With a host of phenomenal debuts on the way, plus some dazzling new work from the likes of Douglas Stuart and Hanya Yanagihara, 2022 is positively groaning with great novels
Whether it’s a hangover from a pandemic-disrupted few years, a sign that writers had particularly productive lockdowns, or perhaps it’s the many centenaries coming up – Ulysses, The Waste Land and Jacob’s Room – but 2022 is positively groaning with great novels. We’ll leave the Observer’s peerless debut feature to cover new novels from the UK and largely focus on books published in the first half of the year.
Prepare your hearts, for Douglas Stuart is back. After the extraordinary success of Shuggie Bain, his second novel, Young Mungo (Picador, April), is another beautiful and moving book, a gay Romeo and Juliet set in the brutal world of Glasgow’s housing estates. Also following up a painfully affecting predecessor is Hanya Yanagihara, whose To Paradise (Macmillan, January) gives us three stories far apart in space and time but each unique in their power to summon the joy and complexity of love, the pain of loss. I’m not sure I’ve ever missed the world of a book as much as I miss To Paradise now I’ve left it. A new Kamila Shamsie novel is always worth celebrating, but Best of Friends (Bloomsbury, October) is something else: 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.
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