Tina Brown
In Bob Woodward’s latest bestseller, about Biden’s management of the Ukraine and Middle East conflicts, the 81-year-old Watergate warhorse proves that he still has his fastball. War (Simon & Schuster) bristles with scoops such as Donald Trump sending Vladimir Putin a personal supply of Covid tests when most Americans couldn’t get them, but its true appeal is the animated offstage glimpses of public figures reduced to ciphers by Beltway media. In one memorable scene, the US defence secretary Lloyd Austin is seen shedding his usual glum gravitas as he pushes back against his Israeli counterpart Yoav Gallant over the need for sending aid to Gaza. “‘Remember what Hamas did to us…’” Gallant said on one call. “‘Yo, Yo!’ Austin said, cutting him off. ‘This is Lloyd you’re talking to. Just give it to me straight. I know what happened.’”
Julian Barnes
An under-18 women’s boxing tournament held in a scuzzy gym in Reno, Nevada, must be one of the most original settings for a first novel. Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot (Daunt Books) lays out the eight contestants’ states of mind, their social and family backgrounds, and their fighting thoughts, in vivid and pongy detail; daringly, and seamlessly, she also fast forwards through their future lives, even up to their deaths. This is a fiery first round in a career which could well go the distance. Colm Tóibín’s rich talents as a novelist need no further enumerating. Long Island (Picador) is a sequel to Brooklyn. You just have to read everything he writes.
Bernardine Evaristo
Diane Abbott became Britain’s first black woman MP in 1987 and has held on to her Hackney constituency ever since. In her first memoir, A Woman Like Me (Viking), we understand how this daughter of working-class Jamaican immigrants has had to fight every step of the way to be treated with equality and respect. This superb account of a trailblazing life reveals how her intelligence, politics, compassion and willpower have shaped her resilience and pioneering spirit. I also devoured the enthralling memoir A Thousand Threads (Fern Press) by the singer Neneh Cherry. She was raised by her Swedish artist mother, Moki Cherry, and her African American jazz musician stepfather, Don Cherry, and her life has been an extraordinary mix of abundant creativity and never-ending travel, always with the changing seasons of her music-making, soulful friendships and devotion to family at the heart of it.
John Bew
Sulmaan Khan’s The Struggle for Taiwan: A History (Allen Lane) is a brilliant example of the use of international history to illuminate a contemporary challenge that we are likely to be hearing a lot more about in 2025. It tells the story of how the island has been the source of great-power contestation going back to the 17th century, before its postwar history, democratisation and rapid technological leaps made it a geopolitical tinderbox. In the spirit of self-help books, I’ve also been reading HR McMaster’s At War with Ourselves (Harper), which is a compelling account of being national security adviser in Trump’s first administration.
William Boyd
Evie Wyld’s fourth novel, The Echoes (Jonathan Cape), confirms her reputation as one of our finest younger novelists. Normally I wouldn’t choose to read a novel narrated by a ghost, but Wyld’s eerie imagination and her cool, measured view of the human condition (and her sense of humour) make it seem the most natural thing in the world.
Another reputation is magnificently confirmed in Drypoint (Faber), Jamie McKendrick’s eighth collection of poetry. Quite simply, a great poet writing at the height of his beguiling, mesmerising powers.
Elif Shafak
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie (Fitzcarraldo) is an old book that has been newly published in English, translated elegantly by Alison Strayer. This is a joint memoir, visual and verbal, by Ernaux and her ex-lover, the late journalist and photographer Marie. Ernaux was undergoing treatment for breast cancer when they started writing and composing this rather unusual diary about desire, illness, memory, love and mortality. Together they have turned the ephemeral and the mundane into touching and long-lasting art.
Another book that I find important is Survival Is a Promise (Allen Lane). The poet, feminist and public intellectual Audre Lorde has a special place in my heart and I often wish she were alive today. She would have so much to say about our broken world. This new biography by “queer black troublemaker” Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a work of brilliant, radiant, inspiring and much-needed scholarship.
Nicola Sturgeon
Percival Everett’s James (Picador) is a masterful reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The premise and structure of the book emulate the original, but the story is told from the perspective of Jim, the slave in Twain’s tale. The book pulls no punches on the utter brutality of slavery – some of the scenes are genuinely harrowing – but there is humour too. Ultimately, it is a life-affirming read. In calling the main character James rather than Jim, Everett symbolises what he set out to do: restore to those so dehumanised by slavery the worth and dignity they deserve. He has written a classic.
