Twelve books for long evenings, chosen by our critics and readers.
Every year we ask our critics for the books they pressed on friends, and every year we ask readers to send in theirs. This time more than 600 of you wrote in, by letter, by email and, in one case, on the back of a lending-library slip from the old town branch. The twelve titles below are the ones that came up again and again, mixed with a few that our reviewers felt deserved a second look before the year is out. All are in print, and most are available from Calder’s independent bookshops and the city library.
The twelve
- The Salt Year, by Margaret Aubery – a family saga set in a fishing town that loses its harbour, told across four winters.
- Under the Viaduct, by Tobias Grenfell – a slim, funny novel about two brothers who inherit a failing pie shop.
- A Field Guide to Small Weather, by Esther Lund – essays on frost, fog and drizzle, part memoir, part natural history.
- The Lamplighter’s Ledger, by Ravi Menon – a historical mystery set among the gas-lit streets of a nineteenth-century port.
- Glass Houses, by Ines Calloway-Hart – short stories about neighbours, each set on the same suburban crescent.
- Night Shift, by Joel Atwood – a nurse’s account of a year on a hospital ward, unsentimental and often very funny.
- The Cartographer’s Daughter, by Signe Halvorsen – a translated novel about a mapmaker’s family on a disappearing island.
- Hill Country, by Bryony Steele – a collection of poems about farming, grief and sheepdogs.
- What the River Carried, by Daniel Oyelaran – a history of one river told through the objects pulled from its mud.
- The Last Tram Home, by Cora Whitlock – a crime novel set over a single night on a city tram network.
- Bread and Bone, by Kit Ambrose – a cookery memoir with recipes for the dark months.
- The Long Table, by Hamid Sarraf – a novel about a wedding feast that lasts three days and changes everyone at it.
The title readers mentioned most often was The Salt Year, which arrived quietly in spring and has been selling steadily ever since. Several of you noted that it reads like a book about Port Selwyn, though the author has never named the town. One reader in Ardle wrote that she had read it aloud to her father over three weeks of evenings and that both of them cried at the same chapter, which seems as good a recommendation as any.
Our critics’ choices
Among the critics, the strongest support was for What the River Carried. It is a history built from fragments – a bone comb, a pilgrim’s badge, a tin toy, a cash register – each pulled from the riverbed by mudlarks and archaeologists over a century. It sounds dry and is anything but; each chapter becomes a short story about the person who dropped the object. Our fiction reviewer pushed hard for Glass Houses, arguing that it is the best collection of short stories to appear in several years and that each story stands alone while adding something to the others.
“Winter is the season when people finally finish things. I always tell customers to pick one big book and one small one, so there is a reward waiting when the long one is done.”
That advice comes from Rosalind Pike, who has run the Canal Street bookshop for nineteen years and whose staff contributed three of the titles on this list. Her shop holds a reading evening on the first Thursday of each month through the winter, with mulled apple juice and a fire in the back room.
For readers who want something lighter
Not every winter book needs to be weighty. Under the Viaduct and The Last Tram Home are both comfortably finished in a weekend, and Night Shift, though it deals with illness and death, is full of warmth and dry humour. Readers with children recommended Bread and Bone as a book to cook from together, since its recipes are simple and the stories that accompany them are short enough to read while the oven heats.
Poetry readers were less vocal this year, but Hill Country drew letters from three different hill-town villages, each praising its unsparing account of lambing season. The translated pick, The Cartographer’s Daughter, came from a reader who said it was the only book she had read twice in a year.
Calder’s central library will display all twelve titles in its winter window from next week, and the reading group at the Harrow branch has already chosen The Long Table for its December meeting. If we have missed your favourite, write in: the best letters will appear in our spring list.
