My Christmas gifts included not only last year’s Booker Prize winner (The Promise), but also two of the titles shortlisted. I’ll get around to The Fortune Men in due course, but I was especially intrigued by Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar, not least because it’s unusual to see a debut novel make it to the shortlist of such a prestigious award. I started the novel with high hopes (it has a terrific opening line – “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure”), but I tired of it quite quickly. Yet another novel about troubled mother-daughter relationships and the unreliability of memory? Enough already. It didn’t help that I found the whiny, self-obsessed narrator obnoxious. Avni Doshi is clearly very talented, but Burnt Sugar should have been a novella at most.

There was a time many years ago when I was diligent about reading all the titles on the Booker Prize shortlist. I’ve grown out of that habit. Looking back over a list of the prize’s winners in the past fifteen or so years, I see I had read only one (Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo) before picking up the 2021 winner, The Promise. The novel was widely, and in some places wildly, praised when it appeared and again when it got the prize, so I was pleased when it showed up, neatly wrapped, under the Christmas tree.

It’s an ambitious novel, though not obviously so. The story itself is simple enough and follows from the mid-1980s to roughly the present day the declining fortunes of the Swarts, a white family who own a ramshackle farm not far from Pretoria. The novel opens with a gathering of the clan for the funeral of Ma and we’re quickly introduced to the grieving Pa (part owner of a reptile-themed amusement park), his three children, Amor, Astrid, and Anton, and some of the wider family. This is South Africa in the 1980s, so we also meet the black farm workers and servants. Among these is Salome, the old housemaid, to whom Ma had made a promise.

No spoilers here, so that’s enough about the plot. Suffice to say the Swart family sees plenty of death over the next 200 pages, and as for that fateful promise made to Salome you’ll have to read the book to find out what happens. I recommend you do. It may have its flaws (I didn’t like the intrusive, occasionally clumsy narrator), and it’s not “the most important book of the last ten years” (as it says on the cover), but it’s a powerful and affecting story through which the painful and hopeful recent history of South Africa is told. If you have read anything by some of the other greats of modern South African literature – Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, and André Brink, for example – you may feel, as I did after finishing The Promise, that Damon Galgut is an exciting newcomer to that great community of writers.

A great deal has been written in the past two years about how the pandemic, and especially the isolation it has demanded, has damaged the mental health of so many people. Forced to separate from others for long periods and to suspend many of the social rituals on which we depended previously, many have suffered greatly, not just from loneliness, but from depression and anxiety. Being alone is deeply troubling for many, and enforced solitude for long periods for those unprepared for it has led to sickness.

In the midst of this comes The Art of Solitude by Stephen Batchelor, a book the publisher calls a literary collage. The author, previously unknown to me, is a celebrated scholar of Buddhism and a former monk, someone who has sought the experience of being alone, learned from others who loved solitude, and thought deeply about its value. Batchelor’s book isn’t some dry, impartial thesis on the history of hermits or one of those sickly self-help manuals promoting the benefits of a solitary life. The Art of Solitude is something much more interesting. It’s a short and engaging set of reflections and observations about the experience of being alone and what that experience can teach us about living a good life with ourselves as individuals and with others. For me the most enjoyable part of the book was the weaving together of Batchelor’s personal journey with the wisdom of others who have engaged deeply with solitude. it’s an eclectic and fascinating bunch: Michel de Montaigne, the Buddha, Aldous Huxley, Agnes Martin, Vermeer, and more.

Some parts of Batchelor’s experience might alienate some readers. I’m thinking particularly of his exploration of the use of psychotropic drugs. No matter. He isn’t trying to convince or convert anyone and he’s certainly no crazy evangelist espousing one type of experience over another. The Art of Solitude is a sensitive, balanced, and nuanced account of one man’s personal experience of solitude and mindfulness. I learned a lot and can imagine returning to the book in the future.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion, it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man/woman is he/she who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. (Emerson).

Looking back at my reading in 2021 I see with some dismay that once again I read fewer titles than in the previous year. I offer in mitigation the excuse that some of the books – biographies of Bacon and Freud and especially the Channon letters – were very long. Reversing the trend of recent years, novels and stories dominated my reading last year (24) while non-fiction fell far behind (10).

It interests me that books about nature and biographies/memoirs made up almost all of the non-fiction pile. Some of them made a deep impression on me, but if forced to pick the best of the bunch I would have to choose the account of Ivor Gurney’s tragic and piteous life. I vowed this time last year to choose my novels more carefully and I think I succeeded. I read some wonderful fiction last year, with works by Kazuo Ishiguro, Niall Williams, and Francis Spufford standing out. It’s silly to try to pick one clear favorite, but MacLaverty’s latest collection and Ali Smith’s quartet stand out as especially memorable.

At my elbow is a small pile of ten books that will accompany me into 2022. I can’t wait to get started.