If you’re looking for inspiration for your 2022 reading pile, you’re in luck. The next 12 months promise some eagerly anticipated releases from award-winning and short-listed authors and there’s sure to be something to appeal to everyone.
There are plenty to choose from, but here’s your rundown of five of the best.
1. Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra (1 March)
Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra’s books have covered travelogue (Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small-Town India), the intellectual response of Asia to western imperialism (From the Ruins of Empire), and the blindless of western liberalism to the non-western world (Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire).
In March, Mishra releases his second novel, Run and Hide. The book comes 20 years after his first, the award-winning The Romantics.
Run and Hide follows Arun, a young boy growing up in a small railway town who is accepted to the Indian Institute of Technology. Charting the rise of New India, and the effects of reaching above your social caste, Arun finds the world of finance far less rewarding than he had imagined.
Retreating from the high-flying city life and its moral ambiguities, Arun heads to a small village in the Himalayas to write.
2. Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo (7 April)
Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names, followed the life of Darling, a 10-year-old girl living in the shanty town of Paradise.
From a childhood of playing games, stealing guavas, and singing Lady Gaga, Darling escapes to the America of her dreams. Once there, she begins to understand that she has replaced one dangerous existence with another. We Need New Names was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker prize.
In her latest novel, Glory, the equine leader of a nation inhabited by intellectual animals is deposed, leading to an internecine struggle as the animals fight for a successor.
This Animal Farm-style take on Robert Mugabe’s fall from power in Zimbabwe follows the political machinations of a number of animal narrators searching for a new leader and hoping not to repeat the all-too-human mistakes of the past.
3. Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St. John Mandel (28 April)
Canadian author Emily St John Mandel’s fan base grew massively with the release of her fourth novel, Station Eleven in 2014. The story of a Shakespearean acting troupe travelling through a post-apocalyptic America won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction.
Mandel followed up Station Eleven with the similarly appreciated The Glass Hotel (2020) and now comes The Sea of Tranquillity.
The exiled son of a 1900s diplomat travels through British Columbia, a famous writer of the future leaves her moon colony to visit earth, and a detective investigates time anomalies beneath the permanently dark skies of the Night City.
Transporting the reader between 1912 and 2401, this compelling story of art, love, and loss tells the story of unravelling time and the far-reaching echoes of a violin heard deep within a Canadian forest.
4. Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata (5 July)
Japanese author Sayaka Murata found fame with her international bestseller, Convenience Store Woman. The quirky tale of a young woman’s struggles to understand and find her place in the world, Murata followed up Convenience Store Woman with the disquieting Earthlings.
Earthlings followed 10-year-old Natsuki and her cousin Yuu as they came to terms with being aliens, the only explanation they can find for their tumultuous relationship with their family and a general sense of being outsiders.
Life Ceremony is the first collection of Murata’s short stories to be translated into English. Expect macabre body horror, taboo-breaking tales of modern relationships and feminism, and skewed humanity in a series of tales not for the faint-hearted.
5. The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid (2 August)
British-Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid came to public attention with the release of his second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, shortlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize.
2017’s Exit West, meanwhile, told a story of young love amidst the migration crisis. Protagonists Nadia and Saeed hear rumours of mysterious black doors as they attempt to leave an unnamed Muslim city besieged by civil war.
Hamid’s follow-up, The Last White Man, arrives in August. It is the realisation of an idea that had been fermenting since 9/11 when the author found his “partial membership” to whiteness revoked.
Its opening lines set the tone of a novel dealing with race, equality, and the effects of being seen: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.”Â
