Billy Bragg, Hari Kunzru, Hilary Mantel, Tom Paulin, William Dalrymple and more choose their top tomes from 2007. Have a read then why not add your favourites in the comments section below?
Francis Beckett
Alliance: the Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another by Jonathon Fenby (Simon & Schuster)
Betjeman by A N Wilson (Arrow Books)
Some of the best history books turn dead statesmen into living, breathing human beings before your eyes. Jonathan Fenby's Alliance: the Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another (Simon & Schuster) is a marvellous portrait of the three men who shaped the world we live in, during the two years (1943-45) when they did it.
And I've always wanted to reach the human being behind John Betjeman's charming but evasive verse autobiography Summoned By Bells. Now, thanks to A N Wilson's Betjeman (Arrow Books), I can. It's not a pretty sight. Wilson seems surprised that his son Paul Betjeman loathed his father, but is too good a writer to tamper with the evidence, and provides excellent reasons why not only his son, but also his father, wife and mistress ought to have loathed the delightful poet and abominably selfish person that was John Betjeman.
Nicholas Blincoe
Swords and Ploughshares by Paddy Ashdown (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
JPod by Douglas Coupland (Bloomsbury)
Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson (Bloomsbury)
The Ghost by Robert Harris (Hutchinson)
Swords and Ploughshares by Paddy Ashdown (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is gathering fans as Paddy is the sole western-backed post-conflict governor not to have made a bollocks of postwar nation-building. JPod by Douglas Coupland and Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson (both Bloomsbury) are fine books by world-class authors - who are also Booker Prize-eligible.
Which leads one to wonder how a national treasure like the Man Booker Prize became so blah so quickly? Though I guess the first rule of the Booker is that you moan about the Booker. Robert Harris did some plangent Booker-moaning this year: but The Ghost (Hutchinson) is the most fun I've had with a novel in ages.
Billy Bragg
The Restless Generation: How Rock Music Changed the Face of 1950s Britain by Pete Frame (Rogan House)
Crow Country by Mark Cocker (Jonathan Cape)
In The Restless Generation: How Rock Music Changed the Face of 1950s Britain by Pete Frame (Rogan House), at last someone has written a definitive prehistory of British pop, restoring skiffle to its rightful place as the original punk rock. The young lads who learned to play Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly songs on cheap Czechoslovakian guitars went on to create the beat groups, the blues boom, the folk revival and heavy metal.
Crow Country by Mark Cocker (Jonathan Cape) is a story from a place where dusk has meaning, filling the air with 40,000 black birds gathering to roost for the night. Through his encounters with rooks, jackdaws and crows, Cocker explores our relationship with nature and the landscape we share.
Christopher Bray
On Chesil Beach (Jonathan Cape)
Growing Up in a War by Bryan Magee (Pimlico)
The House That George Built by Wilfrid Sheed (Random House)
New Makers of Modern Culture Justin Wintle (Routledge)
The year's best sentences are to be found in On Chesil Beach (Jonathan Cape) - although, like all McEwan's other work, the book doesn't survive rereading. Bryan Magee's Growing Up in a War (Pimlico), the second volume in the television philosopher's (remember them?) account of his London childhood, is another masterclass in lucent prose.
Wilfrid Sheed's The House That George Built (Random House, $29.95) is the blissfully non-musicological companion to Alec Wilder's long-out-of-print American Popular Song. At £225, Justin Wintle's New Makers of Modern Culture (Routledge) is a book that I'll only ever be able to look at in the library - so here's to a boiled-down paperback version of this biographical intro to the great thinkers of the past 200 years for next Christmas!
Michael Bywater
The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo (Rider & Co)
I Wouldn't Start From Here by Andrew Mueller (Picador Australia)
Old World, New World: the Story of Britain and America by Kathleen Burk (Little,Brown)
The Roman Triumph by Mary Beard (Harvard University Press)
Evil times have brought a bumper crop of food for thought this year. In The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (Rider & Co), Philip Zimbardo demonstrates persuasively that our species suffers collectively from borderline personality disorder. The symptoms are marvellously catalogued in Andrew Mueller's I Wouldn't Start From Here (Picador Australia, A$35), an utterly sui generis report from the world's plague-spots.
