Lionel Barber
Editor of the FT
It has to be Amy Goldstein’s Janesville, winner of the FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. A stunning socio-economic portrait of a Midwest car manufacturing town left behind by globalisation, Goldstein’s deep and original reporting is both sympathetic and probing. An honourable mention, please, for Philippe Sands’ East West Street, which I came late to this year. It’s a beautifully written story about legal theory (crimes against humanity and genocide in the Nazi era), the city of Lviv in western Ukraine and an intimate family history.
Nilanjana Roy
FT columnist
“History has failed us, but no matter.” Pachinko, Min Jin Lee’s massive, richly wrought second novel, follows Sunja and her children across four generations, from a village in Busan to a ghetto for Korean immigrants in Japan. Sunja weds a pastor to cleanse the stain of her love affair with a charismatic married man. Her second son makes a fortune with pachinko parlours, but as a character notes: “Living everyday in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.” One of 2017’s most rewarding novels.
George Saunders
Author of Lincoln in the Bardo
We often describe a wonderful book as “mind-blowing” or “life-changing” but I’ve found this rarely to actually be the case. I found both descriptions accurate for Ibram X Kendi’s Stamped From the Beginning. Kendi challenges the notion that “ignorant and hateful people . . . produced racist ideas, and that these racist ideas had instituted racist policies”. Rather, he suggests, discrimination causes racist ideas which, in turn, produce, encourage and embolden hate and ignorance. Find an example of racial disparity, he argues, and the only rational explanation is discrimination. It has become increasingly clear to me that, since racism is a white person’s illness, it is incumbent upon white people to radically undertake their own self-curing. Kendi’s book represents a sober, incisive diagnosis. I will never look at racial discrimination in the same way after reading this marvellous, ambitious and clear-sighted book.
Ali Smith
Author of Winter
For anyone interested in any of the multiple greatnesses of Muriel Spark — her sense of creative paradox, her determination to free us from our own tendencies to fix and categorise ourselves to death, her fabular political wisdom, her hard-won blitheness in the teeth of historical fascisms — I’ve just read Alan Taylor’s memoir, Appointment in Arezzo, written in celebration of the imminent centenary of her birth next year, and it’s so true in its friendship to and its critique of Spark and her work, and at the same time such a good read, that I found myself still reading it walking along streets and waiting for Tube trains. It celebrates Spark’s work with real understanding while it celebrates their friendship with candour and warmth. I loved it.
Ben Okri
Author of The Magic Lamp
Basquiat: Boom For Real is the book of a Barbican exhibition this year that brought a whole new dimension to the British perception of the flaming African-American artist’s work. Edited by Dieter Buchhart and Eleanor Nairne, with Lotte Johnson, it is superbly illustrated and packed with richly informative essays that lay bare and repopulate the legend. You come away with the sense that Basquiat somehow managed an extraordinary triumph from beyond what appeared to be the tragic mess of his life; that he outwitted, in an unimaginable way, the limited perceptions of all those around him, those who judged, those who collected, and those who thought they could see but could not really. The true artist surprises time eternally.
Pilita Clark
FT business columnist
On far too many nights this year, I was plonked in front of the TV watching Billions, a riveting Wall Street drama about a US attorney’s struggle to nail a fictional hedge fund billionaire for insider trading. Forlorn when the second season ended, I was delighted to find Black Edge, a mesmerising account by New Yorker writer Sheelah Kolhatkar of the Feds’ very real pursuit of Steven Cohen, founder of the SAC Capital hedge fund. Like an extended version of Billions, it charts wild extravagance and skulduggery on a scale that almost defies belief. Few come out of it well, least of all Wall Street.
Alec Russell
Editor of FT Weekend
Lincoln in the Bardo is not just my novel of the year but of several years surely. For his evocation of a father’s (Lincoln’s) grief for his young dead son, alone, it is outstanding. But it is so much more. And to immerse yourself in the kaleidoscopic cast of characters inhabiting George Saunders’ bardo, squabbling, wrangling, wistful for the past, uncertain of the future, is in this age of Britain’s pre-Brexit limbo all the more extraordinary.
