Meredith's BEST OF 2022

Did I read a lot in 2022? YES! Was it enough? NO! Is it ever enough? NO! IT IS AGONY! Here are my favorite 2022 releases:
 
TRESPASSES – Louise Kennedy
 
An indelibly poised debut novel from – dare I say – the hottest writer out of Ireland right now?! This book follows a young woman named Cushla, a 24-year-old primary school teacher and defacto caretaker of her alcoholic mother in the aftermath of her father’s death, as she falls irresistibly for a married man in his 50s amidst The Troubles of the 1970s around Belfast. Kennedy’s reserved and highly stylized writing delivers a book that is an overwhelmingly sexy romance without being a romance novel – a text of gutsily redefined borders across class, religion, age, landscape, and language.
 
 TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW – Gabrielle Zevin
 
Zevin brings gaming to the literary forefront with this spectacular and moving story of Sam and Sadie, two young creative geniuses and friends over the course of their aspirational and professional careers in game-development. Zevin’s novel is riddled with “Easter Eggs” for gamers, fun nods to the history and experience of gaming, as well as some nods for those who have coded and designed games. Expertly crafted, Zevin manages to elevate both literature and video games as art forms while simultaneously embedding characters deep in your heart.
 
ANOTHER WAY TO SPLIT WATER – Alycia Pirmohamed
 
Pirmohamed’s debut poetry collection is a gorgeous and balanced meditation on longing, the body, things inherited, and more, oft conveyed through tender metaphor of water, of fluidity. Pirmohamed’s language alone is overwhelmingly inventive – she uses select words in such ways as to make them feel completely new. A text to evoke those long-buried aches, this is why we read poetry – to see the self in others, to be recognized.
 
DELPHI – Clare Pollard
 
Pollard’s work deserves a place up amongst Claire Vaye Watkins’s “I LOVE YOU BUT I’VE CHOSEN DARKNESS” and Carmen Maria Machado’s “IN THE DREAM HOUSE” – this compact, experimental text forms earnest, lyrical micro-essays around a series of chapter-headings exploring “-mancy” (a suffix to mark different types of magic), and balances an ephemeral line of academic writing, poetry, and autofiction, while pushing electrifyingly at the bounds of what writing can be.
 
I’M GLAD MY MOM DIED – Jennette McCurdy
 
We knew this was going to be good but we didn’t know it was going to be this good. McCurdy’s story is one of the the worst of its kind for child actors, but the multi-talented artist mines it skillfully, developing a handbook of survival for all. The structure and tone of this memoir is brilliant – framed around the death of her mother and paced beautifully with profound grief, relief, and humor, McCurdy’s 2022 release hosts a litany of trigger warnings, true, but nevertheless was so compelling as to be a one-sitting read.
 
THE GHOST WOODS – C.J. Cooke
 
C.J. Cooke’s striking novel delivers everything one might ask for from a story: fairytales, murder, obscured then uncovered histories, and an unexpected model for queer family life. This atmospheric thriller set in “mother and baby homes” – archaic institutions for unwed pregnant mothers - during the 1950s and 1960s in Scotland takes the best elements of folklore and winds them up tight with the thrill of pop-science’s relevant obsessions with the fungal kingdom and some meaningful reflections on motherhood.