These are my favorites of the books I read this year. They weren’t all published this year.
The outstanding book I read this year reads like a novel, but it is autobiographical: The Postcard by Anne Berest. It’s the story of a French Jewish family that gets a postcard in the mail in 2003 containing only the first names of family members who were killed in the Shoah. The family seeks to learn who sent the postcard.
Fiction
The Postcard’s only rival for my favorite novel-like book of the year is the tale Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, which is about a young, very hip, British South Asian Muslim woman professor who broke with her mother over refusing to wear a head scarf. Despite loving her university job, she goes to Iraq to try to help western women who were lured into marriages with jihadis and whose countries won’t take them back. The story develops in unexpected ways. Younis is an expert in human rights who worked in similar programs.
Homeseeking by Karissa Chen is about a young woman and man in Shanghai who were separated by Mao’s Revolution. Decades later, they meet in California. Their accounts of life during the revolutionary Shanghai, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan, are compelling.
Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali is the story of two girls in Tehran, one privileged, the other not, at the time of the revolution against the shah.
Washington Black by Esi Edugyuan is about an eleven-year-old enslaved boy in Barbados called Washington Black who encounters his enslaver’s brother, an inventor who wants Washington to be his assistant. Washington Black goes through an often-harrowing international odyssey.
In The Lion’s Den by Iris Mwanza, a young woman lawyer in Zambia takes on the case of a young gay man though homosexuality is illegal and both her family and her firm oppose her getting involved.
Dream Count differs from Nigerian-American author Chimananda Adichie’s other books in that it has several women main characters. Plots include the difficulty of finding an African man in the US who treats his lover like an equal; the plight of an African woman hotel room cleaner in the US who is raped by a European diplomat; and the surprising (to me) decadence of some wealthy women in Nigeria.
Heartwood by Amity Gaige tells about a woman hiker who is reported lost on the Appalachian Trail in Maine and the woman ranger who looks for her.
The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters is the story of a very young Mi’kmaq girl in Nova Scotia who is taken by a white woman who wants a child to raise and the devastation that loss causes to the girl’s family.
I don’t read all Tracy Chevalier’s books, but The Glassmakers is particularly interesting. It’s the story of a woman from a glassmaking family in Murano, an island near Venice. The same characters continue across the centuries, so the book tells the history of Murano and Venice.
This year I’ve been particularly interested in stories about fighting Nazis. Kate Quinn, who wrote The Rose Code and The Alice Network, has written several other excellent books. The Huntress is about a Russian woman bomber pilot from World War II who’s looking for a killer, and The Diamond Eye is about a woman sniper’s experiences in the Russian army in World War II. Quinn also wrote The Briar Club, a novel set in Washington, DC in the McCarthy Era.
Mysteries
Sujata Massey, an India-English author, has written excellent mysteries set in early 20th century Bombay. The detective is based on the first woman lawyer in the city. Being a woman enables her to question women crime victims who live in purdah. The books are: The Widows of Malabar Hill, The Satapur Moonstone, The Bombay Prince, and The Mistress of Bhatia House.
Louise Penny’s The Black Wolf (I object to the characterization of black wolves as more sinister than gray wolves) particularly interested me because it shows how Canada’s environmental bounty can make it vulnerable.
Attica Locke’s The Cutting Season is about a woman who is managing the Louisiana plantain where her ancestors were enslaved. The plantation is now a tourist attraction and the site of expensive galas. Local Black people work there depicting the time of enslavement, but the script they must use is falsely cheerful. A murder takes place on the plantation.
Katarina Bivald’s Just Another Dead Author takes place at retreat for writers in rural France. The main speaker, a prominent author, antagonizes everyone and tells attendees that they should give up writing. Someone winds up dead.
Seeking diversion, I read more mysteries than usual this year. Last year I read quite a few by Minnesota author Ellen Hart, who has both a lesbian detective, Jane Lawless, and an outrageous lesbian sidekick. I found the books so enjoyable that I all the rest of the nearly 30 books and then read Hart’s Sophie Greenway mysteries: They aren’t lesbian, but they are very good and detective Sophie has a gay son.
More Lesbian Books
Other lesbian books I especially like include a historical novel, Aimee’s Raised for the Sword, which is set in 1560s France, where Huguenots are being persecuted by Catholic rulers. The main characters are a woman disguised as a man and a young woman who is harassed by men at court.
Becky Bohan’s novel, Slow Bright Things, a sequel to her novel A Light on Altered Land, is a beautifully crafted story of two older lesbians five years into a deep relationship who are planning to marry and continuing to learn to treat each other with excellent care.
I also read installments of two incredible series by lesbian authors.
Elena Graf’s Rip Tide, the eleventh in a series, describes how her fictional Maine town, Hobbs, is recovering and not recovering from a school shooting described in a previous book.