Robert D Kaplan
The Good Earth by Pearl Buck (Simon & Schuster) is as overpowering now as when it was published in 1931. Its subject matter, the life-and-death struggles of a Chinese peasant, is relevant anew as hundreds of millions across the planet struggle for survival, invisible to the elites. Buck was never trendy, unlike her contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, though she was the greater writer. Her knowledge of China and its language was much deeper than their knowledge of Europe and French. She was the ultimate cosmopolitan, an American so deeply immersed in Chinese culture that in her hands it isn’t even exotic: it’s just normal. The result is that The Good Earth is pure magic. There is a truly biblical quality to it.
Ali Smith
In Fratriarchy (Routledge) Juliet Mitchell brilliantly re-sees social and psychological interaction through the conscious/unconscious energies running through sibling relationships; I found this book, with its differently posited understanding of the potentials of both societal structure and the narratives we make and take part in, a thrilling work. A huge pleasure this year too was helping Weatherglass Books judge their new Novella Prize; some of the best things I read this year were on the shortlist for this, a prize so good it ended up not just with one winner but two.
The skilful new-world/old-world choreography of Aerth by Deborah Tomkins will be published in January, while Astraea by the Australian writer Kate Kruimink, available right now, is powerful and unforgettable, a novella of such rich strangeness I don’t think its vividness will ever fade.
Gerry Brakus
It has been a particularly strong year for photography books, but I have completely fallen in love with Jack Davison’s A Is for Ant (Helions). Described by Davison as a “surrealist celebration of children’s alphabet books”, it has captured my middle-aged heart and mind, with echoes of Sarah Moon and images to get lost in. I also thoroughly enjoyed Nothing Lasts Forever by Peter Mitchell (RRB), a retrospective monograph of photographs taken in his adopted hometown of Leeds in the 1970s and 1980s. These scenes of urban decay, captured while Mitchell worked as a truck driver, evoke a sense of nostalgia and understated beauty. Primarily known for his photographic work, Sohrab Hura has made a series of engaging drawings showing everyday life in all its joy and sadness. Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed (Mack) leaves a lasting impression.
John Gray
Caleb Carr’s My Beloved Monster (Allen Lane), an account of the life he shared for 17 years with a Siberian forest cat, is a profound story of mortality, grief and love. Left to die in a locked apartment, Masha was found by Carr in an animal sanctuary, where she adopted him as much as he adopted her. Abused as a child by his violent father and suffering poor health for the rest of his life, he formed a more enduring relationship with her than with any human being. While he was writing in the remote farmhouse they shared in upstate New York, she was “hunting and defending our territory” and comforting him in his illnesses. When she died of cancer Carr was desolated, and died himself, also from cancer, not long after. My Beloved Monster will be compared with JR Ackerley’s classic My Dog Tulip (1956), but to my mind Carr tells a more extraordinary tale. Unlike Ackerley’s Alsatian, Masha remained untamed, befriending an ailing human without ever giving up her wild nature.
Anjana Ahuja
Two books show science and technology in their best and worst lights. First, the dark: by scraping pictures off the web, Clearview AI developed facial-recognition tools that are now used by law enforcement and oppressive political regimes. In the chilling Your Face Belongs to Us (in paperback from Simon & Schuster), Kashmir Hill delves into the firm’s backstory, meets its oddball founder, and advocates a fightback against the loss of privacy. Then return to the light with The Story of a Heart (Abacus), by the palliative-care doctor Rachel Clarke. When nine-year-old Kiera died after a car accident, her heart was transplanted into a boy called Max. With exquisite sensitivity, Clarke describes how the two families collided in grief and hope, helped by the miracle of science. I read this through a veil of tears.
Christopher Caldwell
In La Défaite de l’Occident (“The Defeat of the West”, Gallimard), the French anthropologist and historian Emmanuel Todd argues that, prompted by Nato’s adventure in Ukraine, the Third World War is already underway. The West started it, Todd writes, and is poised to lose it, led by Nato’s most decadent member (the US) and its most servile (the UK). The book was a sensation in France. It has lately been published to acclaim in Spain, Germany and Italy. Oddly, no New York or London edition seems to be planned.
Eimear McBride
Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain (Picador) was a stand-out. Having previously written exquisitely about the sexual body, here he takes on pain and the enforced intimacy of illness. Not only between patient and carer but between the mind and its faltering flesh. Slowly unfolding, thoughtful and nuanced, Small Rain asks for time and repays every second.
Graeme Macrae Burnet’s A Case of Matricide (Saraband) finished up his Gorski trilogy with all the Kafkaesque shenanigans, paranoia and observational bathos you could wish for. It’s an incredibly fun, cleverly crafted novel that works on so many levels I can even forgive him for being a postmodernist.
Geoff Dyer
About 20 years ago – to borrow the opening words of Larkin’s “Wild Oats” – I went into the New York office of Russell Perreault, head of publicity at Vintage. He introduced me to Sloane Crosley, the young woman who would be working on the paperback of my book. Sloane went on to become a brilliant writer in her own right; Russell, I heard five years ago, had killed himself. Sloane’s memoir of their friendship and his death, Grief Is for People (Serpent’s Tail), is the funniest book ever written about suicide and loss – which actually makes it all the more shattering. The best novel I read this year was Alan Hollinghurst’s beautiful, compulsively rambling Our Evenings (Picador).
Helen Lewis
Character Limit (Cornerstone) by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac is an absorbing account of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. It covers the big themes of modern politics – unrestrained billionaires and the lawyers, bankers and other yes-men who enable them; how social media has degraded the public square and melted the brains of its most enthusiastic users; and the eternal quest to find the border between free speech and hate speech.
I’m ashamed to say that it took me until this year to read Kafka’s The Trial,ahead of a Radio 4 series I made about him and Orwell. What a strange and curiously modern work – one of those narratives which is so familiar from pop culture that you might not think it’s worth reading the original. It is.
Neel Mukherjee
The best novel I read this year was Lublin by Manya Wilkinson (And Other Stories). Part picaresque, part boys’ adventure story, part Freud’s joke book, part immersive dive into early-20th-century Jewish life in a Polish corner of the Russian empire, this funny and devastating novel is lucid, beautiful and utterly original. Where has this author been hiding all these years? The Burning Earth by the historian Sunil Amrith (Penguin) is a global history of the environment of the last 500 years. This bleak, stunningly written book shows that the other side of the coin called progress is destruction. Amrith writes like the finest novelist, and his grasp of a mind-boggling expanse of material is deeply impressive.
Ian Rankin
3 Shades of Blue by James Kaplan (Canongate) is a detailed look at the main players behind the album Kind of Blue (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans), showing once again that musical genius can be allied to fatal personality flaws and wayward life choices. It’s a riveting read that takes you straight back to the tunes. My second choice is White City by Dominic Nolan (Headline). If James Ellroy had grown up in 1950s London, this is what he would have written. A brutal and poetic tale of thwarted lives and bad men as racial tensions rise in the city. Nolan makes you care about his characters. I sometimes wanted to look away but couldn’t. Great writing does that.
Alexander McCall Smith
The appeal of Greek mythology never fades, possibly because it is ultimately all about us. This year Stephen Fry published the fourth volume in his wonderful series. Odyssey (Michael Joseph) is beautifully written and gives unalloyed pleasure, even if we know how that story ends. Fry is a companionable writer: reading his interpretation of the myths is like having a courteous, engaged observer at one’s side. I also discovered a book published not quite so recently: Stephen Harrison’s exquisite treatment of the poet Horace, How to Be Content (Princeton). In turbulent times these books are islands of calm – a refuge, perhaps.
Melissa Harrison
Some Booker omissions are so surprising you find yourself wondering if the judges were on meth. Evie Wyld’s The Echoes (Vintage) is staggeringly good, a high-wire act of precision and control, full of vivid imagery and lightly worn psychological insight. Maxis a ghost, haunting his girlfriend Hannah’s south London flat. As the narrative hops through time and inhabits multiple perspectives, we find out how he died, why Hannah refuses to visit her family in Australia and what happened to the older sister she so loved. Wyld perfectly balances humour with darkness as the story unfolds like intricate origami to reveal, at last, the horror at its heart.
Andrew Marr
I enjoyed two novels so much I can’t separate them. Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road (Faber) is a dark, multi-layered seeing-to of silly, corrupt and addictive modern London which made me laugh a lot. James (Mantle), Percival Everett’s reimagining of Huckleberry Finn, was the pick of the Booker list – a nerveless triumph of tone. In a year full of political non-fiction books, I have been most gripped by Tom Holland’s Dominion (Little, Brown), his exciting history of the revolutionary impact of Christianity on the West.
But I have also spent much of the year rereading Henry James: I find it hard to understand how his magnificent novel of late-Victorian London revolutionaries, The Princess Casamassima, isn’t much better known – unless it’s because of the tongue-twisting title, and the worst-named potential assassin in fiction, Hyacinth. But it’s a great romp.
