Discover the 10 Best Fiction Books
The best fiction published this year reminded us to value our relationships with one another, regardless of their form. These books emphasised how we are shaped by the people we surround ourselves with, as well as those who are no longer physically present but whose memories we carry with us.
They are stories about friendship and love, growing up and growing old, loss and living, all centred on characters coming to terms with how and when their people show up for them. A harrowing portrait of grief told through the eyes of an adult daughter remembering her mother, a gritty account of a young woman who forms a community in the midst of her loneliness, a celebration of friendship between two creative geniuses, and more. Here are the top ten fiction books for 2022.
10. Signal Fires, Dani Shapiro
Dani Shapiro’s first novel in 15 years, Signal Fires, begins with a horrific ending. It’s 1985, and three drunken teenagers take a fatal car ride. The details of the accident are kept hidden—and will haunt one family for the rest of their lives. Decades later, the doctor who ran to the accident scene befriends his 11-year-old neighbour, who lives right next to where it happened.
Shapiro creates a moving portrait of guilt, grief, and fate by connecting seemingly disparate threads. And she demonstrates, in heartbreaking terms, how life is made up of random moments—missed opportunities and strange circumstances—and how everything can change in a split second.
9. Trust, Hernan Diaz
Everyone in 1920s New York knows Benjamin and Helen Rask, the wealthy couple at the top of the financial world. But how did they amass so much power and wealth? That question drives the immensely popular 1937 novel Bonds, one of four distinct texts in Hernan Diaz’s Trust. The Rasks’ (or Bevels’, depending on which book-within-a-book you’re reading) story is filled with mysterious multitudes. Diaz spins a dazzling story about subjectivity and greed that undermines, examines, and rewrites their relationship and privilege.
8. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, Kim Fu
Kim Fu’s daring collection of 12 stories features characters dealing with situations that straddle the line between reality and fantasy. Fu reveals quietly profound commentary on the intersections of technology, love, and loss in the places where lines blur. In one story, a girl mysteriously sprouts wings, forcing her friend group to consider their ever-changing adolescent bodies. In another, an insomniac becomes reliant on sporadic visits from a strange man made of sand who may hold the key to her finally falling asleep.
In another bizarre story, a couple repeatedly murders each other in order to keep their relationship alive. These surreal and clever stories all point to hidden crises. Fu takes magical realism to new heights by situating her characters’ relatable emotional battles within beautifully constructed worlds.
7. Young Mungo, Douglas Stuart
Douglas Stuart’s follow-up to his 2020 Booker Prize-winning debut Shuggie Bain is just as depressing as his first. Young Mungo is another visceral depiction of 20th-century working-class Glasgow, this time centred on the impossible first love between two teenage boys. Homophobia and violence surround them, and the young men’s sensitivity is not welcome in their hostile masculinity world. Stuart paints a vivid picture of 1990s Scotland and the struggles of queer men learning to live in the face of it all through rich dialogue and rhythmic prose.
6. If I Survive You, Jonathan Escoffery
The first story in Jonathan Escoffery’s lyrical and kaleidoscopic debut If I Survive You introduces Trelawny, the sole American-born member of a Jamaican family. Escoffery follows Trelawny as he struggles with his identity as the son of Black immigrants living in Miami, where he never feels Black enough.
Escoffery writes with urgency and heart as he depicts his protagonist’s struggles to fit in, especially as his family falls apart in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane and recession. If I Survive You, which has been nominated for a National Book Award in 2022, is a timeless story about a young person grappling with big questions about race and class, captured in intricately drawn scenes of everyday life.
5. Vladimir, Julia May Jonas
The protagonist of Julia May Jonas’ riveting debut novel, an unnamed English professor, is dealing with the public fallout of her husband’s previous affairs with students at the college where they both teach. The narrator is more annoyed than anything else—she and her husband had an open marriage—and she is preoccupied with her own extramarital activity: crushing hard on her department’s newest recruit. As the professor grows closer to her young new colleague, her desire grows into a gnawing obsession. Jonas’s explosive novel raises timely questions about power and campus politics.
4. All This Could Be Different, Sarah Thankam Mathews
In Sarah Thankam Mathews’ tender debut novel All This Could Be Different, a finalist for a 2022 National Book Award, recent college graduate Sneha has just moved to Milwaukee and started an awful job as a corporate consultant. Though the work is soul-crushing, there is a recession brewing, and the money keeps Sneha afloat. She can also send some to her parents in India.
Despite a blossoming romance with an older ballet dancer named Marina, Mathews’ contemplative protagonist is desperately lonely in her new life. As Sneha ponders why she finds it so difficult to open up to others, she is forced to confront the inescapable trauma that she has buried deep within. In an incisive and surprising coming-of-age narrative, Mathews explores this tension as well as the community that Sneha creates for herself in the Midwest.
3. The Book of Goose, Yiyun Li
Agnès has just learned that her childhood best friend, Fabienne, has died. Agnès, now an adult living in America, reflects on growing up in France with Fabienne and a decision Fabienne made that changed both of their lives: when they were kids in the war-ravaged countryside, Fabienne wrote a fictional account of their experiences and published it under Agnès’ name.
The move catapulted Agnès to literary fame—and to a London finishing school where she suffered greatly without Fabienne nearby—and now she’s finally ready to tell her version of the events that defined her adolescence. Yiyun Li dissects the girls’ achingly intimate and, at times, unsettling friendship, and wonders if Agnès ever truly knew the person she was so devoted to. In explaining her response, she reveals a scathing portrait of adolescence.
2. The Hero of This Book, Elizabeth McCracken
An unnamed writer arrives in London for a trip. Her recently deceased mother’s absence — and presence — follows her wherever she goes. As she walks around the city, she is reminded of her mother’s complicated life, the memories they shared, and the strange, ever-changing relationship between child and parent. However, the unnamed writer emphasises that, while she is creating a heartfelt tribute to her mother, this is not a memoir.
Her mother despised those. As the story progresses, Elizabeth McCracken’s latest work of fiction pokes holes in the very idea of fiction itself. The prolific author, whose own mother shared many similarities with the one described in the book, delivers a powerful meditation on loss processing. Along the way, she makes startling revelations about what it really means to write and how fiction can help us understand the most difficult aspects of life.
1. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
Sam Masur, a junior at Harvard, meets Sadie Green on a subway platform. They’ve known each other since childhood, when they first bonded over a shared love of video games, but a schism separated them. In Gabrielle Zevin’s inventive and sweeping novel, estranged friends reconnect and rebuild their relationship, becoming creative partners on a video game that propels them to fame before they reach the age of 25.
As Sam and Sadie struggle with their growing ambitions over the years, they develop a friendship that is far more meaningful than any romance. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a celebration of the narratives in video games and in life that reinforce how important connection is. Zevin creates the most precious kind of love story by following Sam and Sadie’s journey from Massachusetts to California and into the imagined worlds of their games.