KC Luck’s Darkness Rising is the seventh in her Darkness series about lesbians in the Pacific Northwest coping in a world where electrical power has failed. Lesbians take a leading role in establishing a community that is safe for everyone, but some people seek to prey on the vulnerable.
Nonfiction
The best three nonfiction books I read this year were all about Russia. I couldn’t bear to read more about my own country than I read in The New York Times and Heather Cox Richardson’s columns, but I do want to know more about Russia.
Motherland by Julie Ioffe, who comes from a family that emigrated to the US from Russia, chronicles women in Russia from the Revolution to the present. It shows how the situation of women has deteriorated from being revolutionaries and warriors to generally becoming seen as lesser than, and consequently become man-obsessed even though they have careers. The description of Putin’s ice-cold “courtship” of his wife shows how soulless he is. Yet Ioffe found that many Russian women idolize him because he’s hyper-masculine and doesn’t drink much.
Pussy Riot didn’t agree with the adulation. They protested against his rule in various places, including a cathedral. After pressure from Orthodox leaders, Putin’s government sentenced the Pussy Riot women to horrific prisons for more than two-year terms. Putin also virtually abolished the consequences for domestic violence, again with priests’ backing. He also greatly curbed abortion, which had been accepted since the Revolution, not to mention attacking lesbian and gay rights.
But Yulia Navalnya, the dissident Alexei Navalny’s wife now widow (yes, that’s how she wants to be known), is a pilar of courage. Ioffe also writes about wives and mothers who protested by the thousands against drafts for the war on Ukraine and went to the front to try (unsuccessfully) to bring their sons and husbands home.
Patriot, Alexei Navalny’s memoir, describes his tireless work to bring democracy to Russia. He exposed Putin’s corruption and wound up repeatedly imprisoned. Navalny actually believed he could bring about democratic elections and be elected president. The book is valuable, but I couldn’t bring myself to read the ending; he died (undoubtedly was murdered) in prison.
My Russia: What I Saw Inside the Kremlin by Jill Dougherty is a book by a lesbian journalist who attended a Russian university and covered Russia for many years for CNN, covering Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin. She was CNN’s bureau chief when Putin was rising to power.
News Flash: I just picked up, A Long Walk From Gaza by Asmaa Alatawna, a novel about a Palestinian woman who, after a growing up with an abusive father faces a host of problems in Gaza and journeys to Europe as a refugee. It looks worth reading.
The outstanding book I read this year reads like a novel, but it is autobiographical: The Postcard by Anne Berest. It’s the story of a French Jewish family that gets a postcard in the mail in 2003 containing only the first names of family members who were killed in the Shoah. The family seeks to learn who sent the postcard.
Fiction
The Postcard’s only rival for my favorite novel-like book of the year is the tale Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, which is about a young, very hip, British South Asian Muslim woman professor who broke with her mother over refusing to wear a head scarf. Despite loving her university job, she goes to Iraq to try to help western women who were lured into marriages with jihadis and whose countries won’t take them back. The story develops in unexpected ways. Younis is an expert in human rights who worked in similar programs.
Homeseeking by Karissa Chen is about a young woman and man in Shanghai who were separated by Mao’s Revolution. Decades later, they meet in California. Their accounts of life during the revolutionary Shanghai, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan, are compelling.
Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali is the story of two girls in Tehran, one privileged, the other not, at the time of the revolution against the shah.
Washington Black by Esi Edugyuan is about an eleven-year-old enslaved boy in Barbados called Washington Black who encounters his enslaver’s brother, an inventor who wants Washington to be his assistant. Washington Black goes through an often-harrowing international odyssey.
In The Lion’s Den by Iris Mwanza, a young woman lawyer in Zambia takes on the case of a young gay man though homosexuality is illegal and both her family and her firm oppose her getting involved.
Dream Count differs from Nigerian-American author Chimananda Adichie’s other books in that it has several women main characters. Plots include the difficulty of finding an African man in the US who treats his lover like an equal; the plight of an African woman hotel room cleaner in the US who is raped by a European diplomat; and the surprising (to me) decadence of some wealthy women in Nigeria.
Heartwood by Amity Gaige tells about a woman hiker who is reported lost on the Appalachian Trail in Maine and the woman ranger who looks for her.
The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters is the story of a very young Mi’kmaq girl in Nova Scotia who is taken by a white woman who wants a child to raise and the devastation that loss causes to the girl’s family.
I don’t read all Tracy Chevalier’s books, but The Glassmakers is particularly interesting. It’s the story of a woman from a glassmaking family in Murano, an island near Venice. The same characters continue across the centuries, so the book tells the history of Murano and Venice.
