Our critics choose their books of the year, including J G Ballard, A S Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Terry Eagleton, and Ziauddin Sardar

Beryl Bainbridge

My earliest memories are of seeing young men in blue hospital uniforms walking along Lord Street in Southport, their faces a patchwork of skin grafts. I was told they were airmen who had survived burning planes. E R Mayhew's The Reconstruction of Warriors (Greenhill Books) is a heroic account of those heroes of the skies and of the pioneering work of the plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe. Phil Scraton's Hillsborough: the truth (Mainstream Publishing) is a must for those wanting to understand why, at 3.06 on the afternoon of 15 April 1989, the referee blew his whistle to halt the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. This is an exhaustive and compelling account of what lay behind the deaths of 96 men, women and children. Some months ago, it was suggested that a modern author should write a sequel to J M Barrie's Peter Pan (Puffin Classics). What a mistake! Our notion of make-believe is no longer the same, and who could bring back the magic of those lost boys in Neverland? Far better to stick with the one and only story told by Barrie.

J G Ballard

Robert O Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism (Allen Lane) is a shrewd and telling analysis of the 20th century's most sinister political invention. What are the precise ingredients of this particularly nasty stew? I found Paxton's post-mortem deeply unsettling, with its strong hint that the corpse might sit up at any moment and seize us by the throat. John Gray's Heresies (Granta) is a welcome and timely collection of his brilliant essays in the New Statesman over the past few years. Gray expertly demolishes our misguided faith in progress and modernity, global government and the end of history. A powerful antidote to liberal complacency.

Hugo Barnacle

Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing (Little, Brown) is an epic Western with some fairly corny characters, either noble or no good, but it persuades you that the time and place did breed characters like that, and the sidelight on the Indians is intriguing. Andrew Martin's The Blackpool Highflyer (Faber & Faber) is an Edwardian thriller notable not so much for the plot as for the incidentals - the festival of Halifax Wakes Week, the rivalry between music-hall ventriloquists. David Storey's Thin-Ice Skater (Jonathan Cape) is a study of an eccentric, damaged family, making no obvious point (Storey doesn't do obvious points), but weirdly compelling.

Celia Brayfield

Alexandra Fuller's Scribbling the Cat (Picador), a very grown-up sequel to her debut memoir of her childhood in Zimbabwe, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, confirms her as one of the most gifted writers to emerge in the past few years. It's an uncompromising, politically aware and beautifully written account of travelling with a veteran of the Rhodesian war through Zambia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe to the old battlegrounds. Michael Moran's Beyond the Coral Sea (Flamingo) is about the author's voyage among the islands of the Coral, Solomon and Bismarck seas. He evokes not only the steaming rainforest and white-sand beaches, but the imperatives of an ancient people who are slipping from the grip of capitalism and Christianity. This is a society of no strategic or economic significance, unknown to most of the outside world, facing a barren future and unable to shake off its savage past. Moran's depiction makes you question the real nature of humanity. A must-read for Francophiles is Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong (Robson Books), an inquiry by two Canadian academics, Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow, into the essence of Frenchness. The authors penetrated some of the most sacred enclaves of French society and returned to tell the tale with wit and erudition.

A S Byatt

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (Sceptre) should be celebrated, however much attention it has already had. Mitchell tells several interwoven stories - all spellbinding - and teases his readers only to satisfy their curiosity in a new version of an old-fashioned cliff-hanger. I have much admired and enjoyed John Fuller's collection of poems Ghosts (Chatto & Windus). He contemplates age and death with a kind of glee and surprised intelligence that I find very sympathetic, and contemplates the newborn with the same meticulous precision. Peter Rushforth brought out the long and intricate Pinkerton's Sister (Simon & Schuster) after 25 years of silence. It is a tale that rustles with echoes of other texts - the story of a brilliant and troubled woman in 19th-century New York. Well worth the required reading effort. The Pinkerton in question is the Pinkerton of Madame Butterfly. More volumes are being written.

