What Are The Top Fiction Books 2022 Literary Critics Recommend?

Looking back, the critical consensus for 2022 fiction seemed to circle a few themes: historical reevaluation and the nature of truth. I remember 'Demon Copperhead' by Barbara Kingsolver got a rapturous reception for reimagining 'David Copperfield' in Appalachia. The Washington Post called it a masterpiece. 'The Colony' by Audrey Magee, about an English painter on a remote Irish island, was another one that showed up everywhere for its sharp political and linguistic tensions.

Then there were the quieter, introspective books that critics seemed to protectively champion. 'Either/Or' by Elif Batuman continued Selin's adventures with a voice so specific and funny it felt like cheating to call it fiction. 'Now Do You Know Where You Are' by Dana Levin, while poetry, got crossover attention for its raw intimacy. It makes sense—after the pandemic years, critics seemed drawn to works examining how we construct our selves and our stories, whether through grand historical analogies or minute personal detail.

Catching up with the 2022 literary fiction scene, it felt like everyone was talking about the same handful of books—and honestly, most of them lived up to the hype. Hernan Diaz's 'Trust' was the one that actually stuck with me long after I finished it. The structure is this clever puzzle about wealth and narrative control, but it never feels like a gimmick. That one seemed to be on every year-end list from The New Yorker to the NYT.

Beyond that, the critics were really championing writers examining place and displacement. 'The Furrows' by Namwali Serpell has this haunting, almost surreal quality about grief that reviewers praised for its formal daring. I tried it and found it challenging, but in a way that made me think. Claire Keegan's 'Small Things Like These' was another critical darling—a slender, precise novella about moral courage in 1980s Ireland. It’s quiet, but punches way above its weight.

I noticed a strong trend toward ambitious, genre-bending literary works too. 'Our Missing Hearts' by Celeste Ng blended a dystopian family saga with a critique of censorship, landing on plenty of 'best of' lists. For something truly massive in scope, there was 'The Candy House' by Jennifer Egan, a sort-of sequel to 'A Visit from the Goon Squad' exploring memory and technology. Critics ate it up, though some readers found it colder than her earlier work. My own takeaway is that 2022’s critically acclaimed fiction was less about a single standout and more about this rich spread of formally inventive stories tackling big, uneasy questions.

Honestly? I got a bit fatigued by the literary critic circuit in 2022. It felt like an echo chamber praising the same five novels. Everyone raved about 'Trust' and 'Demon Copperhead,' and while they're expertly done, the discourse got so loud it drowned out other voices. I found more interesting stuff slightly off the beaten path.

For instance, 'Booth' by Karen Joy Fowler got some notice but not the fanfare of the top picks. It's a fictional take on the Booth family (yes, that Booth), and it’s weird and gripping in a way a lot of the more polished critical darlings aren't. Same with 'The Book of Goose' by Yiyun Li—a brutal, beautiful story of female friendship and manipulation that should have been in more conversations. Critics maybe default to the big, structurally ambitious books, but some of the year's best writing was in these sharper, narrower focuses. My reading group argued about this for weeks.

2022's big one with critics was definitely Hernan Diaz's 'Trust.' It won the Pulitzer. Beyond that, look at the Booker winner ('The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida' by Shehan Karunatilaka) and the National Book Award fiction winner ('The Rabbit Hutch' by Tess Gunty). Those three give you a solid core of what the professional literary establishment valued: formal innovation, political urgency, and a certain stylistic boldness.