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Tuesday 23 September 2014

Christmas 2012 books of the year

After an unforgettable year for books, novelists, historians and critics select their personal favourites – and suggest Christmas gifts for all appetites.

Photo: Paul Jackson

Antony Beevor

I much admired Sebastian Faulks’s A Possible Life (Hutchinson, £18.99). Faulks is almost always trying something new in his novels, and you never quite know what to expect, even when you think you are in familiar territory. I also enjoyed Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton (Jonathan Cape, £25) much more than I expected. Perhaps the most beautifully written book this year was Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (Hamish Hamilton, £20) a fascinating meditation inspired by walking.

Miranda Hart

The first summer holiday read is always crucial and this year it was The Thread by Victoria Hislop. I read The Island a few years ago and loved it. I can still picture the detailed Greek villages she conjured up and I was immediately hooked by The Thread. My fellow Strictly lover Marian Keyes will come with me on my post-Christmas holiday. Well her book, not her. Although that could be fun.

Sebastian Faulks

I enjoyed Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad Doctors of Victorian England by Sarah Wise (Bodley Head, £20). These are case studies of contested lunacy, in which people could be locked up in private asylums on the say-so of two doctors. It is not the whole story of Victorian psychiatry, with its great philanthropic aims and its wretched practical failures, but it is an illuminating look at an area of social history that inspired Wilkie Collins among others.

Amanda Foreman

My book of the year is Anne Applebaum’s The Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe (Allen Lane, £25). This is a comprehensive and compelling account of how millions of people across Europe went from being defeated by the Nazi occupation to enthusiastically accepting the straitjacket of Soviet-style communism. Applebaum writes that the purpose behind her research was to gain “an understanding of totalitarianism in practice”. Though she is writing about events that happened 70 years ago, there is an implicit message in her book, a warning that the West cannot afford to ignore as new forms of totalitarianism sweep across the globe.

Robert Macfarlane

I was astonished this year by M John Harrison’s Empty Space (Gollancz, £12.99), the concluding novel in the trilogy begun so dazzlingly a decade ago by Light. Harrison is best known as one of the restless fathers of late-modern sci-fi, but genre questions are a distraction in the face of writing of such consistent brilliance and originality. In complete contrast was Artemis Cooper’s biography Patrick Leigh Fermor: an Adventure (John Murray, £25), of the man whose life I think I would most have wished to live. Cooper’s book is a triumph of tact and sympathy — averse to mythmaking but alert to the magic of her subject.

Philip Hensher

Best English novel of the year? Zadie Smith’s angry, committed, richly humane NW (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99). The best American novel was Michael Chabon’s gorgeous and hilarious Telegraph Avenue (Fourth Estate, £18.99), a beautiful period piece from the lost past, five years ago. And the best biography was Jane Ridley’s Bertie: a Life of Edward VII (Chatto, £30) – surprisingly, a vast amount of new information, some of it truly eye-opening, surfaced in this beautifully prepared and serious book.

Kate Summerscale

Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Portobello Books, £14.99) charts the events surrounding the death of a woman in a Mumbai slum. The narrative is so immediate and absorbing that I had to stop and turn to the notes at the back to check that it really was a documentary account. It is – the author spent almost four years interviewing the slum-dwellers of Annawadi, and consulting more than 3,000 public records, to produce this passionate work of reportage. Emily Perkins’s novel The Forrests (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is less obviously dramatic but it, too, is exhilarating to read: intensely attentive, funny, lyrical and moving.

Richard Davenport- Hines

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan is a marvel of erudition and urbanity in The London Square: Gardens in the Midst of Town (Yale, £30). With beautiful, lavish illustrations, he traces the history and celebrates the diversity of the squares that have made London so distinctively spacious a capital. This is a witty, passionate book in praise of aristocratic patronage, middle-class initiative and city living. It is a joy for those who love flowers, fountains and arbours, but is gloriously rude about gated communities, those soulless bolt-holes for the most insecure of the nouveau riches.

Allison Pearson

For dads and boys of all ages, I’d give Giants of Steam (Atlantic, £20) by Jonathan Glancey. For grandparents, aunts and lovers of Ealing Comedy, Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School (Slightly Foxed, £10) by Ysenda Maxtone Graham. For your best girlfriend, Seating Arrangements (Blue Door, £12.99) by novelist Maggie Shipstead, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize. For teenagers, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Simon & Schuster, £7.99). We lost a great poet this year, Wislawa Szymborska. Marvel at her Poems (Roundhouse, £14.99). Another poet has been marshalling his dazzling forces against the dying of the light. Nefertiti in the Flak Tower (Picador, £14.99) by Clive James: for anyone with a heartbeat.

