Bronte Coates shares four books she read in 2014 that have stayed with her.

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

But although we were all women, we struggled to understand what a woman was. Our every move or thought or conversation or dream, once analysed in depth, seemed not to belong to us.

In my review of Elena Ferrante’s most recent release (the third in her series of novels about two women and the intense relationship between them) I commented on her ‘seemingly effortless ability’ to destabilise and dismantle my notions of self. At the time I knew I sounded dramatic but even now, several months later, I still can’t think of a better way to describe my overwhelming response to her work. Ferrante’s attempts to understand what it means to be a woman in her world feel distressing yet thrilling, shocking yet familiar; these novels are wildly addictive literary melodramas.

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

I obsessed, and told myself this obsession was empathy. But it wasn’t, quite. It was more like inpathy. I wasn’t expatriating myself into another life so much as importing its problems into my own.

Of all the books I read this year, Leslie Jamison’s essay collection is the one that most strongly resonated with the kind of person I am, and my view of the world. Much as the title suggests, each essay is an exercise in empathy: Jamison is preoccupied with pain – with everything from the physical duress of ultra-marathon runners to the imagined (but no less real for this) suffering of Morgellons Disease – and her attempts to understand the why and how ate away at me for weeks after finishing the book. Empathy is my way of making sense of the world and Jamison pokes holes in this philosophy even while she engages in it herself. Reading her work I felt the same way I’d felt when I’d first read Joan Didion.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

I’d thought that to heal my great hurt, I should flee to the wild. It was what people did. The nature books I’d read told me so. So many of them had been quests inspired by grief or sadness …

Based on a friend’s recommendation, I finally and somewhat begrudgingly got around to reading H is for Hawk late last year and, of course, I loved it, proving I should always listen to recommendations. The book is an account of Macdonald’s struggles to train a goshawk in the wake of her father’s unexpected death, and it’s also a study of the author T.H. White, a meditation on grief, a history of falconry, an investigation into our obsession with viewing wildness and nature as an answer to pain, and much more. I never thought a goshawk playing with paper would make me burst into tears and it was a wonderful surprise that it did.

Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey

Colette and I have always been interested in mules, perhaps because we consider ourselves hybrids of a sort, never quite able to fit within the boundaries of our sex or species, always feeling we’re a smudgy, mongrel character.

One of the most important things about working with books is to not get too bogged down in the work side of things and forget that, ‘Hey, I actually like books’. And I couldn’t have invented a better antidote to my personal literary fatigue last year than Ceridwen Dovey’s smart, playful collection of stories which arrived in my hands at exactly the right time. I’ve already raved about this collection here and here, but in simplest terms, this is a book that reminded me why I ever fell in love with fiction in the first place.

Bronte Coates