Books of the decade: Your best books of 2009

Wolf Hall made an impact commensurate with its vast size, but what were your highlights of the last year of the Noughties?
Hilary Mantel and detail from portrait of Thomas Cromwell after Hans Holbein the Younger
Hilary Mantel, and detail from portrait of Thomas Cromwell after Hans Holbein the Younger. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/Corbis

Our usual exhortation in these books of the decade blogposts that you jog your memory by going to our special reports or the Wikipedia page for lists of books of the year should be unnecessary this time. Yes, we've finally reached the present – 2009 – and even if your memory is so bad that the past few months are but a haze, the current proliferation of year roundups in the supplements should do the trick.
 
Rather than follow in those footsteps when you can read Justine Jordan on fiction, Sarah Crown on poetry or any number of log-rolling novelists, here's a quick roundup of the top fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children's reads, then over to you for your favourites of 2009.
 
In fiction, Wolf Hall was the biggie of the year, in every sense. After almost universal adulation from critics, Hilary Mantel's 650-pager was favourite for the Booker from the off, and brought off the rare feat for a favourite of actually carrying off the prize. It could yet "do the double" and win the Costa. Some big names delivered the goods this year – Coetzee with Summertime, Tóibín with Brooklyn and Atwood with The Year of the Flood – and short stories did well, with Petina Gappah taking the Guardian first book award. Sarah Waters's ghostly Little Stranger was a winner for me (though not as much as The Night Watch) while Audrey Niffenegger's eagerly awaited follow-up to The Time-Traveller's Wife, the ghostly Her Fearful Symmetry was a disappointment – curiously gripping for about three-quarters considering nothing much happens to the vaguely ludicrous characters, then gripping in the last quarter only because one wants to see if she can rescue the frankly ridiculous plot developments she suddenly introduces towards the end (she can't). Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows and David Vann's Legend of a Suicide were both mesmerisingly good.
 
Non-fiction highlights were Chris Mullin's excellent political dairies, View from the Foothills, and the continuation of David Kynaston's fascinating social history, this time taking us through the 1950s with Family Britain. 2009 was arguably not a particularly strong year for biography but it did see John Carey's William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies kick up a minor storm with revelations about the novelist's teenage years.
 
In poetry, Don Paterson's Rain was the standout volume while there were excellent offerings from Alice Oswald, Ruth Padel, Hugo Williams and Christopher Reid.
 
Children's fiction had a good year. The second part of Patrick Ness's trilogy, which he began with the award-winning The Knife of Never Letting Go, continued strongly with The Ask and The Answer. Margo Lanagan's caused a stir with her marvellous and controversial (you have to love a book the Daily Mail describes as "sordid wretchedness") Tender Morsels. I also loved Charlie Higson's The Enemy, a zombie thriller with a refreshingly positive take on teenagers.
 
And then there was Dan Brown and Twilight
 

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Guardian books readers chew over the best reads of the noughties

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