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07/16/10--16:05: Summer reading: 'coalition books' (chan 1840837)



As the coalition government settles in, we asked writers and politicians, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to David Miliband to Sarah Waters, to recommend two books – unlikely bedfellows or easy companions – to take on holiday this summer

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I will be taking on holiday Colson Whitehead's novel Sag Harbor (Harvill Secker), which is about an African-American boy's summer in upstate New York. I've heard him read an excerpt, which I thought was very good – he says this novel should have been his first, because it is autobiographical in a way that his other novels are not.

I've been meaning to read Lola Shoneyin's wonderfully titled novel about a polygamous family in Nigeria, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives (Serpent's Tail). So that will come with me too.

William Boyd

It is both tempting and mischievous to conjoin for a summer read William Golding and Anthony Burgess. They represent opposing maverick wings of 20th-century English fiction. They had a lot in common as individuals (similar age, late starters as novelists – both in their 40s – heavy drinkers and smokers, musically accomplished) and yet remained entirely distinct as writers of fiction. Towards the end of their writing lives they generated one of the more intriguing literary feuds at the 1980 Booker prize. Burgess and Golding were head-to-head favourites: Burgess with Earthly Powers (Penguin) and Golding with Rites of Passage (Faber). Burgess refused to attend the award dinner unless he was declared winner. He wasn't, so he didn't. John Carey has recently written a superb authorised biography of Golding, William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies (Faber), and Andrew Biswell's biography of Burgess, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (Picador), expertly rearranges and re-establishes the facts that Burgess tried to blur and obscure. Why not add the novels to these exemplary biographies and see for yourself, with the full benefit of hindsight, how a Booker prize jury managed to get it wrong once again?

AS Byatt

The two books I'd take on holiday are Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction by Rowan Williams (Continuum), and The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (Chatto & Windus). The archbishop's book is an absorbing critical account of Dostoevsky's work which uses his real understanding of how Christian ideas shaped Dostoevsky's world and people. He is particularly good on the Devil. De Waal's memoir of his very rich Jewish ancestors, the civilisations they inhabited in Paris, St Petersburg and Vienna, the art they collected and their fate with the coming of the Nazis, is wise, strange and gripping. Two different worlds. Two grippingly readable books.

Alastair Campbell

You do not have to be a cricket fan – though it helps – to enjoy Duncan Hamilton's Harold Larwood (Quercus), a wonderful account of the life of one of our greatest fast bowlers. It's as much a story about class and the gulfs between people often on the same side as it is about sport in a very different era.

David Plouffe helped to run Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and his The Audacity to Win (Viking USA) gives as close an account of its ups and downs – admittedly from a very pro-Obama stance – as you are ever likely to get.

Margaret Drabble

I recommend Why Not Socialism? by GA Cohen (Princeton), who died last year. This tiny book will fit in any pocket, and it gives a neat summary of the arguments against private greed and for the communal interest. It may lead you to his brilliant work If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (Harvard). He has answers to both his questions.

For a terrifying description of what happens to us without communal interest, try Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah: Italy's Other Mafia (Pan). This is ideally unsettling reading for anyone taking a holiday anywhere near Naples, although it also sheds lights on what goes on everywhere from China to Aberdeen. Violent and courageous, this piece of reportage is far more thrilling than any thriller.

Helen Dunmore

Tim Dee's birdwatching memoir The Running Sky (Vintage) is as unexpected as it is brilliant. Birdwatching may or may not hold any appeal for you, but read it anyway. It's a moving, powerful meditation on the natural world that envelops us, even in the heart of our cities. Dee is a very candid writer, as observant about his own idiosyncrasies as he is about those of storm petrels in Shetland or peregrine falcons riding the air-currents by the Clifton suspension bridge. The book makes you want to travel to the places he describes so compellingly, but also to look up at the sky from wherever you are.

The characters in Simon Armitage's fire-cracker collection of tall tales and urban myths, Seeing Stars (Faber), are more likely to be seeing stars because they have been knocked out in a grudge fight than because they are gazing at the constellations. "I hadn't meant to go grave-robbing with Richard Dawkins / but he can be very persuasive", begins one extravagant but perfectly pitched story of mayhem in the cemetery. Sharp, ironic, deadpan and light enough to slip in a backpack for those moments of holiday torpor.

Richard Ford

For starters, think of Flem Snopes with a law degree. Better yet, think of a whole US state full of Flem Snopeses with law degrees. In The Fall of the House of Zeus (Harmony) Curtis Wilkie, a former crack political writer for the Boston Globe, and a Mississippi native (it helps), follows the money from the coffers of Big Tobacco and asbestos into the pockets of some of the wiliest and crookedest good-ole-boy plaintiffs' lawyers in America and, from there, right down the rat-hole to infamy. It makes addictive reading for anyone interested in shameless greed, hilariously rotten behaviour, inept skulduggery and just plain bad manners.

Walks with Men by Ann Beattie (Scribner) is a seemingly modest little novel about either a perversely bad or, if you prefer, a perversely satisfying modern marriage. But there's nothing modest about Beattie's talent: razored perceptiveness, discomforting wit, self-implicating pity and an unstinting, empathetic intelligence about contemporary life. Once you finish it (in about an hour and 10 minutes) you'll want to march right back around to the front and read it again. Ann Beattie's just that good, and she always has been.

Jonathan Franzen

Many reliable friends have been urging me to read Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives (Picador) for the sheer pleasure of it, and I've been thinking that Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (Penguin Classics) might make the perfect beach read this summer – it has those nice, short sections and those cool, dark depths.

John Gray

The first of the two very different books I'd take with me on a long summer holiday is that solitary classic of British shamanism, The Peregrine by JA Baker (Collins). First published in 1967, the book recounts Baker's observations of peregrine falcons, made over 10 winters, during which he lost something of his human personality and at times came to feel he had become one of the birds he was watching. "Unconsciously," he writes, "I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becoming the thing he hunts." It has just been republished in a magnificent new edition that includes Baker's The Hill of Summer and his Diaries, with an introduction by Mark Cocker. In all of them, Baker's personality is systematically effaced and very little is actually known of his life. Yet the near absence of any human being in these books goes with an extraordinary individuality of vision, producing some of the most arresting and beautiful prose in the English language.

György Faludy's autobiography My Happy Days in Hell, translated by Kathleen Szasz (Penguin Classics), is an account of a life passed pleasantly in the dangerous human world. First published in 1962, this is the Hungarian-Jewish poet's story of his flight to France and Africa, his years fighting as a volunteer in the US air force, and his return after the war to Hungary, where, after refusing to write a celebratory poem for Stalin's birthday, he was interned, emerging years later as one of a very small number who survived. Often at risk of death, even flirting with it in his encounters with Nazis and communists, Faludy revelled in the sheer sensation of being alive. Born in 1910, Faludy spent most of his highly productive later life in Canada and died in 2006. An exultant sensuous verve jumps from the pages of this sometimes bleak, never deceived and yet always life-affirming book.

David Hare

A campus novel, a modern reimagining of the film The Blue Angel, in which a professor is brought low by a creative writing student. Doesn't that sound awful? But Francine Prose's hypnotic Blue Angel (Allison & Busby) belongs, with Fellini's 8½ and Wallace Shawn's My Dinner with Andre, to that select category of great works which, in prospect, ought not to succeed. You will even think it worth damaging your eyesight on the ridiculous ant-like print of the paperback.

When the film director John Hughes died, Molly Ringwald put professional writers to shame with a tribute in the New York Times, comparing her own experiences with Hughes to those of Jean-Pierre Léaud with Truffaut. It was a smashing rebuke to the tedious journalistic libel that film actors are stupid. Here was just one who, for a start, writes far better than they do. That's why I'm taking Ringwald's Getting the Pretty Back (It Books) on holiday, hoping it will be just as good.

Michael Holroyd

Dan Rhodes's Little Hands Clapping (Canongate) is a macabre, brilliant and terrifying novel that comes highly recommended by Douglas Coupland as being "totally sick". This sickness arises from the eating habits of its characters, which range from swallowing live spiders in bed at night to the systematic devouring (after a spell in the freezer) of suicide victims from a museum somewhat desperately dedicated to optimism. Good strong stuff.

Richer, more appetising fare (including beef jerky, guinea pigs and maca cocktails) is offered by the travel writer and art historian Michael Jacobs's wonderful Andes (Granta). Jacobs is such a vivid writer that you can feel yourself completing intrepid journeys while sitting safely in your armchair.

Jackie Kay

I'm planning to pack David Remnick's The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (Picador), a meaty and fascinating biography that you need a whole holiday to pore over. Remnick is compulsive reading because he combines a fiction writer's pace with a biographer's psychological depth. He shows how Chicago's complex racial legacy shaped the young Obama, how he crossed the personal to the political to become who he is today, and how his journey illuminates the journey of our whole society.

Certainly Harper Lee would never have imagined, when she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (Arrow), that 50 years later Obama would be president. I'm packing that too, because I want to reread it, to revisit the small town of Maycomb, to remember the words of Tom, the accused black man: "If you was a nigger like me, you'd be scared too." I like to think of the conversation that Lee would have with Obama, or, even better, that Atticus Finch would have with Obama, and to think what can happen in the long and short time of half a century.

AL Kennedy

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man (Jonathan Cape) is a beautifully written and elegantly frank memoir by Bill Clegg. Once an upwardly-mobile young Manhattan literary agent, Clegg collapsed into suicidal crack addiction – in flight from his loves, his promise, his past and himself. The book is desperately honest about his childhood afflictions and his appetites without making excuses or appealing for pity – there are no easy fixes and no flinching; there is simply a lyrical, funny and shattering narration of a long, hard path. Clegg's subsequent entry into a process of recovery is handled with dignity, and his return to the world of books – one of his deepest and earliest loves – along with the act of creating the book itself are quietly and wonderfully redemptive.

My second recommendation is a public-domain reprint of Marmion Wilard Savage's The Bachelor of the Albany, which I'd been meaning to read for a while. It's a gently witty and intelligent fantasy from 1848 – benevolent merchants, giddy twins, Christmas interiors of which Dickens might be proud, complicatedly estranged relatives, a young widow and, of course, the initially impregnable bachelor. It's a book that enjoys itself companionably and contains some lovely passages of exuberantly virtuoso description – the one concerning the Albany itself along with its denizens would probably stand to this day.

David Kynaston

We sometimes forget that two notable writers died on 22 November 1963, that otherwise slow news day. So for a coalition of dead white males, to complement our public schoolboys in Downing Street, I'm plumping for a long-overdue reading of Aldous Huxley's novel Point Counter Point (Vintage), by all accounts a reminder of when conversation still mattered, and a re-reading of CS Lewis's autobiographical, only dimly remembered Surprised by Joy (HarperCollins), with his conversion to (or was it from?) Hegelianism on a bus going up (or was it down?) Headington Hill in Oxford.

David Lodge

I've been saving up Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow (Jonathan Cape) for the Mediterranean holiday I'm about to start, and not just because it's about the sexual shenanigans of young people on vacation in Italy 40 years ago. I always relish the witty inventiveness of Amis's style and have read the first 20 pages of this one chuckling happily. My interest was quickened by his account, in a recent BBC4 interview with Mark Lawson, of the novel's theme: that the rampant sexual revolution of the 1970s was not on the whole good for young women, a view with which, as an observer rather than a participant, I am inclined to agree.

Pope Benedict is coming to England in the autumn to, among other things, preside over the beatification of Cardinal Newman, the first stage to sainthood. Disputes about Newman's sexuality and the alleged miracle on which his beatification depends have already generated controversy. So, another book I aim to read this summer is Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (Continuum), a timely biography by John Cornwell. He admires Newman, but seeks to save him from hagiography and to remind us that he was a great and independent Christian thinker – one of the first, for instance, to accept the idea of evolution – and a master of English prose.

Amis and Newman are certainly an odd couple, but they have one thing in common: they both wrote novels. Denying that he was a saint, Newman said: "Saints don't write tales." Amis would no doubt agree.

Caroline Lucas

I loved Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, because it worked on so many levels – historical, philosophical, political and literary – so I have high hopes of her latest novel, Lacuna (Faber). With fictional characters interwoven with historical figures – Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky – and set against the McCarthy era in the US, it sounds as though it has all the ingredients for another great novel.

A bit closer to work, my husband and I are currently tussling over our one copy of Chris Mullin's diaries, A View from the Foothills (Profile), the way that any couple fight to get the weekend papers first. Mullin is both playful and precise with language, as well as admirably irreverent ("the spooks are livid about the sixth-form essay on Saddam's chemical arsenal cooked up by No 10"), and his book offers a fascinating insight into parliamentary life. What have I let myself in for?

Richard Mabey

I'll need a long summer break just to finish Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's dense but explosively exciting What Darwin Got Wrong (Profile). The celebration of the great scientist's bicentenary last year courteously sidestepped the fact that most cutting-edge biologists now regard natural selection as little more than cosmetic tweaking in the process of evolution. What's happening is far more philosophically thrilling: creatures are doing it for themselves. The authors show how ancient "managerial" genes, self-organising systems in cells and the inherent tendency towards symmetry in living structures all help to generate new organisms fully pre-adapted to their environments. Wings already pre-balanced for flight!

It will be a relief to relax with an account of how, in some hapless organisms, evolution often gets it spectacularly wrong. As a fellow-sufferer from what might be called hydraulic dysfunction, I shall relish Tim Parks's account of his rebellious bladder and his heroic quest for a cure. Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing (Harvill Secker) was, fortunately, an unsuccessful odyssey, otherwise we wouldn't have this maverick book about the stand-off between aspiration and biological constraint – one of the kinds of negotiation that drive evolution, whatever view you have of it.

David Miliband

Mark Oaten's Coalition (Harriman House) is a history of coalition-making since 1850 and has a fascinating chapter looking forward to the election just gone. I think we're all asking ourselves whether this coalition can work, and I've heard that Mark slowly became disenchanted with the whole concept of coalitions during the writing of the book. Essential reading for anyone who wants to be the next leader of the Labour party, but probably best enjoyed travelling back from holiday to get you back into the work zone.

The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis's new and controversial novel (Jonathan Cape), couldn't be further removed from Oaten's book. The reviews have been mixed, but I'm a strong believer in the only way to find out is to read it yourself. I don't think you can ever be disappointed with an Amis novel – his ability to draw you into his writing is second to none. It's definitely one to be enjoyed on holiday, with a cold beer, when the children have gone to bed.

Ed Miliband

I've been reading David Plouffe's The Audacity to Win (Viking USA) – a book to restore your interest and faith in politics. Plouffe, Barack Obama's campaign manager, provides a behind-the-scenes account of how Obama inspired Americans to join his movement, and shows it is possible to win office by combining strategic canniness and a commitment to a politics based on values. One to give to your friends who are cynical about what politics can achieve.

Henning Mankel's novel Depths (Vintage) is one of my favourites. It transports you into a Nordic landscape of intrigue, suspicion, deceit and murder. Part thriller, part psychological fantasy and part political-philosophical tract, it's totally absorbing.

Pankaj Mishra

Having grown up in India, which has far too many sunny, hot days, I find a sofa in a cool dark room more congenial than a crowded beach during July and August; it happily enables a diverse amount of reading. A Visit from the Goon Squad (Knopf), the new novel by Jennifer Egan, a seemingly unassuming but stunningly resourceful writer, sits on top of my fiction pile. I hope also to indulge my weakness for doorstopper biographies of American plutocrats with TJ Stiles's acclaimed The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Knopf).

Blake Morrison

Two very different memoirs, one about discovery, the other about loss. In Red Dust Road (Picador) the poet and novelist Jackie Kay tells of her tense reunions with her birth parents, whom she finds again in mid-life – her mother has Alzheimer's, and her father, a born-again Christian desperate to forget past sins, wants to keep her a secret from his Nigerian family. It might have made a sad story but, told as it is with zest and humour, it becomes a love song to her adoptive parents.

Jim Perrin is better known as a climber than as a poet, but West (Atlantic), written in the aftermath of the suicide of his son and the death of his wife, has a lyrical intensity few poets could equal. By immersing himself in wild landscapes and all the memories they contain, Perrin finds solace in his grief. As well as his magical thinking, he offers a robust, anarchic hedonism that's more like Byron (or the Johnny Byron of Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem) than Wordsworth.

Kate Mosse

My first choice is the powerful new book from Fergal Keane, which tells the harrowing story of one of the forgotten battles of the second world war. Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 (Harper Press) takes us to Rangoon, to the dying days of empire and a particular siege, and a massacre, that reflects all human history through the story of the men and women who died on the road of bones.

For the daylight hours, though, something lighter: the poetry impresario Daisy Goodwin has a novel coming out in August. My Last Duchess (Headline Review) is a love story, set between New York and England in the 1890s, involving an American heiress and her search for a British aristocratic husband.

Andrew Motion

One very English memoir/elegy, Blood Knots by Luke Jennings (Atlantic), which beautifully evokes the landscape and lore of his postwar rural childhood, with all its country orthodoxies (especially fishing) intact; and one Canadian/postmodern memoir/elegy, Nox by Anne Carson (New Directions), which in form and procedure is about as radical as book-publishing gets these days. They describe different kinds of loss, in enormously different ways, yet they converge on the same spot, where every kind of articulation is defeated. Holiday reading if you're heading for a stony beach.

David Nicholls

For some reason I had a notion of Penelope Lively as a quiet, conventional writer, but clearly I was wrong. Moon Tiger (Penguin) is a remarkable novel, evocative, heartbreaking, formally experimental but entirely gripping. Switching between past and present, first and third person, it's a dream-like kaleidoscope of memories and encounters, and yet it never feels disjointed or episodic. It's a book that will stay with me for a very long time.

I'll also be starting the third volume of Paul Murray's Skippy Dies (Hamish Hamilton), his saga of love and death at a shabby Dublin boarding school. At nearly 700 pages it's that rare thing, a comic epic, but the prose and characterisation are so detailed and funny that it rarely drags. Murray is a brilliant comic writer, but also humane and touching, and he captures the misery and elation, joy and anxiety of teenage life.

Audrey Niffenegger

I recommend The Magicians by Lev Grossman (Arrow) for the beach, followed by Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (Harper Perennial).

The Magicians is set in a sort of Harry Potteresque dystopia: our hero, Quentin Coldwater, is obsessive and whiny but has unsuspected magical talents that waft him into a super-secret college of magic in upstate New York. Many of the students are devoted to a series of children's books about a magical land called Fillory, and Grossman explores the boundaries between fiction and reality with great imagination when the students discover that Fillory is real and they can visit it. This is a dark, well-written book that takes the wizard genre into thoughtful places.

The Year of Magical Thinking is an anguished and eloquent account of Didion's grief following the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne. She recounts with great precision her loss, her disbelief, her memories. It's is in no way a beach read, but it does give the reader a heightened sense of the pleasures of simply being alive.

Joseph O'Connor

I will be revisiting two acclaimed masterworks by leading English storytellers: The Alastair Campbell Diaries (Hutchinson) and Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (Vintage). One is a somewhat controversial work about a tender love affair, a troubled honeymoon and the loneliness of marriage. The other is On Chesil Beach.

David Peace

Not one person in the United Kingdom voted for the present "coalition government". So every cut, every budget, every single piece of legislation that this "coalition government" proposes has no mandate from any single member of the electorate. Equally, every single penny of every single pound that we pay in taxes then goes to this unelected "coalition government" – a "coalition government" with no authority whatsoever. A "coalition" of a lust for power and a contempt for democracy. A "government" of the richest 10%, for the richest 10%. And so my "coalition books" remain the Holy Bible and its fifth gospel, The Communist Manifesto (Oxford); here is a coalition you can vote for, and vote for today: the Shield of Marx and the Sword of Christ.

Fred Pearce

Marek Kohn's Turned Out Nice (Faber) is an intimate and stylish geographical romp through the near-permanent summers of Britain's future under global warming. Kohn reckons we will get off lightly. What I really like is the way he puts future change in the context of past transformations of our varied landscape. On holiday in Sussex, I will take this to explore the South Downs and the beautiful Cuckmere valley with new eyes.

Beer provides its own intimate geography of Britain, as Roger Protz highlights in his new edition of 300 Beers to Try Before you Die (Camra Books). Most of his (and my) favoured British brews are rooted in the local landscape that provides their ingredients. And they seem to have been around nearly as long as the places they celebrate. I will be following Protz's tracks to taste Harvey's Sussex Best and Fuller's London Pride; Pendle Witches Brew and Orkney Dark Island.

Annie Proulx

If food for thought is what you like, here are two savage banquets. Bill McKibben's Eaarth (Times Books) is a chilling look-what-we've-done-to-the-planet review that says the globe on which we wasteful, spoiled consumers grew up is gone and in its place is this damaged human-world, eaarth. Yet McKibben focuses not on an endgame, but on new beginnings in response to our narrowing choices. Those new beginnings revolve largely around hunger and food supplies and a return to a simpler life.

Very different is the riveting new book by John Vaillant, The Tiger, to be published by Knopf in August, and to be made into a film. Fans of Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala may know that the source for his film was the 1921 book of the same title by Russian explorer-naturalist Vladimir Arsenyev. Vaillant explores the same fascinating geography: Russia's wild, far-eastern taiga, near the Chinese border, populated by a variety of ethnic groups, ginseng hunters and poachers. The book focuses on the threatened Siberian tiger, a strangely spiritual animal that in legend and fact harbours grudges and takes vengeance. The story is told through the men who work to protect the tigers, and those who kill them. In Arsenyev's day the local people lived with the tigers in something resembling harmony and did not kill them. The tigers recognised human individuals, and, in Vaillant's book, they still do.

Ian Rankin

I recently asked my followers on Twitter if they could recommend new books and writers to me. I've now ordered half a dozen of the suggested titles. The first to turn up was The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra (Picador). I can't tell you much about it except what the jacket tells me, so I know it's about a young man who arrives in Benares hoping to do a lot of reading, but who finds himself affected by his location in strange and wonderful ways. I visited India for the first time this year and am hoping to learn more about the country from this novel.

One city I know pretty well is Belfast – my wife was brought up there and we make regular visits back, so my summer reading will also comprise the latest offering from my favourite Belfast crime writer, (Colin) Bateman. His first name has to go in parentheses, as his publishers want us to ignore it, for some reason. Bateman writes about the real city, so much so that his hero in The Day of the Jack Russell (Headline) owns a bookshop called No Alibis – a shop I know to be real. He also holds meetings at the cafe across the road from it, a cafe I also know very well. This adds an extra layer of pleasure whenever I read (Colin). He is a terrific guide to post-Troubles Belfast and is also very funny, though if he keeps losing names at this rate he'll soon be called Anon . . .

Helen Simpson

Side by side in the holiday suitcase are Indignation by Philip Roth (Vintage) and Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro (Chatto & Windus). These very different writers, now well into their 70s, both seem recently to have extended their already awesome reach. Roth's short furio-comic novel is inflamed by the narrow-minded strictures forced on the young in 50s America by a system which also recklessly sent them to war. The monologue of a dead 19-year-old remembering his short life, this masterly spiralling rant works by means of repetition and recapitulation.

Munro's latest collection also deals with the work of memory – with the past and how to digest it – in breathtaking style. She is subtler but bolder, too, than Roth in her handling of fictional structures, in stories that show how we change (and continue to change) until the day we die. She grows ever more daring in her treatment of the non-stop different versions of events that time produces as perspectives shift and slide.

Hilary Spurling

My ideal book for total immersion on the beach is Katharine McMahon's The Crimson Rooms (Phoenix), the story of a young female lawyer caught up in her first murder case in the aftermath of the first world war. It is one of those books so intensely alive in the past that it makes the world you actually live in feel flimsy and thin. McMahon combines a thriller writer's grip, pace and punch with the true novelist's depth and warmth of feeling.

For a long, slow, lingering read, try Candia McWilliam's What to Look for in Winter (Jonathan Cape), a strange and startling memoir slung between the central poles of writing, alcoholism and blindness. It is a kind of literary origami trick, where the author folds in on herself in tight, dense, intricate coils, then unfolds herself again with miraculous lightness and delicacy.

Tom Stoppard

In 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute, a non-profit organisation based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offered £1m – each – for the solution of seven problems that had continued to resist the best efforts of the best brains. Two years later, a Russian mathematician, Grigori Perelman, proved the Poincaré conjecture, which people had been working on for 98 years. Then he refused the million dollars. He felt insulted and betrayed. Perelman and the world of Soviet maths training make a fascinating, moving tale, and in Perfect Rigor (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Masha Gessen tells it brilliantly. Among recent novels, Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín (Penguin) is faultless.

Colm Tóibín

If you need a book that people will laugh at you for reading anywhere from the airport to the beach, and that you in turn can laugh at for its mad details and its sheer barking insanity, then I suggest you follow my example and move around the world with William Shawcross's biography of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (Macmillan). There are certain beaches especially (and indeed certain airports) where the sight of someone reading this book will cause people to gather their friends and form a circle and simply howl.

On the other hand, if you want to look like a rock of good sense, a person who is deep and wise and worried, then I suggest Whoops: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester (Allen Lane). It not only looks good and solid, but it explains with casual wit and total clarity why everything went wrong and makes sense of the most complex financial matters. If only the Queen Mother were still alive, it would make sense even to her.

Rose Tremain

Bill Clegg's audacious Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man (Jonathan Cape) – read, preferably, with a poolside hangover – could shock you into lifelong sobriety. I've never read anything about crack addiction as painful as this. Luckily for Clegg, he was saved by the love and patience of his friends and is once again a (still-young) literary agent working in Manhattan.

He and others might take as their night-time read Peter Matthiessen's classic The Snow Leopard (newly reissued by Vintage, with an introduction by Richard Mabey) to remind themselves how man can be liberated from himself in other ways. After the death of his wife in 1978, Matthiessen joined his explorer friend, George Schaller, on a trip to the Crystal Mountain in Nepal, in search of the elusive snow leopard and of some way forward for his interrupted life. To say that this is a gripping and awesome journey is to sell short the whole magnificent and complex endeavour. As Mabey writes, Matthiessen did want to glimpse the leopard, but he was also "desperate for it to remain invisible, secretly itself, untouched by his cravings".