Carmen Callil

For the past five years, I have been buried in Vichy France, accompanied each day by the villains, war criminals, buffoons, wretches and unfortunates of that part of Europe at war. Trinny and Susannah's What Not to Wear on the telly saved my sanity. A victim myself of the written word, I like their books best. This year it's What You Wear Can Change Your Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Trinny and Susannah are the Dorothy Parkers of the female body. Merciless to themselves and others, they pounce with beak and paw on women misshapen like the rest of us, and bully them into a kind of rainbow beauty. Into their visual sausage machine go all female bodies past their prime, if they ever had one. Out the other end emerge magically transformed creatures, bulges still intact but decorated like a Christmas tree and flapping happy wings like an Angela Carter heroine. Revolutionary stuff.

Margaret Cook

Christopher Andersen's American Evita: Hillary Clinton's path to power (William Morrow, US) paints a believable portrait of the woman who may become the first female US president. There have been too few powerful women to establish a stereotype, but she has followed the usual game-plan in coming to power on the back of a high-flying man. The insight into the Clintons' turbulent, indestructible partnership is gripping. I came late to the fan club of Adrian Mole, but thoroughly enjoyed Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (Michael Joseph). In a world of winners, Mole shows us how to be lovable by being ordinary and failing abysmally. As with all good humour, there is a dark side - Mole is beset by such real-life worries as spiralling debt and lovers who cling like leeches. David Lodge's Author, Author (Secker & Warburg), a fictionalised story of the novelist Henry James, is a work of immense sympathy. Even the prose sounds more like the prudish James than does Lodge's usually racy style. Although acknowledged as a master, James suffered severe rejection by the general public. Lodge's account of his humiliating failure as a playwright, while men of lesser talent are lauded and made wealthy, is especially poignant.

William Cook

Graham McCann's Frankie Howerd (4th Estate) is an affectionate tribute to an entertainer whose career lasted from the 1940s to the 1990s and changed British comedy. McCann never quite reveals the private person behind the stage persona, but he makes a pretty convincing case for Howerd as Britain's first alternative comedian. Chris Donald's Rude Kids (HarperCollins) is the hugely enjoyable autobiography of the founding editor of Viz. Donald describes how the fanzine he edited from the bedroom of his boyhood home ended up selling more than a million copies per issue, but it's the irreverent portraits of the eccentrics he met along the way that make this book so amusing. Robert McCrum's Wodehouse: a life (Viking) is an absorbing study of the greatest comic writer of the 20th century. McCrum is scrupulously thorough about the controversy of Wodehouse's war years, but his main interest is in Wodehouse's writing - and, remarkably, the stuff about PG's working methods is as engrossing as the stuff about his life.

Rachel Cooke

When it comes to fiction, Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (Picador) wins hands down. A brilliant and subtle novel. I also read two fantastic biographies this year: Jonathan Coe's Like a Fiery Elephant: the story of B S Johnson (Picador) and Cressida Connolly's The Rare and the Beautiful: the lives of the Garmans (4th Estate). Coe's book is genuinely innovative, and both bring relatively unknown characters convincingly to life. For a curmudgeonly Christmas treat, I thoroughly recommend Simon Gray's The Smoking Diaries (Granta): grumpy but strangely moving.

Jason Cowley

Stephen Greenblatt's biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World (Jonathan Cape), is a work of wonderful erudition that can be read as an accessible introduction to the social and political milieu from which Shakespeare emerged, and as an elegant guide to the astonishing poems and plays themselves. There is too much unsourced speculation about Shakespeare himself - about what he "might have" said and done and whom he met, and how these experiences may have directly influenced the work. But you close the book determined immediately to open another: the Complete Works itself.

