Each week, editors and critics from The New Yorker recommend the most captivating, notable, brilliant, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. Now, as 2022 comes to an end, they have chosen a dozen essential reads in nonfiction and a dozen, too, in fiction and poetry.
The Books of Jacob
by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft (Riverhead)
Fiction
The Nobel Prize winner Tokarczuk’s epic novel follows the exploits of an eighteenth-century messianic religious leader as he travels through the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, continually reinventing himself. The novel was excerpted in the magazine.
Grey Bees
by Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Ukrainian by Boris Dralyuk (Deep Vellum)
Fiction
Sergeyich is an eastern Ukrainian Everyman, living in the “grey zone”—the twenty miles or so between the armed camps of Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed troops, three years after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. In loving detail, Kurkov, a Kyiv-based novelist, describes Sergeyich’s care for his bees, his nighttime preparations, his careful rationing. But when the shelling becomes too much for Sergeyich’s bees (and maybe for Sergeyich), he embarks on a journey in his trusty old Lada, travelling through Ukraine proper and eventually to Crimea, where an “inspection” of one of his beehives by the Russian security service leaves his bees in an altered state, looking sickly and gray. Although grounded deeply in the disturbing reality of war, “Grey Bees” sometimes has the feeling of a fable.
Lucky Breaks
by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky (New Directions)
Fiction
Published in Ukraine in 2018, these surreal short stories by a noted photographer probe the experiences of women from the Donbas region, many of whom fled the separatist conflict that erupted in 2014 and now live as refugees in Kyiv. The stories, ethnographic in perspective but Gogolian in register, gravitate toward inexplicable disappearances, repressed memories, and phantasmagoria. Belorusets writes of “the deep penetration of traumatic historical events into the fantasies . . . of everyday life” and richly evokes the fatalistic humor of her marginalized characters, one of whom observes, “If you had the luck to be born here, you take things as they come.”