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From award-winning Asian fiction to great American novels: our pick of the best books from 2016

It’s been quite a year in the world of letters, not least for Asian writers – a Korean won the International Man Booker and Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian fiction continued to expand their reach

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South Korean writer Han Kang, author of International Man Booker winner, The Vegetarian.

Published: 5:02pm, 14 Dec 2016Updated: 2:09pm, 15 Dec 2016

It’s been a lousy year. Brexit, Syria, the epidemic of genuinely great people dying: from Bowie and Prince to Ali and Cohen. And I haven’t even mentioned Bad Santa 2. Or Donald Trump.

The year in books was considerably more encouraging, not least for the insights they offer into the deluge of disasters. Anyone seeking enlightenment about the human cost of Syria’s civil war, for example, should read The Battle for Home by Marwa al-Sabouni. An architect who lives in Homs, she employs memoir, architectural analysis and wonderfully evocative drawings to tell her story and that of her home city. It is astonishing.

It’s also been a stellar year for writers from across Asia. Madeleine Thien, who was associated for several years with City University of Hong Kong, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with Do Not Say We Have Nothing. The title might have been a double-negative tongue-twister, but the narrative effortlessly covers six decades of Chinese history, culminating in the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown. You can read the book as a heartbreaking drama of lives at the mercy of larger political forces but also as a profoundly moving meditation on the liberating power of music.

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian was a worthy winner of 2016’s International Man Booker. By turns surreal, erotic and shocking, this utter one-off is propelled by the otherwise ordinary decision of a young Korean woman to give up meat. What happens next is a verbal firestorm that engulfs big themes such as gender, art, sex and politics.

Other notable International Man Booker nominees included Yan Lianke’s high-minded epic, The Four Books, and Man Tiger, by Eka Kurniawan, who won the FT/Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices Award for Fiction with his startling account of the Indonesian dictatorship.