2014 saw the debuts of a number of authors who are going to be making big names for themselves. The biggest non-fiction title for us was H is For Hawk.
I say non-fiction because it is a book that is difficult to be more specific about. It is part memoir, and part reflection on the writer TH White, with a lot about Goshawk training and some quite breathlessly brilliant writing about the countryside. I don’t know what she will take on next but I look forward to reading it.
Two young British women garnered a lot of coverage with two very different novels. Emma Healey’s book Elizabeth is Missing was a new take on the unreliable narrator genre. Her protagonist is an elderly woman suffering the middle stages of dementia, unable to piece together the clues to solve the mystery of her friend Elizabeth while at the same time uncovering the deeper secrets shrouded in her past.
Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist takes us back to seventeenth century Amsterdam. A young woman is married to a successful but mysterious trader whose secrets threaten the whole household – atmospheric, chilly and with a real sense of time and place. Just published in paperback, The Miniaturist has become an unlikely number one bestseller.