This year has been a big one for Swift with multiple shortlistings and prize-winning books, and now seven titles have been selected as Books of the Year.
Bret Easton Ellis’ Sunday Times-bestselling novel The Shards has been crowned by The Telegraph as his ‘finest novel in a quarter-century’, both ‘richly drawn and full of sly self-reference’ and the Financial Times has praised the novel as a ‘compelling’ and ‘gripping tale’ that is ‘fabulously wrongfooting’. Chris Power in the Sunday Times loved how the novel ‘captured the euphoria of youth’.
David McCloskey’s heart-thumping debut Damascus Station has been chosen by The Times as the Thriller of the Year and called ‘one of the best spy thrillers for years’. His ‘pulsating follow-up’ Moscow X, publishing here in January, has also been selected by Tim Shipman in the Sunday Times as his best book of the year. He says, ‘McCloskey populates a CIA operation to target Putin’s money with convincing characters and gripping tradecraft’.
After being recognised on the shortlists for the Orwell Prize for Non-Fiction and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, Hannah Barnes’ powerful Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children has been included as one of the best thought and ideas books in The Times and Sunday Times. Her ‘forensic, non-judgmental investigation’ into the collapse of the Gender Identity Development Service is ‘as compelling as it is disturbing’ and Sarah Ditum in the Sunday Times has also chosen this ‘essential’ account as her book of the year. The Economist selected Time to Think as one of their best books for 2023, outlining the read as ‘a journalistic and sobering take on a divisive and timely subject’.
River of the Gods by Candice Millard is seen by The Times and Sunday Times as recounting ‘the journey to Lake Tanganyika without affectation, letting this wonderfully bizarre adventure story tell itself’.
Our Forum Press imprint has also impressed this year with Sharron Davies and Craig Lord’s Unfair Play: The Battle for Women’s Sport picked by both The Telegraph and The Times and Sunday Times as a Book of the Year, following on from a recent William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award shortlisting.
Finally, Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation by Danny Kruger has been hailed by The Times and Sunday Times as ‘a rare book by a modern politician in that it seeks to present a complete ideological project’ and ‘refreshing in its ambition’, while The Telegraph concluded that it was the ‘best articulation of a resurgent Tory socialism’.