The history of the "special relationship" between Britain and the United States is complicit in much of our recent troubles, and its history is coherently and elegantly clarified in Kathleen Burk's masterly Old World, New World: the Story of Britain and America (Little, Brown). More ancient parallels are teased out in Mary Beard's The Roman Triumph (Harvard University Press), which shows how ostensible celebrations of military victories were really often deeply ambiguous public rituals.
Amit Chaudhuri
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
Insomnia by Aamer Hussein (Telegram Books)
Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis has been out of print in Britain for a long time; how fortunate, then, that it should not only be available again as a Penguin Modern Classic, but in a marvellous translation by the poet Jamie McKendrick.
Faintly Gatsby-like in its delineation of the romance of luxury and graciousness as experienced by a besotted outsider, darkened by the imminence of 1939 (all the main characters are Jewish), it is nevertheless a paean to life in the way it circles around space and remembered objects.
Two other books, by Pakistani writers in English, who remind us that south Asian anglophone writing can be just as effectively informed by craft as by storytelling: Mohsin Hamid's terrific The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamish Hamilton) and the unique Aamer Hussein's wonder collection of stories Insomnia (Telegram Books).
Rachel Cooke
Between Each Breath by Adam Thorpe (Jonathan Cape)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
Alice in Sunderland by Brian Talbot (Jonathan Cape)
Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan(Jonathan Cape)
In My Father's House (Simon & Schuster) by Miranda Seymour
Some good fiction this year. I loved Adam Thorpe's Between Each Breath (Jonathan Cape), a state-of-the-nation novel disguised as a state-of-Hampstead novel. Clever, beautifully written, moving: why hasn't it won any prizes? Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamish Hamilton) is admirably spare and amazingly exciting, and gets to the heart of matters we might prefer not to think about.
I've also read some great graphic novels, of which the best were Alice in Sunderland (Jonathan Cape) by Bryan Talbot, a whimsical history book that made me proud (or even prouder) to be from the industrial north, and Exit Wounds (Jonathan Cape) by the brilliant young Israeli artist Rutu Modan, which is about the after-effects of a suicide bombing, and is uplifting rather than grim. Best non-fiction would have to be In My Father's House (Simon & Schuster), Miranda Seymour's bizarre, gripping memoir about her gay dad and his obsessive love for a grand house and a biker called Robbie. It's genius!
Jason Cowley
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Picador)
Set in America in the aftermath of an unexplained global catastrophe, Cormac McCarthy's The Road (Picador) is the first great English- language novel of our new century. A father and his young son make their slow way through a burnt and deathly landscape, seeking to find a way to the coast, where they hope to find . . . well, they do not know. There is infinite hope, wrote Kafka, but not for us. In McCarthy's novel there is no hope: the human world is at an end, and most of those still living have regressed into barbarism. And yet the father and son go on, seeking to find meaning and purpose. McCarthy's language is restrained and much sparer than usual, though some of his sentences have a Shakespearean grandeur. The Road is a warning, a lament, and a beautiful love story. I've read nothing finer for many years.
Amanda Craig
Resistance by Owen Sheers (Faber & Faber)
The Scandal of the Season by Sophie Gee(Chatto & Windus)
Incarceron by Catherine Fisher(Hodder Children's)
Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears by Emily Gravett (Macmillan Children's)
I especially enjoyed the poet Owen Sheers's Resistance (Faber & Faber), which imagines the consequences for a small Welsh farming community of women, left behind by their men when the D-Day landings fail and Britain is occupied by Nazis. I also loved Sophie Gee's The Scandal of the Season (Chatto & Windus), imagining how Pope came to write The Rape of the Lock. Clever and exuberantly sexy, with a cast of rakes worthy of any Restoration comedy, it wears its learning lightly enough to be the ideal bedtime read.
For children, my books of the year are Catherine Fisher's Incarceron (Hodder Children's), about people trapped in a living prison the size of a world, and Emily Gravett's Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears (Macmillan Children's). Both are indirectly about resisting the climate of fear and oppression that the last government brought about, but are tackled with a creativity, courage and originality that will make readers of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (Jona than Cape) feel short-changed.
