The Japanese art of kintsugi repairs broken pottery by inserting into the cracks and imperfections a lacquer that includes powdered silver, gold, or platinum. The goal of kintsugi is not to disguise damage but to treat it as an integral part of an object, drawing attention to and beautifying the flaw. The philosophy underpinning the art is a fascinating one and so different from how most of us treat human imperfections and damage. The fractures everyone picks up in a lifetime are the things we usually choose to conceal, the damage that gives the lie to the image of flawlessness we want to show to the world. I can’t make up my mind about kintsugi. By accentuating the imperfection, is the beauty of the original lost, or is something entirely new brought to life? Are the cracks what matter? Is it best to conceal the damage or give it prominence? Can art and beauty ever repair what is broken?

In Andres Neuman’s novel, Yoshie Watanabe survives the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by American forces in August 1945, the only member of his immediate family to do so. After the war he makes his career with a Japanese television manufacturer and is posted to Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and, finally, Madrid, returning to Tokyo in retirement before the tsunami of 2011 and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. A life book-ended by two catastrophes. Four women who knew him intimately – one in each city and none of them Japanese – add their stories to his and to that of a slightly obsessive Argentinian journalist. The result is six perspectives of a single man, six views of a life broken and re-made.

Fracture is a complex and ambitious novel. It is also, at its core, a cold one, looking unflinchingly at the horrors we inflict on one another, sometimes by design and sometimes unintentionally, and on the possibility of acceptance, redemption, and repair.

After finishing the one thousand or so pages of this two-volume biography, it’s hard not to be impressed by the life-long dedication of Lucian Freud to the art of painting and in particular to the painting of the human form. It was the driving passion of his life, provoking, absorbing, and stimulating him for the best part of eighty years. It’s a credit to his biographer that the single-mindedness of Freud’s devotion should be what lingers when the last page of these books is turned. Not the philandering, not the gambling, not the hobnobbing with aristocrats and villains, not the rivalry with Francis Bacon; the struggle to render individual lives in paint is what persists.

Freud has mellowed by the time we meet him in volume 2, but not by much. The casual cruelty, the snobbishness, and deep self-absorption are still in evidence, but as he starts to leave middle age his sharp eye focuses more on his artistic legacy, and with that comes the unrelenting concentration on his work. Partners, children, friends, and dealers all assume a distant second place as the painting takes more and more of his attention and the works become larger, more ambitious, and more demanding.

For Freud the work was everything. Read Feaver’s biography and enjoy the anecdotes and gossip, but, if you can, have reproductions of the work nearby and study them. (I recommend especially the Phaidon edition).

2020 was a bumper year for book publishers. It seems, cloistered at home, that we all bought more books. But have we been reading them? Several friends, all of them dedicated readers, told me last year that they found it difficult to concentrate on books, their minds infected with anxiety and sadness while their bodies stayed untouched by the virus. I read slightly fewer books in 2020 than I did in 2019 (thirty-seven versus thirty-eight), mainly because the places I’ve grown used to consuming them most intensively – airplanes, hotel rooms, departure lounges and the like – were denied to me.

For the first time I can remember I read slightly more non-fiction than fiction (nineteen versus eighteen). Why? I’m not sure. The year’s highlights were all non-fiction: Caste, Underland, Stories of the Sahara, The Man in the Red Coat, and A Month in Siena. Every one of these was wonderful. In contrast, while I read several good novels (The London Train, Here We Are, and especially Hamnet), not one was groundbreaking, brilliant, or completely captivating. I’ll need to choose my fiction more wisely in 2021.

Tana French is a sentimental writer. She believes in heroes (usually flawed), resolutions (sometimes improbable), and redemption. Sentimentality is a useful quality in a mystery novelist, especially when it’s laced with some cynicism. It makes for attractive leading characters and tends towards the kind of neatly resolved stories that are a big part of the genre’s attraction.

A year has passed since I last read one of her novels. That was The Wych Elm, an intricate, tightly knotted story set in Dublin that I remember as having been too long and too meandering to be entirely satisfying. A year on and the prolific Ms. French has taken us to a very different Ireland for her newest story, to its “wild west”, Connemara. It’s here, appropriately enough, that Cal, a former Chicago police officer, has chosen to retire, spending his time fixing up a dilapidated old farmhouse and getting to know his quirky neighbors before trouble comes calling. It’s the kind of trouble that makes it important to acquire a rifle, thereby completing the picture of a 19th century frontier man transplanted to 21st century rural Ireland.

At its heart, The Searcher is a straightforward morality tale, with echos of those black-and-white cowboy movies made by the likes of John Ford in the 1950s. (I assume the novel’s title is a conscious nod to Ford’s film of 1956). It appeals to our longing that right should prevail, even in times when the lines that separate good guys from bad, justice from injustice, and redemption from perdition get blurred. Bad things may happen to good people. Greed and stupidity may be rife and innocence in short supply, but good outcomes are still possible if individuals do the right thing. How much you enjoy The Searcher may depend on whether you believe that.