Peter Parker
The New Zealand novelist Catherine Chidgey ought to be much more celebrated in this country than she is. Do not be put off by the fact that The Axeman’s Carnival (Europa, £14.99) is narrated by a magpie; whimsy is entirely absent from this highly original, thrillingly dark and often very funny novel. The bird is adopted by the wife of a cash-strapped farmer and learns to speak, becoming an internet sensation and so providing useful income. At the same time, its guileless chatter includes picked-up phrases that inadvertently expose what is really going on in the household where it has made its home.
Treat of the year was Sheila Robinson’s Balance, Humanity and Nature (Random Spectacular, £27.50), a clumsily titled but beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated account of the life and work of this wonderful printmaker and illustrator, whose career has sometimes been overshadowed by the other (male) artists associated with Great Bardfield.
Daniel Swift
Caroline Lucas was the UK’s first Green party MP and also did a PhD in English Literature. Her Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story (Hutchinson Heinemann, £22) deftly marries the political and the literary. Ranging over the myths and visions of England and Englishness offered by poets, novelists and politicians including Edward Thomas, P.D. James, William Blake, Stanley Baldwin and Boris Johnson, she argues that our literary history gives us rich material from which to build a new sense of this country, our place in it and how we might face the future. Another England is idealistic, naive and freewheeling, as urgent and lively books often are. I loved it and it is certainly my book of the year.
Stephen Bayley
Although I could never be described as a rural person, two books have excited the bosky sprite in my generally undisturbed elfin grot. The first was Alexandra Harris’s The Rising Down (Faber, £26). Harris is a cultural historian whose previous book was Weatherland, an account of how native artists and writers have reacted to weather. The Rising Down is enchanting, if undefinable. It manages to be both impressively scholarly and delightfully conversational. It’s a macro account of Sussex which goes into micro details – part social history, part geology, psychogeography and personal memoir. There’s a lot of drilling down into this AONB, but of the speculative, not extractive, sort. Harris gives impressive new status to the concept of ‘local history’. It’s a very fine and touching book. Beautifully written, too.
Entirely different in character, if not so very different in ethos, is Will Jones’s Cabin – how to build a retreat in the wilderness and learn to live with nature (Thames & Hudson, £20). We all know the poetics of cabin life from the fantasist Henry David Thoreau, but Jones has written a practical guide. Here you can learn how to set a saddle and beam into a concrete block, assemble your necessary tools (pickaxe, caulking gun, blowtorch, tin snips, block plane) and fashion for yourself a replica Navajo hogan. Truly, the stuff that dreams are made of.
Justin Marozzi
For those of us who love a good spy thriller and long ago exhausted John le Carré, it’s been slim pickings in recent years, Mick Herron notwithstanding. Then along came the former CIA analyst David McCloskey with Damascus Station in 2021 and things have never been the same again. Moscow X (Swift Press, £9.99), his follow-up, is equally enjoyable – marginally less gut-wrenching on the torture front but just as tense – and a timely reminder of how ghastly rich Russians are.
The Oxford professor Eugene Rogan is as good a guide as any to the Middle East. The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World (Allen Lane, £30) is a masterful blend of academic rigour and storytelling flair. That happy synthesis is also achieved by Rachel Kousser in Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great (Blackstone, £33). Her Macedonian empire-builder is a brilliant, reckless, obsessive psychopath. In Battleground: Ten Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East (Yale, £18.99), Christopher Phillips offers a lucid and highly readable account of a region that tragically continues to self-immolate, with a little help from its friends.
Andrea Wulf
Normally I find it difficult to choose the best book of the year, but not so this time. My absolute favourite is Richard Powers’s Playground (Hutchinson Heinemann, £20). He is one of our finest storytellers, taking important present-day subjects, from environmental issues to AI, and turning them into riveting novels. What his Overstory did for trees, Playground is doing for the oceans. Powers weaves together science, emotions and our wonder at nature. The result is a mesmerising, hugely important tale.
