Jojo Moyes

Shortlisted for novel of the year at the British Book awards for Still Me

I often find it hard to remember what I’ve read, but Three Women by Lisa Taddeo (Bloomsbury, £16.99) scorched its way into my consciousness. A journalistic deep dive into the desires and love lives of three women over eight years, it turns on its head much of what you think about how we learn to love.

Kate Weinberg’s debut, The Truants (Bloomsbury, £8.99), took eight years to write, and it shows in the multilayered characters and plot. It contains an image, a hearse in a wood, that stayed with me. If you’ve ever wanted to disappear from your own life, this book will speak to you. You Will Be Safe Here by Damian Barr (Bloomsbury, £16.99) is another debut, but you’d never know it from the lean, beautiful prose. I was afraid this novel about violence through generations in South Africa would be too dark, but it pulls you in, breaks your heart and then ultimately repairs it.

Bernardine Evaristo

Joint winner of the Booker prize for Girl, Woman, Other

Taking Up Space: The Black Girl’s Manifesto for Change (Merky Books, £12.99) by Chelsea Kwakye and Ore Ogunbiyi is a groundbreaking and essential book about how it feels to be a young black woman studying in Britain’s white academic institutions. Zawe Ashton’s entertaining, fictionalised account of her life as an actor in Character Breakdown (Vintage, £16.99) is funny, revealing, shocking and inventively structured with conversations presented in script form. Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss (Granta, £8.99) is a slim novel about an iron age-obsessed man who takes his wife and daughter on a re-enaction holiday. It begins weirdly, ends badly and I loved it.

Casey Cep

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize for Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

I visited New Orleans for the first time on my book tour and was so grateful to have Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House (Little, Brown, £14.99) with me for the journey. It’s such a beautiful memoir, and it gives you a rich and complex portrait of the city. Her book, which will be published in the UK next year, has something in common with another nonfiction book I loved this year: Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing (HarperCollins, £9.99), which also uses one family’s story to tell a broader history – in this case, of the Troubles and all the disappeared. One of Keefe’s gifts is dramatising the individual decisions that collectively shape global history. I admired that same gift in Miriam Toews’s extraordinary Women Talking (Faber, £8.99), which is a fictional treatment of a horrific series of sexual crimes in a remote religious community. The novel is an understated but powerful look at how everyday people make sense of evil and violence – a truly beautiful, challenging portrait of moral discernment.

Mark Haddon

Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize for The Porpoise

Friday Black, a collection of short stories by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Quercus, £8.99), has the thrilling strangeness of George Saunders but driven by a deep and justified anger about the racism and violence that constitute the bedrock of American society. That makes it sound worthy. It isn’t. It’s a rollercoaster ride. Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press, £13.99) is usually described as “eight sentences of 1,000 pages”, which conjures an image of a forbidding avant garde doorstop in the manner of Thomas Bernhard. On the contrary, it is very funny, very readable and one of those novels that expand the possibilities of what a novel can be and do. Chris Ware is one of the great writers of our generation whose graphic novels make most novels (both the graphic and the regular kind) seem thin and simplistic. I spent 20 minutes reading the cover of Rusty Brown (Cape, £25). Buy it. Buy all his work. Make your life larger.

Raymond Antrobus

Winner of the Rathbones Folio prize for The Perseverance

Choosing three books from such a great year, particularly for poetry collections, is hard but there are three politically and lyrically compelling books that I think will remain relevant in the years ahead. The first is Surge by Jay Bernard (Chatto & Windus, £10). Partly influenced by dub poets such as Linton Kwesi Johnson and Jean “Binta” Breeze, it is a book for the air and the page, speculating on the complicated history of the New Cross fire and Grenfell.

The next is Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky (Faber, £10.99), a book for our times and all times. A high lyric cautionary tale of fascism, which is part poetry, part fable, part play. Finally, After the Formalities by Anthony Anaxagorou (Penned in the Margins, £9.99), which speculates on race, family and immigration.

