Find out here which critics, booksellers and media outlets have picked our books in their Best of 2022 book lists!
It has been quite the year. But through it all we’ve published fourteen new titles (and seven new editions of previously published books) and announced our commitment to taking action on climate change. It’s also been an unprecedented year for prizes wins and nominations with Aftermath by Preti Taneja scooping the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize and When Women Kill by Alia Trabucco Zerán (tr. Sophie Hughes) awarded the 2022 British Academy Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. Mona Arshi’s Somebody Loves You and Tice Cin’s Keeping the House also deserve special mentions for the sheer amount of prize shortlists they were on this year. None of this would be possible without you, our readers, subscribers and supporters, and we wanted to take this moment to thank you for reading with us and joining us on our journey.
And what a year of publishing and reading it’s been! Critics and booksellers certainly agree and below you’ll find the titles that made a host of best-of-2022 lists. We’re very proud to have so many of our books highlighted by so many fantastic newspapers, magazines, and bookstores. And we look forward to another year of books, reading, and community in 2023!
Aftermath, Preti Taneja
‘Taneja probes her own experience … surveys its public and private aftershocks, and scrutinizes the clichés that populate narratives of terror’ – New Yorker Best Books of 2022 So Far
‘Simply one of the most remarkable books I’ve ever read. Raw, brutal and yet thoroughly distrustful of easy narratives, Aftermath is an excoriating, and often self- excoriating, survey of the prison system, British society at large, the coded cruelty of institutionalised language and the inadequacy of art as a response to violence.’ – Jonathan Liew, New Statesman’s Best Books of 2022
Included in Nikesh Shukla’s Books of 2022
Included in the London Review Bookshop’s Christmas 2022 tips
Selected by Sam Buchan Watts, Kimberly Campanello, David Hayden and Izabella Scott in The White Review‘s Books of 2022.
Last Letter to a Reader, Gerald Murnane
‘This book gives us the writing lifetime of the reclusive, gnarly master of contemporary Australian literature: it reflects on his previous work, fourteen strange and brilliant books, most of them concerned with the twinned acts of reading and of writing about the act of reading. Murnane’s supreme conviction as a writer is that the images in our mind may be more real than the objects that surround us, and his writing often gives the act of thinking a shape and a sound. These essays are an extraordinary effort made to retrieve an irretrievable entity: the time of thinking, the time of living, “the book being written continually on one’s heart.”’ – New Yorker Best Books of 2022 So Far
When Women Kill, Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes
‘Evocative and trenchant in equal measure, Zerán’s volume about four iconic homicides by Chilean women in the twentieth century and their aftermath is a mesmerising examination of the unwanted truths the act of murder reveals about a society.’ – Philippe Sand’s Favourite Reads of 2022, for Waterstones
True crime enthusiasts will devour Alia Trabucco Zerán’s feminist, genre-mixing When Women Kill, an account of the lives of four women who committed murder. – Isabella Corletto, Words Without Borders ‘Your 2022 Holiday Gift Guide to Reading in Translation’
The Visitors, Jessi Jezewska Stevens
‘It’s both a bold, imaginative play on very recent history and a trenchant prophecy of the terrifying times we’re collectively staring down the barrel of.’ –Anna Cafolla The Face Summer Reads 2022
Included in the (UK and Irish) Booksellers Association’s Summer Catalogue.
My Father’s Diet, Adrian Nathan West
‘My Father’s Diet by Adrian Nathan West was the funniest, bleakest book I read this year, the best thing yet written on the undertheorized (but all too real!) relationship between sad divorced dads and their intellectual adult sons.’ – Andrew Martin, BookForum’s Writers’ Best Books of 2022
Included in Review Bookshop’s Best Books of 2022
Fifty Forgotten Books, R.B. Russell
‘I was pleased to find R. B. Russell’s Fifty Forgotten Books, a mix of memoir and criticism that lives up to its title.’ – Matthew Keeley, for Tor.com, Best Books of 2022
Included in the Seminary Co-op Gift Guide 2022 and the (UK and Irish) Booksellers Association’s Christmas Catalogue.
Invasion of the Spirit People, Juan Pablo Villalobos, translated by Rosalind Harvey
Included in Kirkus Review‘s Books of 2022
Bad Eminence, James Greer
‘The publisher calls it “at once an old-school literary satire in the mode of Vladimir Nabokov as well as a jolly thumb in the eyes of contemporary screen-life and digital celebrity,” which is about as delicious as it gets for me.’ – Emily Temple, LitHub 2022 round-up
Included in the (UK and Irish) Booksellers Association’s Summer Catalogue.
Get ‘em Young, Treat ‘em Tough, Tell ‘em Nothing, Robin McLean
These imaginative, poetic stories overflow with compassion and should seal McLean’s flourishing reputation as a writer of great heft. – Jane Graham, The Big Issue, Best Books from 2022
‘Superb … I would recommend to anyone’ – David Hayden, The White Review‘s Books of 2022
‘This short story collection surveys an innate Americanness with flare, uncanniness and a profound disaffectedness. McLean spans a plethora of states, identities, and time periods, with a mystery and sense of the (almost) unbelievable. There’s both grand, folkloric tales and a story entirely taking place in the mind of a man stuck in a tree; she’s truly a master of the form.’ – Jessie Jones, Lunate Journal’s Books of 2022
Included in Madison Books, James Crossley’s Best Books of 2022
‘I can’t resist McLean’s sharp, witty, elemental, strange writing. The first story in particular is an absolute stunner.’ – Included in Community Bookstore, Noah Mintz’s Top 10 of 2022
‘Leigh says, “Robin McLean takes the great American myths and quick-skins them for the open flame. Stories: absurd, harrowing bleakly hilarious.” – East Bay Booksellers Fall/Winter Fiction Catalog
‘McLean deploys her unique orotund style in more concentrated doses.’ – The Millions 2022 second half preview
Ti Amo , Hanne Ørstavik, translated by Martin Aitken
‘It is a book about intimacy, and the beauty and deep challenge of loving another human being—and how our connections to one another can be both rock solid and as fragile as glass.’ – Enuma Okoro, Financial Times Best Books of 2022
‘Beautiful if devastating’ – Joanna Kavenna in The White Review‘s Books of 2022.
‘I read it at a time of feeling the fragility of life and it made me think of grief in another way.’ – Tice Cin in Lunate Journal’s Books of 2022
‘A sensual and honest exploration of love and getting to terms with the impending death of a loved one.’ – Nataliya Deleva in Lunate Journal‘s Books of 2022
Included in Review Bookshop’s Best Books of 2022
Boulder, Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches
Included in Review Bookshop Best Books of 2022
Included in Adelle Stripe’s Best Books of 2022
‘Baltasar has an innate talent for stretching the complexities of queer lives and predicaments into undulating adventure and tension.’ – Anna Cafolla The Face Summer Reads 2022
Included in Riffraff’s Favorite Books of 2022
The Water Statues, Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Gini Alhadeff
Jaeggy is always the best kind of cutting to start things off (aesthetically speaking) – Quinn Latimer, The White Review‘s Books of 2022
Phenotypes by Paulo Scott, translated by Daniel Hahn
‘A searing indictment of racism and privilege in Brazil, and an uncompromising challenge to the country’s idealised view of itself as a racial democracy.’ – Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times Books of Summer 2022