Share

cover art for 📚Books of the Year📚

The Shakespeare and Company Interview

📚Books of the Year📚

•

In this special episode of the Shakespeare and Company podcast, we look back at our bookseller’s favourite reads of the year.


Some of these titles were published in 2022, others just happened to rise to the top of their respective “to read” piles in the past twelve months…but they all come with the S&Co. stamp of approval.


There’s something for everyone here, from a rock star’s autobiography, to a novel about a 19th century translator’s revolt, to a classic of modern science fiction that spans something like a billion earth years. 


Find the full list below.


Sign up to our newsletter: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/subscriptions


Dancing in Odessa, Ilya Kaminsky: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6316982/kaminsky-ilya-dancing-in-odessa


Cleopatra and Frankenstein, Coco Mellors: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6416524/mellors-coco-cleopatra-and-frankenstein


Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6461812/whitehead-colson-harlem-shuffle


The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6433167/harris-nathan-the-sweetness-of-water


From a Low and Quiet Sea, Donal Ryan: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6871035/ryan-donal-from-a-low-and-quiet-sea


Trespasses by Louise Kennedy: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6192095/louise-kennedy-kennedy-trespasses


Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger and Stella Maris: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/5474563/mccarthy-cormac-the-passenger


Open Water, Caleb Azumah Nelson: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6294505/nelson-caleb-azumah-open-water


Babel Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution, R. F. Kuang: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6031122/kuang-r-f-babel


The Hummingbird, Sandro Veronesi: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6191021/veronesi-sandro-the-hummingbird


The Queens of Sarmiento Park, Camila Sosa Villada: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6111567/villada-camila-sosa-the-queens-of-sarmiento-park


The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/5227917/liu-cixin-the-three-body-problem


A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6951005/saunders-george-a-swim-in-a-pond-in-the-rain


Agatha Christie, Lucy Worsley: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6007132/worsley-lucy-agatha-christie


The Storyteller, Dave Grohl: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6113617/grohl-dave-the-storyteller


The Naked Don't Fear the Water, Matthieu Aikins: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/6088623/aikins-matthieu-the-naked-don-t-fear-the-water


The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7314067/thunberg-greta-the-climate-book


Fight Night, Miriam Toews: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/5994736/toews-miriam-fight-night


*


Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-time


Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

More episodes

View all episodes

  • Lea Ypi: Dignity, Fiction, and the Lives History Erases

    59:52|
    Philosopher and author Lea Ypi joins Adam Biles at Shakespeare and Company Paris to discuss her latest book Indignity: A Life Reimagined, an extraordinary work blending biography, history, and fiction. When a photo of her grandparents' 1941 honeymoon went viral in Albania, sparking online abuse, Ypi found herself compelled to investigate her grandmother Leman's life in full. The search took her into the Albanian Secret Service archives, back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and deep into questions of memory, belonging, and what it means to preserve dignity in a world that conspires against it. Ypi discusses the dual narrative voices of the book, the "silence of the archives," the ethics of fictionalising real lives, and how writing as a novelist rather than a philosopher transformed her understanding of her subject. A conversation about history, imagination, and the moral necessity of hope.Buy Indignity: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/indignity-2*Lea Ypi holds the Ralph Miliband Chair in Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics. Her first trade book, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History won the Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Costa Biography Award. It is translated into over thirty languages.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
  • Shelter and Storm: Arundhati Roy on Writing Her Mother

    49:26|
    An edited version of this conversation is now available as part of our collaboration with The Yale Review. Read it here: https://yalereview.org/article/shakespeare-and-company-interview-arundhati-royRecorded live at Shakespeare and Company, Paris, Adam Biles sits down with Arundhati Roy to discuss her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. Roy reflects on writing a “novelist’s memoir,” where memory and imagination blur, and explores her complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy. The conversation moves from Roy’s unconventional childhood in Kerala to her formative years in architecture, activism, and the aftermath of The God of Small Things. She discusses resisting literary celebrity, embracing political responsibility, and finding strength in chosen families and friendship networks. With candour and wit, Roy rejects reductive “therapy narratives,” instead offering a portrait of identity shaped by contradiction, resilience, and love.Buy Mother Mary Comes to Me: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/mother-mary-comes-to-meArundhati Roy is the author of the novels The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017. She is the author of various works of non-fiction including My Seditious Heart, Azadi and The Architecture of Modern Empire.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company, Paris
  • Ben Lerner on Transcription

