Favourite Books of 2022

I’m all caught up, which means it’s time for this year’s look at my favourite reads from the last twelve months.

2022 felt like a reading year in two parts. I read voraciously for the first 7 or 8 months of the year, finishing my Goodreads challenge of 60 Books in record (for me) time. Then, some time around September, I lost focus and never managed to recover. I usually average around 6 books a month, but for the 4 months I’ve been pushing myself to even make it through 3 or 4 books. I don’t know if it’s stress, distractions, mental health, that I’m not choosing the right reading material, or e) some combination of all of the above, but I hope my ability to read returns swiftly.

I totaled 76 books this year, and some of the highlights of my bookish year included belonging, for a month, to three different book clubs at the same time (work, run by friends, and one run by me), beginning a 10th anniversary re-read of my favourite series (Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles) and having an absolute blast discussing the first three books in the series with my fandom friends over zoom, and going for a blackout in Roar Cat Reads’ Summer Book Bingo by reading 24 books on specific prompts, all featuring LGBTQ+ characters or authors!

Honourable Mentions

They didn’t quite make the cut, but a quick mention for some of the other books this year that I enjoyed:

The Brother/Sister Plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney – I saw a stunning production of “The Brothers Size” pre-pandemic and have been hoping the rest of the triptych would be mounted soon, but while I wait to see them live it was a pleasure to read all three plays. There’s a rhythm to the plays and I found them very visual and easy to picture.

Peter Darling by Austin Chant – I’m not normally one for fairy tale retellings, but I found this one, where Peter is trans and, as an adult, re-evaluating his feelings for Hook, inspired and profound.

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan – This queer reimagining of the life and ascension of Zhu Yuanzhuang, the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty, plays with gender in really interesting ways and I was intrigued by the politics and by Zhu’s rise.

The List

“Going through the mirrors requires confronting yourself. You need guts, you know, to look yourself straight in the eyes, to see yourself as you are, to dive into your own reflection. Those who hide their faces, those who lie to themselves, those who see themselves better than they are, they will never be able.”

10. A Winter’s Promise and The Missing of Clairdelune by Christelle Dabos (Translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle)

A gift exchange with friends put A Winter’s Promise on my radar, and hilariously I was quickly spoiled for my secret book swap by two of the friends discussing A Winter’s Promise on Twitter and then panicking that I would buy it for myself before our exchange date. I may have known what book I was opening, but at least it was one that looked interesting! Sure enough, I really enjoyed the first book in Chistelle Dabos’ YA fantasy quartet about Ophelia, a quiet girl with the ability to ‘read’ inanimate objects and travel through mirrors, who must suddenly leave her family and her home to marry the aloof, cold Thorn and navigate the complicated politics of his world. I also enjoyed its sequel, The Missing of Clairedelune, which deepens the relationship between Ophelia and Thorn. Unfortunately I felt like the first two books almost felt like a separate duology, while the latter two felt entirely different and brought the quartet to a fairly disappointing ending. Still, I’ll always appreciate Ophelia and Thorn and the fascinating world building that Dabos does here. The first two books in the series were a gripping read!

“This is a love story to its blade-dented bone.”

9. The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

Last year Simon Jimenez narrowly missed out on being my favourite book of the year with his brilliant and affecting science-fiction novel The Vanished Birds. This year, I fell in love with his grim fantasy epic The Spear Cuts Through Water. If I could marry Jimenez’s prose, I would. The way he writes is lyrical, moving, epic in scale and world building, and yet intimate when it comes to his characters. The Spear Cuts Through Water is about as different from his previous book as it’s possible to be, and yet it’s also an incredible read. Though the world he creates here is violent and his protagonists both have traumatic pasts to reckon with, watching their arcs as the two warriors, Jun and Keema, grow from reluctantly depending on one another as travel companions, to yearning for one another hooked me and made my heart ache. At this point Simon Jimenez is an auto-buy author for me, and I cannot wait to see what he does next.

“Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. The arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you with seemingly no intermediate step.”

8. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

I’ve been thinking a lot about Emily St. John Mandel over the past few years, as her “pandemic book”, the brilliant Station Eleven, has had a deserving resurgence and even a TV adaptation, that I have yet to watch. I spent this year catching up, reading first The Glass Hotel, which I also enjoyed, and then her latest, Sea of Tranquility. The thing about her work is that it’s so consistently excellent – how does she do it? I am wholeheartedly invested in the Emily St. John Mandel Literature Universe. I love the little threads that connect her books, the commonalities between three otherwise very different novels, and how compulsively readable, accessible, and yet lyrically written all of her works are. While Station Eleven is still my favourite of St. John Mandel’s works, Sea of Tranquility was a joy to read.

“Sometimes his very existence to me is the existence of love itself.”

7. Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur

Told with warmth and honesty, Love in the Big City follows Young, a gay Korean man and aspiring author, who is searching for love in Seoul, South Korea. In all four of its interconnected parts, this slim novel moves between the past and present to explore people and relationships significant to Young throughout his twenties and thirties. The narrative voice is so candid and distinct that I felt like an old friend listening to Young discuss his relationships over drinks at a bar. I both laughed and nearly cried reading Love in the Big City, and found it a moving, raw, and often humorous look at young queer life in Seoul.

“Love can’t cure a mental illness. There are lots of ways to help him, you can just be there. To listen. To talk. To cheer him up if he’s having a bad day. And on the bad days you can ask what to could do to make things easier. Stand by his side, even when things are hard. But also knowing that sometimes people need more support than just one person can give. That’s love darling.”

6. Heartstopper volume 4 by Alice Oseman

I’m a big Alice Oseman fan and have been reading the Heartstopper digests as they’re published and loving the dose of endorphins they give me. While Heartstopper has never shied away from dealing with challenging topics, including bullying and homophobia, volume four shines a spotlight on Charlie’s anxiety and disordered eating problems as he seeks professional help. Just as poignant is Nick’s struggle, as he watches someone he loves in pain and isn’t sure how to help him. As someone who has been having my own mental health struggle, especially recently, this struck close to home for me and I was moved by Charlie’s bravery to face his problems and admit that he’s not okay and he can’t do it alone. Volume four definitely made me tear-up with its gentle, but honest storyline and I love that Charlie and Nick come out the other side stronger together.

“I think perhaps our kissing did do something strange to the way time flowed in the space occupied by our two bodies. Underneath me, she was perfectly open and sweet, content to be kissed and ravished. It couldn’t have lasted as long as I thought it did—long enough to build monuments that crumbled to marbled ruins, long enough that the entire city of Los Angeles fell into the fault line and was rebuilt on its own corpse—but when I looked up, I felt oddly sphinx-like, other and strange.”

5. Siren Queen by Nghi Vo

Writing lists of your favourite books from the last three years over a period of three days really lets you see which authors pop up again and again! Nghi Vo knocked me out with her debut novella, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, and this year I’ve been widely recommending her second novel, Siren Queen. The way Vo writes is so lush and atmospheric that it draws me in and I love her queer Asian women characters who take no shit. Set in a fantastical Hollywood, where both magic and monsters are real, Siren Queen is about Luli Wei, an ambitious, queer, Chinese-American girl who dreams of being a movie star. Gaining the leverage to propel herself into Hollywood, Luli puts some conditions on her contract: “No maids, no funny talking, no fainting flowers.” At first, the studio doesn’t know what to do with her, but then she’s cast as a monster and her star begins to rise. An atmospheric, enthralling story that asks how much of yourself are you willing to carve out for a shot at immortality?

“The grief of the stones was grief for every man killed in the building of the wall, for every man who died defending or attacking, for every man executed by being thrown off the battlements. “But those are our worst criminals!” the king protests, and the young man says, “That doesn’t matter to the stones.”