William Dalrymple
Indian Summer by Alex von Tunzelmann's (Simon & Schuster)
Gandhi: a Political and Spiritual life by Kathryn Tidrick (I B Tauris)
The Adventures of Amir Hamza(Random House Modern Library)
A good year for books about India. The book that impressed me most was Alex von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer (Simon & Schuster) - the best book I have read on the independence and partition of India and Pakistan, and pretty close to a flat-out masterpiece. Very different and almost as good was Kathryn Tidrick's iconoclastic Gandhi: a Political and Spiritual life (I B Tauris), in which she locates the roots of the Mahatma's thought in the lunatic spiritualist fringe of late-Victorian England.
I was also bowled over by a remarkable new translation of The Adventures of Amir Hamza (Random House Modern Library), the Iliad and Odyssey of the medieval Persian world: a rollicking, magic-filled heroic saga, full of myth and imagination. It is the first time it has been translated into English and it is as close as is now possible to the world of the Mughal campfire - those night gatherings of soldiers, Sufis, musicians and camp followers one sees in Mughal miniatures - a storyteller beginning his tale in the clearing of a forest as the embers of the blaze glow red and eager, firelit faces crowd around.
Helena Drysdale
Family Romance by John Lanchester (Faber & Faber)
The Islamist by Ed Hussein (Penguin)
Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know by Ranulph Feinnes (Hodder & Stoughton)
There have been a number of good memoirs this year - not of the misery variety, but books such as John Lanchester's Family Romance (Faber & Faber). This intriguing delve into his parents' past works not only as a detective story, but also as an intimate examination of a family stymied by secrets. I was also impressed by Ed Husain's exposé of his own radical past in The Islamist (Penguin), which not only provides a window on to extremism, but is also beautifully written.
Ranulph Fiennes's autobiography Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (Hodder & Stoughton) concerns extremism of another kind. It's exhausting just reading about his exploits, so it is a perfect bedtime book. It's delightful to plump up one's duck-down pillows while vicariously enduring Fiennes's successive plunges into the deadly waters of the Arctic, and his festering crotch-rot.
Samir el-Youssef
Touchstones by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber & Faber)
Exit Ghost by Philip Roth (Jonathan Cape)
Touchstones by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber & Faber) is a collection of some of the best essays and journalism the Peruvian novelist has penned in the past two decades. Here, he passionately and freshly makes the case that literature matters, that cultured and cultural knowledge is the best means of understanding and confronting the dark side of human society and politics. The ever-illusive relationship between art and life is also the concern of Exit Ghost (Jonathan Cape), the excellent latest novel by Philip Roth.
Recalling The Ghost Writer, an early novel featuring one of Roth's major fictitious characters, Nathan Zuckerman, Roth sees his now ill and old protagonist into post-9/11 America, giving him the last chance to take yet another stab at sexual desire, art and politics. But nothing can beat the crazily heartbreaking statement with which one character greets the result of the 2004 US elections: "I'm going to go out and get an abortion. I don't care if I'm pregnant or not. Get an abortion while you can!"
Esther Freud
The Solitude of Thomas Cave by Georgina Harding (Bloomsbury)
The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani (Headline Review)
I really loved a first novel by Georgina Harding, The Solitude of Thomas Cave (Bloomsbury). It is the spellbinding story of a man who makes a wager that he can last from one whaling season to the next on the uninhabited shores of 17th-century Greenland. No one expects to see him alive again, and by the end of that long winter when the ship returns for him, Harding has ensured we care passionately whether or not he has survived. My other favourite novel this year is also set in the 17th century, but in Iran, in the ancient city of Isfahan. The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani (Headline Review) is the brilliant tale of a young girl, a poor carpet weaver, thrown to the mercy of rich relatives when her father dies. It is utterly fascinating.
Sophie Gee
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (Harvill Secker)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Faber & Faber)
Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes (Michael Joseph)
The best book I read in 2007 was Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (Harvill Secker). It is a wonderful depiction of northern Europe during the Resistance and its aftermath. The other great new novel I read this year was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Faber & Faber), a multigenerational saga about a family from the Dominican Republic, which, exiled by a despotic dictatorship, ends up living in Paterson, New Jersey. Díaz is funny about everything: abuse, torture, maltreatment, obesity, depression, poverty, heartbreak, self-loathing, cruelty, injustice, despair.
