Books of the Year
A further selection of the best and worst books of the year, chosen by some of our regular contributors
Jane Stevenson’s Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye (Cape, £30) was one of the best biographies I have read in years. Not only does Stevenson get to grips with the complexities of Burra’s life, personality and social circle — none of them readily decipherable — she also raises a host of questions about the nature of art and artists which books about painters sometimes forget to consider. The book is a triumph, and just the sort of study which Burra’s reputation needed.
I also liked Paul Willetts’s immensely well-researched evocation of late 1940s London gangland, North Soho 999 (Dewi Lewis Publishing, £9.99). My novel of the year, inexplicably — well, no, all too explicably — absent from the Man Booker lists was Adam Thorpe’s Between Each Breath (Cape, £12.99), a tense, billowing account of an avant-garde composer whose life starts to disintegrate in the wake of a fling with an Estonian violinist, and, with its deftly written prose, offering welcome reminders of Thorpe’s alternative career as a poet.
Cressida Connolly
Annie Freud’s poetry collection, The Best Man That Ever There Was (Picador, £8.99), has been a highlight of 2007. It’s hard to believe that these troubling, hilarious, totally original poems are her first. I shan’t forget her reading at the Cheltenham book festival: before three rows of A-level students from the Ladies’ College, a gleeful Freud extolled the delights of cigarette smoking (‘I love it’), then recited the title poem, which describes eating plover’s eggs and turbot with a lover in a grand hotel; but not until he’d beaten her naked buttocks. Wicked, sexy and always surprising.
The book I’ll be giving everybody for Christmas is Psychogeography (Bloomsbury, £16.80) by the inimitable Will Self, with illustrations by Ralph Steadman. It’s a collection of Self’s walkabout journalism, from Venice to Manhattan. The world looks much stranger after an afternoon within its pages.
Antonia Quirke’s Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers (HarperCollins, £7.99) came out in paperback this year. I loved this strange hybrid of film criticism and amourous autobiography.
Jonathan Sumption
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Joe Mahoney
November 23rd, 2007 6:29pmYou have some good books I would like to read them all if I only had the time.