Lionel Shriver
Author of The Mandibles
I’d have to nominate Lawrence Osborne’s Beautiful Animals, a savvy story about young people who think they’re savvy that could only have been written by a savvy author who is at least middle-aged. On a Greek island during the debt crisis, two western girls from affluent families conspire to rescue a Syrian refugee washed up on the beach. The savvy reader will be relieved to hear that their altruism goes horribly wrong. Osborne’s prose is fluid, his perspective flinty. His glancing approach to the refugee crisis is just right. The book becomes quite the page-turner, once he sets his hook.
Edward Enninful
Editor-in-chief of British Vogue
Salman Rushdie is one of my favourite authors — and his latest novel, The Golden House, is both powerful and hysterically funny. Set in Manhattan in the years leading up to Donald Trump’s election, it traces the development of America’s recent identity crisis through the story of the billionaire Golden family — who take refuge in a palatial Greenwich Village mansion after a sinister tragedy forces them to leave their native India. Watching them is film-maker René, a 21st-century Nick Carraway, who obsessively narrates their movements (and investigates their shadowy past) in between making allusions to everything from Jean-Luc Godard films to PG Wodehouse novels.
Roula Khalaf
Deputy editor of the FT
My favourite read this year was a little gem of a book by Yasmina Khadra, pseudonym for an Algerian author who writes in French. Ce que le jour doit à la nuit (published in translation as What the Day Owes the Night) is a beautifully written coming-of-age novel set in Algeria under French colonial rule, a tale of nationalism found and a cosmopolitan world lost. I found a more majestic and immensely enriching narration of history in Bettany Hughes’ Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities. It’s a journey through conquest and greatness from Roman to Ottoman times and it reminded me of why I love the city.
Sadiq Khan
Mayor of London
My book of the year is Elif Shafak’s Three Daughters of Eve. Shafak is an award-winning novelist who divides her time between Istanbul and London, and she really brings Turkey and the UK to life in her writing. I love the way she vividly depicts the complexities of living between the western and eastern worlds as a Muslim woman. This is a truly modern novel — about the way we are shaped by politics, including freedom of expression and political repression, but also by our personal relationships, whether with our teachers, our friends or our family.
Anne Applebaum
Author of Red Famine
There have been quite a few “why reform failed” tracts and Vladimir Putin biographies, but Masha Gessen’s The Future Is History is one of the first books to explain not just the economy, not just the politics, but the psychology of post-Soviet Russia. Gessen follows a host of people as they navigate civilisational change, from the 1990s into the present. All are struggling in the dark: sociology, psychiatry, political science — these professions were either unknown in the USSR or corrupted by Marxism. Gessen’s subjects try to understand their country as well as their own place in it, a task that takes them in radically different directions.
Melissa Harrison
Author of At Hawthorn Time
In a publishing year packed with brilliant writing, nothing stopped my heart quite like Howard Cunnell’s Fathers & Sons. A fragmentary but utterly lucid multigenerational memoir in which the experience of fatherhood and the demands of masculinity are delicately parsed from all possible angles, it stood out for me for the extraordinary quality of Cunnell’s prose: glancing, agile, heartsore, preternaturally perceptive and above all, tender. A unique, and uniquely beautiful, book.
Jon Day
Author of Cyclogeography
The most memorable book I read this year was Paul Fournel’s Anquetil, Alone, a short, memoiristic biography of the champion French road cyclist Jacques Anquetil, recently translated by Nick Caistor. Anquetil was a stylish cyclist with an eye-poppingly unusual love life; Fournel is a poet and keen cyclist (his essay “Need for the Bike” is one of the great works of cyclo-philosophy). He’s also president of Oulipo, the French literary group which advocates avant-garde techniques of constrained writing. But don’t let that put you off: Anquetil, Alone is a deft, moving, utterly compelling book, and a minor masterpiece.
Readers, what was your favourite book published this year and why? Tell us in 100 words or less by emailing weekend.readers@ft.com before Monday December 11 2018. We’ll publish a selection online
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