I found a new diversion in 2007, Marian Keyes. I started with Rachel's Holiday (Michael Joseph), bought on a whim in Brussels airport. I loved it. It's much sharper and more penetrating than normal chick lit, and funny, too: Nick Hornby for women. (And so is Nick Hornby, as a male friend of mine says, courtesy of Oscar Wilde.)
Jo Glanville
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
One Soldier's War in Chechnya by Arkady Babchenko (Portobello Books)
The Man Who Went Into the West by Byron Rogers (Aurum)
Leaving Beirut by Mai Ghoussoub (Saqi Books)
I greatly enjoyed Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamish Hamilton). This is an elegant, artful, haunting novella - a deceptively simple narrative that is in fact deeply ambiguous. Arkady Babchenko's One Soldier's War in Chechnya (Portobello Books) is a devastating testimony from an extremely talented young writer. One wonders throughout how he survived. It's an account that occupies the same terrain as Holocaust literature, taking you to a place of extreme inhumanity.
Byron Rogers's biography of R S Thomas, The Man Who Went Into the West (Aurum), probably doesn't need any more acclaim. I read it when it came out in paperback this year - one of the most glorious and original biographies ever written. Saqi Books republished Mai Ghoussoub's memoir Leaving Beirut (Aurum), > after her tragic, premature death in February. It deserves the status of a classic - her profound meditations on the Lebanese civil war are strikingly even more relevant today than when the book was first published.
Misha Glenny
Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't Seem to Care) by William Marsden (Knopf Canada)
Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China by Duncan Hewitt (Chatto & Windus)
China Shakes the World: the Rise of a Hungry Nation by James Kynge (Phoenix)
If you are not panicked enough already about global warming and our dependency on fossil fuels, read William Marsden's Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't Seem to Care) (Knopf Canada, US$23.95). Forget the waffly title: this is a gripping and horrifying account of how the province of Alberta and the US are ripping up tens of thousands of square kilometres of vital natural habitat to extract bitumen from the "oil sands" in one of the most murderously polluting processes available to human beings.
Otherwise, the two best-written introductions to what on earth is going on in the Middle Kingdom are James Kynge's China Shakes the World: the Rise of a Hungry Nation (Phoenix) and Duncan Hewitt's Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China (Chatto & Windus).
John Gray
Thatcher and Sons: a Revolution in Three Acts by Simon Jenkins (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press)
The Triumph of the Political Class by Peter Oborne (Simon & Schuster)
Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War by Patrick Wright (Oxford University Press)
These days it's not easy to write anything of deep or lasting interest about British politics, but two books stand out as having pulled off this feat with style and verve. Simon Jenkins's Thatcher and Sons: a Revolution in Three Acts (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press) is an illuminating account of how both main parties have come to be wedded to an ideology of modernisation inherited from the 1980s. Peter Oborne's The Triumph of the Political Class (Simon & Schuster) brilliantly analyses the emergence of the all-party British nomenklatura that has formed around that ideology, and shows how it serves the interests of this new political class.
Another book I enjoyed was Patrick Wright's Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War (Oxford University Press). Ranging from the bungling anti-Bolshevik intervention mounted by the Allies during the Russian civil war to the witless western progressives who travelled in the 1930s to a starving country and came back singing of an earthly paradise, and going right up to the close of the Cold War, it is the story of a metaphor that literally began on the stage and ended in a political theatre of the absurd.
Lynsey Hanley
Look We Have Coming To Dover! by Daljit Nagra (Faber & Faber)
Mrs Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light (Fig Tree)
Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich (Granta Books)
City Survivors by Prof. Anne Power (Policy Press)
My favourite books of 2007 all concern the fact of human beings' interdependence, and the sad, exhausting consequences of pretending that we don't need each other to survive: the poet Daljit Nagra's exhilarating Look We Have Coming To Dover! (Faber & Faber); Alison Light's history of domestic service, Mrs Woolf and the Servants (Fig Tree); Barbara Ehrenreich's study of collective celebration, Dancing in the Streets (Granta Books); and City Strangers (Policy Press); Professor Anne Power's study of urban families. All these books seem dedicated to reminding us what "a good life" really means.
