V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (Picador, £8.99) this year. Strange, thwarted, entrancing book. It calls itself a novel, but it reads as a very thinly disguised memoir about a writer’s secluded — but not yet completely secluded — time on an estate near Salisbury. Naipaul’s writing relies on fastidious observation and a kind of mental precision that conveys the ongoing movement of thought. There is a rhythm to it, an enormous, mounting sense of loss kept in check by a ferocious resistance to sentimentality. Despite its long and devoted descriptions of nature, it is not a sensual book. Crucial, then, that it be followed by a book like James Salter’s memoir Burning the Days (Picador, £7.99). ‘Nature is ravishing,’ writes Salter, ‘but the women are in the cities,’ before continuing: ‘There was one night in Rome, one morning really...’ And there you have Salter in a nutshell. Salter was a real discovery for me this year: an erotic, profound, intoxicating writer. Finally, Roger Ballen’s black-and-white photographs in Shadow Chamber (Phaidon, £19.47) show us things we are afraid of and things we cherish and adore, then sow confusion between the two. If it’s true, as Susan Sontag wrote, that great art makes you nervous, Ballen’s can be nothing else.

Sam Leith

Nicola Barker’s visionary epic, Darkmans (Fourth Estate, £14.99), is a really strange and lively and unsettling book that at first I hated, then loved, and now can’t get out of my head. For steely humour, bleak exactness of evocation and fastidious prose, it’s hard to match A. L. Kennedy’s Day (Cape, £16.99). I also loved Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Fourth Estate, £17.99), a divine gumshoe romp set in an imaginary Jewish homeland in Alaska.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP