Ask ChatGPT about the best books of 2022, and the Open AI tool’s answer will be less than helpful.
“I do not have information about books that were published after my knowledge cutoff of 2021,” it says. Instead, it points out that online resources, bookstores, libraries, friends, and family can be counted on for recommendations. “There are many great books out there,” it ends encouragingly.
What follows, then, is the result of human, not artificial, intelligence. As such, it is fallible, partial, and biased. Proceed with caution.

‘I’m a Fan’, Sheena Patel, Rough Trade Books, 2022.
Much fiction has already dealt with the impact of social media, and the trend continued this year with two striking debut novels: Sheena Patel’s I’m A Fan, and Aravind Jayan’s Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors. The first is a lacerating take on how a second-generation immigrant in London handles Instagram-mediated relationships; the second is an insouciantly-told tale of how a compromising viral video throws a Trivandrum family into disarray.
Hanna Bervoets’ We Had to Remove this Post, translated from the Dutch by Emma Rault, looks at the other side of the coin. It is an illuminating fictional study of the pressure-cooker environment of social media content moderators, and the impact of this activity on their lives.
Long before the advent of social media, those in power have sought to control narratives in many ways. This is the subject of Hernan Diaz’s Trust, an ingenious, four-sided novel that unpacks the puzzle of a Wall Street tycoon’s rise in the 1920s. Familial secrets and lies are also at the heart of Aamina Ahmad’s The Return of Faraz Ali, a compelling, atmospheric debut in which a policeman returns to the place of his birth, a seedy Lahore mohalla, to investigate a murder.

‘Cold Enough For Snow Paperback, Jessica Au, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022.
A family relationship of a different sort is probed in Jessica Au’s delicate, nuanced Cold Enough for Snow, in which a mother and daughter take a short trip to Japan and deal with inner lives and things unsaid. As with every well-crafted novella, it makes an impact far greater than the sum of its pages. Another memorable short novel set in Japan, Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void translated by David Boyd and Lucy North, takes a wry look at established social roles through the saga of a disaffected employee who feigns pregnancy.
Grander ways to ensure domination are explored in R.F. Kuang’s gripping Babel, set in an alternative Victorian universe of Oxford translators, silver-powered inventions, and colonialism’s naked violence. Meanwhile, Amit Majmudar deals with the consequences of nation-building and colonialism in this world with The Map and the Scissors, a recreation of the parallel lives of two London-educated lawyers, Gandhi and Jinnah, in tightly-wound, poetic prose.
More reverberations of modern-day domination can be felt in Jamil Jan Kochai’s The Haunting of Hajji Hotak, a striking collection of short stories set in the fractured world of Afghan immigrants in the United States and their homeland. Another distinctive short story collection, Gurnaik Johal’s We Move, deals with the unstable past and present of other immigrants, the Punjabi community in London’s Southall, in economical and assured strokes.

‘The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human,’ Siddhartha Mukherjee, Simon and Schuster, 2022.
Among the notable works of non-fiction this year were two magisterial surveys and reconsiderations.
Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Song of the Cell is a chronicle of the discovery that all organisms, including humans, are made of “elementary particles”, and how this has transformed science, medicine, and even culture.
And James Poskett’s Horizons dismantles the myth that the scientific revolution was born in the West by showing how it was the result of a confluence of cultures from all over the world.
Last year, Mark David Baer’s The Ottomans also attempted to reconcile East-West polarities by arguing that the Ottoman empire should be viewed as a part of European history. This year, Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Lion House zooms in on the regime of the tenth sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, in a colourful chronicle full of novelistic verve.
Stories of rulers from another swathe of the world are taken up in Anirush Kanisetti’s Lords of the Deccan, which travels from the Chalukyas to the Cholas. The book covers more than five centuries of imperial manoeuvring with aplomb.
How the ways in which we remember the past inform national identity are uncovered by Hannah Rose Woods in Rule Nostalgia. Starting with twenty-first century nostalgia for a British past, she ingeniously looks back to memories of periods such as World War II’s “blitz spirit”, long Edwardian summers, and Victorian optimism. She deals with one country, but the lessons are universal.

‘The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine’, Kaveh Akbar, Penguin, 2022.
The impact of such national notions at a granular level are dealt with in Mansi Choksi’s The Newlyweds, about romance and marriage in today’s India. The book follows the fates of three couples from different regions to show how young people choosing their own partners can be seen by others as replacing order with chaos. It is a compelling investigation of resistance to a form of oppression.
A panoply of lives and landscapes from other parts of the world was wonderfully captured in Slow Road to Tehran, Rebecca Lowe’s account of cycling 11,000 kilometres across twenty countries, from Europe to the Middle East. Lowe is enlightening and self-deprecating throughout, with a keen eye for the unequal fallout of East-West encounters.
The Biblical King Solomon famously warned that of making many books there was no end; undeterred, Nadia Wassef and her colleagues decided to set up a bookshop to house as many as they could. Shelf Life, her memoir of the fortunes of Cairo’s Diwan Bookstore, is a forthright, engaging look at the ups and downs of running a business in a patriarchal society over the years.
Advice on how to tackle all those volumes came in the form of Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now, a series of penetrating essays that dismantle inherited and unseen forms of interpretation. It is a passionate plea for greater engagement – not just with books, but also films, TV shows, histories, and each other.
Finally, balm for the soul came in the form of Kaveh Akbar’s anthology, The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse. This personal compilation of 110 poems “embraced mystery instead of trying to solve it”. Starting with Sumerian priestess Enheduanna, supposedly the world’s first attributable author, it encompasses Homer, Lao Tzu, Rumi, Dante, Donne, Tagore, Cavafy, and Szymborska, among others.
Let these lines from Ghalib in the anthology, translated by Jane Hirshfield, sound a note for the next year:
“It is the rose’s unfolding, Ghalib, that creates the desire to see
In every colour and circumstance
May the eyes be open for what comes.”
Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.
This article was first published on The Wire.