Sarah Waters

One of the books I'll be taking on holiday I've actually just finished, but it's such an impressive, enigmatic, multi-layered novel that I want to read it all over again. It's Austin Wright's Tony & Susan (Atlantic; see review, page 9), a page-turner of a literary thriller that explores the dynamics of family life, of love and betrayal – ultimately, of the reading experience itself. Not since Cormac McCarthy's The Road have I been so gripped and unsettled by a piece of fiction.

The other book in my suitcase – a new biography of Emily Dickinson – may sound more gentle; but that, perhaps, is because we've inherited a view of Dickinson as weedy and reclusive – the ultimate fey "lady poet". Lyndall Gordon's Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds (Virago) promises to cut through the stereotype to expose the dramas and passions of life in the Dickinson home, and sounds like a brilliant, gob-smacking read.

Compiled by Ginny Hooker.

• Summer reading
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• William Boyd
• AS Byatt
• Alastair Campbell
• Margaret Drabble
• Helen Dunmore
• David Hare
• Jackie Kay
• AL Kennedy
• David Lodge
• Caroline Lucas
• David Miliband
• Ed Miliband
• Andrew Motion
• David Peace
• Ian Rankin
• Tom Stoppard
• Colm Tóibín
• Rose Tremain
• Sarah Waters
• Jonathan Franzen
• Richard Mabey
• Blake Morrison
• Audrey Niffenegger
• Annie Proulx
• Summer reading 2010




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11/26/10--16:10: Books of the year (chan 1840837)



Jonathan Franzen's family epic, a new collection from Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin's love letters, a memoir centred on tiny Japanese sculptures ... which books most excited our writers this year?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In Red Dust Road (Picador) Jackie Kay writes lucidly and honestly about being the adopted black daughter of white parents, about searching for her white birth mother and Nigerian birth father, and about the many layers of identity. She has a rare ability to portray sentiment with absolutely no sentimentality. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House) is a fresh and wonderful history of African-American migration. Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Little, Brown) is a grave, beautiful novel about people who experienced the Korean war and the war's legacy. And David Remnick's The Bridge (Picador) is a thorough and well-written biography of Barack Obama. The many Americans who believe invented biographical details about Obama would do well to read it.

John Banville

William James, brother of the – in some quarters – more famous Henry, was that rarest of beings, a philosopher who wrote clear, elegant and exciting prose. In The Heart of William James (Harvard University Press), James's biographer Robert Richardson has put together a dazzling selection of this great thinker's work, with perfectly judged short pieces to usher in each of the selections.

Tony Judt, too, had a wonderful prose style, and his little book The Memory Chalet (William Heinemann), a collection of autobiographical essays, is beautiful and moving. Although Judt, who suffered from motor neurone disease, died earlier this year, this late work is more sustaining than sad.

Death stalks the pages of Seamus Heaney's collection Human Chain (Faber), but as we would expect from this most affirmative and celebratory of poets, the book in the end is really a meditation on life in all its fleeting sweetness.

Julian Barnes

Unfit for life, unsure of love, unschooled in sex, but good at washing up: Philip Larkin, in Letters to Monica (Faber), lays out his all-too-self-aware catalogue of reasons for being uncheerful. The reader is made slightly cheerful by the thought of not having had Larkin's life, but very cheerful that poems of such truth, wit and beauty emerged from it.

If Larkin represents native genius in its costive English form, Stephen Sondheim represents the fecund American version: Finishing the Hat (Virgin Books) is not just a book of lyrics (with cut and variant versions) but an exuberance of memories, principles, anecdotes, criticism and self-criticism.

Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto & Windus) unexpectedly combines a micro craft-form with macro history to great effect.

Mary Beard

The most moving book of the year for me was Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land (Allen Lane) – a powerful "living will" written as Judt succumbed to the complete paralysis of motor neurone disease. It is a marvellous denunciation of modern politics ("Something is profoundly wrong with how we live today"), written with all the grace and intensity that only the dying can muster.

On a cheerier note, I have only just caught up with Reaktion's series of books on animals. Robert Irwin's quizzical investigation of the Camel (one hump and two) and Deirdre Jackson's elegant exploration of the frankly rather dull life of the Lion will appeal even to those who would never normally pick up a book on the natural world.

William Boyd

Stephen Sondheim, who has just turned 80, is the unrivalled genius in the world of musical theatre with five or six masterworks that have redefined the form. A superb, generous melodist and a lyricist up there with Cole Porter and Noël Coward, Sondheim has now given us Finishing the Hat. His detailed commentary on his wonderful songs is honest, shrewd and fascinating. The ideal fix for Sondheim addicts.

Poetry addicts, meanwhile, should swiftly acquire Oliver Reynolds's latest collection, Hodge (Areté Books) – poems of beautiful precision that reveal their secrets slowly. And Samko Tále's Cemetery Book (Garnett Press) by the Slovak writer Daniela Kapitánová offers us, in a superb translation by Julia Sherwood, one of the strangest and most compelling voices I have come across in years. Muriel Spark meets Russell Hoban. An astonishing, dark and scabrous novel.

Anthony Browne

I was fascinated by the fattest book I read, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (Fourth Estate), an epic novel that tells a funny and moving story of an American family unravelling in the first few years after 9/11. It's about the problems that come with liberty, seen through the lives of what at first seems like the perfect couple.

In contrast, my second choice is a small, exquisite picture book, Eric by Shaun Tan (Templar). This is the tale of a strange foreign exchange student, told from the point of view of the host family. Eric is drawn as a tiny, shadowy figure living in a world of giants. The narrator hints at the "cultural things" that divide them. This is a true picture book in that the illustrations tell as much as the words do, and is that relatively rare thing: a picture book appealing equally to both adults and children.

AS Byatt

I bought Rowan Williams's book, Dostoevsky (Continuum), because I have always needed to understand Dostoevsky's Christianity in order to understand how he shaped his characters. Williams's account of that is a revelation. He is also a good reader of the novels and often sharply witty. I liked his chapter on the Devil. I was moved and excited by Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes. My choices also include one novel – Neel Mukherjee's sharp, sad and lively A Life Apart (Constable) – and one book of short stories – Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (Fourth Estate). She is becoming, indeed is, a great short story writer. Seamus Heaney's Human Chain is a wonderful collection. The poems connecting personal grief with Aeneas's journey to the underworld are brilliantly quiet and profoundly moving.

Jonathan Coe

Some of the most important publishing events take place quietly, behind the scenes, far away from the clamour and hype surrounding prize announcements and the impatient quest for the Next Big Literary Thing. I spent much of this year back in the 18th century, trying to rediscover the roots of English satire, and one of the landmark publications for me was the appearance of Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub and Other Works (edited by Marcus Walsh) in its definitive Cambridge edition. It's heartening to know, not just that one of our greatest writers is finally being given the editorial treatment he deserves, but that such a quixotically ambitious publishing series can still be contemplated in the digital age.

Alasdair Gray, of course, is one of the most Swiftian of contemporary writers, and – returning to the 21st century – surely there was no more handsome book published this year than Alasdair Gray: A Life in Pictures (Canongate). The illustrations are as lavish, and the text as eccentric, as even the most optimistic Gray admirer could have wished.

Jilly Cooper

I adored One Day by David Nicholls (Hodder). An exquisitely written love story, it describes the passionate attraction yet reluctance to commit of two opposites: Dexter, a charming, promiscuous public-school Adonis, and clever, chippy, idealistic working-class Emma. As they slide in and out of affairs, marriage to other people, having children and careers which soar and nosedive, one longs for them to get it together.

I also loved Comfort and Joy by India Knight (Fig Tree), a hilarious, bawdy yet touching portrait of Christmas over three years. In a desperate attempt to achieve harmony for the sake of the children, Clara, the enchanting heroine, invites a vast extended family of parents, steps-in-laws, embattled ex-husbands, warring couples and lame-duck friends to stay.

William Dalrymple

My favourite book this year was Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin (Jonathan Cape). Chatwin was a writer blessed with three remarkable gifts: he was a thinker of genuine originality, a reader of astonishing erudition and, above all, a writer of breathtaking prose. All these gifts are on display in his letters, and they are a reminder of just how much we lost with his death. He was also one of the few major British writers who knew and loved the Islamic world.

I certainly don't share Christopher Hitchens's views on Islam, but I loved his witty memoir, Hitch-22 (Atlantic), which had me laughing out loud at a rate of once every other page. The best jokes are in the chapter about Salman Rushdie, and I have had great fun trying (and failing) to beat Rushdie in a literary game that Hitch and he invented: renaming Shakespeare plays with new titles in the style of Robert Ludlum– so The Merchant of Venice becomes "The Rialto Sanction", Hamlet is "The Elsinore Vacillation" and Macbeth becomes "The Dunsinane Reforestation".

Finally Rushdie's own Luka and the Fire of Life (Jonathan Cape) gave great pleasure: he has shown that he is also - rather unexpectedly - one of our best writers for children. I am currently reading it out to my boys at bedtime, and they are both loving it.

Roddy Doyle

Amy Bloom's collection Where the God of Love Hangs Out (Granta) is brilliant. The stories are shocking and lovely. Willy Vlautin's Lean on Pete (Faber) is only brilliant; I hated finishing it. Joseph O'Connor's Ghost Light (Harvill Secker) is absolutely brilliant – a beautifully written love story and, somehow, a chunk of Irish social and political history. There's a section in the middle of Emma Donoghue's Room (Picador) that reminded me of reading Catch 22 when I was 15 – the same excitement, the same "I've never read anything like this before". The whole book is absolutely f**kin' brilliant.

Margaret Drabble

Hilary Spurling's biography of Pearl Buck, Burying the Bones (Profile), is a remarkable and shocking work, full of immensely difficult material so thoroughly absorbed and so well organised that the reader risks underestimating the art and skill that lie behind this strange account of missionary hardship in China and worldly success in the west. The violent history of China in the early years of the 20th century forms a turbulent backdrop, and Buck's reputation as a novelist takes second place to the story of her singular life and times.

Stevie Davies, in Into Suez (Parthian Books), also tackles historical material in a novel that personalises the forces of imperialism and the British class system as it moves with ease from Egypt immediately after the second world war to the 21st century and back again. Davies has a fine eye for colour and place, and a keen recall of the sensations of childhood, and her characters are full of quirks and eccentricities while telling the story of a whole generation.

Helen Dunmore

If depression took a form, what would it be? Winston Churchill, like Samuel Johnson, cast his melancholia as a black dog. In Rebecca Hunt's Mr Chartwell (Fig Tree), Churchill's dog becomes brutally and absurdly real as he arrives to sink his teeth into the life of a young widow. The richness of Hunt's language and the hidden patterns that link Esther Hammerhans and Churchill make this first novel a vivid, moving delight.

For many years, the poet Lawrence Sail has produced a new poem each Christmas, and now these are collected in Songs of the Darkness (Enitharmon Press), which is as starkly truthful about winter and darkness as it is about the frail threads of hope that light the season.

Geoff Dyer

People seemed to get their knickers in a right old twist over David Shields's Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Hamish Hamilton), a subtler and more nuanced book than the "Is-the-novel-dead-(again)?" controversy it generated. Full of bits filched from other people's books, it was highly original, consistently stimulating – and it nudged me, belatedly, towards the work of David Markson, whom I started reading a couple of months after he died. First published in the US in 2001, Markson's This Is Not a Novel finally waded across the Atlantic – courtesy of the enterprising CB Editions – this year. A swirl of unattributed quotations from other authors, an energising expression of readerly ennui and a meditation on mortality, it felt like a book one had unconsciously been waiting to discover. Let's hope this is the beginning of a Markson . . . I was going to say revival, but first we need a proper vival.

Dave Eggers

Marlon James's The Book of Night Women (Oneworld Publications) is one of those contemporary masterpieces that seems like it came out of the author's head, fait accompli. But of course it didn't. James is just a great writer, and he's conjured a complete and believable world – 18th-century Jamaica – and has got so deep inside his characters, most of them slaves on a sugar plantation, that the reading experience is immersive: any time you put the book down to, say, drive a car or get a sandwich, it's a shock. It pulls no punches, so be prepared to be knocked sideways.

Richard Ford

Only two novels made my heart beat faster in the past 12 months. One was The Privileges (Corsair), by an already acclaimed young American named Jonathan Dee. Depending on whom you believe (the critic James Wood and I diverge), The Privileges is either a novel of curetting ironies about a young Gotham family that gets rich (but also gets "poor") on the financial bubble now burst, and loses its soul; or else – my view – it's a spot-on, straightforward, not especially ironical family saga about the same subject; and is full not of lost souls but of interesting, layered characters you might come to empathise with and not forget. Either way, it's tone-perfect, ingenious in its acuity about modern life. It seems to have the right words for everything. It's blazingly funny. And it's unabashedly serious. I loved it.

The other memorable book was The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape). There certainly isn't a brilliant novelist in English that the English (and American) reading populace takes more stunningly for granted than Amis. He's what we'd over here call the "pound-for-pound" English sentence writer. OK, this novel is about seemingly serious business: the social order, the sexual revolution, the "M" word (morals), societal change with a big "C". But I just came back day after day for the sentences, the wit, the fully internalised cultural nous. This book has that rare and wonderful quality of taking the reader into a charmed confidence he's not quite sure he deserves, but that he (in my case) wouldn't miss for the world.

Antonia Fraser

My two favourites this year were a novel that reads like history and a historical study which reads like a novel. Heartstone by CJ Sansom (Mantle) is the latest in the adventures of Master Matthew Shardlake, the hunchback lawyer who finds himself wherever in the 16th century the scene is darkest, most cruel – and most exciting. This particular book centres on Henry VIII's great warship the Mary Rose, getting ready on the south coast of England to invade France; readers of so-called real history will know in advance what will happen to the ship and those aboard, but none of this detracts from the intricacies of the plot.

Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre (Bloomsbury) concerns what is in effect a spy story of the second world war: the elaborate plot to plant counter-information about the projected invasion of southern Europe by the allies, with the use of a corpse belonging to an innocent bystander. Le Carré never did better in his prime.

Stephen Frears

The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal's account of two journeys: that of his diasporic family, the great Jewish banking Ephrussi dynasty, who came from Odessa to Paris and Vienna, and on to Croydon and Tunbridge Wells; and that of the 246 netsuke figures which lay hidden during the German occupation in a mattress used by the lady's maid Anna before returning to Japan. Highlights include Charles, the 19th-century art collector, who can be seen in one of Renoir's paintings and who is the prototype for Swann; and Hitler and Goebbels arriving in Vienna after the Anschluss. Elegant. Modest. Tragic. Homeric.

And I choose Duncan Hamilton's biography Harold Larwood (Quercus), if only for the amount of beer Arthur Carr would pour into the demon Nottinghamshire bowler before unleashing him.

John Gray

John Ashbery's Collected Poems 1956-1987, edited by Mark Ford (Carcanet), is a book I found inexhaustible. Possibly the greatest living English-speaking poet and one of the most prolific, Ashbery takes language to its limits, so that words serve as pointers to shifting experiences that elude description. Containing his masterpiece "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror", one of the most penetrating 20th-century meditations on what it means to be human, this collection succeeded in stirring my thoughts as well as delighting me.

The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin Classics) is a collection of short pieces in which the Argentine ponders the great metaphysical questions with playful scepticism and ranges happily over his favourite writers, poets and films. In the 18 selections here – on Oscar Wilde and GK Chesterton, Alfred Hitchcock, the Arabian Nights, the joy he felt when Paris was liberated from the Nazis and his tranquil acceptance of his blindness, among other things – Borges demonstrates that profundity and wit need not be at odds. These little essays are morsels of sheer intellectual pleasure.

Tessa Hadley

William Dalrymple's Nine Lives (Bloomsbury) came out in paperback this year. He tells the stories of nine individuals in India and Pakistan, all steeped in one kind of religious practice or another: a Jain nun, a singer of Rajasthani epic, a sculptor carving gods in Tamil Nadu, a woman in a trance in a Sufi shrine in Sindh. He earns their stories through his personal involvement and careful listening; he insists on the persisting importance of their visions and traditions in our contemporary world. His touch as a writer is so fine – exact, sensual, charged with history and politics. No mystification, just authentic mystery.

It's as if I've chosen one book in hot colour, one in black and white. I'm reading Colm Tóibín's new book of stories, The Empty Family (Penguin). Tóibín doesn't write like anybody else: his spare sentences carve out new spaces in our collective thought. The protagonists here are usually solitaries – unattached gay men in middle age, Lady Gregory lonely in her marriage, a girl in Menorca taking possession alone of the house she's inherited. They know they are missing out on the heat of family life and relationships; they're half sorry but they're also half relieved. It's not love that's redemptive in these stories, only hungry life itself: the solidities of landscape and cityscape, the intricacies of history, the physics of the grey waves of the sea, a glass of cold beer in a bar. The mood is sad but the joy is in the sentences: exhilarating, penetrating, fresh.

David Hare

Does it matter if Freedom is the kind of book of which you approve? Does it matter if it conforms to your theoretical agenda for the future of the novel? Is it the exact novel you yourself would write if, of course, you ever got round to writing one? Who cares? Far more important is the fact that, for as long as you're reading it, Jonathan Franzen pulls off the extraordinary feat of making the lives of his characters more real to you than your own life. He writes with fabulous assurance about sex, death and the environment – three things we keep reading that novelists can't manage any more.

Another treat was The Ghosts of Belfast, which I bought at an American airport. In the UK it's less helpfully sold as The Twelve (Vintage). Stuart Neville takes one of today's defining subjects – truth and reconciliation – and writes a crime novel about the dishonesty and violence necessary to the success of the peace process in Northern Ireland. Great subject, great thriller.

Eric Hobsbawm

Two excellent books this year remind me of some of my own past researches: John A Davis's The Jews of San Nicandro (Yale University Press) is about the Italian peasants who converted to Judaism; and Charles Van Onselen's Masked Raiders: Irish Banditry in Southern Africa (ZebraPress, Cape Town).

Michael Holroyd

Andrew McConnell Stott's The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi (Canongate) presents Grimaldi's extraordinary stage career from the late 18th to the early 19th centuries not only as a record of the British theatre at a time of revolution but also as an extreme visual satire on political and social events. The book is full of wonderful descriptions of how this manic yet poignant clown beat off competition from talented animals (the dancing horse, the singing duck, the mathematical pig) as well as from infant prodigies in frilly costumes, to become the "supreme comic being, part-child, part-nightmare". He had a magical effect on audiences who, on seeing their friend Joey on stage, forgot all the torment and anxiety of their lives outside the theatre.

Sjeng Scheijen's Diaghilev: A Life (Profile Books) is a highly detailed and impressive account of his subject's career. We are shown Diaghilev, like the leader of a superior coalition, gathering a team of all the talents – composers, choreographers, dancers, singers, writers, painters – and giving them a new aesthetic agenda. He emerges as a man of action and of imagination, of ruthless and relentless charm and devastating ambition: not always sympathetic, but almost always inspirational.

Jackie Kay

Kazuo Ishiguro writes brilliantly about nostalgia. In Nocturnes (Faber), his rich and satisfying quintet of stories – each playing a different piece of music – the characters' voices are as rich as the music itself, striking true notes about the nature of love, regret, choices and roads not taken.

Another wonderful collection of stories to emerge was Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly (Faber): an impressive cast of characters and stories emerge in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, with fighting spirit, making you think about survival, love and grief.

Rupert Thomson's moving memoir This Party's Got to Stop (Granta) is a surprisingly funny study of grief. Three brothers move back into their father's house. It's a riot and tear-jerkingly sad.

AL Kennedy

I would highly recommend Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man by Bill Clegg (Jonathan Cape). I haven't read a book at a single sitting for a long while, but this held me for the duration – it's an honest and wonderfully crafted book by a man as intoxicated by language as he was by crack. Not at all the standard recovery memoir, it has real literary depth and complexity of construction without seeming in any way contrived.

I would also mention Derren Brown's Confessions of a Conjuror (Channel 4) – in some ways an oddly similar book in its levels of intimacy and self-awareness. It combines a playfully baroque prose style with pinpoint observation and almost excruciating levels of self-examination, if not loathing. It's a fascinating experience.

Hanif Kureishi

Gary Greenberg's Manufacturing Depression (Bloomsbury) is a witty sprint through the attempts of psychiatrists and scientists to reduce myriad forms of mental distress – always better described by poets than neuroscientists – to a single illness treatable by a pill. By 2005, 10% of the American population were using antidepressants.

If doctors are the real dealers, Mike Jay's High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture (Thames & Hudson) is a vivid report on the other side of drugs, the ones which get you high and give you pleasure rather than pretend to make you well. (They're less likely to be placebos, too.)

Renata Salecl's Choice (Profile Books) is an informative inquiry into our present illusions of freedom and agency, and the madness they can create. She writes well about the political use of anxiety and insecurity as a form of social control. And she says: "When any idea is glorified in a particular society at a particular time, it is necessary to be cautious about it." Big Society, anyone?

David Kynaston

I enjoyed Juliet Gardiner's panoramic, insightful survey of The Thirties (HarperCollins); Jehanne Wake's superbly researched Sisters of Fortune (Chatto & Windus), about four American heiresses (1788-1874) who took old Europe by storm; Henrietta Heald's equally thorough William Armstrong: Magician of the North (Northumbria Press), the life of a major, remarkably various Victorian; and Harry Ricketts's Strange Meetings: The Poets of the Great War (Chatto & Windus), a haunting, almost cinematic group biography.

My book of the year, though, is Philip Larkin's Letters to Monica. Thrillingly, one encounters here a very different Larkin from the earlier Selected Letters: more domestic, sometimes – but only sometimes – more humane, and often touchingly vulnerable, not least about poems that would come to be seen as among his finest. "You are the one," Monica Jones reassured him at one low point, and for English poetry in the third quarter of the 20th century he surely was.

Nick Laird

I liked Christopher Ricks's True Friendship (Yale) very much, and collections by Alan Gillis (Here Comes the Night, The Gallery Press), Jo Shapcott (Of Mutability, Faber) and the American poet Timothy Donnelly (The Cloud Corporation, Wave Books).

The most frightening book of the year was John Lanchester's astute and funny dissection of the financial meltdown, Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (Penguin).

David Lodge

The distinguished liberal theologian John Hick, now in his late 80s, uses the neglected form of the Platonic dialogue to treat the currently hot topic of the grounds for religious faith and the arguments against it, in Between Faith and Doubt: Dialogues on Religion and Reason (Palgrave Macmillan). Although he makes his own position clear – a non-dogmatic belief in transcendence which draws for inspiration on all the great world religions – the work is not didactic, and scepticism gets a fair crack of the whip. Most readers of whatever persuasion (or none) will find their assumptions and prejudices challenged at some point.

The novelist Tim Parks's Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing (Harvill Secker) is an unclassifiable book about his quest for the cure of an undiagnosable condition, a chronic and painful one best described in the medical literature as "a headache in the pelvis". Against all his assumptions and prejudices, he finds relief eventually in New Age-style meditation, but his journey is inward as well as outward, and involves a brutally honest, darkly comic self-examination of his life and character, written with Parks's usual stylistic verve. No mature male reader could fail to be gripped by this story, alternately wincing and laughing in sympathy – but my wife found it equally absorbing.

Hilary Mantel

If God ordained men should rule over women, how can a woman ever rule a nation? This question perplexed medieval Europe, and in She-Wolves (Faber) the young historian Helen Castor explores it with energy and flair, taking as her leading ladies four formidable English queens who preceded the Tudors. Each of these women challenged what was seen as the natural order, and Castor makes their complex stories highly readable, exciting and thought-provoking.

Pankaj Mishra

Is short fiction, with its necessarily fragmentary form and brisk epiphanies, better placed than the panoramic novel to capture the weird disjointedness and partial visions of modern life? Certainly, I was more captivated this year by short stories than long novels. David Means's fourth collection The Spot (Faber) confirms him as a writer with a distinctive, ceaselessly surprising sensibility. Set in China, Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl illuminates some of the strangest corners of human experience. The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador US) offers a bracing retrospective of one of America's most intelligent and worldly writers.

In non-fiction, I much admired John Calvert's Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (C Hurst & Co). Set against the specific context of nation-building in Egypt, it shrewdly describes a recurrent but little-understood political journey from secular liberalism to violent extremism. I cannot recommend highly enough The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations (University of Chicago Press), Tzvetan Todorov's characteristically wise take on the new politics of hysteria in Europe and America.

Blake Morrison

In a very good year for books – Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom, Seamus Heaney's collection Human Chain, Philip Larkin's Letters to Monica, Howard Jacobson's Booker-winning The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury), Jane Miller's candid thoughts on getting older, Crazy Age (Virago) – special mention to two publications from smaller presses. Friedrich Christian Delius's Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, excellently translated by Jamie Bulloch (Peirene), tells the story of a young German woman in Rome in 1943: the single 117-page sentence, covering just an hour-long walk, contains multitudes. John Lucas's memoir Next Year Will Be Better (Five Leaves Publications) recalls in astonishing and celebratory detail the sounds, tastes and smells of England in the 1950s, with particular attention paid to poetry and jazz.

Andrew Motion

The six novels shortlisted for the Man Booker, which I chaired this year, all speak for themselves. When the prize-reading was done, I had particular pleasure reading Sarah Bakewell's ingeniously organised and wittily wise life of Montaigne, How to Live (Chatto), Alexandra Harris's Romantic Moderns (Thames & Hudson) – an exceptionally well-written and deeply illuminating account of mid-20th- century British writers and painters – and The Mirabelles by Annie Freud (Picador): original, moving, smart and memorable.

David Nicholls

Paul Murray's Skippy Dies (Hamish Hamilton) is a brilliant depiction of the heaven and hell of male adolescence. Sam Lipsyte's The Ask (Old Street Publishing) is funny, smart and mean, and I also admired Tim Pears's heartbreaking Landed (William Heinemann) and Philip Roth's Nemesis (Jonathan Cape). But Candia McWilliam's much-praised memoir What to Look for in Winter (Jonathan Cape) is my favourite book of the year, startlingly honest, wry, sad and wise.

