All the books I read in 2020 and 2021

Kobo Abe, The Ruined Map

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Svetlana Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer

Svetlana Alexievich, Second-hand Time

Carlos Manuel Álvarez, The Fallen

Daniel Anselme, On Leave

Bernardo Atxaga, Nevada Days

Yukito Ayatsuji, The Decagon House Murders

Dorothy Baker, Young Man with a Horn

Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat

Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds

Quentin Bates, Cold Comfort

David Bellos, Jacques Tati

Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond

Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19

Matt Benton Rees, The Fourth Assassin

Laurent Binet, Civilisations

Cara Black, Murder on the Champ de Mars

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, The Passenger

Kate Briggs, This Little Art

Craig Brown, One Two Three Four

Dino Buzzati, Poem Strip

Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe

Jonathan Coe, Mr Wilder and Me

Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

Colin Cotterill, Six and a Half Deadly Sins

Gioacchino Criaco, Black Souls

Frédéric Dard, The Executioner Weeps

Frédéric Dard, Crush

Augusto De Angelis, The Murdered Banker

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

Brian Dillon, Suppose a Sentence

David Diop, At Night All Blood Is Black

Garry Disher, Bitter Wash Road 

Garry Disher, The Dragon Man

Garry Disher, Port Vila Blues

Stuart Douglas, Shuggie Bain

David Downing, Jack of Spies

Geoff Dyer, See/Saw: Looking at Photographs

Mathias Enard, Zone

Annie Ernaux, The Years

Agustín Fernández Mallo, The Things We’ve Seen

Jon Fosse, The Other Name (Septology I-II)*

Jon Fosse, I is Another (Septology III-V)*

Jon Fosse, A New Name (Septology VI-VII)*

Jon Fosse, Scenes from a Childhood

Alan Furst, Under Occupation

Gaito Gazdanov, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf

Natalia Ginzburg, The Dry Heart

Rainald Goetz, Rave

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

Phil Harrison, The Age of Static

John Hersey, Hiroshima

Andrew Humphreys, Raving upon Thames

Denis Johnson, The Stars at Noon

Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis, The Boy in the Suitcase

Ryszard Kapuściński, The Emperor

David Keenan, This is Memorial Device

Philip Kerr, Hitler’s Peace

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle 6

Karl Ove Knausgaard & Fredrik Ekelund, Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game

Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café

Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear

Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream

Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

Seicho Matsumoto, A Quiet Place

Fernanda Melchior, Hurricane Season

Clemens Meyer, Bricks and Mortar

Leonard Michaels, The Nachman Stories

Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel

Shigeru Mizuki, Showa 1926-39

Patrick Modiano, Missing Person

Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore

Haruki Murakami, First Person Singular

Magdalen Nabb, The Monster of Florence

Cees Nooteboom, Roads to Santiago

Howard Norman, The Northern Lights

James O’Brien, How to Be Right

Andrew O’Hagan, Mayflies

David Olusuga, Black and British

Eliot Pattison, The Lord of Death

David Peace, Tokyo Redux

Roberto Perone, The Second Life of Inspector Canessa

Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read

Leo Perutz, Saint Peter’s Snow

Arthur Phillips, The King at the Edge of the World

Chris Power, A Lonely Man

Ian Rankin, A Song for the Dark Times

Robin Robertson, The Long Take

Marilynne Robinson, Jack

Nicholas Royle, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector

Salman Rushdie, Quichotte

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

Leonardo Sciascia, A Simple Story 

Anna Seghers, Transit

Jorge Semprun, The Long Voyage

Adania Shibli, Minor Detail

Soji Shimada, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders

Georges Simenon, Sunday

Georges Simenon, Death Threats

Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory

Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Masako Togawa, The Lady Killer

Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

William Trevor, Last Stories

Janwillem van de Wetering, The Sergeant’s Cat

Hilde Vandermeeren, The Scorpion’s Head

Luis Fernando Verissimo, The Spies

Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace

Enrique Vila-Matas, Never Any End to Paris

Katharina Volckmer, The Appointment

Peter Wahloo, The Lorry

Edmund White, The Flâneur

Timothy Williams, Big Italy

Qiu Xiaolong, Enigma of China

Seishi Yokomizo, The Honjin Murders

Seishi Yokomizo, The Inugami Curse

Shuichi Yoshida, Villain

Nell Zink, Doxology (120)

* Book(s) of the year(s)

Avian invasion

It's the harsh 'Sqruawck!' that often alerts you to their presence. Then there is the flash of fluorescent green in the sky. If they're perched in a tree, you may even get a glimpse of red beak.

As a resident of Richmond, I'm terribly proud of our parakeet population. A chance sighting during the day feels like a cheery greeting from the gods, a bright hint of good fortune and conviviality.

Now, Paradise Road, the 'extremely small' publisher behind writer Peter Watts's estimable investigation of Battersea Power Station, Up In Smoke, has produced The Parakeeting of London, by 'gonzo ornithologists' Nick Hunt and Tim Mitchell. A delightful trawl through the history and mythology of our cocksure neighbours, it's interspersed with many wonderful interviews with random passersby, whose views frequently stray into chance musings on immigration and belonging.

