A further selection of books of the year — the best and most overrated of 2015

Daniel Hahn

 
I suspect many people won’t bother to read Katherine Rundell’s The Wolf Wilder (Bloomsbury, £12.99) because it’s a children’s book. Don’t be one of those people. You’d be depriving yourself of a ferociously paced, brilliantly imagined piece of gorgeous, immersive storytelling — and really, why would you want to do that? Set in Russia a century ago, it’s the story of a girl and her friends (some of whom are wolves) forced to be brave, and to right some great wrongs.

We began 2015 with the introduction to another bright new talent, following the publication of The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Portobello, £12.99), superbly translated by Deborah Smith. Set in contemporary Korea, it’s an irresistibly weird and sensuous story of betrayals, transformation, flesh, domestic and social taboos, family responsibility and sex. This one is not for children. But read it anyway.

Christopher Howse

 
Two biographies that changed my mind. Gerard Kilroy’s Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Ashgate, £80) vividly sketches the intellectual worlds of Oxford and Prague in the first half of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. They were not as cut off from each other as we might suppose. Campion, one of the men who connected the two, dominated his time with impressive composure, even as he suffered appalling treatment. Too late for last year’s best books was The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope by Austen Ivereigh (Allen & Unwin, £20), which shows why Pope Francis is not a silly old commie. The author’s insights into his Argentine background and hard spiritual road make sense of his rejection of the trappings of power and intellectual elitism. I now like Campion and Francis much more than I did.

Marcus Berkmann

 
Nothing makes me happier than a perfectly pitched comic novel, and this year I chanced upon two. Kate Clanchy’s Meeting the English (Picador, £16.99)