Books of the year – part two

Daniel Swift

I feel as though I came late to the Sarah Moss party. Nobody told me she was this divided country’s most urgent novelist. Her themes: the cycles of history, male absurdity, the forms female subversion may take, in irony, sickness and sacrifice. It helps that she’s absurdly topical, and that she’s funny. Her new book, Ghost Wall (Granta, £12.99), is the shorter, spikier companion piece to her previous novel, The Tidal Zone. It is about ancient Britain and its re-enactment in the present day, and like all the novels I’ve loved best this year, it’s also a parable.

Other parables: I was hugely moved by Jesse Ball’s allegorical Census (Granta, £14.99), about love and Down’s Syndrome, and am so glad that the austere Australian fabulist Gerald Murnane is getting the wide attention he deserves.

Sara Wheeler

I gulped down Last Stories by William Trevor (Viking Penguin, £14.99). Up to his usual stellar standard but, as we lost him two years ago, the pages sang like a threnody. Is it possible that there won’t ever be another Trevor to look forward to? I shall have to start at the beginning again and work my way through the oeuvre.

I greatly enjoyed the ruminative, gothic travelogue The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places by William Atkins (Faber, £20). Besides the Gobi, Atkins tackles a sliver of the fearsome 370,000-sqkm Taklamakan. It’s a vital topic. ‘It has been estimated,’ he writes, ‘that desertification affects a sixth of humankind and 70 per cent of all arid areas.’ The book is as much history as travelogue.

The welcome trend for rewriting myths produced Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99), which is the Iliad from a female perspective. I loved it.