Peter Florence

Cressida Cowell's How To Seize A Dragon's Jewel is the tenth and penultimate book in her Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III series for 7+ readers, and positions her creation as the most inventive, entertaining and demanding contemporary children's epic. I expect she's going to end up on the Beowulf/Dark Materials side of the happy ending, and she sits well in that company. And Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies cements her version as our national myth and does for the Tudors what Shakespeare did for the Plantagenets.

Juliet Nicolson

I was hugely entertained by Bertie: a Life of Edward VII (Chatto, £30), Jane Ridley’s wonderful biography of the girl-crazy prince who set the pace for Edwardian aristocratic high jinks yet became, after nearly six decades in waiting, not a bad king. The Letters of T S Eliot Volume 3: 1926-1927 (Faber, £40) moved me deeply. This last selection under the impressive joint editorship of John Haffenden with Eliot’s second wife Valerie includes the unfolding tragedy of Eliot’s first marriage. And on no account miss the scripts of Tom Stoppard’s dazzling TV dramatisation of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (Faber, £20).

Roger Scruton

One book came my way this year that made me sit up – indeed sometimes stand up and walk around in fury. This was Iron Curtain (Allen Lane, £25) by Anne Applebaum, which tells the story of the communist takeover of Eastern Europe, and exposes, in lucid, deadpan prose, the moral depravity, treacherousness and utter indifference to other people’s suffering that the communists and their fellow travellers exhibited.

Rupert Christiansen

John Potter and Neil Sorrell’s wide-ranging A History of Singing (Cambridge, £75) explores a little studied but fundamental human activity. Tanya Harrod’s biography of the ceramicist Michael Cardew, The Last Sane Man (Yale, £30), illuminates a deeply complex personality. And Stephen Alford’s The Watchers: a Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I (Allen Lane, £20) is a grand piece of scholarship that also grips and enthrals. My essential bedside book is Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s An Insomniac’s Guide to the Small Hours (Short Books, £10) – pure delight, if too much fun to send you back to sleep.

Fay Weldon

For Christmas, I will give to writers: Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton (Cape, £25), a moving autobiography of a man who risked his life for his craft. To the delinquent young: David Whitehouse’s Bed (Canongate, £7.99), an eccentric first novel, one hopes the first of many, about a man who grows obese in the cause of love. To those wary of history repeating itself: Douglas Smith’s Former People: the Last Days of the Russian Aristocracy (Macmillan, £20) – a timely warning about the shape of things to come. To dinner party conversationalists: Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood (Cape, £20) To art lovers: Sue Hubbard’s Girl in White (Cinnamon Press, £8.99).

Tom Holland

Sebastian Faulks writes with such fluency and ease that it can take the reader a while to realise just how sophisticated a game he is playing with his haunting new novel, A Possible Life. Issues of empathy and identity, of contact and separation, are explored in five seemingly distinct short stories, which nevertheless in the end reveal themselves to have been subtly interfused. I was also much moved by Llewelyn Morgan’s brilliant The Buddhas of Bamiyan: a history of the two colossal statues destroyed by the Taliban. Scholarly and even-handed, it is simultaneously heart-rending.

Robert Douglas- Fairhurst

This has been a good year for history – Judith Flanders’s The Victorian City (Atlantic, £25) was a particular highlight – but an even better year for historical fiction. While Hilary Mantel has deservedly been getting the lion’s share of attention for Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate, £20), my own favourite recent piece of hist-lit is D J Taylor’s Derby Day (Vintage, £7.99), which was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and came out in paperback earlier this year. It is a detective story as gripping as the Victorian novels that inspired it, and is written with narrative flair and a terrific sense of fun.

Susan Hill

The 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death was obliterated by the Jub-Olympics, and new MM books sank. Most comprehensive for any Monroe obsessive like me was The Marilyn Monroe Encyclopedia by Adam Victor (Duckworth, £20), and most welcome, a reissue of Norman Mailer and Bert Stern’s Marilyn Monroe (Taschen, £44.99). What was it about her? She would have been 86 but the Marilyns of this world weren’t made to grow old, which is probably the secret.