Amanda Craig

I was relieved that Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty won the Booker for a number of reasons, not least because it reasserts the supremacy of the classical novel over the sort of experimental postmodernist tosh still venerated by fashionable critics. A superb satire on a vile era, it is flawlessly written and extremely funny. However, I was dismayed that David Lodge's Author, Author suffered by comparison with Colm Toibin's novel about Henry James. Not only does Lodge capture the kindliness and humour of the Master, but his novel is a rare portrait of friendship between men - and between authors of widely different tempers and talents. It enlarges the spirit as well as entertaining the heart, and is a really fine novel. I also loved Deborah Moggach's gentler satire on Blair's Britain, These Foolish Things (Chatto & Windus), in which a group of pensioners are persuaded to invest their declining years and savings in an Indian boarding house, with deliciously unexpected results. For children aged six to eight, Cressida Cowell's How to Train Your Dragon and How to be a Pirate (Hodder Children's Books) are stuffed with adventure and dour Scottish humour about life as a Viking nerd. For eight and over, Michelle Paver's Wolf Brother (Orion Childrens), an utterly gripping Bronze Age quest to kill or be killed by a giant bear, is written with compelling economy and detail.

Edwina Currie

As usual, I dived into the Booker list nominations. Colm Toibin's The Master (Picador) should have won, no question. A novelisation of the last years of Henry James, it is both poignant and fascinating. Most of all, it made me want to go and read the novels again. Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty irritated me greatly at first: if it had been written by anybody but a gay man, it would have been criticised as savagely homophobic. But it drew me in, and its ending made me weep. A sad, honest appraisal of the Thatcher years. But if you want to know what happens in real life, read John Cornwell's Hitler's Scientists: science, war and the Devil's pact (Penguin). Full of grim irony: the scientist who invented Zyklon B, it turns out, was a Jew.

Margaret Drabble

I greatly enjoyed Richard Shelton's The Longshoreman: a life at the water's edge (Atlantic Books), although much of it is about matters that do not interest me, such as shooting wildfowl and railway engines. But the bits about fish and fishing are wonderful. He writes about salmon and lampreys and lobsters with poetry and feeling, and the book is full of strange facts. David Caute's The Dancer Defects (Oxford University Press) is packed with information about cultural conflicts and rivalries during the cold war, some of which has become available only recently: a heroic undertaking, tirelessly researched and impartially presented, and a very readable and useful work of reference.

Patricia Duncker

This was my year for masters and commanders, an unexpected list of male heroes. Colm Toibin's portrait of Henry James in The Master moved me to tears. Self-repression, irony and understatement are all heroic qualities. A big re-read was Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (Minerva), his extraordinary analysis of the psychodynamics of capitalism. The scene where Thomas Buddenbrook reads Schopenhauer in the gazebo still makes my hair stand on end. In Southey on Nelson (HarperCollins), Richard Holmes has re-edited and republished the first biography of Britain's naval hero. When he sailed into battle, Nelson's habitual command to his captains - which they loved - was: "Engage the enemy more closely." This is my New Year's resolution.

Terry Eagleton

Power, Politics and Culture (Bloomsbury) is a superbly wide-ranging set of interviews with the late Edward Said, in which Said's voice - civilised, passionate, rational, acerbic - reminds us that moral commitment and scrupulous analysis need not necessarily be at odds. David Lodge's Author, Author is the novel about Henry James that wasn't shortlisted for the Booker prize. But despite some sizeable defects, it has a lot more bite, wit and humour than Colm Toibin's rather soulful The Master.

Susan Elderkin

Gail Jones is a western Australian novelist who only recently came to British attention when Sixty Lights (Harvill Press), her second novel, made the Booker longlist. It tells the story of Lucy Strange, who emigrates to London and becomes an amateur photographer. What it's really about is her ability to discover joy and beauty in unexpected flashes - right up to and including the moment of death. Strange is one of those rare creations in contemporary fiction who live with you long after you've turned the last page.

Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: why we tell stories (Continuum) may be deeply conservative in its view of modern storytelling as a reflection of society's moral decline, but this enormous tome is worth the work. As Booker rips through plot summaries from Beowolf to James Bond, he shows how fundamental to life stories are - quite simply, humans have never existed without them. For the first time, I started to understand why the hell I spend my days sitting at a desk making things up. Danuta de Rhodes's The Little White Car (Canongate) is a delightful romp of a book, written after Rhodes decided he wanted to be a member of the chick-lit club. It's the story of the girl whose little white car may have been involved in the crash that killed Princess Diana - bad taste, I hear you say, but these hapless characters are so charmingly dotty, and Rhodes's touch so light, that he gets away with it - and, it has to be said, trumps a whole load of female chick-lit authors in the process.

Richard Gott

The most gripping book I have read this year is Jon Lee Anderson's The Fall of Baghdad (Penguin), a report from Iraq well worth reading if only for its wonderful description of the debate between reporters and their news desks about the desirability, or not, of remaining in the city to experience "shock and awe". On a similar theme, I have been delighted by Malise Ruthven's imaginative Historical Atlas of Islam (Harvard University Press), which reveals with maps and text the time-frame and geographical extent of Muslim influence. A rather different world is summoned up by Adam Feinstein's Pablo Neruda: a passion for life (Bloomsbury), a sparkling biography of the curmudgeonly Chilean communist who, through his poetry, did more even than the Cuban revolution to draw attention to the hopes and aspirations of Latin America's peoples.

John Gray

Perhaps the most important book I read this year was Michael Klare's Blood and Oil: the dangers and consequences of America's growing petroleum dependency (Metropolitan Books). Klare shows how America's need for oil drives its military interventions in many parts of the world, and argues that unless there is radical reform in US energy policies, we are in for decades of oil wars. I think Klare is optimistic in thinking that this can be avoided - after Iraq and Bush's re-election, the die is cast - but his analysis is brilliant and indispensable. I was delighted by Don Paterson's The Book of Shadows (Picador). This marvellous collection of reflections and aphorisms on art, sex, work and death by one of our most gifted poets demonstrates that it is possible to write lightly about the weightiest things (and things that have no weight at all).

Roy Hattersley

Tristram Hunt's Building Jerusalem (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) tells more than the story of how Victorian cities were built. It is a study in national self-confidence. The buildings illustrate the spirit that made Britain great. David McKie's Jabez (Atlantic Books) reveals another side of Victorian life. The biography of one of the rogues who infested the 19th-century parliament is as entertaining as it is informative. Robert Skidelsky's single-volume compression of his monumental three-part work on John Maynard Keynes (Macmillan) is the one book to be published this year that we can be sure will still be in print in 2054.

Michael Holroyd

I have a weakness for Andrew Crumey's novels. I call it a weakness because I've noticed that, when reading them in waiting-rooms or on trains, people look up angrily whenever I laugh. There's much to laugh at in Mobius Dick (Picador). Like a magical conjuror, Crumey keeps all manner of subjects - chaos and coincidence, quantum mechanics, psychoanalysis, technology, telepathy and much else - whirling amazingly in the air. Owen Sheers's The Dust Diaries (Faber & Faber) breaks every rule and ignores all the guidelines that divide fiction from non-fiction as he tracks down his great-great-uncle, once a legendary figure in Southern Rhodesia. "I want more than facts," he writes, though acknowledging that fiction arises from facts and that stories never end. I hope not too many writers try to follow his example, but simply enjoy what is a unique achievement written with integrity and great imaginative power.

Prue Leith

Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (Bloomsbury) is a sweeping novel of love, betrayal, loss and violence set in Kabul and San Francisco. Absorbing and moving. Robert Harris's Pompeii (Arrow) is a great, fast, easy read of a novel. It's as exciting as Harris's work usually is, and provides an enjoyable education about volcanoes. Bee Wilson's The Hive: the story of the honeybee and us (John Murray) is much more than a loo book of curious stuff about bees. Beautifully written and absorbing.