Erica Wagner
Oliver Sacks’s Letters (Picador) isn’t a book of the year – it’s a book for a lifetime. The great neurologist’s brilliance and humanity is no secret; but here (superbly edited by Kate Edgar) the reader sees his life unfold in real time: his original, challenging work, his love for his family, his unique passions, his evolving relationship to his sexuality. Keep this by your side, dip into it, be reminded of the wonders of our shared humanity. In fiction, Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise (Wildfire) is more than a delight: it is a family saga that grips from the first page while reckoning fluently – and with deep humour – with 20th-century history.
Henry Marsh
Sophie Kinsella’s novella What Does It Feel Like? (Bantam Press) – a fictionalised but directly autobiographical novella about her diagnosis with a malignant brain tumour – is profound, moving and beautifully written. Of all the books I have read about living with cancer, this is by far the best. David Spiegelhalter’s The Art of Uncertainty (Pelican) is a superb and highly readable book on the all-important subject of probability that anybody interested in trying to understand the future and its uncertainty should read.
Andrew Motion
Concerning the Future of Souls (Tuskar Rock) by Joy Williams is a “follow-up” to her brilliant Ninety-Nine Stories of God, a collection of 99 short (sometimes very short) pieces of fiction that simultaneously dazzle, intrigue, provoke, bemuse and complicatedly entertain. Their central character is Azrael – tormented angel and transporter of souls – whose tasks turn out to be mostly impossible, but whose interrogations of Death and friendship with the Devil prove that a sufficiently enquiring mind has at least the potential to find consolation in a world of bewilderments. Williams is one of the most pioneering fiction writers of our time, and this late work contains her most powerful meditation yet on human mortality, species extinctions, and the present climate disaster.
Brendan Simms
I very much enjoyed John O’Beirne Ranelagh’s The Irish Republican Brotherhood, 1914-1924 (Irish Academic Press). The author is the son of a legendary member of the “Old IRA”, and interviewed many surviving members during the 1970s. He evokes a world gone by with empathy but without sentimentality, unsure whether the killing and the suffering was really worth it.
I was also completely absorbed by Dodie Smith’s 1948 novel I Capture the Castle (Vintage), which oddly I had never read before. It is an Edith Wharton meets Evelyn Waugh story about American money and English breeding with some surprises. The 2003 film version, with Romola Garai and Bill Nighy, is pretty good too.
John Banville
The most intellectually stimulating book I read this year was Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People by Emily Herring (Basic Books). It is hard to believe now, but in the early 20th century Bergson was one of the most famous people in the world, as famous as Albert Einstein, with whom he differed in a public confrontation in Paris in 1922. His philosophy of time was founded on two key concepts, durée, his word for the undulating temporal flow, and élan vital, the ongoing accumulation of experience over time. Bergsonism is definitely due a revival.
Olivia Laing
I loved Nate Lippens’ debut, My Dead Book, and Ripcord (Pilot Press) is even better: a meditation on sex, time, death, from an ageing queer man in the Midwest. Lippens is the master of the one-liner, and these compressed, aphoristic vignettes pack a powerful punch. His writing always reminds me of that great sentence-maker Gary Indiana, who died this autumn, so I’m rereading Indiana’s most brilliant novel. Three Month Fever (Semiotext) turns the story of the serial killer Andrew Cunanan into an ever-more prescient account of the American fixation with violence and fame. Vale, Gary. You really were the greatest.
Ed Smith
Dan Davies’ The Unaccountability Machine (Profile) is mischievous and fiercely intelligent. And the subject isn’t going away, given how giant organisations hide behind “process” and “systems” – while getting everything wrong. Davies considers the stupid “smart” phone app you have to download, the phone line that never answers, the drop-down menu with boxes of non-sequiturs – all of which are designed to baffle the consumer, while protecting anyone inside the system from having to make a judgement.
It sounds pretentious to pick a book of aphorisms. But if a deep thinker wants to condense their world-view into a few elegant words and gift wrap it in a witticism, it feels churlish not to grab it with both hands. Besides, The Faber Book of Aphorisms (1964), selected by WH Auden and Louis Kronenberger, is a cracker.