Craig Raine

Frances Stonor Saunders's The Woman Who Shot Mussolini (Faber) moves from close-up (the nick in Mussolini's nose left by the bullet) to a kind of Google Earth. This riveting biography of Violet Gibson – a forgotten, pitiable, slightly potty, peripheral figure – also encompasses the deranged psyche of the 20th century. A bygone world in a grain of true grit.

Hearing Ourselves Think by Philip Hancock (Smiths Knoll) is crammed with unpoetic qualia from the world of City and Guilds. Hancock left school at 16 to take up an apprenticeship. Twenty-odd years ago, the former probation officer Simon Armitage founded the Democratic People's Republic of Poetry. Hancock is a citizen – with a commonsense understanding that technical drawing, Halfords, The Dukes of Hazzard, Everton Mints and Frank Spencer can hold their own in poetry.

Ian Rankin

Must You Go? (Weidenfeld) is Antonia Fraser's story of her life with Harold Pinter, presented in the form of her diary entries. Great figures from recent (literary) history flit though its pages, but what really engages is the sense of life and love intertwining.

Many of us north of the border were dumbfounded when James Robertson's novel And the Land Lay Still (Hamish Hamilton) failed even to make the Booker longlist. This is Robertson's sweeping history of life and politics in 20th-century Scotland. Bold, discursive and deep, it should not be ignored.

Saul Bellow's Letters (Penguin Classics) takes us deep into the fertile mind of one of the US's most interesting novelists. There are spats, divorces, and revelations throughout. I had renewed admiration for the man by the end of this book, and wanted to reread his novels.

I am a sucker for books about music and the music industry, and Nick Kent's Apathy for the Devil (Faber) held me spellbound. Kent's first interviews as a fledgling rock journalist were with the MC5, the Stooges, Captain Beefheart, the Grateful Dead and Lou Reed. If that list whets your appetite, you can be sure that Kent delivers.

Helen Simpson

Martin Stannard's Muriel Spark: The Biography (Phoenix) was fascinating despite its occasionally hamstrung tone (yes, Spark invited Stannard to write her biography, saying "Treat me as though I were dead," but – Spark being Spark – this can't have been easy). What is clear from this scrupulous account of her 88 years is that she always put her writing first. How did she produce so much? "I've nothing else to do. I've put myself in that position." Immune to emotional blackmail, refusing to play the victim, she was big on revenge for even the slightest of slights, and refused to cook, clean or go downstairs in front of men ("I have a fear of being pushed from behind").

It would be interesting to know what Philippa Perry would have made of her. Couch Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan) is Perry's clever, funny account of a psychotherapy case study, and makes good use of the graphic novel's format, thought and speech bubbles appearing side by side within the same frame.

Tom Stoppard

I started the year by reading a dozen books on the Wall Street implosion. Even if you're bored with it all, The Big Short by Michael Lewis (Allen Lane) is unmissable: and if you're not, How Markets Fail by John Cassidy (Penguin) has the best, deepest backstory, and is as well written as you would expect from someone who covers economics for the New Yorker.

This year, too, I enormously enjoyed the last 518 pages of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (Fourth Estate), which I had put aside in 2001 to read when I had time. I am now on page 14 of Freedom. Highly recommended.

Paul Theroux

It was EB White who said: "An Englishman is not happy until he has explained America." Jonathan Raban ought to be very happy on this score, because his Driving Home: An American Scrapbook (Picador) – essays about everything from Sarah Palin and Barack Obama to John Muir and Gore Vidal – explains the State of the Union, and Raban continues to be the most resourceful refugee on our shores. I greatly admired The Last Stand by Nathaniel Philbrick (Bodley Head), a parallel account of Custer and Sitting Bull; and I liked having a chance to find more nuances in Madame Bovary in the new Lydia Davis translation (Penguin Classics) and read it blissfully as though floating, as Flaubert puts it in a different context, "in a river of milk".

Adam Thirlwell

I've happily discovered an entire new publisher, Visual Editions, who specialise in what they call "visual reading". And in my love of new and hybrid fictional forms I've read and reread two books with pictures. There was Wilson by Daniel Clowes (Jonathan Cape), a very short, very funny and very sad graphic novel. And I loved Animalinside (Sylph Editions/New Directions) – a small series of small fictions by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, with images by Max Neumann. In them, Krasznahorkai invents a way of miming the way a dog might talk: or even, not quite a dog. The stories are translated by Ottilie Mulzet, while George Szirtes has translated two of Krasznahorkai's novels, including War and War (New Directions). Via both translators, Krasznahorkai's looping sentences seem to me to be drastically original.

Colm Tóibín

David Grossman's To the End of the Land (Jonathan Cape) and David Malouf's Ransom (Vintage) deal with war and families; one is set in contemporary Israel and the other in ancient Greece. Both dramatise with breathtaking skill what is intimate and personal; they place their vulnerable people in the foreground against the background filled with recognition of the pain and damage that war causes. Both books have an extraordinary emotional charge.

In poetry, Seamus Heaney's Human Chain contains some of his best work – elegiac, beautifully controlled and crafted. And in the public world, both John Lanchester's Whoops! and Fintan O'Toole's Enough Is Enough (Faber) manage to explain the financial crisis with wit and passion; but more than anything else, both writers offer pure clarity in their interpretation and explanation of how we got here.

Rose Tremain

America's current agitation about its moral standing in the world is powerfully captured in two extraordinary books: Philip Roth's Nemesis and Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. In these works of fiction, my old friend and mentor Malcolm Bradbury's assertion that "the imagination is the best pathway through troubled times" is brilliantly vindicated.

In Nemesis, Roth's best novel for some time, a young man of impeccable fitness and stern moral character, Bucky Cantor, takes a summer job as playground director in a Newark school  in 1944. When a polio epidemic arrives, Bucky knows that he should stay to help the children through this fearful time, yet chooses instead to leave to join his girlfriend at a summer camp in the Pocono mountains. Torn between elation at his escape and guilt at his dereliction of duty, Bucky waits in agony for the punishment he knows must one day fall on him. Roth's message has a deadly clarity: if you know what's right and you turn aside from it, you will never fully recover.

In Franzen's Freedom, the Berglund family, mid-western suburbanites who might have lived quiet, unimpeachable lives, find themselves enslaved to the multiple possibilities – sexual, material and political – available to them in a society where the moral compass is helplessly spinning. Like Ian McEwan, Franzen has both the accomplished miniaturist's eye for telling everyday detail and a sophisticated understanding of the contemporary big picture. His choice of a consoling ending doesn't diminish the novel's message: freedom abused can maim and kill.

Jeanette Winterson

For two millennia women have heard how our brains are too small, our wombs too big, our blood too thin or too cold, or how we are too weak/excitable/nervous (supply your own adjective) to do whatever it is we were thinking of doing. Since the 1970s we have been getting even and getting equal, but just when you thought it was OK to do rocket science, along comes neuroscience to tell us it's all in the hardwiring of our brains, and really, women don't have the connections – and I don't mean the ones in the boardroom. Cordelia Fine's brilliant book Delusions of Gender (Icon) debunks the likes of Simon Baron-Cohen, dressed up in one of his brother's outfits as a mad scientist, waving mobiles at newborn babies to see if the boys are more "interested" than the girls.

Jackie Kay's poetry readings have audiences alternately weeping with laughter and just weeping, and her autobiography in search of her blood parents does the same. Red Dust Road is a lovely book, thoughtful and high-spirited, registering loss and love alike.

Jo Shapcott is such a good poet, with a sensitive ear and a gutsy voice. Her collection Of Mutability is about transformation – and that includes decay, life in its leaving as well as its celebrating. This is a book to shove in your pocket and take for a walk, reading one poem at a time, and listening to the voice in your head.

Compiled by Ginny Hooker

• What are your books of the year? Join the discussion here

• Best books of the year
• Best books
• Fiction
• Poetry
• History
• Biography
• Business and finance
• Children and teenagers
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Julian Barnes
• William Boyd
• AS Byatt
• Blake Morrison
• Andrew Motion
• Margaret Drabble
• Jeanette Winterson
• John Banville
• Mary Beard
• Jonathan Coe
• Jilly Cooper
• Roddy Doyle
• Helen Dunmore
• Ian Rankin
• Tom Stoppard
• Rose Tremain
• Helen Simpson
• Colm Tóibín
• Dave Eggers
• Richard Ford
• John Gray
• Hanif Kureishi
• Hilary Mantel
• David Lodge
• Stephen Frears
• Teen books
• Children's books: 8-12 years
• Children's books: 7 and under




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01/01/11--16:05: Books in 2011 – from the new Alan Hollinghurst to David Foster Wallace's unfinished The Pale King (chan 1840837)



There's little by way of ex-prime ministers' memoirs, but the year ahead offers some fiction big-hitters and some impressive debuts

By far the two most talked-about (if not most read) books published in the past 12 months have been Tony Blair's memoir A Journey and Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom. It is tempting, therefore, to ask what their equivalents are likely to be in the coming year. The good news is that, as far as I can tell, they won't have any equivalents. If 2010 was, in literary terms, a year of disproportionate attention lavished on a few high-profile titles, 2011 looks set to be one in which the spoils of praise and publicity are more evenly divided.

It helps, of course, that no ex-prime ministers (or indeed ex-presidents) will be publishing their memoirs, although political anoraks will still have much to get them going, from volume two of Alastair Campbell's diaries, Power and the People (Hutchinson, January), to Sarah Brown's Behind the Black Door (Ebury, March), her account of life at No 10, which will certainly be more revealing about what wielding power is like than her husband's recent Beyond the Crash. Another politics title to look out for is Medhi Hasan and James Macintyre's Ed Miliband and the Remaking of the Labour Party, a July offering from the innovative politics publisher Biteback.

Those who like their reading to track the news cycle closely will also find much to divert them in Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website (Cape, February), by Assange's former number two, Daniel Domscheit-Berg. It's a book that is likely to irritate Domscheit-Berg's former boss, scooping as it does his own recently signed (and currently untitled) memoir, which Canongate expects to publish later in the year.

A broader, more reflective take on the recent past will be provided early in 2011 by two hard-hitting works of current affairs: Eric Hobsbawm's How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism (Little, Brown, January), about the thinker's ongoing relevance to the modern world, and Dambisa Moyo's How the West was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices Ahead (Allen Lane, January), a critique of postwar western economic policy by the well-respected author of 2009's Dead Aid. In history and biography, 2011's offerings look slightly less compelling, aside from Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, January) and Sadakat Kadri's Heaven on Earth: A History of Sharia Law (Bodley Head, June). In October, the biographer Claire Tomalin publishes her eagerly awaited life of Dickens (Viking).

One non-genre fiction that is thriving is the memoir, and the first few months of 2011 sees a glut of them, many with a depressing theme: stand-outs include Sarah Manguso's The Two Kinds of Decay (Granta, February), about the author's struggle with degenerative disease, and Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story (Fourth Estate, March), about her battle to survive her husband's unexpected death. Another leading American novelist, Annie Proulx, is also branching out into the personal form, with Bird Cloud (Fourth Estate, February), an account of building a new home on a 640-acre plot of Wyoming prairie.

For some reason, books about raising children are much to the fore in coming months. Affluenza author Oliver James returns with How Not to F*** Them Up (Ebury, June), about bringing up under-threes, while in the memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Bloomsbury, February), Amy Chua, a Yale law professor, outlines the superiority of Chinese child-rearing methods. Joining them in this contentious terrain is Rebecca Asher's polemic Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality (Harvill Secker, April), calling for a revolution in child-rearing based on greater equality for mothers.

Moving to fiction, the first few months of the year are chiefly notable for some impressive debuts. In January, Sunjeev Sahota's Ours Are the Streets (Picador) audaciously attempts to make us feel sympathy for a British suicide bomber, while AD Miller's highly accomplished thriller Snowdrops (Atlantic) relates the misfortunes of a British lawyer in contemporary Moscow. Another January debut, Scissors, Paper, Stone (Bloomsbury), by Observer journalist Elizabeth Day, deftly unpicks a daughter's troubled relationship with her mother after her father has lapsed into a coma. In February, Tristran Garcia's Hate: A Romance (Faber) – a novel that took France by storm – chronicles friendship and death in 1980s Paris, while Mirza Waheed's The Collaborator (Viking) is a heartbreaking portrayal of war-torn Kashmir in the 90s. In March, Leo Benedictus's The Afterparty (Cape) – touted as a "new kind of novel" – offers an ingenious postmodern take on contemporary celebrity culture. Surely the year's unlikeliest debut, though, will be Jamil Ahmad's The Wandering Falcon (Hamish Hamilton), a collection of stories set in Pakistan's northwest frontier by a 77-year-old Pakistani ex-government official.

As the year moves forward, there will be a greater number of works by established authors. In April David Lodge brings out A Man of Parts (Harvill Secker), a fictional account of the life of HG Wells, and Esther Freud skewers the world of acting in Lucky Break (Bloomsbury). Edward St Aubyn returns in May with At Last (Picador), the final instalment of his exquisite Patrick Melrose series, while Anne Enright publishes The Forgotten Waltz, a story of remembered love set in contemporary Dublin, her first novel since her Booker prize-winning The Gathering. In June, the highly talented Ross Raisin brings out his second novel, Waterline (Viking), and there's also a return for Ali Smith, with the eccentrically titled There but for the (Hamish Hamilton).

But two novels stand out, for very different reasons, as particularly momentous. In April, David Foster Wallace's unfinished work The Pale King (Hamish Hamilton) finally hits the shelves, more than two years after his death. The story of life in a tax office, it promises to be yet another reminder from this remarkable writer of how wide the possibilities of fiction remain. And then in July, Alan Hollinghurst publishes The Stranger's Child (Picador), his first novel since his Booker-winning The Line of Beauty (2004). An epic story of two families and two houses spanning the entire 20th century, it promises to enhance its author's claim to the title of best British novelist working at the moment.

• Alan Hollinghurst
• Alastair Campbell
• Sarah Brown
• David Foster Wallace
• David Lodge
• Joyce Carol Oates
• Ali Smith
• Anne Enright
• Annie Proulx

William Skidelsky




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03/04/11--03:19: The great books giveaway (chan 1840837)



On Saturday 5 March, a million books will be given away across the UK in the first ever World Book Night. We asked writers which books they give as gifts and which they've been most pleased to receive. And children's authors recommended books to give to children

David Almond
I'd give a child any book by the amazing Cressida Cowell. Best to start with How to Train Your Dragon (Hodder) and then go on to the whole series that recounts the life and adventures of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III. The books are exciting, barmy, hilarious, clever, original, accessible, heartwarming and wonderfully well written.

Margaret Atwood
The book I most often give as a gift is The Gift, by Lewis Hyde (Canongate). I keep four or five copies around the house at all times, for swift giving to people who need them. Most often they are artists of one kind or another, and are worrying about the disconnect between what they do and how hard they work, and how little money they make. Hyde's book explains the differences between the money economy in which we think we live, and the gift economy, in which we also live. Gifts – including artistic gifts – travel in mysterious ways, but travel they must, or else they die. The Gift is essential reading for anyone who has embarked on this journey. (It also inspired the creators of World Book Night. That is one of its gifts.)

John Banville
The most fascinating and most beautifully produced book I have come across in some years was given to me by a friend this Christmas past. Microscripts, by Robert Walser, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions/Christine Burgin), is a thing like no other, a transcription of Walser's tiny stories that he wrote in maniacally tiny handwriting, the letters no more than a millimetre high, so that an entire story would fit on the back of a matchbox. The deciphering of the script, by Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte, was a triumph of scholarly tenacity, and this edition, designed by Christine Burgin, is a triumph of the book-maker's art.

William Boyd
On the whole I prefer to give a book token and let people make their own selection, but my book-gift of choice more often than not tends to be Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (Penguin Modern Classics). It is a unique novel – taking the form of hundreds of pages of footnotes to a 999-line epic poem in rhyming couplets. It's very funny, as well as being very brilliant. No one else could have written it and no one could ever hope to write anything similar. So I give it, I suppose, both as a kind of a test and a mark of respect, the subtext being: I hope you appreciate this extraordinary book and also that I think you are the type of cultured person with a fully functioning sense of humour who will.

Raymond Briggs
The best book I received as a child was William the Outlaw, by Richmal Crompton (Macmillan). I remember sitting by the fire in the kitchen and laughing so much I almost fell off the chair. My mother got slightly alarmed thinking I was having a fit. Today, I have an almost complete collection of the William books; their crackpot humour never dates and is as good as the Goons.

Anthony Browne
The one book I would give to a child is The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by the American writer and illustrator Chris Van Allsburg (Andersen), an extraordinary, unique picture book with a brilliant premise. The fictional introduction – the only piece of text longer than two sentences – explains that the pictures in the book are the articles of an unsolved mystery. Thirty years ago a man called Harris Burdick approached a children's book publisher, explaining that he had written 14 stories. Rather than burden the publisher with his entire body of work, he brought just one picture from each story, under each of which he had written the title and a brief caption for the illustration. The publisher was fascinated by the pictures and told Burdick that he would like to see the stories in their entirety as soon as possible. Burdick agreed to bring them to him the next day. But he didn't show up. For years, the publisher tried desperately to track him down, without success. Harris Burdick had mysteriously disappeared and all that was left of him were the 14 mesmerising pictures.

The rest of the book shows us the strange black and white illustrations with their titles and captions. Each one is a superb, imaginative work of art. Having set himself up with the inspired introduction, Van Allsburg was then at liberty to produce a series of drawings entirely from his imagination, free from the limitations of a traditional narrative. The result is a series of implied narratives that are as enthralling as the child's imagination chooses them to be. I have often talked about the importance of leaving gaps between the pictures and the text for children to fill in with their own imaginations. In the case of The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, the gaps are cavernous.

AS Byatt
I particularly like giving books to my literary granddaughter, who is going to read English at university next year. Things like the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, or the poems of Wallace Stevens, or Keats's letters. Or Alice Oswald's The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (Faber). I remember starting my own library of poetry at her age, and I still have those books. I also send her things like Angela Carter's anthology Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (Virago) – short, sharp stories to read in between A level studies.

Julia Donaldson
I would give Days with Frog and Toad, by Arnold Lobel (Harper). This is one of four books, each containing five short stories about a pair of amphibian friends. Frog is the straight guy and Toad is the comically cantankerous half of the duo. He endears himself to readers because he embodies so many human foibles, such as laziness, fear and attachment to routine. (And his frequent exclamations of "Blah!" get children hooting with laughter, so perhaps it's not the ideal bedtime choice.) In my favourite story, "The List", Toad makes a list of Things To Do and then refuses to do anything when it blows away. (He can't chase after it because that wasn't on the list.) I know just how he feels.

Roddy Doyle
I think I was 10. I was having a party. The weather was good, so my mother was keeping us all outside, so we'd break nothing and get sick on the grass. One of my friends handed me a present. He looked a bit embarrassed. I knew what it was before I opened it. A book.

Books weren't presents. I loved books, but they were a bit like food. I loved chicken, but a leg in wrapping paper would have been a huge disappointment. But my mother was looking, so I thanked him and tore off the paper. Great Expectations. I eventually read it. Pip in the graveyard, the escaped convict – more than 40 years later, I'm still reading Dickens.

Margaret Drabble
The best book I've ever been given is the complete six-volume edition of Van Gogh's letters last Christmas, but the book I kept on giving to my grandchildren when they were small was Dr Seuss's The Sneetches (HarperCollins). I gave them all lots of copies until I was told to stop. I loved this book so much, I wanted them to love it too. Dr Seuss is so amusing and egalitarian and free-thinking and so unlike all the more respectable English books I was given and liked as a child. Green Eggs and Ham was pretty good too, but the Sneetches were best. They should be compulsory reading for all warring nations.

Dave Eggers
I find myself recommending Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (Harper Perennial), about the Biafran war, all the time. It's ideal for people who are are looking for the scope and breadth of Tolstoy, or Chekhov, Edward P Jones or even Steinbeck. She has the kind of unwavering command of history and humanity that puts her in that company.

Tim Flannery
My all-time favourite book gift is Oliver Lawson Dick's edition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives (Penguin). You can almost smell and taste 17th-century England, and with the lives of the likes of Shakespeare, Hobbes, Harvey and Lady Herbert revealed "unto ye cunny", it was far too dangerous a work to publish until long after Aubrey's death.

The book I've been most pleased to receive is Tomás O'Crohan's 1929 classic The Islandman (Oxford). It was a present from my great friend Adam Wynn, and what a classic tale it is, telling vividly of the last remnants of a truly tribal Europe.

Neil Gaiman
The book I give most often is Tom Phillips's gloriously strange A Humument (Thames & Hudson). I do not know how to describe it to people – art book? Novel? Proto-graphic novel? It is unique: a mundane and gloomily worthy Victorian novel called A Human Document, recreated, reinvented and retold, page by page, into the adventures of a man named Toge. Each page has been painted into, cut up. The original novel is still visible, but now there's a mad, allusive tale of life on top of it, filled with gnomic, haiku-like texts and paintings. It even has a sex scene. Whatever it is, it makes me happy.

John Gray
"Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text." So writes Fernando Pessoa in the 148th note of The Book of Disquiet (Penguin, edited and translated by Richard Zenith), a unique text composed from scraps that the elusive Portuguese writer left in a large trunk; it was first published in 1982, nearly 50 years after his death. Writing under the guise of a series of alter egos or "heteronyms", Pessoa established himself as one – in fact, several – of Portugal and Europe's greatest poets. If you're looking for plot and character or a message of some kind, The Book of Disquiet is not for you. If you're bored with such conventional fictions, it may be the book you've always been looking for.

Mark Haddon
The book I most often give away is Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (Vintage). As the subtitle describes it, it is "A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years". At root it is an explanation of why Eurasians run the world: not because of any innate racial superiority but because of blunt geographical and biological facts. It's easy for societies to move east or west between similar climates, for example, but very hard for societies to migrate north and south (you don't cross the Sahara on a whim in search of good farmland). The book is also packed with solutions to old unanswered questions as well as intriguing questions you'd never thought of asking. Why did Aztecs die of Spanish diseases while the Spanish seemed immune to Aztec ones? Why can't you train a leopard to hunt? How the hell did anyone find Pitcairn Island, let alone tell anyone else about it?

The book I've most enjoyed receiving as a gift is Full Moon, by Michael Light (Cape), which is full of big, beautiful, digitally restored photographs of the Apollo missions. I think it's very difficult to believe completely in the fact that men have travelled to the moon until you read this book – the crispness of the focus, the sheer physical detail, bolts and tubes and scratched glass, the dirtiness of the lunar surface. Perhaps I'm still a 12-year-old boy at heart, but I can't open this book without a kind of ache, an almost religious realisation that there really is somewhere else.

Mohsin Hamid
The book I most often give is Pereira Maintains by the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi, translated by Patrick Creagh (Canongate). It's an amazing novel: a political thriller, a touching romance, deliciously compressed and formally intriguing. I give it because it's a pleasure to read and among the books I love it's the one that most people have never heard of. (It's also one of the books I've been most pleased to receive as a gift, in San Francisco a decade ago, for all the same reasons.)

Charlie Higson
I would give a child any of Andy Stanton's Mr Gum books (Egmont) – they are wildly funny and inventive and play around with the whole idea of what a book is and how a story is told. Any author who creates a billionaire gingerbread man called Alan Taylor deserves to win the Nobel prize for literature. The book I was most pleased to receive when I was a kid was a collection of Greek myths and legends. I've always loved these stories and they're the basis of nearly every story told since then. They appealed to me as boy because there's a pleasing lack of morality to them and lots of fighting.

Eric Hobsbawm
I was once, a long long time ago, given WH Auden's Look, Stranger! (Faber), just published, as a birthday present. That is the book gift I remember most vividly.

Mary Hoffman

If the child were 8-12 years old, I think I would choose Louis Sachar's Holes (Bloomsbury). This is a perfectly constructed book as well as being exciting, funny and full of suspense. You know you are in safe hands from the opening line: "There is no lake at Camp Green Lake." It's a real writer's book, giving tremendous pleasure to an adult who appreciates Sachar's skill. But it's equally enjoyable by a child reader – a winner all round.

Michael Holroyd
The book I most often give as a present is A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes (Vintage Classics). A superficial reason is that, owing to a generous moment of confusion by Royal Mail, I have several copies in a handsome Folio Society edition. But the real reason is that I consider it a much-overlooked and undervalued novel, inappropriately eclipsed perhaps by William Golding's Lord of the Flies. On one level it's an exciting adventure story with great storms and earthquakes, terrific animals, unruly children and some dubious pirates. What more, when young, could you want? But all this coexists with another narrative, darker and more sophisticated, complex and tragic. You can read this book over again and have read a different novel.

Anthony Horowitz
If there was anything I hated receiving as a child, it was a book token. I had a couple of namby-pamby aunts who always gave me book tokens, a present almost purposely designed to remind me how thick and illiterate I was. There was always the expectation that I would buy a "good" book – rather than a Beano annual. And anyway I often lost the wretched thing long before I got anywhere near a shop. But I loved receiving books and still remember unwrapping Andrew Lang's Tales of Troy (Wordsworth) one Christmas day. It instantly opened the world of myth and legend for me. I absolutely loved the adventures of Ulysses, the death of Achilles, the rivalry of the gods, the construction of the wooden horse that ended the nine long years of war. Myths could be seen as the first great stories of our civilisation, and Lang told them very well (with excellent illustrations). This was the start of an enthusiasm that has lasted to this day. I still hate book tokens though.

Lewis Hyde
I went to college in Minnesota in the mid-1960s. There were a number of talented poets in the state at the time, including Robert Bly and John Berryman. We young writers used to hang around them just to see how they held their pens, what kind of paper they used, what they ate for breakfast.

This is an example, it turns out, of a Hindu practice, darshan, meaning to lay eyes on or to behold. Young artists need to be able to contemplate their more accomplished elders. Something is transmitted by sight alone. More is transmitted, of course, by the work of art itself, by the poem spoken or in print. And, to be sure, there needs to be an actual cash economy of literature if writers and publishers are to survive. But the cash economy is useless unless the gift of art is there as well, doing its strange, transformative work.

The young Bob Dylan lived in Minnesota a few years before I got there and he has since written about the day in Minneapolis when he first heard Woody Guthrie recordings: "I listened all afternoon . . . as if in a trance . . . feeling more like myself than ever before".

