Book Reviews

Stand aside, Homer. I doubt whether even the author of the Iliad could have matched Alexis Peri’s account of the 872-day siege which Leningrad endured after Hitler’s army encircled the city in September 1941. I never knew, for example, that if an adult starved for months on a few ounces of bread daily, a sip of soup and very little water — if they were lucky enough to get their daily rations — you couldn’t tell when they were naked whether they were male or female. I wouldn’t have believed that starving parents might eat their dead children, or vice versa; yet 1,500 Leningraders were arrested for cannibalism. When people

In the year of Roald Dahl’s centenary, the Spectator Books Podcast decided to debate this sacred cow. Lucy Mangan, author of Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory, drapes garlands of flowers; while the critic James McConnachie readies the captive bolt gun… Who will you agree with? Find out by listening here: And if you enjoyed this week’s episode please subscribe on iTunes!

A good year for novels. Rachel Cusk’s Transit (Cape, £16.99) is a brilliant and original enterprise, as well as a hymn to the joys of the good story. Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton (Viking, £12.99) shouldn’t work, but its frail texture was a triumph of tenderness, and sent me back to her excellent Olive Kitteridge. And I loved David Szalay’s scabrous, intelligent and hugely engaging All That Man Is (Cape, £14.99). My major discovery, though, was Joy Williams, whose collected stories, The Visiting Privilege (Tuskar Rock, £16.99), proved an electric and dangerously human volume. Not making sense, and making too much sense, is Williams’s alarming territory. You will

Kate Loveman’s Samuel Pepys and his Books (Oxford, £60) abounded in memorable touches: Pepys buying a Mass book in 1660 and reading it aloud late into the night ‘with great pleasure to my wife to hear that she long ago was so well acquainted with’; or Pepys writing handy memos to self: ‘Consult Sir Wm Petty about the No. of Men in the World &c’. I like the ‘&c’. From The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Peter Gilliver (Oxford, £40) I learnt that Charles Onions, 1872–1965, the OED’s fourth editor, pronounced his name like the vegetable and, on a larger canvas, of the stupendous struggle to wrestle millions

Easily the most original novel of the year was Charlotte Hobson’s The Vanishing Futurist (Faber, £16.99). It tells the story of an English governess who finds herself caught up in the Russian Revolution; but instead of retreating to the safety of Cornwall, she stays on in order to join a sort of prototype commune run by the charismatic Futurist Nikita Slavkin. Entirely sui generis, it also boasts the year’s best cover design. This is the book I’ll be giving people for Christmas. World events were gloomy when Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth (Bloomsbury, £18.99) and Ali Smith’s Autumn (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99) appeared. Each of these books describes the best in human nature:

Hot on the heels of his books about the Bible and the Queen comes A.N. Wilson’s witty, learned, utterly self-possessed novel Resolution (Atlantic, £16), about the turbulent life of George Forster. He was the Polish-born, Warrington-raised, multi-lingual Enlightenment scholar-scientist who, aged 18, was appointed botanist on board the Resolution. His popular account of the voyage pipped Captain Cook’s own book to the post. So Wilson’s Forster is a guilty man, a protégé who murdered his master: ‘It now amazes me that I had the gall, the sheer cheek, to write my Voyage book. I wrote it fast. We finished it before Cook. It sold well — only now do I

Does size matter? This year my go-to stocking filler will be the pocket-sized Grow a Pair by Joanna Walsh, from Readux Books: 64 pages of unadulterated pleasure ($4.99). Walsh’s collection of hilarious, nimbly interlinked ‘fairy tales about sex’ (‘The Three Big Dicks’, ‘The Princess and the Penis’) is a comic gem to set beside Nicholson Baker’s slim masterpiece Vox (1992), a book about phone sex. Make like Monica Lewinsky and give Vox to the Bill Clinton in your life, or treat yourself and go solo: either way, both these books will make you laugh, blush, and nod in delighted — if risqué — recognition. Not so good on sex was

Back in 2006, David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, hired me as guide for his first trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to research The Mission Song. Evenings were spent on the terrace of the Orchids Hotel in Bukavu, watching pirogues languidly traverse Lake Kivu, ice cubes clinking in respective glasses of Scotch. It was easily the most entertaining ten days of my life, despite the stonking hangovers. Cornwell proved to be a thespian manqué. The wry, extremely funny anecdotes about his career as diplomat, spy and writer, his charming conman father, his peripatetic childhood and his encounters with the likes of Yasser Arafat, Richard Burton and Rupert Murdoch

As events unfolded this year, it was reassuring to read superb non-fiction that celebrated expertise. Two stand out. Trials: On Death Row in Pakistan (Penguin, £16.99) tells how Isabel Buchanan, fresh from a law degree, applied her feeling and intelligence to apprentice in a jurisdiction which, by 2014, saw a person executed every day. Ed Yong’s magnificent revaluation of bacteriology, I Contain Multitudes (Penguin, £20), counsels humility for student doctors like me: modern medicine’s pathogens may be the future’s therapeutics. And then there is Mark Greif’s Against Everything (Verso, £16.99), which — as its title suggests — matches brilliant critique with improbable optimism. His essays risk embarrassment to analyse the irritations of urban life

Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 (Borough, £16.99) is set in a bankrupt America where the middle classes are foraging to survive. All aspects of the dystopia are thoroughly and chillingly imagined — but without ever losing the psychological plausibility of a gripping family saga. My other favourite novel was Jonathan Unleashed (Bloomsbury, £14.99), Meg Rosoff’s first work for adults. For some writers, twentysomething Jonathan’s inability to ‘cross the huge gulf between childhood and adulthood’ might be evidence of male inadequacy. Rosoff, though, shows how right he is to be scared about growing up, in an exhilarating read that makes abiding pessimism very funny indeed. Finally, for all music fans, there’s David Hepworth’s 1971 (Bantam,

Best novel: no question, Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen (Atlantic Books, £13.50). A Florida comcrime (I just made that word up) which makes you feel better about the US in a year when that’s been tricky. You can be sexually saucy and inoffensive — a lesson Donald has never learned. It’s been a crowning year for our best living literary critic, Sir Christopher Ricks. His long campaign for Bob Dylan to be taken seriously in a literary way has triumphed. His edition of The Poems of T. S. Eliot with his co-editor Jim McCue, (Faber, two volumes, £26 each) is (literally) monumental and will last for as long as poetry is read. Peter

Novelists can’t merely tell cracking tales. We’re supposed to save the world. At the University of Kent, a student implored me to inscribe The Mandibles with instructions for ‘how to keep this from happening’ — for the feverish young man now vowed to devote his life to preventing my new novel’s debt-fuelled near-future financial collapse. And I thought I was just doing a book signing. I wrote, ‘To keep this from happening, pay your bills. To cash in on this happening, get as deeply into debt as possible.’ The next student proffered a tiny spiral notebook, in which I was to jot ‘three things that are really important’. In desperation, I

Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (Bodley Head, £30) is an impressive and fascinating read. I have no idea what Lutherans have made of it, but for those of us who have harboured an irrational dislike of this extraordinary and unpleasant man, it’s a comfort to know we weren’t completely wrong. It’s taken me a long time to come across her, but it’s hard to imagine there is a better short-story writer than Deborah Eisenberg. All unmistakably hers, all intriguingly different, and almost all brilliant, her Collected Stories (Picador USA, £17.75) brings together 30 years’ work that shows no sign of going off in quality. Click here for more Spectator Books of the Year

My novel-reading year has been dominated by Barbara Pym, starting with Excellent Women (Virago, £8.99). Pym is usually likened to Jane Austen, but her hilarious situation comedies and recurring characters constantly reminded me of Balzac. Island Home: A Landscape Memoir (Picador, £12.99) is an all-too-brief autobiography by the novelist Tim Winton. He sees Europe with the eyes of an extra-terrestrial, finding nature ‘impossibly fertile’ and the Alps ‘claustrophobic’. As an unhappy schoolboy in Western Australia, he explored the violent, delicate landscapes which cars have erased, rendering ‘the outlandish mundane’. Winton’s dry, physical descriptions have the opposite effect. Hannah Kohler’s The Outside Lands (Picador, £12.99), the tense saga of an American family at the time

The Vanishing Man (Chatto, £18.99) by Laura Cumming is a moving memorial, written in the wake of the death of the author’s father. An impassioned celebration of Velázquez and a snapshot of the snobberies of the art world in the mid-19th century, it’s a cracking good story to boot. By contrast, a slow read rather than a page-turner, Ann Wroe’s Six Facets of Light (Cape, £25) is a compendium of art, literature and science that takes you from Fra Angelico and Eric Ravilious, Milton and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Einstein, Newton and Clerk Maxwell. A book for winter. Click here for more Spectator Books of the Year

My novel of the year was What Belongs to You (Picador, £12.99), Garth Greenwell’s slender, poised, clear-eyed and devastating account of the depths to which unrequited sexual obsession can lead you, particularly if you become entangled with a rent-boy in Sofia. I also enjoyed and admired Aravind Adiga’s funny and touching Selection Day (Picador, £16.99), in which cricketing prodigies in Mumbai face googlies from both bowlers and life. And Tom Bullough’s densely and thrillingly written Addlands (Granta, £14.99), which traces the lives of a farming family on the Welsh borders through 70 years. Treat of the year was Richard Stokes’s The Penguin Book of English Song (Penguin, £30), an original and invaluable anthology of poems that have been

I loved Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton, £12.99). It’s a short, characteristically oblique story of a young woman in southern Spain with her crapulous mother, there to attend a dodgy-sounding, marble-adorned medical establishment where they hope to find — at last — a cure for the mother’s inability to walk. It’s no surprise it didn’t win the Man Booker prize, because as well as being elegant and deeply strange, it’s hummingly funny throughout. As we all know, prize juries regard jokes as a distinct disadvantage. I’m reviewing the year’s cricket books at the moment for next April’s Wisden, and the outstanding volume so far has been The Grade Cricketer, by Dave Edwards, Sam

Far and Away: How Travel Can Change the World is a collection of pieces by the American essayist Andrew Solomon (Chatto, £25). From Moscow to Mongolia, Antarctica to Afghanistan, Solomon observes the world and reflects what he sees both on himself and on his own country. Resilience, hope, flux: Solomon has an outsider’s eagle eye. A dazzling volume. I also enjoyed On Reading, Writing and Living with Books (Pushkin Press, £4.99). This slim tome is among the first of a gorgeous new series culling extracts from the shelves of the London Library, an institution which celebrates its 175th birthday this year. Authors anthologised include Virginia Woolf and George Eliot. In