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According to new data from YouGov, 40% of British adults have not read a single book in the last year, with the median Briton having read or listened to three. In a world where there are so many other distractions and forms of entertainment to choose from, fewer and fewer people are getting stuck into books – yet lots of us would like to be reading more. So we asked authors, booksellers and critics to choose the book they think you should read this year – even if you only read one.
James by Percival Everett
James was being hailed a modern classic and a “masterpiece” before it even hit bookshops last year. US novelist Percival Everett, the author of more than 30 published works, dared to take on the American cultural cornerstone that Hemingway described as “the best book we’ve had”, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – only this time from the perspective of the runaway enslaved man, Jim. Everett rescues James from the racial stereotypes of the original, restoring his proper name and humanity. He might not be free, but Everett gives him narrative agency and a pencil with which to write his own story.
Don’t worry if this is your first proper encounter with Huck. James has all the pace and adventure of the children’s classic, but with adult wit, wisdom and furious intent. “I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not,” Everett has said. James is an important novel and also a magnificently enjoyable one. And, handily, it is newly out in paperback. Lisa Allardice, the Guardian’s chief books writer
A Life’s Music by Andreï Makine
A very short novel that contains multitudes. A young Russian composer flees Moscow, heading for Ukraine, desperate to escape Stalin’s purge of intellectuals in 1941. Then Russia’s war with Nazi Germany begins and his life turns upside down. How will he survive? What means and reserves of character does he have at his disposal? Profound, moving, haunting – full of resonances that are even more valid in today’s fraught times. A mini-masterpiece. William Boyd, novelist
Killing Floor by Lee Child
This novel is the debut of Child’s legendary hero: army veteran turned drifter and one-man A-team, Jack Reacher. It is a page-turning delight, a relentless rollercoaster of action and twists that grip you by the throat from the get-go. This book has mystery, danger, conspiracy, adrenaline-pumping action and a larger-than-life hero that you can’t help rooting for. In short, it’s everything you’d want in a thriller. Go on, dive in! Abir Mukherjee, novelist
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Last year when I judged the Booker prize, my fellow judges and I picked this novel as our winner. It’s a short read, but a beautifully expansive one, offering a perspective that is epic yet intimate, heartbreaking yet awe-inspiring. It reminded me how fleeting life is, but how much each moment can hold. I’ve never read anything like it. Sara Collins, novelist
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
I’m not usually a fantasy reader, but Yarros’s smash-hit romantasy novel got me out of a reading slump very successfully. It has everything you need to keep you gripped: romance, action, adventure and more dragons than you could ever dream of. It’s one of my go-to recommendations at the shop now, whether the customer is a fantasy fan or not. Almost without fail, everyone who has picked a copy up has come back raving about it! Ben Johns, co-owner of Simply Books in Stockport
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Question 7 by Richard Flanagan
One book? As a literary editor whose leisure time is as dominated by reading as my working life, it seems an impossible ask. But one recent title immediately sprang to mind: the Australian author Richard Flanagan’s Question 7. It’s a unique blend of memoir, history, science and philosophical thought experiment, with the structural cunning, propulsive energy and imaginative beauty of a gripping novel. It hinges on the contingencies of fate: were it not for Hiroshima, Flanagan’s father would have perished in a Japanese PoW camp, and he would never have been born. From here, the book opens like a concertina to consider the strange genesis of nuclear weapons, Tasmania’s shameful colonial story, his own family line, and a brush with death – thrillingly told – that upended his sense of self. Weaving together imagination and history, Flanagan profoundly conveys how all our lives are an “ongoing invention”. It’s a book that will stay with you for ever. Justine Jordan, the Guardian’s fiction editor
Bat Eater by Kylie Lee Baker
Cora is a crime-scene cleaner, but her job doesn’t bother her, not when she’s witnessed her sister’s murder. With the killer at large, nobody can reach Cora: not her aunt who’s preparing for the Hungry Ghost festival, not her weird colleagues, and especially not the shadow nibbling at her coffee table. Haunted by the taunt “bat eater” and a series of killings in Chinatown, Cora believes someone is targeting east Asian women, and something might be targeting her. Folk-horror meets crime thriller in a witty, gory, genre-defying novel that takes readers on an exploration of Chinese-American heritage while observing the racism rampant in New York during Covid-19. Brooke Smith, bookseller at House of Books & Friends in Manchester
Juice by Tim Winton
Something about this book really shook me. Sure, it has similarities to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Mad Max: Fury Road, and it is another cli-fi book, but it manages to be completely its own thing. Mostly because Tim Winton is a deeply humane writer, concerned with moments of connection across divides, with a deep care for nature and an impossibly hopeful desire for humanity to succeed, together. A farmer escorts a child across a dystopian Australia ravaged by the fallout of climate collapse. And when they are captured, the farmer, in order to stay alive, spends one night telling his captor his life story. For sure, we can expect eco-revenge-military cells, tragic love, extreme weather and epic heists, but we also have something deeper: the power of a single story that can change the course of the world. Nikesh Shukla, author and screenwriter
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
Every bookseller knows that no book is meant for everyone – but for anyone who is in a reading rut, Elif Shafak novels are a pretty reliable way of getting unstuck! One of our great storytellers, you could start anywhere in her oeuvre and find a page-turning, plot-driven, politically prescient book that will strike a slightly different chord with every reader. Her latest is a propulsive work of ecofiction that spans Dickensian London and contemporary Kurdistan: River Thames to River Tigris. It’s riveting, readable, complex and quietly queer, with characters to fall completely in love with – rich and escapist. Mairi Oliver, owner of Lighthouse Bookshop in Edinburgh
Black British Lives Matter, edited by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder
Black British Lives Matter is a collection of essays from a selection of experts and public figures, sharing their insights and experiences from the perspective of being Black in modern Britain. At a time when efforts towards equality and anti-racism are being questioned and even threatened, books such as this are not simply nice-to-haves; they are essential. Written with clarity and passion, the essays in this book (including Sir David Adjaye, Nadine White, David Olusoga and Baroness Doreen Lawerence) offer a context for understanding racism while illuminating vital truths about contemporary society, that we can all benefit from. Jeffrey Boakye, author and broadcaster