Hari Kunzru
Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (Bloomsbury)
Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell (Sceptre)
Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City (Bloomsbury) confirmed all my worst fears about the lunacy in Iraq. In fiction, I have spent much of the year (as always) studiously not reading the latest "big books". Instead, I enjoyed Serve the People! by Yan Lianke (Constable), a book banned in China because of its subject matter: a pair of illicit lovers during the Cultural Revolution deliberately desecrate various icons of communism.
Another good novel was Winter's Bone (Sceptre) by Daniel Woodrell, whose brand of rural Gothic is extremely scary. This is set in a backwoods community in the Ozarks where everyone is cooking up meths in the trailer and strangers approach at their peril.
Robert Macfarlane
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon (Fourth Estate)
Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union (Fourth Estate) is a fantastical tumble of a novel: a counterfactual gumshoe thriller set in the Jewish homeland of, er, Alaska. Noir with kvetching, or Raymond Chandler rewritten by Woody Allen. That may sound irritating; it is anything but.
Hilary Mantel
Being Shelley: the Poet's Search for Himself by Anne Wroe (Jonathan Cape)
Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan (Faber & Faber)
Shelley biography has been served well in recent years by Richard Holmes and Paul Foot; not better, but different, is Ann Wroe's Being Shelley: the Poet's Search for Himself (Jonathan Cape). Wroe is a writer of imaginative non-fiction who has a historian's respect for primary resources and a poet's style and inventiveness. She has set out to explore Shelley's inner experience, always grounding her speculation in his texts, and in doing so allows acute insight into the process of writing itself. It shows up most literary biography as trivial and stale.
It's almost impossible to write a perfect novel, however short and contained, but a note-perfect short story is something a very few people can produce. The Irish writer Claire Keegan does it in her second collection of stories, Walk the Blue Fields (Faber & Faber). Immaculate structure, a lovely, easy flow of language, and a certain stony-eyed realism about human experience; she is very much part of an Irish tradition, but a unique craftswoman for all that.
David Marquand
Postwar by Tony Judt (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press)
Alexis de Tocqueville by Hugh Brogan (Profile Books)
The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury)
For me 2007 has been the year of the historians. Top of my list is Tony Judt's Postwar (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press) - a masterly work of history in a classic style, telling the astonishing, paradox-laden history of Europe since the end of the Second World War. Judt shows that the Holocaust was the defining event in 20th-century European history.
Though he doesn't say this - or at any rate doesn't dwell on it - it helps to explain Britain's strange, contorted attitude to the rest of the continent. In different ways and to different degrees, most Continental countries have come to terms with their roles in this unspeakable evil. But we weren't involved in the Holocaust (or rather, were not aware of being involved), because we weren't occupied. It reinforced the myth of British exceptionalism and British superiority to our fellow Europeans. And on a deeper, more basic level, it created a chasm of incomprehension between us and the mainland.
I have also been moved, excited and impressed by Hugh Brogan's magnificent biography Alexis de Tocqueville (Profile Books), of the greatest analyst of democracy there has ever been. Until now, de Tocqueville was, for me, a kind of talking head - or perhaps writing head. Thanks to Brogan he is now a real, breathing human being - a genius still, but often dangerously wrong.
Last in my list is William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal (Bloomsbury), a really shocking history of what I was taught to call the Indian Mutiny. Dalrymple has killed off any lingering idea that British imperialism was benign and Whiggish - a thought that ought to become central in the debate on British values that Gordon Brown wants to inaugurate.
Jonathan Meades
Villages of Vision: a Study of Strange Utopias by Gillian Darley (Five Leaves)
Londonistan by Melanie Phillips (Gibson Square; revised version)
Soviet Deportations in Estonia, edited by Kristi Kukk and Toivo Raun (Tartu University Press)
Villages of Vision: a Study of Strange Utopias by Gillian Darley (Five Leaves) is one of the greatest architectural books ever written. Darley is as passionate as Nairn, as elegant as Summerson, as clued up as Pevsner.
