SCC English Books of the Year

As usual, alongside our Books of the Year list round-up, here are the SCC English choices (some of which were published earlier, but appeared in paperback in 2016). Here's the 2015 list.

• Book of the Year: the late Kent Haruf's Our Souls at Night. Written in his dying days, this short novel is pitch-perfect. [Unfortunately, it seems that Robert Redford and Jane Fonda will star in the film version: good luck to them in making an audience believe they are ordinary people].
• Two non-fiction books about the African-American experience: Deborah Leovy: Ghettoside (deep long-term journalism of the kind that is under great threat) and Ta-Nehisi Coates: Between the World and Me (superb deep thinking, also under threat).
• Sara Baume: Spill simmer falter wither. The moving story of a lost soul, and his dog.
• Thomas Harding: The House by the Lake. Fascinating story of a family house by a lake near Berlin, drilling vertically into German history.
• Mary Aiken: The Cyber Effect. Important thoughts about our world, and especially about our children's place in it.
• Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: a brief history of humankind: enormously thought-provoking, with a bracing historical overview which puts our current anxieties into perspective.