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From anti-romcoms and horror to razor-sharp essays and state-of-the-nation novels, it's been a brilliant year for books. Here are BBC Culture's top picks.

Known as a modern master of the form, this is George Saunders' first short story collection since 2013's Tenth of December, which was a National Book Award finalist. Liberation Day's nine stories consider human connection, power, enslavement and oppression with Saunders' trademark deadpan humour and comion. "These stories are not only perfectly pitched; they come with enough comedy to have you grinning and enough empathy to suddenly stop you in your tracks," writes The Guardian, while according to the Sydney Morning Herald, "Saunders is masterful, he illuminates with a fierce flame". (RL)

Set in a drought-hit backwater of rural Florida, The Kingdom of Sand tells the story of a nameless narrator's existence of semi-solitude, as the memories of his other, previous life come and go. The Guardian said: "Holleran renders an elegiac and very funny contemplation of not just ageing but an age... A wistful, witty meditation on a gay man's twilight years and the twilight of America." The  novel is "all the more affecting and engaging", Colm Toíbín writes in the New York Times, because, in 1978, Holleran wrote the "quintessential novel of gay abandon", Dancer from the Dance. "Now at almost 80 years of age, he has produced a novel remarkable for its integrity, for its readiness to embrace difficult truths and for its complex way of paying homage to the ing of time." (LB)

An avid Europhile and chronicler of modern Britain, Jonathan Coe's latest spans 75 years of British history through the lives of one family living on the outskirts of Birmingham near a famous chocolate factory. The novel's events and characters cross paths with those from Coe's trilogy that began with 2001's The Rotters' Club and ended with the acclaimed Middle England (2018), and, like the latter, Bournville is "a state of the nation novel," writes the Observer, one that explores the personal and the political, and the relationship between Britain and Europe with "prose of enduring beauty". The FT writes that Coe has, "with considerable humour, satire – and at times, acute anger – established himself as the voice of England's political conscience". (RL)

Barbara Kingsolver's modern reimagining of David Copperfield is a "powerful reworking" of Charles Dickens's most celebrated and personal novel, writes The Guardian, calling it "the book she was born to write". Set in Kingsolver's home region of Appalachia, it transposes Dickens's critique of the injustices of Victorian Britain to contemporary America, where Copperhead lives in near-destitution amid the US opioid crisis. "This serious subject matter belies the sheer fun that Kingsolver has with her endlessly inventive adaptation," writes the TLS, praising the novel's "sharp social observation and moments of great descriptive beauty." (RL)

In 1970s Belfast, a young Catholic teacher, Cushla, meets an older, married Protestant man in the pub owned by her family, an encounter that changes both of their lives for ever. As an affair between the two progresses, the daily news of the Troubles unfolds, and tensions in the town escalate. Previously the author of short stories, in Treses, says the Washington Post, "Kennedy has more room to flesh out her characters and dramatise their predicaments. She does so masterfully, convincing her reader of all that unfolds". Meanwhile, The Spectator says: "This cleverly crafted love story about ordinary lives ravaged by violence tears at your heart without succumbing to sentimentality." (LB)

When a whale washes up on the beach in Dorset near Cristabel Seagrave's home at Chilcombe estate, the 12-year-old claims it as her own. Benignly neglected by her step-parents, who are distracted by endless parties, she and her siblings find their own way to grow up and educate themselves. Then, as war approaches and their lives take different tracks, the siblings are drawn into the conflict. "Generous, filling, deeply satisfying, funny-sad, every page crammed with life and experience," is how the Sunday Times describes it. Quinn is "one of those writers who has her finger on humanity's pulse. An absolute treat of a book, to be read and reread". The Independent says: "This is a chunky novel to get lost in, full of pacy plotting and luscious language." (LB)

"The most propulsively entertaining of Li's novels," according to the New York Times, The Book of Goose is the fifth from the Chinese-born, US-based writer. It is what The Observer calls a "deeply strange" tale of two adolescent girls in rural, post-war  who concoct a literary hoax and briefly become a publishing sensation. The Observer praises "the thrilling complexity of The Book of Goose's relationship with the literary impulse", while The New York Times calls it "an existential fable that illuminates the tangle of motives behind our writing of stories". (RL)

