Once again, this year was filled with unknowns, emerging from a pandemic, anticipating the Midterm elections, reconnecting with family, friends and colleagues in person. These 10 fiction and 10 nonfiction adult titles helped the team at Shelf Awareness reflect, sustain, and find some bright spots and some literary companions during the strange and unpredictable year that was 2022. Click through to see our reviews. (And click here to see our Best Children's and YA Books of 2022.)
Fiction
At Certain Points We Touch by Lauren John Joseph (Bloomsbury)
Fellowship Point by Alice Elliot Dark (Scribner)
Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang (Flatiron)
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu (Morrow)
Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn (Berkley)
Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu (Tin House)
Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher (Tor)
Spear by Nicola Griffith (Tordotcom)
We Are the Light by Matthew Quick (Avid Reader)
The Wild Hunt by Emma Seckel (Tin House)
Nonfiction
All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt (Penguin Press)
Black Boy Smile by D. Watkins (Legacy Lit)
Black Hollywood by Carell Augustus (Ebony Magazine/Sourcebooks)
Ducks by Kate Beaton (Drawn & Quarterly)
Endless Forms by Seirian Sumner (Harper)
How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler (Little, Brown)
Inciting Joy by Ross Gay (Algonquin)
Life on the Mississippi by Rinker Buck (Avid Reader)
One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank, illus. by Maira Kalman (Avid Reader)
Shy by Mary Rodgers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)