Thought Box

Books to read in the New Year

Books to read in the New Year

by Shruthi Venkatesh January 2 2019, 5:30 pm Estimated Reading Time: 3 mins, 35 secs

Here is a list of must-read fiction and non-fiction coming out in the year 2019.

Non-Fiction – 2019

The very first on the list stands Julia Blackburn’s Time Song: Searching for Doggerland where the author tells the story of the huge, fertile plain that once connected the east of England with mainland Europe using a singular combination of memoir, verse and story. This work is expected to be charming and strange in every single bit.  Diarmaid Ferriter’s The Border is a must read.  The work presents the Irish historian charts, the history of the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic from the 1920s to the present day. Another of such genre comes the Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem by Francis Green and David Kynaston which describes the educational system and its effect on both social mobility and democracy.

The library book (The Guardian)

This year, some books are expected to be based on feminism aftermath the effects of #MeToo. In regard to such category, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez will reveal how the world continues to be designed by men, for men. Similarly, The Gendered Brain by the neuroscientist Gina Rippon, in which she will debunk once and for all the various stereotypes and dumb assumptions we have about the ways men and women think. The digital world also takes a role in The Library Book by Susan Orlean. Here, Orlean, the journalist best known for her bestseller The Orchid Thief, became fascinated by a fire that destroyed 400,000 books in the city’s public library in 1986. Her efforts to tell the story of libraries everywhere and to examine what we are losing as these institutions struggle to redefine themselves in the age of Google stands as the main plot.

Fiction – 2019

David Nicholls has shown his adaptation as his best in Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose series which was the best thing on TV this year. Nicholls publishes a new novel, Sweet Sorrow, a sun-drenched portrait of young love. Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again is a prize-winner and picks up where its popular predecessor left off. There’s also a new novel from John Lanchester, The Wall which is set in a dystopian Britain under siege from the others. Written in chilling, affectless prose, the novel is smart, speculative fiction from one of our most brilliantly wide-ranging minds. Nicola Rayner has written the new The Girl on the Train, although her novel also features on perfect prose, the climax will leave one stunned. It is indeed an addictive sensation. If one is looking out for a 900-page novel in a single sentence then the following are the best reads. Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport - a wildly ambitious and righteously angry portrait of contemporary America. Ali Smith follows up Winter with Spring as her up-to-the-minute seasonal portraits of Britain pass the halfway point. Slack-Tide by Elanor Dymott is about a love that arrives unbidden in the wake of a tragedy. It is said to be beautifully written.

(the guardian)

Alex Preston the award winning author subjects three novels which are eligible for prizes and praise this year. Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf - an astonishing novel – an African Game of Thrones that must have TV execs in a hot lather to adapt it. Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock is a multilayered masterpiece. Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing With Feathers has an extraordinary ability to get under the reader’s skin and his story of a peculiar child written in prose that thrums with rhythm and life.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a novelist said that “for a country to have a great writer is like having another government – and while 2019 looks as if it will bring yet more political mayhem, we can at least comfort ourselves with a splendid line-up of fiction to get us through the dark days ahead.”




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