I'm Sorry You Feel that Way by Rebecca Wait 

"Desperately sad – and extremely funny," is how iNews describes Rebecca Wait's fourth novel, I'm Sorry You Feel that Way. "Its exquisitely detailed examination of interpersonal relationships allows it to become furtively comionate, generous even to the worst offenders and one of the richest explorations of family dysfunction I've read." The novel explores the intricacies of family relationships, as sisters Alice and Hanna face a challenging upbringing with a dominant mother, absent father and disapproving older brother. As adults, they must deal not only with disappointments in love and work, but also ever-more complicated family conflict and tensions. It is "razor-sharp", says The Observer. (LB)

According to The Atlantic, Cormac McCarthy's The enger, published in 2022, along with its follow-up, Stella Maris, are "the richest and strongest work of McCarthy's career," and represent a genuine publishing event. The 89-year-old writer of No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006) is considered one of America's greatest living novelists, and these typically apocalyptic, bleak books could well be his last. The enger, writes The Irish Times, is "among McCarthy's most quietly reflective novels, recalling the moments of serenity amid scenes of devastation that made The Road so haunting." (RL)

A 21st-Century retelling of Nancy Mitford's classic The Pursuit of Love, India Knight's novel Darling transposes the original to the bohemian household of Alconleigh farm in Norfolk. Our narrator is Franny, and teenage Linda Radlett lives with her rock-star father Matthew, ethereal mother Sadie, and her many siblings. It is an ambitious idea but, according to The Guardian, "Knight rises to that challenge with aplomb… Darling is a very human book, full of feelings and heartbreak and humour and joy". Meanwhile, iNews says that the characters are depicted with an "enveloping warmth", and the novel is "an absolute hoot". It concludes: "This is a gorgeously bittersweet portrait of growing up, where happiness is only ever fleeting." (LB)

There are More Things by Yara Rodrigues Fowler

In 2019, following her debut novel Stubborn Archivist, Yara Rodrigues Fowler was named by the Financial Times as "one of the planet's 30 most exciting young people," and the author's follow-up has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political fiction and the Goldsmiths Prize. There are More Things tells the story of Catarina – who grows up in a well-known political family in Olinda, Brazil – and Londoner Melissa. When the two women meet, as political turmoil in Brazil and the UK unfurls, their friendship intensifies. The novel is "an enriching read", says The Irish Times. "From the chaotic London riots and Brexit to the dark era of Brazil's military dictatorship, this novel paints a stirring portrait of the legacy of violence." (LB)

"The quality that distinguishes Ernaux's writing on sex from others in her milieu is the total absence of shame," writes The Guardian of this memoir of a torrid, 18-month love affair between Ernaux and a married Russian diplomat that began in Leningrad in 1988 and continued in Paris. Getting Lost (which is published in translation this year) is the second book of Ernaux's to be inspired by the affair – the first, a slight, memoir-like novel, was Simple ion (1991). Recently awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, Ernaux – now in her 80s – is a huge literary celebrity in . Her writing on sex is spare and direct, explicit and subversive. Getting Lost is, writes The New York Times, "a feverish book… about being impaled by desire, and about the things human beings want, as opposed to the things for which they settle." (RL)

Written during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, King's latest is a world-hopping fantasy whose hero is Charlie Reade, a talented 17-year-old who has lost his mother in a car accident and is caring for his grieving, alcoholic father. When Charlie befriends the reclusive Mr Bowditch and his ancient German Shepherd dog, Radar, he discovers underneath Bodwitch's shed a portal to the kingdom of Empis, where the people – who have a disfiguring illness called "the grey" – are facing a terrifying evil. Described as "a multiverse-traversing, genre-hopping intertextual mash-up" by the New York Times, Fairy Tale is, according to The Guardian, "vintage, timeless King, a transporting, terrifying treat". (RL)