William Feaver

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize for The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth 1922-1968

William Dalrymple’s stupendous The Anarchy (Bloomsbury, £30) propels into focus the story of the East India Company’s takeover of Mughal India, an exercise of opportunism, violence, shamelessness and, at times, heroic greed. More immediate is Edna O’Brien’s Girl (Faber, £16.99), an unflinching parable: Heart of Darkness revisited with Boko Haram horrors recounted as incipient legend. For me, Michael Bird’s Artists’ Letters (White Lion Publishing, £20) has proved ideal dipping. Letters reproduced, transcribed and annotated yield rare insights: Leonardo (“I will assemble catapults”) with (Edward) Lear’s spelling (“fewcher thyme”) and Mondrian’s sore tooth.

Lucy Ellmann

Winner of the Goldsmiths prize for Ducks, Newburyport

Three Muslim women have surreal adventures in Leila Aboulela’s latest novel, Bird Summons (W&N, £16.99), her wildest yet, full of her own take on myth, religion and womanhood. Aboulela, based in Aberdeen, deserves as big a following here as she has in Africa. Or bigger. Not strictly new, perhaps, but still terrific: Faber & Faber has republished five Thomas Bernhard novels, shamefully out of print in the UK for 20 years. If you haven’t read Bernhard, you will not know of the most radical advance in fiction since Joyce. Bernhard’s influence is pervasive and his style riskily contagious. My advice: dive in. As for my third choice, am I allowed to choose a book I guest edited this year? It is the fourth and final volume of The Evergreen, a beautifully designed anthology of poetry and prose published by the Word Bank (£15), an indie based in Edinburgh’s Old Town. The latest issue, dedicated to the “future”, is devoted solely to writing by women and is international in flavour. Suzy Romer discusses the vital role of grandmothers in Spain, Kylie Grant revels in Glasgow’s litter and, in Monica Datta’s astounding Zus!, three young Dutch sisters decide to rustle up a canal system for the US.

Olivia Laing

Winner of the James Tait Black memorial prize for fiction for Crudo

Being increasingly future-averse, I was gripped by the title of I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going by Peter McGough before I tracked down a copy (it’s only published in the US), but this memoir is truly fascinating; a rags-to-riches rollercoaster about the 1980s art boom in downtown New York. McGough wanted to escape the ugliness of the 20th century by retreating to the past; meanwhile, in Mother Ship (Vintage, £14.99), novelist Francesca Segal celebrates the technological innovations that kept her twins, born 10 weeks prematurely, alive. It’s a song of praise to the beleaguered, indomitable NHS, with writing at such a pitch that it lingered with me all year. Speaking of enviable phrase-making, I was also smitten by music critic par excellence Ian Penman’s It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99), a collection of dazzling, singular essays on Prince, James Brown, Sinatra, Elvis that gets to the heart of why music exerts such a strange power in our lives.

Hilary McKay

Winner of the Costa children’s book award for The Skylarks’ War

For me, 2019 has been a year of fantasy and folk tales, both new and retold, in every age group. For children, Lampie and the Children of the Sea (Pushkin Press, £12.99) by Annet Schaap stood out. Lampie, the daughter of a lighthouse keeper, is a girl of great and grumpy courage, with a salty way with words. One day she forgets to buy matches and the lighthouse lantern doesn’t shine. So begins a dark-and-stormy-night of a fairytale that I absolutely loved.

For adults, my choice is poetry: The Women Left Behind (Dempsey & Windle, £10) by Imogen Russell Williams. Rapunzel’s witch; Blodeuwedd, who was shaped from flowers; and Romeo’s Rosaline, among many others – English literature forgot them, closed the door and turned away. Now at last we have their voices: wry, lamenting, vengeful, witty, bright, magnificent. Last, a book for everyone: Deeplight (Pan Macmillan, £9.99) by Frances Hardinge. A stunning new ocean mythology of friendship and lost gods, it’s complex, engrossing and gorgeously written, and kept me reading until past 3am but was worth it, over and over.

