Books of the year
2020 / Three books
by Johanna Thomas-Corr
Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, (Fourth Estate) made most other fiction feel pale and bloodless this year. There was treasure on every one of its 900-plus pages. Easier on the wrist but still big on ideas was Jenny Offill’s third novel, Weather (Granta), about a Brooklyn librarian weighed down by apocalyptic worries. It delivered gnomic observations, anywhere between a paragraph and a sentence long, as well as jokes, trivia, confessions and tick-box surveys. I also loved the verve of Paul Mendez’s debut novel, Rainbow Milk (Dialogue Books) about a black, gay Jehovah’s Witness who runs away to London where he becomes a sex worker. Full of tenderness and soul, it’s a book about shame and humiliation and how you overcome it.
NEWSTATESMAN
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