    52:57|
    Recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, Adam Biles speaks with Ben Lerner about his novel Transcription, a formally inventive meditation on technology, memory, and human connection.Beginning with the novel’s deceptively simple premise (a writer loses his recording device and reconstructs an interview from memory) the conversation expands into questions of mediation, voice, and authenticity. Lerner explores how devices reshape attention and relationships, suggesting that humans themselves function as “media,” transmitting voices across time and between generations.The discussion moves between the philosophical and the intimate: from the limits of digital communication to the emotional power of disembodied voices, from intergenerational care to the fragile transmission of experience. Ultimately, Transcription emerges as a reflection on how stories, memories, and voices persist—less as fixed recordings than as living, shifting acts of interpretation.Buy Transcription: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/transcription-4Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and is the author of three other internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 and The Topeka School. He has published the poetry collections The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award), Mean Free Path and No Art as well as the essay The Hatred of Poetry. Lerner lives and teaches in Brooklyn.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
  • Why Translate Homer Again? Daniel Mendelsohn on his new Odyssey

    59:31|
    Why Translate Homer Again? Daniel Mendelsohn on his new OdysseyThis conversation explore’s Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation of The Odyssey. Mendelsohn reflects on why this endlessly retranslated text still invites fresh interpretation, describing Odysseus as a “proto-author” whose storytelling shapes reality itself.The discussion delves into the craft of translation; balancing precision with poetic vitality, preserving the strangeness of Homeric Greek while remaining readable, and making deliberate choices about line length, diction, and even spelling. Mendelsohn also highlights the influence of teaching and lifelong engagement with the text, emphasising close reading and the role of students in deepening understanding.Beyond technique, the conversation explores why The Odyssey endures. its themes of homecoming, identity, storytelling, and time continue to resonate across generations, making it both an ancient epic and a strikingly modern work.Buy The Odyssey: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-odyssey-51Memoirist, critic, translator, and frequent contributor of essays to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of ten books, including the international bestsellers The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, an NPR and Kirkus Best Book of the Year. His other honors include the Prix Médicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy’s highest honor for foreign writers. In 2022 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France. He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
  • Rare Book Collecting with Ben Brown

    01:07:58|
    In this special edition, we revisit three conversations with Shakespeare and Company rare book dealer Ben Brown, originally recorded in 2022. Across these episodes, Ben guides us into the fascinating, often mysterious world of book collecting.We begin with the basics: what makes a first edition and how collectors identify them. Ben shares insights into the thrill of the hunt and the appeal of owning a first edition. Next, we explore the extraordinary publishing history of Ulysses, from censorship battles to rare early editions, revealing how controversy shaped its legacy. Finally, we turn to signed books, unpacking why an author’s signature adds emotional and monetary value—and how provenance can transform an object into a story.Discover our rare books collection here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/lists/rare-books
  • Going South: Tash Aw on Inheritance, Identity, and Escape

    55:32|
    This week Adam Biles speaks with Tash Aw about The South, his novel of inheritance, identity, and quiet upheaval. Set on a decaying farm in southern Malaysia, the story follows a family confronting generational fracture, class tension, and the uneasy weight of belonging. Aw explores how landscape is felt through the body rather than described, and how memory—fragmentary and unreliable—shapes narrative voice.The conversation covers adolescence, queer awakening, and the tension between freedom and fear when removed from social scrutiny. Aw reflects on writing from hindsight, the interplay between personal experience and fiction, and the ways families both sustain and constrain individual identity. Buy The South: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-south-7*TASH AW is the author of five novels, including We, the Survivors, and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, The Face: Strangers on a Pier, both finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has also won a Whitbread Award, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and an O. Henry Prize, and has three times been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His fiction has been translated into twenty-three languages.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
  • Booker Prize Winner David Szalay on Agency, Violence, and Restraint

