Hold your own at any Christmas dinner party with our guide to the best and worst of this year's books.
Novel of the year
In a year sadly short on humorous novels - unless you count the 2007 Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing's bizarre gender allegory The Cleft (Fourth Estate) - Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan (Granta Books) provided welcome, if double-edged, laughs. The novel traces the wanderings-in-exile of the 350-pound "sophisticate and melancholic" Misha Vainberg, aka "Snack Daddy". The US-educated son of a Russian oligarch, Misha is desperate to return to New York but finds himself diverted to Absurdistan, a dysfunctional Caucasian state in the grip of an oil-fuelled civil war.
A fast-talking satire of globalisation, junk food, corruption, rapacious multinationals and gangster rap (Misha keeps his spirits up with his favourite urban ballad, Humungous G's "I'm Bustin' My Nut Tonight"), Absurdistan was one of the funniest, and saddest, books of the year.
What the critics said:
"You'll feel fondled by the time you finish but you'll also feel well-fed."
(Patrick Ness, Guardian)
What you should think:
The Snack Daddy of 2007's literary fiction.
Outing of the year
J K Rowling's announcement, at a Carnegie Hall reading in October, that the kindly Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore was gay sparked a media panic. How would parents explain to junior Potter fans? And had she finally alienated Christian readers already troubled by Harry's dabbling in the "black arts"?
But to some it came as little surprise. Bloggers were quick to point out Dumbledore's fondness for "sweeping purple robes", and that "Albus Dumbledore", sinisterly, is a perfect anagram of "Male bods rule, bud". Others suggested that it might in fact be Harry, not his headmaster, who is gay. "After all, before he learns of his true identity, Harry is forced to live in a closet in the Dursleys' house," the Telegraph helpfully observed.
What the critics said:
"America can't get enough of gay Dumbledore."
(Ross von Metzke, Pink News)
What you should think:
A storm in a goblet.
Handbags of the year
The NS columnist John Sutherland had a hand in stoking one of the more highbrow playground disputes of the year. A new edition of the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton's Ideology: an Introduction (Verso) went largely unnoticed until Sutherland pointed out in a blog for the Guardian that Eagleton's new preface to the book contained a stinging attack on Martin Amis. Incensed by the novelist's pronouncements on Islam and terrorism, Eagleton accused him of espousing views more commonly held by a "British National Party thug".
The story was given added spice by the two now being colleagues at Manchester University. Though Amis initially maintained a dignified silence, he eventually dragged himself away from writing sycophantic profiles of Tony Blair to send a stern missive to the Guardian's letters page.
What the critics said:
"[Kingsley Amis was] a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals . . . Amis fils has clearly learned more from him than how to turn a shapely phrase."
(Terry Eagleton)
"Terry Eagleton inhabits a parallel universe of groaning and blundering factoids . . . can I ask him, in a collegial spirit, to shut up about it?"
(Martin Amis)
What you should think:
Eagleton had a point. But does anybody take Martin Amis seriously enough, these days, to care?
Cash-ins of the year
In a year when the popularity - and sales - of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (Black Swan) showed no sign of abating, imitators were quick to join the divine fray. The biggest splash was caused by Christopher Hitchens, whose anti-religious offering was titled, with characteristic restraint, God Is Not Great (Atlantic Books). Following his sell-out speaking tour of the United States, UK readers were subjected to Hitchens and Ian McEwan congratulating each other on their clear-sighted atheism on stage. Believers showed little more restraint, however.
John Cornwell's wittily written Darwin's Angel (Profile Books) was followed by a host of more spurious titles: Andrew Wilson's Deluded By Dawkins? (Kingsway), David Robertson's The Dawkins Letters (Christian Focus) and Alister McGrath's The Dawkins Delusion? (SPCK).
What the critics said:
"A splendid, boisterously virile broadside of a book."
(Richard Dawkins on Hitchens, TLS)
What you should think:
The Lord provides.
Genre-bend of the year
Today's young people are far too busy updating their Facebook profiles to have time for literature. Some writers see this as a marketing opportunity: in March the former advertising exec Ziv Navoth claimed to have revolutionised the form by inventing the "nanotale", an ultra-short story that it takes just 30 minutes to write.
It was an inspired move, let down only by his stories not being any good. More promisingly, however, collections such as Missing Kissinger (Chatto & Windus), by the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, and Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You (Canongate) showed evidence that a new generation of writers was willing to experiment with the form.
What the critics said:
"High drama, skilled and emotionally wrenching."
(Todd McEwen on Keret, Guardian)
"The only emotion a nanotale is likely to provoke is a sense of rancour that there go seven minutes of your life you'll never get back." (Daniel Trilling on Navoth, New Statesman)
What you should think:
Short: good.
Cause of the year
In 2007, Africa was the cause célèbre of Vanity Fair, Live 8 and Angelina. Thanks to Starbucks - that notoriously anti-union coffee shop, infamous for bullying Ethiopian farmers - it was possible to curl up with a frothy cappuccino and A Long Way Gone (Fourth Estate), the first title of the company's new book club and a chilling first-person memoir by the former child-soldier Ishmael Beah. Painful stories of drugged-up child warriors, also from Biyi Bandele's Burma Boy (Jonathan Cape) and Dave Eggers's experimental fictional biography of Valentino Achak Deng, What Is the What (Hamish Hamilton), became surprise bestsellers. Written mostly from the relative safety of homes in America, they were must-reads for the worldly and compassionate consumer.
What the critics said:
"The most moving and remarkable story that I think I've ever seen."
(John Stewart on Beah, The Daily Show)
What you should think:
These stories must be told, but possibly not by Starbucks.
Prolific author of the year
When Gordon Brown isn't busy taking swift and decisive action, he likes nothing better than to slip into a baggy woollen jumper with patches at the elbows and play at being a writer. Finishing three books - Courage (Bloomsbury), Britain's Everyday Heroes (Mainstream) and the forthcoming Wartime Courage (Bloomsbury) - is an impressive feat for a man who became Prime Minister in June. So how did he find the time to write them?
The answer, in the case of Britain's Everyday Heroes, at least, is that he didn't. Most of the 33 interviews with hard-working members of the public were carried out and written up by researchers from the charity Community Links. Though Brown did find time to write the introduction and the conclusion, bless him.
What the critics said:
"To publicly identify your heroes is akin to appearing on Desert Island Discs - you either bare your soul or try to project a carefully constructed image." (Clive Stafford Smith on Courage, New Statesman)
"This book is about people in all parts of Britain who have given me a fresh insight into the needs and aspirations of our country." (Brown on Britain's Everyday Heroes)
What you should think:
Next year, expect a confessional volume about the election that never was, entitled If I Did It.
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