As ever, I didn’t read as much as I wanted to in 2021 and, of course, I still haven’t finished Finnegans Wake. Here are a few more books I finished this year and the complete list is below.
A Lonely Man by Chris Power is a brilliant and ingeniously layered literary thriller. Like a postmodern Le Carre with much to say about what stories are ours to tell.
The Eighth Girl by Maxine Mei-Fung Chung has an interesting premise (a multiple-personality psychological thriller) but I found the writing clunky and cliched at times (the phrase ‘murder of crows’ appears twice). Great story though and I’ll be interested to see the TV adaptation if it comes to light.
I read Satan is Real in preparation for my interview with Wendy Erskine for Your Own Personal Beatles. Two brilliantly written and very disturbing short stories. I can’t wait to read Wendy’s new collection Dance Move which is published next year. When I spoke to Wendy she had just interviewed Paul Muldoon so I also read his latest collection of poems Howdie-Skelp, which is playful, inscrutable and surprisingly filthy. Muldoon of course edited the collection of Paul McCartney’s Lyrics this year so it was nice to see a mention of ‘Lovely Rita’ in the poem ‘An Item’.
Shappi Khorsandi also appeared on Your Own Personal Beatles this year and I absolutely loved her book A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English. Shappi writes so well from the point of view of a child and this memoir is a really extraordinary account of her family’s arrival in the UK following the Iranian Revolution in the late 70s.
Happy new year to you all – my resolution for next year is to only read one book at a time!
Here are all the other books I read in 2021:
Close to the Bone – Stuart MacBride The Death of Francis Bacon – Max Porter Asylum Road – Olivia Sudjic Girl A – Abigail Dean Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro The Dark is Rising – Susan Cooper Boy Parts – Eliza Clark My Phantoms – Gwendoline Riley (my book of the year) Delicacy: A Memoir about Cake and Death – Katy Wix What Belongs to You – Garth Greenwell No One is Talking about This – Patricia Lockwood Sweet Home – Wendy Erskine A Song for the Dark Times – Ian Rankin How to Write One Song – Jeff Tweedy The Last Landlady – Laura Thompson Acts of Desperation – Megan Nolan Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro Beautiful World, Where Are You? – Sally Rooney Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy Beatles ’66: The Revolutionary Year – Steve Turner The Beatles: The Authorised Biography – Hunter Davies

















