sent three finalists to the board — Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell and The Pale King, published after David Foster Wallace’s death — and the board declined to choose among them. No fiction prize was awarded that year. None of the three came out in 2012 — Train Dreams had even run in The Paris Review ten years before it became a book — so none of them belongs on a list of 2012 in any case. The fiction Pulitzer awarded in 2013, for a book of 2012, went to The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson.
What was the most popular novel of 2012?
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was the most talked-about novel of 2012. It spent seventy-one weeks on the New York Times hardcover fiction list, eleven of them at number one, and was filmed by David Fincher in 2014 from Flynn’s own screenplay. In pure sales the year belonged to the Fifty Shades trilogy, which is not on this list because the first book was self-published in 2011.
Is Mastery by Robert Greene worth reading?
Yes — it is one of the most substantive books on the subject of expertise and long-term development. Greene builds the argument on sixteen historical figures, from Leonardo da Vinci and Charles Darwin to John Coltrane, and on nine living masters he interviewed himself. The case he makes is that mastery comes from sustained apprenticeship, deep attention and a willingness to accept how slow real learning is. It has been on my personal bookshelf since it was published.
Is Bring Up the Bodies written in the second person?
No. Mantel writes the Cromwell novels in the third person and the present tense. What is unusual is the pronoun: “he” means Cromwell unless a sentence says otherwise, which keeps the reader inside his head without ever using “I”. Enough readers lost track of it in Wolf Hall that the clarifying tag “he, Cromwell” turns up far more often in Bring Up the Bodies than in the book before it.
Did Alice Munro write about her own life in Dear Life?
Not quite, and she said so herself. The last four pieces sit under the heading “Finale”, and her note in front of them calls them “not quite stories” that are “autobiographical in feeling” rather than in fact. She had worked this way before, in The View from Castle Rock in 2006. Dear Life was her last book. She said in June 2013 that she was probably finished writing, and the Nobel Prize in Literature followed that October.
Which writers published their first book in 2012?
Kevin Powers published The Yellow Birds, his first book of any kind, after serving as a machine gunner in Iraq. R.J. Palacio published Wonder, Eowyn Ivey The Snow Child and Karen Thompson Walker The Age of Miracles, all first books. Two to be careful with: Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis were both first novels by writers who had already published a book — stories in one case, poetry in the other.
What was the best-selling book of 2012?
The Fifty Shades trilogy outsold everything else. In August 2012 the three books passed the Harry Potter series to become Amazon UK’s best-selling books ever, and roughly half of that revenue was digital, against about a fifth at Random House itself. They are not on this list because the trilogy began as self-published fan fiction in 2011; only the third volume first appeared in 2012, by which time a major publisher had taken the series over.
What else happened in books in 2012?
Three things. The Department of Justice sued Apple and five publishers on 11 April over e-book pricing, and three of them settled the same day. Bertelsmann and Pearson agreed on 29 October to merge Random House and Penguin. And the American Library Association recorded 464 attempts to remove or restrict books, with Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants the most challenged of all. In the same year Encyclopaedia Britannica stopped printing after 244 years.
Footnotes
Gone Girl 4 facts
Crown published it on 5 June 2012.
This page said Nick calls the police on the morning of the anniversary. Amy disappears that morning; the call to the police comes later the same day, after a neighbour rings him at the bar about the open front door.correction
On the bestseller claim: seventy-one weeks on the New York Times hardcover fiction list, eleven of them at number one. “Topping the lists for over a year” was more than the record shows, so the page now gives the weeks.correction
David Fincher’s film came out on 3 October 2014, from a screenplay by Flynn herself.
Mastery 3 facts
Viking published it on 13 November 2012.