At 20 years old, Leila Mottley became the youngest ever nominee when Nightcrawling was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and the novel was an instant New York Times bestseller. The story is based on a true crime in 2015, involving sexual exploitation, corruption and brutality in the Oakland police department. The novel's central character is 17-year-old Kiara Johnson, a protagonist who is "one of the toughest and kindest young heroines of our time," says the Guardian. "Restlessly truth-seeking, Nightcrawling marks the dazzling arrival of a young writer with a voice and vision you won't easily get out of your head." Nightcrawling is, says iNews, "an extraordinarily moving debut". (LB)

Told in a series of vignettes, After Sappho reimagines the lives of a group of notable feminists, artists and writers of the past. Among them are Colette, Josephine Baker, Virginia Woolf and Sarah Bernhardt, each of them facing obstacles and battling for liberation and justice. According to the Irish Times, After Sappho "delivers on its own promise with great stylistic power and verve". The Guardian says:"[With] sentences crisply flat yet billowing easily into gorgeous lyricism... [After Sappho] is a book that's wholly seduced by seduction and that seduces in turn." (LB)

From the author of the 2017 bestseller, Little Fires Everywhere, this dystopian novel is set in a post-crisis US of surveillance and book-banning, where children are forcibly separated from their parents, and people – particularly Asian-Americans – are condemned for "un-American" activities. Twelve-year-old Bird lives with his father, a talented linguistics professor forced to stack books in a library, while Bird's mother – a prominent Chinese-American poet – has disappeared three years' previously. Bird's quest to find her leads him to an underground network of librarian resistance-fighters, and towards the fate of the taken children. "Ng's own masterful telling of this tale of governmental cruelty and the shadow armies of ordinary citizens who both facilitate and resist is its own best testimony to the unpredictable possibilities of storytelling," writes NPR, while Vogue called Our Missing Hearts "an unwaveringly dark fairy tale for a world that has stopped making sense". (RL)

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka 

Winner of the Booker Prize, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida tells the magical story of a war photographer who has woken up dead, apparently in a celestial visa office. In the afterlife, surrounded by ghouls, he has seven moons to  the man and woman he loves most. The novel "fizzes with energy, imagery and ideas against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars" say the Booker judges. The Guardian says the novel "recalls the mordant wit and surrealism of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls or Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita... Karunatilaka has done artistic justice to a terrible period in his country's history." (LB)

"The Colony contains multitudes – on families, on men and women, on rural communities – with much of it just visible on the surface, like the flicker of a smile or a shark in the water," writes John Self in The Times. The novel portrays one summer on a small island off the coast of Ireland. Two separate visitors – an artist and a linguist, both seeking to capture the truth and essence of the place – force the islanders to question their own values and desires. "Austere and stark," writes the Financial Times, "The Colony is a novel about big, important things." (LB)

From the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and the Booker-shortlisted Exit West (2017), Hamid borrows a clever conceit from Kafka's Metamorphosis to imaginatively consider race and racism through the character of Anders, a white man living in a small US town, who wakes up one morning to find his skin has turned dark. As Anders begins to face conflict in his life and relationships; and as more and more people follow suit, violence and unrest erupts on the streets. "For a novel that explores the functions and presumptions of racism, The Last White Man is a peculiarly hopeful story," writes The Washington Post. The Last White Man is "a short novel of very long sentences" that is, writes The Guardian, "[a] strange, beautiful allegorical tale… compellingly readable and strangely musical, as if being recounted as a kind of folktale to future generations." (RL)

"A genre-bending, time-skipping story about New York City's elite in the roaring '20s and Great Depression," is how Vanity Fair describes Trust by Hernan Diaz, who was a Pulitzer finalist for his 2017 novel In the Distance. A legendary New York couple has risen to the top of a world of apparently endless wealth – but at what cost? Diaz's novel puts competing narratives into dialogue with each other, resulting in a puzzle that explores how power can manipulate the truth. Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Trust is a "surprising, engrossing and beautifully executed novel," says the Irish Times, that "confirms Diaz as a virtuoso of storytelling". (LB)

