With just a few weeks left of 2022 I’m taking a look at my favourite books of the year.

As with previous yearly round-ups, I’m breaking my end of year list down into three posts: best from the 746, best newly published books (or new to me), and best books by Irish authors.

Which is really just a cheeky way of having a Top 15 Books of the Year, rather than a Top 10!

Today I am starting with the books I’ve enjoyed most from the original 746. I finally reached the halfway point in my mammoth reading challenge this year and read some blinders.

The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor

I enjoyed this book so much that it gave me the idea to run A Year with William Trevor alongside Kim at Reading Matters next year. At the heart of this slim novel, set in the seaside town of Dynmouth, is a fabulous creation in fifteen-year old Timothy Gedge, an awkward, insinuating boy who spends his time hanging around the town and watching its residents in a manner which is often just a little too close for comfort. The Children of Dynmouth is masterpiece of understatement and tension and a skilfully written character study, which was a deserving winner of the Whitbread Prize and a place on the Booker Prize shortlist in 1976.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

What a book to kick off my 20 Books of Summer challenge this year! Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is one of the best collections of short stories that I have read in a long time. His unsentimental, often brutal yet always brilliant stories lay bare the lives of ordinary people, all trying to do the right thing is a world of alienation and hopelessness. Written with a vividness, humour and sharp wit that bring the reader immediately to the heart of the protagonist’s experience, these stories turn on moments of quiet self-realisation or a creeping sense of unexpected dread.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

I was blown away by thisbeautifully affecting novel, in which Michael Cunningham uses Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway as a springboard to explore a day in the lives of three very different women, all of whom are linked in some way to that book. The Hours is a thoughtful, deeply satisfying novel that doesn’t hit one false note and beautifully explores how our lives are given meaning not by what we have achieved, or failed to achieve, but by the moments of happiness that signified hope, if only for an hour.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

I read this while on holiday in Crete earlier in the year and relished every beautiful and brutal page. Lonesome Dove is an epic in every sense of the word and I’m grateful to Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running and Working From Home, whose Larry McMurtry Project 2022 gave me the impetus to finally read this doorstopper of a Western. Lonesome Dove is a fabulous cowboy novel, vivid in landscape and place and rich in character and incident. It’s violent, frightening, funny, heartbreaking and transcends the genre. What more could you ask for? A modern classic.

Happy Are the Happy by Yasmina Reza, translated by John Cullen

This was my highlight of Novellas in November this year. The cover describes it as a novel, the length suggests a novella and the content is a series of twenty short, interconnected chapters, narrated by a range of characters, which crackle with inventiveness and playfulness. These characters are all connected, some intimately and others in more oblique ways and although these connections are at times vague, the attentive reader will be rewarded. A fascinating, clever and entertaining exploration into the search for happiness in all its forms.

SPECIAL MENTION: It’s Not Yet Dark by Simon Fitzmaurice

Check back tomorrow when I’ll be writing about my favourite books of the year by Irish writers and on Friday I’ll decide on my Top Five new (or new to me) books of 2022.

The 746 books of the year 2022 The 746