The List: authors’ and critics’ best books of 2019

Welcome to our annual wrap-up of the books our writers and critics took a shine to in 2019.

The best books of 2019.

JAMES BRADLEY, author and critic

Three of my favourite books of 2019 were connected in one way or another with this year’s Man Booker Prize, one by winning, two by missing out, in one case on the prize, in the other on the shortlist. Of the three, my two favourites are probably Max ­Porter’s Lanny and Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. The follow-up to Porter’s wrenching Grief is the Thing with Feathers, the deceptively slim Lanny is a work of exhilarating precision and great emotional power, not just in its language, but in its ear for vernacular language. By contrast, Ellman’s opus is just a handful of sentences that run to more than 1000 pages, a looping, joyously parenthetical excursion through the mind of an American housewife and the anxieties and absurdities of our historical moment. The book that beat it, Bernardine Evaristo’s energetic and generous chronicle of the complexities of black life in Britain, Girl, Woman, Other, is also a delight, effortlessly leaping across decades and class divides. I also hugely admired Horizon, Barry Lopez’s magisterial attempt to draw together the events and experiences that have shaped his life and writing. Closer to home, I adored Lucy Treloar’s Wolfe Island, a novel that deserves to become one of the classics of the new wave of books grappling with the human and political effects of the crisis of climate change.

Lucy Ellmann’s Booker Prize short-listed Ducks, Newburyport

PETER CAREY, author

Hisham Matar has come to Siena, he says, to look at paintings, and he even reproduces them so we can stand beside him. But A Month in Siena is so much more than this. It is an exquisitely structured coda to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Return. This is actually the work he has just finished when he arrives in Siena, where he must finally confront the fact that he will never see his father in this life. What a jewel this is, driven by desire, grief, yearning, loss, illuminated by hope, the kindness of strangers continually making tribute to the delicacy and grace of the Arab home the author lost so many years ago. Hernan Diaz can spin plates and crack walnuts at the same time. His dazzling novel, In the Distance, is a continually unsettling reinvention of American landscape. He offers the treasure of that weird alienated understanding that comes from being a foreigner with roots in Argentina, Sweden and, of course, New York. Then there is a superb nonfiction work that is as engrossing and surprising as a good novel. The title says all you need to know — Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. The author is Patrick Radden Keefe.

SIMON CATERSON, writer and critic

It has been a wonderful reading year for innovative, intelligent and passionate nonfiction. Four books in particular were outstanding — A New History of the Irish in Australia by Elizabeth Malcolm and Dianne Hall, Escape from Earth: A Secret History of the Space Rocket by Fraser MacDonald, Lars Svendsen’s Understanding Animals, and Almost Human: A Biography of Julius the Chimpanzee by Alfred Fidjestøl. Each of these books presents a genuinely fresh way of looking at a topic we may feel is familiar. They moved me. So often a book of the year could be the one we are reading right now that has taken possession of our imagination. At the time of writing I am reading Grant Fowlds’s compelling memoir, Saving the Last Rhinos: The Life of a Frontline Conservationist. Fowlds (with co-author Graham Spence) adds substantially to the growing body of books and documentary films exposing the mind-numbingly cruel war on African wildlife. We are witness to the rapid extermination of the remaining populations of iconic animals whose sole existential threat — and therefore their only hope — is us humans.

MIRIAM COSIC, writer and critic

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff is an enlightening and terrifying analysis of where we are, written by a Harvard Business School professor emerita. Economic and social inequalities have reverted to the pre-industrial ‘‘feudal” pattern, but we haven’t. This is existential toothpaste that can’t be squeezed back into the tube. The polemic Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, by firebrand Egyptian-American feminist Mona Eltahawy, will be an eye-opener to anyone who doubts the need for feminism in our time but would like to learn about the varying degrees of horror in women’s subjugation worldwide, from the pay gap to the use of rape as a weapon of war. David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends argues that the success of democracy relies primarily on trust in institutions such as free elections, free speech and binding contracts, and prosperity, which thrives on stability and peace. Runciman, a ­political scientist, describes the decline of both. I binged Emma Viskic’s first two novels about deaf investigator Caleb Zelic earlier this year and am reading the latest, Darkness for Light, as I write. The diversity of Viskic’s world is not political correctness but life as it’s lived. The writing is gripping, the twists unforeseeable and the denouements shocking.

