Allan Massie

I haven’t read a better new novel this year than Clara’s Tale by Pierre Péju (Harvill Secker, £12.99). Excellently translated by Euan Cameron, this is a meditation on the nihilism of the 20th century, but also a fine narrative, sometimes chilling, sometimes with marvellous moments of redemptive tenderness. It owes something to Camus, and discharges that debt admirably. Charles Allen’s Kipling Sahib (Little, Brown, £20) is both a delightful evocation of late 19th-century India and an acute study of Kipling’s genius; utterly absorbing. Other Colours by Orhan Pamuk (Faber, £20) is a very fine collection of essays, memoirs and reflections on literature, life and politics; it includes his delightful and inspiring Nobel lecture. I also greatly enjoyed The Renaissance Popes by Gerard Noel (Basic Books), full of agreeably scandalous stories, also offering a spirited defence of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI. I rarely read overrated books these days, experience having taught me that novels praised by certain reviewers are far better avoided.

Anita Brookner

Death of the novel — again. This conclusion was reached after reading the ramshackle performances of J. M. Coetzee (Diary of a Bad Year, Harvill Secker, £16.99), Michael Ondaatje (Divisadero, Bloomsbury, £17.99) and Philip Roth (Exit Ghost, Cape, £16.99). I make exception for Ian McEwen’s On Chesil Beach (Cape, £12.99), which should have won the Man Booker, and Justin Cartwright’s The Song Before it is Sung (Bloomsbury, £16.99), a subtle exploration of a troubling friendship. Everything else proved unmemorable.

Rereadings: the novels of Edith de Born, completely forgotten precursor, both in style and subject matter, of Sybille Bedford. Of cosmopolitan background — her books are set in Austria, France and Belgium — she demonstrates an intriguing combination of rootlessness and good manners. I recommend The House in Vienna and The Flat in Paris (both Chapman and Hall). These novels are long out of print and perhaps need not be revived. Their saving grace is that, like her slightly younger contemporaries, Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor, this author writes like a lady.

P. J. Kavanagh

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP