Book signings were a thing of the past; as Margaret Atwood showed, 21st century authors could autograph e-books remotely. Publishers should also beware now that technology has made self-publishing as easy as releasing Fifty Shades of Grey online.

While our hyperspeed, atomised hi-tech age has ensured reading has never been more central to daily existence, there is no end to critics pointing out that skimming social media, instant messages and newsfeed headlines is nothing like the sustained focus demanded by a novel.

And yet the book has not only survived, in a variety of forms, it has thrived. As Harvard University book historian Leah Price notes, as early as 2016, paper books were out­stripping e-books (again, in America) by US$300 million.

Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books was one of about 2.2 million new texts and editions publish­ed globally in 2019, roughly 440,000 of which were released in China alone.

Of course, this abundance is not necessarily good in itself. As far back as 2002, Joseph Epstein was already bemoaning in The New York Times, “Something on the order of 80,000 books get published in America every year, most of them not needed, not wanted, not in any way remotely necessary.” One of many attendant ironies is the mini-boom of examinations of distraction such as Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (2010), Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants (2016) and Cal Newport’s Deep Work(2016), all of which worry about the reader’s ability to finish the text at hand.

Despite this bewildering super-profusion, there were notable examples of books with the power to rise from the swamp and grab the attention of the world.

One of the dominant cultural forces of the 2010s was E.L. James’ Fifty Shades trilogy, which may have begun life as a novel read in the privacy of a Kindle or erotic dungeon, but before long was being flaunted openly in airports and trains. It not only spawned three bad movies but knocked erotic fiction into shape as a viable mainstream concern.

James’ biggest rival in terms of sales and cultural impact was Game of Thrones, which despite author George R.R. Martin’s desultory progress on a new instalment, began life as a series of novels. That these won a large following main­ly by word of mouth before the all-conquering, if morally suspect, television series proves the quieter imaginative pleasures of reading enthrals every bit as strongly as visual culture’s booms and busts.Even Kanye West or Star Wars would be hard pressed to surpass Margaret Atwood’s 2019. Augmenting the success of The Handmaid’s Tale on television, Atwood published The Testaments , a sequel to her 1985 novel, to front-page headlines, ecstatic reviews and even a Booker Prize, or rather 50 per cent thereof (the Boo or Ker Prize, perhaps). Unable to do anything quietly this year, Atwood shared the award with Bernardine Evaristo, for Girl, Woman, Other, despite a rule banning such dead heats.But to this reviewer’s mind, the biggest success story of the decade was Claire McFall. The Scottish teacher and young-adult writer might have been unheralded in her homeland, but her debut novel Ferryman (2013) made her a megastar in China, remaining in the top 10 bestsellers’ chart for three years. Subsequent instalments Trespassers (2017) and Outcasts (2019) suggest Ferryman was no flash in the pan, winning McFall a film deal, despite Outcasts managing only a single review on Amazon UK.Inverting this pyramid, writers from across Asia enjoyed unprecedented international success throughout the decade. Japan’s Keigo Higashinois one of the world’s bestselling authors thanks to the mass popularity of his psychological thrillers in Japan, China and more recently in the anglophone world.China’s Bi Feiyu’s Three Sisters (2010) won the short-lived Man Asian Prize, which also shortlisted work by Tie Ning, Sheng Keyi and Yan Lianke, the latter of whom enjoyed a string of critical and commercial hits throughout the 2010s, including Four Books (2011), The Explosion Chronicles (2016) and The Day the Sun Died (2015).

The global visibility of these contemporary writers has been bolstered by the efforts of presses such as Penguin Classics and Pushkin in excavating older but significant works such as The Nine Cloud Dream (1687) by Kim Man-jung, East Goes West (1937) by Younghill Kang, Masako Togawa’s The Master Key (1984) and The Hanging on Union Square (1935) by H.T. Tsiang.

Perhaps the most welcome development of all was an English-language translation of Louis “Jin Yong” Cha Leung-yung’s wuxiaCondor trilogy, overseen by Anna Holmwood and published by the MacLehose Press. All the concerns of English-speaking editors, who wondered whether readers outside China could cope with Cha’s epic, almost metaphysical fights, melted away in the course of two wonderful novels. A Snake Lies Waiting, part three of a projected 12 books, is due in early 2020. Sadly, Cha died only a few months after part one was released, in 2018.

The success of all these books owes much to an impressive generation of translators, arguably the most famous of whom is Ken Liu. An admired novelist in his own right, he is even more celebrated for his role in this golden age of Chinese science-fiction.His first act was to translate the Three-Body Problem trilogy, by Liu Cixin, which has become a global phenomen­on since part one appeared in 2014 (six years after the Chinese version). Just as influential are Ken Liu’s two antho­logies of science-fiction short stories (Invisible Planets from 2016 and 2019’s Broken Stars ), which brought Chen Qiufan, Xia Jia and Hao Jingfang to international attention.If you need convincing about the value of this literary work then read the news of book burnings at Zhenyuan county library, in Gansu province, seemingly to “cleanse” the shelves of “illegal”, “biased” or “improper” material.A sunnier alternative is to recommend some books of the year and the decade. In 2019, I would pick Flèche, a brilliant first poetry collection by Hong Kong-born poet Mary Jean Chan, and Empires of Dust , Jiang Zilong’s extraordinary account of a peasant’s great leap forward from Mao Zedong towards China’s modern communist-capitalist balancing act. Both could grace the decade as a whole, but I will suggest four more.

Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) divided critical opinion, but the chances are if you liked it, you loved it. Karen Joy Fowler’s We are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013) is witty, clever and profoundly moving, breathing new life into family dysfunction. Almost exactly the same can be said of Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things (2014), with added apocalypse and space travel. Finally, the Extinction Rebellion manifesto, This is Not a Drill (2019), may not boast the most elegant prose, but it’s hard to think of a more timely or urgent publication.

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