Sue Prideaux
Alexei Navalny began Patriot (Bodley Head) in 2020 in Germany, recovering from Putin’s first attempt to murder him with a nerve agent that had left him in a coma for 18 days. Six months later he flew back to Russia, to face what he knew was inevitable. The rest of this posthumous memoir was assembled from notes smuggled out from his Siberian prison colony, where he died in February. His only weapon words, Navalny skewers Putin’s tyranny, corruption and lies, but even while inhumanly caged his humour, love of life and ultimate faith in humankind shine through, alongside his conviction that it is absolutely worthwhile to be martyred for truth.
Yanis Varoufakis
Alpa Shah’s The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India (William Collins) issues a devastating warning on how easy it is to lose one’s country to forces working to corrode and demolish democracy’s foundations. It is a cautionary tale for lazy Western narratives that lambast “authoritarian” China yet celebrate India as the “world’s largest democracy”. Shah demonstrates how a hard-earned democracy can die in substance, if not in form, through a process of criminalising and incarcerating dissent. Beautifully written, it exposes the ugly New Authoritarianism we all face, including in Europe and the United States, as well as the courage of those sacrificing everything to keep democracy possible.
David Reynolds
In 2009 Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s veteran prime minister, described air conditioning as “perhaps one of the signal inventions of history”. Sunil Amrith – raised (literally) in Singapore, a city-state climbing ever higher by “remaking nature for human ends” – has taught extensively on both sides of the Atlantic. In The Burning Earth (Allen Lane), he brings together today’s “crisis of life on Earth” and the “concerns with justice and human freedom” that animated his early work. Written with passion and insight, this is a highly readable grand narrative illustrated by vignettes from across the globe.
Lyndall Gordon
Dayspring: A Memoir (Karavan Press and uHlanga) is by CJ (Jonty) Driver, a poet and political activist against apartheid. He is a moral being writing with a directness that comes from the soul. This honesty reminds me of the autobiographical fictions of JM Coetzee, who edited this book. The memorable relationships are with interrogators while Driver was imprisoned and with a girl he loved. He’s truthful, too, when it comes to his own failure: casual infidelity. Goodness is hard to convey, but this memoir does so, a respite in a world rent by liars.
Alan Johnson
Rillington Place acquired such notoriety that residents insisted the name of the cul-de-sac be changed. It was Ruston Close by the time I was helping the milkman put pints on its doorsteps as an 11-year-old. I crossed the threshold of number 10 every Saturday to collect the milk money without realising it was a murder scene in which the victims had been entombed. In The Peepshow (Bloomsbury) Kate Summerscale focuses on those victims and “the heady mix of disapproval and desire” with which Britain’s newspapers approached the story. Gabriel’s Moon (Viking) is William Boyd’s contribution to the Cold War spy-thriller genre. It’s unlikely to win him the literary prize his writing deserves, but guaranteed to please those of us who value a cracking story, well told.
Katherine Rundell
Granta has published all five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, and they’re a revelation. She is so astute, so generous, so snobbish and yet so self-lacerating, so galvanisingly intelligent. She looks squarely at the bodily reality of writing: “I am brain fagged and must resist the desire to tear up and cross out – must fill my mind with air and light; and walk and blanket it in fog. Rubber boots help.” She records both misery and enjoyment, and the flashes of elation when an idea strikes her as good are electric to read.
Otherwise, the book I loved most this year was Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (Oxford University Press), which is far more joyfully readable than I’d imagined: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
Jesse Armstrong
I read slowly. So, I often don’t keep up with new books even from writers I love. This year I did manage to hit three big ones. The Fraud by Zadie Smith (Penguin), out in paperback, is a lesson in how to stare directly into the political sun of right now and not have your eyes burnt out, by making the work about something apparently totally other. In Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (Faber), with watchmaker precision, she tweezers open the workings of a lattice of intimate relations and gives a precise reading – astringent and empathetic at the same time – of the minutely-changing atmospherics in a number of living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms. Finally, Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise (Wildfire) has the compelling readability of a Jonathan Franzen family drama, the laughs of an early Philip Roth, and the American Pastoral-sadness and depth of a later Roth too.
Mark Cocker
In his finest book to date, the philosopher Jeremy Mynott has drawn up a near-perfect summary of our relations with the rest of planetary life in The Story of Nature: A Human History (Yale). If you want something more monumentally detailed on this theme, you can do no better than my book of the century: the neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist’s two-volume The Matter with Things (Perspectiva). Analysing every aspect of Western civilisation, he argues that biodiversity collapse and climate chaos are rooted in the twofold nature of human perception and brain structure. McGilchrist’s book is itself a magnificent expression of human creativity.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
A Voyage Around the Queen by Craig Brown (4th Estate) is a book about Elizabeth II full of lists, dreams, surreal encounters between discreet courtiers and visiting despots, and hilarious asides. It is a mosaic: a treasury of glittering bits which add up to a witty and tender book about the dumpy woman who took pains to avoid ever saying anything interesting, and so fascinated millions. Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell (Wildfire) is another mosaic, constructed without the cement of an authorial voice. Cockerell’s great-grandfather played an important role in the beginnings of Zionism. She boldly decided to allow her sources to tell the story. The resulting book is arrestingly fresh.
