| | Review by The Spectator

Andro Linklater

It will be apparent to the alert reader that crows have become the new dog. No book about these intelligent, witty, exploitative creatures can be bad. The most enjoyable that I read this year was Corvus: A Life with Birds, whose seductively dotty author, Esther Wolfson, lives in what appears to be an aviary of wounded and rescued birds (Granta, £8.99). It contains such enticing lines as ‘I heard the unmistakable thump of a dead parrot falling from its perch.’ (I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the quote because my copy has been lent and re-lent to perdition.) Mark Cocker’s Crow Country (Vintage, £8.99) contained the most distinguished pastoral writing that I read this year, and opened my eyes to the difference between a roost and a rookery. The outstanding novel was Marilynne Robinson’s Home (Virago, £7.99). Miraculous in its delicacy, wrenching in its anguish, it was a reminder of the exhilarating power that fiction can exert on the imagination.

Rupert Christiansen

The most alluring fiction I have read is Aleksandar Hemon’s collection of short stories Love and Obstacles (Picador, £12.99 ). A Bosnian Serb who emigrated to Chicago at the start of the Balkans War, Hemon writes wonderfully vivid and idiosyncratic English and tells tales that are both hauntingly strange and terribly funny.

Two books of hard but complex fact gave me some understanding of matters which I usually consider way beyond my intellectual ken. Christopher Potter’s You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe (Hutchinson, £20) and James Le Fanu’s Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Harper Press, £18.99) are both masterly pieces of scientific explanation, written with great sensitivity and clarity.

Best bedside reading: Richard Eyre’s hugely enjoyable selection of interviews Talking Theatre (Nick Hern Books, £20). Eyre’s questioning gets beyond the usual journalistic tittle-tattle and makes actors and directors sound as intelligent and thoughtful as they really are.