Best book of the year by far was Alvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires. Cortez and Moctezuma bicker in the Aztec Emperor’s palace as the Aztec Empire falls. Brilliantly hallucinogenic, anti-Imperialist, and with a surprising appearance from T-Rex. Amazing. Read it, but maybe avoid taking as many drugs as the protagonists, who spend most of their time trying to make sense of the clash of two cultures while munching psychoactive plants.
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes traces the story of a marine biologist from the depths of the oceans to the Oort Cloud in outer space. Don’t let the sci-fi elements put you off, it is hugely imaginative look at the fragility of life on earth and climate change.
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner was nominated for the Booker Prize, which normally annoys me, but this was great, a freelance spy infiltrating an eco-cult in the French countryside. A philosophical take on the spy novel, but lots of fun. A thriller about climate change that manages to be fast moving and witty.
Barrowbeck by Andrew Michael Hurley is more folk horror from the best selling writer, a series of short stories tracing a remote village on the Yorkshire Lancashire border. Chilling, but sadly lacks any characters called Chadwick, which is a let down in a novel set in my homelands.
Oddest book of the year was The Book of Elsewhere by China Miéville and Keanu Reeves. For those who don’t know him Miéville is probably Britains foremost writer of weird fiction, and an uncompromising far left agitator. His classic The City And The City was a BBC series with David Morrissey a couple of years back. Keanu is of course Keanu. A couple of years back Keanu wrote the well received BSRKR graphic novel, which attracted lots of attention from streaming studios. Book of Elswehere is an attempt to flesh out the mythos I assume so that Reeves and Miéville can sell the studios 5 series rather than 1. It is still good fun, but I am not sure it was the best use of Miéville’s talents.
In non-fiction How To Win An Information War by Peter Pomerantsev was the stand out read. Partly a biography of Sefton Delmer, the head of disinformation for SOE in WW2 and nemesis of Goebbels, partly an attempt to answer the biggest political question of them all – how to fight lies with truth? Pomerentsev cohosted the Autocracy in America podcast with Anne Applebaum whose own book Autocracy Inc. was an essential guide to the way that authoritarianism is becoming the worlds most profitable business: