Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (Hogarth, £16.99), her modern version of The Taming of the Shrew, came as a surprise: the funniest book she has written, much funnier than Shakespeare. Private Eye considers that I should not praise Ferdinand Mount because I was at Eton with him but we never spoke to each other there, so

I’ve chosen two very different stories of young American lives. In Another Day in the Death of America (Guardian/Faber, £16.99), the journalist Gary Younge anatomises American society and its squandered potential by means of a simple conceit: he chose a random date in 2013 and investigated the lives of those children and teenagers shot and