Some books are lazy, languid affairs and some are page-turners — forcing you to finish them in one go. We asked our book critics, Darryl Accone and Percy Zvomuya, for their top 10 reads of the year.
Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution
Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui and Moisés Sío Wong
(Pathfinder Press)
Even more fascinating than its title and subtitle suggest, because all three generals have much to say about the war against the apartheid army in Angola, and the decisive Angolan and Cuban victory at Cuito Cuanavale, which ultimately brought the National Party to the negotiating table. Chui headed the 90th Tank Brigade in Malanje, and lost a leg when his vehicle hit an anti-tank mine in northern Angola.
— Darryl Accone
The Savage Detectives
Roberto Bolano
(Picador)
Literature as life: Bolano and his characters live to write in this compelling and unforgettable portrait of the pursuit of literature, and unflinching statement of aesthetic belief.
— Darryl Accone
The Cry of the Sloth
Sam Savage
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
The epistolary novel steps into the delightfully entangled and disrupted world of small-town dreamer Andrew Whittaker, landlord, not very handyman, and quixotic editor of an independent literary journal that isn’t.
— Darryl Accone
Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics
Jonathan Wilson
(Orion)
Art and artifice, stratagems and sleight-of-feet: they’re all here in this page-turner on the philosophy and praxis of the great thinker-coaches and teams. Essential reading to understand better what really happens during a football game.
— Darryl Accone
Small Memories: A Memoir
José Saramago
(Harvill Secker)
The Master of Lisbon shows the grandeur of small things recollected in this refulgent memoir of the child, boy and youth from Azinhaga who became the man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.
— Darryl Accone
The Museum of Innocence
Orhan Pamuk
(Faber and Faber)
The Master of Istanbul adopts a simple declarative style in this story of love gained yet thwarted, requited but denied. These entanglements of heart and soul are told in prose the more affecting for its uncharacteristic directness.
— Darryl Accone
2666
Roberto Bolano
(Picador)
The best novel I read this year. The New York Times said the 1000 page tome is “a landmark in what’s possible for the novel as a form”. Finish and klaar.
— Percy Zvomuya
Amulet
Roberto Bolano
(Picador)
Narrator Auxilio Lacouture’s frank and often humourous reminiscences about Mexico City’s poetry scene from a university toilet under a military siege.
— Percy Zvomuya
Summertime
JM Coetzee
(Harvill Secker)
The master, John Maxwell Coetzee, is dead and an English biographer is interviewing people who knew him. The Booker shortlisted narrative is Coetzee in his wickedly inventive mode, flagellating the self and his Afrikaaner kinsfolk.
— Percy Zvomuya
A Man Who is Not A Man
Thando Mgqolozana
(University of Kwazulu Natal Press)
Mgqolozana is perhaps South Africa’s most significant new writer from 2009. The moving novel is about a botched circumcision. In the narrative Mgqolozana portrays with tenderness and craft a ritual that’s eating up boys it was supposed to make into men.
— Percy Zvomuya