As a year in books, 2015 was the best of times and the worst of times. It was a year when original new voices sang out, old pros kept up the good work and prize-winning heavyweights were decidedly hit and miss.
It was also a year of unrealistic expectations. Publishers routinely rhapsodise about their forthcoming wares, but 2015 may well be remembered as the year in which the publicity machine went into overdrive, allowing hysterical hoopla to win the day over level-headed appraisal. For many readers, then, 2015 was neither good nor bad, just disappointing.
Year in review 2015: See all of our end-of-the-year coverage
One of the first titles of the year was Paula Hawkins's debut, The Girl on the Train. Despite selling more than a million copies in its first two months, achieving the record for sitting the longest at the top spot of the UK hardback chart and spawning a Hollywood film, Hawkins's novel chugs along on worn-out tracks, is nearly derailed by its cardboard characterisation and has a plot-twist as glaring as an oncoming train. A gushing blurb from fellow thriller writer SJ Watson undoubtedly contributed to sales, although Watson needs to raise his own game as his Second Life suffered from Second Novel Syndrome, being a pale follow-up to his bestselling debut Before I Go to Sleep.
A far more robust and unpredictable thriller came courtesy of JK Rowling's alter-ego, Robert Galbraith. Cormoran Strike's third outing was grislier than his previous two, and showed that Rowling is now a million miles from Hogwarts. As befits fiction's most preposterously named detective, Rowling-Galbraith called her latest mystery the suitably awful Career of Evil.
Two blockbusting, headline-dominating summer reads neatly capitalised on (or, depending on your take, ruthlessly exploited) past successes. Once it was announced that E L James had reworked Fifty Shades of Grey and that Harper Lee had penned Go Set a Watchman, a sequel of sorts to To Kill a Mockingbird, resistance was futile. The former turned out to be laughably flaccid, the latter woefully patchy. One author knew exactly what she was releasing, the other hadn't the foggiest. Unsurprisingly, both books have sold bucket-loads – a remarkable feat as neither was in a fit enough state for publication.
Two other novels were big in both senses of the word. Hanya Yanagihara's 700-page A Little Life proved to be massive on publication, while Garth Risk Hallberg's 900-page-plus debut City on Fire was one of those books that was hyped-to-the-hilt before publication.
With the dust now settled, we can see both reads for what they truly are: large, ambitious works that don’t so much sprawl as sag, and which desperately cry out for a ruthless editor. Hallberg needed to hack at swaths of excess; Yanagihara’s graphic catalogue of woes was all dark and no light.
A Little Life secured a place on many a prize shortlist but lost out to worthier books: Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings bagged the Booker and Adam Johnson's Fortune Smiles won the National Book Award for fiction. Two runners-up, one for each prize, deserve honourable mention: Chigozie Obioma's The Fishermen was a gripping fable about family bonds; and Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies was a compelling portrait of a marriage viewed from two varying perspectives, and was only sporadically marred by farcical metaphors such as: "She had gorgeous hands, like owlets." Meanwhile the Booker International Prize went to that Hungarian purveyor of bleak magic, László Krasznahorkai, and the Nobel Prize in literature to the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich. As with Patrick Modiano last year, expect a wave of English translations of the new laureate's oeuvre.
The year gave us further instalments in acclaimed literary series. The Karl Ove Knausgaard juggernaut rumbled on with the fourth segment in the My Struggle cycle; Jane Smiley produced the second and third parts of her Last Hundred Years trilogy and Elena Ferrante brought her entrancing Neapolitan Novels to an end. Jeanette Winterson kicked off a new series of Shakespeare "retellings" with The Gap of Time, her cover version of The Winter's Tale, and in Slade House, David Mitchell delivered if not a sequel to, then at least an offshoot of his 2014 novel The Bone Clocks. David Lagercrantz and Anthony Horowitz continued the Millennium series and 007's adventures, respectively. Ears were pressed to the ground but no one could hear the sound of Stieg Larsson or Ian Fleming spinning in their graves.
After 10 years of silence, Kazuo Ishiguro returned and divided readers with an allegory featuring a she-dragon and Arthurian knights (The Buried Giant), and after 14 years away Milan Kundera came back as a shadow of his former, vibrant self. Marilynne Robinson and Mario Vargas Llosa impressed with collections of essays, Anne Enright and Anne Tyler once again shone a penetrating beam on families and marriages, and hardy perennials William Boyd, Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker explored the human heart in new battlegrounds.
A brace of stellar biographies traced the lives of two American greats. Robert Crawford's Young Eliot marked the 50th anniversary of T S Eliot's death, and Zachary Leader's The Life of Saul Bellow chimed with the centenary of the author's birth. Adam Sisman's John le Carré revealed a life of secrets, success and heartache, and Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 provided fascinating insights into a complex literary great.
For a while, writers of Franzenstein proportions stomped all over the competition, while other big-hitters such as Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison dealt weak lobs and demonstrated they were living off past power.
Away from the bustle and clamour of “literary event” publications by reigning top-notchers was the less pronounced but more satisfying fuss around books by little-known or underappreciated authors.
Rupert Thomson's mesmerising Katherine Carlyle whisked the reader off on a frenetic journey into wilderness; Emma Hooper enchanted with Etta and Otto and Russell and James; and Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation, a reimagining of Camus's The Stranger from an Arab perspective, deserved every accolade it got.
In the end, 2015 was full of hot air and hollow words, but good, honest, even powerful fact and fiction still thrived and flourished.
So, too, did the book in general, with sales of print paperbacks and hardbacks trumping those of Kindle e-books. Here’s hoping for continued rude health in 2016.
Malcolm Forbes also writes for The Economist, the Financial Times and the Literary Review. He lives in Edinburgh.
