Evaristo, Porter, Cox and Moore featured on the New Statesman Books of the Year 2019

A comprehensive and prestigious list of authors offer their favourite books of the year 2019.

Nicola Sturgeon and Jessie Burton chose Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo, Sturgeon commenting that “[Girl, Woman, Other] isn’t just my book of the year, it’s one of the most insightful and life-affirming books I’ve read in many a year. It comprises twelve beautifully interwoven stories of identity, race, womanhood, gender and sexuality, all rooted in the realities and complexities of modern Britain. The characters are vivid and authentic, the writing exquisite and it brims with humanity.”

Richard Lloyd Parry chose Lanny by Max Porter: “Lanny by Max Porter is the best new novel that I read this year, and it more than lives up to the promise of his first novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers. It’s a book about the English neo-countryside that creates a new way of being sentimental – a cruel, clear-sighted, ironic kind of sentimentality. It’s as if Ted Hughes and Emily Dickinson took over writing the scripts for The Archers. I loved it.”

Leo Robson chose  Zonal Marking by Michael Cox: “[Zonal Marking] is about approaches in European football since 1992, is one of the most illuminating and engrossing works of cultural history I’ve ever read”

Andrew Marr chose Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography Volume 3 by Charles Moore: “It has been a very good year for biographies, and for lots of people Charles Moore’s third volume of his Margaret Thatcher biography will be the book of 2019.”

 

Click here to read more on the New Statesman website.