The seventh novel from the acclaimed Pakistani-British writer of A God in Every Stone (2014) and 2017's bestselling Home Fire, Best of Friends explores the intricacies of friendship through the lives of two very different women, lifelong friends Zahra and Maryam. The novel opens with them as teenagers in 1980s Karachi; later, they are successful forty-somethings living in London with deeply conflicting political views. When troubling events from their past resurface, their friendship is put to the test. "It's the deep-rooted and complicated bond between the two women that keeps us turning the pages," writes The Spectator. The Observer called it: "an epic story that explores the ties of childhood friendship, the possibility of escape, the way the political world intrudes into the personal, all through the lens of two sharply drawn protagonists." (RL)

The story of six siblings and an injustice that shatters their close bond, Booth is the Booker-shortlisted novel by Karen Joy Fowler, author of the bestselling We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. The Booth brothers and sisters grow up in 1830s rural Baltimore as civil war draws closer, each with their own dreams and battles to fight. One of them, Johnny, makes a decision that will change the course of history – the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. "In its stretch and imaginative depth, Booth has an utterly seductive authority," says The Guardian. The novel, says The Literary Review, "captures with enthralling vividness a country caught in the grip of fanatical populism, ripped apart by irreconcilable political differences and boiling with fury and rage... An unalloyed triumph". (LB)

Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread (later Costa) prize for her first novel, 1995's Behind the Scenes at the Museum. She has since published several novels – two of which also won Costa prizes – including the acclaimed Life After Life (2013), which was adapted into a BBC TV series this year. Set amid the dancers, drinkers and gangsters of "Roaring" 1920s London, Shrines of Gaiety is chock-full of sex, intrigue and vice coalescing around the figure of Nellie Coker, a notorious entrepreneur who presides over a series of Soho nightclubs. Shrines of Gaeity is, according to The New York Times, "a cocktail of fizz and melancholy, generously poured," while Atkinson is "a keenly sympathetic observer of human foibles, one who can sketch a character in one quicksilver sentence".  The novel is "a marvel of plate-spinning narrative knowhow,'' writes The Observer. (RL)

Best-selling New York Times essayist Sloane Crosley has combined themes of love, luck and hipsterism to create a New York City anti-rom-com that is also a satire on internet millennial life. Publishers Weekly describes Cult Classic as "a witty and fantastical story of dating and experimental psychology in New York City… Thoroughly hilarious [and] sharply perceptive… Crosley has found the perfect fictional subject for her gimlet eye". The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, says: "Crosley's writing is as funny as ever, with a great line or clever observation on nearly every page… Her fascinating conceits – entertaining and compelling in their own right – are the engines of the narrative, but her insights into contemporary life are the fuel." (LB)

Douglas Stuart, the author of the Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain (2020), has won rapturous praise once again for his second novel, a heartbreaking queer love story between Protestant Mungo and Catholic James, who come together across the divided landscape of a Glasgow council estate in the post-Thatcher era. "Young Mungo is a suspense story wrapped around a novel of acute psychological observation. It's hard to imagine a more disquieting and powerful work of fiction will be published anytime soon about the perils of being different," says Maureen Corrigan, book critic of NPR's Fresh Air. "If the first novel announced Stuart as a novelist of great promise, this confirms him as a prodigious talent," writes Alex Preston in The Observer. (RL)

In Jennifer Egan's 2011 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, Bix Bouton featured as a minor character. Now he is back as a tech visionary at the opening of The Candy House, as CEO of internet giant Mandala who is in search of his next "utopian vision". Bouton's invention, Own Your Unconscious, is the catalyst for the novel's exploration of the end of privacy in the digital age and how tech turns the world upside down. Meanwhile, the underlying temptation metaphor of Hansel and Gretel's "candy house" permeates the book. It is an "exhilarating, deeply pleasurable" novel, says Prospect, while The New York Times calls it "a spectacular palace built out of rabbit holes". (LB)

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