I also enjoyed a very different kind of book – non-fiction, quieter, slower, but also fascinating. Martin Goodman’s My Head for a Tree (Profile, £14.99) is about the Bishnois, a community in India who protect trees with their lives. They are the first true environmentalists and their story is remarkable.
Throughout the year, I’ve immersed myself in Maggie O’Farrell’s back catalogue, and the more I read, the more I admire her genius for creating worlds into which I can disappear. There is a joy in acquainting oneself with a writer’s oeuvre, a pleasure which I haven’t really allowed myself since my early twenties (too many books, too many writers, too many stories, too many distractions). I’m refusing to pick one of her titles because the delight lies in their entirety.
Hilary Spurling
Xinran’s Book of Secrets: A Personal History of Betrayal in Red China (Bloomsbury, £25) tells the true story of Jie, an idealistic young revolutionary unconditionally dedicated to the Chinese Communist party. He survives the Japanese invasion in 1937, civil war, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the ensuing famine that killed nearly 40 million people and the chaotic violence of the Cultural Revolution. Ten years in a labour camp wrecked his home life and led to implacable political persecution that ended only with his death. ‘In modern China, all human lives are being re-carved under the knife of the party,’ writes Xinran, who has spent the past two decades telling stories like this one that show the price paid in human terms.
Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad (William Collins, £10.99) is another book of horrors related with extraordinary grace, warmth and clarity by Daniel Finkelstein, whose family on both sides was decimated by the Holocaust.
Boyd Tonkin
Good novels about the processes – and principles – of politics are vanishingly rare; funny, artful and exuberant ones are almost non-existent. Yet in The Night-Soil Men (Salt, £12.99), Bill Broady conjures the careers of three north country Labour party pioneers (Philip Snowden, Fred Jowett and Victor Grayson) into an improbably entertaining carnival-chronicle of high ideals and low skulduggery. In another fictional galaxy, Samantha Harvey’s eerily beautiful Orbital (Vintage, £9.99), a group of International Space Station astronauts become rapt witnesses to the greatness, and smallness, of humanity as they/we hurtle through the void.
In The Island (Faber, £25), an epic study of the young W.H. Auden, Nicholas Jenkins brilliantly scales up fine-grained literary criticism into wide-angled cultural history. And a pair of unbowed truth-tellers splendidly unite courage, comedy and defiant verve in their reports from the planet of trauma and recovery: Salman Rushdie in Knife (Cape, £20) and Hanif Kureishi in Shattered (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99).
Graham Robb
Roger Lytollis is that rarissima avis: a shy investigative reporter. His Panic as Man Burns Crumpets (Robinson, £16.99) is a hilarious and depressing account of the shrivelling of local journalism and the abuse flung at the ‘sad wankers’ who produce it. Lytollis was one of the last remaining wits of the Cumberland News. Now, an adjustment to the price of a fast-food product counts as a major event. Reports of council and court proceedings are rare and skimpy, and the only humour is accidental: ‘A dog owner was fined because their dog wasn’t wearing a mussel.’
The closure of Britain’s last coal-fired power station induced me to read Richard Llewellyn’s bestselling novel of 1939, How Green Was My Valley, which I had been warned was mawkish lowbrow literature. It is a brilliantly narrated account of growing up in a Welsh mining community. I have only the faintest idea why the Oxford Companion to English Literature excludes it.
Ruth Scurr
The best novel I have read this year is Roz Dineen’s Briefly Very Beautiful (Bloomsbury, £16.99). In the tradition of haunting dystopian fiction by women (Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood), Dineen begins her novel in a London-like city ravaged by climate degradation and terrorism. From this desperate setting, she draws a tender portrait of maternal love. Her central character, Cass, has three small children to protect: two stepchildren and one biological child by her absent partner. To Cass, the children are everything – ‘mine-mine’ she says, holding her stepson close and deciding the time has come to leave the violent, smoke-filled city. Briefly Very Beautiful is a poetic and sensual page-turner that perfectly captures motherhood on the brink of apocalypse.
