Best Books of 2011
December 14, 2011
The lists of the Best Books of 2011 have been announced, with authors, critics and readers naming the fiction and non-fiction books that stood out for them this year.
Haruki Murakami’s eagerly-anticipated
1Q84 caused a sensation when it was released, with midnight launches around the world and record-breaking sales. It was identified as a favourite by contributors to the lists in the
Independent,
Kirkus Reviews, the
London Review of Books, the
New York Times and the
Financial Times.
A Visit From the Goon Squad by
Jennifer Egan won the
2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was mentioned in almost every Books of the Year list, including the
Guardian, the
Times,
New Statesman,
Evening Standard,
Independent &
Independent on Sunday,
London Review of Books,
Daily Telegraph and
Financial Times. It was also named at #2 in the Amazon Editors’ Top 50.
Other works of fiction that garnered a mention in the round-ups were
Ann Patchett’s
State of Wonder;
Glen Duncan’s
The Last Werewolf;
Out of It by
Selma Dabbagh;
A Man of Parts,
David Lodge’s fictionalised biography of HG Wells;
Gillespie and I by
Jane Harris;
Afterwards by
Rosamund Lupton and
One Dog and His Boy, the last novel for children by the late
Eva Ibbotson.
Several collections of stories also made the Best Books lists, including new writing by
DW Wilson who won the
BBC Short Story Award earlier this year with his collection
Once You Break A Knuckle; classic stories from
Alan Garner, brought together in the new
Collected Folk Tales and a collection of new and old writing by Pulitzer-prize winning American author
Steven Millhauser,
We Others.
In the non-fiction stakes, two biographies have been nominated several times;
Susie Harries’s
Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life has been called ‘a masterpiece of the biographical genre’ and was chosen by critics in the
Guardian,
New Statesman, Independent, Evening Standard, the Sunday Times, and the
London Review of Books.
Walter Isaacson’s
Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography topped best-seller lists all over the world when it was released and appeared in the selections of
the Times, Financial Times, Independent, Amazon, and Sunday Times. It also came second in
Time Magazine’s Top 10 Non-fiction books of the Year.
Other biographical works that appeared in the Best Books lists were
No Angel: The Secret Life of Bernie Ecclestone by biographer
Tom Bower; the memoirs of Earl Ferrers,
Whatever Next?;
I Left My Tent in San Francisco by
Emma Kennedy and the much-anticipated
You Can’t Say That, the autobiography of
Ken Livingstone.
A number of non-fiction books on the state of the global economy have also been nominated as important works in politically turbulent times, including
That Used To Be Us by
Thomas L. Friedman & Michael Mandelbaum;
The Leaderless Revolution by
Carne Ross and
Treasure Islands by
Nicholas Shaxson. More lighthearted non-fiction books that the critics identified as highlights of the year included works on Twitter (
How to Leave Twitter by
Grace Dent), football (
The Football Men by
Simon Kuper) and butterflies (
The Butterfly Isles: A Summer in Search Of Our Emperors and Admirals by
Patrick Barkham.)
