Please forgive me, authors of hard-hitting nonfiction investigations, or dark personal sagas, or intense emotional thrillers set in contemporary New York. This year, all I craved in my reading was
escape. I couldn’t focus on a book unless it got me out of my head and into someone else’s, or out of my house and into another world. It was fine if the place I was escaping to was worse than America, 2020, as long as it was different. These are the 10 books that whisked me away.
The Animals in That Country
A wildly inventive dystopian adventure, in which a mysterious pandemic causes humans to be able to understand the speech of animals. As an irascible grandmother follows her son across the Australian Outback, she’s tormented by the birds overhead, bugged by the ants underfoot, and protected by a dingo who wouldn’t mind becoming the alpha. Both a hell of a ride and a revealing thought experiment about our place in the natural world.