Melanie Phillips's Londonistan (Gibson Square; revised version) is 10 per cent an ill-written rant along with 90 per cent ill-written sanity about how the right-on-ness of the 1970s has become Establishment thought and has permitted a violent, fascistic, nazislamist, alien cult to threaten Britain from within.
Soviet Deportations in Estonia, edited by Kristi Kukk and Toivo Raun (Tartu University Press), presents precise, heartbreaking case histories, told in the first person. They make one wonder once again why fellow-travellers of the left should be excused when fellow-travellers of the right are not.
James Meek
Light Years by James Salter(Penguin)
A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter (Picador)
Disgrace by J M Coetzee (Vintage)
Waiting for the Barbarians by J M Coetzee (Vintage)
There's great virtue in reading multiple books by the same writer in rapid succession. You perceive the faint shape of the metanovel, the writer's abiding preoccupations. In the past year I read two wonderful James Salter novels, Light Years (Penguin) and the subtly anti-Hemingway A Sport and a Pastime (Picador). Light Years, the lyrical, fragmentary evocation of the glory days, waning and end of a marriage, is the better of the two, and notable for the way the heroine is utterly constant to her present self even as she betrays her past self.
Reading J M Coetzee's humblingly true masterwork Disgrace (Vintage), I fell into the trap of assuming some age-specific, autobiographical influence on the way the hero tries to replace failing virility with power. Soon after, I read his Waiting for the Barbarians (Vintage), written 19 years earlier, and saw that the theme had abided with him for at least a generation.
Shazia Mirza
The Observations by Jane Harris (Faber & Faber)
Always Go to Bed on an Argument by Deborah Ross (Profile Books)
The Observations by Jane Harris (Faber & Faber) is very funny, highly original, and set in Scotland in 1863. Bessy Buckley is a young Irish maid who takes a job in a big country house. She has a mysterious past and an intriguing voice. Arabella, her mistress, has her own secrets. They are great female characters and although the novel is scary in parts, I managed to laugh through the dark bits.
Deborah Ross's Always Go to Bed on an Argument (Profile Books), subtitled And Other Useful Advice From the Non-Domestic Goddess, is for people with low standards or none and for slobs and slackers - in other words, for most of us. It has six chapters and deals with the mundane, ranging from the house and home to holidays, fashion and the male.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud (Picador)
Absolute War byChris Bellamy (Macmillan)
Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press)
The Kremlin's Scholar by Dmitrii Shepilov (Yale University Press)
The Mughal Emperors by Francis Robinson(Thames & Hudson)
The Perilous Crown by Munro Price (Macmillan)
In fiction, I'm loving Claire Messud's superbly vivid, touchingly funny novel of media Manhattanites, The Emperor's Children (Picador). It was a year of wonderful history: Chris Bellamy's Absolute War (Macmillan) on the Nazi-Soviet conflict is outstanding - magisterial and often witty in tone. Tim Weiner's CIA history Legacy of Ashes (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press) combines thrilling storytelling with terrifying revelations.
The Kremlin's Scholar by Dmitrii Shepilov (Yale University Press) is the most fascinatingly intimate memoir of Stalin since Khrushchev Remembers. Francis Robinson's The Mughal Emperors (Thames & Hudson) on Tamerlane and his Timurid central Asian and later Indian dynasty is scholarly yet compelling - the best book I have read on the Mughals. Last, The Perilous Crown (Macmillan), Munro Price's biography of Louis-Philippe of France and his sister Adélaïde, is deliciously readable, original in scholarship and sophisticated in style.
Tom Paulin
Letters of Ted Hughes by Christopher Reid (Faber & Faber)
One of the big books this season is Letters of Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber), selected and edited by Christopher Reid. The letters are driven and urgent, with moments that are like poems - the discovery of a weeping hedgehog, the behaviour of bears, a bullfight - and there are moving love letters to Sylvia Plath, as well as severe letters about and to those critics who analysed their relationship. Reid's editing is deft and meticulous.