It's a terrific read and you can order a copy from Paradise Road, or ask your local bookshop to get it in.

Not so slight return

Gangway are back, back, back! The Danish pop group, who split up in 1998, release a fantastic new album, Whatever It Is, on 5 April. Fêted with multiple awards in their home country, their biggest moment in the UK probably came with dissolute single My Girl and Me (1986).

Gangway's first album The Twist, with its echoes of The Smiths, came out back in 1984; Whatever It Is feels appropriately like the follow-up to the band's final, seventh, That's Life (1996). In the spirit of experimentation on that album, Whatever It Is is completely contemporary - as if That's Life had been moved forward in time.

The songwriting is as lovely as ever, as evidenced on first single Colourful Combinations, augmented by some fascinating sounds: there's a great mix from track Whatever… to the penultimate Exit, with its sample reference to where they left off 23 years ago - a hiatus worthy of filmmakers Whit Stillman, Terrence Malick or Roy Andersson. Second single Don't Want to Go Home, reworked from songwriter Henrik Balling's The Quiet Boy side project, sits particularly well here (I love, again, the odd noise at the end).

The band intend to back up this tremendous achievement with a series of live dates throughout the year. You can find links to the album and more on the band's Facebook page.

New from the BFI

Some exciting news: I've contributed a piece about Georges Simenon to the booklet accompanying a new, dual format edition of 1967 film Stranger in the House. This adaptation of the Belgian author's novel Les inconnus dans la maison (1940) by director Pierre Rouve stars James Mason alongside Geraldine Chaplin and Bobby Darin. It's been released as part of the BFI's Flipside strand - you can read more about it and order a copy here. As the image on the booklet cover declares: 'A great Simenon becomes a great film.'

Merry Christmas!

After a slightly uninspiring start, Harry Gruyaert's covers for Penguin's continuing Maigret reissues are getting really good. The Flemish House (number 14) is out now, followed by The Madman of Bergerac in January (Liberty Bar is out in March). And there's a hardback edition of the first four books in an edition originally designed by author Georges Simenon.

Happy Christmas and all the very best for 2015!

The Maigret Circle

A rare post to pull together a few developments in the Simenon universe, which seems to be expanding as Penguin floods bookstores with its new Maigret translations: number eight in the series, The Grand Banks Café (previously The Sailor's Rendez-Vous) is due out 5 June. It's a shame no bookshops have had any offers on these new imprints to tempt me to augment my complete, if ramshackle, Maigret collection, but Penguin will get me out for the English-language debut of The Mahé Circle (1944), translated by Siân Reynolds and released simultaneously with The Grand Banks…

One of the prolific author's non-Maigret, romans durs, The Mahé Circle (cover image above) is an intriguing addition to Simenon's translated catalogue, in which the good Dr Mahé is trapped in a bleak infatuation on his recurring family holiday in Porquerolles - the island off the Côte d'Azur and the setting for My Friend Maigret (1949), one of the dozen or so books featured in Penguin's previous, apparently ill-fated Simenon revival back in 2003. A little down the coast, the Cannes Film Festival has hosted the premiere of Mathieu Amalric's intriguing adaptation of The Blue Room (1955), starring the actor-director alongside Stéphanie Cléau and Léa Drucker (here's the poster).

No doubt all this and more will be mulled over by biographers Pierre Assouline and Patrick Marnham when they share the stage at the Institut Français on 1 June. Their discussion follows a screening of one of my favourite Simenon adaptations, M Hire, as part of the Institut's all too short Noir is the Colour season.

Sickert at Tate Britain

'Taste is the death of a painter' - Walter Richard Sickert, 1908


This week Tate Britain officially reopened its doors after a two-year renovation; it celebrates this weekend with a 'house-warming party'. The new rehang, sponsored by BP, arranges 500 years of British art chronologically, throwing up a number of juxtapositions and surprises.

If you want to trace the work of one artist through the BP Walk through British Art, you could do worse than follow the career of Walter Sickert. The German-born artist first appears halfway round Tate Britain's west wing in the room dedicated to the 1840s - Café des Tribunaux, Dieppe (c1890) - and continues to the front of the east wing: Miss Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as Isabella of France (1932).

The theatre crops up in early, Impressionistic, Minnie Cunningham at the Old Bedford (1892), though his fascination is given an unsettling, haunting twist in Brighton Pierrots (1915). In between, La Hollandaise (c1906) perhaps represents the peak of his Camden Town nudes.

Unfortunately, there's no room for Ennui (c1914), and I'd love to see his 1935 portraits of the Martin family, but on the way are Sickert's contemporaries: the Camden Town and Bloomsbury groups, Augustus John and his associates, and the Vorticists. Following Dulwich Picture Gallery's recent exhibition, 'A Crisis of Brilliance', the work of a group of Slade artists from a century ago shines especially brightly: David Bomberg (The Mud Bath, 1914), Stanley Spencer (Swan Upping at Cookham, 1915-19), CRW Nevinson (La Mitrailleuse, 1915), Paul Nash (Dead Sea, 1940-1) and Mark Gertler's wonderful Merry-Go-Round (1916).