Philip Hensher

I always look forward to a book by Philip Hoare, and his Leviathan (Fourth Estate, £18.99) had all the vim, gusto and enthusiasm for curiosa that anyone could wish. The best biography I read was Mark Bostridge’s Florence Nightingale (Viking, £25). J. G.Ballard’s superb and tranquil-surfaced memoirs, Miracles of Life (Fourth Estate, £14.99), which he has declared to be his last book, contains some of his very best writing, which is saying a good deal. The non-fiction work I got most pleasure out of, however, was Perfumes: The Guide (Profile, £20). The authors, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, who very much know what they are talking about, and can write unforgettably well (sometimes excoriatingly rudely, too), here produced an unexpected classic of criticism.       

Among the new novels I enjoyed most was Jacob Ross’s wonderful Pynter Bender (Fourth Estate, £16.99). Ross is a figure of great authority and renown in his native Grenada, where this novel has been keenly awaited for years, but it’s a unique and exciting journey for any reader. I also loved Amitav Ghosh’s dense and sumptuous Sea of Poppies (John Murray, £18.99); and Tim Winton’s wonderfully controlled Breath (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99) did exactly and marvellously what it set out to do. Ross Raisin’s God’s Own Country (Viking, £14.99) was a very strong debut.

The worst book I read all year was the autobiography of John Prescott. Absolutely scandalously bad, if you reflect what political memoirs used to be like (Prezza, Headline, £18.99).

Francis King

My most memorable novel of the year was Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog (Chatto & Windus, £16.99), set in Australia, the country to which the author emigrated from Ceylon in her 16th year.

Her protagonist, also an immigrant, in his case from India, sees Australia as resembling ‘a bricked-up door at which, faint but insistent, the sound of knocking can be heard’. This sense of exclusion is beautifully conveyed, as is the restless drama in which most of the other characters live out their tumultuous lives. Kretser’s creativity is so fecund that events and personalities are crowded into a narrative often too short comfortably to contain them. But her book nonetheless remains a most impressive achievement.

The work that gave me most pleasure was Jeremy Lewis’s Grub Street Irregular (Harper Press, £20), the third instalment of an extremely sharp and funny account of life in a literary jungle in which, for him at least, many of the biggest beasts have been women.

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