Orlando Figes

Laurent Binet’s HHhH (Harvill Secker, £16.99) is a brilliant hybrid, half-history, half-novel, which retells the story of Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination in 1942. It is at once a gripping thriller and an unsettling meditation on the intermingling of fact and invention in historical writing. I also much enjoyed Francesca Segal’s The Innocents (Chatto, £14.99), a deft resetting of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence in the wealthy London Jewish community of Hampstead Garden Suburb. Funny, mocking, affectionate and wise, it has the finest qualities of the novel of manners.

Nicola Barker

In the world of unlikely partnerships (Norman Wisdom’s demi-God status in Albania, the salted caramel, Liam Gallagher’s love of Neighbours), the extraordinary and frankly improbable 50-year love affair between Jamaican Rude-boys and the humble, even staid Clarks shoe has to be right up there. Clarks in Jamaica (One Love, £30) by Al Fingers is this year’s must-have book for anyone with a serious (but not too serious) interest in the joys of cross-cultural pollination. Crazy. Colourful. Fun. Sincere. The perfect gift for a snooty daughter’s reprobate boyfriend.

Richard Dorment

James Stourton and Charles Sebag-Montefiore’s The British as Art Collectors: From the Tudors to the Present (Scala, £60) was the surprise art book of the year for me – a lively narrative account of art collecting in this country so well written and so beautifully illustrated that you keep turning the pages to find out what happened next. The authors are particularly good on collecting coups, such as Charles I’s purchase of the Gonzaga Collection, and I have never read a better account of the dispersal of the Orleans Collection after the French Revolution. A visit to the National Gallery in London or Edinburgh will never be the same.

Benedict Brogan

For a political journalist, three vital books this year: Janan Ganesh’s George Osborne: the Austerity Chancellor (Biteback, £20), his illuminating biography of the Coalition’s great enigma; Andrew Adonis’s Education, Education, Education: Reforming England’s Schools (Biteback, £12.99), passionate and compelling in equal measure; and The Fix (Collins, £18.99) by Damian Thompson, a gripping insight into our perilous digital addictions. And for pleasure? The reissued spy thrillers of Eric Ambler: intrigue and violence in a Europe on the edge of the abyss – disturbingly familiar.

Anne Applebaum

Edward Lucas’s Deception: the Untold Story of East-West Espionage Today (Bloomsbury, £14) certainly contained the best investigative reporting of the year. Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War Two (Viking, £25) sheds light on a period of recent history most would like to forget. And Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate, £20) was the book I pre-ordered so as to be able to read it the instant it was published. I wasn’t disappointed.

Joseph Connolly

When I’m writing a novel, I can never read fiction, but I made an exception for Martin Amis’s latest, Lionel Asbo: State of England (Jonathan Cape, £18.99). It was absurd, dated and practically plotless — but for all that, there were just so many sentences to delight you. Amis increasingly writes for writers, seemingly regarding mere readers as virtually irrelevant.

Cressida Cowell

Whenever I go to a museum, and see little melancholy objects caught behind the glass, I always think: “If only they could talk.” In Shakespeare’s Restless World (Allen Lane, £25), Neil MacGregor looks at 20 such objects, and with meticulous research he brings to life an entire lost world. Reading this book is like visiting the past in the company of a highly well-informed and intelligent friend.

Nicholas Shakespeare

In Patrick White’s centenary year, fans of Australia’s only Nobel Laureate had two treats: the publication of his unfinished last novel, The Hanging Garden (Cape, £14.99) and the reissue of his first, Happy Valley (Cape, £18.99), published in 1939, when he was just 27. White, extraordinarily, never allowed it to be reprinted in his lifetime. To read it now is like encountering a new work by, say, William Faulkner. Alone in the Classroom (MacLehose, £18.99) by my favourite living novelist, Elizabeth Hay, is a story of murder and obsessive love in prairie Canada, and better even than Alice Munro.

Philip Womack

For sheer inventive brilliance, my book of the year is Anne Carson's Antigonick (Bloodaxe, £15) which retells Sophocles' Antigone, with some haunting images by Bianca Stone superimposed over the text. For brain-scrambling weirdness, I recommend Alan Garner's Boneland, a text that glances sideways at some of the strangest and deepest matters of Britain (Fourth Estate, £16.99). My reissue of the year is Ronald Firbank's glassily brilliant Vainglory (Penguin Classics, £10.99), even if the Sitwells think he's silly; and my children's book of the year is, without a doubt, Libba Bray's fantastically involving The Diviners (Atom, £12.99), which features a flapper heroine and a killer back from the dead.

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