Mastery — Robert Greene, Viking Penguin 2012 (Internet Archive)
Da Vinci, Einstein, Darwin and Proust are on the page, and they are four of sixteen. The others run from Hakuin and Benjamin Franklin through Mozart, Goethe, Keats, Faraday, Edison and Henry Ford to Martha Graham, Buckminster Fuller, John Coltrane and Glenn Gould.correction
Mastery — Robert Greene, Viking Penguin 2012 (Internet Archive)
The living half of the book rests on nine people Greene interviewed: V.S. Ramachandran, Daniel Everett, Paul Graham, Santiago Calatrava, Freddie Roach, Yoky Matsuoka, Teresita Fernández, Temple Grandin and Cesar Rodriguez.
Mastery — Robert Greene, Viking Penguin 2012 (Internet Archive)
Bring Up the Bodies 5 facts
Fourth Estate published it on 8 May 2012 and it won the Man Booker Prize on 16 October, over a shortlist of Tan Twan Eng, Deborah Levy, Alison Moore, Will Self and Jeet Thayil.
This page said Mantel was the first author to win the Booker twice. She was the first woman and the first British author, and the first to win with a sequel — but the third author. J.M. Coetzee won in 1983 and 1999, Peter Carey in 1988 and 2001.correction
Hilary Mantel wins Man Booker Prize for Bring Up the Bodies — NPR
It said the novel is in an unusual second person, with “you” as Cromwell. It is in the third person and the present tense. Mantel on why: “It didn’t make sense to call him ‘Cromwell’, as if he were somewhere across the room. I called him ‘he’.” Some readers objected that they could not always tell who “he” was.correction
Hilary Mantel: how I came to write Wolf Hall — The Booker Prizes
And it said six hundred pages. The Fourth Estate edition runs to 411; the American Henry Holt edition to 432. Wolf Hall is the six-hundred-page one.correction
The Costa Book of the Year followed on 29 January 2013 — the first time one book took both prizes in the same year.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers 3 facts
Random House published it on 7 February 2012 and it won the National Book Award for Nonfiction on 14 November. This page said only “the National Book Award”, which on the same evening also went to Louise Erdrich, further down this list, for fiction.correction
Boo reported in Annawadi from November 2007 to March 2011 — nearer three and a half years than three — and set the method out in an Author’s Note at the back.correction
Behind the Beautiful Forevers — The Christian Science Monitor
Annawadi sits beside Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai, in the shadow of the luxury hotels that serve it. The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award followed in 2013.
NW 3 facts
Hamish Hamilton published it in Britain on 27 August 2012, Penguin Press in America on 4 September. It is her fourth novel, after White Teeth, The Autograph Man and On Beauty.
The estate is called Caldwell, and the four are Leah Hanwell, Natalie Blake (born Keisha), Felix Cooper and Nathan Bogle.
It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2013. It won neither.
This Is How You Lose Her 2 facts
Riverhead published it on 11 September 2012 and it was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, losing to The Round House.
Nine stories, eight of them Yunior’s. The ninth, “Otravida, Otravez”, is narrated by a Dominican woman called Yasmin, so this page now says eight rather than “most”.correction
The Round House 2 facts
Harper published it on 2 October 2012 and it won the National Book Award for Fiction on 14 November, Erdrich’s first. This page said only “the National Book Award”.correction
2012 National Book Awards go to Erdrich, Boo — Publishers Weekly
Joe Coutts is thirteen in the novel’s 1988, on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota, and tells it looking back as an adult. The Alex Award, the American Book Award and the Indies Choice Award followed in 2013.
Dear Life 6 facts
Knopf published it on 13 November 2012; McClelland and Stewart in Canada and Chatto and Windus in Britain the same autumn.
This page called the last four pieces explicitly autobiographical. Munro’s own note in front of them: they are “not quite stories”, they form a separate unit, and that unit is “autobiographical in feeling”. The distinction is hers and it is worth keeping.correction
It also said the form was new to her. The View from Castle Rock, in 2006, had already worked her own family history the same way.correction
The four are called The Eye, Night, Voices and Dear Life, and they sit under the heading “Finale” after ten stories.
