Like many people, I imagine, my reading habits changed in 2020. I read more; and I read different types of books. It’s been a year of comfort reading, no doubt, and as the year went on I found myself increasingly drawn to either 19th century staples – Austen, Hardy – or to ‘boy’s own’ thrillers from the 60s and 70s by the likes of Desmond Bagley, Hammond Innes and Victor Canning.

Still, amongst all that retro reading there was still time for some relatively new material, although by no means all of it was published during the year itself. Here’s my best and worst of the year, selected from all of the above.

Best

1. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Although dealing with another harrowing subject – the abuse of boys in a Florida reform school in the 1960s – this relatively slim volume is a significant departure stylistically from Whitehead’s slavery era The Underground Railroad. It feels pared back, restrained, and entirely rooted in a grim reality. All of which means that, when the inevitable rushes of violence do arrive, they become all the more powerful.

2. To The Lions by Holly Watt

Some reviewers felt that this first novel by investigative journalist Watt failed to live up to her reporting work, and didn’t quite work. They are wrong. It’s a gripping and entirely believable account of two journalist trying to uncover a gruesome secret being played out in the Libyan desert. And it’s wonderful to see a real, functioning newsroom portrayed properly in a novel, rather than the dismissive and one-dimensional version seen in most books and TV dramas.

3. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Here’s a hot tip for you – keep an eye on this up-and-coming author, he could have a bright future. I’d read plenty of Dickens before last year – Great Expectations, Hard Times, A Tale Of Two Cites etc. – but for some inexplicable reason had never got around to what the author called his “favourite child”. Clearly there will be nothing I can write here that hasn’t been written before, but it was a joy to find that the twin evils found elsewhere in his novels – caricature instead of character, and overbearing moralising – were entirely absent. A pleasure from start to finish.

Worst

There were a few candidates here. Despite previously enjoying Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and No Country For Old Men, the ultra-sparse style of The Crossing was a step too far for me. I thought Sally Rooney’s Normal People was overrated, being extraordinarily simplistic in places. And I started Lisa Jewell’s bestseller The Family Upstairs but really didn’t have the inclination to finish it. But this novel, first published in 1998, took the overall prize:

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

I really wanted to love this. Billed as the Latin American novel which blew away all the old giants of the scene (Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes), the Chilean writer Bolano forget everything that made all of those other authors so successful. Plot. Imagination. Characters to care about. This is part road movie, part Bildungsroman, part treatise on poetry, and the sum of its middling parts never once threatens to become a coherent whole.