BOOKS OF THE YEAR
The best books of 2020: Our critics select their picks of the year
Literary fiction
Estelle Birdy
This year's literary fiction offerings blasted a much-needed path to other worlds.
When you hit the last page of Anne Enright's Actress (Jonathan Cape, €19.60) you take a breath and dive straight back in again. Showcasing her mastery of the sentence and her extraordinary emotional intelligence as she explores the relationship between an actress and daughter, it's moving but never sentimental, funny but never pastiche.
In Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell (Tinder Press, €19.99), we're transported to Shakespeare's home -although the man himself is never named. The title refers to Shakespeare's ill-fated son who died at the age of 11, but it is Shakespeare's wife, known in the book as Agnes, who takes centre stage in this strangely modern story of life in a plague-worn Warwickshire village. Hamnet won this year's Women's Prize for Fiction.
A Thousand Moons (Faber & Faber, €16.99) sees Sebastian Barry at his powerful, lyrical best. It's an ambitious sequel to the Costa-winning Days Without End but easily read as a standalone piece. Barry (inset)continues his multi-book exploration of the Irish diaspora through generations of the McNulty and Dunne clans. Identity, culture, gender and race are examined sensitively through the eyes of Winona, a Native American girl adopted by the cross-dressing Thomas McNulty and his partner John Cole during the American Indian Wars.
Another sequel, featuring a complicated young woman, Tsitsi Dangerengba's Booker shortlisted This Mournable Body (Faber, €17.99) is a gem. This follow-up to 1988's Nervous Conditions sees the central character Tambu all grown up. Set in 1990s' Harare, this is a powerful, magical novel that considers race and colonialism through Tambu's eyes as she turns her village into an ecotourism location.
There's a universality to Donal Ryan's stories, never more so than in the Eason Novel of the Year, Strange Flowers (Transworld, €11.99). Set in the 1960s in Tipperary, where we meet the Gladney family, whose village is rocked by the disappearance of their daughter and her reappearance some years later, with her unusual family in tow. Ryan's love of people pours from every page.
I needed more sun and more Africa and I got both in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's The First Woman (One World, €20.50). Growing up in Idi Amin's Uganda, Kirabo is a young girl searching for her maternal origins. This is a funny, funny book, filled with magic and ancestry. Transported indeed.
Estelle Birdy is a writer and reviewer. Her debut novel, Ravelling, will be published by Lilliput Press in 2021
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