Best Reads of 2019

Looking over the books I read in 2019, I’m struck by how many of them are “old.”

“Old” is, of course, a relative concept: people have different ideas about what makes a book—or any object—old. It doesn’t simply come down to age. It’s probably fair to say that a book that was printed and bound 400 years ago is by any standard “old.” But what about a book published 20 years ago? What if, for the sake of definition, we choose to believe that any book that is “not new” qualifies as “old?” What exactly do we mean by “not new?”

In this acquisitive age, corporations and advertisers do what they can to ensure that our purchase decisions are driven by notions of newness, which is often equated with fresh or original or exciting. There is a measure of value implicit in the quality of being new, as opposed to being old, which we sometimes see equated with moribund, irrelevant or obsolete. New is desirable. Old is not. Gadgets, furniture, housewares, clothes, cars, music … The push to buy new is relentless.

Regardless, and for any number of reasons, there are times when only a book published years ago will satisfy the craving. But our choices will seldom be random. We’re more likely to seek out specific older books because of their reputation: they’ve been deemed classic, or we read them years ago and want to re-live the experience or see if our memory is accurate, or we want to read something else by an author we admire. But when you’re rating books, somehow it doesn’t seem quite fair to measure a new book that hasn’t had time to establish its worth against one that has won awards and been lavished with praise for thirty or forty or fifty years and is still in print after all that time.

So, in the interests of fairness, and since I make the rules, and since I don’t have to answer to anyone, I’ve decided that for 2019 I will leave the “old” books off my list of best reads. Next year I might do things differently. We’ll see.

And, for the record, these are the “old” books I read in 2019. All of them would have been on my list were I not so concerned with fairness:

A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble, published in 1963 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

The Bridge by Maggie Hemingway, published in 1986 by Jonathan Cape.

The Centaur by John Updike, published in 1963 by Knopf.

Stories by Jean Stafford, John Cheever, Daniel Fuchs, William Maxwell, published in 1956 by Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy.

Sacred Families: Three Novellas by José Donoso, published in 1977 by Knopf.

Repetition by Peter Handke, published in 1988 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The Stone Arbor & Other Stories by Roger Angell, published in 1960 by Little, Brown.

Best Reads of 2019 (New Books Only):

Movement and change are core to Jasmina Odor’s first collection of short fiction. Her characters are edgy and dissatisfied with their lot in life, always searching and questioning, challenging the limits that their circumstances have imposed. Even when their lives seem fine, they spend their days looking for a way to step out of the present and into some new way of being. Often though, things are not fine. The tragic backdrop for some of the stories in You Can’t Stay Here is war, specifically the brutal and prolonged civil war that split the former Yugoslavia into a smattering of smaller states. Odor emigrated to Canada in the early 1990s and she brings a profound sensitivity to the forces that compel people to seek refuge from dangers seen and unseen, and to what it means to have your life divided into “before” and “after,” to her short fiction. But, beyond all this, her stories are compellingly multi-faceted, layering personal complications on emotional complexities, building psychologically intricate and elaborately detailed worlds for her characters to inhabit. In the opening story, “A Board of Perfect Pine,” Josh and Nina brave a winter storm to attend a party at Josh’s parents’ home, where Nina drinks too much and misbehaves embarrassingly with an older man for reasons that she can’t explain other than to say that some part of her is “curious and yearning and unapologetic.” In “The Time of the Apricots” Juliet’s novel has been made into a film and she has attended the premier. The story is narrated by her boyfriend Alek, a Croatian refugee, who spends much of the story trying to decipher her puzzling behaviour and figure out why she is so unhappy when everything seems to be working in her favour. And in the title story Ivona and Sven, Croatian refugees living in Canada, have laboured to bring Sven’s parents over for a visit. But Ivona, dealing with a boss at work who is attracted to her, a young son with autism, and deepening feelings of restlessness and foreboding, cannot abide their criticisms and, knowing that she’s putting her marriage at risk, tells them they have to leave. For many of the author’s people love is an impossible mystery, causing only pain. Odor’s writing is lush and full-blooded, filled with arresting phrases and telling observations on the numerous subtle ways that people confound and cause damage to each other. These are wise and poignant but never sentimental stories that grow more fascinating with repeated readings. A stellar debut.