Steven Poole
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (Picador)
Falling Man by Don DeLillo (Picador)
Diary of a Bad Year by J M Coetzee (Harvill Secker)
Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (Picador) was an epic of drenched sensuality and absurdly chewable dialogue, as though Don DeLillo and Joseph Heller had collaborated on a Vietnam war novel. DeLillo's own Falling Man (Picador), the first 9/11 novel that will endure, crafted a dialogue between shattering thunder and shattered silence.
J M Coetzee's mesmerising Diary of a Bad Year (Harvill Secker) was considered by some not to be a novel at all, as though there existed some bureaucratic checklist of novelistic virtues that Coetzee failed to satisfy; its drama consisted in the author's characteristic ice being implacably heated to melting point.
This was also the happy year in which I discovered Lee Child, the British author of US-set thrillers with shiny covers that can be found at airports. His technical command of sentence rhythm and paragraph structure puts an alarming number of his literary compatriots to shame.
Sukhdev Sandhu
A Postcard to Nina by Jens Lekman (Secretly Canadian Records)
Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon (New York Review of Books Classics)
No story I have read this year, or indeed the past decade, can compare to that told in the album A Postcard to Nina by Jens Lekman (Secretly Canadian Records). It's a truly wonderful tale, delivered in a style akin to Jonathan Richman playing with Al Green's backing band, about the time he visited a pen-pal friend in Berlin. Nina's family, with whom he's about to eat dinner, doesn't know she's a lesbian; in fact, she's told them that Jens is her boyfriend. The evening's drama is recounted with wit and detail enough to make you laugh aloud, tenderness and love to make you shed tears. It also features the best use of the phrase "out-of-office auto reply" to have appeared in any art form to date.
My other great delight has been Luc Sante's translation of Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon (New York Review of Books Classics), a collection of over a thousand anonymous items by the French anarchist - deliciously tart and brilliantly compacted micro-vignettes of daily life in all its ironies, passions and dark mysteries.
Ziauddin Sardar
On Suicide Bombing by Talal Asad (Columbia University Press)
The End of Tolerance by Arun Kundnani (Pluto)
Who Cares About Britishness? by Vron Ware (Arcadia)
Talal Asad's On Suicide Bombing (Columbia University Press, $19.95) is a work of pure genius. Asad argues that liberal thought may separate the idea of politics from the idea of violence, but mortal violence is integral to liberalism. He contrasts the liberal notion of violence with how suicide bombers justify their actions. It is essential reading for all mindless neoconservatives.
In The End of Tolerance (Pluto), Arun Kundnani provides a detailed and well-researched account of the rise of anti-Muslim racism in Britain. Kundnani's chilling conclusion is that racism has become integral to British political discourse, with routine demonisation of refugees, immigrants and Muslims. Looking beyond Britain, Vron Ware travels around the globe to discover how the debate on Britishness looks from the outside. Who Cares About Britishness? (Arcadia) brilliantly explores issues of identity and belonging in a world where change is the only constant and single identity is as rare as the lamented dodo.
Alexei Sayle
Santaland Diaries by David Sedaris (Abacus)
Lost Oasis by Robert Twigger (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
I don't seem to be able to remember much I've read this year but David Sedaris's Santaland Diaries (Abacus) have stayed with me. I think this might be a Christmas-themed rehash of previous stuff, but the first story about his time as a Macy's elf nearly made me choke with laughter. I have followed Robert Twigger's life through his books, mostly because I'm terribly grateful that it isn't my life. I'm halfway through his latest, Lost Oasis (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), so I don't yet know why he ends up pulling something that looks like a kid's toy trolley across the Sahara, but his portrait of modern Cairo is truthful and unsettling.
Jeff Sharlet
God's Harvard: a Christian College on a Mission to Save America by Hanna Rosin (Harcourt)
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong by Russ Kick (Disinformation Company)
Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (Bloomsbury)
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Iraq (Alpha Books)
The books published this year that I've been most glad for are small, interior, and closely observed. Hanna Rosin's God's Harvard: a Christian College on a Mission to Save America (Harcourt, $25), a narrative non-fictional account of life and study at Patrick Henry College - a new school created to channel Christian fundamentalists into Washington, DC - follows the trivial concerns of ordinary believers to their strange and even touching conclusions.
