William Trevor
Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man by Claire Tomalin (Penguin, £8.99). This is a classic biography, gracefully written, driven by a perception that never falters. The contradictions and lingering mysteries in Hardy’s life, both as a man and a novelist, are investigated fruitfully but gently, without gratuitous or prurient curiosity. Speculation is offered with well-mannered diffidence when there is doubt; with the certainty of exemplary research when there isn’t. A worthy addition to the best of Hardy’s novels, A Time-Torn Man often reads like a particularly good novel itself.
Equally a treat is Eleven Houses by Christopher Fitz-Simon (Penguin Ireland, £18.99), a memoir of a confused childhood in ‘Ireland, North and South, mainly during the 1940s’. The many moves from house to house were brought about by the war and the fact that the paterfamilias was an army officer. Far from well-to-do, the family was both Catholic and Protestant, their Ireland a place one wishes hadn’t gone away. There’s pleasure, and quiet charm, on every page.
Caroline Moorehead
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.
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
Christmas looms and loyalties divide. Should I go for the Shameless Plug or the more high-minded Service to Literature? Luckily I’m able to unite these objectives by announcing that the funniest new book I read all year (in a strong field of five) was Cooler, Faster, More Expensive: The Return of the Sloane Ranger (Atlantic, £19.99) by Peter York and a friend of mine Olivia Stewart-Liberty. Olivia is my son’s godmother and she promises to shower him with diamond-encrusted building bricks if her book becomes a Christmas bestseller. So — it’s worth every penny. As for Literature, I hope my son’s other godparent, the explorer Matthew Leeming, will read this recommendation and be inspired to complete his Afghan diary Altogether Elsewhere which Picador have been waiting for, in a state of mounting excitement, for six and a half years. Finish it, mate, and maybe they’ll let me plug it here next Christmas.
Roger Lewis
Light the candles and draw the thick velvet curtains, take a deep draught of purple wine and lift Jonathan Black’s The Secret History of the World (Quercus, £25) on to the brass eagle-shaped lectern. I was much impressed by this richly textured and magisterial omnium gatherum about conspiracy theories. Yet, ironically, the book has itself been the subject of a conspiracy, as absolutely no newspaper would permit me to review it. I know exactly how this decision came to be made. Members of that most esoteric of societies, The Ancient Conclave of Literary Editors, which meets in a Giant Pyramid under Wee Georgie Weidenfeld’s house, were frightened of what might occur if the populace had been encouraged (as Black promises) ‘to access supernatural levels of intelligence’. Another worrying recommendation was that ‘eye-to-eye meditation can also be practised in a sexual context’. When I tried that, my hairnet blew off.
The conspiracies don’t stop there. For Jonathan Black, I can reveal, is the pseudonym of Mark Booth, the highly esteemed and mischievous non-fiction editor at Random House who made Peter Kay’s memoirs into the biggest bestseller of all time and who helps ghost the Moon Goddess Jordan’s novels.
Another great read of mine in 2007 won’t officially be available until early 2008 — Duncan Fallowell’s long-awaited hedonistic masterpiece about his visit to New Zealand, Going as Far as I Can (Profile, £12.99). There is no nonsense about scaling glaciers or being polite about Maoris here. Instead we have passages of pure poetry on the crumbling Edwardian-era theatres, where Larry and Viv once played, and page upon page of justifi able fury at the country’s scandalous demolition of anything architecturally distinguished. Collections of European art — the Sickerts and Matthew Smiths — are hidden in basements and are not allowed to be exhibited, as it is deemed politically incorrect to upstage Polynesian tat. New Zealand comes across as a philistine hellhole, so Fallowell shuts himself in a motel to contemplate his knackers floating in the bath instead. You assuredly didn’t get that in Bruce Chatwin.
Thirdly, I relished Anne Fadiman’s At Large and At Small, a collection of whimsical essays, on butterfly collecting or the nature of ice cream, beautifully produced by Penguin (£12.99).
Charlotte Moore
Three fine and subtle novels, all concerned in different ways with the emotional aftermath of the second world war, were Thomas Keneally’s The Widow And Her Hero (Sceptre, £16.99), Penelope Lively’s Consequences (Fig Tree, £16.99) and Alan Judd’s Dancing With Eva (Simon & Schuster, £8.99).
The most striking memoir I read this year was Miranda Seymour’s absorbing, chilling account of life in the grip of her father’s obsessive delusions of grandeur — In My Father’s House (Simon & Schuster, £14.99)
Most enjoyable poetry of the year was Simon Armitage’s robust reworking of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Faber, £12.99).
Best discovery from the past was Independent People by Haldor Laxness, Iceland’s equivalent of Thomas Hardy. It’s a magnificent epic about a crofter family in the early 20th century, when life was so harsh that the sight of a dandelion was a cause for celebration (Harvill, £8.99).
D. J. Taylor
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
David Cannadine’s Andrew Mellon (Allen Lane, £30) is a striking portrait of a great American misanthrope, which will be much enjoyed by those who persist in believing that money cannot buy happiness. I know that one ought not to compliment women in the presence of their husbands, but The Ordeal of Elizabeth March (HarperPress, £25) by Linda Colley (aka Mrs Cannadine) is a rather remarkable piece of archival detective work, the biography of a highly unconventional woman, propelled by
misfortune and curiosity to travel in 18th-century America, Africa and India. Her very existence was unknown before Colley made her a peg on which to hang some characteristically original reflections on the European diaspora of the 18th century. The second volume of F. P. Locke’s Edmund Burke (Clarendon Press, £190 for both volumes) completes a life of the great political theorist and orator which is unlikely to be superseded for a long time. We shall all learn to love the 18th century in the end.
