Books of the year – part one

Philip Hensher

The best novels of the year were Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (Fleet, £16.99) and James Meek’s To Calais, In Ordinary Time (Canongate, £17.99). These days, novels are often praised for the gravity of their subjects, but what elevates Whitehead’s treatment of race and American brutality is the elegance
of its style and the satisfying inventiveness of its form.

Meek’s book is an astounding linguistic fantasy about the advent of the Black Death. French, Anglo-Saxon and Latin collide in a world of fake news, uncertain sexual borders and the dread of a catastrophe which looks in some ways very much like our own. The other novel I thoroughly recommend from my year’s reading, incidentally, is George Eliot’s glorious Romola — a bit late in the day, I know (it was published in 1863).

Oliver Soden’s Michael Tippett (Weidenfeld, £25) was exemplary, and placed this wonderful, neglected, undeniably silly composer in his world of political idealism and radical experiments.