Myself, I remember that Bly once gave me a little pamphlet of translations he'd made of poems by Issa. Here's one of them:

Now listen, you watermelons –

if any thieves come –

turn into frogs!

The first page of this pamphlet contained a simple declaration: "This booklet is a gift, and is not to be sold." Years later I myself was to write a book on gift exchange and art. Perhaps the seed of that work was planted by my having been lucky enough to witness an older man's generosity.

PD James
I never give books, only book tokens, which I give frequently for birthdays and at Christmas to young and old members of my family. There would in any case be no book that I would most often give, as each book has to be chosen individually for the recipient. The book I have been most pleased to receive was The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, which was awarded to me as a short story prize at the Cambridge and County High School for Girls on 12 November 1936.

Hari Kunzru
As so much of my reading life takes place onscreen, I've increasingly begun to fetishise books as objects. I find a lot of gifts in rare-book dealers – a first of BS Johnson's The Unfortunates as a wedding present for two writers, and an early edition of The Lord of the Rings for a childhood friend. I've given several people books in Collins's Britain in Pictures series, published as a patriotic exercise during the second world war. These little books survey everything from novelists to mountaineers. Texts were written by major figures such as Edith Sitwell, John Betjeman, John Piper and Cecil Beaton. They're beautiful and inexpensive, and you can always find one that's appropriate for the recipient.

John Lanchester
About 10 years ago I had a conversation with Jonathan Franzen about writers' books, in the sense of books particularly admired by other writers but not, for whatever reason, as widely famous as they deserved to be. He mentioned Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson, and since then it's become the book I've given away more often than any other. It's a collection of linked short stories, Johnson's first; before it he was best known as a poet. It's a beautifully fresh fiction, whose main character is a young, junky alcoholic, and it's an extraordinary, Blakean piece of poetic prose – that being one of the hardest things for any writer to achieve without succumbing to self-indulgence.

Another book I greatly admire and have often given away, and even more often recommended, is John Keegan's The Face of Battle (Pimlico), about ordinary soldiers' experience of war down the centuries. For some reason I've had a very low level of uptake when it comes to people actually reading the book, maybe because the friends I've given it to tend to be anti-war types. But that's the point: the soldier's-eye-view makes this about as anti-war as a book can be.

Andrea Levy
In 1979 I was given a copy of The Women's Room, by Marilyn French (Virago) for my 23rd birthday. I had never really read a novel from start to finish before. I was made to read Dickens and George Eliot at school, which was such tough going for me that I believed reading fiction to be a form of torture. So I looked at this fat book and wondered if it might be useful as a door stop. But then I started to I read it and I was amazed. That experience changed me into a voracious reader. It was the most valuable present I have ever been given.

David Lodge
I possess a small black-bound copy of Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the Dog!), by Jerome K Jerome, inscribed on the fly-leaf: "Happy Xmas to David, Love & Kisses, Auntie Eileen" and dated "Xmas 1944". I was nine years and eleven months old. Eileen was my mother's younger sister, a glamorous and exciting figure to me because she was working as a civilian secretary for the US army in recently liberated Paris. How she obtained the book, the 106th impression, printed in December 1944, and conveyed it to me I do not know. It quickly became one of my favourite books, which I read again and again, especially when comfort reading was required. I tended to skip the historical and topographical passages and revisit the comic set pieces. I have just read the first few pages again and almost immediately I was laughing aloud at the funniest description of hypochondria in all literature.

Many years later a Bulgarian postgraduate student who was writing a thesis about my novels wrote to ask me some questions, one of which was: "is your writing influenced by Jerome K Jerome?" It had never occurred to me before – I liked to answer this kind of question with such names as Joyce, Greene and Waugh, but I replied without hesitation, "Yes". I hope she got her PhD – she deserved it for that insight.

David Mitchell
Choosing the right gift-book is the art of the matchmaker – it must be tailored to the individual – and so there's no single book that I give to people habitually. Books that I have given to more than one person, however, include Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (Bloomsbury), Minnesotan poet James Wright's The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press), Chekhov's A Life in Letters (Penguin) (his de facto memoir) and, most recently, Keith Richards's meaty, wise autobiography, Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

The book I was most pleased to receive as a gift was Through the Looking-Glass. I was about 10, and my mum just left it in my bedroom, unannounced. I remember following the bizarrely staid Alice on her trippy quest (wondering why she never screams "You people are all total nutters!") until it was too dark to read any more.

Michael Moorcock
Apart from George Meredith's spectacular The Amazing Marriage (out of print for 80 years), the book I give away most frequently is probably One Last Mad Embrace, by Jack Trevor Story (Reinkarnation), once the Guardian's favourite and funniest columnist. Although The Trouble with Harry and Live Now, Pay Later are better known (and almost as funny), I believe Embrace to be his masterpiece, skilfully blending the real life of an impoverished movie writer with a hilariously fast-paced plot. It's impossible to tell where autobiography ends and invention begins, but it's safe to say that the more absurd and incredible the anecdote the more likely it is to derive from Story's own life. For some reason, books about lower middle-class or working-class life rarely stay in print, but Story's books have enough enthusiasts to be regularly reprinted and are pictures of an almost forgotten world of the 1950s and 60s.

The book I was most pleased to receive (as an adult) was The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson, recently reprinted by Savoy Books with all the original brilliant illustrations from Lilliput magazine. The Surrealist Sporting Club's dwarf boxer mostly fights timepieces, but plays Mars at soccer, enjoys the night of the big witch shoot, looks in at a very long-running play at the Plant Theatre and goes 10 rounds with a grandfather clock. Absolutely original, incredibly funny. The new edition is also one of the most beautifully produced books around.

Andrew Motion
I don't have a regular giveaway book: I'm more likely to give something I happen to have read recently and liked. But if I were to have a regular . . . it would be Edward Thomas's Collected Poems (Faber). They don't make big claims, but they're stealthily commanding: a beautiful end in themselves, and a doorway to modern poetry. And being given something? The chance would be a fine thing. Anything by or about Tennyson is always very welcome (address supplied).

David Nicholls

The books we give change as we grow older. At university I presented The Rattle Bag to anyone who so much as looked at me, but two have remained constant over the years: Tender is the Night, by F Scott Fitzgerald (Penguin) and JD Salinger's Franny and Zooey (Penguin), two books that languish in the shadow of better-known works. In truth, Franny and Zooey is more of a gamble – I know some people find it precious and self-indulgent – but I'd be very wary of befriending anyone who wasn't moved by the last page of that beautiful book.

As to gifts I've received, I have a first edition of Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings which would be at the top of my list in the event of that terrible hypothetical house-fire.

Michelle Paver
When I was about five years old, my father gave me Once Long Ago, by Roger Lancelyn Green for Christmas. At the time, I didn't own many hardbacks – mostly we got our books from the library – and this was the biggest, most beautiful book I'd ever owned. It's a marvellous collection of fairy stories from around the world: there's a man-eating Chinese monster who's a satisfyingly messy eater, an ancient Egyptian treasure thief, a terrifying Icelandic witch in a stone boat – and many more, all evocatively illustrated by the Czech artist Vojtech Kubasta. Although I didn't realise it at the time, each story is retold in a style that's in keeping with its source country, whether it's Sudanese, Polynesian, Japanese or Basuto.

I read it again and again. I don't think it's a coincidence that I've ended up delving into the myths of different cultures to create my own fairy tales. And it hasn't escaped my notice that the first story in the collection is an American Indian story called "The Boy and the Wolves".

Terry Pratchett
Some miscalculation a few years ago meant that we ended up with, I think, five copies of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. We didn't take any of them back to the shop, taking the view that even in the outside toilet you might find yourself wanting to know in a hurry about the correct usage of the Oxford comma. The experience led to a family pact, but generally Schott's Miscellany manages to get through twice. That is fine because in our house books are neither furnishings nor badges of learning; they are debris. Officially we have two libraries, which are defined as places where you store your old books while your new books pile up beside the bed. All library owners have to beware of the inveterate book borrower but I am a compulsive book lender and keep a stock of Gail Bell's The Poison Principle (Pan), and I'm down to my last copy of Dorothy Hartley's Food in England (Piatkus).

Annie Proulx
As I love Italian cuisine I have given away so many copies of that wonderful regional history of geography, people, particular dishes and foodstuffs by the Russian-born literary scholar Elena Kostioukovitch, Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (Duckworth), that I rarely have a copy on hand for myself. Kostioukovitch is Umberto Eco's translator. The book is lavishly illustrated and gives great reading pleasure. For North American friends who share an interest in natural history, I have found nothing more gripping and readable than Tim Flannery's The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples (Penguin). For friends who are curious about New Mexico, the unique murder mysteries of Tony Hillerman featuring Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee give a detailed picture of the dry desert-mountain terrain of the American south-west.

Jonathan Raban
There's an element of missionary activity in giving a book to a friend. Of course you want to simply share your own excitement and pleasure in the text, but you also want to turn your friend into a fellow convert, an initiate in the faith. I like to give poetry anthologies to people who don't usually read poetry. It hardly matters which anthology: it might be Palgrave's Golden Treasury (Oxford), or Christopher Ricks's newish edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse, or Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney's The Rattle Bag (Faber). I imagine someone, grown slack in the habit of skimming a novel for its story or a newspaper column for its opinion, discovering, for the first time, the joy of patiently teasing out, say, the three stanzas of Keats's "Ode to Melancholy", word by word and line by line, over the course of a rapt hour or three.

Ian Rankin
When I was a student, a friend gave me the first two volumes of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (Arrow) for my birthday. I started reading the first book, thinking: not sure I'm going to like this. All snobby privilege and a world I won't be interested in. By volume two, I was hooked. Widmerpool and the others were such good company, and the writing was elegant and concise, so I bought the rest of the books in the series.

Michael Rosen

It all depends on the age of the child, but I think the tales that seem to work on so many levels for different ages are the Greek myths. I know of two very good retellings – Geraldine McCaughrean's and Terry Deary's – but the stories can be revisited in different ways at different times in our lives. This makes them great for sharing, too.

Meg Rosoff
My parents gave me Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (Puffin) for my 11th birthday. The book features a geeky, intelligent child who also happens to be named Meg; she is overshadowed by a variety of cooler, more intelligent, academically successful characters. As part of the harrowing quest to find her scientist father, Meg is presented with the gift of her faults by the strange and tragic Mrs Whatsit. This was my first literary epiphany – it went against everything I'd ever been taught about being good and cultivating only positive qualities. Passion, stubbornness and rage save Meg in the end, and it was exactly those qualities that (after many trials and tribulations, and more than 30 years later) saved me.

Salman Rushdie
Three times in my life I've been given beautiful old editions of translations of the great story-compendium The Arabian Nights, or, to give it its proper title, The Thousand Nights and One Night. I'm delighted to have them all. This is the book that contains all other books; and its frame story, the tale of the teller of tales Scheherazade, is one of the great accounts of heroism in all of literature. It is the story of how a brilliant and brave woman escapes death at the hands of a monster – King Shahryar, who has been marrying, deflowering and then executing a virgin every night for three years – by telling him stories every night for the next two and three-quarter years and, improbably, civilising him. That she falls in love with the beast she tames is also the stuff of fable.

Lionel Shriver
The novel I've most enjoyed giving is A Home at the End of the World, by Michael Cunningham (Penguin). This author is better known for a later book, The Hours – naturally, since that one made it to the cinema. But this earlier novel has a rare warmth to it, without ever seeming sappy. It reconfigures the concept of family into something you can create, as opposed to a bunch of people you're simply stuck with. When I gave this book to my best friend in New York, he went out and bought – I kid you not – 10 more copies to give to other friends. Now that's a good present: one that multiplies itself.

Frances Stonor Saunders
The Door, by Magda Szabó, translated by Len Rix (Vintage) is a painfully beautiful account of the unlikely bond between two women – an (unnamed) married writer and her enigmatic cleaner, Emerence – who are separated by class, education, age and experience. The story develops into an emotionally and morally complex pas de deux, and holds you spellbound until the end.

You can read the novel again and again without really understanding how it works, but it conjures a psychological atmosphere that is unforgettable. It confirms the Hungarian Szabó as one of the great voices of 20th-century European literature. She died in 2007, aged 90, with a book in her lap.

Colm Tóibín
Over the 19 years since it first appeared, Eugene McCabe's novel Death and Nightingales (Vintage) is the book I have most often given to people. This is because of my own experience reading it – a sheer delight in the scenes and sentences, and then a realisation, a sudden jolt, as the enormity of what is really being planned and plotted becomes plain to both the heroine and the reader all at the same time. It is a wonderful gift because once someone has read this book, they become addicted to talking about it, describing their shock at the level of darkness and evil and sheer malevolence, as well as innocence, depicted and dramatised in its pages.

Rose Tremain
All writers have to steer a difficult course round the giving of their own books. When I started writing, I used to imagine that friends would gasp with joy at the arrival of a newly published Rose Tremain hardback, but I was mainly deluded. And I never had much luck with either of my parents or with my sister as readers. The gift of a new book was habitually followed by a deafening silence.

Perhaps this has made me wary of offering novels – my own, or anyone else's. What I most often give is the poetry that has really spoken to me, starting with my three favourite collected editions, Yeats, Auden and Larkin, and topping these up with a dash of Carol Ann Duffy, who seems to be the only serious modern poet who has remembered how to conjure the liberating power of laughter.

Sarah Waters
One of my most treasured possessions is a Picador paperback copy of the Grimms' Household Tales, given to me as an 11th birthday present in 1977. Until then, fairy stories had come to me via Disney, and were rather cosy affairs. These short, odd stories were much darker, and I found myself both troubled and thrilled by their macabre details: the talking horse's head in "The Goose-Girl", the endlessly growing noses in "The Nose Tree", the little girl who has to cut off a finger to make a key for her brothers' prison in "The Seven Ravens". The illustrations – by Mervyn Peake – only added to the beauty and the weirdness.

Like all powerful narratives, their meanings shift with each re-reading. I was wonderfully lucky to receive them at such a hungry, impressionable age. The book, when I handle it now, still feels like a gift.

Jacqueline Wilson
To a small child I'd give Lavender's Blue: A Book of Nursery Rhymes, compiled by Kathleen Lines and brilliantly illustrated by Harold Jones (Oxford). He uses a wonderful delicate colour palette of blue, sage green, lilac and apricot to create his own quirkily detailed dream-like world. You could pore over the pages every day for a year and still find fresh delights.

www.worldbooknight.org

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03/11/11--02:00: David Lodge on HG Wells (chan 1840837)



HG Wells, author of more than 100 books, was also a prophet of the sexual revolution. David Lodge delves into his many affairs and, below, DJ Taylor considers his literary achievement

In 2004, while waiting for my novel about Henry James, Author, Author, to come out, I occupied myself by writing the introduction to a Penguin Classics edition of HG Wells's novel Kipps. In April I made this note in my very occasional diary:

Researching Kipps I came across in Wells's Experiment in Autobiography an interesting story of the ménage of Mr and Mrs Hubert Bland at Well Hall, Eltham. He was a Fabian, a philanderer who converted to Catholicism, she was E Nesbit. Possible material for a novel like Author, Author here. Sex, politics, children's literature . . . How much has it been worked over?

Little did I know, but it was probably being worked over at that very moment by AS Byatt, who five years later would publish her novel The Children's Book, the central character of which is a children's author with a philandering husband, recognisably inspired by Nesbit (or so I understand – I have abstained from reading it to date).

The possible novel I glimpsed in those few pages of Wells's autobiography was one in which his involvement with the Blands, and the conjunction of his writings and Edith Nesbit's, would provide a structure similar to the relationship between Henry James and George du Maurier in Author, Author. But I soon discovered from Julia Briggs's excellent 1987 biography of Nesbit, A Woman of Passion, that Edith's interesting story began long before she met Wells, while his own continued long after they became estranged, so their relationship could be only one episode in a novel about him

I already knew something of Wells's life from writing literary criticism about his work, but the more deeply I looked into it the more astonishingly rich in human and historical interest it appeared. Beginning inauspiciously (he was the son of unsuccessful shopkeepers and was apprenticed to the drapery trade at the age of 14), it stretched from 1866 to 1946, a period of global political turmoil, including two world wars, in which he played a public role. The bibliography of his published work contains some 3,000 items, including more than 100 books. He met and conversed with nearly every well-known statesman and writer of his time, and in his science fiction and speculative prose he foresaw the invention of, among other things, television, tanks, aerial warfare and the atom bomb. He made a strenuous effort to direct the Fabian Society towards his own idiosyncratic model of socialism (an updated version of Plato's Republic), nearly destroying it in the process, and worked selflessly if vainly all his life for the cause of world government. His Outline of History, published in 1920, was an ambitious attempt to "teach the peoples of the world . . . that they are all engaged in a common work, that they have sprung from common origins, and all are contributing some special service to the general end". It was a global bestseller.

"Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century," George Orwell wrote in 1941, "are in some sense Wells's own creation." Between the wars, however, his influence gradually declined, along with the quality of his writing. The triumph of literary modernism in the 1920s made his work look old-fashioned, and the novels that have retained classic status, such as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr Polly, all belong to the first 15 years of his long literary career. His mind remained fertile with new ideas – in the late 30s, for instance, he proposed something he called the "World Brain", an enormous bank of human knowledge stored on microfilm and transported free to users by aeroplane, which needed only the invention of the microchip to resemble the internet – but the world paid diminishing attention to them. There was pathos in his own sense of this neglect in his last years, and in his deepening pessimism about the fate of the human race, epitomised in the title of his last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether.

Wells was also a prophet of the sexual revolution of our own era. He believed in free love and practised it tirelessly. He was married twice to women he loved, but neither of whom satisfied him sexually, and had several long-term relationships, as well as innumerable briefer affairs, mostly condoned by his second wife, Jane. Of particular interest because of the scandal they aroused were his relationships with three young women half his age: Rosamund Bland, the secretly adopted daughter of Edith and Hubert Bland, who was actually fathered by Bland on Edith's companion and housekeeper, Alice Hoatson; Amber Reeves, a brilliant Cambridge undergraduate, also the daughter of prominent Fabians; and Rebecca West, whom he invited to his Essex country house in 1912 to discuss her witty demolition of his novel Marriage in the feminist journal The Freewoman, a meeting that led in due course to the birth of Anthony West on the first day of the first world war, and a stormy relationship that lasted for some 10 years. Reeves also became pregnant by Wells, by her own desire, with dramatic consequences. There were interesting liaisons with the novelists Dorothy Richardson (who portrayed Wells in her novel sequence Pilgrimage), Violet Hunt and Elizabeth von Arnim. Then there was Moura, Baroness Budberg, a Russian aristocrat who survived the Russian revolution as the secretary and probably mistress of Maxim Gorky and with whom Wells slept when staying in Gorky's flat in Petrograd in 1920. They met again after Jane's death in 1927. Moura was the great love of his later life and his acknowledged mistress, but refused to marry or cohabit with him. Wells has the reputation of being a predatory seducer, but in all the relationships I investigated, with the possible exception of the always inscrutable Moura, he was initially the pursued rather than the pursuer.

Sexuality, the most private and intimate aspect of a person's life, presents a challenge for the writer of a biographical novel. It wasn't a problem for me in the case of Author, Author, because I share the view of most of James's biographers that he was a celibate bachelor who repressed or sublimated his inherent homosexual tendencies. Wells was, in this respect, as in others, the antithesis of James. Fortunately for my purposes, he wrote a secret "Postscript" to his 1934 autobiography, about his sexual life, to be published after he and the women mentioned in it were dead. It eventually appeared, edited by his son Gip, in 1984 under the title Wells in Love. This gave me the essential facts about the major relationships in his life, and a large number of minor ones, as well as invaluable information about his sexual development in childhood and adolescence. It contains only hints of his proclivities as a lover, but these could be supplemented from other sources, especially his letters to West.

Like most students of Wells I came to the conclusion that he was riven with contradictions in principle and practice, but that he was also one of the most interesting and prodigiously talented figures in 20th-century cultural history. The main problem for me was to find in a mass of fascinating material a novel-shaped story, by which I mean a story that has more cohesion and patterning than the faithful chronicle of a life can usually provide. Gradually it emerged: a frame story of Wells's last years, 1944-46, set mainly in his Blitz-battered Regent's Park house, in which Rebecca West, Anthony West and Moura figure prominently; and between these two bookends, the story of the most interesting part of Wells's life, from childhood to the mid-1920s, recalled by him in a variety of discourses, first person and third person, following the sequence of the most important women in his life, showing how they affected, fed into, disrupted, and at times threatened to destroy his career as a writer and public man.

The biographical novel, a type of prose narrative which uses novelistic methods to tell a story about a real person's life, has become increasingly popular with writers and readers of literary fiction in recent decades, and lately has been the subject of controversy. In January William Skidelsky argued in the Observer that a concentration on historical reality stops writers using their imagination. A week later Antony Beevor attacked the trend from the opposite direction in a talk to the Royal Society of Literature on "The Perils of Faction". One of the many perils he identified was that "when a novelist uses a major historical character, the reader has no idea what he or she has taken from recorded fact and what has been invented in their re-creation of events."

I understand the concerns of Skidelsky and Beevor, but there are many different ways of combining fact and fiction, and each example must be judged on its own terms. Some bio-novels, for instance, put their historical characters into situations that they never actually experienced, or imagine encounters between historical characters who never met, sometimes in a comic, carnivalesque mode. I am drawn to the kind based on the known facts about the subject but which uses fictional methods to explore the gaps between them, including the subjective experience of the persons involved.

Through novelistic techniques that evolved in the 19th and 20th centuries – especially "free indirect style", which combines third-person narration with a character's inner voice, and the alternation of this with scenes of dramatic dialogue and interaction – a bio-novel can give a more vivid sense of a person's life as lived than the discourse of biography, in which the voice of the biographer predominates and the narrative content is determined by the available evidence. The novelistic method involves inventing – or, as I would prefer to say, imagining – innumerable small units in the continuum of represented experience. As Beevor observes, there is no way the reader can tell which they are. But as long as they are compatible with the factual record, and the book is presented and read as a novel, not as history, no harm is done, and something may be gained. Bio-fiction does not pretend to replace biography, but complements it, offering a different kind of interpretation of real lives. By putting himself imaginatively inside the consciousness of a historical individual the novelist can contribute to the understanding of biographical "facts".

The episode of Wells's life that required me to use most imaginative reconstruction was his affair with Rosamund Bland. Few hard facts are known about it. It began probably at or near Dymchurch, where the Blands had a holiday house, near the Wellses' home in Sandgate, in the summer of 1906, when Rosamund was a buxom, flirtatious young woman of 19, secretary of the newly formed group of young Fabians known as the Nursery, and very much under HG's spell. According to Wells's own brief, slightly ashamed account in the Postscript, he "never found any great charm in Rosamund", but "she talked of love and how her father's attentions to her were becoming unfatherly", so he decided to protect her from incest by possessing her himself. In this he was encouraged by her natural mother Alice, "who had a queer sort of liking for me". Hubert got wind of the affair and used it to blacken Wells's character among the senior Fabians later that year at a critical moment in his campaign to reform the society. Relations cooled between the two families but there was no permanent breach until, at some subsequent date, Wells and Rosamund were intercepted by Bland on Paddington station in the act of going off together – "for a dirty weekend in Paris", according to her sister-in-law's later testimony. By some accounts the enraged father, an amateur boxer who used to spar with Bernard Shaw, thumped Wells before dragging his errant daughter home.

Julia Briggs usefully pointed out that Wells may have planned to travel from Paddington to Plymouth to take one of the transatlantic liners across the Channel – less conspicuous than the usual routes. She also believed the incident must have happened some time shortly after 4 March 1908, because of a surviving letter from Rosamund to Jane Wells of that date, which begins:

Dear Mrs Wells,

Of course you have an invitation to the Nursery lectures. I wouldn't think of sending you a ticket. It never occurred to me to write and ask you because I thought you would understand that you were to come if you wanted to. I'm so sorry you aren't coming to our dance on the 20th. I thought I might have had an opportunity of talking to you a little bit.

Briggs asserted: "it is virtually impossible that Jane Wells would have been asked to a dance at Well Hall after the event [at Paddington]." With this I had to agree, but it created a serious problem for the cohesion of my novel. As Briggs was aware, Wells began his affair with Amber Reeves in the spring of 1908 – in fact during her Easter vacation, when she was preparing for the second part of her tripos examinations. It was the culmination of a mutual attraction, cloaked by a kind of tutorial relationship, which had developed at an accelerating pace that year – one of the great passions of Wells's life, and his most daring experiment in free love, which lasted for nearly two years until he very reluctantly agreed to end it. Why on earth would he go off for a dirty weekend with a girl he never really cared for, a few weeks before he and Amber became lovers? How could I make this psychologically plausible, and not utterly discreditable? The problem baffled me, and blocked the progress of my novel, until I suddenly saw the answer. Because the Blands used to hold dances at Well Hall, Briggs assumed that "our dance" in Rosamund's letter referred to such an occasion, but it was much more likely that it referred to a Fabian Nursery dance, to which Jane and HG had been invited as members of the executive. Because the archive of the Nursery held at the LSE doesn't begin until 1910, it is impossible to verify that they held a dance on 20 March 1908, but Patricia Pugh's history of the Fabian Society, Educate, Agitate, Organize, confirmed that the Nursery did indeed hold dances in the early years, which was good enough for me. I felt free to place the Paddington episode in the early summer of 1907, a much more plausible date for several other reasons. Rosamund's letter has exactly the wistful tone of someone who would like to heal a breach with a former friend.

Of course I could have ignored Briggs's dating of the Paddington incident when I first encountered it, and placed it at a different time – very few readers would have challenged me. But that would have been to break the rule I set myself: to respect the known facts. When the different documentary sources I consulted gave different versions of the same event, I favoured the one that seemed most plausible to me as a novelist. In the Postscript to his autobiography, Wells describes his third visit to Russia, undertaken primarily to interview Stalin, in 1934. He asked Moura, who had lived independently in Europe since she parted company with Gorky in 1928, to accompany him. She refused, saying she dared not return to Russia, and that she had to visit her children in Estonia, where they arranged to meet on his return journey. He took his son Gip as companion instead. Visiting Gorky in his dacha outside Moscow, Wells was stunned to discover that, unknown to him and contrary to her own accounts of her movements, Moura had stayed with Gorky three times in the past year, most recently only a week before his own visit. Wells felt betrayed and described vividly how he was plunged into paroxysms of jealous rage. He set off alone for Tallinn, determined to confront Moura with her deception.

