The Skinny's Books of 2022
So many books, so little time. Our writers tell us about some of their absolute favourite reads from this year – get your Christmas reading sorted here
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (Picador)
When a deep-sea expedition goes quietly and monstrously awry, marine researcher Leah returns to her wife Miri after too many months away, haunted and unnervingly changed. Julia Armfield’s debut novel is a masterclass in ecological horror, situating the human body as a site of palpable anxiety where supposed fixed boundaries of skin and tissue can give way to an indifferent and otherworldly breach. Building slow dread through the ever-so-slightly wrongness of things, Our Wives Under the Sea reads like the damp choke of salt water in the throat, the soft, heavy tangle of seaweed that drowns and drowns. [Anahit Behrooz]
Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova (Atlantic Books)
Camilla Grudova's debut novel, Children of Paradise, is a grotesque ode to the sticky depths of Edinburgh's beloved independent cinemas and the invisible workforce who lurk in their aisles after dark. It’s a croaked whisper from behind a red velvet curtain, haunting and darkly seductive, which grows louder as the hallucinatory world of the Paradise, the eponymous cinema of the novel’s Gothic happenings, begins to unravel.
Through desperate acts of subversion, the underpaid workers writhe against the repulsive monotony of their jobs, only to find themselves surveilled and under threat as tragedy propels the cinema’s absorption by a corporate monolith. Above all, it's a tale of precarity – of arts institutions and labourers, and of how these pockets of eccentricity can be gouged out of a city by an uncaring market – one which has felt all the more relevant in Scotland since its publication. [Paula Lacey]
there are more things by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (Fleet)
Yara Rodrigues Fowler’s there are more things is a political novel rooted in power and cemented in hope. Set in present London during a time of austerity, the hostile environment, and rising fascism, it illuminates the possibilities of direct action and community-led mobilisation against a failing system of capitalism and climate destruction.
It follows the political awakening of its two young protagonists, Melissa and Catarina. Not only are they linked by the city of London, but also through shared Brazilian heritage and connections to the country’s turbulent history; a history that is given its own timeline to show how guerilla activists worked to combat the 1960s dictatorship that reigned over Brazil. As both narratives move forward, Rodrigues Fowler begins to highlight history repeating itself, but more importantly how direct action can and has been used to overcome the very systems meant to rob us of our right to hope. [Andrés Ordorica]
Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong (Jonathan Cape)
Ocean Vuong’s second poetry collection Time Is a Mother is a gorgeous, moving and awe-inspiring gathering of poems that feel like award-winning short films. These vignettes of loss, grief and love will take your breath away, and getting the chance to experience life as Vuong sees it will change the way you see the world around you. Running through the poems is the immutable loss of his mother, themes of family, memory and belonging, and subtle nature motifs – rain, water, snow and thunder colour the landscape. “We’ll only live once this time”, he writes. Yes, we will – and his collection will help us savour all the little, beautiful, otherwise forgotten moments of life along the way. [Nasim Rebecca Asl]
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Chatto & Windus)
Utterly beautiful and endlessly hopeful, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a love letter to life, friendship, and creativity in all its joy and pain. It follows Sam, Sadie, and Marx, who go from being ambitious college students to successful game developers through the 1990s and 2000s. Their triumphs, failures, tragedies and grief – even after becoming stars in their field – are felt so keenly that it seems bizarre that they aren’t real people.
The novel is so carefully and thoughtfully constructed that reading it feels like an invitation from Zevin to enter a game, to play. Every moment has layers of meaning, and there are references within references, where she pulls inspiration from poetry, music, art, novels, films. It’s an ambitious, magnificent jewel of a book, and one that will live within its reader for a long time. [Sim Bajwa]
Illustrations by Nänni-Pää