I spend a fair bit of time going through the fiction bookshelves at various Oxfams (my favourites are in Chiswick, Oxford St Giles and Cirencester), looking for hidden gems that I might have missed. So a lot of my picks are the most random finds, with compelling titles and fun covers (can you tell I’m really into sunny yellow?). Here are three of my recommendations from the books I read last year.

The Life of a Banana, PP Wong

This is a sweet and moving story about the experience of race in Britain through the eyes of a twelve year-old British-born Singaporean Chinese girl. I thought PP Wong does such a fine job of capturing the child’s very funny and endearing voice, while balancing it with the sad story of how she becomes an orphan and is forced to uproot her life in the care of her strict grandmother. It’s a very interesting insight into what life looks like when you don’t fit in, with the horrible school bullying being the hardest to read, yet the story doesn’t lose that light-heartedness and warmth as spoken from an innocent child’s voice.

Sugarbread, Balli Kaur Jaswal

I read this straight after The Life of a Banana and it’s an interesting juxtaposition: the story takes place in Singapore rather than Britain and it’s related by a ten year-old Sikh girl. I found it a very absorbing account of the melting pot of nationalities, religions and social statuses coexisting in Singapore, a topic that I wasn’t familiar with at all. The touching multi-generational family drama exposes the challenges of being different, yet it also reminds you of all the things we have in common everywhere we grow up.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman

This book had a bestselling status the year it came out, I remember seeing it for ages in all the bookshop displays in 2017. It’s a very intriguing story where you know something very bad is lurking in the past and you can’t wait to find out what happened, but the pacing is so expertly mastered that you’re equally drawn by both the past and the evolving present. Unlike the previous two novels, the character is not a misfit because of her ethnicity, but because of her social awkwardness. Firmly on the autistic/Asperger’s spectrum, Eleanor Oliphant is harsh and judgemental, and it takes a while to warm up to her. But seeing her grow and slowly uncovering her trauma is what makes the character so endearing – and a very intriguing future film adaptation, when this happens.

Have you read any of these? What are your favourite novels about misfits?