Books of the Year lists 2022

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Over the last 13 years I’ve done a compilation of Books of the Year lists, originally at www.sccenglish.ie and last year here for the first time, with lists that feature in the press (some may be pay-walled) and on some blogs. This is a selective list of the highest-quality lists: if you want almost everything that moves, check out Largehearted Boy.


Previous lists for every year since 2010 are here, while the 2020 post is here, and the 2021 here.

  • As usual, the Guardian has probably the most comprehensive lists, and there are plenty of them: fiction, children’s books, sport, food, graphic novels, music and more. To focus on poetry: Rishi Dastidar picks out particularly strong collections by women, like The English Summer by Holly Hopkins. Not to leave out men: Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise was superb: his new collaboration with the photographer Johnny Pitts called Home is Not a Place is one I want to get: they explore Black communities by the south-east coast of England.

  • The Irish Independent has choices by ‘top authors’: Louise Kennedy (whose Trespasses is mentioned in so many other lists, and which I need to get to) kicks off, and I like the sound of This Train Is For (No Alibis Press), ‘a collection of beautifully crafted short stories from Co Derry writer Bernie McGill.’ Joseph O’Connor also goes North, with These Days by Lucy Caldwell.

  • The Irish Times lists include a general selection with Malachy Clerkin on sports books / Tony Clayton-Lea on music books / Rory Kiberd on nonfiction books / Adrian Duncan on art books / Seán Hewitt and Martina Evans on poetry /Niamh Donnelly on fiction / Jane Casey on crime fiction / Claire Hennessy on young-adult fiction / Sara Keating on children’s books, as well as non-fiction (including one of the books of the moment, Sally Hayden’s My Fourth Time, We Drowned on the refugee crisis).

  • The Irish Examiner selection is from Kevin O’Sullivan. Included in his selection is the excellent Donal Ryan’s latest: ‘The Queen Of Dirt Island may be the best thing he has written to date. Predictably enough, it is a slender, beautiful, subtly life-affirming piece.’

  • The New York Times: 10 best books of 2022 includes an Irish resident, Claire-Louise Bennett, author of the fine Pond, and here now for Checkout-19: ‘You’ll come away dazed, delighted, reminded of just how much fun reading can be, eager to share it with people in your lives.’ And there’s also, deservedly, Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves, which I have written about in this piece comparing it to Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. Like the Guardian, the NYT has a huge number of lists, like Best Crime Fiction.

  • I’m a big fan of the Five Books site (a simple idea, really well executed), and it has quite a few lists in both fiction and non-fiction. For instance, there’s Best Books for Teens: As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh is set in the Syrian civil war.

  • Slate’s 10 best books of 2022 includes Lynne Tilman’s Mothercare, ‘so arid and unsentimental that it feels, at first, like the darkest of jokes: an unsparing, uncaring memoir of caregiving.’ This sounds like something many of us have experienced.

  • I love a post on book cover designs: Creative Review’s Mark Sinclair chooses his favourites. A clever one for Will Storr’s The Status Game.

  • The Sydney Morning Herald not surprisingly has plenty of Australian writers giving their commendations, with a couple of mentions to Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au which I also read this year (it’s set in Japan).

  • Always a good one for English teacher: the English and Media Centre in London Christmas Reads features both staff adult recommendations and student ones.

  • Literary Hub’s staff have chosen 38 favourite books of the year, with Senior Editor Corinne Segal going for Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux’s Getting Lost, translated by Alison L. Strayer.

  • Also in LitHub, Emily Temple calculates which books have appeared most often (American lists only).

  • Vulture from New York magazine: ‘Yes, this list features more than one book set in a postapocalyptic world, but have you looked around lately?’ The Furrows by Namwali Serpell sounds interesting and powerful.

  • NPR presents 8 notable books from critics and staff from the mega list of 402. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus has been recommended by many.

  • The Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Fiction include the latest from Maggie O’Farrell, following her very successful and affecting Hamnet, called The Marriage Portrait. Lots of notice has also come to NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel Glory, based on Robert Mugabe.

  • Former English teacher Geoff Barton’s excellent selection.

  • Jane Graham in the Big Issue looks at best children’s books, with Beverley Naidoo returning after 10 years with Children of the Stone City, and a further piece looks at independent publishers, including the Booker winner The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka from Sort of Books.

  • The Books for Keeps selection for children is comprehensive. Professor Teresa Cremin of the Open University recommends a book which has created quite a stir, Tyger by S.F. Said, a ‘remarkable book which demands re-reading, respect and in-depth discussion.’

  • A new one here is Aspects of History. Authors and contributors cite the books they’ve enjoyed this year, such as Saul David on Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 by Max Hastings, ‘a brilliant, beautifully-constructed and thrilling re-assessment of the most perilous moment in history.’

  • In The Conversation (a site I use a lot for class materials), there is best fiction, the five books including Treacle Walker by the veteran Alan Garner, which was short-listed for the Booker.

  • Time magazine has 10 best non-fiction books, such as His Name Is George Floyd by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, and another which interests me, The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland.

  • CrimeReads is a really good site: essential for anyone interested in the genre. Their Best Crime Novels of the year include Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais, ‘brutal poetry, distilled’ which I’ve noticed on this side of the Atlantic from Fitzcarraldo Editions. And as an English teacher and someone who knows Maine, I fancy the sound of Adam White’s The Midcoast.

  • The Millions always has lots of good essays on the theme A Year in Reading, including Laura Warrell on loneliness.

  • Bookriot’s selections are always good: this time among the several lists we have the children’s graphic book Green Lantern: Alliance by Minh Lê and Andie Tong, ‘one of the best books to come out of DC’s graphic novel line for kids.’

  • The School Library Journal has a lot of lists: hunt around their website.

  • Prospect Magazine’s Books of the Year: Ideas starts with Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels, which I’ve wanted to read since hearing her on The Rest of History podcast. And the same for Sarah Churchwell’s The Wrath to Come on Gone with the Wind (her book on Gatsby was superb). And Lucy Scholes chooses her 10 favourite fiction books of the year, with some great choices, including the Booker-shortlisted The Trees by Percival Everett.

  • PBS NewsHour has critics Gilbert Cruz and Maureen Corrigan discussing their choices. Lovely to see Claire Keegan’s Foster there, 12 years after its release.

  • Barack Obama always easily wins ‘most interesting reading by a former President’. This year, included is Afterlives by the Nobel Winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, which I admired too.

  • The AU Review’s Best Books include Benjamin Stevenson‘s Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, ‘an Agatha Christie-style whodunnit about a dysfunctional family stuck in an Australian ski resort, which sounds fun.

  • Stylist Magazine’s selection includes Janice Hallett’s very successful The Appeal.

  • In the Seattle Times, Jordan Snowden chooses the story of the truth behind the hugely successful Go Ask Alice by Rick Emerson in Unmasking Alice, which was ‘not, in fact, the memoir of a teenage drug addict and, instead, a fictional work written by a woman named Beatrice Sparks, who had a considerable hand in the onset of the satanic panic.’

  • Tyler Cowan of Marginal Revolution has best non-fiction.