Melissa Harrison

Winner of the European Union prize for literature for All Among the Barley

I was dazzled by Sandra Newman’s The Heavens (Granta, £12.99), which had a time-travel premise (and a noteworthy cameo) that really shouldn’t have worked but absolutely did. How she pulled it off is anyone’s guess, but it left me hugely envious of her confidence and skill. Into a stagnating UK marketplace for memoirs about place came Jessica J Lee’s beautiful Two Trees Make a Forest: On Memory, Migration and Taiwan (Little, Brown, £16.99). Lee is editor of the Willowherb Review, publishing nature writing by writers of colour, including Nina Mingya Powles, winner of the inaugural Nan Shepherd prize. Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women (Bloomsbury, £16.99) dives deep into the erotic lives of three women, using source material collected over hundreds of hours of interviews. The resulting account of the awakening, distortion and expression of desire in three very different lives is insightful, devastating and utterly unforgettable.

Lindsey Hilsum

Winner of the James Tait Black memorial prize for biography with In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin

It’s been a year of disinformation, but Peter Pomerantsev has given us a guide in This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality (Faber, £14.99). By dissecting the techniques governments use to create myths and sow confusion, he shows how the freedom of expression his parents sought when they fled the Soviet Union is now used to justify twisting the truth. No such tricks in Our Women on the Ground: Essays By Arab Women Reporting from the Middle East, edited by Zahra Hankir (Harvill Secker, £14.99), which showcases journalism at its bravest. Determination, grit and humour shine through the writing of reporters who frequently face opposition from their own families. Maybe fiction is the best respite from strife and the ever more difficult daily task of telling facts from falsehoods. Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise (Chatto and Windus, £18.99) reworks legend with the compelling force of a thriller. Here, myth is not a distraction, but the key to a deeper truth.

Muhammad Khan

Winner of the Branford Boase award for I Am Thunder

Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas by Adam Kay (Picador, £9.99) is a fun-size follow-up to the wildly popular This Is Going to Hurt. More stories from the frontline of the NHS that will hit you in the feels and also have you ho-ho-hoing over the festive season. Patrice Lawrence’s Rose, Interrupted (Hachette, £7.99) is a marvellous novel that explores what life is like for a pair of siblings after they are excommunicated from a strict religious sect. Rose seeks freedom, while her brother Rudder seeks redemption. Rounding out my top three is Fearscape: Vol 1 by Ryan O’Sullivan (Vault Comics, £15.99) – a comically dark and witty graphic novel with a narrator who is unreliable, delusional and downright despicable. Once a generation the Muse travels to Earth to take our greatest storyteller back with her to battle fear-creatures. But then she mistakes Henry, a shameless plagiarist, for the best and all hell breaks loose.

Sally Nicholls

Shortlisted for the Carnegie medal for Things a Bright Girl Can Do

My eldest started school in September, so education has been very much on my mind. I devoured Kate Clanchy’s Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (Picador, £16.99) therefore. Covering everything from uniform to off-rolling, this is an incredibly readable memoir of 30 years as an English teacher and poet. I also enjoyed Emma Darwin’s This Is Not a Book About Charles Darwin (Holland House, £14.99), an exploration of her failure to write a novel about her famous ancestor and his illustrious family. Finding the spaces in real history to tell a fictional story is a problem I am very familiar with. Recommended. Finally, I’ve never read a Hilary McKay novel I didn’t love, and The Time of Green Magic (Macmillan, £12.99) was no exception. This story of blended families and a house where books come to life would make a perfect Christmas present for any bookish nine- to 12-year-old.

