Gutter's Books of 2022
Henry (Editor)
This year I loved Damon Galgut’s The Promise. Visiting the same characters at four funerals over three decades, it’s a tale of faith, betrayal and disappointment, as South Africa and the family at the centre of the novel try and fail to move on from apartheid. A book where I would happily spend another 400 pages with the characters.
And for a bonus read, I loved Jonathon Goldstein’s I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow. The veteran podcaster counts down to his fortieth birthday with a weekly diary that made me laugh so much, people came through from the next room to check if I was okay.
Kate (Managing Editor)
I’m A Fan by Sheena Patel was my book of this year, which I’ve mentioned already on the Gutter socials. but I also really enjoyed Richard E Grant’s A Pocket Full of Happiness. I usually hate celebrity memoir and autobiography as they’re often poorly written, but this is a really beautiful account of Richard’s wife’s death from lung cancer, over the space of a year, and how she encourages him and their daughter to find a pocket full of happiness in each day after her death. Very moving!
Laura (Reviews Editor)
In non-fiction, I was most impressed by The Naked Don’t Fear The Water by Mathieu Atkins, a brave piece of reportage trailing a migrant journey from Kabul to Athens. If I was to limit my recommendations to just one book from this year, it would be this one.
Calum (Reviews Editor)
Tessa Berring’s eagerly-awaited (by me at least) second collection Folded Purse (published last month on Blue Diode) does everything I most like poetry to do and expertly - stunning, stumbling line breaks, precisely occasional repetitions, and the emergent disassociation of feeling words as things, all wrapped up in a disturbed and discombobulated domesticity, which if playful and funny if not entirely ‘playtime’ or ‘fun’. It’s even better than Berring’s previous collection Bitten Hair, which is saying something. Experience, for example, the stop-you-in-your-tracks heartrend(er)ing perfection of ‘About a Word’:
The heart-
breaking hope
of a word
It breaks
my heart
Cal B (Distrubutor)
‘The Farseer Trilogy’ by Robin Hobb - an understated and underappreciated trio of masterfully-woven fantasy novels about an ostracised child and his illicit relationship with nature, through which he battles court intrigue, sinister plots, and teenage romance. Subtler than George R.R. Martin’s ‘Song of Ice and Fire’, and all the more immersive - substituting the dense lore of the latter for a world which leaps off the page, and whose magic beguiles the inner child of the reader just as Le Guin’s ‘Earthsea’ books did twenty years before, and Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ series did two years later.
Ryan (Designer)
This was a sloppy reading year for me - I didn’t read anything published in 2022, and anything I did read didn’t knock my socks off. Sometimes that’s how it goes! So I can’t exactly pin down a best book of the year. However, there were many book covers I loved - so here’s three I adored.
Garden Physic, Sylvia Legris
Much like Sylvia Legris’ poetry, the cover for Garden Physic pushes back against the twee cliches of nature writing, with a jaggy, alien plant more likely to have walked off the pages of Day of the Triffids than out of a botanical garden. The combo of hand lettering and a geometric sans serif suggest a journey from home remedies to big pharma, while the two neat little leaves at the top are a reminder that even what seems to be the smallest amount of personal growth can be the product of years and years of hard, messy, invisible work.
Our Wives Under The Sea, Julia Armfield
Full disclosure: I thought I was over covers of placid, pretty women sinking, or drowning, or walking into the ocean, or emerging from lakes, or gazing up out of bathtubs. The long horrible history of drowned women make these powerful images, for sure, but their power has been been diluted through over-exposure. And then came Our Wives Under The Sea. It achieves the same chilling effect without using water, the fluid uncategorisable and viscous, somewhere between ectoplasm and Vaseline, the distortion transforming the placid, pretty woman into something that might just be malevolent. A perfect wet ghostliness for a story of someone returned from the ocean floor not quite right.
It Came From The Closet, ed. Joe Vallese
God, I wish i’d come up with this cover. It doesn’t hurt that I’m a sucker for zine collage aesthetics, Hammer Horror typefaces and high-contrast, punky colour schemes. But really it all comes down to that punchline of a neon pink limp wrist punching out of the grave, the sort of singular image you can only get away with once, and nobody else can ever do anything remotely similar without obviously ripping off the original. Clever and funny and spooky? Brilliant!