Books of the Year for Christmas

Franzen’s Freedom and Larkin’s Letters, Tony Blair’s inner ‘animal’ and 100 objects that told the history of the world – in this special issue we survey the literary highlights of 2010. But first, leading names select their personal favourites… and the presents they’ll be giving this Christmas.
Hilary Mantel
Annabel Lyon won prizes in her native Canada for her note-perfect historical novel The Golden Mean (Atlantic, £14.99), but here it has not had the attention it deserves. It tells the story of Aristotle and the young Alexander; her interpretation of their relationship and their world is luminous and deeply intelligent. Richard Cohen’s Chasing the Sun: the Epic Story of the Star that Gives Us Life (Simon & Schuster, £30) is a warming book for short winter days, blending myth with history and science, and guaranteed to please and fascinate almost any reader.
Orlando Figes
David Nicholls’s One Day (Hodder, £7.99) is hugely enjoyable, and Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists (Quercus, £16.99), though really a collection of short stories, is memorably good for a debut. But my book of the year is Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live: a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Chatto, £16.99), a jewel of a book and a perfect introduction to the great Renaissance writer, whose “essais” are a constant inspiration, source of entertainment and practical philosophy for life.
Antonia Fraser
The non-fiction book I enjoyed most this year was Philip Ziegler’s masterly biography of Edward Heath (HarperPress, £25). It may come as a surprise to find that a Life of this prime minister is exciting. Heath’s chronological position, between the colourful figures of Wilson and Thatcher, has diverted us from what an extraordinary political life he had. As for fiction, no year that includes two thrillers by Lee Child – 61 Hours (Bantam, £7.99) is better than Worth Dying For (Bantam, £18.99) – can be anything but blessed. Jack Reacher is another loner like Heath, but he has a more dramatic love life.
Colm Tóibín
Ghost Light (Harvill Secker, £16.99) by Joseph O’Connor tells the story of the love affair between the playwright John Millington Synge and the actress Molly Allgood. It displays an astonishing command of voice, using tones that are both tender and powerfully emotional, with brilliant command of the period. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Hamish Hamilton, £20) display one of the great contemporary American stylists, someone in possesssion of a glittering mind and a way of dealing with experience which is original and sharp. I also enjoyed Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto, £16.99) for the quality of the writing and the evocation of a Europe that was destroyed. Philip Larkin’s Letters to Monica (Faber, £22.50) are a hoot and make clear that Larkin was not only a good poet but a great big sour softie.
Esther Freud
I was entranced and moved by Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand That First Held Mine (Headline, £10.99), a novel that proves yet again what a brilliant storyteller she is. Louise Doughty’s Whatever You Love (Faber, £12.99), about a woman reeling from the death of her daughter, is a masterful, structurally perfect thriller. Helen Simpson’s elegant short stories In-Flight Entertainment (Cape, £14.99) cleverly bring home their serious message, and Polly Samson’s Perfect Lives (Virago, £15.99) is a life-enhancing treat of a book, stories too, but strung together cleverly into a novel. I also loved Tim Parks’s searingly honest memoir, Teach Us to Sit Still (Harvill Secker, £12.99) about his prostate problems, which unlikely as it sounds, was funny and inspiring.
Simon Schama
The Israeli writer David Grossman’s novel To the End of the Land (Cape, £18.99) has some first-rate writing about the craziness of modern war; but it is also a book about the Jewish family that manages to embody Palestinian suffering while not being sentimental about Israeli Arabs. The opening can be a bit difficult to read, but I would urge everyone to stick with it. It is unsettling, moving and profound and it’s been splendidly translated from the Hebrew. I also rather loved Stephen J Pyne’s history of the Voyager space journey, Voyager (Viking).
Jeffrey Archer
My book of the year is, without question, Sir Tommy MacPherson’s autobiography, Behind Enemy Lines (Mainstream, £17.99). Sir Tommy, who I’ve known for more than 40 years, is often described as the bravest man of the Second World War – he’s certainly the most decorated, having won three MCs, three Croix de Guerre, and the Légion d’Honneur, not to mention being awarded a CBE and a Papal Knighthood – all in the space of four years. The book reads like a combination of a Biggles adventure and Dick Barton. I have also spent many happy hours browsing Caravaggio: the Complete Paintings (Taschen, £99.99) by Sebastian Schutze, and several productive hours reading Strictly English (Random House, £12.99) by Simon Heffer.