Andrew Lycett
Having excoriated the East India Company’s exploitative practices in recent books, William Dalrymple adopts a different approach to power (mainly soft) in The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury, £30). He celebrates how, through trade, missionaries and sometimes might, India’s influence expanded into Central and South-east Asia, giving rise, for a millennium and a half from around 250 BC, to an ‘Indosphere’, where its ideas, art and religions dominated. With a mind-boggling mastery of sources, Dalrymple weaves a thrilling tale of India’s cultural hegemony, not forgetting its invention of mathematics and related disciplines still used today.
History in the House by Richard Davenport-Hines (William Collins, £26) is a splendid account – acerbic, learned and unabashedly politically incorrect – of how history has been taught at Christ Church, Oxford, inculcating a gentlemanly tradition of public service (13 prime ministers studied there), in what was long the university’s most exclusive and aristocratic college.
I inwardly groaned on hearing that Nick Harkaway was taking up his father John le Carré’s mantle to write a George Smiley ‘continuation novel’. But Karla’s Choice (Viking, £22) is brilliant – every bit as suspenseful and knowing as the original, and often more humorous.
Rod Liddle
Because I do almost all of my reading on Kindle, I am no longer aware of either the title of each book I’ve read or the author. This is a problem when I particularly like a book and wish to read more by the same writer, and also when I’m asked to do stuff like this. I do recall getting around to The Offing by Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury, £8.99), which was kind of unexpectedly wonderful – lyrical, evocative and even uplifting. I say ‘unexpectedly’ because it wasn’t what I expected from a Brutalist whose first venture was The Book of Fuck.
That mischievous little monkey Jasper Fforde was on his best form yet with Red Side Story (Hodder & Stoughton, £20). For once it was possible to invest a little in the characters, as well as enjoying the incessant puns and Fforde’s marvellously eccentric imagination.
I spent the first few months of the year reading every book written by David Mitchell – no, not that smug comedian – having thrilled to Cloud Atlas. I can report that the best of the rest is The Thousand Summers of Jacob De Zoet, followed by Black Swan Green. But they are all worth reading – he is surely our finest living novelist.
I also read The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson Heinemann, £22) and was enjoying it greatly until the grave and despicable act of sexual transgression at the end. Oi, Faulks! No! No!
Mark Cocker
Kapka Kassabova’s Anima: A Wild Pastoral (Cape £22) is a hymn to our continent’s last shepherds in Bulgaria’s Rhodope mountains. The author displays great courage during her summers of near-total isolation and literary daring in arguing for the importance of a non-human realm in the affairs of all Europeans.
Yet my book of the year (and the century) explains with unparalleled clarity why the biosphere should be central to all human values. Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (Yale, £14.99) documents in exacting detail how the hemispheres in our brains create separate, if complementary, versions of ‘reality’. The author is a top neuroscientist, but his arguments draw on all western civilisation, particularly the arts. No work better accounts for our current ecological crises or explains more clearly why we should lead lives fully integrated with the natural realm. It is a monumental achievement: a touchstone for all environmental action.
Claire Lowdon
My inner medieval history geek was roused from dormancy by Bart Van Loo’s gloriously rambunctious The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire (Apollo, £12), which tells the tale of the Burgundian dukes who presided over Flanders during its extraordinary late-medieval boom time. Van Loo whisks the reader through bloody battles, scurrilous in-fighting and plenty of political intrigue, accompanied by memorable character portraits of murderous John the Fearless, randy Philip the Good and creepy Charles the Bold. As in so many Early Netherlandish paintings, however, the star of the show is the background detail, from descriptions of eye-poppingly lavish Burgundian feasts to discussions of technology, textiles and the medieval relationship with time. In Nancy Forest-Flier’s lively translation from the Dutch this ostensibly obscure chapter of European history feels both otherworldly and startlingly modern.
