This page is an ongoing list of the books I’ve read during the year, along with links to where I have written about them.

16. Ruth McKee, Wild Iris (Ireland, 2026). One Easter weekend, a woman hovers between past and present, being and not being. [***]

15. Lucia Odoom, Cosmos (Denmark, 2024 tr. 2026). A Ghanaian refugee in Copenhagen searches for a place to belong. [****]

14. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (USA, 1963). I found this suitably disorienting, but wonder if I’d have got more out of it earlier in life. [***]

13. Senaa Ahmad, The Age of Calamities (Canada, 2026). Stories that cast history into myriad shapes. [****]

12. Cho Yeeun, Shift (South Korea, 2017 tr. 2026). Thriller about a healing power thar comes at a steep price. Kept me reading, which is what I wanted from it. [***]

11. William Golding, The Inheritors (England, 1955). A tribe of Neanderthals encounter Homo Sapiens for the first and last time. I wanted to like this more than I did. [***]

9. Inès Cagnati, Crazy Genie (France, 1976 tr. 2026). A looping novel of rural life, with vivid bursts of trauma. [****]

10. Henry Van Dyke, Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (USA, 1965). The tale of Oliver, a young Black gay man living in a splendidly eccentric household, which gradually and affectingly falls apart. [***]

8. Percival Everett, James (USA, 2024). Based on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this novel opens up space for the fugitive slave Jim, narratively, emotionally, and intellectually. [****]

7. Jupiter Jones, The Hyena’s Daughter (England, 2026). A novel about the daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft and their step-sister. It’s restless and shapeshifting. [***]

6. Gillian Freeman, The Leather Boys (England, 1961). One of the first (if not the first) novels to depict love between two working-class men falling. Of its time, perhaps, but affecting. [***]

5. Jennifer Dawson, The Ha-Ha (England, 1961). This tale of a young woman in a psychiatric institution felt strikingly modern to me in the way that she wishes she understood the world as easily as everyone else seems to. [****]

4. Ferenc Karinthy, Metropole (Hungary, 1970 tr. 2008). This novel is immersive in its depiction of a linguist stranded in a city where the language is unintelligible, and chilling in how easily something like a popular uprising can disappear from its reality. [****]

3. Chloe Dalton, Raising Hare (England, 2024). Part memoir, part nature writing, as the author’s life is transformed when she rescues a leveret. [***]

2. Ágota Kristóf, I Don’t Care (Hungary, 2004 tr. 2024). Story collection from the author of The Notebook. These can be just as sharp and austere. [****]

1. Atsuhiro Yoshida, Goodnight Tokyo (Japan, 2019 tr. 2024). A set of interconnected stories moving through the worlds of night-time Tokyo. [***]