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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.

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

Alfred Hickling

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.

Clare Brennan

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.

Lettie Ransley

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.

Simon Hoggart

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.

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 Mullan

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

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.

Natasha Tripney

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.

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.

John Mullan

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.

John Mullan

01/20/12--14:55: Small World by David Lodge (chan 1840837)

Week three: on writing Small World

In the 1970s, when I was a senior lecturer at Birmingham University, I began to do lecture tours of universities in foreign countries at the invitation of the British Council and to give papers at international conferences in foreign cities. The latter were usually much more enjoyable than similar events in England, with their spartan accommodation in student halls and canteen food to match. Abroad you stayed in hotels, ate in restaurants and did some sightseeing in congenial company.

In the summer of 1979 I joined a horde of participants in the James Joyce Symposium in Zurich, and went straight from there to another conference on Narrative Theory in Israel, where I was greeted by several Joyceans I had just met in Zurich. It struck me that jet travel had created a new academic community, a global campus inhabited by wandering scholars who met in exotic locations to demonstrate their professional skills (it was a time when traditional literary scholarship was being challenged by a host of competing new methodologies), while at the same time indulging in the pleasures of tourism, and sometimes amorous dalliance. I thought there might be an entertaining novel to be written about this phenomenon, in which the contrast between the high ideals of academia and the human weaknesses of its members would be illustrated on a broader canvas than usual.

I sketched the plan of a novel with a large cast of academics of various nationalities, including Philip Swallow, Morris Zapp and several other characters from my earlier book, Changing Places, and a naive young hero who would be a novice on the global campus, caught up in its jet-propelled peregrinations. I could think of plenty of locations and situations to put them in, beginning with a comfortless conference at the fictional University of Rummidge in the English midlands, but for a long time I was held up by the lack of a narrative structure. Some 30 pages into the notebook which I dedicated to the project was a despairing question: "What could provide a basis for a story?" And then a few pages later, a breakthrough: "Could some myth serve, as in Ulysses? Eg, the Grail legend – involves a lot of different characters and long journeys."

I was thinking of the way Joyce modelled his account of a day in the lives of some Dubliners on Homer's Odyssey, and I had just been to see John Boorman's flawed but exciting film Excalibur, which suggested to me an analogy of a mock-heroic kind between the errant knights of the Round Table and modern globe-trotting academics. I was also thinking of TS Eliot's poem The Waste Land, and his use of Jessie Weston's interpretation of the quest for the Holy Grail as the Christian transmutation of a pagan myth about the restoration of fertility to a sterile kingdom and its Fisher King.

I added to my cast an aged, distinguished but sadly impotent scholar called Arthur Kingfisher, who had in his gift the Unesco chair of literary criticism, coveted by ambitious academics on account of its light duties and huge salary. I named my idealistic young hero Persse, after the chaste Arthurian knight Perceval, and the elusive young woman he falls in love with Angelica, after the heroine of Ariosto's chivalric romance Orlando Furioso. (Years later I came across an intriguing personal ad in the Los Angeles Times : "Angelica, where are you? Still searching. Persse.")

The idea was to superimpose a satirical comedy of modern academic manners on a pattern of mythic motifs and romantic archetypes, the interlacing of several plotlines in traditional romance licensing an extravagant use of coincidence to contrive connections between my numerous characters and their fortunes or misfortunes. Since academics love to talk shop, my characters could plausibly provide a kind of commentary on the proliferating literary echoes and allusions for readers unfamiliar with their sources, but I tried to make the novel also simply enjoyable as a narrative combining suspense, mystery and comedy.

I set the story in 1979, the year of its inception, and incorporated the Zurich and Israel conferences, but not Mrs Thatcher's general election victory in the same year. By the time Small World was published in 1984, her policies had drastically changed the climate on Britain's campuses. State funding was cut, new appointments were frozen and the ethos of business management was being imposed on universities. In this context a novel about academics swanning around the globe on conference grants seemed to some of my colleagues, and a few reviewers, inopportune. Most readers, I'm glad to say, responded to Small World in the carnivalesque spirit in which it was written. But my next novel, Nice Work, returned to Rummidge in a more soberly realistic mode, to complete a trilogy which was never consciously planned as such.

• Next week John Mullan will be looking at readers' responses.

David Lodge

01/27/12--14:55: Small World by David Lodge (chan 1840837)

Week four: readers' responses

There we were, doing something like literary criticism on a novel dedicated to satirising the industry of academic literary criticism. When David Lodge came to the Guardian book club to discuss Small World, the very first questioner wondered whether the critical discourses that found their way into the novel, all deriving in some way from real critical movements, had any staying power, or were they so much "twaddle". Lodge, who was once one of the foremost explicators of Mikhail Bakhtin in the anglophone world, deftly avoided specifying what critical beliefs continued to influence him, though his several references to the "carnivalesque" aspects of his fiction gave a clue to his tastes. As in the works that Bakhtin favoured, the academic comic novel shows the lower motives of high-minded people.

The novel clearly still comes to ebullient life for its readers, yet it depicts a lost world. Professor Morris Zapp's peroration about the world-transforming effects of the Xerox machine and direct-dialled phone calls now sounds, the author wryly conceded, deliciously antique. There was some rumination about the changing aspects of academic life ("Not as much fun"), with one reader asking: "Would it be possible to write such a successful and high-impact satirical novel around academic life today?" The new culture of measurement and assessment was, the questioner suggested, so absurd that it was ripe for satire, but so grey that it hardly tempted the comic writer. "Do you think that the behaviour of academics at conferences has changed as a result of Small World?" asked another reader, mischievously. Lodge remembered some colleagues at Birmingham University complaining that, because of the novel, their wives looked at them suspiciously after they came back from conferences. He sounded rather regretful as he said that the culture of "hedonism" that was once in evidence has indeed perished, and earnest sobriety taken over.