4. The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison

My review of this on Goodreads was just “I love Thara Celehar so much you guys” and that remains true! If you too enjoy watching a lonely, haunted, depressed, gay man of faith solve murders in a steampunk fantasy setting populated by elves and goblins, then you’re going to love both The Witness for the Dead and its sequel, The Grief of Stones. Thara’s journey in The Grief of Stones as he reckons with a loss and how this loss changes his core identity is heartbreaking and profound. There’s also a side mystery featuring scones, so obviously I loved this book. I will read as many stories about Thara Celehar as Katherine Addison is willing to write.

“Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction.”

3. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

King Lear is my favourite Shakespeare play and one of my favourite plays period, so I’ve had this acclaimed retelling, which casts Lear as an aging Iowa farmer dividing his thousand acre farm between his three daughters, on my list for ages. I’m so glad I finally picked it up, because A Thousand Acres is everything it promised to be. As a retelling it succeeds by finding the perfect balance between nods to Shakespeare’s play and doing something original and exciting rather than strictly updating the source material. The characters are layered, and I love that our viewpoint character is Ginny (Goneril in King Lear), which give us a fresh perspective on the story. Smiley’s writing and her character work drew me in and I think A Thousand Acres is that exceptional retelling that stands alone but can be enriched through some understanding of Lear.

“And if perhaps his friends had just learned his name, that the aloof small mage and artist was called Raphael, had a brother from another world called Kasian, well, he had to admit that he was rather relieved, in that distant marionette way, that he would not end the Game with no one to know his real name.”

2. Til Human Voices Wake Us by Victoria Goddard

Last year, Victoria Goddard’s The Hands of the Emperor topped my list of Favourite Reads. Although considerably less polished, her debut novel Til Human Voices Wake Us was one of my favourite books of 2022. Perhaps not since Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell have I encountered a book that meshed together so many of my special interests that it felt written just for me. Til Human Voices Wake Us is about Raphael, the Lord of Ysthar (our Earth), who is coming to the end of a centuries-old contest with an opposing mage. If he loses “The Great Game”, Ysthar will be forfeit. At this worst of all possible times, his life is upended by the arrival of his long-lost twin brother. Combining complicated brother bonds, a protagonist who hides behind masks, music, a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and Shakespeare, Til Human Voices Wake Us very nearly brought me to tears and Raphael, this withdrawn man with the weight of the world literally and metaphorically on his shoulders, is one of my new favourite fictional characters.

“You’ll find that what you can bear increases a great deal when you are not offered any other choice.”

1. The Bone Orchard by Sara A. Mueller

Judging from the 3.60 rating on Goodreads, this is a divisive choice for the number one spot, but it’s my list and I loved it. I do think The Bone Orchard is either a book you are going to absolutely adore or that it’s style just won’t be to your tastes. For me, it was clearly the former. Sara A. Mueller’s genre-defying debut novel is part political fantasy, part gothic revenge narrative, and part murder mystery. It revolves around Charm, the necromantic mistress of a brothel that services the wealthy of Borenguard, including its Emperor. When Charm is summoned to the Emperor’s deathbed, he charges her with choosing which of his awful sons will carry on the empire, and discovering which one is responsible for his own murder. I read The Bone Orchard compulsively in three or four days, drawn in by the rich world building, visual storytelling, the deft plotting, and the character work. I fell in love with its characters, especially Charm, who rebels through dying her hair in vibrant shades, and Justice, the most compassionate of Charm’s boneghosts. It’s densely written and there’s a lot to keep track of, but if you’re up for some intense courtly intrigue and themes of trauma, The Bone Orchard is a rewarding and wholly original read. It’s absolutely deserving of the title of my favourite book read in 2022 and although this is a standalone, I cannot wait to see what Sara Mueller comes up with next!


I’d love to know what books made your favourites lists, so let me know in the comments or drop a link to your blog posts so I can add to next year’s TBR!

Wishing you all a wonderful new year filled with new favourite reads and unexpected delights! See you in 2023.