Books of the year, chosen by our regular reviewers

Clare Mulley

In the past I have sometimes wondered how many books I would read if only someone had the kindness to lock me up. It turns out, this Covid year, not to be so many — but the quality has been high. Amelia Gentleman’s brilliant and devastating The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (Guardian Faber, £10.99) fuelled me with an outrage in no way diminished by David Olusoga’s masterful and hugely compelling Black and British: A Forgotten History(Pan, £12.99). I know I was late to the party for that book but, as statues tumbled, I enjoyed Keith Lowe’s very timely and thought-provoking Prisoners of History: What Monuments Tell Us About History and Ourselves (William Collins, £20). Finally, you can’t beat a bit of Ben Macintyre when in need of distraction, and Agent Sonya (Viking, £25) doesn’t disappoint.

Philip Hensher

A strange year for a reader; and the most compelling literary experience I had was reading every one of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels between March and July. The greatest vogue this novelist had was during the war years and in the time of privation afterwards. Reading, without distraction, her penetrating, disillusioned voices in the silence of an immured city was to understand why many of her contemporaries thought her the greatest English novelist of their time. When the climax of Elders and Betters (1944) came, and the small boy asks, ‘with increasing violence’, ‘Have we been through an impossible day through no fault of our own, or have we not?’, it was as if the novelist had understood what was to come, and what her readers would live through. They are currently unfashionable novels — you will hunt for most of them on second-hand books websites — but, as I rediscovered, great masterpieces.

It was a disappointing year for new publications, only partly attributable to the disruptions of Covid.