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Oak Bay librarian reviews 2016’s top titles

Favourite fiction and non-fiction titles to while away winter

If winter has you wanting to curl up with a good book, you’re in luck. Here are my favourite reads of 2016.

Fiction

Do not say we have nothing, by Madeleine Thien – This beautiful, heartbreaking story of three generations  in China during the years of revolution, cultural revolution and Tiananmen Square won the Governor General’s Award, the Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.

• A Gentleman from Moscow, by Amor Towles – A fascinating look at Stalinist Russia, in 1922 a former aristocrat is sentenced to live in a hotel room in Moscow. For the next few decades he lives in his room and forms a life with the other guests and hotel workers, and raises a child who has been left in the hotel.

Commonwealth, by Anne Patchett – Patchett is a thoughtful modern American novelist who explores family relationships over time and in difficult circumstances.

• My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante – Ferrante’s four-book Neapolitan series presents an enduring friendship in a poor and conflicted  Italian city.

• A Hero of France, by Alan Furst – Furst writes solidly researched spy novels with lots of accurate historical details, suspense and a touch of romance.

• Mothering Sunday: a romance, by Graham Swift – Sharing what she believes will be a last tryst with a longtime secret lover on the eve of his marriage, a woman reflects on the years they have spent together and her journey of self-discovery against a backdrop of 20th-century history.

Golden Son, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda – A story of two friends from different backgrounds in contemporary India.

• The End of Days, by Jenny Erpenbeck – Modern German literature in translation, this book consists of five “books,” each leading to a different death for an unnamed woman protagonist as she travels through the time of war, revolution and communism.

Non-fiction

• Road to Little Dribbling, by Bill Bryson – Who can resist this favourite author? We laugh and we cry, as he travels through England and reports on his experiences.

50 Psychology Classics, by Tom Butler-Bowden – A fascinating compilation and brief review of 50 influential psychologists, including Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

• How can I help? by David S. Goldbloom – What is it like to be a psychiatrist? The author presents a typical week with many situations and illnesses, making it a fine addition to the growing genre of readable and informative books by doctors.

• The Lonely City: Adventures in the art of being alone, by Olivia Laing – A thoughtful book, both personal and political, addressing the experience of isolation.

Red Star Tattoo, by Sonja Larsen – One of the “strange childhood” genre, about a girl who is abandoned by  parents who send her to live in a communist cult at a young age.

• This is not my life, by Diane Schoemperlen’s – The Canadian author’s six-year relationship with a convict makes compelling reading – why we do the things we do for love.

• Do no harm: Stories of life, death and brain surgery, by Henry Marsh – Brain surgeon? Now there’s a job.  This compelling book brings many harrowing situations to life as he does his best to solve some of medicine’s most complex problems.

Joy Huebert is public services librarian at the Oak Bay branch of the Greater Victoria Public Library.