PETER CRAVEN, writer and critic

Among classics I read Bleak House and Hard Times by Dickens, though the former overshadows the latter. Thomas Mann’s Genesis of a Novel superbly mediates between memoir and criticism. Antonia Fraser’s Mary Queen of Scots is narrative history with a brilliance of colouration. Adam ­Sisman’s Hugh Trevor-Roper is about as good as ­biography gets and Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler very vividly veers between history of sombre weight and vivid journalism. I reread the Book of Job, the starkest and most tragic of all biblical visions, in old translations, and the Acts of the Apostles and St Paul’s epistles in the King James, as a preliminary to Christos Tsiolkas’s disturbing and powerful ­Damascus. The late Australian poet Robert Harris has a strong Selected that includes his masterpiece, Jane Interlinear. Guy Rundle’s essays, Practice, full of mercy and humour for all their radicalism, are among the finest things this country has produced. JM Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus is the culmination of the masterwork of a sequence characterised by the power of its vision and the poignancy of its articulation, the work of a supreme master. Salman Rushdie’s Don Quichotte, the Cervantean title a gesture rather than a necessary hypothesis, is the best thing he has written in 30 years. Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook is a taste of the dazzling diary that constitutes her life’s work. Hilary ­McPhee’s Other People’s Houses is a beautifully poised memoir-cum-thriller by the notable publisher, who is enthralled and in some sense imprisoned by her vision of the Middle East. Elton John’s Me is a ribald feast of anecdote and wisdom, self-revelation and naked dishing of the dirt. The last volume of Charles Moore’s authorised life of Margaret Thatcher is grand, monumental and unsurpassable. Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust is the scintillating saga of the greatest storyteller of his generation.

Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume 1 1978-1987

TRENT DALTON, journalist and author

I’ve been diving deep into a world of fiction in my own writing this year and diving into brutal fact with my reading. Matthew Condon’s The Night Dragon explores one of Queensland’s most notorious killers and the crime world he crawled about in. Block out a week to read it because you’ll read it in one day and you won’t sleep for the following six. Three other standout works of epic longform journalism were Jess Hill’s microscopic investigation into our national domestic abuse crisis See What You Made Me Do; Dan Box’s Bowraville, a harrowing extension of the excellent podcast he made for The Australian; and David Leser’s Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing. But maybe the books on my shelf that mattered most to me this year were the ones that helped me farewell and remember two giants of Australian writing: Learning Human by Les Murray and Sentenced to Life by Clive James.

GREGORY DAY, author, poet and critic

Great books require a deliberated, as opposed to a momentary, Twitter-style courage. Two of the best examples this year were Hilary McPhee’s Other People’s Houses and Robert MacFarlane’s Underland. MacFarlane’s descent in Underland sees him as intrepid and descriptively brilliant as ever while offering a ­hi-res scan of our human impact on the bowels of the Earth. A chastening, claustrophobic, thrilling book to read, it must have been quite terrifying to research and write. McPhee’s Other People’s Houses is framed by the remarkable inside story of how a friendship at school in Colac led to her literary collaboration with Prince Hassan of Jordan. This makes for a fascinating and rather glamorous tale of geopolitical intrigue. The real story though is of how McPhee reconstructs herself body and soul after emotional and physical devastation. Exquisitely written and emotionally raw, Other People’s Houses is also a flinty and naturally feminist memoir in which men are never glibly objectified. And for such an intensely physical book it holds a rare metaphysical potency. It’s surely destined to become a classic of Australian life-writing.