Bart van Es

Winner of the Costa book of the year award for The Cut Out Girl

Over the last few years I have become fascinated by so-called autofiction: books that read like novels (with dialogue, metaphors and precise descriptions) but which are also, at some level, memoirs or autobiographies. Rachel Cusk is a master of the genre and her collection of sharp, provocative essays, Coventry (Faber, £14.99), the follow-up to her Outline trilogy, had me transfixed. I also loved Will by the Flemish author Jeroen Olyslaegers (Pushkin, £14.99), which tells the story of Antwerp under Nazi occupation. The narrator, a policeman who both resists and collaborates in the Holocaust, is a brilliant, morally complex creation. Will is now out in a fine translation and is a compelling read. Finally, Greta Thunberg’s collection of speeches, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (Penguin, £2.99), is simple and truthful. She inspired me to join the Extinction Rebellion protests earlier this year.

Elizabeth Acevedo

Winner of the Carnegie medal for The Poet X

For Black Girls Like Me by Mariama J Lockington (Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc, £13.99) is a story about a transracial adoptee that had me tearing up, gasping and rooting for the main character, Makeda. It stretched my imagination about the kinds of tough topics a young person can handle reading about. I am so thankful for this honest, gorgeous book. Natasha Diaz’s novel Color Me In (Penguin Random House, £13.99), about a black Jewish poet in Harlem undergoing her bat mitzvah, is such a good book focused on faith, race, rites of passage and the way that young people have to learn not only to stand up for themselves, but also for their communities, especially when they belong to communities that wield power over others. Jacqueline Woodson’s latest novel, Red at the Bone (W&N, £14.99), is a beast of a book; a masterclass on pace, characterisation and how a writer can be flexible. You’ll find yourself rooting for every character, and hurting for them as well.

Elif Shafak

Shortlisted for the Booker prize for 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

One of my favourite books this year has been Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Profile, £10.99). It is a stunning research on “information civilisation”, concentration of power and the sinister exploitation of our data at the expense of our freedom, which are no doubt some of the most pressing issues of our times. But more than that, this is a fascinating and wise and honest exploration of what it means to be human in the digital age and why we need to fight back. Technology is way too important to leave it to tech companies, which are clearly becoming tech monopolies. We all need to become part of this important discussion, and for that to happen, we need to ask the right questions. This book is a brilliant way to do that.

I loved Helon Habila’s Travelers (Penguin, £12.99). Such a wonderful gem. The book is composed of several stories of people from completely different backgrounds – students, academics, outcasts; these are heartbreaking but equally life-affirming tales that might seem separate at first, but then beautifully connect and intertwine in the end, leaving us longing for more. Where is home, where does exile start or does it ever end?

I would also wholeheartedly recommend Lemn Sissay’s My Name Is Why (Canongate, £16.99). This powerful and unflinchingly honest memoir has so much to say about the failures of our system and the silences of our society – being black, being in foster care, the struggle for identity, belonging, equality and dignity... A must-read book for anyone who refuses to be “defined by darkness” and injustice.

James Clarke

Winner of the Betty Trask award for The Litten Path

Elizabeth Hardwick’s shimmering melancholia Sleepless Nights was given a crisp reissue in 2019 (Faber, £8.99), 40 years after it was first published, and it’s my book of the year. It’s a dream slideshow, part memoir, part missive, part fiction, a work of lasting beauty that guides you through the mysteries, and tragedies of people the narrator has known and loved: the literary equivalent of polished onyx. This Is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill (Profile Books, £7.99) tells the story of an influential publisher brought down in a sexual misconduct scandal. It’s a stunningly written, arch look at transgression and our need to feel understood and confided in, and in an age of calling out groping men who think they can hide behind their money, it’s of the moment too. Nobber by Oisin Fagan (John Murray, £12.99) is the book about medieval Ireland I never knew I wanted. Plague-ridden, trippy and violent, it’s uniquely told and full of startling images.