Claire Messud
This year, I’ve been a judge for Canada’s Giller Prize and can recommend a significant number of works of Canadian fiction; but the Giller lists, long and short, already do that. In addition, I’ve been enthralled and inspired by Christopher Hitchens’s autobiography Hitch-22 (Atlantic, £20). I’ve been deeply moved by Tony Judt’s reminiscence-in-essays, The Memory Chalet (Heinemann, £16.99). Many of these pieces appeared in The New York Review of Books before his death this summer. And I’ve delighted in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador) by one of America’s finest practitioners of the form. My only complaint about this book is that there aren’t more stories to collect.
Andrew Motion
For Booker reasons, I’ve spent most of this year reading fiction – and the shortlist contains my six best novels of the year, with Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury, £18.99) a very impressive and enjoyable winner. Apart from that: Seamus Heaney’s wonderfully contained and understated Human Chain (Faber, £12.99) and Jo Shapcott’s similarly modest (and similarly potent) Of Mutability (Faber, £12.99) stand out among poetry collections.
Sebastian Faulks
I enjoyed Michael Lewis’s The Big Short (Allen Lane, £25) on the sub-prime mortgage crisis in America. It’s slightly technical, but he’s such a funny writer and so good and clear at explaining how finance works.
Nicholas Shakespeare
The author of Suite Française led a short, bright, tragic existence, well-told in The Life of Irène Némirovsky (Chatto, £25) by Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt. A re-reading of Allan Massie’s masterful drama about Vichy France, A Question of Loyalties (Canongate, £8.99), confirms it to be one of the best novels by a contemporary British writer, a virtuoso example of what fiction can do that history can’t. I also enjoyed Barbara Trapido’s Sex and Stravinsky (Bloomsbury, £11.99), a multicultural family saga that embraces France, South Africa, Australia and North Oxford.
Peter Mandelson
High Financier: the Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg by Niall Ferguson (Allen Lane, £30). Politicians often struggle to do detail. It’s easier to deal in vision and the long-term view. The world of finance is the reverse. But in the case of the iconic German/British banker Siegmund Warburg, the two came together. Ferguson’s account of Warburg’s life not only reveals a prophet of European unification and, later, globalisation, but a banker from a more responsible (and civilised) era. Having learnt from the excesses and chaos of the Thirties, Warburg created a model which set the standard which others followed and which we now have to rediscover.
Jilly Cooper
One of the loveliest sounds of the year was the tumultous cheer that rang out when the15-times champion jump jockey, AP McCoy, at last won the Grand National. In McCoy (Racing Post, £20) that peerless racing correspondent, Brough Scott, pays tribute to AP’s incredible career.The other lovely sound this year was the laughter, at the British Book Awards, that greeted Paul O’Grady’s spiel when he presented the Popular Fiction Award. Paul is that precious thing: as funny on the page as on the stage. The second volume of his autobiography, The Devil Rides Out (Bantam, £20), is even funnier and more touching than the million-selling first volume. It follows Paul’s riotous life from dizzy teenager to even dizzier drag queen. I defy anyone not to enjoy this book.
Amanda Foreman
I loved Voices from the Grave (Faber, £14.99), Ed Moloney’s interviews with the IRA mastermind Brendan “The Dark” Hughes, and the UVF bomber David Ervine. Because both men were dying when they recorded their testimonies, Moloney's account does more to reveal the sordid truth of the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland than any other book in print. But most important, Hughes makes a persuasive claim about Jean McConville – the Belfast mother of 10 – who was kidnapped and murdered on the orders of the IRA. Voices from the Grave opens up the possibility of justice for one of the greatest crimes ever committed by any side during the Troubles.
Alexander McCall Smith
I was one of those many readers who enjoyed every minute of Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag. This year, in Operation Mincemeat (Bloomsbury, £7.99), Macintyre has again given us a wonderfully readable version of one of the great stories of the Second World War. In order to mislead the Germans as to the Allies’ real target in the Mediterranean, a body was dumped off the Spanish coast – conveniently carrying sensitive military letters. The Germans swallowed it hook, line and sinker. The whole story is told here in fascinating detail. I also enjoyed Listen To This (Fourth Estate, £25) by The New Yorker’s music critic, Alex Ross. This is a series of essays on diverse aspects of music by one who explains complex ideas in an admirably intelligible, helpful way.
Allison Pearson
I stayed up all night to finish What to Look for in Winter (Cape, £18.99), Candia McWilliam’s extraordinary account of how a beautiful, feted novelist became a “fat ghost”, an alcoholic slaking her addiction with cleaning fluid. Just when it seemed Fate had done its worst, McWilliam lost her eyesight. There is a horrible amount of misery lit out there; most of it misery without the redeeming power of lit. This book is the opposite. The blind author does not wallow in her suffering; rather she uses her formidable word armoury to vanquish the dark. Anyone suffering Downton Abbey withdrawal symptoms (who isn't?) will find an instant tonic in Daisy Goodwin’s My Last Duchess (Headline, £12.99). The story of Cora Cash, an American heiress in the 1890s who bags an English duke, this is a deliciously evocative first novel that lingers in the mind. Henry James with belles on.
