A Year in Reading: Claire Messud

One of the great pleasures of this year for me was the last volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy, The Story of the Lost Child. It’s not to be read on its own, though — you’ve got to devour the other three books first. Ferrante builds her rich and textured world over time, and this last volume would not, I think, truly make sense without the others. I also highly recommend the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s response to Albert Camus’s The Stranger: entitled The Meursault Investigation, it retells the iconic story from an Algerian’s perspective, and gives us a view of contemporary Algerian life in the bargain. The Sympathizer, a terrific first novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, was another of my year’s discoveries: narrated by a Vietnamese double-agent who ends up in the United States, the book is rich, surprising, and often darkly funny. And last, but by no means least, while helping my teenage daughter to find some great books she might enjoy, I’ve had the joy of rediscovering some old favorites, including Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart and — delicious, always inappropriate, and oddly perspicacious – André Gide’s The Counterfeiters.

Claire Messud 's most recent novel is The Woman Upstairs.