Frank McLynn

A cascade of books appeared in anticipation of next year's Trafalgar bicentenary, and by far the finest was John Sugden's Nelson: a dream of glory (Jonathan Cape). As a monument to careful scholarship, Sugden's is a class act. Yet the "total" writer about the sea must be Richard Woodman, whose The Real Cruel Sea (John Murray) is the finest work to date on the cruelly ill-used and underrated merchant navy in the Second World War. Richard Overy's The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (Allen Lane) should have all students of totalitarianism reaching for superlatives, as it has all the virtues: erudition, insight, originality, lucidity and elegance.

Sarfraz Manzoor

Given that its author is famous for not looking back, Bob Dylan's Chronicles (Simon & Schuster) proved an unexpected triumph. Dazzling in detail and generous in spirit, this is Dylan repaying the love and faith of his fans with a memoir that takes us closer than we ever have imagined to seeing the world through his eyes. Another year and another masterpiece from Philip Roth, the most important writer working today. With The Plot Against America (Jonathan Cape), a blistering re-imagining of America's wartime past, Roth summons the ghosts of his Newark childhood to remind us that the first casualty of war is tolerance. Anyone surprised by George W Bush's re-election has probably not read Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with America? (Secker & Warburg). Its argument - that cultural issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage were the real deciders - is lucid and depressingly persuasive.

Andrew Martin

I have three novels to recommend, starting with Cottonwood (Picador) by the American thriller-writer Scott Phillips. As it's a Western with overtones of horror, I've seldom felt less intellectual pressure to enjoy a book, and seldom read one faster. I also enjoyed Alan Sillitoe's A Man of His Time (Flamingo), a vivid, violent account of the life of a blacksmith in late Victorian-Edwardian Nottinghamshire. (Amazing to think that this book was written in Notting Hill.) My third choice is Muriel Spark's The Finishing School (Viking), which is elegant, nasty and fully up-to-date. It might have been the work of a brilliant 22-year-old, whereas in fact Spark is 87.

Pankaj Mishra

I admired Ziauddin Sardar's Desperately Seeking Paradise: journeys of a sceptical Muslim (Granta) and Anouar Majid's Freedom and Orthodoxy (Stanford). Both books gave me an intimate view of Islam and Muslims in a world shaped by imperialism. In Stories I Stole: from Georgia (Atlantic Books), Wendell Steavenson seemed to invigorate the slightly troubled genre of travel writing. I also enjoyed Hanif Kureishi's memoir, My Ear at His Heart (Faber & Faber) and Tabish Khair's skilfully inventive novel The Bus Stopped (Picador).

Julie Myerson

Louise Dean's Becoming Strangers (Scribner) is an astonishingly assured debut - it feels like the work of a novelist in her prime, and she's terrifyingly young. Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now (Puffin) had my 13-year-old daughter and me equally moved: this is a novel about childhood adventure, love and kissing. It already feels like a classic, in the sense that you can't imagine a world without it. Jonathan Coe's The Closed Circle (Viking) is a novel I both speeded through and dreaded finishing. I laughed and cried with recognition - every bit as good as its prequel, The Rotter's Club. And Toby Litt's Ghost Story (Hamish Hamilton) completely shattered me. A tender and horribly credible tale of love and loss swerving off the beaten track - the kind of modern, chewy yet untricksy prose that almost every novelist would kill to achieve.

Rowan Pelling

I recommend every novel on the Booker shortlist, but some marvellous books haven't had the attention they deserve: James Hamilton-Paterson's Cooking with Fernet Branca (Faber & Faber) is a comic masterpiece that should rightly be selling by the bucket-load (just ignore the twee cover). Kate Atkinson's Case Histories (Doubleday) is utterly compelling and her best book since Behind the Scenes at the Museum. In Paradise (Jonathan Cape), A L Kennedy weaves her word magic around one woman's determined embrace of alcohol. Sam North's The Unnumbered (Scribner) pierces the heart with its tragic love story featuring literature's most repellent villain of recent years. Without doubt, the armchair read of the year, and fully deserving its lavish critical acclaim, is Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (Bloomsbury).

