2014 was a very
good year for Square Books, with many strong new books and writers from near
and far bringing
you to us. Tasmanian Richard Flanagan and his Booker
Prize-winning The Narrow
Road to the Deep North made # 13 on our list,
just behind Let Me Be
Frank with You (12) by Richard Ford, who
was here December 11. Michael Pollan’s memorable appearance served up Cooked (37), as did Megan Abbott (The Fever, 93) and Mary Miller (The Last Days of California, 16), both Grisham
writers-in-residence; and John Darnielle (Wolf in White Van, 20); Paul Finebaum (My Conference Can Beat Your
Conference, 17); Elizabeth Spencer (Starting Over, 35); Greg Iles (Natchez Burning, 3);
Susan Minot (Thirty Girls, 21); and Josh Weil (The Great Glass Sea, 99).
Writers right
here in Oxford contributed significantly: Ben McClelland (Lifesaving Labradors, 93);
Curtis Wilkie (Assassins,
Eccentrics, Politicians and Other Persons of Interest, 10), and The Fall of the House of Zeus, 33); Ace Atkins (The Forsaken, 15); the King 
Twins (Our Josephine (61); Inside My
Italian Kitchen by Luisa Arico (63);
Tom Franklin, Crooked
Letter, Crooked Letter (51) and, with Beth Ann
Fennelly, Tilted World (39), Michael Henry, Finding Ishmael (78); Larry Brown’s
timeless first book, Facing the Music (91), Neil White’s In the Sanctuary of Outcasts (41), Flying Shoes by Lisa
Howorth (2),
and The Search
for Good Wine by John Hailman (46). Dean Faulkner
Wells’ great Oxford memoir, Every Day by the Sun (64), shines alongside her
famouser uncle – As I Lay
Dying (44)
and Selected
Short Stories (43) by William Faulkner. 
Not that the author has to be from or come here in order for a book to do well – witness The Boys in the Boat (90), How Not to be a Dick (38), Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (50), Gone Girl (34), Killing Patton (55), and Rebecca Solnit’s book on New Orleans, The Unfathomable City (42), Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Golden Book (60), Wild (59) and Unbroken (56). And there were signed books we got from publishers whose authors did not come here – those by Jan Karon, George Will, George Bush, Hillary Clinton, Donna Tartt, Haruki Murakami, Lena Dunham, and Amy Poehler all found a place among our top sellers, as did Carsick by John Waters, who did not come here this year but plans to this March immediately following the Oxford Conference for the Book.