Dust down your bookshelves and dive in: this is your 2022 reading list, sorted.
28 December, 2021
The approach of a new year fills us with rosy excitement for several reasons: the new destinations on our radar, some conscious travel resolutions we're vowing to keep, and now, brand-new books. Our paperback friends have kept us afloat through yet another uncertain year, and we've been on the hunt for some hot-off-the-press literature to stuff into our carry-on in 2022.
From debut novels to a collection of poems, these titles muse on themes spanning life in postcolonial Portugal to love after death, and the tensions and nuances of the great American dream.
4th January
Xochitl Gonzalez' debut novel tells the story of Olga Acevedo's life as a Manhattan party planner - a job which has her running ludicrous errands for the luxe-seeking New York elite, and one which seems to be putting her at uncomfortable odds with her Puerto Rican roots. Dissecting familial strife and political corruption against the backdrop of Puerto Rican Brooklyn, Gonzalez chronicles the American Dream with zealous energy, honesty and wit.
11th January
We're still recovering from reading T Magazine's editor-in-chief and author Hanya Yanagihara's gut-wrenching debut novel A Little Life (you'll get no spoilers from us). Delving into the nuances of the American dream, Yanagihara's second novel, To Paradise, explores the grand experiment that is the United States over the course of three centuries. If the beautifully wrought characters and visceral emotion of the author's first novel are anything to go by, then this new work is bound to keep us all up reading well past witching hour.
10th March
Clover Stroud's writing explores the human heart with such razor-sharp honesty that her books often leave us gasping for air between chapters. Her first work, The Wild Other, is a memoir of her childhood spent in rural Wiltshire - an idyllic existence that was shattered when her mother was left permanently brain-damaged after a horrific riding accident, when Stroud was 16. Her third book, The Red of My Blood, explores yet another gut-punching loss in the writer's life: the sudden death of her sister from breast cancer, days after she'd been told she had years to live. Charting the year after her sister's death with the same emotional clarity as seen in her previous two books, Stroud's love letter to her sibling is an enduring, hopeful and transcendent story of life after death.
4th January
The complexities and depth of female friendships have long been a source of creative inspiration for writers. Jean Chen Ho plucks from this source in her debut novel Fiona and Jane, a witty and unsentimental book that traces the lives of two Taiwanese-American women across two decades, as they encounter love, heartbreak, loss and joy along the way.
5th April
From the author of the acclaimed 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous comes this heartfelt poetry collection from Ocean Vuong, written after his mother died following a battle with breast cancer. Sitting at the paradoxical edges between grief and survival, Vuong's intimate second collection of poems searches for life in the aftermath of his mother's passing, moving through his own vivid memory to find restoration from loss.
22nd February
For Alice, the underground pool in the unnamed city in which she swims provides a stabilising force against the dementia she battles with on a daily basis, and a comforting balm for the strained relationships of her life on land. Until one day, when a crack beneath the surface of the pool forces its closure, and Alice must navigate the fractures of her own memory and the troubles this begins to cause for her husband and daughter.
8th February
Set in the wake of the Portuguese Colonial War, this novel by celebrated septuagenarian author Lídia Jorge has finally been translated into English 20 years after its original release in Portuguese. The story of two families brought together and then wrenched apart, the saga vividly brings to life a country politically altered by postcolonial migration, set against a backdrop of a Romeo and Juliet-style love story.