This year I’ve been particularly interested in stories about fighting Nazis. Kate Quinn, who wrote The Rose Code and The Alice Network, has written several other excellent books. The Huntress is about a Russian woman bomber pilot from World War II who’s looking for a killer, and The Diamond Eye is about a woman sniper’s experiences in the Russian army in World War II. Quinn also wrote The Briar Club, a novel set in Washington, DC in the McCarthy Era.
Mysteries
Sujata Massey, an India-English author, has written excellent mysteries set in early 20th century Bombay. The detective is based on the first woman lawyer in the city. Being a woman enables her to question women crime victims who live in purdah. The books are: The Widows of Malabar Hill, The Satapur Moonstone, The Bombay Prince, and The Mistress of Bhatia House.
Louise Penny’s The Black Wolf (I object to the characterization of black wolves as more sinister than gray wolves) particularly interested me because it shows how Canada’s environmental bounty can make it vulnerable.
Attica Locke’s The Cutting Season is about a woman who is managing the Louisiana plantain where her ancestors were enslaved. The plantation is now a tourist attraction and the site of expensive galas. Local Black people work there depicting the time of enslavement, but the script they must use is falsely cheerful. A murder takes place on the plantation.
Katarina Bivald’s Just Another Dead Author takes place at retreat for writers in rural France. The main speaker, a prominent author, antagonizes everyone and tells attendees that they should give up writing. Someone winds up dead.
Seeking diversion, I read more mysteries than usual this year. Last year I read quite a few by Minnesota author Ellen Hart, who has both a lesbian detective, Jane Lawless, and an outrageous lesbian sidekick. I found the books so enjoyable that I all the rest of the nearly 30 books and then read Hart’s Sophie Greenway mysteries: They aren’t lesbian, but they are very good and detective Sophie has a gay son.
More Lesbian Books
Other lesbian books I especially like include a historical novel, Aimee’s Raised for the Sword, which is set in 1560s France, where Huguenots are being persecuted by Catholic rulers. The main characters are a woman disguised as a man and a young woman who is harassed by men at court.
Becky Bohan’s novel, Slow Bright Things, a sequel to her novel A Light on Altered Land, is a beautifully crafted story of two older lesbians five years into a deep relationship who are planning to marry and continuing to learn to treat each other with excellent care.
I also read installments of two incredible series by lesbian authors.
Elena Graf’s Rip Tide, the eleventh in a series, describes how her fictional Maine town, Hobbs, is recovering and not recovering from a school shooting described in a previous book.
KC Luck’s Darkness Rising is the seventh in her Darkness series about lesbians in the Pacific Northwest coping in a world where electrical power has failed. Lesbians take a leading role in establishing a community that is safe for everyone, but some people seek to prey on the vulnerable.
Nonfiction
The best three nonfiction books I read this year were all about Russia. I couldn’t bear to read more about my own country than I read in The New York Times and Heather Cox Richardson’s columns, but I do want to know more about Russia.
Motherland by Julie Ioffe, who comes from a family that emigrated to the US from Russia, chronicles women in Russia from the Revolution to the present. It shows how the situation of women has deteriorated from being revolutionaries and warriors to generally becoming seen as lesser than, and consequently become man-obsessed even though they have careers. The description of Putin’s ice-cold “courtship” of his wife shows how soulless he is. Yet Ioffe found that many Russian women idolize him because he’s hyper-masculine and doesn’t drink much.
Pussy Riot didn’t agree with the adulation. They protested against his rule in various places, including a cathedral. After pressure from Orthodox leaders, Putin’s government sentenced the Pussy Riot women to horrific prisons for more than two-year terms. Putin also virtually abolished the consequences for domestic violence, again with priests’ backing. He also greatly curbed abortion, which had been accepted since the Revolution, not to mention attacking lesbian and gay rights.
But Yulia Navalnya, the dissident Alexei Navalny’s wife now widow (yes, that’s how she wants to be known), is a pilar of courage. Ioffe also writes about wives and mothers who protested by the thousands against drafts for the war on Ukraine and went to the front to try (unsuccessfully) to bring their sons and husbands home.
Patriot, Alexei Navalny’s memoir, describes his tireless work to bring democracy to Russia. He exposed Putin’s corruption and wound up repeatedly imprisoned. Navalny actually believed he could bring about democratic elections and be elected president. The book is valuable, but I couldn’t bring myself to read the ending; he died (undoubtedly was murdered) in prison.
My Russia: What I Saw Inside the Kremlin by Jill Dougherty is a book by a lesbian journalist who attended a Russian university and covered Russia for many years for CNN, covering Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin. She was CNN’s bureau chief when Putin was rising to power.
News Flash: I just picked up, A Long Walk From Gaza by Asmaa Alatawna, a novel about a Palestinian woman who, after a growing up with an abusive father faces a host of problems in Gaza and journeys to Europe as a refugee. It looks worth reading.
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