Andrew Roberts

As a Francophobe, I was shaken in my prejudice by Alistair Horne's Friend or Foe: an Anglo-Saxon history of France (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), which in this anniversary year of the entente cordiale convinced me that the whole thing was not just a French ramp to drag the British empire into defending France against Wilhelmine Germany. Continuing on the French theme, Napoleon on Elba (Ravenhall) is the diary of the emperor's British jailer, Sir Neil Campbell, edited with much erudition by Jonathan North. It was canny of the history publisher Ravenhall Books to find an unpublished manuscript of this much interest to publish as its first book. Charles Whiting's The Field Marshal's Revenge: the breakdown of a special relationship (Pen & Sword) brilliantly charts the clashes between Montgomery and the Americans, showing how important Eisenhower's emollience was in soothing the Yankophobic Monty.

Anthony Sampson

Three books gave me unexpected pleasure. The Art of the Steal (Putnam, US) by Christopher Mason is not elegantly written, but it tells the story of the Sotheby's and Christie's price-fixing scandal with compulsive readability.

Robert Winder's Bloody Foreigners (Little, Brown) tells the story of immigrants to Britain, from the nation's medieval beginnings, with vivid accounts of the periodic scare-stories that climaxed in the campaigns against Jewish refugees from pogroms before the Second World War. It puts the present concerns about asylum-seekers into perspective. Anatol Lieven's America Right or Wrong (HarperCollins) is a well-documented and outspoken account of the origins of American nationalism and its dangerous implications for Britain and the world.

Sukhdev Sandhu

Philip Brophy's 100 Modern Soundtracks (BFI) is an outstanding contribution to the growing body of literature on auditory culture. All the essays, on films as diverse as M and Dr Dolittle, are neologism-rich, insight-packed thought-bombs. Sarah Lowndes's Social Sculpture (Stopstop) is a fascinating study of the music and visual scene in Glasgow that joins the dots between Douglas Gordon and

Belle and Sebastian. Low Pay, High Profile (New Press), by America's finest cultural critic Andrew Ross, collects essays on the Nike-Man Utd sponsorship deal, the ecological impact of hi-tech factories and the second anti-sweatshop movement. All are incisive, engaged and hugely engaging.

Ziauddin Sardar

Suhayl Saadi's Psychoraag (Black and White Publishing) is an enchanting and colourful novel that combines magical realism with the gritty reality of Glasgow's urban scene. Saadi's protagonist, DJ Zaf, seems to have walked out of Midnight's Children and into Trainspotting. The themes of Scottish Pakistani identity, generational conflict and displacement are treated with confidence and dignity. Humayun Ansari's The Infidel Within: Muslims in Britain since 1800 (Hurst) is a scholarly, sweeping history. Ansari highlights the mind-boggling diversity of British Muslims and gives potted biographies of some interesting, not to say strange, luminaries. Finally, Jessica Williams's 50 Facts That Should Change the World (Icon Books) provides proof of why we cannot be complacent about the world as it is today. Should become the bible of political activists everywhere.

Frances Stonor Saunders

The single most striking piece of writing I've read all year is by Ann Pasternak Slater in the autumn issue of the journal Arete. "Kasztner's Ark" is a novella-length treatment of the (true) story of Dr Rudolf Kasztner, a Hungarian who saved 1,684 fellow Jews from extermination in Auschwitz. Kasztner's ark was the train that transported these Jews not into the death camp, but out of it, into Switzerland. His mission involved making agonising choices, and quaffing cocktails with the SS. After the war, an Israeli court found he had collaborated with the Nazis and assisted them in the Holocaust. He took the case to appeal, but before the Supreme Court handed down its conclusions, he was assassinated by a Jewish extremist in a car park near his home in Tel Aviv. A year later, in 1958, Kasztner was exonerated. In Pasternak Slater's hands, this complex and harrowing story is set free from the moral confusions that have cast a shadow over Kasztner for more than half a century. It is almost impossible to achieve the right acoustic in Holocaust history: this account is written at perfect pitch.