She said she was probably finished writing four months before the prize, in an interview after the Trillium Book Award on 19 June 2013: “I’m probably not going to write anymore. And, so, it’s nice to go out with a bang.” This page had the order the other way round.correction
The Nobel Prize in Literature came on 10 October 2013, for a “master of the contemporary short story”.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013, press release — NobelPrize.org
2012 in books 16 facts
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 went to Mo Yan, with the citation quoted on this page reproduced exactly as the Nobel Foundation sets it. The announcement was on 11 October.
No Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded in 2012. The jury put forward Train Dreams, Swamplandia! and The Pale King; the board picked none of them. None is a book of 2012: Train Dreams first ran in The Paris Review in 2002 and came out as a book in 2011.
2012 Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists — The Pulitzer Prizes
Train Dreams is the awkward one of those three: it first ran in The Paris Review in the summer of 2002 and Farrar, Straus and Giroux published it as a book on 30 August 2011.
Redshirts came from Tor on 5 June 2012 and won the Hugo Award for Best Novel the following year.
The fiction Pulitzer awarded in 2013, for a book of 2012, went to The Orphan Master’s Son. The Black Count took biography and Devil in the Grove general nonfiction, both also 2012 books.
The National Book Critics Circle gave its 2012 fiction award to Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and its nonfiction award to Far From the Tree, announced on 28 February 2013. Robert Caro took biography with The Passage of Power and Leanne Shapton autobiography with Swimming Studies.
NBCC announces awards for publishing year 2012 — National Book Critics Circle
The Orange Prize of 2012 went to The Song of Achilles on 30 May. Bloomsbury had published it in 2011, so it is not on this page. Orange pulled out of the sponsorship weeks before the ceremony, which made it the last Orange Prize.correction
One more on the Booker shortlist: Swimming Home by Deborah Levy was first published by And Other Stories on 1 September 2011, so it belongs to that year and not to this list.correction
The Lighthouse came from Salt Publishing on 15 August 2012 — a Booker shortlisting for an independent press of a handful of people.
The Prix Goncourt went to Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome, published by Actes Sud on 22 August 2012.
On 1 August 2012 the three Fifty Shades books passed the Harry Potter series to become Amazon UK’s best-selling books ever. The first of them was self-published in 2011, which is why it is not on this list.correction
British spending on books rose four per cent to 3.3 billion pounds in 2012, with digital up sixty-six per cent to 411 million and print down one per cent.
Fifty Shades of Grey helps UK book sales turn a new leaf — Management Today
Bertelsmann and Pearson announced on 29 October 2012 that Random House and Penguin would combine, 53 per cent to 47. It completed in July 2013.
The Department of Justice sued Apple and five publishers over e-book pricing on 11 April 2012. Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon and Schuster settled the same day.
Justice Department reaches settlement with three publishers — U.S. Department of Justice
The American Library Association recorded 464 attempts to remove or restrict material in 2012. The most challenged title was Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants, for offensive language and for being unsuited to its age group.
Encyclopaedia Britannica announced on 13 March 2012 that it would stop printing after 244 years.
Last verified 25 September 2026. Everything marked “correction” above is a place where this page said something different before. The three that mattered are all in one entry: Bring Up the Bodies is written in the third person, not the second, it runs to about four hundred pages rather than six hundred, and Hilary Mantel was the first woman and the first British author to win the Booker twice but the third author to do it, after J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey. Two more are worth knowing: Alice Munro called the last four pieces in Dear Life “autobiographical in feeling” rather than autobiographical, she had worked that way before, and she said she was probably finished writing four months before the Nobel rather than after it; and both of this year’s National Book Awards are on this page, so each entry now says which one it won. Where a source contradicts the version that circulates, the source wins. Anything I could not source to a named publisher, prize body, archive, library record, newspaper or reference work is not on this page. Where a Wikipedia article is the source, that is what the footnote says.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.
Where to go next
Pages on this site that pick up where 2012 leaves off.
On writing the book of the year
“It didn’t make sense to call him ‘Cromwell’, as if he were somewhere across the room. I called him ‘he’.” — Hilary Mantel
If this list resonated with you, you’ll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
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