Reviewed by Robert Goodman.
2019 was another bumper year for both Australian and international books across all genres. While some of the biggest titles of the year did not make it to the Pile, here are some of my favourites of the year (with links to the full reviews):
Crime Fiction
Plenty of 2018 debut Australian crime authors delivered great second books this year. These include Dervla McTiernan’s The Scholar, Christian White’s The Wife and the Widow, Richard Anderson’s Boxed and Mark Brandi’s The Rip. While Australian crime stalwarts continued to deliver – Michael Robotham started a new series in style with Good Girl, Bad Girl and Garry Disher’s Peace is a masterpiece of rural crime fiction.
On the international front, Attica Locke continued her Highway 59 series of East Texas crime novels with Heaven, My Home, Laura Lipmann used a real crime to explore 1960s Baltimore in The Lady in the Lake, and Jess Kidd delivered a supernatural Victorian detective novel with Things in Jars.
Thrillers
Those looking for a fast paced beach read can not go past Adrian McKinty’s The Chain or Jack Heath’s Hunter. Some other great 2019 thrillers include Blood in the Water by Jack Flynn, Twisted by Steve Cavanagh and Out of the Dark from Gregg Hurwitz’s ever reliable Orphan X series.
Science Fiction
Tade Thompson released both the second and third books in his Wormwood trilogy – The Rosewater Insurrection and The Rosewater Redemption, expanding the world that he built in Rosewater and building to a mind-bending, ethically challenging finale. Arkady Martine’s debut A Memory Called Empire and Megan O’Keefe’s debut Velocity Weapon showed that there is plenty of life (and fun to be had) in high concept space opera. As always, there was plenty of dystopian fare, the best being Rob Hart’s debut The Warehouse, a frighteningly plausible Amazon-style future, and Ben Smith’s Doggerland, a spare, atmospheric tale of two characters stuck out on a rusting windfarm in the North Sea. And great books from reliable names like James SA Corey (Tiamat’s Wrath), Becky Chambers (To Be Taught if Fortunate) and Ted Chiang (Exhalation).
Fantasy
The best fantasy novels this year were the ones that broke the epic fantasy mould. Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House is a dark magical academy tale set in Yale that explores privilege and entitlement. Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower used the story of Hamlet as a means for exploring our relationship with the divine (with a bit of gender fluidity thrown in for good measure). Fonda Lee’s Jade War expanded her Godfather meets 1970s Kung Fu meets epic fantasy universe in exciting ways. Some of the other standouts took their cues from different mythologies, such as Alexander Dan Vilhjalmsson’s Shadows of the Short Days (Icelandic), Rebecca Roanhorse’s Storm of Locusts (Navajo) and Guillermo del Toro and Cornellia Funke’s novelisation of Pan’s Labyrinth (Spanish). And Matt Ruff explored racism by repurposing the works of a well known but problematic author in Lovecraft Country.
Historical
Some immersive and fascinating historical novels this year. From Australia Nigel Featherstone’s Bodies of Men is a romance set in the Australian campaign in Egypt in World War II; Lenny Bartulin’s Fortune romps across the 19th Century with a range of characters blown about by the tide of events and chance; and Tony Jones followed up his debut with In Darkness Visible which takes readers back into the Balkan conflict in the 1990s and the subsequent international war crimes trials. Three American historical novels also stand out: Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys revealed the painful and abusive world of a reformatory school in Florida in the 1960s; TC Boyle exposed the lives of guru Timothy Leary and his followers in Outside Looking In; and Lara Prescott’s debut The Secrets We Kept was based on the story of the writing and publication of Doctor Zhivago and its role in the Cold War.
Literature
And then there were the stunning books that don’t nearly fit into a genre bucket. Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha looked at the African American and Korean communities and the legacy of the 1992 LA riots. Ann Patchett delivered another beautifully observed and thematically rich gem in The Dutch House. Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise repurposed Greek mythology to explore themes of abuse and control. And Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier is a poetic tale of two ageing Irish crims.
As always, there are plenty of great books to read no matter what you are into and more good stuff to come in 2020.