Charles Saumarez Smith
I hugely admired Alexandra Harris’s Romantic Moderns (Thames & Hudson, £19.95). It’s a beautifully written analysis of the highways and byways of English culture in the Thirties – its attitudes to cooking and the weather, the establishment of the Georgian Group and Victoriana. It could be fey, but isn’t.
Antony Beevor
Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (Bodley Head, £25) is the most important work of history for years. Snyder shows what really took place between 1930 and 1945 in the Baltic states, Belarus, Poland and Ukraine. From the Stalinist famines to the death marches of 1945 and the mass ethnic cleansing, these borderlands were the focus of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s ideological obsessions. Amanda Foreman’s A World on Fire (Allen Lane, £30) is a marvellous epic account of the American Civil War – with an emphasis on British involvement.
Lydia Davis
My books of the year have to include, at the top, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals (Hamish Hamilton, £20), in which Foer conveys, following meticulous research, the plight of the animals so many of us choose to enjoy for our meals. Equally compelling, in other categories, were Paula Fox’s Second World War memoir, The Coldest Winter (Picador); and Lorenza Foschini’s Proust’s Overcoat (Portobello, £9.99, tr by Eric Karpeles), which tracks the things – and family members – left behind by Proust.
Nick Laird
The scariest book of the year was John Lanchester’s brilliant guide to the financial crash, Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (Penguin, £9.99). And I can think of two fluent, funny novels I read recently – Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist (Pocket, £7.99) and Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound (Vintage, £7.99).
Rupert Christiansen
Martin Gayford’s Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud (Thames & Hudson, £18.95) is a little masterpiece of table (or easel) talk, illustrating Freud’s intense intelligence and sensibility as well as his painterly genius. Jennifer Homans’s Apollo’s Angels (Granta, £30) is a hugely articulate and intellectually bracing history of ballet. Among novels, I felt far more nourished by Jane Smiley’s quiet, subtle and beautifully composed Private Life (Faber, £12.99) than by Jonathan Franzen’s comparable but overrated Freedom (Fourth Estate, £20). I would also dearly love to recommend Candia McWilliam’s astonishingly powerful and poetic memoir What to Look for in Winter (Cape, £18.99), but as she is a close friend I suppose I can’t.
Dominic Sandbrook
I loved Dr Thorpe’s Supermac: the Life of Harold Macmillan (Chatto, £25): a beautifully judged political biography, written with great flair and insight, and surely the last word on one of our most civilised, cunning and ambiguous prime ministers. And on a very different note, I hugely enjoyed Jonathan Wilson’s Anatomy of England: a History in Ten Matches (Orion, £14.99), a characteristically atmospheric and provocative history of the national football team by the most literate of modern sportswriters – although, sadly, his prediction that Fabio Capello would turn our fortunes around now looks decidedly rash.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Jonathan Franzen enjoyed, or endured, plenty of press attention for the accidental misprints that crept into an early edition of Freedom (Fourth Estate, £20), but after reading it you can see why he was worried. It is a large novel in which every word counts. Whether or not it is the Great American Novel is a question best left to posterity, but it is undoubtedly a great novel about America. Rarely has the land of the free been scrutinised with such a sharp but loving eye.
Philip Hensher
Not every year produces a great novel, but this one did. No question about it: Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (Fourth Estate, £20) swept everything before it in intricately observed, humane, unprejudiced armfuls. For sheer technical bravado, there was no novel to touch it in 2010. On the non-fiction front, Simon Winder’s brilliantly amusing and learned cabinet of curiosities about the land that the English forgot, Germania (Picador, £18.99), was a deserved popular success. The German tourist board should be very grateful to have a wit like Mr Winder on their side.
Juliet Gardiner
Two books remarkable for casting a glorious light on the oddest corners. The Hare with the Amber Eyes (Chatto, £16.99) is a short, lingering memoir by one of Britain’s leading ceramicists, Edmund de Waal, about how his Uncle Iggy came to acquire his collection of 264 netsuke – a very big collection of very small wood and ivory Japanese objects. Janie Hampton's How the Girl Guides Won the War (Harper Press, £20) tells of the days when “do your best” was an injunction far removed from knots and camp fires with brownies being taught how to put out incendiary bombs, and the “international sisterhood” stretching a helping hand across occupied Europe.