In HG Wells: Aspects of a Life (1984) Anthony West asserts, naming Gip as his source, that Wells and his son deduced between them that Moura must be a spy working for Russian intelligence, that she had been planted on him at the very beginning of their relationship in 1920 and had been reporting on him ever since. When Wells accused Moura of this in Tallinn she admitted it. She told him that it was the only way she could have survived the revolution and that, "as a biologist, he had to know that survival was the first law of life." According to West, although Wells patched up their relationship, he never recovered from the disillusionment, and it was the underlying reason for the misanthropy of his last years.

West's account is repeated by John Gray in his new book, The Immortalization Commission, and Gray discussed Wells's and Moura's relationship in an essay for Review, published on 8 January. Without Gray's endnote reference, readers of that piece would perhaps assume that the story came from Wells's Postscript. It does not. Wells gives a very detailed account of his showdown with Moura in Tallinn – it is the one dialogue scene in my novel hardly a word of which I had to invent – and at no point in it, or anywhere else, does he accuse Moura of being a spy, only of being "a liar and cheat". West's book is a mine of information but he is not always reliable, and in this instance I have followed Wells's account. If West's version were true, why would Wells give a different one in a work to be published after he and Moura were dead? I find it hard to believe – and I would have found it hard to render in my novel – that he received Moura's frank admission in 1934 that she was a Russian spy who had all along exploited him out of self-interested motives, but that nevertheless he soon resumed a sexual relationship with her, begged her to marry him, and maintained that she was one of the few women he truly loved. Also her daughter Tania recalls in her memoir, A Little of All These, that Moura asked her in June 1936 to tell HG that she had been taken ill in Paris when in fact she had gone to Moscow to visit the terminally ill Gorky. Moura would surely not have bothered with this deception if two years earlier she had confessed to being a regular visitor to the Soviet Union in the pay of OGPU.

It would be surprising if Wells, knowing something of Moura's life in revolutionary Russia, never suspected that she had been compromised into acting as an agent for Russian intelligence, but I take the view that he suppressed or was in denial of this as a possible explanation of her attachment to him, and in my novel it surfaces only towards the very end of his life. Admittedly, in this position it helps to make my narrative novel-shaped.

Wells's golden age, by DJ Taylor

On Christmas Day 1903 HG Wells arrived in the French resort of St Jean Pied de Port, where his friend George Gissing lay dying. Welcomed into the sick man's bedroom, Wells immediately began to find fault with the nursing arrangements, insisted that his fellow-novelist – delirious and running a high temperature – was being "starved", force-fed him broth and, according to Gissing's widow, helped to kill him. To compound this exercise in insensitivity, Wells then put Gissing's last words into the mouth of Uncle Ponderevo in Tono-Bungay's celebrated death-bed scene.

It is difficult not to find something rather symbolic in this catalogue of impulsive gestures and rock-solid confidence in the matter of one's personal judgment: a neat little metaphor not only for the barnstorming way in which Wells conducted his life, but for the art which was that life's justification. If the majority of his novels, let alone the socio-political musings of his later period, were directed at the burning question of The Way We Live Now, then their guiding principle is the title of a second Trollope novel: He Knew He Was Right.

The first area in which Wells claimed specialist knowledge was the future. It is not an exaggeration to say that the half-dozen "scientific romances" published at the fag-end of the Victorian era shaped the thinking of an entire teenage generation. As Orwell once put it: "There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers . . . and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of planets and the bottom of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined."

The reference to "respectable people" is significant, for the novels of Wells's great period – essentially the first decade of the 20th century – are, at bottom, terrific assaults on the idea of "respectability" and its devitalising effect on the teeming lower-middle-class world from which he came. The heroes of The History of Mr Polly (1904) Kipps (1905) and Tono-Bungay (1909) are trying desperately to escape either their origins or the chains that hold them down. Kipps, a draper's apprentice, uses an unexpected legacy to try to turn himself into a "gentleman". George Ponderevo in Tono-Bungay hitches himself to the wagon of his uncle's patent-medicine scam. Mr Polly, trapped behind his Kentish shop-counter, fakes his own death. Each is hamstrung not by his mental horizons but by the stultifying hand of convention, class consciousness and the habit of judging every step you take by the yardstick of what other people might think of you.

In strict taxonomic terms, Wells is the link between the cramped lower-bourgeois interiors of Dickens and Thackeray's early work and Orwell's 1930s fiction. The scene in Coming Up for Air (1939), in which George Bowling revisits the Thames Valley town of his upbringing and finds his now-decayed first love working in a tobacconist's shop, is sharply reminiscent of a key passage in Mr Polly. But there's a difference between Kipps and Ponderevo and some of Thackeray's tuft-hunting arrivistes, and it lies in the fact that Wells actively sympathises with his heroes. He may mock Kipps's ambitions, he may insist that his aspirations are not worth the having, but in the end class solidarity always wins out, if only because Kipps, like Polly and Ponderevo, is a backward projection of Wells himself, minus the genius – a harmless, averagely accomplished lower-middle-class boy, condemned to the drudging, joyless life of the shopkeeper's assistant, until money sets him free.

Or not, as the case may be. For Wells's other great theme is that money is no help in negotiating the complex obstacle course of early 20th-century English social life. His moral is the moral of Great Expectations brought forward into the Edwardian age: don't throw over the class you were born into; don't imagine that the process of "bettering yourself" won't involve huge amounts of moral compromise and self-delusion. The great enemy in every book from Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) to Ann Veronica (1909) is what Wells calls "the ruling power of this land, Stupidity". Against this he envisions a world in which people will behave better to each other, a world in which honest aspiration and fellow-feeling won't automatically be snuffed out by snobbery and hidebound tradition, a world in which "equality" is not a dirty word. At the same time, it is self-evidently a world in which people like HG Wells are allowed to luxuriate and prosper. On one level, Kipps is an exposé of an outdated social system, of a life based fundamentally on the principle of fooling yourself, but is also, you imagine, an apologia pro vita sua.

What remains is a kind of sentimental realism, in which the happy endings, such as they are, altogether fail to disguise some of the genuine horrors that lurk behind the wainscoting of the average early 20th-century parlour: the out-of-work drapers' assistants quietly starving to death in library reading rooms, and tubercular journalists coughing their guts out in rented garrets. Wells was never a realist in the textbook sense, and the brute matter-of-factness of a contemporary American such as Theodore Dreiser was denied him both by the tradition in which he wrote and, even more important, by the view that he took of the world. In his essay "Wells, Hitler and the World State" (1941), Orwell proposed that Wells was simply "too sane" for the mid-century landscape of marching armies and lofted flags. By the time of his death in 1946 Wells openly despaired of the state of the world in which he found himself; but in the golden years before the first world war, he was merely exasperated, confident that a little more collective action, a little more personal resonance, could change things for the better.

"I don't suppose there ever was a chap quite like me before," Kipps tells his wife. In fact, this is a red herring, for the English novel of the previous century is full of bewildered socio-economic migrants of the Kipps sort, ripe to be exploited by the unscrupulous predators of the gentlemanly drawing room. On the other hand, no previous novelist had Wells's ability to decode the assumptions on which a certain kind of middle-class life was based. These early forays into social realism are, consequently a number of things all at once – disguised autobiographies, economic clarion calls, successful attempts to extend the English novel's social range. But they are, above all, horribly funny books, written by a man who still believed that the most effective way of attacking something was to laugh at it.

• HG Wells
• David Lodge
• Fiction




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04/09/11--19:30: A Man of Parts by David Lodge – review (chan 1840837)



David Lodge's novel is an intimate portrait of HG Wells

While DH Lawrence preached the sexual revolution, HG Wells put it into practice. Free love was demanding work but someone had to do it, and no one could accuse HG of slacking. When his first wife failed to satisfy him, he married a second, Jane, and when she proved a wet blanket he turned to other women, with her consent. He was not the most alluring of men: small (5ft 5in), fattish, domineering and opinionated. But the women kept coming. Several were virgins half his age. Others were seduced by his celebrity and radical thinking. In bed Rebecca West called him Jaguar and he called her Panther, names which dissolved old gender norms of prey and predator.

Wells wrote about his love affairs or "passades" in a postscript to his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), leaving instructions that it be suppressed till a decent interval (50 years) had gone by. "My story of my relations with women is mainly a story of greed, foolishness and great expectation," he concluded, adding that its insights into "the misfit of male and female desires" made it a story worth telling. David Lodge retells it as a 500-page biographical novel that explores the relationship between author and lover, prophet and philanderer, bed and book.

"He smelled of walnuts and he frisked like a nice animal," West said, explaining what made Wells attractive. Elizabeth von Arnim thought he smelled of honey. There was also – or there is here – the prostitute he went to for his first experience of sex, who exclaimed: "My, you've got a big one for a little chap." No less important an endowment was his boundless enthusiasm. The women who fell for his high-flown talk of "triangular mutuality" might have been less pleased to learn that Jane was his true love and that he thought of sex as recreation, on a par with tennis or badminton. But they enjoyed his ingenuity and lack of stuffiness. He liked to make love in the open air, and once did so (with Von Arnim) on top of the Correspondence page of the Times, above a letter denouncing West.

His self-deluded pursuit of harmless fun invariably ended in farce or disaster. A carefully planned secret trip to Paris with the youthful Rosamund Bland got no further than Paddington, where they were intercepted by her outraged father. Amber Reeves became pregnant and had to be married off. He also got West pregnant while distracted by the presence of a cleaner in his flat (so much for his command of coitus interruptus). Then there was Hedwig Verena, who turned up one night naked under her raincoat and slit her wrists; quick thinking saved her from death and him from exposure in the press, but he was beginning to learn that there's no such thing as a free ride. He spent his later years being relatively loyal to Moura Budberg, his Russian mistress.

If history is (in Alan Bennett's phrase) one fucking thing after another, the risk in writing Wells's history is that it will become one fucking fuck after another. Fortunately Lodge is also interested in Wells's books (parts of A Man of Parts read like literary criticism) and in his tussles with the Fabians. The personal and the public are, in any case, hard to separate. When Shaw and the Webbs fought his plans to reform the Fabian Society it was, in part, out of fear that his ideas about marriage (and the gossip surrounding his private life) would discredit the socialist endeavour.

Lodge isn't the first novelist to recognise the potential of such material. In a little book about West in 1985, Fay Weldon characterised their affair as "Wells and West! The encounter of giants – Godzilla meets King Kong!" Lodge's Wells is a monster, too, but a lovable and sometimes pathetic one. Where circumstances demand male badinage, he can keep his end up ("What's the most times you've done it in one night?" "I don't know . . . I lose count after it gets into double figures") but he cuts an increasingly isolated figure.

The virtue of good biofic – and A Man of Parts is excellent biofic – is that it makes you want to go back to the primary sources. The drawback is that, until you do, you can't be sure what's factual and what's invented. Did Bland, on her last time in bed with Wells, come to "a genuine, uncontrollable climax, crying out in surprise and joy"? Could Reeves "effortlessly cross her ankles behind his neck while lying underneath him"? Did Rebecca West have a "luxuriant bush"? Was Violet Hunt "shamelessly versatile" in the art of fellatio? "I have imagined many circumstantial details which history omitted to record," Lodge admits, and the innocent reader will probably conclude that these are among them.

Still, just as HG was tireless in his philandering, so Lodge has been tireless in his research, and nothing here has been casually inserted. The Acknowledgments run to several pages, and he not only lists the many biographies consulted but specifies which letters in the novel have been made up. Less grounded novelists would let their imagination run away with them but Lodge remains scrupulous and scholarly. With some subjects that would be a failing, but Wells's life is so extraordinary that it needs no embroidery.

What it does require is a shape, and Lodge gives it one, first by beginning at the end, in Hanover Terrace, London, in 1944 as the dying author reviews his past life and, second, by having Wells interrogate himself, as if conducting a Q&A session with an unusually well-prepared interviewer. It's not the most subtle of devices but it does allow a break from the free indirect style. Moreover, the questions – easy full tosses at first – gradually get tougher, with Wells forced to confront his failures. Eugenics, antisemitism, warmongering, male chauvinism, double standards: he answers the charges with a mix of stubborn defensiveness and belated guilt.

There'll be some who feel that Lodge still lets his man off lightly, and that the outward amenability of Wells's wife Jane as he takes each new mistress fails to register the price she paid. But Lodge does succeed in showing what made Wells, in his lifetime, so irresistible. It helps that there are affinities between author and subject – a lower-middle-class south London childhood, for instance – that were absent from Lodge's earlier novel about Henry James. But sympathy is no guarantee of success: you also need narrative drive. Unlike many of Wells's, Lodge's novel has that. It bounds along terrifically and never tires, even in bed.

Blake Morrison's The Last Weekend is published by Vintage.

• Fiction
• HG Wells
• David Lodge

Blake Morrison




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04/16/11--21:30: A Man of Parts by David Lodge – review (chan 1840837)



Wells's life would suit a great biography or a novel. This hybrid doesn't quite come off

A Man of Parts is either a biography of HG Wells in the form of a novel, or a novel in the form of a biography of HG Wells. David Lodge has imagined some details and manufactured some correspondence, detailed in an acknowledgements section, but the novelistic element is kept within bounds. It's true he has invented interviews (or self-interviews, in which Wells accuses and defends himself in dialogue form) to supplement his narrative, but this modest liberty is hardly more than some biographers claim as a matter of course – Ackroyd on Dickens is an obvious example.

The benefit of this hybrid form for the writer is that it frees up the texture of the book, avoiding the build-up of clogging documentation, and allows him to hurry over or emphasise themes at will. The benefit for the reader isn't so clear.

In the opening section, set in 1944, Wells is in his late 70s, unwell and despairing, writing Mind at the End of its Tether with what energy remains to him, and also working on a very different piece of prose called The Happy Turning: "It is a slight, sunny prose fantasia, a carnivalesque reworking of his story 'The Door in the Wall'. It owes something to the idea of 'dreaming true' in George du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson and even more to Henry James's tale 'The Great Good Place'."

It's hard to identify this professorial voice as belonging to anyone but Lodge himself (even without the knowledge that he has written a novel about the friendship of du Maurier and James). It seems to rule out the readerly surrender on which fiction depends.

The bulk of the book amounts to a flashback to Wells's earlier life, returning to his last months in the final section. Here his work is discussed in a more conventionally novelistic way, with family members looking up from reading the proofs of a book to pass comment, or consulting the shelves to substantiate a point ("'Remember Karenin in The World Set Free?'").

Lodge's title suggests both Wells's unusually broad portfolio of interests and also a recurrent obsession. Short, unshapely and not always able to produce respectable middle-class vowel sounds, HG Wells was perhaps the least likely sex machine in literary history. His two marriages were to women who were hardly on speaking terms with desire, but he more than made up for this in his spare time. The interest in strong, independent women was sincere, but it was hardly impaired by their regular sexual availability. The secret of his success seems to have been a winning combination of pheromones, which gave him the aroma of walnuts (according to Rebecca West's testimony) or honey (Elizabeth von Arnim).

Rebecca West is given a point of view in the first and last sections, but not during her involvement with Wells, when she was transformed from a drily savage critic of his work to a woman obsessed. The novelistic element of A Man of Parts would have been stronger with invented or elaborated testimony from the remarkable women (including Dorothy Richardson and Amber Reeves) who found Wells an object of fascination.

The affair with Reeves would make the best self-contained fictional narrative. She inspired Ann Veronica, but the scandal made relations impossible with the straitlaced Fabian Society, in which Wells had made his most sustained attempt to turn socialist principle into practice.

There's a fair amount of gush in the book's tone when dealing with its hero's love life, along the lines of: "'I never felt such sensations before,' she sighed after a gratifying orgasm. 'And I never realised a man could go on for so long.'" This novelettishness can't really be blamed on the deluded romanticism of the women involved, in the absence of their point of view. HG Wells wrote something called Boon, but not for Mills & Boon.

The book's final verdict on Wells, given by Rebecca West, is that "HG was like a comet. He appeared suddenly out of obscurity at the end of the 19th century and blazed in the literary firmament for decades, evoking astonishment and awe and alarm, like the comet of In the Days of the Comet which threatened to destroy the earth, but in fact transformed it by the beneficial effect of its gaseous tail." She anticipates that one day he will glow in the firmament once again.

In recent years David Lodge has suffered a different type of astronomical event, a partial eclipse by other writers. First he had the bad fortune to publish a book with Henry James as a major character shortly after Colm Toíbín had produced The Master. Now he has chosen a protagonist who becomes involved in the unconventional household of Hubert and Edith Bland (who wrote under the name of E Nesbit). This is a fascinating little world of secrets and cross-currents, ideals and betrayals, but his version has none of the intensity AS Byatt gave to her transformation of it in The Children's Book.

Henry James also features in A Man of Parts, since the two writers were under the impression they were friends, and lavished ambiguous compliments on each other's books until Wells published Boon, containing savage parody impossible for James to take in good humour. David Lodge defers to James's status but doesn't seem attracted to his principles of writing. He must know that James would have found his chosen approach hopelessly miscellaneous.

The narrative's uncertain distance from the protagonist is shown by one mannerism in particular. A number of times Lodge refers to the central character as "himself", in a way that is awkward and sounds almost Irish: "She declared that the Webbs' friendship with himself was at an end", for instance. At other times he stays loyal to "he": "The general editor, who admired her book reviews, had invited [Rebecca West] to contribute to the series on a subject of her own choice, and she proposed Henry James – to his displeased surprise…" Here "his" attaches, by any orthodox grammar, to "editor". Again: "[William] Joyce was granted leave to appeal, which is where [Rebecca West's] article ends. Writing to congratulate her he says that he enjoyed reading it, but would enjoy seeing her even more." A long moment's thought is needed to understand that it isn't Lord Haw-Haw who is writing to, congratulating and wanting to see Rebecca West. It seems to be worth quite a lot of clumsiness to avoid saying "Wells", and sounding like the straightforward biography A Man of Parts so much wants not to be.

• David Lodge
• HG Wells
• Biography
• Fiction

Adam Mars-Jones




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04/22/11--04:01: Guardian Books podcast: Jennifer Egan and Easter reading for children (chan 1840837)

In this week's podcast, in the week she won the Pulitzer prize, Jennifer Egan talks to Claire Armitstead about her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, and explains why she chose to write an entire chapter of it in PowerPoint slides.

David Lodge comes in to talk about why he turned to HG Wells for his latest foray into fictional biography, A Man of Parts. And children's site editor Michelle Pauli goes on a tour of the Just Imagine Story Centre in Chelmsford and suggests some of the best books to keep your kids entertained over the Easter holidays.

Reading list
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Constable & Robinson)
A Man of Parts by David Lodge (Harvill Secker)
Scorpia Rising by Anthony Horowitz (Walker Books)
The Throne of Fire by Rick Riordan (Puffin)
Dead Man's Cove by Lauren St John (Orion Children's)
Sky Hawk by Gill Lewis
The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper

Sarah Crown

Claire Armitstead

Michelle Pauli







05/04/11--04:27: David Lodge's top 10 HG Wells books (chan 1840837)



The novelist selects his favourites from the vast and various output of The Time Machine author

Born in 1935, David Lodge is the author of 14 novels including Nice Work, Thinks... and Deaf Sentence. He is also Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, where he taught between 1960 and 1987. As well as his fiction, he has written numerous books of criticism. His new novel, A Man of Parts, is a fictionalised account of HG Wells's life and career. Reviewing it in the Guardian, Blake Morrison said it "bounds along terrifically and never tires" while showing "what made Wells, in his lifetime, so irresistible".

"HG Wells (1866-1946) was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century. He is probably best known today as the author of classic works of science fiction, but he published well over 100 books in his lifetime, of many different kinds: novels and short stories that were realistic, fantastic, comic, tragic, and didactic, utopias and dystopias, social criticism, reportage, travel, autobiography and biography, world history … and also found time to edit collaborative encyclopaedic works on science and economics. I have selected 10 personal favourites from this abundance."

1.  The Time Machine (1895)

This was the book that made Wells instantly famous when it was first published, and it has never been out of print since. The machine itself quaintly resembles a bicycle, on which the time-traveller ventures further and further towards the death of the Earth as the sun cools. On the way he stops in the year 802,000 to discover a disturbing reversal of the Victorian class-system. Unforgettable.

2.  The War of the Worlds (1898)

The mother of all aliens-invade-the-earth novels. Monsters from Mars land in the south of England near Woking and cause devastation, death and mass panic with their sophisticated weaponry, until they are defeated in an unexpected but plausible way that owes more to Nature than humanity.

3. Kipps (1905)

Arthur Kipps is a down-trodden apprentice in a drapery store (as Wells himself was) who unexpectedly inherits a fortune that enables him to live the life of a gentleman. But without education and the talents possessed by his creator he is exploited and humiliated by his new bourgeois associates. The novel combines rich comedy and biting social criticism with Dickensian verve.

4.  Tono-Bungay (1909)

Its rather off-putting title is the name of a worthless patent medicine which, through meretricious advertising and marketing, makes the narrator's pharmacist uncle, Edward Ponderovo, ridiculously rich until his bubble bursts. This, however, is only one thread in a wide-ranging Condition of England novel that contains some of Wells's most powerful writing, especially its descriptions of London.

5. Ann Veronica (1909)

The story of a young woman rebelling against her stuffy middle-class, suburban upbringing, seeking independence in every aspect of life, including sex. Set against the background of the suffragette movement, from which Ann Veronica eventually parts, the novel was banned from libraries and denounced from pulpits when it was first published. It remains a lively, engaging picture of a society in transition between traditional and progressive values.

6. The History of Mr Polly (1910)

Widely considered to be Wells's most perfectly-formed novel, this comic idyll is the story of a henpecked, unsuccessful, desperately frustrated small shopkeeper who bungles but survives a suicide-and-arson attempt, and becomes master of his fate under another identity.

7. Mr Brittling Sees It Through (1916)

"The War That Will End War", Wells called it when it broke out in August 1914, but as time passed and the casualties mounted he became disillusioned and renounced his early jingoistic fervour. Mr Brittling is a transparently autobiographical and amusingly critical self-portrait. His changing response to the tragic conflict struck a chord with people in many countries, and the novel was a bestseller.

8.    Russia in the Shadows (1920)

Wells first visited Russia in January 1914. This is a vivid account of his return to post-revolutionary St Petersburg, now called Petrograd, a ruined city with a near-starving population. Wells was a first-class reporter, and he had the advantage of staying with his friend, Maxim Gorky, rather than the carefully-monitored hotel usually reserved for foreign visitors. He also had enough prestige to get an interview with Lenin in Moscow.

9.    A Short History of the World (1922)

Although it drew on the same research as Wells's Outline of History, this book was a separate, original work. It is an amazing feat of lucid, economical exposition that tells the story of our planet from its very beginnings up to the first world war. It has been reissued by Penguin with an admiring introduction by the historian Norman Stone, who says: "Wells is the English writer of this century whom I should most like to raise from the dead."

10.   Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (1934)

The subtitle is of course to be taken with a pinch of salt, but this work is remarkable for its honesty and absence of vanity. Organised thematically rather than chronologically, it contains revealing memories of Wells's underprivileged family background and early struggles, and reflects the multiplicity of his later interests and achievements.

 

• David Lodge
• HG Wells
• Fiction




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05/18/11--10:24: Secret Thoughts – review (chan 1840837)



Octagon, Bolton

There's a joke that goes like this: two behavioural psychologists are in bed together and one says to the other: "That was good for you, how was it for me?"

David Lodge's play is adapted from his 2001 novel Thinks ... and gives the joke dramatic form. Helen Reed, a recently widowed novelist, seeks solace through a placement on a windswept provincial campus. Ralph Messenger, an expert in artificial intelligence, is the university's resident media star, forever chasing headlines and women.

Lodge's novel boils down neatly into an intellectually and erotically charged dialogue on the nature of the mind. For Messenger, a scientist, consciousness is an unquantifiable problem; for Reed, a novelist, it is her stock-in-trade. Lodge has great fun with their disparities of discourse: Messenger reads one of Reed's books and dismisses it as "women's writing"; she in turn reads a paper on grief and discovers she is suffering from "a cognitive adjustment to an attachment structure in response to a death event".

Lodge cannot quite eradicate the sense that some of the cerebral jousting has a more natural home in a novel than on stage. Yet after a laboured start, the characters gradually begin to seem more like people than conduits for ideas. Kate Coogan impressively mines the core of Reed's repressed Catholicism; Rob Edwards conveys Messenger's arrogance without making him repellent. David Thacker's cool, considered production gives the impression of a show that may be easier to admire than adore, yet by the end quite satisfactorily readjusts one's attachment structure.

Rating: 3/5

• Theatre
• David Lodge

Alfred Hickling




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05/21/11--16:04: Secret Thoughts – review (chan 1840837)



Octagon, Bolton

"David Lodge yokes together two warhorses, the campus novel and the novel of adultery, and uses them to pull an old debate – the rival claims of science and art – to tell the truth about life." So wrote Adam Mars-Jones in these pages, reviewing Thinks... in 2001. Now Lodge has adapted and renamed his novel as a two-hander for the stage. This simplification emphasises its Mills & Boon qualities ("He was surprisingly strong in the arms and shoulders…") and highlights its patina of Graham Greene grey ("to still believe in sin but no longer in the possibility of absolution"). Helen is a recently widowed novelist and pick-and-mix Catholic; Ralph is a professor of cognitive science and an enthusiastic philanderer. Both lecture at a "green field" university, economically suggested by Ciaran Bagnall's backdrop of concrete-style soaring ribs, infilled with glass panes. On to these are projected a range of exteriors and Helen's journal entries as she types them. As in the book, much of the "debate" is conveyed through this journal, and through a stream-of-consciousness tape log that Ralph is keeping as an experiment in cognition. These "secret thoughts" of the title, under David Thacker's direction, are delivered directly to the audience by Kate Coogan and Rob Edwards, who admirably uncover the emotional truths of their not altogether truthful characters.

