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Books of the Year

Spectator reviewers

Wednesday, 21st November 2007

A further selection of the best and worst books of the year, chosen by some of our regular contributors

Two best books of the year: The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany (Fourth Estate, £7.99), a sharp, humorous novel about the people who inhabit an old apartment block in downtown Cairo, once sumptuous and now fallen on less elegant times, who manipulate and intrigue their way through life against a backdrop of Islamists plotting revolution.

The Rebels (Picador, £12.99) is the third of Sandor Marai’s novels to appear in English, a tale of four young men in a small town somewhere in Austria-Hungary in 1917, neither quite boys nor yet adults, fearful of what is to come and clinging to the last vestiges of childhood.

The most disappointing book was Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present, by Joanna Bourke (Virago, £25). More about the rapists than the raped,it is a compendium of statistics and facts, leaving a dismal picture of the cruelty that men — and women — are capable of inflicting on each other.

Gary Dexter

I bought Les Dawson’s Secret Notebooks (JR Books, £15.99) to see if it could furnish an explanation of why Les wrote A Time Before Genesis, the only serious fiction he ever produced, a disturbing novel of alien conspiracy, sexual mutilation and global apocalypse. Unfortunately it couldn’t, being mainly scribblings for his show spots and monologues — but it contained some gems of Dawsonian surrealism, such as: ‘I came from a very poor neighbourhood. Petty theft was rife. It got to the stage where we had to brand the greenfly.’ Continuing with the horticultural theme, Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet by Oliver Morton (Fourth Estate, £25) was a timely book. After 400 wide-ranging pages it was difficult to gainsay the author’s conclusion that the best prospect for future energy generation is solar: ‘new technologies that sit in the space between the photovoltaic cell and the leaf’.

Alan Judd

The reissue by McBooks Press (Amazon, £7.43) of John Biggins’s Otto Prohaska tetralogy, beginning with A Sailor of Austria, is more than welcome. Set in the Austro-Hungarian empire’s submarine service (sic) during the first world war, it evokes that impossible empire so convincingly that it is hard to believe that the author wasn’t there (he wasn’t). Reversing customary chronology, the three successor volumes recount Prohaska’s earlier wartime and pre-war adventures with equal authority and with the same wry erudition. This engagingly affectionate but critical recreation of a world almost as remote — but just as plausible — as Patrick O’Brian’s Nelsonian navy deserves wider recognition.

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Joe Mahoney

November 23rd, 2007 6:29pm

You have some good books I would like to read them all if I only had the time.

The power of the evasive word

Michael Howard

The Economist Book of Obituaries, by Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe

Deadlier than the male

Andrew Taylor

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so.