Robert MacFarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey

HELEN ELLIOTT, writer and critic

Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend is profound, sophisticated, searching. Three old friends who love one another spend the weekend clearing out the house of their fourth friend, who has died. There’s a dog called Finn to send a chilly reminder about the facts of ageing. An effortless, brilliant novel. There Was Still Love by Favel Parrett is a tender exploration of what it means to lose your home and country, to never be able to settle. Based on Parrett’s Czech grandparents, who came to live in Melbourne, and her great aunt, who stayed in Prague after 1945, it offers lovely portraits of ordinary men and women and the children who loved them. Kathy O’Shaughnessy’s In Love With George Eliot, the debut novel from an excellent literary journalist, covers Eliot’s intimate life and friendships and loves in those high Victorian times when the world looked explainable and perfectible. More than any biography, or letters, this novel suggests the authentic nature of an extraordinary woman. I normally dislike recreations but adored this. Regarding Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, it’s enough to say that the judges got it right. Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble is a marriage-in-strife novel from New York. Gone Girl without being a thriller. Two versions of a marriage and always unexpected. Also very funny. Yellow Notebook, Helen Garner’s diaries from 1978-1987, is a rich insight into what it means to be an artist. Not just a writer but any kind of artist where the pull of the work surpasses everything else. Reading these snatches of life being lived is like being given a painting you love gleaming with the still-wet paint.

Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

DELIA FALCONER, author

My favourite novel this year was Ali Smith’s Spring, the third in her bravura Seasonal Quartet. Although I didn’t love it as much as my favourite, Winter, it is another layered miracle of humour, anger, wit and heart, ranging across art, film, friendship, grieving and the neoliberal institutions of Brexit-era Britain, including its detention centres. My bet is that Smith’s seasonal novels, each charged with a peculiar energy by being written over four months, will rank among the important literary achievements of the early century. Among this year’s nonfiction, I admired British nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, a pilgrimage through the world’s underground spaces, including karst rivers, catacombs and salt mines stretching far below the North Sea, which is also an exploration of deep time. As claustrophobia- ­inducing as it is mind-expanding in asking us to think beyond our narrow human timeframe, this is, for me, Macfarlane’s best book so far. While I’ve been dubious about the posthumous Oliver Sacks industry, Lawrence Weschler’s richly detailed memoir, And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?, is a treasure. Concentrated on the early 1980s phase of a 30-year friendship, it depicts a ratbaggy, conflicted, ambitious, though still immensely likeable Sacks; a refreshing corrective to cuddlier recent portraits. I was also galvanised by American poet and essayist Anne Boyer’s The Undying, an excoriating and distilled philosophical exploration of serious illness that is also an eloquent indictment of a health system, where for the poorly insured, a double mastectomy is day surgery. Boyer writes herself back into life, not as a compliant and grateful victim, but as a fiercely sharp critic of the forms of medicine, and storytelling, that have been forced upon her as a precariously employed single mother. “I would rather write nothing at all,” she states, “than propagandise for the world as it is.”

Spring, by Ali Smith.

ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE, author and critic

Having immersed myself in exquisitely eccentric nonfiction all year, I did not expect to be as moved as I was by Aleksandr Pushkin’s 1825 verse-novel, Eugene Onegin. The faintly antiquated devices employed — the jaded narrator, the forgiving iambic ­tetrameter — fail to detract from Pushkin’s compelling narrative of his eponymous protagonist, an unpleasant, affectively flattened aristocrat, the archetypal “superfluous man”, and Tatyana, the woman who loves him. Her rich and nuanced feelings bring his emotional poverty into high relief. Touched by her honesty when she confesses her love, Onegin is unable to transcend the issue of class differences, and dismisses her, if delicately. Onegin’s insistence on form over sincerity, symbolising his own spiritual deadening, reaches its apotheosis when he fatally shoots his romantic, tender-hearted poet friend Vladimir in a duel. When, years later at a Moscow ball, Onegin sees Tatyana, transformed by an advantageous marriage into a “cold, aloof Princess” and “unapproachable goddess”, he is mesmerised. He shadows her, hoping to fracture her composure. Her response, which determined the template for countless fictional Russian heroines, has lost none of its disquieting power. A masterpiece.