Diana Evans

Winner of the South Bank Sky Arts award and shortlisted for the Orwell prize, the Women’s prize for fiction and the Rathbones Folio prize for Ordinary People

Hair is no small subject for the African diaspora, indeed for the history of colonialism and imperialism, which pretty much includes all of us, so I’ve been pleasantly engrossed this autumn in Emma Dabiri’s excellent nonfiction debut Don’t Touch My Hair (Allen Lane, £16.99). Part memoir, part spiky, thoroughly researched sociopolitical analysis, it delves deep into the painful realities and history of follicular racism while offering useful maintenance tips in the process. Of the poetry I’ve been reading this year, Anthony Anaxagorou’s second collection, After the Formalities (Penned in the Margins, £9.99), stands out for its sharp and beguiling, imaginative scope and the endlessly surprising electricity of its language: “I can fit my childhood into a fist”; “there’s a kind of shaking the living perform”. And speaking of imaginative scope, there are few writers who possess quite the boundless daring of Irenosen Okojie, whose second collection of short stories, Nudibranch (Little, Brown, £14.99), is dazzling, a feast for the senses, as well as a lesson in both creative and existential bravery.

Stuart Turton

Winner of the Costa first novel award for The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

Let’s start with The Hug by Eoin McLaughlin and Polly Dunbar (Faber, £6.99), because it’s utterly lovely. It’s a children’s book I read to my young daughter, and it makes her face light up every time she hears it. Reading to give somebody else pleasure isn’t a thing I’ve done before, but it’s surprisingly wonderful. The Porpoise by Mark Haddon (Chatto & Windus, £18.99) is the book I’ve recommended the most this year, because it’s the one I had the most fun with. It kept shifting as I read it, changing from action to romance to science-fiction. It’s dizzying. And then there’s A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths by John Barton (Allen Lane, £25). I was brought up Roman Catholic and I’m fascinated/annoyed by the way religion still entangles itself in my thought processes, long past the point I stopped believing in any of it. This book has helped unpick some of my mental knots.

Chigozie Obioma

Shortlisted for the Booker prize for An Orchestra of Minorities

Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press, £13.99) stretches the imagination and brings to the universe it seeks to recreate such intensity of purpose and flamboyance that one would be hard-pressed to think of any other word other than “original” to describe it.

I very much admired Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End (Hamish Hamilton, £12.99), a highly unusual novel in which a writer confronts one of life’s deepest sorrows in losing her child. It is a conceptual novel that challenges the form, but the exchanges between the mother and son are funny, touching and profoundly moving.

Perhaps one of the most underrated novels of the year is Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s House of Stone (Atlantic, £8.99), an expansive tale that celebrates a nation through a central character. Were it written about any western country, this novel would have been much talked about, but we are talking Zimbabwe here. It is an ambitious and daring novel from a promising writer.

Will Eaves

Winner of the Wellcome book prize for Murmur. Also shortlisted for the James Tait Black memorial prize for fiction

The Library of Ice (Scribner, £9.99), Nancy Campbell’s essay on art, science and life in the Arctic, has the direct seriousness of the early Pelican nonfiction list. It’s wittily arranged, too: one section segues from Bill Jacklin’s Rink mural at Washington airport to Noel Streatfeild’s White Boots, and thence to Torvill and Dean’s 1980s figure-skating routines. With a similar associative light touch, Ian Sansom’s September 1, 1939 (4th Estate, £16.99) invokes Vladimir Nabokov and Ed Sheeran to illuminate WH Auden’s famous poem. The book is also a homage to Auden’s aphoristic prose, and such identification with another has its own point to make: an artistic persona, necessarily half borrowed, can take you so far, but the work itself must stay truthful. These distinctions are caught, beautifully and unexpectedly, in novelist Paul Bailey’s first collection of poems, Inheritance (CB Editions, £8.99), about age and self-consciousness, in which the shedding of one literary skin reveals another.

Claire Adam

Winner of the Desmond Elliott prize for Golden Child

Here are three recent books that, once opened, I couldn’t put down. I came across the essay collection Constellations by Sinéad Gleeson (Picador, £16.99) in the bookshop of the British Library: I’d put aside the day for my own work and ended up standing by the display table, getting in everyone’s way, turning page after page, quite unable to tear myself away. Self-Portrait, Celia Paul’s memoir (Jonathan Cape, £20), I read on my Kindle, until two in the morning when I should have been asleep; it was the photograph of the artist in a bare room that drew me in – how I wished my life afforded me that bare room. Finally, Lemn Sissay’s memoir, My Name Is Why (Canongate, £16.99), which I read in one compulsive sitting: a book that reminds me, as it should remind us all, that the state of childhood is a state of profound vulnerability.