Russ Kick's bizarre anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong (Disinformation Company) gathers essays on and excerpts from the magnificent unbelief of Irving Berlin, Mark Twain, H G Wells, and a host of other brilliant doubters and God-defiers. Less inspiring, if more nihilistic, is Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City (Bloomsbury). This depressing portrait of American hubris in Iraq - such as that of the senior Green Zone administrators who can't be bothered to read so weighty a tome as The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Iraq (Alpha Books) - is bearable only because it's so absurd, a collection of even more awful miniatures of the war that brings to mind the old Borscht Belt mantra: It's funny because it's sad, sad because it's funny. God help us.
Indra Sinha
Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
A General History of the Pyrates by Daniel Defoe
The Odyssey: a Modern Sequel by Nikos Kazantzakis
It must be hell to be a character in a Nicola Barker novel. Never a moment's peace. In Darkmans (Fourth Estate), Barker layers image on image, piles phrase on phrase, builds up portraits seen from every possible angle. A character is "like an ancient yogi", "a Pacific pearl diver", "the still before the storm", "a suspended wave . . . the vengeful tsunami of history". There is no need for this verbal cubism, as she has the skill to catch and fix a character in a couple of deft lines. The point is the sheer joy of the telling. The characters' back histories are fascinating and teach us the quirks of plumbing in Baden-Württemberg and the politics of Diyarbakir.
Sitting by a Lotois lake, I passed a pleasant afternoon with A General History of the Pyrates by my old friend Daniel Defoe, and was inspired to revisit Roxana and Moll Flanders. A little-known work of Nikos Kazantzakis is his passionate, angry The Odyssey: a Modern Sequel, which takes up the tale where Homer left off. H G Wells is remembered for his science fiction: Tono-Bungay is also a fine novel of his about the rise and fall of a marketing genius. Intimations of the worthlessness to come, half a century before McDonald's.
Bee Wilson
The Letters of Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber)
A Curious Earth (Chatto & Windus) by Gerard Woodward
Persia in Peckham (Prospect) by Sally Butcher
The Letters of Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber) is, for Plath-Hughes obsessives, the final piece of the jigsaw - though it doesn't make the overall picture of their relationship and poetry any less enigmatic. This is the essential companion to both Hughes's Birthday Letters and Plath's Letters Home. Hughes turns out to be a terrific letter writer - pithy, sometimes wild, often wise.
My favourite novel of the year was A Curious Earth (Chatto & Windus) by Gerard Woodward. It's a mystery that the Booker judges overlooked this haunting and funny novel about art and love, the last in Woodward's autobiographical trilogy. Finally, Persia in Peckham (Prospect) by Sally Butcher is a celebration of a shop - Persepolis, a Persian emporium in south-east London, which Butcher runs with her husband - but also a love letter to Iranian food. The recipes, reminiscent of Claudia Roden, are easy and glorious.
Michela Wrong
Poisoned Wells by Nicholas Shaxson (Palgrave Macmillan)
Brazzaville Charms by Cassie Knight (Frances Lincoln)
The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier (Oxford University Press)
I believe in painless self-education, so it's satisfying to log a number of highly readable non-fiction books about Africa. Two that caught my attention this year were Poisoned Wells by Nicholas Shaxson (Palgrave Macmillan) and Brazzaville Charms by Cassie Knight (Frances Lincoln). The first is a lively exploration of Africa's oil industry, set to grow in global importance as other petroleum sources dry up. Knight's book tells the story of a country most people don't even know exists: the Congo that wasn't led by Mobutu and didn't feature in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. But Congo-Brazzaville is just as weird and wacky place as its bigger brother and Knight has penned an affectionate account of a state which encapsulates many of Africa's problems.
Finally, Paul Collier's bracing The Bottom Billion (Oxford University Press) is a must-read for anyone who has tired of the emotionalism of the Geldof-Bono aid brigade or who suspects that the simplistic mantra of "More, more, more", chanted by the likes of Jeffrey Sachs, cannot be an adequate response to world poverty.
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