Books of the year: Start 2023 with these 2022 recommendations

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Terry-Ann Adams

One of the best things to come out of the Open Book Fest this year was a book exchange between me and fellow author Lester Walbrugh. I devoured Elton Baatjies, a truly South African crime novel, with the same appetite I had as a child. It is set in the Western Cape and gives you an intimate look into life in a dorpie. The crimes are well set up and researched, the characters are complex and the victims are human. I cannot wait for more from Walbrugh. His writing is deliciously South African, without pretence, and shines a light on the Coloured community and its struggles while critiquing its biases. Read Elton Baatjies.

Mia Arderne

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way by Alistair MacKay is set in dystopian Cape Town. This tale of doom and resilience follows three queer friends who must navigate climate collapse as their world unravels. The elite live in virtual reality while the masses toil under searing temperatures with almost no water. It’s an unrivalled commentary on class, late-stage capitalism and environmental destruction, prophetic in addressing our likely future. The representation of queer characters is vulnerable, tender and devastating. The writer does not shy away from the darkest sides of humanity’s apathy. The novel deals with enormously high stakes and the reader is left with a profound warning of our fragility and devolution. Bone-chilling as it is, it forces us, as does the title, to reimagine an alternate future. A crucial read.

Diane Awerbuck 

The most impressive read was Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat, which starts out being about sex and art, and ends up being about death and life after the pandemic. Reminiscent of Fugitive Pieces, it’s a book-length poem with zero structural weaknesses. Magnificent and true to the core. But my favourite read by far was Sarah Lotz’s Impossible, a love story with a terrible twist: the would-be lovers are so star-crossed that their lives bleed into another time-space continuum. This is a perfect novel —  consistently hilarious dialogue, humane characters, gargantuan themes in small spaces. Read it for Lotz’s blisteringly funny prose and the most wish-fulfilling ever after.

Tiah Beautement 

My Mess is a Bit of a Life by Georgia Pritchett found me when I needed it. I felt seen while reading the hilarious, heart-wrenching and brutally honest memoir by the Emmy Award-winning writer of Veep and Succession. Nobody has had it easy since 2020 and Pritchett’s story of living with anxiety is a soothing balm for the living wounded. Best of all, she built a successful career and a lovely family despite her fumbling path. It is comedy gold with razor-edged hope.

Efemia Chela 

I'd recommend Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories by Amilcar Cabral. It is a collection of interviews, official speeches and internal party directives from 1962 to 1973, written in the thick of the battle for independence of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. The author was a poet, agronomist and diplomat so his multifaceted approach to African freedom makes it a riveting read. Cabral's rousing declarations and elegant analyses call to us from nearly 50 years ago, yet feel contemporary as they address decolonisation, social progress and equality in South Africa and beyond.

Bruce Dennill

I think, weirdly, it was a coffee-table book: Obie Oberholzer's Happysadland: Southern African Stories. It's an important reminder of the poetry that exists in the South African experience, rather than just the impact of whatever is making headlines that week. Oberholzer sees the beauty — and melancholy — in the details and, visually and narratively, superbly communicates both. I think I see the world in a similar way, but I have some way to go before I can express my delight or distress as well as he does. Once you've read this book and taken in its photographic excellence, you can't help but understand what it is to feel “happysad”.

Sue Grant-Marshall

The Quality of Mercy by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu has all I look for in a book. Set in Africa, the prose is sparkling, original and exquisitely crafted. Through the eyes of police officer Spokes Moloi, The Quality of Mercy tells the history of an unspecified country and city (I guess Bulawayo) moving from colonial times to the present. Spokes is searching for a possibly dead, certainly vanished, white man. In doing so, he moves through city life, tribal villages, troubled marriages, misogyny, racial hatred and war. Topics Ndlovu treats with a sophisticated balance and even-handedness. Cruelty, glamour, high society and bustling rural life abound in a book bursting with characters that leap off the page. It’s a tale that makes you think ... then think again. Watch her, read her ... Ndlovu is headed for literary heights.

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Craig Higginson 

I recommend Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait. This novel is set in Florence in the 1560s and the protagonist is Lucrezia de Medici, who grows up in the Palazzo Vecchio, where Michelangelo’s “David” stands in the square beneath her bedroom window. At 13 she is forced into a politically motivated marriage with Alfonso d’Este. The novel is an account of their marriage and the marriage portrait of Lucrezia commissioned by her husband. Lucrezia is a gifted painter and the novel is a dialogue between life and art, and whether either was available even to a highly privileged young woman of the 16th century. Lucrezia famously died at 16 from tuberculosis, but many believe she was murdered by her husband. Like its cover, this novel is brightly coloured, full of life, danger and intrigue, and has a deeply moving and surprising ending.

Shaun Lunga 

Viola Davis’s memoir Finding Me is deeply felt and raw. The book is a reminder to show up for ourselves, live our dreams and take charge of our lives. Underpinned by its epic tale of revenge, Wahala, Nikki May’s debut novel is a darkly subversive modern take on family, friendship and culture. Okechukwu Nzelu’s sophomore novel Here Again Now is about three Igbo men living in Britain. Two are queer, the other is not. The novel is about the sudden death of one of them and the aftershocks of this tragic loss as the survivors are left to come to terms with each other and their grief. You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi’s is a romance glittering with luxury and opulence, an exploration of how love can be born from grief.