Fintan O’Toole
Ferdia Lennon’s remarkable debut novel, Glorious Exploits (Fig Tree), is set in Syracuse in 412 BCE, after the disastrous Athenian invasion of Sicily. It picks up on Plutarch’s report that some of the prisoners were saved from a grim death because they could remember lines from Euripides, for whom the Syracusans had a special love. Lennon imagines two unemployed potters trying to get Athenian captives to stage Medea and The Trojan Women. His own coup de théâtre is to have the story told in a contemporary Dublin working-class voice, giving it gripping immediacy and urgency.
I also caught up with the paperback of Anna Funder’s brilliant meditation of the life of George Orwell’s wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (Penguin). It’s a furious, fascinating and all-too-current exposure of the inner life of the patriarchy.
Jonathan Coe
In a year filled with recent histories, political essays and contemporary novels, the book I relished most was one that took me out of my reading comfort-zone: Anima: A Wild Pastoral by Kapka Kassabova (Jonathan Cape). Kassabova, a Bulgarian-born poet, has written a series of books about her experiences living in inaccessible Balkan regions. In Anima, she stays with shepherds who are experts in a breed of dog called Karakachan, making them “one of the oldest nomadic peoples to have entered modernity with their animals”. Kassabova’s prose, lyrical but unsentimental, brings you into the heart of this landscape and community, and gently, insistently confronts the reader with questions about what it means to be human, and to be living within a natural world which we persist in disrupting or violating.
David Gauke
The political book of the year for me has to be No Way Out by Tim Shipman (William Collins), the third volume of his history of the Brexit years. I say that having not necessarily enjoyed reading it, as it covers the grim period from the 2017 general election to the moment Boris Johnson became prime minister. But it is a lively, authoritative account of a crucial (if still raw) period. Shipman is a little tougher on Theresa May than I would like, but this is a rounded and well-sourced explanation of how we found ourselves in the Brexit impasse.
Rowan Williams
For sheer exuberance of writing combined with equal insight into the creative process, the minds of children, and the way adults imagine children, Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood (Oneworld) has to be high on any list. And for something completely different, try The Holiness of Ordinary People by Madeleine Delbrêl (Ignatius Press). Delbrêl was a French social worker who lived a life of intense private prayer and died in 1964. This translation of some of her pungently witty and very challenging reflections shows us a really remarkable kind of faith – deep, uncompromsing, unshowy, realistic.
Tomiwa Owolade
The novel I most loved this year is Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan (Faber). From dodgy oligarchs to drill artists, it explores a variety of 21st-century London life; in O’Hagan’s rich canvas the unifying theme is the battle for status and belonging. The non-fiction book I most enjoyed is The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (4th Estate). She uses the extraordinary and short life of George Villiers (First Duke of Buckingham) to examine sex, misogyny, diplomacy and power in Jacobean and early Stuart England. Her prose is sublime.
Lyndsey Stonebridge
Nine years ago, on a balmy Friday evening in November, along with millions, I clutched my phone for five hours witnessing the terrorist attacks in Paris. In 2022, the trial of the surviving accomplices took place, dubbed V13 (for vendredi the 13th). Emmanuel Carrère, quite possibly France’s best non-fiction writer, attended and wrote a weekly column for L’Obs. This November, John Lambert’s scrupulous translation of Carrère’s V13: A Chronicle of a Trial (Fern Press) was published. I read it in the summer, against the background of Gaza and Ukraine, at a moment when the world has apparently conceded to mass political violence. How do we live with this? Carrère’s answer is a writer’s answer: with meticulous, moral attention to the people – strangers, victims, perpetrators, friends – we live with. It’s a masterpiece.
Tom Holland
It might seem bold, in the pages of this magazine of all magazines, to praise a book by the literary editor of the Spectator – but Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood was so enjoyable and stimulating a read that I am going to risk it. Simultaneously erudite and entertaining, it provides – in the words of its subtitle – a history of childhood reading: a theme that Leith handles with both love and respect. The title is perfectly chosen: for reading The Haunted Wood, I did indeed feel that I was venturing back into a long-forgotten dimension of wonder and magic.
Melvyn Bragg
Over the years Hunter Davies has perfected a subtle and unique conversational prose, which – underlying a light and playful surface – can be, as in Letters to Margaret: Confessions to My Late Wife (Apollo), warm, revelatory and moving. I’ve just caught up with John Banville’s The Sea (Picador). Martin Amis described him as a “master” and yet again Banville confirms this.
Michael Moorcock
A plethora of fine London books for me this year, including Alan Moore’s The Great When (Bloomsbury) and John King’s London Country (London Books), both highly original. Perhaps Iain Sinclair’s Pariah Genius (Cheerio) is the most stimulating. Sinclair brings a postwar bohemian world to vivid reality, following the photographer John Deakin as he chronicles the lives and uneasy deaths of Francis Bacon and others. The novel is fresh and vivid, and renews insight into a world very few really know or understand and characters whose private lives are comprehended by almost none.
Preti Taneja
Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death by Susana Monsó (Princeton) is a philosopher’s enquiry into animal and human responses to mortality. Challenging our tendency to anthropomorphise, it raises important questions about animal behaviour and emotional life, and how, in the light of these we must reframe our own humanness. I also revisited two novels that explore our dehumanisation of “others” to haunting and horrific effect: Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (Canongate), about hitchhiker disappearances in the Scottish Borders, and Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (Fitzcarraldo), a novel of breathtaking craft and depths about the deaths and lives of Palestinian women under occupation, narrative, history, and collective memory. Both are unforgettable.
Maurice Glasman
The two finest books I read this year were The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli (Pushkin) and All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (Penguin). Da Empoli’s, written from the perspective of Putin’s chief strategist, details how the privatisations of the 1990s set the scene for the return of the Tsar. Penn Warren’s is loosely built around Huey Long, the populist from Louisiana whose slogan was: “Every man a king and no one wears a crown.” Read together, they provide an account of the political success of Putin and Trump respectively. Academic work tends towards the unreadable and irrelevant while journalism tends to the trivial and psychological. Both these novels, in contrast, are written in the first person, and are vivid in their depiction of real historical events they could not possibly have witnessed. Trump and Putin endure and both books helped me understand why.
Andrew Hussey
Freaks Out! (Nine Eight Books) by Luke Haines, the songwriter and ex-frontman of the Auteurs, is a forced march through rock ’n’ roll history, arguing that the best, “most righteous” rock music comes from the losers, obsessives or simply the mad. These include “freaks” such as Gene Vincent, Lou Reed and Big Youth, and probably Haines himself.
In The Museum of Small and Fragile Things (Indigo), Suzanne Joinson revisits her childhood in working-class Crewe with a family of real-life “freaks”, cult devotees, who survive on meditation and weed. It is tender, sharp and finally as moving as it is unflinching.
Guy Gunaratne
Álvaro Enrigue’s latest novel, You Dreamed of Empires (Harvill Secker), translated by Natasha Wimmer, is a kind of historical hallucination set during an encounter between the conquistador Hernan Cortés and the emperor Moctezuma. It’s a book about the slightest moments in history when entire futures are not yet seized for domination. It will also gently teach you how to pronounce Tenochtitlan.
Michael Prodger
Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (Faber), is both revealing and measured. She detaches the artist from strident contemporary debates to place him firmly back in his own time and finds both degradation and dignity in his commitment to his own vision. In The Story of Drawing (Yale), Susan Owens shows not just the centrality of graphic art from prehistory onwards, but how artists from Dürer to Seurat used pen and pencil as a way to investigate their most private thoughts.
Marina Warner
The Celtic corpus of fantastic legends is undersung, compared to classical myths. In Otherworld: Nine Tales of Wonder and Romance from Medieval Ireland (Oxford), Lisa M Bitel’s light-footed retellings do justice to the stories’ strangeness as well as their earthy wit.
This year I was captivated by Clare Pollard’s novel The Modern Fairies (Fig Tree): a freewheeling and ingenious imbroglio inspired by the 17th- and 18th-century salonnières who practised the art of the fairy tale.
Kevin Barry
Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding (Chatto & Windus)is like a perfect French movie of a novel – in fact, it wears its devotion to the beautiful and blithe films of Éric Rohmer on its sleeve – but it is elevated by the writer’s elegant, original and often very funny prose. A Belleville apartment, some decades apart, and the couples that live there is the basic mise en scène, but it opens out in unexpected directions. Mary Costello’s Barcelona (Canongate) is for me the most impressive story collection of the year. This is a haunting and beguiling work that raises difficult questions and sets them in a strange, revealing light. A masterful storywriter, as good anyone involved with the craft now.
