Another great read of mine in 2007 won’t officially be available until early 2008 — Duncan Fallowell’s long-awaited hedonistic masterpiece about his visit to New Zealand, Going as Far as I Can (Profile, £12.99). There is no nonsense about scaling glaciers or being polite about Maoris here. Instead we have passages of pure poetry on the crumbling Edwardian-era theatres, where Larry and Viv once played, and page upon page of justifiable fury at the country’s scandalous demolition of anything architecturally distinguished. Collections of European art — the Sickerts and Matthew Smiths — are hidden in basements and are not allowed to be exhibited, as it is deemed politically incorrect to upstage Polynesian tat. New Zealand comes across as a philistine hellhole, so Fallowell shuts himself in a motel to contemplate his knackers floating in the bath instead. You assuredly didn’t get that in Bruce Chatwin.

Thirdly, I relished Anne Fadiman’s At Large and At Small, a collection of whimsical essays, on butterfly collecting or the nature of ice cream, beautifully produced by Penguin (£12.99).

Charlotte Moore

Three fine and subtle novels, all concerned in different ways with the emotional aftermath of the second world war, were Thomas Keneally’s The Widow And Her Hero (Sceptre, £16.99), Penelope Lively’s Consequences (Fig Tree, £16.99) and Alan Judd’s Dancing With Eva (Simon & Schuster, £8.99).

The most striking memoir I read this year was Miranda Seymour’s absorbing, chilling account of life in the grip of her father’s obsessive delusions of grandeur — In My Father’s House (Simon & Schuster, £14.99)

Most enjoyable poetry of the year was Simon Armitage’s robust reworking of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Faber, £12.99).

Best discovery from the past was Independent People by Haldor Laxness, Iceland’s equivalent of Thomas Hardy. It’s a magnificent epic about a crofter family in the early 20th century, when life was so harsh that the sight of a dandelion was a cause for celebration (Harvill, £8.99).

D. J. Taylor

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