The 3 best fiction books I read in 2021

I have to say it at the outset… I think I’m obsessed with books that are filled with a beautiful melancholy, that move me and break my heart a little, that leave me with this lingering emotion that feels lived rather than consumed. 

With that caveat, these are the three best books I read last year.

• The Porpoise by Mark Haddon. I thought it would be impossible for Mark Haddon to write a book better than “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. I was wrong. This book is a work of staggering imagination and virtuosity, a mythic fable, an adventure epic, a dark allegory but most of all a book of tragic, heartbreaking beauty. 

• The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. Yes it’s a beautiful, elegiac book about loss, grief and healing. But the writing. Oh the writing! It has the clarity, precision and freshness of a cold, blue winter day.

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. It may not be a book that hits the heights of “Remains of the Day” or even “Never Let Me Go” but even then, to read Ishiguro is a privilege and a gift. His ability to look at the big philosophical and existential questions through the prism of individual experience remains unsurpassed. And always in that inimitable, understated style, where what is unsaid is filled with more depth and emotion than a million words. In some ways he is the greatest writer in the English since Hemingway and I am truly grateful to be a recipient of his genius.