Books of the Year | 24 November 2007

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.