{"id":5376,"date":"2020-01-01T11:28:35","date_gmt":"2020-01-01T11:28:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aussiepizzas.com\/PIZZADELIVERY\/my-top-5-books-of-2019\/"},"modified":"2020-01-01T11:28:35","modified_gmt":"2020-01-01T11:28:35","slug":"my-top-5-books-of-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.aussiepizzas.com\/PIZZADELIVERY\/my-top-5-books-of-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"My Top 5 Books of 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Of the 135 books I read this year, there were many candidates for the top five and it was hard to narrow down my choices. As usual<\/a>, I read a lot of thrillers, mysteries, crime and suspense, but my top five, and the further five on my longlist, are a little more diverse. And although I didn’t pay attention to the gender of the authors when I was making my choices, all five of this year’s top five, and four of my longlist, are written by women.
1. Searching for Sylvie Lee<\/i><\/a> by Jean Kwok. At the start of Jean Kwok’s novel, the titular Sylvie Lee leaves her family and home in Brooklyn to visit her dying grandmother in the Netherlands and then disappears. Her younger sister Amy, who has always felt overshadowed by her beautiful and accomplished older sister, is left to pick up the pieces of Sylvie’s seemingly perfect life and to try to find her. But the more Amy digs, the more troubling secrets she uncovers. The premise sounds superficially like Gone Girl<\/i> but this is a very different book, thematically and tonally. The story is told from the perspective of Amy, Sylvie and their mother, and just like with Kwok’s Girl in Translation<\/a><\/i>, the author really conveys the influences of the primary languages of the three characters \u2014 Dutch for Sylvie, English for Amy and Chinese for their mother \u2014 on their English narrative. Haunting and evocative, Searching for Sylvie Lee<\/i> is perhaps too slow-paced to be a traditional thriller, and the mystery at the heart of the novel always comes second to the relationships between the central characters.
2. Blood Orange<\/a><\/i> by Harriet Tyce. Criminal lawyer Alison’s personal life is in free fall as her career flourishes and she takes on her first murder case, defending a woman who stabbed her husband to death. She has a doting husband and an adoring six-year-old daughter, but she also has a drinking problem and is having an affair with a rakish colleague. And as Tyce’s cleverly constructed and evocative novel unfolds, Alison’s professional and personal worlds collide and she struggles to hold it all together. Tyce’s characterisation is spot on, although none of the central characters are especially likeable, and I found myself racing through the novel to reach its dark climax.
3. The Testaments<\/a> <\/i>by Margaret Atwood. Since I first read Cat’s Eye<\/i> at 14, I’ve devoured everything Margaret Atwood has written, and The Handmaid’s Tale<\/i> remains one of my all-time favourites. It’s such a brilliant novel that a sequel could have been risky were it not Margaret Atwood putting pen to paper (or perhaps fingers to keyboard). Unsurprisingly, The Testaments<\/i> is a highly accomplished novel that builds upon its predecessor, answering some, if not all, of its unresolved questions. Picking up 15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale<\/i>, three women offer their testaments: Aunt Lydia, who achieved personal power as an enforcer of the totalitarian Gilead regime, and two young women growing up inside Gilead and in neighbouring Canada, respectively. Atwood is a master storyteller and her dystopian worlds are as richly painted as they are horrific.
4. What Red Was<\/a> <\/i>by Rosie Price. When I started to read Rosie Price’s debut novel, I was reminded of David Nicholls’ One Day<\/i><\/a>, a favourite of mine, but it soon diverged. Kate and Max meet at university and soon become the closest of friends, despite their very different backgrounds. Max draws Kate in to his enticing world of privilege, and she allows her other relationships to fade away. But then one night something horrific happens that causes Kate’s fragile new world to shatter, as she reexamines everything she thought she knew about friendship and love, loyalty and courage. A beautifully written character study, What Red Was<\/i> is uncompromising, sorrowful and utterly gripping.
5. Invisible Women<\/a> <\/i>by Caroline Criado Perez. From office air conditioning temperatures, to medical research and urban planning, our world is predominantly designed for men, as Caroline Criado Perez convincingly demonstrates in her fascinating, and often shocking, book. Bringing together big data and case studies, Criado uncovers systematic gender bias across many domains, some I anticipated, others I had never even considered, such as inner city transportation networks.
And here are five more books that I enjoyed, which almost made my top five:<\/p>\n