It's that special time of the year again - time to bulk up your holiday reading list! To get you in the mood I'm pleased to share my favourite reads from this year
Most chilling read: Where The Dead Wait, Ally Wilkes
"Red. Red. Fabric, floor, and all contents. The crimson shouted at Day, beat like a hammer on his skull, a hollow rap-a-tap directly on his temples. The sun through the tent walls was like arterial spray, full force and pounding. There were dead things everywhere, and he clapped his hand to his mouth."
What's better than failed, desperate expeditions to the frozen wastes, doomed souls, and the looming specter of cannibalism that none can forgive and none can forget? That's right, NOTHING.
Following the success of All The White Spaces, with Where The Dead Wait Wilkes returns in triumph to the ice and gore and the tenderness of masculinity in impossible situations. This time protagonist William Day leads the adventure, having already failed one Arctic expedition with a suspicious and tragic loss of life. The shadow of shame and ignominy cast across Day's existence is long, but darker still the specter of his charismatic and heroic second in command Jesse Stevens.
When Stevens goes missing, can Day manage to lead one last expedition to bring him home?
Most anti-capitalist read: The Marigold, Andrew F Sullivan
“The sinkhole was eight years old. Some of the kids in Foynes Village assumed it was always there, like the bluffs or Lake Ontario or the one swastika carved into the third-floor concrete on Tower 2. Henrietta Brakes knew better. She remembered the courtyard between the four towers, kids kicking soccer balls as hard as they could at each other, cookouts before the weather got too hot each summer, the sound of Alma's brother screaming as someone pumped a shotgun into his chest and left him spluttering in the centre of the grass, a dying star.”
Sullivan brings us to a near-future dystopian Toronto, its crumbling infrastructure squeezed almost dry by developers whose only vision is to squeeze further. Symbol of hubris the giant condo tower The Marigold sits half-empty and already beginning to crumble, while owner Stanley Marigold's only obsession is the next tower, and the next.
Meanwhile a pervasive rot is seeping below ground, spreading from one building to the next, and people are beginning to vanish. This is a tremendously interesting novel that pulls together the threads of people from all across the city toward a shocking finale.
Corporate horror: The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies
“... the financial system of the developed world, from around the fall of Communism in Europe, had reached a point where the overall system of incentives in the economy was so criminogenic that banks had a natural tendency to organise themselves into fraudulent behaviour. All the top executives had to do was set unrealistic profitability targets and underinvest in legal departments and compliance systems.”
I don't often include much non-fiction in my best of lists, but the Unaccountability Machine is a cracking read pitched for the layperson to understand. The subtitle reveals more "Why big systems make terrible decisions - and how the world lost its mind".
Davies explores the ways in which decision making has been insidiously replaced by systems and processes at alarming levels of government, finance and industry, widening the chasm between decision makers and those affected by their choices (or refusal to make choices) into something unbridgable. Critically, the result has been ensuring that nobody can ever be held accountable or punished - indeed, that no person can even be conceptualized as holding responsibility when things go wrong.
Davies' sometimes dry theory is livened with many real-life examples of incidents, mistakes, disasters, and a cascading tumult of ducking the blame that will leave you just as horrified as any slasher novel.
Most inevitable doom: The Frolic Of The Beasts, Yukio Mishima, translated by Andrew Clare
“Fronting the long, narrow bay, the rows of houses and the forested mountains seemed to overlap each other, merging into a single, flat picture. As the boat came further into the bay, however, the sense of distance between objects and buildings quickly increased; between the ice-crushing tower and the ice plant, between the lookout tower and the house rooftops, and the congealed picture increasingly gained perspective as if it had been thinned with hot water. Even the dazzlling surface of the inlet seemed to unfold, and the pale reflection of the concrete quay was no longer simply a line of white refined wax
Standing slightly apart from those who had come to welcome the boat, a single figure waited under the eaves of the warehouse, a sky-blue parasol concealing her face. Kōji found it difficult to reconcile the vivid, charming image in front of him with the starved vision he had been desperately clinging to for so long.”
This is a profoundly atmospheric and reflective piece that nonetheless carries the weight of menace atop every beautifully crafted scene, as bloodshed and tragedy are established before the story even takes place.
The simple actions of the doomed characters in their vivid environment build a compounding sense of dread over the course of what is a slim but perfectly paced novel.
Most beautiful read: Orbital, Samantha Harvey
“None of them knows what to say to Chie, what consolation you can offer to someone who suffers the shock of bereavement while in orbit. You must want surely to get home, and say some sort of goodbye. No need to speak; you only have to look out through the window at a radiance doubling and redoubling. The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we're on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.”
It's a trick of timing, but the smugness I felt reading and enjoying Orbital JUST BEFORE it won The Booker Prize was immense. Layered in exquisite beauty, sadness and hope, Orbital follows the occupants of a space station as they loop around the earth, looking down at us and all of our struggles. It is part poetry, part philosophy and intensely humanist. Due to the dense language (and amount of times I cried) I found myself reading this in small bursts, but it was a trememdously rewarding novel.
Those are my top reads for this year! I hope I've managed to stock up your to-read list for the holiday season
BP Gregory is the author of five novels including Flora & Jim, about an earth frozen over and a father who will do the most terrible things to keep his daughter alive.
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