Roger Scruton

I can think of no better funeral ode to Derrida than Frederick Crews's Postmodern Pooh (Profile Books), a wonderful satire of deconstruction and all that has stemmed from it. This is one of the funniest books I have read this year, and a worthy successor to Crews's The Pooh Perplex of 30 years ago. Add Francis Wheen's How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (Perennial) and you have a clear summary of why you shouldn't send your children to a postmodern university. So where do you turn for wisdom in postmodern times? Where people have always turned, says Jonathan Aitken, in his moving Psalms for People Under Pressure (Continuum). The punishment that Aitken called down on himself was vindictive and merciless: in the psalms, however, he found the strength to accept, to repent and (hardest of all) to forgive his enemies.

William Skidelsky

Comfortably the best fiction I read this year was David Foster Wallace's short-story collection Oblivion (Abacus). Wallace is not to everyone's taste: people are put off by his deliberate deployment of pretentious and clumsy language; his sentences that ramble on for pages; his wilful difficulty. (One reviewer called this collection "execrable".) But the rewards of perseverance are high. There is a seriousness to Wallace's fiction, a desire to show us what is truly revealing about his characters. A second fine example of contemporary American fiction is David Leavitt's The Body of Jonah Boyd (Bloomsbury). Although more conventional than anything by Wallace, this is an ingenious, entertaining parable about creativity. The cleverest thing about it is that, while Leavitt's message appears to be cynical (true genius is a mirage; art is about plagiarism as much as anything else), the novel itself demonstrates that, in Leavitt's case, the creative impulse is alive and well.

Ann Widdecombe

Once, when life expectancy was limited, youth was not a bar to achievement and acclaim. Mozart composed at eight; Alexander Pope was famous at 23; and Pitt the Younger was prime minister at 24. He led the country for 19 years and through some turbulent times. William Hague's William Pitt the Younger (HarperCollins) is a book about a witty, youthful and ambitious politician by a witty, youthful and ambitious politician. Victoria Seymour's Court in the Act is a delightful little volume describing policing in a seaside town during the Second World War when, in addition to fighting the usual crimes under unusual conditions, there was a raft of new laws to impose as well - showing a chink of light through a blind could land you in jail for a month!

Bee Wilson

I enjoyed Gerard Woodward's Booker-nominated novel I'll Go to Bed at Noon (Chatto & Windus) much more than any of the three favourites. Woodward is a kind of Zola for our times. His depiction of a family of alcoholics in the 1970s is both funny and profound and contains brilliant descriptions of food in that era, including a particularly disgusting-sounding "sandwich gateau". Most books on motherhood are very annoying, but Kate Clanchy's book of spare, elegant poems, Newborn (Picador), is the exception. Clanchy somehow manages to be moving without being mawkish; even when she is mawkish, the poems are so exceptionally beautiful, it doesn't matter. Her words lodge themselves in your brain and won't leave. Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail Eating: a kind of British cooking (Bloomsbury), the entirely original cookbook by the hero of modern British offal, has just been reissued. As well as having a charming style, the book has surprisingly doable recipes, not all of them carnivorous - roast tomatoes with crottins is one delicious example.

Peregrine Worsthorne

This year, coincidentally, two fascinating novels have been published based on the life of Henry James. Instead of proving too much of a good thing, they only whet the appetite for more. Colm Toibin's The Master is particularly perceptive and moving about Henry James's self-torturing and self-protecting approach to all human intimacies. David Lodge's Author, Author is equally perceptive and moving about the masochistic frustrations caused by James's theatrical ambitions. Anybody interested in the art of the novel will find both these works marvellously illuminating. My third recommendation is Simon Ball's The Guardsmen (HarperCollins), which recounts the interweaving destinies of four guards officers in the First World War - Harold Macmillan, Bobbity Salisbury, Oliver Lyttelton and Harry Cruickshank - all of whom went on to become prominent Conservative politicians. May not sound all that gripping, but worth reading if you are interested in learning how Britain was governed in the good old days.

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