guaranteed festive cert BOOKS o celebrity stocking filler tat here, ust some

EMILY & DAN ROSS STORYSMITH BOOKS

Not for the fi rst time in 2020, we’ve found ourselves preparing to open our bookshop to the public after a prolonged closure. This time around we were a little more prepared for taking online orders only but, this being Christmas, the shop was beginning to resemble a tiny and slightly untidy warehouse. , fi ne a very untidy warehouse.

Beavering away with the doors closed and only the books for company encouraged some refl ection, though, and we realised something.

Among the chaos and upset, the publishing world managed to quietly present some absolute stunners, and turn this year into an unexpectedly bountiful one for great books.

Without a doubt, our most anticipated title for the year was Earthlings, by the enigmatic Japanese author Sayaka Murata.

Her previous novel, Convenience Store Woman, was an unexpected international phenomenon thanks to its blunt yet accessible style. So

“Among the chaos of 2020, the publishing world managed to quietly present some absolute stunners” A good year for books

Well, we guess it had to be good for something. Hold the celebrity biographies; instead, stick these 2020 crackers in the Christmas stocking . . .

obviously she followed it up with a superimmersive experimental novel about a woman who believes she is an alien and spends her time talking to a space hedgehog named Piyyut (who also happens to grace the cover). It’s not for the fainthearted, and it may polarise your fi reside discussions at book club this month, but for sheer entertainment value we found it hard to beat.

Similarly entertaining but very much more down to earth was Hannelore Cayre’s stylish and witty barnstormer The Godmother, which introduced us to Patience Portefeux, a lowly translator turned burgeoning queen of the Parisian crime underworld in a delicious and inhalable novelette. Likewise, The Adventures Of China Iron gave us a heroine with grit and palpable gumption: Gabriel Cabezón Cámara’s feminist retelling of an old Argentinian legend has a whisky-chugging Scottish woman in it, it’s a gay love story and it’s only 200 pages long (we are big fans of brevity).

Perhaps appropriately, given recent events, some of our favourite books this year showed us the heart of America. Pew, Catherine Lacey’s haunting fable about an unnamed, ungendered and completely unknown stranger who arrives in an unnamed town in the country’s deep south, is a masterclass in tension, slowly revealing just how the gracious hospitality of a community can only go so far.

Jia Tolentino’s immensely readable collection of essays, Trick Mirror, proved to be just as intriguing as its title, distilling and dissecting topics ranging from campus sexual assault to the prevalence of pre-packaged salads for o ce lunches with e ual rigour, a picture of contemporary America drawn by a writer who is deeply immersed within it.

And then there was Real Life, Brandon Taylor’s Booker-nominated début novel about a mild-mannered biologist who in one lifechanging weekend reckons with his own status as a gay black man. In many ways it’s one of the quietest novels of the year, a tender and melancholy story about reticence, shame and ignored injustices, but, such is the intangible magic of a good book, it reveals so much more after you’ve turned the last page. 2021 will have to do well to beat this year for good books (we’ve read some already; more on that next time), but for now we’re content to look back. You may notice that our favourite books this year weren’t the celebrity autobiographies some retailers may guide you towards, and looking beyond the bestsellers is something we always try to encourage.

As we welcome our customers back in the shop, that’s exactly what we’ll be doing once again in our e orts to pair every reader with their perfect Christmas gift. Well, once we’ve tidied up a bit.

Storysmith is now open at 49 North Street; www.storysmithbooks.com