Sara Wheeler
Like all Ian Frazier’s books, Paradise Bronx (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, £26.60) shows that seeing is more important than travelling. Frazier paints a portrait of a New York borough crouching in the shadow of Manhattan – one the size of Paris, with 42 branches of McDonald’s and a single bookshop. He brilliantly pulls off the hardest thing – to blend history and personal narrative and not let the joins show.
On another note, I enjoyed Thom Gunn by Michael Nott (Faber, £25). The book reveals slowly, but rather wonderfully, how a great writer makes the choices that shape him. Nott conveys, with tenderness, what happens when desire takes the upper hand.
Mary Beard
My book of 2024 was first published in 1925 but has long been out of print. Reissued this year, it is Jane Ellen Harrison’s Reminiscences of a Student’s Life (McNally Editions, £14.99) – a short, quirky memoir of a notorious classicist and Britain’s first professional female ‘academic’ in the modern sense of the word. If that sounds a little niche, I promise that it isn’t. The book is full of Harrison’s hilarious anecdotes: facing down William Gladstone; being expected to curtsy to the young Hirohito on his visit to Cambridge (it was, she said, some consolation to know that he believed himself to be a god); and her sometimes capricious leniency as a magistrate on the Cambridge bench (she claimed to have let off an Armenian simply because he spoke such a difficult language). It’s a wonderful evocation of women’s resilience and spirit in a university that still excluded them from degrees.
Roger Lewis
Should you be white, married with children and properly educated, forget about ever receiving public recognition in the arts – the Royal Society of Literature, for example, routinely cancels such wretches. Far better to be transgender – that’s becoming compulsory. For this reason I lapped up Bonjour Mademoiselle: April Ashley and the Pursuit of a Lovely Life by Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts (Scribe, £22). What’s here coyly described as ‘gender-affirming surgery’ was much more graphically described in Duncan Fallowell’s biography April Ashley’s Odyssey (1982) – worth finding and ripe for republication. Unlike subsequent studies in the field, it’s a work of literature.
Tom Holland
The Eagle and the Hart (Allen Lane, £25) is a brilliant achievement in which Helen Castor fashions out of the lives of the two royal cousins, Richard II and Henry IV, not just a glorious work of history but a gripping and haunting tragedy. She is not, of course, the first writer to have made a drama out of the crisis that brought the Lancastrians to power, but it is the measure of her genius for narrative and character that the tale she tells does not remotely suffer from comparison with Shakespeare. Two men of remarkable but opposed talent, yoked together in mutual hatred, in death as in life, each doomed forever to be defined by the other: here is tragedy indeed. There was no book published this year, novels included, that I found richer in character; no plot more taut.
William Dalrymple
How did the great schism within Islam between Sunni and Shia develop? In The House Divided (Profile, £25), Barnaby Rogerson traces the way in which the 16th-century confrontation between the Ottomans of Turkey and the Safavids of Iran cemented what had previously been a much more porous division. Rogerson is an eloquent and always fascinating guide to one of the crucial turning points of Persian and Middle Eastern history. Few British authors understand the region so intimately.
Another wonderful writer is Stephen Platt, whose dauntingly erudite and beautifully crafted study of the Opium Wars, Imperial Twilight (Atlantic, £25) is a superb narrative history, full of fabulous characters and well-plotted twists. Platt demonstrates a complete mastery of the complex world of mid-19th century China.
Whole libraries have been written on the Ramayana and the question of the historicity of the most popular of the South Asian epics, but the legacy of the demon Ravana is less well known. In Ravana’s Lanka (Penguin India, Rps 320), Sunela Jayewardene searches her beloved island for evidence for Rama’s greatest adversary and comes to a series of often surprising conclusions about his realm. At once a personal quest for the roots of a nation and an exploration of the meaning in a myth, the book is also a beautiful written celebration of one of the loveliest islands on Earth.
Finally, Pankaj Mishra illuminates a far darker landscape in The World After Gaza (Fern Press, £20). As scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original, it’s by a long way the saddest and most thought-provoking book I have read this year.
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