Satirising your own world has its difficulties. "As a novelist, I was undermining, or subverting, or satirising the institution in which I was working, and I began to find that more and more difficult." What about the "gender politics" of academia, a member of the audience asked. "In Small World most of the academics are male and that is realistic. The female academics, I would suggest, are treated rather harshly by the satire. In your later work you seem to be more sympathetic to the role of the female academic." Our author would not concede that this was a fair picture. The novel's two main female characters, Angelica Pabst and Miss Sybil Maiden, were the only two characters in the novel who seemed to know what was really happening. Lodge confessed that he had re-read the paper that Angelica gives at the MLA conference and thought it was "really rather good". "She runs rings round the male characters."

Angelica is also a character from a romance plot taken from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and relish for the allusiveness of Small World was shared. One commenter on the book club website claimed that their interest in grail stories had been so awakened by the novel that they had named their son Perceval. There were comparisons with the literariness of other academic novels, notably AS Byatt's Possession, and another commenter pointed out that Anthony Powell's final novel, The Fisher King, had used the same myth as Lodge. "I wonder if Powell ever acknowledged any indebtedness to Lodge for suggesting the same legend to him as a structure for his novel?"

The author's delight in the carnivalesque allowed him to exploit mythology, but what about other belief systems? One reader wanted to know if Lodge would call himself a Catholic novelist. He declined the label, preferring to see Catholicism as one comic element among others, though he agreed that the Catholicism of his protagonist, Persse, was central to the plot of Small World. (Like some knight from romance, he intends to win his beloved while preserving his chastity.) If we were to read his novels in chronological order we would see, he thought, a once orthodox Roman Catholic becoming "less and less so as time went on".

We had talked a good deal about how much Lodge had drawn on the real American academic Stanley Fish for his roguish Professor Morris Zapp, and there was a good deal of affection on show for a character who has taken on a peculiar life of his own. The pleasure of creating Zapp for Lodge was bringing him to England – seeing his own country through the eyes of another. "Is there any way we can tempt you to bring Morris back," pleaded one reader, "perhaps in a nursing home novel?" The old monster would now be in his 80s, but that perhaps was not the main problem. "The way that Stanley Fish has co-opted the character makes it difficult for me to write about him any more." Indeed, we managed to get confused between the two of them. "He writes a column for the New York Times … He teaches at Yale." We all thought for a moment it was Zapp that he was describing, but in fact it was the equally unstoppable Fish. Could Zapp not live on, like his real-life counterpart? Perhaps a short story? "OK," said his creator, "I'll think about that one."

• John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. From next week he will be looking at The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. Join them at 7pm on Tuesday 21 February in the Scott Room, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Tickets are £8 each, click here to book.

John Mullan

02/14/12--04:44: Paperback Q&A: David Lodge on A Man of Parts (chan 1840837)

The author explains how his fascination with HG Wells's literary, political and sexual careers grew into a novel

How did you come to write A Man of Parts?
Preparing an introduction for a new edition of HG Wells's novel Kipps (1905), I looked into his life at the time he wrote it, when he was active in the socialist Fabian Society and involved with the children's writer Edith Nesbit, her husband Hubert Bland, and their daughter Rosamund. This story, in which radical politics, literary life and sexual intrigue were sensationally intertwined, prompted me to write a biographical novel about Wells of the same kind as the one I had written about Henry James, Author, Author.

What was most difficult about it?
First, finding a novel-shaped story in Wells's long life, which encompassed so many varied interests, changes of fortune, literary productions, political interventions, and sexual relationships. Second, how to handle the many flaws and contradictions in his character and behaviour.

What did you most enjoy?
Solving those problems – at least to my own satisfaction. Firstly by making Wells's relationships with the most important women in his life – two wives, three young women half his age, and the enigmatic, elusive Russian Moura Budberg – the spine of the narrative; secondly, by framing it with an account of his last two years of life, and giving him a second, inner voice with whom he goes over his past, accusing and defending himself.

How long did it take?
About 18 months once I started writing. More than that for research.

What has changed for you since it was first published?
After a gap of some years I have got involved in live theatre again. A new play, Secret Thoughts, a two-hander based on my novel Thinks… was premiered at the Bolton Octagon last May, and opens in Paris this month as Pensées Secrètes, translated by Gérald Sibleyras.

Who's your favourite writer?
The one I most admire and have learned most from is James Joyce. Those I most enjoy re-reading are probably Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh.

What are your other inspirations?
Biographies, memoirs, newspapers, magazines, TV documentaries … and what the late Simon Gray called "old life".

Give us a writing tip.
Try to read your own work in draft as if you hadn't written it, projecting its effect from sentence to sentence on someone who doesn't have to keep on reading if s(he) is bored, irritated, or unconvinced.

What, if anything, would you do differently if you were starting the book again?
Very little. I revise a good deal in the process of composition. Of course when you revisit a text of your own there are always sentences you would on reflection like to tweak, or perhaps delete, and there are a few in A Man of Parts.

What are you working on now?
Nothing I'm ready to talk about.

Books: David Lodge | guardian.co.uk

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