Christina's favourites 2022

Yes, it's the time of year when every bookshop in the land tells you about their top reads and why there were no better reads in this particular year. We're no different, but we HAVE made it extra difficult for our booksellers by asking them to choose only three books. These needn't have been published in 2022; they were merely titles that our team picked up at some point in the year and which will stay with them long after the 2023 page has been turned.

Today, we bring you Christina's 2022 favourites!

Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai by Nina Mingya Powles: this collection of essays is full of vivid sensory descriptions, beautiful illustrations, and meditations on language, family, belonging, cooking and eating. Nina Mingya Powles’s writing is generous, personal, and crafted with precision. I loved the exploration of being curious about one’s appetite in tracing its roots and connections.

Book Lovers by Emily Henry: This enemies-to-lovers romance is brilliant and very hot. I found its meditations on choosing what life to live, on having a sister, on grief and remembering, very moving and true. I yelled about this book, I cried for the last 30 pages, I took photos of my favourite passages and sent them to friends in texts full of exclamation marks.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin: Speaking of crying! This is a deeply inventive, intertextual book, playful and expansive, and a love letter to the art of video games. To me, it felt like a book about friendships - about living your life with your friends; but also about do-overs, about inevitability, and about what to do when you have suffered an unimaginable loss. Even though I cried a lot during this book it left me with a sense of hope, and the possibility of joy.

(CW Tomorrow Tomorrow: this book does feature unchallenged anti-palestinian sentiment in a zionist character)

Check out favourites from the rest of the Lighthouse team: Rachel's Noor's Lindsay's, Trisha, Nyrema, Mairi and Jess.