In Force of Nature, Jane Harper’s gripping follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Dry, we are once again led through a complex, multi-layered case by federal agent Aaron Falk. Ten employees of BaileyTennants, a conglomerate with international reach and vast financial resources, are taking part in a wilderness bonding exercise operated by “Executive Adventures,” trudging through the remote bushland of the Giralang Ranges, near Melbourne. The two teams, one of five women, the other of five men, will hike the trail over several days, stopping at established camps along the way for meals and supplies. However, everything goes wrong for the women’s team. In poor weather they get turned around and lose the trail, and the situation worsens when latent hostilities boil over within the group. When four team members eventually straggle out of the bush—well behind schedule, with each suffering various scrapes, bruises and cuts—Alice Russell is missing. Aaron and his partner, Carman Cooper, work in a unit investigating financial crimes, and it turns out that BaileyTennants is in their crosshairs and that Alice is their mole on the inside, a whistleblower strategically situated to get them the evidence they need to build their case. But does this have anything to do with her disappearance? As in her first novel, Harper constructs her story with great patience, dropping ambiguous clues into a volatile mix, revealing troubling details as the investigation moves in several directions at once, and sending her detectives down one blind alley after another in their pursuit of the truth. Another similarity to The Dry is the crucial role played by setting. Harper’s Giralang Ranges are fictional but are drawn with persuasive clarity. And to add to the atmosphere of menace, twenty years earlier, the Giralang Ranges were the stomping ground of a psychopathic killer named Martin Kovac, who left a trail of young women’s bodies in his wake before being caught, tried and convicted. By the time Alice goes missing, Kovac is long dead, but his grisly crimes cast a creepy and portentous shadow over Falk’s investigation and add spice to the rampant speculation over what has happened to Alice. Harper splits the story into two threads: one that follows Falk and Cooper’s investigation into the circumstances surrounding Alice’s disappearance, and a second that takes us inside the women’s fateful trek through the bush. Aaron Falk, though staid, rooted, and emotionally reticent, is an appealingly haunted protagonist, carrying with him a weighty baggage of personal regrets and failures. Force of Nature is a spellbinding work of fiction that more than delivers on the promise of Jane Harper’s first novel and establishes her as a master of psychological suspense.

Australian Jane Harper has built a solid international reputation for her two crime novels featuring Federal Investigator Aaron Falk, The Dry and Force of Nature. Falk does not feature in The Lost Man, but his absence does not mean this novel is any less gripping or suspenseful than her first two. The story is set in the outback, at an isolated cattle station more than 1,000 km west of Brisbane during the hottest days of the Australian summer. The Bright family is one of the chief landowners in the area. One day shortly before Christmas Cameron Bright sets out on an errand but fails to return home, and his wizened body is later discovered at a local landmark called the stockman’s grave. Cameron—smart, experienced, respected—has succumbed to the pitiless and relentless heat, which can kill a man in a few hours. But what was he doing out there, alone, apparently unprepared and completely exposed? The most shocking and inexplicable aspect of the death is that his Land Cruiser—in perfect working order and fully stocked with water and food, none of which had been touched—is discovered about 9 km away. There was no distress call. The police force, which consists of a single officer, conducts a perfunctory investigation. But with no witnesses, no evidence that a crime has even been committed, and no suspects, the investigation stalls and produces nothing by way of conclusive results. Ultimately, it is ruled a case of death by misadventure, which means everyone assumes Cam, who by all accounts had recently later discovered at a local landmark called the stockman’s grave. Cameron—smart, experienced, respected—has succumbed to the pitiless and relentless heat, which can kill a man in a few hours. But what was he doing out there, alone, apparently unprepared and completely exposed? The most shocking and inexplicable aspect of the death is that his Land Cruiser—in perfect working order and fully stocked with water and food, none of which had been touched—is discovered about 9 km away. There was no distress call. The police force, which consists of a single officer, conducts a perfunctory investigation. But with no witnesses, no evidence that a crime has even been committed, and no suspects, the investigation stalls and produces nothing by way of conclusive results. Ultimately, it is ruled a case of death by misadventure, which means everyone assumes Cam, who by all accounts had recently been acting strangely and seemed to be troubled, took his own life. The family, especially Cam’s older brother Nathan, have doubts about this. Nathan, acting on nothing more than his gut, which pesters him with suspicions and a feeling that something is very wrong, starts nosing around, asking questions and peeling back the layers. Jane Harper is a patient writer, and the action proceeds slowly, haltingly, as myriad disconcerting family secrets and prior bad acts are dragged into the light of day. Nathan, a solitary soul with a complicated past, stumbles through a haphazard investigation into his brother’s death and in the process learns more than he wants to about himself and the people around him. One of the most compelling features of Jane Harper’s novels is her use of the Australian landscape to build tension and evoke human emotion. In The Lost Man, Australia’s beautiful, shimmering, deadly outback haunts every page. Jane Harper has outdone herself with this richly textured and thoroughly engaging novel.

