THREE books stood out for me this year, though none are from this year. First, The Hearing Trumpet, by the surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington. This slender story, illustrated by the writer, is wholly unpredictable and wild. It's told by a 92-year-old woman whose son and daughter-in-law are scheming to put her in an old person's home. She cannot change their plans, but she can use her remarkable wit to survive the strange world that greets her upon being institutionalised. "People under 70 and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats," she says. Possibly no other writer has more successfully defied what we think of when we think of old age.
Another novel that left me amazed is The Known World by Edward P. Jones. Before reading it, I didn't know that before slavery saw its end in the United States, a small number of black families also owned slaves. In a language that is nothing short of miraculous, Jones explores every possible angle of power and abuse of power, confronting us with the question of how an individual can inflict upon another a violence he or she has known. Who can break the cycle, who cannot, and why? Pakistani readers will find much to identify with in these pages.
Finally, Footnotes in Gaza by the comic journalist Joe Sacco. Like Jones, Sacco is interested in where the seeds of grief and anger come from, but in a different context. He details two mostly forgotten killings of Palestinians by Israelis in 1956 - one in Khan Younis, the other in Rafah. As he digs up the past by interviewing survivors and scrutinising archives, war rages on in the present. He writes in the foreword, "The past and present cannot be so easily disentangled; they are part of a remorseless continuum, a historical blur." But Sacco's combination of oral histories, documentary evidence, a committed translator-guide, and drawings that are breath-stopping in their attention to detail, all give him the power to see through the blur, and show us what the media never did, and never will. A book to cherish.
