Reviewed by Robert Goodman.
2021 was yet another crazy year but for many one that gave us plenty of home-based reading time! As always here are some of the best from the top of the Pile by the Bed very loosely organised by genre.
Crime Fiction
There have been some great first crime novels this year. On the Australian front there was new rural noir with Margaret Hickey’s Cutter’s End, Sydney gangland crime in Loraine Peck’s Ned Kelly Award Winning The Second Son and a chilly thriller in Allie Reynolds’ Shiver. On the international front Femi Kayode took on institutionalised crime in Nigeria in Lightseekers, Emma Stonex reworked an old lighthouse mystery in the The Lamplighters and DV Bishop delivered a page turning crime story set in Renaissance Italy in City of Vengeance.
As always some top notch Australian crime this year including Sarah Bailey’s The Housemate, LA Larkin’s fiery The Safe Place and Adrian Hyland’s Canticle Creek. Unmissable international crime reads this year included SA Cosby’s blistering second novel Razorblade Tears, Colson Whitehead’s 1960’s set heist novel Harlem Shuffle, John Le Carre’s final espionage novel Silverview and the manga-esque and totally fun Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka.
Science Fiction
Despite the plethora of average dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction in 2021, there were still some stand outs including Catherynne M Valente’s The Past is Red and Claire North’s Notes from a Burning Age. Space opera still made a good showing with the second book in Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan Series A Desolation Called Peace, Artifact Space by Miles Cameron and the long awaited and epic ninth and final book of The Expanse – James SA Corey’s Leviathan Falls. Other great scifi included Chris Hadfield’s alternate history thriller The Apollo Murders, Jeff VanderMeer’s environmental mystery Hummingbird Salamander, Sarah Flannery Murphy’s girl power, alternative history road trip Girl One and Australian author Max Barry’s multiworld chase thriller The 22 Murders of Madison May.
Fantasy
The best fantasy this year, and also my personal favourite of 2021, was an epic poem and one of the oldest pieces of English literature. Maria Dahvana Headly’s new translation of Beowulf, brought this classic Old English tale of heroes and monsters and dragons vividly to life and demonstrated its lasting appeal. Great antipodean fantasy included Australian author Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun, a reimagining of 14th Century China, and New Zealander Chloe Gong’s duology These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends a gangland drama with monsters set in an alternative 1920s Shanghai and loosely based on Romeo and Juliet. Irish crime writer CK McDonnell delivered in the tricky urban fantasy/comedy genre with The Stranger Times. And Israeli author Lavie Tidhar continued to push the boundaries of the genre with his new-weird Western The Escapement.
Literary Fiction
Most of the best reads this year had a historical bent. Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize Winner The Promise took on the last twenty years of South African history through the lens of four funerals; Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle centred on the golden age of aviation in the first half of the Twentieth Century; Sylvia Moreno Garcia’s Velvet Was the Night was a part-thriller part-romance set in 1970s Mexico; and Gordon Macrea Burnet explored psychiatry and fraud in 1960s London in Case Study.
On the slightly more contemporary front Emily Bitto’s Wild Abandon explored hedonism and late stage capitalism in 2010s America; and Nickolas Butler’s Godspeed also took on American society through but through the lens of the construction of an impossible building. And finally the wildest of the bunch was Laurent Binet’s Civilisations a spectacular counter-factual history which imagined an Incan conquest of Europe in the 16th Century.
As always, there are plenty of great books from this year that did not get a mention (reviews of all of which can be found on Pile by the Bed) and the pile already growing for the start of 2022.
