Best of the year that was

John Self is The Critic’s lead fiction critic. He lives in Belfast

IT WAS A TOPSY-TURVY YEAR IN FICTION, where many people had more time than ever to read, but the signs did not align to make it easy. Publishers delayed releases until they neatly clashed with bookstores closing. Our leading literary prize offered a mixed shortlist.

Nonetheless, trends poked through. Dystopian disaster fiction, of course, overran the shelves, from Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind to Don DeLillo’s The Silence and Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness, with a subset of previously published pandemic novels dusted down for fresh appeal. (They didn’t appeal.)

Many of our leading novelists of the 1980s and 90s found themselves, aptly, looking back, some with style and aplomb (Adam Mars-Jones’s Box Hill, Jonathan Coe’s Mr Wilder &), others with mixed success (Martin Amis’s , William Boyd’s ).