2022 was an interesting year for any number of real life occurrences, but it was also a bumper year for fiction. Here is Quizlit’s picks for the 9 Best Books of 2022.
1. You made a Fool of Death with your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi
You made a Fool of Death with your Beauty is a 2022 romance novel by Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi. It is Emezi’s first romance novel, third adult novel and it follows Feyi Adekola, a Nigerian American visual artist as she heals from the trauma of widowhood and finds new love.
2. Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
A story of queer love and working-class families, Young Mungo is the brilliant second novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain.
Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars—Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic—and they should be sworn enemies. Yet against all odds, they fall in love as they find sanctuary and dream of escape in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. But when Mungo’s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a remote loch with two strange men, he will need all his strength and courage to find his way back to a place where he and James might still have a future.
3. Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
Glory is the bold new novel of Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo. Published on 8 March 2022, Glory is a political satire set around the time of Robert Mugabe’s fall and inspired by George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm. It was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.
4. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
Winner of the 2022 Booker Prize , set in Colombo 1990. this blistering murder-mystery-cum-ghost-story set amid the carnage of Sri Lanka’s civil war focuses on the effort to preserve ordinary life in the face of sectarian violence.
5. Siren Queen by Nghi Vo
Luli Wei is beautiful, talented, and desperate to be a star. Coming of age in pre-Code Hollywood, she knows how dangerous the movie business is and how limited the roles are for a Chinese American girl from Hungarian Hill—but she doesn’t care. She’d rather play a monster than a maid.
Siren Queen offers up an enthralling exploration of an outsider achieving stardom on her own terms, in a fantastical Hollywood where the monsters are real and the magic of the silver screen illuminates every page.
6. The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
The Books of Jacob is an epic historical novel by Olga Tokarczuk, published by Wydawnictwo Literackie in October 2014 in Polish. It is Tokarczuk’s ninth novel and is the product of extensive historical research, taking her seven years to write. The Books of Jacob is a 912-page novel divided into seven books. Set in the mid-18th century, “The Books of Jacob” is about a charismatic self-proclaimed messiah, Jacob Frank, a young Jew who travels through the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, attracting and repelling crowds and authorities in equal measure.
The English translation was released in 2022.
7. Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra
This charming novel follows Gonzalo, an aspiring poet, from his teen-age sonnets and sexual escapades to his relationship with a girlfriend, Carla, and her son, whom Gonzalo adopts as his stepson. (Gonzalo notes the unfortunate resonance between the Spanish for stepfather, padrastro, and poetastro, bad poet.) The stepson, Vicente, also wants to be a poet, and the second half of the novel sends up the Chilean literary scene as he guides a gringa journalist through a country where poetry is a national passion. As one character says, “Being a Chilean poet is like being a Peruvian chef or a Brazilian soccer player or a Venezuelan model.”
8. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel
The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.
9. The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn
Danish author Olga Ravn’s brilliantly unusual novel The Employees, which has been shortlisted for the International Booker prize, is an SF epic in miniature, but it takes a prosaic approach to our dreams of extraterrestrial transcendence. “It’s not hard to clean them,” says a crew member of the strange objects found on the faraway planet New Discovery, now housed in the Six-Thousand Ship orbiting above. “I normally use a little brush.”
Check out our picks for the Best Books of 2023