• David Lodge
• Theatre

Clare Brennan




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05/28/11--16:05: Ginger, You're Barmy by David Lodge – review (chan 1840837)



David Lodge's 1962 comic novel about national service offers little sign of Britain's dawning sexual revolution

Languishing in the dog days of national service, David Lodge's 1962 novel is a close contemporary and very English bedfellow to Joseph Heller's wild military satire Catch-22 – a stinging critique of the long hangover of war.

Dispatched to basic training at Catterick after graduation, Jonathan Browne is thrust into a world of cosmic dreariness, punctuated only by the petty cruelties of small-minded sergeant majors and sadistic COs. His comrades are a rag‑tag bunch of pompous public school types and foulmouthed barrowboys, yet among them Jon finds allies: the delicate, doomed Percy, and Mike – id to Jon's ego – an Irish Catholic dropout and hothead. While Jon makes the accommodations necessary to survive, Mike's volatile behaviour leads him into debilitating conflict with the military establishment.

Lodge's vignettes of army life are spiced with a wit that is both droll and mordant, and his characters are deftly rendered. Jon himself is not without flaws: his small vanities and moral lacunae are laid bare, yet his compassion and outrage make Ginger an impressively humane and feelingly political indictment of a tawdry postwar compromise.

Just as it is Jon's tragedy to be one of a lost generation stranded between the war and the sexual revolution, so Ginger evokes a forgotten moment: completed the year before the Chatterley trial tore up the style guide for literary fiction, its quaint idiom must have seemed almost immediately dated. Lodge owes an obvious debt to Graham Greene, but Jon and Mike's consanguinity with John Osborne's Jimmy Porter is clear, even if they never quite achieve the crystalline rage of the Angry Young Men. Lodge's novel is, in this sense, a moving glimpse of a world on the cusp of change: Janus-faced, profound above all in its uncertainties.

• David Lodge
• Joseph Heller
• Graham Greene
• John Osborne
• Classics

Lettie Ransley




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06/03/11--23:00: Simon Hoggart's week: Keeping the good life in the family (chan 1840837)



Fifa is a cosy organisation which – like Soviet Union party trusties – looks after its own

✒Years ago I went to Moscow, and was shown round one of the hard currency shops there by the Observer's correspondent, Mark Frankland. Only foreigners with real money were admitted to these stores, along with the nomenklatura, which meant Communist party trusties.

Mark suggested buying a box of chocolate covered halva – ordinary Russians would kill for such a treat, he said. It was very pleasant, but there was nothing particularly luxurious about it; it might be on a par with Turkish delight for us. The point for the elect was that nobody else could have it. For most people the system brought nothing but shop windows filled with tins of pickled herring and cabbage.

A year or so later Ronald Reagan mused that he would love to get Soviet leaders to visit an ordinary supermarket in the States, where they would get some idea of the dazzling choice of everything, available to everyone. But they would have been appalled. When you had spent your life struggling up the horrible greasy pole of Kremlin politics, so that you could enjoy caviar, fillet steak and chocolate halva, the notion that everyone might share your good fortune would be intolerable.

I'm reminded of this when I read about Fifa, that other cosy organisation that looks after its own and – in their case – dishes out first class travel and accommodation, limousines to matches where Blatter's "football family" (as in "dat was bidness; dis is family" – Godfathers I, II and III) enjoy the best seats, and in some cases envelopes allegedly filled with $40,000 in bills.

Of course they all vote for Blatter! And of course they nearly all voted against England, with its terrifying threat of reform. What possible interest could this lot have in spreading all that money to African villages where small boys kick around tennis balls, or even to Hackney Marshes, when it could be spent on them?

✒Of course we don't have the cult of personality here, as they did in the Soviet Union. Except, perhaps, in Westminster, where I picked up a copy of the Westminster Record, an inaptly named four-page propaganda sheet published (not, they say, at our expense) for the Conservatives. "How our borough is safer under Boris Johnson," it proclaims. "Council tax frozen under Boris". Answers to the "Boris wordsearch" puzzle include Boris's multitudinous achievements, such as "street trees" and "booze ban".

In all I counted no fewer than 44 mentions of "Boris Johnson" or "Boris" – 11 per page, plus nine photographs of the Great Leader. But, as I say, no personality cult there.

✒Am I right in thinking that last weekend was the only occasion when Sir Alex Ferguson lost a football match and, instead of blaming the referee, praised the winning side? I am sure I will be corrected if I am wrong.

✒Off to the Hay festival, which I still love even though the Guardian no longer sponsors it. I will be plugging my new paperback, A Long Lunch, which of course I thoroughly recommend. We are driving up, in what promises to be good weather, though in Wales the rain is always just over the hill. I only hope we can make Hay while the sun shines.

The great thing about Hay is that there are so many events going on that you meet the most surprising, random collection of people. I recall a four-way conversation involving me, Christopher Hitchens, Barry Cryer and the bishop of Edinburgh, who had come down by motorcycle and was still in his leathers. Or chatting with David Lodge and George Osborne, not exactly blood brothers.

Bob Marshall-Andrews, the former Labour MP, who is plugging his own new book, Off Message, even more ruthlessly than me, recalls in its pages a visit to the festival to take part in Any Questions with, among others, Jeanette Winterson. Bob was persuaded to stay for a dinner party nearby, where he ate well and drank copiously. Word came that Ms Winterson had gone home unexpectedly, and that he could have the room – in a nearby mansion – that she no longer required.

Pissed as a rat, Bob arrived there by taxi at 3am, to be greeted by a composed and very beautiful hostess. "I uttered the first words that came into my head: 'Hello, I'm Jeanette Winterson.'" Quite unfazed, his hostess said that he was expected and showed him to his room.

Next morning he had sobered up and offered an apology. His hostess said they had already found out who he really was. But she was a great Winterson fan. She had never seen a photograph of her, but she knew she was a lesbian. "I am sorry to say that when you announced yourself as Jeanette Winterson, I thought you actually were Jeanette Winterson."

If you've ever seen Marshall-Andrews on TV, you'll know this is utterly bizarre, like confusing Dennis the Menace with Kate Moss.

• Fifa
• Sepp Blatter
• Ronald Reagan
• Boris Johnson
• Sir Alex Ferguson
• Hay festival
• Festivals
• Christopher Hitchens
• David Lodge
• George Osborne
• Jeanette Winterson

Simon Hoggart




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06/17/11--15:55: The best holiday reads (chan 1840837)



Anna Karenina on the beach, The Corrections in Patagonia, Death in Venice overlooking the Lido ... Writers recall their most memorable holiday reads – what are yours?

John Banville

I came late to Henry James. In my teenage years I read some of the stories and The Turn of the Screw, but I did not approach the novels until the early 1970s when, on holiday in Florence, I took up The Portrait of a Lady in a well-thumbed Modern Library edition. I had not realised that so much of the book was set in and around Florence, or that James had written the first instalments in the Hôtel de l'Arno, just around the corner from the pensione where I was staying, near Santa Croce.

The "discovery" of James was one of the formative experiences of my life, and that it should have occurred in Florence, of all places, lent it an almost magical significance. In those days, before mass tourism thoroughly destroyed it, the city was largely still the one that James had known, and for me his stately ghost haunted its shaded streets and sunny piazzas, where often, too, I thought I glimpsed, strolling among the international crowd, a handsome young American woman from another age, whom I seemed to recognise . . .

William Boyd

In 1971, at the age of 18, I left school and went off to spend nine months at the University of Nice on the Côte d'Azur. It was my gap year, long before gap years were invented. As reading matter for my journey to Nice I bought an American novel – because I was only interested in American novels at the time – called The Sophomore by Barry Spacks, first published in 1968 but now out of print. I still have the tattered Fontana paperback. Over that unforgettable summer of 1971 I read The Sophomore again and again. It was speaking to me in the most insistent way. It's a comic novel about the amorous travails of a 23-year-old man at an American university – but it's also very dry, knowing and sophisticated. I was about to go to university myself and, through my reading of this novel, I began to understand what one could do with fiction: how experience of life could be invented or edited, then manipulated and shaped to make people laugh and think about themselves. I see now that The Sophomore was the serendipitous push I needed to set me on my way. I read it again last year. It holds up remarkably well – an American Lucky Jim. Someone should republish it.

AS Byatt

I was married (for the first time) in the summer of 1959. I was working on a D Phil in Oxford on 17th-century religious allegory. My supervisor was the great Helen Gardner. I went to see her at the end of the academic year. She said, not for the first time, that the academic life required a nun-like devotion and chastity. She said that when I married my state research grant would be withdrawn as I would be a married woman – a married man had his grant increased. After these blows she made gracious conversation. She was, she said, reading Proust. She gave a little laugh. In English, of course – she wasn't up to reading him in French. In a state of pure rage I walked into Blackwell's, purchased the whole of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu in French, and began reading. I read all summer, across Europe, back in England. That was when I knew I was a writer, not an academic. Every sentence was a new revelation of what language could do. At first I needed a dictionary, and then I didn't, mostly. I had never met so finely woven a tapestry of writing. I began to plan a novel that would be as long as my life, that would make life and novel one. That didn't exactly work out. But that was my very best summer of reading.

Jonathan Coe

I read Narziss and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse some time in the late 1970s, when I was on a caravan holiday with my parents. We would go away every year to Abersoch for three weeks, and although, if the weather was bad (which it usually was), there was precious little to do except read, I never seemed to take enough books with me. So I was often thrown on the mercy of the beachside bookshops.

You could wander into one of these tiny places and there, amid the shrimping nets and souvenir egg timers, you would find a revolving stand with the most eclectic choice of novels, including Penguin Modern Classics, of all things. So there I found Hesse's penultimate major work, and that began my late-adolescent love affair with his books – although I always preferred the austere, Germanic ones to those that flirted with eastern mysticism. Narziss and Goldmund is schematic in a way that is typical of Hesse – one character stands for the Apollonian way of life, one for the Dionysian – but I didn't notice that, I just loved its sense of the medieval landscape, and I spent a happy few days dreaming that I was in a German monastery rather than a rain-swept corner of north Wales.

Jilly Cooper

When I was 22 my parents took me to Lake Como in Italy, the perfect romantic setting. Mourning a break up with an adored boyfriend, I discovered and devoured the poems of AE Housman, totally identifying with their sense of love and loss and revelling in the ravishing descriptions of the Shropshire countryside. One poem, which contained the lines "Possess, as I possessed a season, / The countries I resign", moved me so much that I copied the entire thing into my notebook. Chancing upon it, my parents assumed I was the author and that they had given birth to a genius. Alas, I had to disillusion them, but I've adored Housman's poems ever since.

Margaret Drabble

My most memorable holiday book is Angus Wilson's Late Call, which I read on holiday in Morocco, or rather on my way to Morocco, for I think I read it on the boat from Marseille to Tangier. I had discovered Wilson's work while still at university and eagerly read each book as it was published; this novel, which came out in 1964, was as gripping as all the others had been, and very unexpected. It's the story of a newly retired hotel manageress trying to adapt to life with her widowed headmaster son in a new town. It's full of social comedy and human tragedy, and I remember being utterly gripped by the wholly real world Wilson created. It was a perfect companion on a trip that was at times rather unsettling. I don't know how a sophisticated and highly educated man such as Wilson can have entered so fully into this woman's hopes and fears, but he did. It's also more experimental than it looks in terms of narrative technique. It was made into a TV series in which Dandy Nichols played the main role brilliantly. Many of Wilson's books are now available through Faber Finds, including this one. I continue to associate it, quite inappropriately, with memories of Marseille, the Mediterranean and Casablanca.

Geoff Dyer

I bought Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia in June 1986 from Compendium in Camden, London (a Mecca, back then, for theory-hungry radicals) and read it, intermittently, throughout the summer in Brixton. Given the diversity of these "Reflections on Damaged Life" – compiled in the molten core of the 20th century – it's not surprising that what I recall is less the specific content of the book than the experience of reading it, the current coursing through its pages. Dialectical thought – "an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means. But since it must use these means, it is at every moment in danger of itself acquiring a coercive character" – is taken to an extreme that is aesthetic (the first section is "For Marcel Proust") as well as cerebral. Needless to say, I couldn't understand all of it; still can't, to be honest, but this passage means more to me now than it did 25 years ago: "Slippers are designed to be slipped into without help from the hand. They are monuments to the hatred of bending down."

Jennifer Egan

I read Donna Tartt's The Secret History in the summer of 1991, while staying with my boyfriend in a small house on Martha's Vineyard. The book hadn't yet been published, but there was already such advance furore over it that just getting my hands on a battered, grease-stained galley felt like an unbelievable score. I sat down expecting to be riveted but prepared for disillusionment – how many books can stand up to an expectation like that?

Shortly after I started the book, the septic system in the house where we were staying backed up and filled the washing machine (which happened to contain most of our clothing) with sewage. We had few clothes, no hot water, and a domestic crisis to deal with. But I experienced the devolution of our beach vacation into drudgery from a blurred remove; I was reading The Secret History. I read Tartt's book at a laundromat, trying to remove the cloacal stench from our clothes; I read it while awaiting the arrival of a septic expert. I read it in line at a hardware store and at red lights. At one point I found myself contemplating – seriously – trying to read the book while actually driving.

I don't remember the characters or plot particularly well. What I remember is the way it transported me – kidnapped me, really, from circumstances I was all too happy to escape. I remember thinking, as I read: "I want to do this to people."

Jonathan Franzen

In 1997, when my mother knew she didn't have long to live, she spent a good part of her life savings and took her three kids and their families on a cruise to Alaska. I'd been working on a piece of fiction about cruises, and I'd rushed to finish it before getting on the ship, because I didn't want to be influenced by a real cruise experience. But I was ready for a real vacation – unlimited food and drink and coastal scenery – and the book I brought along was Halldôr Laxness's novel Independent People. It's a story about an Icelandic sheep farmer, but it's also a story about everything: modernity, history, freedom, love. Its excellence was almost a problem for me, because once I was hooked I just wanted to stay in my stateroom and read it. Fortunately the northern summer days were endless, and I could read all afternoon and still have hours after dinner to soak up the Iceland-like light and air. The best reading experiences partake of eternity, because we forget time for a while and thereby escape it. When I came to the end of Independent People, I cried like I've never cried over a novel, before or since.

Antonia Fraser

I once spent the whole long summer holidays in the Highlands of Scotland reading A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell. It certainly rained outside, and probably inside, too, given the ancient structure of the house, but I never noticed. I was transfixed by that time, that place, as delineated by the master. And just as I finished the last volume, the master himself (married to my aunt) came to stay. He volunteered laughingly to sign all my copies with some deprecating phrase: "If you don't object." There was a temporary hitch when one of the books – Casanova's Chinese Restaurant – was found to bear the inscription "Marigold Johnson", obviously swiped by me from my best friend. But Powell was more than equal to the situation. He wrote: "This book once belonged to" above "Marigold Johnson" and then added: "but now belongs to Antonia Fraser". I still have the whole set, of which this is a particularly treasured volume. This summer I intend to read them all again – on my Kindle this time, so no signatures involved.

Michael Frayn

We were staying in a hotel deep in the Umbrian countryside. Alitalia had lost all our luggage, and we had no car because I'd managed to leave my driving licence behind, so there was nothing to do but read. But that turned out to be fine, because it was my second and even more enjoyable trip through La Chartreuse de Parme, and my first acquaintance with one of the most wonderful books I've ever come across, A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz. It's a magical recreation of not one but several lost worlds, of an intensely lived childhood, and of the unforgotten pain at the heart of it. Car-less, luggage-less Italy vanished behind a bright veil of tears and laughter.

Esther Freud

It was early summer and I'd gone on holiday to the island of Formentera, feeling particularly ragged and exhausted after a play I'd written, acted in and produced. I booked to stay in the same hotel I'd stayed in as a child, not knowing for sure if there were any other hotels, and arrived to find that it was on the top of a hill almost an hour's walk from the coast. So every day I set off with my costume, a towel and a book – Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and spent the afternoon lying on the beach immersed in Russia, romance, philosophy and suspense. As the days passed, these worlds began to tangle together, Anna's soaring feelings for Vronsky, the white sand of the beach, Levin's discourses on nature, a quick, cold dip in the sea. I never think now about Kitty's frustrations, or the terrible suffering of Anna as she is forced to choose between her lover and her child, without remembering the long trudge up the hill to La Mola, and the sense of peace as I sat on the terrace eking out the last pages in the fading light. I arrived back in London, refreshed and restored; though I've never been back to Formentera, I've reread Anna Karenina many times.

William Gibson

If that's holiday as in "utterly removed from any sense of immediate surroundings", my most memorable holiday reading is Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which I started in the cab on the way to Vancouver airport, headed for a first trip to Berlin where I was doing something, I wasn't sure what, with Samuel Delany and Wim Wenders at the Kunsthalle. I am uncertain as to the year, likely it was 1991, before the publication of All the Pretty Horses. I had recently read McCarthy's astonishing The Orchard Keeper, and on the urging of the friend who had recommended that, I began Blood Meridian. I remember nothing else, door to door, between my home in Vancouver and the hotel room in which I finished the book in Berlin. I awoke from it as from some terribly potent dream, and found myself, quite unexpectedly, in a strange city. Being Berlin, and particularly then, it was a very strange city. A few nights later, over in the east, I continued to experience intense overlays of Blood Meridian. Indeed, I think those overlays helped me better comprehend what I was seeing, and not to panic. The Judge, I knew, would understand all of this.

John Gray

I can't recall exactly when or where I first read John Cowper Powys's Wolf Solent from cover to cover. I remember taking the book with me on a summer trip along the California coast, something like 30 years ago, and being completely absorbed in it while lying on a cliff north of San Francisco. Very few places have the wild tranquillity of that coastline, and yet I found myself following Powys's protagonist back to the fields and hedges of the West Country – a part of the world that at the time I hardly knew. The imaginative intensity with which Powys re-envisioned the landscape in which he had grown up (he wrote the book while living in upstate New York) almost blotted out the beauty of the place I had come to see.

Powys came to see his life as that of a collector of memories. Like his character Solent, "he hunted them like a mad botanist, like a crazed butterfly-collector". Not just any memories – those that Powys/Solent pursued were more like Proust's distilled sensations, which preserve moments of natural beauty and human poetry from being consumed by time. The novel tells how Solent returns to his Dorset home, where he finds himself lost in a maze of family secrets and complex relationships. He never emerges from the labyrinth, but along the way he gathers a cache of memories – torn-off leaves, rain-drenched roads, banked-up clouds, "casual little things" more significant and enduring than the outward events of his life. Contained in a succession of battered paperbacks, Powys's brilliant images have lit up many otherwise almost forgotten journeys I've made since that summer 30-odd years ago.

David Hare

At the end of 2001, I went walking in Patagonia with a copy of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Every day I couldn't wait to get blown back off the trail and into my austere bed to read another hundred pages. I would, as it turned out, spend the next eight years in the book's company, writing 23 drafts of a still-unrealised screenplay. But I've never felt for a moment that I was wasting my time. All the intimacy you enjoy in a novel was at last being combined with a wit, a vigour, a historical perspective and a political grasp that remain completely original. I recommend Patagonia – wind, rain, sky and wildness. In short, the best possible place to feel an art form moving forward.

Michael Holroyd

I've always had a leaning towards island literature (from The Tempest to The Admirable Crichton). So it wasn't surprising that I was won over by the extraordinary enchantment of Sylvia Townsend Warner's novel Mr Fortune's Maggot some 15 years ago while on the Canary Islands. Having been left £1,000 by his godmother, Timothy Fortune abandons the real world, where he was a clerk at Lloyd's Bank (the bank in which TS Eliot worked), and enters the church. Equipped with a harmonium and a sewing machine, he sets off on a pious adventure to an island in the South Seas. There he appears to convert a young boy but, having eaten from the Tree of Innocence, he is himself converted to nature, love and the secret of happiness. This charming story seemed to lend a special magic to the fortunate isles where I was on holiday and, reluctant to reach the end and return home, I remember reading the book extremely slowly. But no one can stay long in such places of fantasy without destroying their unique qualities. Mr Fortune must face returning to the mainland where the first world war has started. I returned to a country that would become contaminated by bankers. I still have this book, however, and can make my escape back to that island from time to time.

Hari Kunzru

I knew that if I was going to read Proust's In Search of Lost Time, I'd need a lot of time and concentration. In 1997 I went travelling alone round Chiapas and the Yucatán. I put all six volumes of the Terence Kilmartin translation into my backpack, and tackled them in a series of hostels and cafés. I read at least three volumes in a hammock on the beach at Tulum, where I spent a couple of weeks living in a kind of shack – I understand it's quite developed now, but at the time there were relatively few travellers. In the morning the army would sweep the beach, looking for packets of cocaine that had been dropped into the bay by light planes. You could hear their engines at night. I remember being engrossed in Marcel's jealous fantasies about Albertine, as a 3ft-long snake made its way across the sand directly underneath me. It wasn't much like the elegant hotel at Balbec.

David Lodge

In the 1970s we had several family summer holidays in Connemara, staying in or near the little fishing port of Roundstone. When the weather is fine (admittedly unpredictable) it is a place incomparable for wild beauty and superb, sparsely populated beaches. On the first of these trips, in 1971, I took with me John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, which had just come out in paperback. It was the perfect vacation reading for me, since it was not only a gripping story with a picturesque seaside setting, but also fed my professional interest, as both novelist and academic critic, in the nature of narrative. Fowles tells his Victorian tale with a wealth of carefully researched detail, but deliberately sabotages realistic illusion by intruding into the text himself as a modern existentialist writer unable or unwilling to make up his mind how to end his story. In fact he provides three different endings and invites us to choose. This kind of metafictional experimentation was more daringly original then than it may seem today, and I found it very exciting. Fowles's play with alternative endings certainly influenced the last chapter of a very different kind of novel which I was writing at the time, Changing Places, where every possible ending to the long-distance wife-swapping plot is canvassed but none selected.

Andrew Motion

The Odyssey on Ithaca. Whenever I looked up from the page, I saw the ruins of Odysseus's palace (so called), the beach where he eventually made landfall, the empty cave where his cult once thrived, the bare rocky hills described in the poem – and also saw myth and reality tumbling through one another.

Joseph O'Connor

When I was 17, my first girlfriend gave me a tattered copy of a novel she loved. I read it on holiday that summer in Connemara. Encountering the opening sentence of JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was like waking up in a new world. "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." It had never occurred to me that anyone could write with such glee-inducing sullenness. It was like hearing Bob Dylan or the Sex Pistols for the first time.

You felt Holden was talking to you – perhaps to you alone – and that your responses were somehow part of the story. You even felt he was listening. This was something remarkable: fiction as friendship-assertion. I return to it every three or four summers, the closest thing in my life to a pilgrimage, and whenever I do, I'm reading a different novel, but one as fresh and funny and strangely unnerving as the book that switched on the lights of my youth.

Jonathan Raban

Venice, late summer of 1971. Not really a holiday, because the New Statesman had asked me to fill in for their regular movie critic (John Coleman, who was drying out at some alcoholic clinic) at the film festival. My hotel room on the Lido was small and hot. It filled with mosquitoes whenever the window was opened, and stank of insecticide whenever it was closed. I read Death in Venice for the first time, and the second, and the third, and the fourth. The smell of Flit, or whatever it was, turned into the disinfectant reek of the city in a cholera epidemic, as I turned into Von Aschenbach, guiltily enchanted by the boy Tadzio. I neglected my film-going duties to live in Thomas Mann's Venice, a world so powerfully vivid that the real thing seemed its faint shadow. I can't recall a single movie that I saw, but the book remains a touchstone. I wouldn't read it in Venice, though, unless I wanted to be blinded to my surroundings; safer to keep it for a wet Sunday afternoon in, say, Catford or Slough.

Ian Rankin

A few years back, my wife and I went to Kenya on holiday. Her brother was working in Nairobi and arranged a week-long "safari" for us. We would be camping – no TV or radio; no newspapers or laptop or mobile phone signal. I knew I needed to take a nice long book with me (as well as a torch). I opted for War and Peace. It had been sitting unread on one of my bookshelves for years. I started reading it on the flight over and soon became engrossed. There was one accidental benefit of the book, however – as we lay under canvas in 30-degree heat, I would read the winter descriptions aloud to Miranda. They became our virtual "air con". (The book was also handy for crushing bitey insects.) I don't think it's the greatest book ever written – there's too much concentration on the "haves" and nothing about the disenfranchised. But it was a good choice of book for Kenya in the heat.

Will Self

When I was 18 I took a bus to Lisbon – you used to do that back in the day. Magic Bus from a dusty parking lot next to Gloucester Road tube – I think it cost £25. I had an army surplus kitbag, some hash stashed inside a toothpaste tube – you picked apart the end of the tube with plyers, shoved in the dope, then rolled it up as if it was half used – and John Fowles's The Magus. I'd liked Fowles's other books (The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Collector, and so on), while not exactly viewing them as belonging to the literary bon ton – more, I suppose, what would nowadays be called a "guilty pleasure". Anyway, the bus, for those of us of extended height, was waaay uncomfortable – but the Fowles did its job of nullifying the bumps and bashes. I can't remember that much about it, except that it was all about some young, romantic, sex-obsessed man and how his cruel and feckless treatment of a lovely girl – in the Father Ted sense – was punished by the eponymous Magus with a series of real-life psycho-dramas staged in the Cyclades. It was – if I remember rightly – one of those books with huge narrative pulsion, and I couldn't stop reading. I read to the Channel, I read on the ferry, I read south on the autoroute, I read through the Pyrenees, I read through Spain. I arrived in Lisbon and read all night in a fleapit hotel. I entrained for the south and read on the train. I arrived at the Algarve and walked along a cliff, reading. I got the toothpaste tube out, unrolled it, got out the hash, skinned up, lit up, and finished the book on a high that then plummeted. There I was: not in the Cyclades being punished for sexual amorality, but in Portugal being approached by a German hippy for a toke. A German hippy who then strummed "Stairway to Heaven" on his guitar and suggested I sing along.