The woods of Knocknaree harbour a secret. One August afternoon in 1984 in this ordinary, serene semi-rural Dublin suburb, three children ventured into the woods, but only one came out. The three, all age 12, were inseparable best friends Germaine (“Jamie”) Elinor Rowan, Peter Joseph Savage, and Adam Robert Ryan. Adam Ryan was discovered by searchers, bloodied and catatonic but with no memory of what happened. Of the other two there was no trace. Flash forward twenty years. Jamie and Peter are still missing, and Adam Ryan is now a Dublin murder detective who, though damaged and haunted by the past, has not let it define him or hold him back. He goes by the name Rob Ryan and has told no one on the force that he is the survivor of that incident, no one except for his partner and best friend Cassie Maddox. But now there is a new case to solve—12-year-old Katy Devlin has been savagely murdered—and the setting is Knocknaree, the very wood where Ryan’s friends vanished. Ryan and Maddox catch the case, and Ryan marches into the fray fully aware that the secret he’s holding back calls his objectivity into question and could harm or even end his career should the truth come to light. But even though some of the people he confronts regarding Katy’s murder are people he knew or knew of when he was young, he decides it’s a risk worth taking. Especially when he spots similarities to the earlier case and senses a chance to put the past to rest. Tana French’s haunted by the past, has not let it define him or hold him back. He goes by the name Rob Ryan and has told no one on the force that he is the survivor of that incident, no one except for his partner and best friend Cassie Maddox. But now there is a new case to solve—12-year-old Katy Devlin has been savagely murdered—and the setting is Knocknaree, the very wood where Ryan’s friends vanished. Ryan and Maddox catch the case, and Ryan marches into the fray fully aware that the secret he’s holding back calls his objectivity into question and could harm or even end his career should the truth come to light. But even though some of the people he confronts regarding Katy’s murder are people he knew or knew of when he was young, he decides it’s a risk worth taking. Especially when he spots similarities to the earlier case and senses a chance to put the past to rest. Tana French’s first novel is a taut psychological suspense thriller that delivers on every promise it makes to the reader. In the Woods drips atmosphere and is crowded with richly drawn, fully realized characters engaged in compelling relationships. Narrated by Ryan, the intricately plotted story veers down blind alleys and sends the detectives on one wild goose chase after another in their pursuit of a truth that, even as the clues pile up and we close in on the culprit, seems more elusive than ever. However, though complex and multi-layered, the story never strains credibility or leaves you scratching your head. Maybe a few scenes descend close to the realm of melodrama, and some of Ryan’s more agonized, angst-ridden monologues could have been condensed. But French’s award-winning debut remains a carefully crafted and delightfully entertaining work of fiction, and totally deserving of the critical acclaim and numerous accolades that came its way.

It’s not often that a book comes along that offers the reader an experience unlike any he has previously encountered. Milkman is radical, innovative, immersive, not to mention challenging and, at times, brutally disorienting. The novel’s setting is an unnamed country at a time of civil unrest, which it makes sense for us to assume is Northern Ireland in the 1970s, at the height of the Troubles, with communities divided along religious and political lines and where people live under a constant threat of violence perpetrated by two warring factions: the renouncers of the state and the state police. 18-year-old middle sister is the narrator. Middle sister comes from a family that, like most of the families she knows, has been adversely affected by the ongoing conflict: her brother and brother-in-law have met violent ends. Her father is also dead. What middle sister wants more than anything is to fly under the radar, live by her own rules, distance herself from the conflict and not call undue attention to herself. Unfortunately, she has grown into a beautiful young woman who, in her striving for anonymity, has developed habits and practices that, unbeknownst to her, have attracted precisely the kind of attention throughout the community that she hoped to avoid and made her the subject of rampant rumour-mongering. Several things mark her as unusual: she runs for exercise, she reads books while walking, and she’s taking a night class in French. Specifically, middle sister has become an object of interest to the milkman, a high-ranking renouncer of the state, by all accounts a very dangerous man, who begins turning up when she least expects it, and who knows everything about her. Initially she is confused and frightened by his approach, unsure what he wants from her, uncertain how to behave toward him. When he talks to her, it is in a disarmingly circular manner, using language that demonstrates his thorough knowledge of her activities and relationships but is never overtly threatening or suggestive. And yet, these one-sided conversations (she never says anything) are filled with menace and innuendo, implying that a bond already exists between them and prodding her to change her conduct to suit community expectations. The action of the novel takes us through several anxious months in middle sister’s life, during which she struggles to make sense of what is happening while also making a series of startling discoveries about herself, her family, her “maybe-boyfriend,” and the meddling, hurtful, treacherous world in which she resides, where everyone is constantly being judged, where allegiances are assumed, and where to not act is in itself an act of defiance. The novel is narrated in a breathless rush. The prose is dense, the chapters are long, the paragraphs run on for pages. The language is endlessly inventive but sometimes repetitive. With few exceptions, characters are referred to by designations derived from some status or activity (“tablet girl’s sister,” “longest friend”) rather than names. There is conversation, but little in the way of dialogue. At times middle sister’s blasé observations about herself, her family, and others that make up her circle, are very funny. Milkman is a dazzlingly original work of fiction: a moving indictment of sectarian violence filled with moments of absurd energy and blistering honesty. It is also a book that demands that the reader give himself/herself to it completely, without reservation, because it must be read as it is written: breathlessly, in a rush. Without a doubt, middle sister is one of the more fascinating fictional characters you will encounter—we are invited deep into her consciousness where her heart, mind and soul are laid bare—and Anna Burns draws the brutal and tragic world in which she lives in minutely horrifying detail.