Tommy Orange

Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio prize for There There

The three books I enjoyed reading the most in 2019 are Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Vintage, £12.99), Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (4th Estate, £16.99), and Samanta Schweblin’s Mouthful of Birds (Oneworld, £12.99). Ocean’s novel because it is just so very full of beauty and power. Also, grace. Valeria’s novel because it is exquisitely smart, funny and thrilling, and Samanta’s stories because they are so new and strange and good. Her collection makes me want to use the trite and overused descriptor Kafkaesque, but I won’t.

Hallie Rubenhold

Winner of the Baillie-Gifford prize for The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack the Ripper

Top of my list is Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women (Bloomsbury, £16.99). The best stories are often true ones; an intimate examination of three women’s sex lives is a seductive subject in itself, but the sumptuous and visceral writing made this book an enthralling read. Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (Chatto & Windus, £20) provided the perfect escapist pleasure, cleverly knitting together strands from both her novel The Handmaid’s Tale and its television adaptation. Observing Atwood work with two storytelling mediums has been an education. Lara Maiklem’s Mudlarking (Bloomsbury, £18.99) is testimony to the beauty of micro-history and how small objects and unknown figures are capable of telling large, panoramic stories. In this case, the author has constructed a history of London from artefacts found on the Thames foreshore.

Julia Lovell

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize for Maoism: A Global History

I’ve chosen three books that make us see the world in new, connected ways. William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy (Bloomsbury, £30) tells the extraordinary story of how the East India Company became a ruthless colonising power that throughout the 18th century effectively ended Mughal control of India. The book is a powerful, timely reminder of the dangerous power of corporate excess. Toby Green’s A Fistful of Shells (Allen Lane, £30) uses a global archive – in Africa, the Americas and Europe – to explore the complex, flourishing and connected economy of West Africa existing long before a European capitalist system established itself on the continent. Extraordinarily written and researched, the book paints a huge, complex canvas, filled with individual detail. Azadeh Moaveni’s Guest House for Young Widows (Scribe UK, £16.99) brilliantly illuminates the transnational lives and choices of women who joined Isis. Resting on interviews across Europe and the Middle East, it subtly, carefully explains how such women took the path they did.

David Keenan

Winner of the Gordon Burn award for For the Good Times

The most incredible book I read this year was Paul Kingsnorth’s Savage Gods (Little Toller, £14), a dramatic self-accounting that explodes “nature writing” to strain at the limits of language itself. Kingsnorth charts the breakdown of his faith in words, in nature as an uncomplicated restorative, in the idea of “progress”, while fearlessly tracking his conclusions to their very ends. This is a writer – and a writer that burns – attempting to cure himself of writing, on the page, and it leads to some profound, and just as often jaw-dropping, insights. Kingsnorth’s two novels, The Wake and Beast, were masterpieces. But it’s hard to imagine where he might go after this. Nowhere, perhaps.

My favourite novel was Bindlestiff by Wayne Holloway (Influx Press, £9.99), a riotous, high-energy vision of future America and contemporary Hollywood that is dizzying in its imagination as it jumps between prose and film script and tears through modes and genres with a high modernist glee and a rock’n’roll swagger. My favourite short story collection was Wendy Erskine’s Sweet Home (Picador, £12.99). The prose is amazing, the dialogue perfect; Erskine is attuned to the momentous surrealism of everyday life in contemporary Belfast, where different rules continue to apply.