Tom Stoppard

About 50 years ago I took two books by Edmund Wilson on a solo journey through Spain by train, bus and thumb. One of the books was Classics and Commercials, a fat collection of book reviews. The other one was Axel's Castle, longer essays on "the makers of modern literature". Wilson remains the exemplary critic for me. I missed quite a lot of Spain on my way down to Gibraltar, spending hours on my bed reading instead of looking around. I've forgotten everything about my journey except getting bitten by Wilson and by bed bugs in Algeciras.

Colm Tóibín

I have the book still. I wrote a date on the title page: July 1972. I got a summer job as a barman in the Grand Hotel in Tramore in County Waterford that summer, when I was 17. I was the worst barman who ever lived. My pints of Guinness were unholy. Even the vodkas I poured (and vodka was all the rage in Tramore than summer) had something wrong with them. I worked from six in the evening to two in the morning. I spent the fine days on the big long beach. My copy of The Essential Hemingway has pages stained with seawater. I read The Sun Also Rises on that beach in Tramore and I read the great Hemingway short stories for the first time. It made me dream about going to Spain, but it also gave me something else – an idea of prose as something glamorous, smart and shaped, and the idea of character in fiction as something oddly mysterious, worthy of sympathy and admiration, but also elusive. And more than anything, the sheer pleasure of the sentences and their rhythms, and the amount of emotion living in what was not said, what was between the words and the sentences.

Rose Tremain

In 1967, the year I left university, I spent most of the summer in an isolated house in Corsica, built above a deep, winding river. I used to spend hours by this river, reading, sunbathing and swimming and wondering where my life was headed.

The book I was reading was Patrick White's Voss, which charts the journey of a German exile into the unmapped Australian outback in the 1840s. As Voss travels deeper into the intemperate wilderness, persecuted by every tribulation this arid terrain can inflict on man, he struggles to understand the nature of his sudden love for Laura Trevelyan, an orphaned young woman, shunned by society for her obstinate cleverness. Even as Voss moves further and further away from Laura, with little hope of return, his dreams of "normal" happiness and domestic ease increase.

This tension – between the solitary voyage and the longing for love and companionship – is what makes this book such a masterpiece. And in 1967, before I had written anything worth publishing, yet already aching to succeed as a novelist, I understood that these conflicting desires lie at the heart of most writers' lives and would lie at the heart of mine.

Sarah Waters

My first grown-up holiday was in 1987: my girlfriend and I had just finished our finals, and wanted to celebrate with a budget trip to somewhere sunny. By chance, we chose Dubrovnik – and it was such a glorious, memorable trip that it is still Dubrovnik's hot stone streets and blue seas that pop into my head whenever I hear the words "summer holiday". The book I took was a memorable one, too: John Fowles's The Magus. With its vivid Greek island setting, it was an ideal vacation read; and, at 21, I was just about the perfect age for it, for it's a book about the awful arrogance, but also the wonderful susceptibility, of youth.

Rereading the novel recently, I was struck by its essential daftness, as well as by the deep dubiousness of its sexual politics. But I was still gripped and impressed: Fowles is a fabulous storyteller, and The Magus is brilliantly twisty and tricksy, with some really uncanny moments. It's one of the few novels I've read that has made me gasp in surprise. I'd still recommend it as a fascinating read, for a holiday or for any time.

Compiled by Ginny Hooker.

• Summer reading
• Best books
• John Banville
• William Boyd
• AS Byatt
• Jonathan Coe
• Jilly Cooper
• Margaret Drabble
• Jennifer Egan
• Jonathan Franzen
• Michael Frayn
• William Gibson
• John Gray
• David Hare
• Michael Holroyd
• David Lodge
• Andrew Motion
• Jonathan Raban
• Ian Rankin
• Will Self
• Tom Stoppard
• Colm Tóibín
• Rose Tremain
• Sarah Waters
• Fiction




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11/18/11--14:55: John Mullan's 10 of the best (chan 1840837)



From John Clare to Primo Levi, here are 10 examples of titles in the form of questions. Got any others?

"What Is Life?" by John Clare Clare, an agricultural labourer, asked this big question in his poem – and came up with an unconsoling answer. "A mist retreating from the morning sun, / A busy, bustling, still-repeated dream". It's all "a bubble on the stream".

Miss or Mrs? by Wilkie Collins This Victorian novella was a Christmas bestseller. Fifteen-year-old Natalie Graybrooke is engaged to middle-aged Richard Turlington (who is after her fortune), and in love with her cousin Launcelot Linzie. When Turlington discovers their secret marriage (thus the title) he plots to murder Natalie's trusting father, but is himself killed when his own revolver misfires.

Is He Popenjoy? by Anthony Trollope You have to read the book to get the point of this terrific title. The evil Marquis of Brotherton returns from Italy with a wife and child (Lord Popenjoy) and evicts his mother and siblings from the ancestral home. The title refers to the novel-long struggle over the identity of the rightful heir.

What's Become of Waring? by Anthony Powell Taken from the first line of a poem by Robert Browning, this title refers to a highly reclusive bestselling author, TT Waring. The nameless narrator, who works for Waring's publisher, is told at a séance that Waring is in fact dead. We eventually discover the truth of this, and the efforts to produce a respectful biography of Waring uncover the full extent of his fraudulence.

Why Didn't They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie Apparently Christie happened on the title when a family member exclaimed this question in exasperation as he came to the end of a whodunit. In Christie's novel they are the last words of a dying man discovered at the foot of a cliff. Christie plays with the reader's expectations about the kind of person who might be called "Evans".

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee George and Martha, an American academic and his wife, entertain Nick and Honey, a new professor at a New England college and his wife. As the booze flows, George and Martha make the younger couple participants in a game of marital humiliation. Martha, mocking academic folly, sings the title.

May We Borrow Your Husband? by Graham Greene The title of Greene's short story is the question that honeymooning Poppy keeps being asked by two charming gay interior designers who are sharing the same hotel in the South of France. The world-weary narrator recognises that Poppy's husband is really gay, and will go on being thus "borrowed" in the years to come.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick In a world after nuclear war, humans and animals are poisoned by fallout. Humans have made android animals to remind them of life on Earth before the cataclysm. Synthetic humans, lacking only the capacity for empathy, labour on Mars, but some escape and bounty hunter Rick Deckard (who is the owner of an electric sheep) is given the task of "retiring" them.

How Far Can You Go? by David Lodge Lodge's comic novel follows a group of young Roman Catholics from their student days in the 1950s, across the increasingly permissive couple of decades that follow. The title satirically connects the sexual desires and anxieties that preoccupy them to the loosening of religious dogma.

If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi Levi's title is taken from a rabbinical passage beginning "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" and urging the person of faith to act. It fits his story of Jewish partisans fighting the Germans after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Mendel, the protagonist, sees his family annihilated but fights his way to freedom in postwar Italy.

• Don't forget to add your suggestions for next week's topic

• John Clare
• Wilkie Collins
• Anthony Trollope
• Agatha Christie
• Edward Albee
• Graham Greene
• Philip K Dick
• David Lodge
• Primo Levi

John Mullan




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11/25/11--10:27: Books of the year 2011 (chan 1840837)



A novel about a dinner-party guest who won't leave, a history of Henry VII, an inquiry into madness … Which books have most impressed our writers this year?
• Join the debate and let us know which were your books of 2011

Chimamanda Adichie

I admired the lovely sentences and moving story in Sebastian Barry's On Canaan's Side (Faber), about an Irish-American woman looking back at her life. Binyavanga Wainaina's One Day I Will Write About This Place (Granta) is a strange, allusive, tender memoir about growing up in middle-class Kenya. Tracy K Smith's poems in Life on Mars (Turnaround) are startling and exquisite.

Tariq Ali

Shifting alliances at home and abroad, ruthless accumulation of capital and endless court intrigues form the backdrop to Thomas Penn's Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England (Allen Lane), a chilling and enticing portrait of Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty that created a centralised English state. Well written and well researched, the book helps us understand why Shakespeare decided to give this Henry a miss. It would have been difficult to prettify him. The Royal National Theatre should seek to remedy this omission rapidly: Winter King has a very modern feel.

A winter nightmare is the subject of Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89 (Profile) by Rodric Braithwaite. Written largely from material obtained from Soviet archives, this account explains why the Afghans hate being occupied and each chapter offers a warning to the Nato occupiers of today.

Elias Khoury's latest novel, As Though She Were Sleeping (Maclehose Press), returns to a golden age. Beirut in the 30s, unoccupied Palestine and a love affair recalled through a set of dream sequences: an Arab spring of a very different sort.

Simon Armitage

Although most people knew him as a novelist and indeed a painter, Glyn Hughes had been quietly publishing poetry since the 60s. A Year in the Bull-Box (Arc Publications) is a poem-sequence detailing the turning of the seasons and the eternal processes of nature from the vantage point of a "bull-box" (that's a stone hut to you and me) in the Ribble Valley. It is also a meditation on mortality, written as Hughes succumbed to the cancer that was to take his life earlier this year. In those last 12 months he seemed to have found a grace and contentment that is both humbling and inspiring, and I don't ever remember being as moved by a book of poems. I also want to mention a pamphlet, Pages from Bee Journal (Isinglass) by Sean Borodale. A lot of poets seem to be writing about bees these days, but like the honey he describes, "disconcerting, / solid broth / of forest flora full of fox", these are poems so dense and rich you could stand a spoon in them.

John Banville

Eileen Battersby's Ordinary Dogs (Faber) must be the most reticent autobiography ever written, since the author is no more than a shadowy presence behind the figures of the two dogs, Bilbo and Frodo – "the guys", as she calls them – who shared her life for more than 20 years. It is a wonderful book, cleanly and honestly written, funny, wise and valiant, and entirely free of sentimentality. Writing Beckett's Letters by George Craig (Sylph Editions) is, strictly speaking, a pamphlet rather than a book, but it speaks volumes. Craig is the translator of the Beckett correspondence, the second volume of which was recently published, and his account of the joys and miseries of the task is elegant, exemplary and enlightening. In Harold Bloom's The Anatomy of Influence (Yale) the great American critic returns to an old theme – artists form themselves out of an agon with their illustrious predecessors – and, in his 80th year, is as provocative, as gloriously preposterous and as captivating as ever.

Julian Barnes

Is there a better short story writer in the world than Alice Munro? In her New Selected Stories (Chatto & Windus) she gives the long story the meatiness of a novel, and moves through time with an ease few can match. The Wine of Solitude (Chatto & Windus) continues our rediscovery (in Sandra Smith's fine translations) of Irène Némirovsky's work: it's an unerring portrait of a neglected, baleful and punitive daughter. Among homegrown fiction, I most admired Edward St Aubyn's At Last (Picador), and Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child (Picador) – the most originally and brilliantly structured novel I've read in a long time.

Sebastian Barry

Seething with inventiveness, humanity, wit and language fit for the Big Rock Candy Mountain, indomitable and adroit, full of angelic swagger and pretend pratfalls, Ali Smith's gleaming There but for the (Hamish Hamilton) took the biscuit this year.

A book that moved the heart and soul and head down into a sombre gear, and recalled to some degree the purposes of Primo Levi – to shine a clear, bare light on what happened in historical darkness – Steve Sem-Sandberg's novel The Emperor of Lies (Faber) is both a remembrance of vanished evils, and a warning to modern kings and conquerors.

Belinda McKeon's subtle Solace (Picador) and Kevin Barry's rampaging City of Bohane (Jonathan Cape) put up two gallant new flags for the Irish novel.

William Boyd

Sarah Raven's Wild Flowers (Bloomsbury) is a complete delight. Massive, all-encompassing, superbly illustrated with Jonathan Buckley's photographs, it is clearly a labour of love – and the evidence of that is there on every page, not least in Raven's tirelessly informative, absolutely precise and beautifully vivid prose.

If Wild Flowers is the reference book of the year then Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life (Penguin Viking) takes the biography laurels. Written with immense knowledge and literary poise, it presents a portrait of the novelist unrivalled in its complex humanity. Dickens lives and breathes in these pages; Tomalin's instinctive grasp of the man himself is engrossing.

Seek out Jim Clark's Dream Repairman (easily available online), one of the best books written about the movie business – but seen from the film editor's angle, which makes it very rare. Also very candid, very shrewd and very funny.

AS Byatt

There but for the is a brilliant title for a brilliant novel. Ali Smith invents new forms of fiction in the interstices between parts of a sentence – commenting "but the thing I particularly like about the word but … is that it always takes you off to the side …" The story is about a man who leaves a tedious dinner party, locks himself into a bedroom and refuses to leave. His hostess calls in the press and he becomes a cause celebre. He is put together in a series of stories from different, tangential points of view. The novel is both funny and moving – it succeeds because of Smith's extraordinary skill with ordinary language. I also loved Philip Hensher's King of the Badgers (Fourth Estate), a tale about the disappearance of a child from an English coastal town. Hensher is both maliciously witty and ultimately generous – difficult to pull off, but he does it with authority.

Jonathan Coe

People Who Eat Darkness (Jonathan Cape) by Richard Lloyd Parry is a chilling account of the murder of Lucie Blackman in Japan 11 years ago. Parry shows a rare compassion and a refusal to judge: despite the horrors of the crime, almost the most upsetting feature of his story is the blameless ordinariness of the life Blackman left behind in England.

I thought the Man Booker judges – intentionally or not – played a brilliant game this year. They chose a diverse and challenging shortlist and then, having royally offended the literary establishment by excluding so many of their current favourites, they proceeded to wrongfoot everybody by choosing a winner of impeccable merit. Result! However, it's depressing to see that some novels continue simply to pass under the radar. In a year when the judges were looking for "readability" and books that "zip along", it was sad they overlooked a novel which had these qualities, as well as being wise, funny and sometimes distressing – It Had to Be You (Harper), the 18th novel by David Nobbs. I'm sure they would have loved it if they had noticed it.

Julia Donaldson

I was inspired to read Elen Caldecott's Operation Eiffel Tower (Bloomsbury) when I saw her talk about it at the Edinburgh book festival and was as entranced as all the eight-to-twelves. The book is about three siblings who try to raise money for their parents (on the verge of breaking up) to have a romantic weekend in Paris. Some scenes are funny (the children's attempted forgery is hilarious); others are poignant, particularly their visit to a B&B when they can't think what to say to their dad.

My favourite picture books were both about friendship. Fluff and Billy by Nicola Killen (Egmont), a young, simple story of two penguins who fall out and make up, has beautiful illustrations and a satisfying patterned text. The more sophisticated I Don't Want to be a Pea! by Ann Bonwill and Simon Rickerty (OUP) features a hippo and a bird arguing about what to wear for a fancy-dress party. It's all in dialogue, so parents and children can have fun doing the voices.

Illustrated books don't have to be for the very young. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd (Walker) is a novel about a teenager whose mother is dying of cancer. The idea of a yew-tree monster telling stories to the boy was conceived by Dowd shortly before her own death. Ness responded to the challenge of writing the book. It's a powerful story, made unforgettable by Jim Kay's inky illustrations.

Roddy Doyle

We live in a time of deep recession but, here in Dublin, things still start at "brilliant" and work their way up. The Outlaw Album (Sceptre) is a collection of stories by one of the world's great novelists, Daniel Woodrell, and it's brilliant. I'm fond of big dark Russian books, so I loved Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Granta). It's exhilarating, funny and … brilliant. Jennifer Egan's novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad (Corsair), is so good, so original, so surprising and wonderful – it's just absolutely fuckin' brilliant.

Margaret Drabble

Two remarkable short novels, one of which won the Man Booker prize, one of which is yet to find a publisher, though it is so good it surely will. Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape) has rightly been highly praised for its economy and elegance. Some also found it funny, but I found it melancholy, as it explored paths not taken, disasters not averted, sadnesses never accommodated. I then read Barnes's short stories, Pulse (Jonathan Cape), some of which are wickedly funny, but I liked best the sad Scottish landscapes of "Marriage Lines". The unpublished novel by my Cambridge contemporary Bernadine Bishop is about bowel cancer, but it is not sad at all, it is full of wit, good humour, interesting characters, a wonderfully imagined baby, and a deftness of plotting that seems effortlessly natural. It's astonishingly fresh and real.

Helen Dunmore

November (Picador) by Sean O'Brien is a sombre and beautiful collection of poems, shot through with his sardonic humour. The elegies for his mother and father are perhaps the most moving poems that he has yet written, and, like the best of such poems, they are both intimate and universal.

Irène Némirovsky's The Wine of Solitude is a brilliant coming-of-age novel and the most autobiographical of Némirovsky's works. Many people now know Suite Française, but her other novels shouldn't be overshadowed by it. I particularly loved the scenes set in Finland during the civil war, and the portrait of a loveless relationship between a young girl and her mother. Némirovsky is so honest and she never fluffs a line.

Geoff Dyer

I had some reservations about Pulphead, a collection of essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan (FSG, USA). The David Foster Wallace influence seemed so pronounced, there was the conspicuously dubious taste and a fondness for deranged critical hyperbole – I mean, who would even bother to listen to Guns N' Roses, let alone claim that Axl Rose achieved "the greatest white male rock dance moment of the video age"? But then I thought: hey, what a great category of praise to invent! By then the DFW doubt had retired itself and JJS's prose was working its own hard-to-fathom magic. It has a ramshackle loquacity, a down-home hyper-eloquence and an off-the-wallishness that is almost lapidary. I'm still puzzling my way though the life – Sullivan was born and lives in the American South; as a teen he went through an evangelical Christian phase (beautifully revealed in the opening piece, "Upon this Rock") – and the writing that's resulting from it, but am feeling the way publishers do when they come across a new voice, fully formed and quite distinctive. Assuming a UK edition is forthcoming, might I pitch in with the suggestion that the cover features a William Christenberry photograph?

Jonathan Franzen

Ben Lerner's recent novel Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press)and Joshua Cody's new memoir [sic] (Bloomsbury) are undoubtedly the kind of books that the former Swedish Academy secretary Horace Engdahl had in mind when he faulted American authors for their insularity and self-involvement. Both books are also hilarious and cracklingly intelligent, fully alive and original in every sentence, and abuzz with the feel of our late-late-modern moment; and one senses that these are the qualities of American literature that actually annoyed Engdahl.

Leaving the Atocha Station is the story of a mentally unstable, substance-dependent young poet brilliantly and excruciatingly wasting a fellowship year in Madrid. [sic] is the story of a moderately depraved young musical prodigy who is suddenly stricken with near-fatal cancer. The former is worth whatever Amazonian contortions are required for a British reader to lay hands on it.

John Gray

Norman Davies's Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (Allen Lane) is many rare things, rolled into one. An exercise in salvage and retrieval, recalling from oblivion some of history's losers; an encyclopedia of unremembered Europe, recounting the stories of Europe's failed states, some never having had a chance of survival, others casualties of events or folly; a personal ramble, by a great historian, through some of the continent's lost byways – it's all of these, and a book that any reader interested in modern Europe will be sorry to finish. It's also – though Davies is too civilised and graceful a writer to labour the point – a warning. "Successful statehood," he writes, "is, in fact, a rare blessing." I only wish that this wonderfully exhilarating and melancholy book would be read by our leaders, and borne in mind when they next consider exporting our accidentally successful arrangements by military force to some other country.

David Hare

The title of the biggest ego in American letters is never anyone's for long, but with her shameless book of essays The Professor and Other Writings (Harper) Terry Castle grabs the crown and hugs it to her. This is the critic as narcissist, literature just the stuff you stand on to get a better look in the mirror. But the techniques and strategies honed by such sumptuous self-love make this Stanford academic murderous when she sets about other great egos – chiefly those of her exes, her mother and Susan Sontag.

Two British memoirs seem reticent by comparison. Simon Hoggart denies that A Long Lunch (John Murray) is an autobiography, but it clearly is, and all the better for being hilarious. Fascinating, the degree to which his time spent reporting Northern Ireland in the 1970s shaped Hoggart's valiant view of life. And Michael Frayn's My Father's Fortune: A Life (Faber) retrieves a complicated suburban childhood in Surrey in the 1940s. Everything about it rings familiar, funny and true.

Robert Harris

I was fascinated by Alexandra Styron's memoir of William Styron, Reading My Father (Scribner): an intimate and unsparing account of what it was like to be the youngest daughter not only of an illustrious novelist – difficult enough in itself, I would have thought – but of a profound depressive, who also seems to have been friends with just about everyone famous in America. Two novels published this year have particularly lingered in my mind: David Lodge's portrait of HG Wells, A Man of Parts (Harvill Secker), succeeded in fusing the best bits of fiction and biography to bring the man and his erotic adventures to life; and Justin Cartwright's Other People's Money (Bloomsbury) created a believable, fictional private bank on the brink of destruction. Finally, Max Hastings once again demonstrated his pre-eminence as a chronicler of the second world war with All Hell Let Loose (Harper), a masterly one-volume account of that epic conflict – a book which the rulers of Europe would do well to read at the end of this melancholy year.

Eric Hobsbawm

Among the 2011 books that came my way I particularly welcomed Owen Jones's Chavs (Verso), a passionate and well-documented denunciation of the upper-class contempt for the proles that has recently become so visible in the British class system. Unaccountably neglected, Göran Therborn's The World: A Beginners Guide (Polity), a survey of the present state, problems and outlook of the globe by a Swedish master sociologist, is one of the rare books that lives up to its title. It is lucid, intelligent about the future and admirably researched. The book I have enjoyed most is Karl Miller's Tretower to Clyro (Quercus), a collection of characteristically pawky essays by one of the great literary editors of our time, combined with a wonderful account of explorations à trois of the Celtic parts of Great Britain.

Alan Hollinghurst

Two books this year gave me the almost dreamlike pleasure of finding out things that I'd long wanted to know. Susie Harries's Nikolaus Pevsner (Chatto) may justly be subtitled "The Life": it shows a complete mastery of the many different areas, cultural, political and artistic, in which this complex and essential figure moved and made his mark. The book's very fitting scale and tirelessness are more than matched by its wit, subtlety and human understanding. In Duncan Fallowell's How to Disappear (Ditto) travel and its chance encounters provide the pretext for pursuit of much more marginal figures: in "Who was Alastair Graham?" he explores the post-Oxford life of Evelyn Waugh's Oxford boyfriend in a way that throws light into dim corners of British social history. In "The Curious Case of Bapsy Pavry", an Indian lady who became the Marchioness of Winchester and lived out a long widowhood in a Firbankian fantasy of social aspiration is chased down with a tenderly marvelling mordancy that is a keynote of Fallowell's brilliant and haunting book.

Michael Holroyd

Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Stranger's Child tracks the cultural, sexual, biographical and social changes that took place in 20th-century Britain. He has a versatile wit and enjoys playing with figures from the past as well as with his readers, teasing them and misleading them until, drawn into the story, they almost become additional characters in it. This is a modern version of the novel EM Forster would have wished to write.

A most ingenious and original solution to the moral and aesthetic problems thrown up by the cult of biographical fiction is given in John Spurling's A Book of Liszts (Seagull Books) – a brilliant set of supple variations encircling the life and career of the great virtuoso Franz Liszt. Those who believe that such speculative and experimental hybrids mark the end of more traditional biography should read Fiona MacCarthy's wonderful The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (Faber). This is a perfect coming together of biographer and subject.

Nick Hornby

Everyone else will pick Claire Tomalin's superb Charles Dickens, so I won't. But I've read three terrific novels this year, all of them funny, all of them sad. Joe Dunthorne's Wild Abandon (Hamish Hamilton), like Kevin Wilson's The Family Fang (Picador), is about what happens to children when parents become consumed by their beliefs. In Wild Abandon it's communal living that causes all the trouble, in The Family Fang it's performance art; both books are populated by flawed, occasionally exasperating, lovable and, above all, thoroughly imagined characters. James Hynes's Next (Reagan Arthur) is, mystifyingly, still without a publisher in the UK, but don't let that put you off. It's dark, comic, real and, in the end, terrifying, and there are many, many men in their late 40s and 50s who would wince with recognition at Hynes's Kevin Quinn.

Hampton Sides's Hellhound on His Trail (Allen Lane), a gripping account of the hunt for James Earl Ray, reminds us once again that a lot of Americans in the 1960s were living through a nightmare, not through a long, dreamy summer of love.

Hari Kunzru

As ever a lot of my reading has been books that haven't been released this year – many titles in the wonderful New York Review Books classics series, whose multicoloured spines now take up a good two feet of bookshelf in my apartment. Teju Cole's Open City (Faber), a Sebaldesque wander through New York, and Hisham Matar's Anatomy of a Disappearance (Viking) both stood out in fiction, as did David Foster Wallace's unfinished The Pale King (Hamish Hamilton). I also enjoyed McKenzie Wark's tour through the legacy of Situationism, The Beach Beneath the Street (Verso), and Manuel DeLanda's attempt at a unified description of everything in Philosophy and Simulation (Continuum). Sonia Faleiro's Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay Dance Bars (Canongate) also did what every good piece of reportage ought to – took me to a place I couldn't have gone by myself.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanan Al-Shaykh's vivid "reimagining" of the One Thousand and One Nights (Bloomsbury) is a treat and a trap for story lovers. Like a contemporary Shahrazad, Al-Shaykh has rendered 19 little masterpieces into a wondrously warm, ribald and hilarious concoction, reminding us of how bang up to date these stories can be.

If we might forget how central these tales are to our culture, Marina Warner's wondrous Stranger Magic (Chatto & Windus) is a scholarly excursion around some of the stories, her mind as rich and fascinating as the stories themselves, taking us on a magic carpet from Borges and Goethe, to Edward Said and the movies.

In his magisterial What is Madness? (Hamish Hamilton), Darian Leader explains that the "irrational" delusions and hallucinations of the mad are their attempts at sense: a good story is a good symptom, and can make a life possible. As Virginia Woolf said: "The whole world is a work of art."

John Lanchester

Non-fiction: I loved two very different books of criticism, Nicola Shulman's beautifully lucid study of Thomas Wyatt, Graven with Diamonds (Short Books), and Owen Hatherley's furiously pro-Modernist A Guide to the New Ruins of Britain (Verso). Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow (Allen Lane) seems to me a genuinely important book. Fiction: A four-way tie between Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (Fourth Estate), Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists (Quercus), and Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding (Fourth Estate, January). Guilty pleasure: George RR Martin's fantasy sequence A Song of Fire and Ice. I'm now on volume five, A Dance with Dragons (HarperVoyager), and fear the withdrawal symptoms when it's finished.

