We’ve collated some of our favourite international books of the year, from heart-rending fiction to swaggering history, juicy political memoirs and much more.
The New Life by Tom Crewe
Sometimes there comes along a debut novel that feels like an immediate classic. Tom Crewe’s The New Life is just such a book. It’s a beautifully crafted, seductive story about illicit desires in Victorian London that takes inspiration from two real-life pioneers, the academics John Addington Symonds and Henry Havelock Ellis. Both were married men who chafed against social constraints; both felt thrilled by a new age of possibilities. Crewe’s novelised version brings this era vividly to life with its gas lamps, thick beards and spirit of utopianism.
Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy
You could heat a small family home with the paper wasted on mediocre writing about motherhood, so how refreshing it is to read Claire Kilroy. This is a psychological horror story-cum-love letter about a new mother stuck at home with her monster of a toddler, while her useless husband (or is he? Being sleepless and strung-out doesn’t make for the most reliable narrator) texts her smiley faces and expects dinner. The perfect Christmas present for men married to new mothers.
Dead Man’s Creek by Chris Hammer
The detectives Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan, first encountered last year in Opal Country, investigate the discovery of two skeletons unearthed when an eco-warrior blows up a dam on the Murray River, New South Wales. This superb crime drama features the Waters family and the Buchanan clan. It has three timelines: 1943, when Italian prisoners of war are at work in the Barmah-Millewa Forest; 1973, when 15-year-old Tessa Waters falls for beautiful Tycho Buchanan; and the present, when the air is thick with chickens coming home to roost. As the three narratives dovetail seamlessly, the tension continues to escalate.
Damascus Station by David McCloskey
The debut novel of the former CIA analyst David McCloskey is one of the best spy thrillers for years. Set during the early events of the civil war in Syria, it pits a case officer with the agency, Sam Joseph, against President Assad’s ruthless security regime as he recruits a source inside it, Mariam Haddad. Their love affair increases the possibility of exposure and the tension, but what lingers is McCloskey’s knowledge of the game and the pervasive ambience of sweaty paranoia.
The Scarlet Papers by Matthew Richardson
Scarlet King was MI6’s No 1 Russia expert. But all the while, the elderly ex-spook claims, she was a double agent, which is why her successors are determined to block her bombshell memoirs, and why she asks Max Archer, a floundering don, to help her to publish them. His adventures in trying to secure the manuscript are intercut with flashbacks to Scarlet’s key missions from the Forties to the Nineties — Vienna, Moscow, Washington — in a superbly constructed book that’s an elaborate spy yarn, a campus novel and a historical novel.
Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler
On the face of it, this is a book about a handful of composers whose lives were changed beyond measure by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War, among them Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich. But this book is also about landscape, from the mountains of Bavaria to the gates of Buchenwald, as well as music’s extraordinary power to bridge the gap between past and present. It’s written with a rare sensitivity to language and memory. The result is not just a great book about the legacy of the Second World War, but a work of extraordinary power, beauty and human feeling.
Spare by Prince Harry
Prince Harry’s book is the bestselling memoir of the year, and for all the hype and hysteria both on and off the page, it is a rattling page-turner. There are the confessions of drug use, sexual escapades, mawkish misery in palatial surroundings, racism and psychics, his time at Eton, in the army, and his most bitter battle: the one he has with the press. Excruciating and excoriating in equal measure, Spare may be lacking in introspection, but as a personal insight into one boy’s life in an extraordinary spotlight of modern royalty and a dysfunctional family, it may never be bettered.
A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention and Murder by Mark O’Connell
Why did he do it? Was there some “thread of violence” in Malcolm Macarthur’s life that caused him casually to murder two strangers in the course of preparing for a robbery? Macarthur, a bow tie-wearing Irish toff, caused a sensation in Ireland in 1982 when he was captured after a manhunt, found hiding in the home of his friend the attorney-general. In this fascinating, thoughtful, unusual account of a life and a crime, Mark O’Connell explains how he got to know (the not particularly repentant) Macarthur, piecing together his past in search of clues that would explain his brutal outburst. Along the way he explores the ethics of true-crime writing.
Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey
Monica Heisey’s debut novel takes the “hot mess” template of a young woman going off the rails, adds lashings of sardonic humour and swipes at our online obsessions to create a heartbreaker of a book. Maggie reels through her first year as a 29-year-old divorcee, behaving increasingly monstrously and desperately papering the cracks with wickedly funny punchlines — until she can’t any more. Heisey captures the shock of a long-term relationship collapsing with needle-sharp observation, but makes it hilarious at the same time. Quite the trick.
The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter
How’s this for a first line? “Beatrice was hungry for taste, texture, mouthfeel. Crispy, crunchy, silky, chewy.” Beatrice is a natural-born chef in a community religiously devoted to modest eating. When the love of her life tears up her meticulously copied recipe book, Beatrice flees to the city, a vertiginous three-tiered Leviathan whose rich, middling and poor layers are connected (barely) by a flying train service. In the Middle she learns to perform miracles with potato skins and cream. Meanwhile, in a plot that slowly, steadily tramlines with Beatrice’s own, Reiko, a young artist native to this world, is out of funds and sick of always having to represent her ethnicity in her work. The fastest way to invent yourself in this city, she finds, is to take what you need. So she leaves college and becomes a thief. Chana Porter is the new Philip K Dick, a writer whose sheer love of invention wrestles for attention with her social satire.