Lesley Nneka Arimah

Winner of the Caine prize for African fiction for Skinned

Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine (Random House USA Inc, £22.50) is a gem of a short story collection that evinces enviable skill and a broad range as Fajardo-Anstine unfolds both sweeping and intimate stories of indigenous and Latin experiences in the American west. House of Stone by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma (Atlantic, £8.99) is a literary, historical page-turner - a tall order that Tshuma achieves in this exceptional debut. There are several gasp-out-loud twists and a narrator who charms and offends in equal measure, even as the novel thoughtfully examines a brutal period in Zimbabwe’s history. Tressie McMillan Cottom is a genius. In Thick and Other Essays (New Press, £13.99) she articulates America’s social dimensions in regards to race, gender, education and class with a studied consideration born of intensive research, shored with the digestibility of personal experience. I have long been a fan of her work and Thick delivered beyond my already high expectations.

Caroline Criado Perez

Winner of Books Are My Bag readers’ choice award and Royal Society insight investment science book prize for Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

This has been a bumper year for dog-related memoirs and while obviously I loved them all (all dog memoirs are good girls), Lost Dog: A Love Story by Kate Spicer (Ebury, £16.99) was my favourite. Funny, touching and absolutely right about the redeeming power of the pooch. A doggy page-turner: I read it straight through in two days.

Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Wildfire, £18.99) was a minute, unsparing examination of the breakdown of a marriage. I kept having to stop to take pictures of passages (some of which ran on for pages) to send to friends because it was just too accurate. Sad, mad and funny. Also features a bonus dog. The bombshell revelation of Becoming Beauvoir (Bloomsbury, £20), Kate Kirkpatrick’s excellent biography of Simone de Beauvoir, is the bowdlerisation of The Second Sex by the man who translated this seminal feminist text into English. HM Parshley cut De Beauvoir’s analysis of housework and references to women’s anger, along with 78 women’s names from the women’s history section. He kept in references to men’s feelings, though.

Leila Slimani

Winner of the British book awards fiction debut award for Lullaby

Muhammad Abdelnabi is one of the most brilliant Egyptian authors today and rightly received the Arab literature prize for La chambre de l’araignée (In the Spider’s Room) (the American University in Cairo Press, £9.99). He is the first Arab writer to explore homosexuality so sincerely and extensively. His novel was inspired by a very famous case in Egypt: in 2001, 52 men were arrested in a nightclub because of their sexuality. The author adopts the point of view of one of them so the reader becomes effectively embedded in the gay community of a country where homosexuals are systematically persecuted. This beautifully written and poetic book moved me to tears; it is an ode to freedom and a real act of bravery. The Sport of Kings by CE Morgan (4th Estate, £16.99) was translated into French in January 2019. It tells the story of a redemption and is a declaration of love to horses. I was really impressed by the author’s style and lyricism and the way she described violence inside a family and between social classes.

The Other Americans by Laila Lalami (Bloomsbury Circus, £16.99) is probably one of the most powerful books I’ve read these past few years on immigration and the US. I experienced the same pleasure reading it as I got from the great classical novels I read as a teenager. Its variety of characters and scenes makes it hard to categorise. The former seem so real, so alive, you can almost touch them; Lalami has a wonderful, very tender way of exploring their souls.

Tayari Jones

Winner of the Women’s prize for fiction for An American Marriage

One of my favourite novels of 2019 is You Will Be Safe Here by Damian Barr (Bloomsbury, £16.99), which is almost like two novels at once. The first half is an unflinching look at the second Boer war at the turn of the 20th century. Be warned; this is a demanding read. Any war, even one known as “the last gentlemen’s war”, is marked by unchecked brutality and Barr never lets us lose sight of the toll of the inhumanity inflicted on the Boers and that they inflict on the indigenous people of South Africa. Then, with grace and artistry, he weaves this story with that of a modern-day gay conversion camp that bears far too close a resemblance to the conditions of war. There is pain on these pages and poetry too. I left this book bruised yet somehow better for it.

I also loved Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn (Oneworld, £16.99). It’s a story about mothers, daughters and the high price immigrants pay to change their lives. My final pick is a gorgeous collection of poetry by Jericho Brown. The Tradition (Pan Macmillan, £10.99) spins poetic gold from the exquisite pain and pleasure of being black in America.