GIDEON HAIGH, journalist and author

My life can roughly be divided between the period before I heard The Fall’s 1982 album, Hex Enduction Hour, and the years since: a pub crawl this year through the favourite Manchester hostelries of the band’s lead singer, Mark E. Smith, was the perfect prelude to the Old Trafford Ashes Test match. So nothing so captivated me recently as Have a Bleedin Guess, a track-by-track, slice-by-slice memoir cum analysis of Hex by one of the ­record’s twin drummers, Paul Hanley, then a schoolboy roped in because brother Steve was playing bass. It’s wonderfully anorakish: the production, the engineering, the instruments, the allusions to Wyndham Lewis, HP Lovecraft, Kris Kristofferson, Norman Mailer and Crossroads et al, the influences on the cover art, sleeve notes and vinyl pressing. But it’s also a fine insight into the impulses and dynamics of artistic collaboration, the magic that arises from a disparate group of people mysteriously attuned to one another. Of course, like the best such writing, it turns you back to the record — not that I’ve ever been far from it

ALEX MILLER, novelist

Fiona Harari’s We are Here: Talking with Australia’s Oldest Holocaust Survivors is a deeply moving collection that sits alongside Jacob Rosenberg’s 2007 masterpiece, East of Time, and Kitia Altman’s 2012 Memories of Ordinary People as a brilliantly readable example of Holocaust writings. My grandchildren are reading it and are absorbed by it. Harari’s interest is in the living, the precious memories of those who are still with us from that other world. The award-winning journalist and author of two previous books reminds us who we are as Australians and how we came to inhabit this culture of ours: “From 1946 to 1961, 27,000 Jewish survivors migrated to Australia, more than doubling the size of the country’s pre-war community, and irrevocably infusing it with a Central European character.” The young, as well as the old, are hungry to be informed about who they are as Australians. Harari’s book is a richly valuable source of cultural understanding for our own and the generations that are to follow us. It is a necessary book, in which the truth of our history remains alive and immediate.

LOUIS NOWRA, playwright and screen writer

Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir, The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood, Youth and Dependency, is a marvellous and, at times, hugely unsettling read. Sydney Art Deco by Peter Sheridan is a sumptuous and definitive study. I regard Lydia Davis’s stories as a supreme achievement in contemporary American literature. Her recent Essays are as intriguing and witty as her fictions. Judd Apatow’s It’s Garry Shandling’s Book is a mammoth and fitting tribute to the comic genius who created It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and The Larry Sanders Show. It’s a must for every fan.

THUY ON, Big Issue books editor

My two favourite books this year are, in different ways, all about the nuances and subtleties of language. Their authors are preoccupied with the semantics and physical shape of words respectively. Amanda Montell’s Wordslut, subtitled “A feminist guide to taking back the language”, is a fascinating, sassy and comprehensive sociolinguistic survey of the correlation between gendered language and societal values, and how, so much of the time, and without speakers and readers even realising, English is innately, historically sexist. Montell argues that a more inclusive and expansive linguistic future starts with those of us who agitate for gender equality reflecting those beliefs with our language choices. Despite the weighty topic and the vast research, the book is accessible and provocative. Nick Gadd’s Death of a ­Typographer is a romp of a novel. It’s a witty and playful quasi-detective fiction that’s populated by a motley crew of obsessives who swoon or grimace at particular letterforms. Gadd’s endearingly oddball characters ride on a narrative full of typographical jokes and exotic locations. You’ll never look at fonts again without appreciating their idiosyncrasies after reading this book.

GEOFF PAGE, author, poet and critic

This was another rich year for Australian poetry. In my reading, four collections stand out from a strong field. The first is Lisa Gorton’s Empirical. Again we have the care, the thoughtfulness, the calm attention to detail, the sense of being unhurried that her readers have come to expect. Its high point is Royal Park, a minutely detailed account of the area and the uses it has been put to since Batman included it in his “treaty” with the Kulin people. The second is Andy Kissane’s The Tomb of the Unknown Artist. Kissane is unfailingly empathetic, a master of poetic narrative — and of the “middle style” where language is not an end in itself but an unobtrusive vehicle for poignancy (and, occasionally, ­humour or irony). The third is Penelope Layland’s Things I’ve Thought To Tell You Since I Saw You Last. It bristles with poems asking to be quoted, among them “Timor mortis conturbat me”, which begins: “Faith is most faint / in this house before dawn. / A sigh might extinguish it.” The last is Philip Neilsen’s Wildlife of Berlin. Neilsen is one of a diminishing breed of Australian poets whose poems are always incisive and tightly focused. Often witty, but poignant too, they unfailingly leave a distinct imprint on the emotions.

