I recently visited a bookshop for the first time in ages. Browsing the shelves, picking up books at random, reading back covers and ruffling through the pages was a true joy.
In another difficult year, books once again brought me solace. Here's a roundup of my best books of 2021 (these are the best books I read this year, not the best ones that were published this year).
An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire is an Australian crime novel that throws the crime-writing conventions out of the window. It's more about male violence and sexual aggression than about solving the murder with which it starts.
This new short story collection by Comma Press focuses on what the American Way looks like to those at the sharp end of US aggression around the world.
In Digging to America, Tyler charts the course of two mismatched families, the hale and hearty, all-American Donaldsons and the quieter, more reticent Iranian-American Yazdans. All they have in common is that they both adopted babies from Korea at the…