Obama shares favourite reads of 2022, including Diaz and Gurnah

Former US President Barack Obama has released a 13-strong list of his favourite books of the year, spanning memoir, fiction and non-fiction, including Booker Prize-longlisted Trust by Hernan Diaz (Picador), 2021 Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives (Bloomsbury) and his wife Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry (Viking), joking, “I’m a bit biased on this one”. 

Other picks included The Furrows: A Novel by Namwali Serpell (Hogarth), The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan (Hutchinson Heinemann), Black Cake by Sharmaine Wilkerson (Michael Joseph), Liberation Day by George Saunders (Bloomsbury) and The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (Corsair). 

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel (Picador) was also selected, alongside The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff (Little, Brown) and South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand The Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry, which is published by Ecco in the US and has not yet been released in the UK.  

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (Jonathan Cape) and An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong (Bodley Head) complete the list.