In Rachel Cusk’s episodic novel, Outline, a British writer named Faye has been hired to teach a short-term course in creative writing at a school in Athens. We meet her on the plane to Greece, where she has been engaged in conversation with her seatmate, a Greek gentleman much older than her. During the flight, they share their personal histories, both of which include failed marriages and divorce. It is a probing, deeply confessional conversation, with the participants at pains to explain why their marriages fell apart. It is also a conversation which compels them to reflect upon decisions they’ve made and view the impact of those decisions from the perspective of their interlocutor. The novel proceeds through its ten chapters in this manner, with Faye walking the streets of Athens, going to bars and restaurants, engaged in lengthy conversation with a variety of characters—other teachers, an old friend, the Greek gentleman again, a famous novelist, a famous poet, her students—all of whom use their time in the spotlight to question and probe and speak loquaciously and revealingly about their lives and loves, their needs, their desires, their regrets, their place in the world, and what it means to be male or female, as the case may be. And along the way, through these encounters, the outline of Faye's story is gradually filled in. It will be evident early on that in Outline Rachel Cusk is not striving for the kind of narrative momentum or continuity, or even coherence, that we are taught in writing classes a novel must possess in order to keep the reader turning the pages. In fact, Outline is a novel that deliberately subverts that principle, and is instead built around what could be regarded as a series of random—or, perhaps, selected—encounters. The common factor throughout is Faye. Everything we see and hear is filtered through her consciousness: coloured by her personal experience, her needs, desires, responsibilities and life pressures. Her coolly analytic, cerebral, non-judgmental, sometimes ironic observations about life, marriage, the city she’s visiting, the people in whose company she finds herself, are relentlessly fascinating and endow the book with the forward thrust of a thriller. In the end, Outline seems to suggest that the act of constructing an identity to present to the world is largely futile because other people will determine who we are when they interpret the things we say and do.

It’s impossible to imagine a more genial, candid, or generous tour guide than Tom Cox, whose fascinating, enlightening and moving accounts of his meanderings through the English countryside fill the pages of Ring the Hill. This is by no means a conventional travel book: the information it provides regarding towns, villages, hamlets, hills, rivers, fields, historical sites and monuments that are on Cox’s itinerary is secondary to the author’s often humorous, sometimes sobering reflections on being alive, and the story of his own life in progress: the relationships, observations, learning opportunities and personal decisions that have bestowed on him an uncommon degree of self-awareness and a vivid sense of his place in the world and, indeed, the cosmos. Tom Cox is less traveler than nomad: a man who moves house with unusual regularity, not out of dissatisfaction, but more out of restless curiosity, driven, one imagines, by a yearning for a new and different experience. Once settled into new digs—sometimes before settling—his custom is to go out and explore, compulsively and in any weather, the surrounding countryside and jot down his findings and commentary in a journal. In the six sections of Ring the Hill, Cox reports on ramblings through, among others, Glastonbury, The Peak District, Dartmoor and Dartington. Interspersed among descriptions of his discoveries and sightings are accounts of events taking place in his life at the time: visits with his Mom and Dad, encounters with locals (human and animal), the music he’s listening to, an obsession with climbing hills, an equal obsession with swimming, extreme weather, the adventures of his cats, his struggles to keep a tidy garden. Cox writes from a perspective of great compassion for the natural world and for those among us who strive to nurture and protect that world: his critiques are generally reserved for the disfiguring scars that recent human activity has left upon the landscape. He is knowledgeable, a retainer and purveyor of facts, but also easily distracted: we often witness him changing course on a whim when something off the beaten path catches his eye. He is flawed but aware of and admirably at peace with his shortcomings. Discussions of the ways in which natural phenomena influence his moods cause us to suspect that here is someone highly attuned and sensitive to the rhythms of the planet. Casual references to the presence of the dead within the land of the living and the influence of ancient rites and customs upon the present lend a mystical note to the narrative. Make of me what you will, he seems to be saying, this is who I am. The overall tone in these pieces is wise and conversational, and it is a conversation that will leave you hungry for more while lingering in your mind long after you have finished reading the book.