    48:50|
    An edited version of this conversation is now available as part of our collaboration with The Yale Review. Read it here: https://yalereview.org/article/shakespeare-and-company-interview-david-szalayThis week Adam Biles sits down with Booker Prize–winner David Szalay to discuss his novel Flesh — a work that begins in post-Soviet Hungary and expands into a stark portrait of Europe over the last three decades.Szalay describes writing a book that takes almost nothing for granted, grounding experience in the physical body rather than psychology. They explore the novel’s emotionally charged yet morally unresolved relationships, its refusal of overt judgment, and its spare, withholding prose style.The conversation covers masculinity, violence, agency, and the seductive fantasy of “the West,” asking whether István is passive — or simply shaped by forces larger than himself. What happens when a novel resists explanation? When language reaches its limits? And how can restraint intensify emotional impact rather than diminish it?Buy Flesh: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/flesh-2*Winner of the Booker Prize 2025 for Flesh. David Szalay was born in Canada, grew up in London and now lives in Vienna. He is the author of six works of fiction that have been translated into over 20 languages, as well as several BBC radio dramas. His debut novel, London and the South-East, won Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes. All That Man Is was awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016. He was selected for the 2013 edition of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, and in 2010 appeared in the Telegraph’s list of the top 20 British writers under 40. In November 2025, Flesh won the Booker Prize.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
  • Murder, Mannerism and the Medicis with Laurent Binet

    01:00:31|
    Recorded live in the bookshop, this conversation dives into the inventive world of Perspectives, Laurent Binet’s historical novel that transforms Renaissance Florence into the scene of a gripping whodunnit. The discussion explores how a real painter’s death becomes the catalyst for a dazzling literary experiment: a murder investigation told entirely through letters, gossip, and competing testimonies.The author reveals how the book blends meticulous archival research with narrative play—treating history not as a fixed record but as a puzzle assembled from partial truths. From the politics of ducal courts to the working lives of artists and artisans, the episode uncovers a city in creative and ideological upheaval, grappling with what comes after artistic perfection.At once detective story, art-history meditation, and sly reflection on storytelling itself, this is a lively exploration of how the past can feel startlingly contemporary—and how every account depends on who’s holding the pen.Buy Perspectives: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/perspectives-4*Laurent Binet lives and works in France. His first novel, HHhH, was an international bestseller which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt du premier roman, among other prizes. The 7th Function of Language won the Prix de la FNAC and Prix Interallié. Civilisations is a bestseller that has won the Grand Prix de l'Académie française.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
  • George Saunders: Fiction, Free Will, and the Question of Redemption

    45:03|
    George Saunders returns to the Shakespeare and Company Podcast to talk with host Adam Biles about Vigil, his long-awaited new novel. Set on the threshold between life and death, Vigil follows a dying oil executive and the ghost tasked with comforting him, unfolding as a darkly comic, morally urgent meditation on guilt, responsibility, and free will in the age of climate collapse.Saunders discusses his fascination with liminal spaces and afterlives, the technical challenges of writing beyond realism, and how revision allows fiction to think more deeply than polemic ever could. Drawing on his own past in the oil industry, he reflects on writing characters implicated in environmental harm with both empathy and moral seriousness. The conversation ranges across Dickens, Tolstoy, Buddhism, and the novel’s central question: whether redemption is possible when action is no longer an option. As ever, Saunders brings humor, generosity, and intellectual daring to a discussion that embraces complexity rather than easy answers.*George Saunders is the author of thirteen books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize in 2017, and five collections of stories including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recent collection Liberation Day (selected by former President Obama has one of his ten favourite books of 2021). Three of Saunders’ books –Pastoralia, Tenth of December, and Lincoln in the Bardo – were chosen for the New York Times’ list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Saunders hosts the popular Story Club on Substack, which grew out of his book on the Russian short story, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In 2013, he was named one of the world's 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w