SCMP's list of the best books of 2014
2014 was a vintage year for publishing, with some strong debuts and fine follow-ups. James Kidd offers his list of the best holiday reads
Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos
Subtitled Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, this book by The New Yorker's Evan Osnos asks fundamental questions. Can the Communist Party square control and freedom of the individual? Mixing reportage and commentary, Osnos seeks answers, no matter how complex. Required reading.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
Flanagan's Man Booker winner is a historical novel with personal roots. Inspired by his father's own experiences, it is set on the infamous and brutal Burma railroad where an Australian doctor is tortured by memories of his vanished life, and the lives that vanish each day before his very eyes. Unflinching and deeply moving.
The Search Warrant by Patrick Modiano
2014's Nobel Literary Prize laureate may have inspired questions ranging from "Who?" to "What?" but the French novelist was a deserved recipient if 1997's The Search Warrant is anything to go by. This elliptical novel tries to piece together the disappearance, in 1942, of 15-year-old Dora Bruder. The narrator's efforts are heroic and futile, as Dora represents the millions who vanished without trace.
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride
Eimear McBride's extraordinary, challenging debut gathered four major prizes in Britain. The unsettling rhythms of its staccato sentences have earned passionate praise and some dislike, but this frank, de-contextualised fictional autobiography of a young Irish woman is already a book of the year.
Redeployment by Phil Klay
Phil Klay won the National Book Award for best fiction for these unblinking stories about soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. One of a new generation of American soldier-writers, Klay is hard-bitten but humane, whether he recalls a soldier shooting dogs that have eaten human flesh or a Marine who collected body parts.