Jane Ridley
The best heavyweight biography that I have read this year is Tim Jeal’s Stanley (Faber, £25). Wise, fair and deeply researched, Jeal’s book sets the record straight on the great Victorian explorer, exonerating him from allegations of racism, brutality and suppressed homosexuality. Jeal has an extraordinary tale of African adventure to tell and he tells it superbly well. A. N. Wilson’s enjoyable and erudite novel Winnie and Wolf (Hutchinson, £17.99) is the story of the romance between Hitler and Winfred Wagner, the composer’s English daughter-in-law. Wilson succeeds in making Hitler into a believable character, as well as giving fascinating insights into the worlds of Weimar Germany and Wagnerian opera. An Alphabet of Aunts by C. M. Dawnay (Jonathan Cape, £14.99) is the perfect solution to everyone’s Christmas present problem: a word-game book to be enjoyed by children and adults alike, deliciously illustrated by Mungo McCosh.
Bevis Hillier
In 100 years’ time I think the period of Eng. Lit. from 1959 (when the first volume of George Painter’s life of Proust appeared) to now will be regarded as the Age of Biography. With her books on Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Vita Sackville-West and Rebecca West, Victoria Glendinning has been one of the finest exponents of the genre, along with Peter Ackroyd, Robert Caro, Peter Conradi, P. N. Furbank, Michael Holroyd, Fiona MacCarthy, Peter Parker, Robert Skidelsky, Hilary Spurling, Judith Thurman and many others.
Glendinning’s biography Leonard Woolf was published in 2006 but came out in paperback this year (Simon & Schuster, £9.99). Until I read it, I had had two conflicting views of Woolf. The first was a naturally favourable one from his volumes of autobiography, which I lapped up in the 1960s, when I was in my twenties and he was still alive. The other was the jaundiced view of him as an irascible, humourless figure in Richard Kennedy’s A Boy at the Hogarth Press (1972), the first book of the Whittington Press, to which I wrote the introduction. Now Glendinning’s balanced, lucid biography has enabled me to steer my way between Scylla and Charybdis: Woolf was a goodie with a few baddie traits.
I’ve enjoyed Horses & Husbands: The Memoirs of Etti Plesch, edited by Hugo Vickers (Dovecote Press, £17.95). Etti was born an Austrian countess; married six times, thrice to counts (two of whom were seduced away by the femme fatale writer Louise de Vilmorin); and is the only woman ever to have won the Derby twice. This spoilt, calculating minx must have been pretty intolerable to know; and not Max Beerbohm, not Craig Brown, could contrive a parody of her more glorious and hilarious than the one she creates of herself. Take the opening of her book:
Recently I was in London lunching at the Connaught. The man at the next table was eating caviar … I did not envy him. His caviar was black. This seemed t o me typical of life today, in which so few high standards are maintained. There is no good caviar today. The best caviar I ever ate was at the wedding of Karim (the Aga Khan). It was grey with just a hint of pink.
To be fair to Etti, she does have a few amusing anecdotes and some juicy morsels of gossip, among them Louise de Vilmorin’s boast about the Duff Coopers — ‘I had Duff, I had Diana, but never together’ — but there are so many unconsciously priceless fragments, way beyond parody. Page 71: ‘Pali [Count Pali Palffy, her second husband] was kind and easy to get along with.’ Page 72: ‘One night … Pali got so annoyed that he picked up one of the musicians and threw him out of the window.’ ‘I thought [Hermann] Göring was charming if fat, while Goebbels I must say, was likeable and intelligent.’ ‘It is only about 10 years ago that I realised that servants had days off.’ ‘I have always advised girls that if they want to marry a rich man they must go to the best hotel in the city.’ ‘[Rosemarie Kanzler] and I came from very different backgrounds, which is to say that Rosemarie had no background at all.’ And:
Enid, Lady Kenmare was a great friend with an intriguing past. Willie Maugham nicknamed her ‘Lady Killmore’ as she was rumoured to have murdered as many as three former husbands.
I think Countess Etti should have written a book called Etti-quette.
Andrew Taylor
On one level, Tokyo Year Zero (Faber, £16.99) by David Peace is a murder mystery; on another it is a grimly effective exploration of Tokyo a year after the end of the second world war. Peace creates — or recreates? — a nightmarish vision of a society in disintegration, both physically and morally. Not for the squeamish, but this is a book that travels deep into its very own heart of darkness.
A different sort of darkness is investigated in Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter in the Dark (Orion, £9.99), whose central character is a Miami crime scene investigator and part-time psychopathic killer. With ingredients like that, the novel should be both nauseating and derivative, but it’s neither. It is dark, original, and often very funny — like the Dexter
series as a whole.
In Losing You (Michael Joseph, £12.99), Nicci French gives a brilliant demonstration of how simple a very good thriller can be: a teenage girl goes missing on the Essex coast; in a single day, her mother tries with increasing desperation to track her down, and in the process finds out more about her daughter than she ever suspected. A book to chill the heart of every parent.
Patrick Marnham
The Laughter of Mothers (Harvill Secker, £12), the latest collection of poems by Paul Durcan, takes us further through the story of his life in Dublin and Mayo, and tells us more about Ireland in the last 60 years than any three-volume history. We meet additional characters from his extraordinary re-imagined reality; his Aunt Sara Mary ‘one of the black, red-roaring fighting Durcans of Mayo’, who ran the family pub, and whose father had been put up against the wall by the IRA in 1923, and his Grand Aunt Maud Gonne, sitting up in bed and ‘sticking out her claws’ to embrace the infant poet before he ran terrified from the room. But this collection is above all a tribute to his gentle mother, who stood by him in times of trouble, and who ended her life leading a sensational break out of three old ladies from the Alzheimer’s home, ‘Driving West and Wearing Gold’.
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