LIAM PIEPER, writer and critic

No book better captures the absurdity of life in 2019 than Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is In Trouble, a hilarious New York City picaresque of post-divorce app-assisted sexual liberation/mystery novel. A worthy, and considerably less creepy, heir to Philip Roth. Max Porter’s Lanny gave us a heartbreaking fable of Brexit-era England that fuses fantasy, poetry and deep humanism into a profound, heartbreaking and truly unique book. Closer to home, The Yield by Tara June Winch is a celebration of Wiradjuri language and culture, eloquently exploring land, memory, intergenerational trauma and home, while Josephine Rowe’s Here Until August offers a masterclass in the short story. Conversely, Alexander Chee’s collected non-fiction, How To Write an Autobiographical Novel, approaches the epitome of what can be done in a personal essay. Witty, wry, wise, breathtakingly sad. Last, but far from least, Christos Tsiolkas’s Damascus — profane, profound, peerless. 

FELICITY PLUNKETT, poet and critic

Michelle de Kretser’s On Shirley Hazzard offers an intimate and vibrant consideration of Hazzard’s work. Max Porter describes the jagged lyric slivers of Denise Riley’s exploration of atemporality and mourning, Time Lived, Without its Flow, as “burnished to the point of poetic intensity”. Charmaine Papertalk Green’s Nganajungu Yagu begins with a “red journey suitcase” of letters between the teenage poet and her mother, expanding into an innovative poetic witnessing of language, culture and loss, while Alice Oswald’s magnificent long poem, Nobody, swims between stories from The Odyssey, its “windblown, water-damaged” voice imagining humanity’s smallness against the sea. The “infinity of repetitions” of memory, ekphrasis and haunting comprising Lisa Gorton’s mobile and marvellous Empirical also work between fracture and repair. In fiction, Ali Smith’s exhilarating Spring continues her virtuosic, urgent seasonal quartet. Elliott Perlman’s lopingly paced Maybe the Horse will Talk investigates corporate corruption and pulses with hope, while Carrie Tiffany’s Exploded View limns a child’s brave, solitary resistance in the face of adult violence. I had the joy of launching Amanda O’Callaghan’s stories, This Taste For Silence — acute, tender and wry studies of curled secrets and their disclosure.

STEPHEN ROMEI, literary editor

I’m on leave, so here is an alphabetical, comment-free list of the 10 best books I read in the past 12 months: Allowed To Grow Old: Portraits of Elderly Animals from Farm Sanctuaries, by Isa ­Leshko; A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina, by Paul Kane; Bruny, by Heather Rose; Damascus, by Christos Tsiolkas; Lanny, by Max Porter; Grief is a Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter; The Chain, by Adrian McKinty; The Death of Jesus, by JM Coetzee; The ­Illustrated Encyclopedia of Ugly Animals, by Sami Bayly; The Weekend, by Charlotte Wood.

Damascus by Christos Tsiolkas.

MANDY SAYER, author and critic

The Offing by Benjamin Myers is narrated from the point of view of a 16-year-old boy who, after the end of World War II, sets out on foot from his Durham village and walks across the countryside to the coast. There he meets an eccentric and well-read ­recluse who will change his life irrevocably. A lyrical salute to the ravishing beauty of the natural world. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee, recently reissued in the Penguin Classics series, is a rollicking account of the author’s experiences of leaving his Cotswold village in 1933, also as a teenager, and walking through Spain for a year, with just a blanket to sleep under and his violin to play on the streets for a few meagre coins each day. Brimming with feisty, hilarious characters and breathtaking evocations of the changing landscape, this slim volume is a little diamond among the bland rocks of more recent writings about travel. At Last by Edward St Aubyn is the final instalment of the Patrick Melrose series of novels, blackly funny and studded with awful, painful, eternal truths. Framed by the memorial service of his appalling and melodramatic mother, it is a bravura marriage of exquisite prose style and plot.

