Apparently Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the last person who could claim to have read every book ever published; after that, there were simply too many books in the world for the feat to be possible. A few years ago (before I grew a beard) I was told I had an uncanny likeness to Coleridge, and while I can’t claim to be as well-read as him, it’s certainly true that I’ve always got a book on the go. Here is a selection of some of the best ones I read this year. If you’re looking for your next read, or for good last-minute Christmas presents, they all come highly recommended (along with Foul and Fair and Dead Man Singing, obviously!)

 

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heap by HG Parry

I first encountered New Zealand author HG Parry through her Jonathan Stange and Mr Norrell-like A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians, and she has fast become one of my favourite writers. This was her first novel, which I caught up with earlier this year, and it’s a stunning display of invention, literary references and wonderful plotting. Towards the end I thought I saw where the story was going and I would have been highly satisfied with that ending, only for Parry to blindside me with a twist unimaginably better than the one I had incorrectly foreseen. She has now made it onto my list of writers whose name is the only thing I need on a cover to convince me to read a book.

 

Murder at the Christmas Emporium by Andreina Cordani

One of the great things about being involved with the Bournemouth Writing Festival is being part of a community of writers, and the number of friends whose books I get to buy. This is one of those, but its place in the list is very much on merit rather than just friendship.

A group of strangers find themselves marooned overnight in a Christmas-themed toy shop, with guilty secrets being gradually exposed as an unknown murderer picks them off one-by-one. It’s a page-turning read that constantly reveals new information, simultaneously expanding the reader’s understanding and throwing up more questions. By the end, all the loose ends are brought together with expert precision. It’s the second of Andreina’s books that I’ve read – predecessor The 12 Days of Murder is great too – and I’m sure it won’t be the last. This is the better of the two, in my opinion.

 

Football and How to Survive It by Pat Nevin

I remember enjoying Pat Nevin as a player, a tricky and skilful winger who was always worth watching, even if he spent several years at my least favourite football club, Fulham’s bratty rivals from across SW6. He was an oddity as a player, with cultural enthusiasms that went beyond the regular range of interests for a professional in the 1980s, preferring Joy Division, the Fall and the Smiths to the more typical territory of Lionel Ritchie and Billy Joel at the time. At Chelsea, when his team-mates regularly sought out his copy of NME and cut it up, he started buying two copies each week, making sure that one was easy to find so that he could enjoy the other one in peace. His outsider status was combined with a typically strong-willed Glaswegian mentality that made him an early campaigner against racism in football back in the days when, incredibly, that wasn’t a popular position to take. His first memoir, The Accidental Footballer was a favourite read of mine a couple of years ago, and this follow up, covering the tail-end of his playing days with Tranmere Rovers and Kilmarnock, and then his time in the unique role of player-Chief Executive at Motherwell FC, is just as good, full of anecdotes that are worth paying at the turnstiles for. He remains one of my favourite pundits, and if I was in charge of the BBC Sports department, he’d get moved from 5 Live into regular rotation on Match of the Day, but then again maybe that wouldn’t suit his perennial outsider status. Either way, we need more Pat Nevins in the game, and definitely more on our bookshelves.

 

The Midlife Trials of Annabeth Hope by Alice May

Another friend from the Bournemouth Writing Festival, and a book that I probably wouldn’t have read if it wasn’t for that, but I’m very glad I did. The genre (romance) is one that I don’t often dip into, but I found this hard to put down. The two lead characters each have their own complicated set of problems to deal with, creating numerous believable obstructions to their getting together. Both protagonists are sympathetic and well-drawn, meaning that there’s no sense of ‘oh no, it’s him again; I wish we could get back to her storyline’ (or vice versa), and both storylines are well resolved in their own right regardless of the will-they-won't-they factor. A great read.

 

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

There’s a café in the backstreets of Tokyo where the coffee can transport you back in time, but there are rules: you travel in time not space, so you must remain in the café itself, and you can only meet people who were there at the time you travel back to. More than that, you can’t leave one particular seat, and you have to finish your drink – and thereby return to the present – before the coffee gets cold. I picked it up because of the concept, but I stayed with it (and it stayed with me) for the expert way the author weaves together the stories of a handful of time-travelling customers. It packs a fully-caffeinated emotional punch that left me wanting more. Kawaguchi has written a handful of sequels which are also good, but somehow don’t have the impact of the original for me. This one is definitely worth your time though, with or without coffee.

 

The Good Patient by Alex Stone

A suspenseful psychological thriller by another of my writer friends. Lauren makes for a compelling heroine, albeit one who leaves the reader wondering just how far she may have gone to overcome the baggage of her past. Alex’s plot twists left me constantly reassessing and second guessing what was coming next, and the ending was immensely satisfying – a happy ending that felt realistic rather than cliched.

 

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Okay, so I’m a bit late to the party on this one, with it having come out in 2020, but I didn’t get around to reading it until this year. It’s a creative reimagining of the life of William Shakespeare and his family, focusing on the fact that he had a son, Hamnet, who died at the age of 11 just three years before his father wrote the (almost) eponymous play. Shakespeare isn’t the star of the book by any means, with Hamnet himself and mother Agnes sharing, and at times dominating, the reader’s focus. It’s a lovely exploration of grief, love, loss and how the creative act can be wrapped up in all of the above. Simply wonderful.