Mark Lawson

Belatedly and deservedly, this was the year of Julian Barnes: winner of the Man Booker and the David Cohen prizes and shortlisted for the Costa – as close as a Leicester City fan will get to doing the triple. Although ideally, for literary posterity, Barnes's mastery of the short form in The Sense of an Ending would have seen a Nadal-Federer showdown in the Booker finals with Alan Hollinghurst's mastery of the long form in The Stranger's Child. In a UK-US prize, they could also have slugged it out with The Marriage Plot (Fourth Estate), with which Jeffrey Eugenides again showed the benefits of taking almost a decade between books. Two great veterans of the suspense form made us glad that there's no gold watch or golden handshake for novelists: PD James with Death Comes to Pemberley (Faber) and Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery (Harvill Secker). David Lodge wrote a fine novel in the form of a literary biography – anatomising HG Wells in A Man of Parts – and Jeanette Winterson an extraordinary tragic-comic literary autobiography: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Jonathan Cape).

David Lodge

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad revived memories of the days, decades ago, when American fiction seemed so much more vital and innovative than our own. It is unusual in structure, presenting a number of stories, most of them about people in the music business, which seem to be freestanding but prove to have surprising connections with each other, and the style effortlessly hits its targets again and again. Raymond Tallis's Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Acumen) is a trenchant, lucid and witty attack on the reductive materialism of many scientific accounts of consciousness – not from a religious point of view, but that of an atheist humanist with a distinguished record in medicine and neuroscience. The book that gave me most pleasure, however, was one I bought in 2010 and didn't get round to reading until this year. Philip Larkin's Letters to Monica, edited by Anthony Thwaite (Faber), make a remarkable human document that is, by turns, bad-tempered, self-lacerating, tender, sad and irresistibly funny.

Robert Macfarlane

Two books of fire and one of water: Philip Connors's Fire Season (Picador), about his seasons spent as a fire-watcher in the Gila Wilderness; Jocelyn Brooke's cracklingly bizarre The Military Orchid, a memoir-satire-nature-quest about orchids and home-made fireworks, first published in 1948, and just reissued in a beautiful edition by Little Toller Press; and Susie Parr's The Story of Swimming (Dewi Lewis), a superbly illustrated cultural history of bathing – dipping, watering, wild swimming – in Britain. I also greatly admired Matthew Hollis's biography of Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France (Faber), and was fascinated by much of the work gathered in Harriet Tarlo's anthology of experimental landscape poetry, The Ground Aslant (Shearsman).

Hilary Mantel

Two history books written with flair and dash, both gripping and enjoyable, both filling gaps in the imagination. Thomas Penn's Winter King is a lively and alarming study of the strange and ferocious Henry VII, the first Tudor king. Helen Castor's She-Wolves (Faber) is subtitled The Women Who Ruled England before Elizabeth, and includes a fascinating study of Margaret of Anjou, who rages through Shakespeare's history plays, dauntless and ferociously energetic, battling on behalf of her fragile husband Henry VI. Penn shows us how an instinctive Machiavellian with a feeble claim to kingship transformed himself into a despot and founded a dynasty. Castor shows how her heroines fought and flourished, despite the affront to the moral order represented by women on the battlefield and women on the throne.

Pankaj Mishra

In 15th-century Benares, the iconoclastic Indian poet Kabi inadvertently began one of the world's oldest literary collaborative projects. The poems attributed to him have been enriched by the renderings of Ezra Pound and Czesław Miłosz as well as those of Rajasthan's bard singers. A stylishly contemporary contribution to this work-in-progress is Songs of Kabir, the translations by the poet and essayist Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (NYRB Classics). Yu Hua's China in Ten Words (Pantheon) offers something very rare: a boldly ironic, even caustic, perspective on Chinese society by a literary novelist still resident in China and privy to its innermost everyday tensions. Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo (Verso) stimulatingly uncovers the contradictions of an ideology that is much too self-righteously invoked. I also enjoyed Aravind Adiga's novel Last Man in Tower (Atlantic) and Gyan Prakash's essay Mumbai Fables (Princeton) – both books set in Mumbai and exceptionally alert to the exuberance and malignity of the city's gangsterish capitalism.

Lorrie Moore

I read two books that won prizes in the UK this year, Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife (Phoenix) and Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, and found them exquisitely written and deeply engaging. Obreht's novel is written so authoritatively if obliquely, one of its themes being what it is to have once been on the right side of history and then find oneself later on the wrong, but the writing, sentence by sentence, is what really impresses. The same is true of The Sense of an Ending, with which in some ways it shares a theme.

Blake Morrison

In his polemic Reality Hunger (Penguin), David Shields argues for the pleasures of the "lyric essay" – part-autobiographical, part-narrative, part-intellectual inquiry. Three collections of essays this year help his case. First, Caryl Phillips's Colour Me English (Harvill Secker), which reflects on race, migration, Islamophobia and (in one scary essay) mountaineering, with telling passages on his upbringing in Leeds in the 1960s and arrival in New York round 9/11. Second, Tretower to Clyro, in which Karl Miller celebrates country themes (from lambs to foxes) and country writers (from John McGahern to Ted Hughes); there's the bonus of a long preface by Andrew O'Hagan, describing journeys to the Celtic fringes that he and Miller took with Seamus Heaney. Third, Arguably by Christopher Hitchens (Atlantic), a selection from one of the great polemical journalists of our age and the ideal complement to his memoir of last year Hitch 22 (Atlantic).

The most chilling full-length work of non-fiction I read this year was Richard Lloyd Parry's People Who Eat Darkness, about the murder of Lucie Blackman in Tokyo.

Patrick Ness

By far the best novel I read this year – and I read the entire Booker longlist out of increasingly perplexed curiosity – was Ali Smith's There but for the. It's smart, warm, experimental, and surprisingly moving; I'm dismayed it hasn't received more recognition. Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad, on the other hand, has taken numerous awards, but deserves every one. It's the first book in a long time that made me jealous. And for adults, for teenagers, for anyone at all, Mal Peet's Life: An Exploded Diagram (Walker Books) must be sought out. Concerning the pursuit of virginity loss in 1960s Norfolk against the background of the Cuban missile crisis, it's fresh, vital and with an ending that still stuns, 11 months after I read it.

David Nicholls

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad managed to be both inventive and hugely entertaining, and I also enjoyed Edward St Aubyn's At Last, the final instalment of the consistently excellent Patrick Melrose series. Read them all, now. Stewart Lee's How I Escaped My Certain Fate (Faber) restored at least a little of my faith in stand-up comedy, and two current reads are late additions to the list of favourites; Claire Tomalin's admirably brisk and entertaining Dickens biography and Craig Taylor's Londoners (Granta)an epic portrait in eighty voices that shows the city to be just as … well … Dickensian as it has ever been.

Jeremy Paxman

The most memorable fiction I read this year was Jamil Ahmad's The Wandering Falcon (Hamish Hamilton), a series of loosely connected stories set on the frontiers of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. The author was nearly 80 before his book was published, having spent his working life among the tribes of Balochistan, whose stories he obviously absorbed over the years. In this captivating book you can feel them blow off the page like dry desert air.

Steven Pinker

Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower (Allen Lane). The counterculture was wrong: your problem is not that you're uptight and repressed and should let it all hang out, but that you're profligate and impulsive and need to bulk up your self-control. Baumeister's ingenious experiments, enlivened with Tierney's vignettes from history and technology, show you how. Joshua S Goldstein, Winning the War on War (Dutton); John Mueller, War and Ideas (Routledge); Andrew Mack, Human Security Report 2009/2010 (OUP USA). Believe it or not, war is going out of style, according to these updates from some of the sources I used in my own recent book. Matthew White, Atrocitology (Canongate). A serious book, written with a light touch, on the hundred worst things humans have done to each other (that we know of). Erica Chenoweth and Maria J Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works (Columbia). Gandhi was right, not just morally but empirically: nonviolent resistance is three times more effective than violence.

Craig Raine

In Alice Oswald's Homer (Memorial, Faber), the nameless are named. Oswald has excised the main Homeric narrative – Achilles, Patroclus, Agamemnon, Helen, Paris. True, Hector gets a mention, but only to say that he, too, died like the little people, the bit-players who bite the dust. Homer's brief lives: "Euphorbus died / Leaving his silver hairclip on the battlefield." Oswald shares with Christopher Logue fearless anachronism – Oswald's Hector, "Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running" – but Memorial, though good, isn't a patch on Logue's Homer. A better editor would have dissuaded her from monotonously repeating her epic similes. Towards the end, there are 10 unrepeated similes. So the final, 11th simile, which closes the poem, is the more forceful for being repeated – like a closing, extended chord. And it is brilliant in its own right: a shooting star as a "whip of stars". Memorial has 15 or so perfect touches that show Oswald to be a considerable poet: for example "flower-lit cliffs", "the darkness hit him with a dull clang", the sea "just lifted and flattened lifted and flattened", "fire with its loose hair flying rushes through a city".

Kamila Shamsie

It's impossible to explain through any discussion of plot and character the hypnotic brilliance of Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table (Jonathan Cape). The joy of boyhood and the darkness at its edges are conveyed in scenes of extraordinary imagination – boys lashed to a deck in a storm, a dog biting down on the throat of a man, a girl skating across the deck of a ship in the early morning, a prisoner in chains walking its length at night. It is entirely … well, Ondaatje-esque.

Helen Simpson

Among the best collections of short stories I've read this year is Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Pocket Books), where the form is used to explore character in a way I haven't seen done before, examining the heroine from story to story via different viewpoints and time perspectives. Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (Fourth Estate) tells sad, graceful stories of love and savage loneliness, beginning with the haunting almost-novella-length "Kindness". The title story of Margaret Drabble's A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (Penguin Classic) is worth the cover price alone. After several novels Sarah Hall has this year published The Beautiful Indifference (Faber), seven skilfully adrenalised stories, precise and sensual, in which the scent of violence is a constant. And from half a century ago comes Vasily Grossman's The Road (Quercus), whose title story can be read as a 4,000-word distillation of his epic novel Life and Fate (Vintage), written the year following the confiscation of that novel's typescript by the Soviet authorities.

Ahdaf Soueif

I'm delighted to see Selma Dabbagh's book Out of It published (Bloomsbury). Driven, fast-paced, edgy, this is Dabbagh's first novel – although she's written excellent short stories. A narrative of Gaza, it brings a very welcome new voice and a new consciousness to the Palestinian story.

Amjad Naser's Haythu la Tasqut al-Amtar, or Where the Rain doesn't Fall (Dar al-Adab, Beirut), is one of the best books I've read in a long time. Naser is an inspired poet and this work takes the precision and economy of his language into prose narrative for the first time. Gentle, sad, hopeful – a poet writing prose at his mature best. Watch out for the English translation. I'm reading Chris Harman's A People's History of the World (Verso). It's really helpful to zoom out from time to time when you're living massive events at very close quarters.

For bilingual readers I cannot end without mentioning Tamim al-Barghouti and Amin Haddad's poems born of the Egyptian revolution – even though they are as yet uncollected. These were the poems that were read and sung in Tahrir Square and the other public spaces of Egypt. They still keep us going.

Colm Tóibín

Three books by literary stylists which dealt with grief and loss raised fascinating questions about style and tone and storytelling under fierce pressure. I found all three books affecting and disturbing. One was Joan Didion's Blue Nights (Fourth Estate), which is even more raw and filled with loss than her previous memoir; the second is Francisco Goldman's Say Her Name (Grove Press), a masterpiece of storytelling and scene-setting; the third is Gjertrud Schnackenberg's Heavenly Questions (Bloodaxe), poems with her customary eloquence and gravity now filled with shock and hurt, certainly the most beautiful work she has made. In the meantime, Jeffrey Eugenides and Alan Hollinghurst produced two supremely confident novels; their ambiguous versions of destiny and desire in The Marriage Plot and The Stranger's Child made me laugh at certain moments and sit up and shiver at others.

Rose Tremain

Two historical novels achieve quiet distinction this year: Andrew Miller's Pure (Sceptre) and Barry Unsworth's The Quality of Mercy (Hutchinson). While Miller's prose is poetic and impressionistic, Unsworth's is formal and dense, yet both novels unfold highly dramatic stories in a measured and unfussy way. Pure gives to a young engineer, Jean-Baptiste Baratte, the gruesome task of digging up and carting away the mountains of the dead who lie in the Cemetery of Les Innocents in Paris in 1785, polluting its surrounding air and water. Over Baratte's terrible enterprise lies the shadow of the coming revolution, thus giving to Miller's vivid images of "purification" a fine historical ambiguity. Unsworth's novel, picking up the story of the 18th century slave-ship mutiny told in Sacred Hunger, has Erasmus Kemp, son of the disgraced ship owner, trying to bring the mutineers to trial in England, but finding himself thwarted not only by one slippery fugitive, but also by his own conscience, made suddenly manifest to him by his love for the reforming sister of a liberal lawyer. Both books are notable for their subtle meditations on kindness and compassion.

Jeanette Winterson

Carol Ann Duffy, The Bees (Picador). Take one line, "What will you do with the gift of your left life?" Beautiful and moving poetry for the real world.

Ali Smith, There but for the. What would you do if an uninvited guest locked himself in the bathroom and refused to come out? She writes so well, distinctive, a bit crazy, compelling in the way that language should be, with surprises everywhere.

Darian Leader, What Is Madness? Our madness-measure is always changing. This is a thought-provoking book about how we diagnose and differentiate our many kinds of insanities. In spite of the Freud/Lacan obsession with the phallus as a central psychic symbol (oy vey), this is a book posing necessary questions and offering genuine insights.

Leo Hollis, The Stones of London: A History in Twelve Buildings (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). A clever tour through London's long life using her built architecture and the stories found there. From Westminster Abbey through Regent Street and Wembley Stadium to the Gherkin. Absorbing and enjoyable.
• Compiled by Ginny Hooker.

• To order books mentioned, with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop

• What have you enjoyed reading in the past 12 months? Send us your recommendations (including details of the publisher) in no more than 150 words, by email to readers.books@guardian.co.uk or write to us at Readers' Books of the Year, Review, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, to arrive no later than Sunday 11 December. We would most like to hear about recent titles. Please include a postal address and telephone number or email address. We will publish a selection of your choices in the paper and on the website – or join the books of the year debate here

• Best books of the year
• Best books
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Simon Armitage
• John Banville
• Julian Barnes
• Sebastian Barry
• William Boyd
• AS Byatt
• Jonathan Coe
• Julia Donaldson
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• Hilary Mantel
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• Blake Morrison
• Patrick Ness
• David Nicholls
• Jeremy Paxman
• Steven Pinker
• Craig Raine
• Helen Simpson
• Colm Tóibín
• Rose Tremain
• Jeanette Winterson




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11/26/11--16:05: The Campus Trilogy by David Lodge – review (chan 1840837)



David Lodge's trilogy of novels about a fictional English university are solidly crafted pieces of comedy, the last oddly prescient about academic life and British society

David Lodge's three solidly crafted comic novels of academic life, compiled here in one volume, are all set in the fictional University of Rummidge, a rain-lashed, new-built institution in the Midlands.

In Changing Places, written in 1975 but set in the tail end of the 1960s – in the years of student protest – Rummidge's comparatively undistinguished Philip Swallow embarks on an academic exchange with the flamboyant Morris Zapp of Euphoric State University in the US. After the initial culture shock has abated the two men find themselves becoming increasingly comfortable in their new lives, to the point where even their wives become part of the swap. Changing Places is the most formally experimental of the three books – parts of it are written as play text, one section is entirely composed of newspaper clippings – but all three share a postmodern playfulness, a generous dusting of literary reference.  

The second novel, Small World, is set against the backdrop of the international academic conference circuit, and is full of echoes of medieval literature; young Irishman Persse McGarrigle travels the world in search of the love of his life while a large cast of international academics, including Swallow and Zapp, joust for a near-mythical professorship. 

The trilogy concludes with Nice Work, a reworking of the Victorian industrial novel, written in the mid 1980s but set in 1979. Feminist academic Robyn Penrose is reluctantly put forward for a "shadowing" scheme in which she is obliged to follow factory boss Victor Wilcox about his day-to-day business, in an attempt to open up a dialogue between Rummidge and its industrial surroundings. As in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, initial animosity between the two gives way to grudging respect before spilling over into something more. Nice Work is also, despite the specificity of its setting, the most resonant and in some ways prescient of three books in the way it depicts shifts in the academic environment and in British society as a whole.

• David Lodge
• Classics
• Fiction

Natasha Tripney




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12/12/11--01:50: Small World by David Lodge (chan 1840837)



David Lodge will be in discussion with John Mullan at Kings Place on 16 January

Date: Monday 16 January
Time: 7pm
Venue: The Scott Room, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU
Price: £8*

David Lodge talks to John Mullan about Small World, the second in his trilogy of satirical novels set at the fictional University of Rummidge. The novel sees Professors Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp (the protagonists of the first novel, Changing Places), jet off on a glamorous tour of international literary conferences, combining academic infighting and tourism, witty literary debate and romance. Lodge makes playful allusions to Arthurian legend (the Holy Grail is a $100,000-a-year UNESCO position that requires very little work) in this wry and affectionate take on academic life.

David Lodge's novels include Changing Places and Nice Works (the other two titles in his campus trilogy), Author, Author, his fictionalised account of the later life of Henry James and, most recently, A Man of Parts, a portrait of HG Wells. Small World was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 1984.




• David Lodge
• Fiction




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01/06/12--14:54: Small World by David Lodge (chan 1840837)



Week one: stereotypes

The climax of David Lodge's Small World sees a panel of celebrated literary scholars gathered in front of a large conference audience for a forum on "The Function of Criticism". It is understood that they are competing for the best academic job in the world: the vastly well-paid, commitment-free Unesco Chair of Literary Criticism. Each of the academics represents an approach to criticism, but each also represents a nation.

The Englishman is an anti-theoretical humanist, who inevitably begins by quoting Dr Johnson. The Frenchman is a leathery structuralist, interested only in the universal binary principles of all texts. The German tries to trump the Frenchman with his even more universalist reception theory. The Italian proffers an Althusserian critique of the very notion of literature, which she reveals to be an instrument of bourgeois hegemony. And the American performs a loosely Freudian, fearlessly meretricious meditation on the similarities between literary criticism and striptease, from his party piece at another conference at the start of the book.

To girdle his "small world" of academics from different countries, Lodge needs national stereotypes. Even his protagonist Persse McGarrigle, an innocent abroad, is something of a stereotype. A young lecturer at (the fictional) University College Limerick, he wanders into the world of vainglorious international academics, winning his way by charm and good fortune: what could he be but Irish? The seasoned American professor who befriends him, Morris Zapp, strides out of Lodge's earlier campus novel, Changing Places, and has acquired a life that animates the stereotype. Amazing his British peers by being louder, richer and more confident than they can ever be, even his shameless opportunism and lack of intellectual principle are disarming. Lodge earns his right to stereotype academics from other nations by caustically stereotyping the shabby British.

We often feel that we should not be amused by a stereotype, as though it were inherently an insult. Yet satire, which deals in typicality, often relies on stereotypes. In the works of some satirical novelists these can indeed be insults: there are Frenchmen in the novels of Tobias Smollett or Fanny Burney that could only entertain a Francophobe. To be credible, and to amuse the undogmatic reader, a stereotype above all needs animation. The Italian Marxist Fulvia Morgana, who wears gorgeous clothes from Milan fashion houses and lives in a sumptuously tasteful villa, is certainly a two-dimensional character. Yet she is an entirely satisfying one. Hypocrisy knows no national borders, but there is an especially Italian gusto about her reconciling of Leninist principles with la dolce vita. It is caught perfectly when she is giving Morris a lift from Milan airport in her Maserati coupé and raises her fist in solidarity to striking workers on the picket line, who smile broadly and return the gesture. The Italian way.

The word "stereotype" is a metaphor from printing – a block of characters that could be reused – so the art of the stereotype becomes one of avoiding mere repetition. When he comes to his German academic, Professor Siegfried von Turpitz, Lodge does not so easily avoid repetition. Von Turpitz's appearance – the "pale and expressionless" face of a former Panzer commander beneath his "skullcap of flat blond hair" – reminds you rather readily of film cameos, while the black kid glove in which his right hand is always sheathed – no one dares ask why – is perhaps too reminiscent of the brilliant ex-Nazi scientist in Dr Strangelove.

Yet this is an aberration. The rest of Lodge's national stereotypes have just enough quiddity to be believable. Akira Sakazaki, the Japanese academic living in his tiny Tokyo capsule, is attempting to translate an English novel of working-class life. He fires off missives to the novelist Ronald Frobisher enquiring about the meanings of demotic phrases. "p. 107, 3 down, 'Bugger me, but I feel like some faggots tonight.' Does Ernie mean that he feels a sudden desire for homosexual intercourse. If so, why does he mention this to his wife?" With his earnestness and complete incomprehension of the novel's idioms, you might say that Sakazaki is a stereotype, but you laugh because here is one stereotype perplexedly confronting another. Frobisher, a superannuated Angry Young Man, made his name peddling northern "reality" to the educated reader.

And stereotypes can include their own correctives to our expectations. When McGarrigle takes refuge from the rain in a bar in Tokyo and encounters the delights of karaoke, he also comes across a party of Japanese translators. In drunken chat, they introduce him to their Japanese versions of Shakespeare titles: The Merchant of Venice is "The Strange Affair of the Flesh and the Bosom"; Romeo and Juliet is "Lust and Dream of the Transitory World". Those mistranslating Japanese are poets too.

• John Mullan is professor of English at University College London.

• David Lodge
• Fiction

John Mullan




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01/13/12--14:55: Small World by David Lodge (chan 1840837)



Week two: coincidences

Finally, about 300 pages into Small World, someone actually says, "It's a small world." The novel's hero, young academic Persse McGarrigle, meets a Japanese academic, Akira Sakazaki, in a Tokyo karaoke bar and finds that the only novelist he personally knows, Ronald Frobisher, is also the only English writer whom Akira translates. No wonder he reaches for the cliché. His Japanese companion confirms that this experience of coincidence is universal by proffering the Japanese idiom – "We say, 'It's a narrow world.'" The title of David Lodge's Small World is a phrase that we use so often because we so often unexpectedly encounter people we know. Every meeting is a coincidence, but in novels coincidence seems to signify some hidden design.

In the stories of the first great English novelist, Daniel Defoe, coincidences are taken as signs of God's providential involvement in human affairs. The point of coincidences is that characters notice them. Robinson Crusoe notices coincidences and sees a pattern of divine purpose. Lodge's characters have other responses. When Persse, on his way to visit his aunt, meets Morris Zapp, who is visiting his former landlord, on the suburban streets of Rummidge, they find they are headed for the same road.

"That's a remarkable coincidence," exclaims Zapp. Of course, they are actually headed for the same house, a discovery that inspires Zapp to do "a little jig of excitement". He is delighted to find that his old drinking partner, Dr O'Shea, is also Persse's uncle; it confirms his convivial confidence that he knows everyone worth knowing. Yet the reader can see, as the characters cannot, that the coincidence is a matter of plotting: it is a way of letting us know the fate of Persse's cousin Bernadette, who lived with the O'Sheas when Zapp was their lodger. Pregnant by an unknown lover, she has disappeared, but will return to play an important part in the story.

Travelling the world looking for the woman he loves, Persse keeps meeting Zapp. "He hadn't been in Amsterdam three hours before he met Morris Zapp." Zapp takes every coincidental encounter as a natural consequence of his own importance. Persse, the ingénu, is always surprised. He also meets Miss Sybil Maiden (note the name), the retired Girtonian expert on fertility rites, almost everywhere. "Fancy seeing you're here." It must be because she is always going to conferences, but no: when they meet on a beach in Hawaii she tells him she is just taking a holiday. She is like a walking narrative principle. "The surprise is mutual," she will say, never sounding in the least surprised. Whenever they meet, she provides some explanation of his misadventures according to the narrative theory of her mentor, Jessie Weston, pioneering analyst of romance stories.

Miss Maiden keeps turning up as a commentator, and because she holds the key to the story of the beautiful identical twins, Angelica and Lily, for whom Persse is searching. Coincidence is a function of the romance plot of the novel, in which the hero quests for, but keeps failing to claim, his beloved, while all the subsidiary characters bump into their former lovers and lost children.

It is almost impossible for the critic to write a "spoiler" for this novel, because the reader knows that anyone who goes missing in one place will reappear in another. Philip Swallow has had a blissful one-night encounter with Joy, who has later been declared dead in a plane crash. But of course he will meet her again on one of those apparently pointless academic jaunts to a distant land. Reunited, the lovers will be enjoying a trip to Jerusalem when they will bump into his son, who just happens to be working on a kibbutz during his gap year.

Satirical novelists often relish coincidence. When, near the end of David Copperfield, the protagonist is given a tour of a new model prison by his former schoolmaster Creakle (now transmogrified into a Middlesex magistrate), he is presented with the two most exemplary prisoners, in adjacent cells. The authorities are peculiarly proud of Number Twenty-Seven and Number Twenty-Eight – who turn out to be, respectively, Uriah Heep ("I see my follies now, sir") and Steerforth's sinister valet Littimer ("I am conscious of my own past follies"). David feels "resigned wonder" at this most unlikely yet logical coincidence. Probability is not the point here; a different kind of plausibility reigns. These two consummate hypocrites belong together and, by an irrefutable satirical logic, they come together where they can practise their sinister habits of servility.

So coincidence can be a special pleasure of fiction. At the heart of Lodge's novel is Cheryl Summerbee who, working at the departure desk at Heathrow airport, is the impresario of coincidences. As Cheryl directs him, Persse notices in her bag the deerstalker hat that Zapp meant to give him. He tells her that he is "the very man" to whom Zapp asked her to post it. "Well," she says. "There's a coincidence." She is hardly surprised. She meets everyone and she entertains herself by manufacturing meetings: she has the job of allocating seats, and indulges her pleasure in pairing people off. So what individuals experience as chance is in fact contrivance. She is the novel's own novelist.

• John Mullan is professor of English at University College London.

• David Lodge
• Fiction

John Mullan




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