GRETCHEN SHIRM, writer and critic
Anyone who questions the value of intensely personal fiction in tumultuous times ought to read Vigdis Hjorth’s novel, Will and Testament (translated by Charlotte Barslund). Hjorth is a Norwegian author who draws on her family’s inheritance dispute, and the uncomfortable truths that emerge following her father’s death. She has drawn superficial comparisons to Karl Ove Knausgaard, though she is less concerned with subjectivity as an end in itself, bringing in concepts from Freud and using examples from the Balkans conflict to illuminate human behaviour. Ultimately, Will and Testament is engaged with the idea of whether there is such a thing as shared truth. This year I discovered Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich. Last Witnesses (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) provides an electrifying account of World War II through the testimony of adults who were children at the time. The narratives are dreamlike, the memories frozen in time, as Alexievich’s witnesses use childlike language to recount brutally adult events. On the home front, I was quietly hypnotised by Carrie Tiffany’s Exploded View, a short but powerful work that uses the extended metaphor of car mechanics to craft a novel that reads like a poem. Peggy Frew’s discontinuous narrative, Islands, was also impressive, with some of the entries demonstrating a nuance worthy of Alice Munro.

BEEJAY SILCOX, writer and critic

Writing from the cacophonous chaos of Cairo, the novels I relished in 2019 drew me back to Australian shores. My reading year began gloriously with Kristina Olsson’s Shell. As the radical silhouette of the Opera House takes shape in Sydney Harbour, Jørn Utzon’s divisive building becomes a scapegoat for the ­nation’s ills — a symbol of that ever-present Australian tension between aspiration and comfort. A novel as sinuous and edged as the building it inhabits. Charlotte Wood’s sixth novel, The Weekend, which I had the pleasure to review for these pages, was a simmering triumph. The air crackles in this novel — alive with summer heat, insect thrum and the palpable tension of a disintegrating friendship. But the book I have pressed into the most hands this year is Ahmet Altan’s I Will Never See This World Again. Smuggled out of prison in feverish instalments, the Turkish writer’s account of his censorious, Kafkaesque detention is a love letter to the imagination. “You can imprison me but you cannot keep me in prison,” he writes. “Because, like all writers, I have magic. I can pass through walls with ease.” Ahmet was released on November 6; eight days later, he was rearrested.

DIANE STUBBINGS, writer and critic

I loved Kevin Barry’s Night Boat To Tangier, a crime caper whose lineage draws in John Banville, Martin McDonagh and Samuel Beckett. Moving seamlessly between comedy and deeply felt drama, Barry writes with honesty, insight and a lyricism that is both robust and hypnotic. Two books about writers impressed. Fiona Sampson’s In Search of Mary Shelley explores connections between Shelley’s life and her writing. Generously argued, Sampson’s work offers valuable insights into the ways in which experience weaves itself into the act of creation. Olivia Laing takes Virginia Woolf as her focus in To The River. Part memoir, part paean to the natural world and the history it encompasses, To The River sees Laing discovering not merely a new perspective on her own life but a more intimate attachment to Woolf and her oeuvre. But far and away the best book I read this year — this century even — is Lucy Ellmann’s funny, frightening and incredibly addictive Ducks, Newburyport. There is a wonderful tension between the novel’s protracted length — the central character’s long, long stream-of-consciousness — and the Twitter-like ­factoids, perceptions and diversions of which that stream is comprised. Ellmann encapsulates existence in the 21st century, its dimensions and its contours, while offering an intense portrait of motherhood, of mothering and of being mothered, and of “the fact that sometimes you feel just a microsecond of pure happiness, in between all the burdens of survival and all”.

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood.

LOUISE SWINN, writer and critic

Nicola Redhouse’s Unlike the Heart is a forensic and smart deep-dive into anxiety, psychoanalysis, genetics and family. The honesty of this incredibly humane memoir really illuminates the downright murky workings of the brain with such an intelligent touch. Redhouse is an incredibly fine and assured stylist too. Another one I just couldn’t put down was Patrick deWitt’s French Exit. It’s hard to write genuinely funny stories but this mother-and-son tale made me smile all the way through. Fabulously entertaining — I ignored Netflix for it. Mandy Ord’s When One Person Dies the Whole World is Over is a graphic novel page-to-day diary of a year and it reminded me of Heidi Julavits’ excellent The Folded Clock. It’s a delicately complex work of great emotional restraint and I became incredibly invested in the intricacies of Ord’s life. I did not want the year to be over. I loved Another Planet by Everything but the Girl frontwoman Tracey Thorn, the follow-up to her Bedsit Disco Queen. Her anthropological musings on growing up and suburbia and how to live are fascinating, and she is such a clear and thoughtful writer, a joy to spend time with.