Michele Magwood 

My top title was Stolen Focus — Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari. This was a shock and a revelation. It's about the fragmentation of our minds amid the maelstrom of distractions coming at us constantly through social media. It's not Covid brain, it's not advancing years, we really are losing our ability to focus and media companies are cynically abetting it. Hari shows the dangerous effect this is having on global culture on a vast scale. The book starts with the annoyance of phone notifications and ends with a world threatened by civil collapse. He lays out practical ways of regaining deep attention spans and how we can learn to think deeply again. Life changing.

Tinyiko Maluleke

Like its cousin the biography, the memoir is a genre so popular it tends to attract many would-be authors with inflated egos who have exaggerated senses of achievement for themselves of their subjects. Flora Veit-Wild’s They Called You Dambudzo is one of the finest biographical memoirs I have read in a long time. When it comes to this genre, there no substitute for a thorough knowledge and awareness of the subject through trade and talent. Given her close relationship with her subject, Dambudzo Marechera, Veit-Wild writes intimately, yet with a stunning measure of objectivity. She does so in a passionate yet scholarly and refreshingly elegant manner that brings out Marechera, warts and all, sohis strengths and foibles are fully on display. This should be compulsory reading for wannabe writers, whether they wish to write their biographies, those of other people, or their own memoirs.

Wamuwi Mbao

Per Petterson's Men In My Situation is not, strictly speaking, a new book. It was originally published in Norway in 2018, but has been brought out in English, and it's good. If you can make it past the title (it's not the type of book you think it is), you'll enjoy this dark but compelling read about a man whose family decides it no longer need him. Arvid is a well-drawn main character whose sadness has deep roots. Petterson is great at capturing the texture of the internal tensions that pluck at family life. It's a tender and moving novel that is bracingly un-American and runs at its own pace.

Andrea Nagel

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen. There’s no-one who does modern domestic drama quite as well as Jonathan Franzen. Ian McEwan attempts the genre well in his latest novel, Lessons, but the book is indulgently long and painfully earnest. In fact, it’s boring. Franzen, on the other hand, with his deft writerly ability and supernatural knack for getting right into the heart of his characters turns the drab goings-on of family life into a technicolour masterpiece of human psychology projected onto the big screen of the mind’s eye — all with a light touch and sophisticated sense of humour. The novel is centred around a failing marriage with delicious past secrets and illicit sexual urges, all spiced up by the narcissism of a daughter, the dangerous drug abuse of a middle child and the lost idealism of an oldest son. Crossroads, though set in the American Midwest in the ’70s, grapples with the feelings, shortcomings, fantasies and dark sides we all have, whether we admit it or not.

Bill Nasson 

France: An Adventure History by Graham Robb isn’t what you’d call a conventional history of a country. Though it has 18 chronological chapters, starting with the ancient Gauls (a reminder of the hilarious Asterix & Obelix comics) right through to the mass-populist Gilets Jaunes' (“yellow vests”) protests of 2018, this entertaining book doesn’t attempt to cover the whole French story. So you won’t find yet another narrative account of the 1789 revolution or of the fall of France in 1940. Instead, Robb serves up vivid recreations of random episodes of absorbing interest, such as Napoleon’s peculiar relations with women, the many novelists killed in first World War battles and the cultural significance of the Tour de France. Lively, energetic and idiosyncratic, France makes you understand something of what it must have been like to have lived through one of its distinct moments. I can think of few other books that do a better job of combining place, atmosphere, history and explanation. What a refreshing 2022 antidote to South Africa: A history of Presidential Sofas and Cabinet Clowns.

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Nancy Richards

I wept through it and when I finished The Man who Loved Crocodile Tamers by Finuala Dowling, such is the emotion it evokes. A writer works with her father Paddy’s real-life story, the man who did indeed love an eccentric crocodile tamer (well, alligator actually) called Koringa, to produce a memorably crafted novel. It touches the tender nerve network of family and some shriekingly vivid entrail images of World War 2 battlefields in a tale that takes you into old schools and churches, hospitals and circus tents, advertising agencies, the streets of London, bars of Cape Town and even the downtrodden of Marseille. Most endearing are the interspersed heartfelt Fragments from a writer’s diary. This is a beautiful nugget of family legend, glistening with poet Dowling’s exquisitely turned phrases and hallmark huggable humour.

Bron Sibree 

Two unusual narratives vied for a permanent place in my heart. Sisters in Resistance, a non-fiction by Canadian historian Tilar Mazzeo, revealed a “hidden” history so gripping it reads like a brilliantly plotted spy novel. Horse, a novel by celebrated writer Geraldine Brooks, illuminates the “forgotten” history of America’s thriving mid-19th-century horseracing industry and the outsize role therein of enslaved black trainers and groomsmen. Sisters in Resistance gripped me from the get-go, deftly unspooling the story of how three unlikely women — Edda Mussolini, daughter of Italy’s Fascist dictator, an American housewife and a German spy — outwitted the Nazis. Even 70-plus years after World War 2, it’s spine-tingling to discover how these women risked all to ensure the infamous Ciano Diaries ended up as evidence at Nuremburg. Horse was, for me, a slower burn, peeling back the historical curtain in unexpected and measured ways, ultimately sheeting home the legacy of enslavement and racism in America.