The top 5
Honourable Mentions
Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize winner is a narrative delight that explores the last 20 years of South African history through the lives and deaths of an Afrikaner family.
Colson Whitehead also shows he can deliver in any genre – Harlem Shuffle is a heist novel with more in its mind, set in a vivd 1960s Harlem.
Graeme Macrea Burnet creates another meta-novel this one centring around a fraudulent psychologist in 1960s London and the woman who is intent on exposing him.
SA Cosby deals with issues of race, sexuality and family in the context of a propulsive and sometimes violent crime drama.
The wildest of the bunch – Laurant Binet’s counter-factual history in which the Incans get horses, steel and immunity early and go on to conquer 16th Century Europe.
Robert Goodman
For more of Robert’s reviews, visit his blog Pile By the Bed
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Robert Goodman is a book reviewer, former Ned Kelly Awards judge and institutionalised public servant based in Sydney. This and over 450 more book reviews can be found on his website Pile By the Bed.