Neil McCormick
I was halfway through Jonathan Franzen’s much lauded Freedom (Fourth Estate, £20) before it really got a grip on me, and it took his imaginary rocker Richard Katz to perk my interest. It is difficult to pull off rock stars in fiction but the contradictions of Katz, paralysed between idealism and hedonism, arrogance and self-loathing, balanced with a cocktail of womanising and drugs, are completely seductive. I was amused by Franzen’s description of Keith Richards looking like “a wolf dressed up in a grandmother’s bonnet”. Now here is a rock star too far-fetched for a work of fiction, as his highly entertaining autobiography Life (Weidenfeld, £20) demonstrates. As anyone who has met him knows, Richards is poetically eloquent and observant, and the book, written with James Fox, captures his true voice.
Robert Sackville-West
Freedom (Fourth Estate, £20) by Jonathan Franzen was the first book I read on a Kindle, and this big novel about a family coping with the moral dilemmas of modern times was so engrossing that I didn’t even notice the new medium. I also loved novelist Rupert Thomson’s dark, disturbing but often very funny memoir This Party’s Got to Stop (Granta, £16.99) – that’s what the policeman said when he called time on a mad, seven-month-long binge of drink and drugs by three brothers as they try to come to terms with the death of both parents. And, finally – but still on a family theme – I’m very grateful to my wife for introducing me to The Old Wives’ Tale (Penguin, £12.99) by Arnold Bennett: the story of two very different sisters, set in a 19th-century Pottery Town and Paris.
Simon Heffer
The best book I have read this year, and indeed for several years, was Michael Burleigh’s superb Moral Combat (HarperPress, £30). Burleigh examines the morality of the Second World War: not merely of the main combatant powers, but of individual participants, in a depth normally not attempted in conventional histories of the conflict. He displays a great depth of scholarship, impeccable research, and fine judgments. It is also beautifully and, at times, wittily written. Nobody has read so many books on the Second World War that he or she does not need to read this one too. Indeed, its genius is that it casts everything else one has read, however good, in an entirely new light.
Bettany Hughes
The Hare with the Amber Eyes (Chatto, £16.99) by Edmund de Waal tells the real story of the author’s collection of small Japanese carvings and their journey to Britain via 19th century Europe and the horrors of Nazi imprisonment. Apparently mundane, it is a rich tale of the pleasure and pains of what it is to be human. The Ashmolean Museum – the world’s oldest public Museum has had a long love affair with beautiful things, and now it produces beautiful books too. The latest, The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy (Lund Humphries, £40) by Colin Harrison and Christopher Newall, opens to the warm-butter kiss of Mediterranean sunshine – imagined and observed. Essential English winter reading.
Philip Womack
Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies (Hamish Hamilton, £13.99), set in an Irish boarding school, is a slick, strange, wondrous thing: witty and dark, full of the most sharply drawn characters, it is both intensely moving, shocking and charming. On the other side of the Atlantic, Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges (Corsair, £11.99) showed, with elegance and rapier intelligence, the Faustian arc of a super-rich couple. J G Farrell’s Troubles (Phoenix, £7.99), which won the Lost Booker prize, was a welcome re-entrant onto the literary scene with its muscular, ironical wryness, while Hesiod’s Calendar (Oxford Poets, £9.95) by Robert Saxton is a version of the Theogony and Works and Days that delights and enthrals in equal measure.
Liz Jensen
The brilliant Far North by Marcel Theroux, published in 2009, set the gold standard for my 2010 reading. The novels that hit the same heights for me this year were Abraham Verghese’s masterful medico-social epic Cutting for Stone (Vintage, £7.99), set in Ethiopia; Lesley Glaister’s Chosen (Tindall Street Press, £9.99), a haunting and terrifying exploration of a young woman sucked into a cult; Monique Roffey’s The White Woman on The Green Bicycle (Pocket, £7.99), which drew me into the lushness and pain of another world; and Emma Donoghue’s unsentimental and perfectly judged Room (Picador, £12.99), inspired by the Joseph Fritzl case.
Peter Hennessy
Dr Thorpe’s Supermac (Chatto, £25): “Uncle” Harold Macmillan really walks and talks his stylish yet nervy way through these pages. Keith Jeffery’s MI6 (Bloomsbury, £30): marvellously crafted book giving the Secret Intelligence Service its delayed and deserved place in the historical sun especially its activities in the Second World War. Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat (Bloomsbury, £7.99): a wonderful retelling of the cracking Second World War story of ‘The Man Who Never Was’ enriched by new archival material.
Kamila Shamsie
David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Sceptre, £18.99) is that rare thing – a novel which actually deserves the accolade “tour de force”. Mitchell long ago established his ability to write brilliant dialogue, vary furious pace with languid interludes, and bring scenes from distant places crackling to life – but with this novel he also became a writer who knows how to break his reader’s heart. Or my heart, at the very least.
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