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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

John Preston’s The Dig (Viking, £16.99) is a sensitive and beautifully written evocation of the finding of the Sutton Hoo Saxon treasure in Suffolk in 1939. Elegiac in tone, it tells the story through the eyes of the principals, their shared passion for the past driven in part by growing awareness of their imminent future during that final peacetime summer.

Simon Baker

My favourite novel of 2007, which was omitted from an oddly undistinguished Booker longlist, was The Pesthouse by Jim Crace (Picador, £12.99), a dystopian image of a future, plague-ridden America which has regressed following an unspecified catastrophe. In the novel a young man and woman try to make their way out of a dying country in which all history, art and science have been lost. It is written beautifully, with conviction and feeling, and is the author’s best work for several years. My non-fiction choice is God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens (Atlantic, £17.99), a book which, along with Richard Dawkins’s 2006 The God Delusion (and, best of all, Bertrand Russell’s 1927 masterpiece Why I am Not a Christian), stands as a clear-sighted, elegant and witty unravelling of a superstition adhered to long after Darwin put God out of a job. (Although if the rumours are true about God’s 2008 riposte Now You’re For It, You Blasted Atheists, I obviously retract my recommendation entirely.)

Lloyd Evans