Best Books of 2019

The Testaments

Margaret Atwood · 10 September 2019 · McClelland & Stewart · Booker Prize, 2019 (joint)

The sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale arrives thirty-four years later and from three perspectives: Agnes, a girl growing up inside Gilead; Daisy, a teenager in Toronto who believes she is somebody else entirely until Mayday operatives tell her otherwise on her sixteenth birthday; and Aunt Lydia, whose testimony is written in secret and hidden inside a hollowed-out book in the Ardua Hall library. It is faster and more plot-driven than its predecessor, less interested in the interiority of oppression than in its machinery.

The Testaments earned its Booker on the strength of Aunt Lydia’s chapters. The women in The Handmaid’s Tale were prisoners; Aunt Lydia helped build the prison and has spent decades deciding whether to dismantle it. Her voice is the most surprising thing Atwood has done in decades — calculating, self-aware, and unforgiving about her own complicity. If the first book is about what it feels like to be inside a totalitarian system, this one is about what it takes to understand one well enough to survive it.

Girl, Woman, Other

Bernardine Evaristo · 2 May 2019 · Hamish Hamilton · Booker Prize, 2019 (joint)

Twelve people in Britain, aged nineteen to ninety-three, predominantly Black and predominantly women — among them Amma, a theatre director; her daughter Yazz; Morgan, non-binary, who becomes an activist with a following on social media; Shirley, a Peckham schoolteacher; and Hattie, ninety-three, still running the family farm. Evaristo writes without standard punctuation or paragraph breaks, in a form that sits somewhere between prose and poetry, and the lives turn out to be connected in ways the characters themselves do not know.

The formal choice enacts the argument. Evaristo is not asking you to read twelve separate portraits; she is showing you a web, and the absence of full stops is what makes the lives run into one another. This is one of the most structurally ambitious British novels of recent decades and also one of the most generous and entertaining to read. Evaristo became the first Black woman to win the Booker.

The Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead · 16 July 2019 · Doubleday · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2020

A reform school in Florida in the 1960s, based on the real Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, where documented abuse, violence and murder were hidden inside the language of correction. Two Black boys, Elwood and Turner, navigate a system designed to destroy them: one through belief in the promises of the civil rights movement, the other through a clear-eyed sense of exactly what those promises are worth. It won the 2019 Kirkus Prize and the 2020 Pulitzer, Whitehead’s second.

Where The Underground Railroad was expansive and allegorical, The Nickel Boys is compressed and precise — a short novel that accomplishes more than most long ones. Whitehead takes a documented atrocity and makes it personal through two boys whose characters are distinct enough that the horror lands in the specific rather than the historical. The ending reframes everything before it. A harder book than The Underground Railroad, and a more important one.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong · 4 June 2019 · Penguin Press

A letter from a son to a mother who cannot read it. Vuong writes to his Vietnamese immigrant mother about his childhood in Hartford, his body, his sexuality, the violence he witnessed and the tenderness he found where he did not expect it. It is his first novel; his first full-length poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, had appeared in 2016 and won the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Vuong writes prose the way most writers write poetry — with close attention to every syllable, every image, the distance between one sentence and the next. The result takes an hour to read and days to leave. The letter structure gives it an intimacy that conventional first-person narration cannot reach: you are reading something not meant for you, which is the most honest position a reader can be put in. If you have any resistance to autofiction, this will dissolve it.

Know My Name

Chanel Miller · 24 September 2019 · Viking · National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, 2019

For years she was Emily Doe: the victim impact statement read by millions, and a name the court had taken from her. Here she takes it back, and writes the assault, the trial, the six-month sentence and the years after it from the inside. It is her first book, and it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.

The anonymous statement was already one of the most-read pieces of writing of the decade. The book is better, because it has room for everything the statement could not hold: the childhood, the humour, the drawing, the boredom of the legal process, the specific indignity of being cross-examined about your own body. It sits next to Our Women on the Ground on this list for a reason — both are about who gets to narrate.

The Anarchy

William Dalrymple · 10 September 2019 · Bloomsbury

How a joint-stock company chartered on the last day of 1600 came, by 1803, to rule the Indian subcontinent with a private army twice the size of the British state’s. Dalrymple builds the story around the Battle of Plassey and the conquest of Bengal against a collapsing Mughal empire, using Persian-language sources alongside the company’s own records. Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and a finalist for the Cundill History Prize. Note that the American edition carries a different subtitle.

The argument is why it belongs here and not only on a history shelf: this was not a nation conquering a subcontinent, it was a corporation doing it, answerable to shareholders in London and regularly bailed out by a government it had lobbied. Dalrymple never labours the modern parallel, which is what makes it land.

Breasts and Eggs

Mieko Kawakami · July 2019 · Bungeishunjū, Tokyo

Published in Japanese as Natsu monogatari and in English in 2020, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd. Natsuko, a writer in Tokyo with no money and no partner, wants a child; her sister Makiko is saving for breast implants; her niece Midoriko has stopped speaking to her mother and answers her in writing. It won the 73rd Mainichi Publishing Culture Award. Book One is a complete rewriting of her 2008 novella Chichi to Ran, which won the Akutagawa Prize and was never translated; Book Two is new.

Kawakami writes about women’s bodies and women’s money with a directness that Japanese literary fiction had not much allowed, and the book was argued about at home for exactly that reason. The second half, on a woman trying to have a child alone in a country whose fertility system assumes a husband, is where it becomes unanswerable. The one book on this list not written in English, and it earns its place.

Our Women on the Ground

Zahra Hankir (ed.) · 6 August 2019 · Penguin Books

Nineteen Arab women journalists writing in the first person about covering war, displacement and political upheaval across the Arab world — from Syria, Iraq and Libya to Yemen, Lebanon and Egypt — with a foreword by Christiane Amanpour. Each essay is an interior account of what it costs to report from inside the society being reported on: the risks specific to women, the question of belonging while you cover your own country’s destruction, the choices made where no choice is clean.

This collection does what most war reporting cannot: it gives you the inside. Not just what happened but what it cost to be there, who helped, what had to be left behind. The range across countries means no single narrative dominates. It is the most honest book I have read about what journalism actually is and what it takes from the people who do it, and the fact that it is almost never mentioned alongside the year’s major books says something about whose stories we count.

→ Read my full thoughts on Our Women on the Ground