ROBYN WALTON, writer and critic

I love what books can teach me, and I love how excellently written prose lifts my spirits. JM Coetzee’s tough-minded Age of Iron tests our notions of fairness and charity. It stayed in my mind long after I first read it, and I’ve just bought a copy of Text’s reissue. Mike McCormack in his Solar Bones performed that brilliant feat of poetically circling farther and farther outward into the Irish community from a prosaic starting point, the kitchen table, while Anna Burns’s Milkman took me into the strange and funny difficulties of existing in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Elizabeth Strout not only writes fine prose founded in her insights into seemingly ordinary Americans but finds more to say when she revisits. I belatedly admired her Anything is Possible this year and plan to get me a copy of her latest follow-up ­fiction, Olive, Again. Of the non-fiction crime-writing that came my way in 2019, Dan Box’s Bowraville stood out for its first-hand observations, its detail, and the challenge it issues to all investigators and those who fund them to be thorough and non-discriminatory. In crime fiction, I read Joanna Baker for the first time, finding in The Slipping Place an engaging plot set within astutely observed social strata in Hobart.

ASHLEIGH WILSON, author and editor

Only one writer has changed the way I read this year. While most books bring with them a certain forward momentum — Adrian McKinty’s The Chain, perhaps, or Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble, or the two journalistic accounts about Harvey Weinstein (one by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the other by Ronan Farrow), or even Charlotte Wood’s masterful novel, The Weekend — Max Porter offers a different experience. While reading Lanny, Porter’s glorious chorus of voices, I found myself slowing down, trying to extend my time with these pages. Lanny is a gripping story, but this was about savouring every moment, every phrase, every image, every inflection. This is of course the sort of response that one associates more with poetry, but Porter, as his many devoted readers know, conjures a world all of his own. Which is why, after Lanny, I turned to his 2015 book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, and slowed down to that gentle pace once again.

Lanny, by Max Porter.

GERARD WINDSOR, author and critic

Paul Lynch’s Grace begins in Donegal in 1845 when a peasant woman realises the man in her life is eyeing off Grace, her 10-year-old daughter. She butchers the child’s hair, dresses her as a boy, and casts her out. The Great Famine is about to strike Ireland. Could any history match Lynch’s evocation of this catastrophe. The immense and paradoxical achievement of his novel is that he uses the most lyrical, imaginative language and freshness of metaphor to convey the horror of the famine, unsparing in its effects on the bodies, minds and moral sense of its victims. Grace is a confronting and magical book. Instead of rendering Christianity as an object of piety or vilification, Meredith Lake’s The Bible in Australia presents a compelling case for the impact of biblical ideas and language on Australia’s values and national mentality. Comprehensive and neutral, it deserves the multiple prizes it has won. An orphaned Iraqi refugee driving through Sydney’s Redfern feels a bump and thinks he might have hit someone. He becomes obsessed with finding out if he has, and making reparation. John Hughes’s novella, No One, a parable about responsibility and guilt, is nuanced and unsettling. And so often a Hughes sentence is a gem of both beauty and profundity. The Lynch is 2017, the Lake 2018, the Hughes 2019.

ED WRIGHT, writer and critic

In poetry, I’ve really enjoyed Chloe Wilson’s Not Fox Nor Axe, MTC Cronin’s God is Waiting in the World’s Yard, and Duncan Hose’s scurrilous The Jewelled Shillelagh. I also went back to TS Eliot. It’s wonderfully strange; what got me was the humour and the musicality, as if the phrases were singing in your head. I also reread much of Les Murray’s wonderful Collected Poems and was reminded of his greatness in the year he left us. I had the pleasure of meeting the Indian writer Tishani Doshi this year. Doshi’s novel, Small Days and Nights, as well as the powerful poetry contained in the collection Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods are superb. My novel of the year, however, was Ceridwen Dovey’s Garden of the Fugitives. Her exploration of character is superb. Madelaine Dickie’s Red Can Origami, set in the Kimberley, has a special quality that has ­lingered. Rick Morton’s memoir, One Hundred Years of Dirt, is a fantastic account of a difficult upbringing. I’m a sucker for ­big-picture history and ­Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari really hit the spot.