Leo Robson
Perry Anderson has been the most scintillant, conceptually resourceful, and idiosyncratically elegant British essayist for most of the now 60 years he has been practising. His Disputing Disaster (Verso), a survey of historians’ accounts of the genealogy of the First World War, is a phenomenal exercise in synoptic thinking.
Anyone with a taste for verbal and cultural analysis – an interest in football may help – should be grateful for the elucidating impudence of Adam Hurrey, who has turned his podcast Football Cliches into a breezy book Extra Time Beckons, Penalties Loom (Headline).
William Davies
Perhaps the most illuminating work in political economy I read this year was really a history of accounting: Discounting the Future: The Ascendency of a Political Technology (Zone Books) by the French sociologist Liliana Doganova. Discounting is an arcane accounting practice, used by economists, governments and businesses, which, Doganova shows, has reshaped the world around us, and plays a particularly significant – and often harmful – role in the valuation of the natural environment. Doganova explains a paradox of contemporary capitalism, that we are simultaneously fixated on future outcomes as the measure of all value (as in notions of return on investment) while also negligent when it comes to those humans and non-humans who will have to live in the future world we bequeath to them. Discounting turns out to be at the heart of this problem.
In a very different genre, I also loved Will Hodgkinson’s Street Level Superstar: A Year with Lawrence (Nine Eight Books), a portrait of the magnificently eccentric, semi-famous former Denim and Felt frontman. In the year when the Gallagher brothers returned with their Thatcherite ambitions (and ticket-charging system) to cash in on old hits, there’s a certain majesty in Lawrence’s anti-commodity shtick, a reminder that indie music could also be difficult, singular and infuriatingly impossible to package. Like a time capsule from a world without Instagram or Spotify.
Melissa Benn
The novel I have most discussed with friends this year is Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (Granta), which traces the masochistic relationship of a younger woman to an older, married, journalist. Set in East Germany before and after the fall of the Wall, it’s a metaphorical tale – and an often uncomfortable read – about freedom, lost and found. Since Trump’s re-election, my mind keeps returning to The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel(Penguin). Sandel identifies the ways in which progressives on both sides of the Atlantic have abandoned ideas of the common good, betting everything on the idea of meritocracy. This has created a smug elite who are now regularly punished at the polls.
Margaret MacMillan
Funny, moving, beautifully written, Percival Everett’s James (Picador) retelling of Huckleberry Finn is a brave thing to do – but Everett is a fitting match for Mark Twain. Yaroslav Hrytsak’s Ukraine: Forging of Nation (Sphere) shows the many overlapping and interacting peoples, languages, and religions in the borderlands where empires clashed over the centuries. Hrystak provides a highly readable account of a complex and tangled history and shows how, from the 19th century, a modern Ukrainian nation, wracked by brutal invasions, revolutions and civil wars, somehow emerged.
Katie Stallard
Alexei Navalny’s posthumous memoir, Patriot (Bodley Head), is tragic and inspiring, funny and devastating. The late Russian opposition leader reflects on his childhood growing up in a Soviet military family, his disillusionment with the kleptocratic Russian state that has metastasised under Vladimir Putin, and his determination to return to Russia despite narrowly surviving an assassination attempt in 2020. “If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary,” he wrote before his death. “If you’re not prepared to do that… those are not convictions and principles; they’re only thoughts in your head.”
For those grappling with the tumultuous events of US politics and bracing for the imminent return of an even more aggrieved Donald Trump to the White House, the American poet Ross Gay’s 2019 essay collection The Book of Delights (Coronet) offers solace as he documents the overlooked delights of his daily life over the course of a year. This concept might have been trite in less capable hands, but the writing is beautiful and the experience of reading this book is deeply restorative as Gay urges us not to despair, even in these dispiriting times.
Tom Gatti
Lara Pawson’s Spent Light (CB Editions), shortlisted for this year’s Goldsmiths Prize, is a book of objects. From a toaster to a brass door handle to a squirrel’s tail, everything that meets the narrator’s eye connects to a personal memory or historical event. Is it a novel, a memoir or a love letter? I’m not sure, but it keeps drawing me back to its shocking, funny, revelatory pages.
Ali Smith, Erica Wagner and others appear at Cambridge Literary Festival, 23-24 November.
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump World