John Banville
The Once and Future Liberal; There Your Heart Lies; Angel Hill
Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (Harper) has annoyed a great many people in the US, though its message is nothing but common sense: in the age of Trumpery, nothing can be done for vulnerable minorities unless liberals get themselves elected to positions of influence. An urgent and important book by one of the clearest and most inspired political thinkers of the day. There Your Heart Lies by Mary Gordon (Pantheon) takes us back to an earlier time of crisis, the 1930s and the Spanish civil war, and an American woman’s experiences in it. A thoughtful, provocative and beautifully written novel. Michael Longley’s Angel Hill (Cape) is at once elegiac and celebratory, and achingly beautiful. Longley has honed his poetry to the bone, but how the bone does shine.
Nicola Barker
Becoming Myself; All Things Remembered; Wonder Beyond Belief
Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir (Piatkus) by Irvin D Yalom. When Yalom publishes something – anything – I buy it, and he never disappoints. He’s an amazing storyteller, a gorgeous writer, a great, generous, compassionate thinker, and – quite rightly – one of the world’s most influential mental healthcare practitioners. All Things Remembered (Faber) by Goldie. A fabulous, whirling kaleidoscope of music, memory and trauma. Top highlights: when Goldie’s boa constrictor decides to try to eat him after he staggers home from the pub smelling like a kebab; and when his favourite piece of custom-made jewellery is stolen – right from under his nose – by dodgy Russian airport officials. Magical and cautionary. Navid Kermani’s Wonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity (Polity). Iranian-born, German-bred, Muslim novelist/intellectual Kermani travels the globe looking at significant (and not so significant) Christian artworks. This truly is one of the best books I’ve read in years: funny, outrageous, touching, intimate, glorious.
William Boyd
Insomniac Diaries; David Bowie: A Life; Fasting and Feasting
As a Vladimir Nabokov completist, I could not resist Insomniac Diaries: Experiments with Time (ed. Gennady Barabtarlo, Princeton). Over a period of a few weeks in 1964 Nabokov wrote down his dreams, nightly. Here they are – not random narcoleptic scribblings but direct pellucid access to the great man’s unconscious. Utterly fascinating. Dylan Jones made absolutely the right decision to frame his superb life of David Bowie as a multi-voiced oral biography. David Bowie: A Life (Preface) suits the shape-shifting, beguiling, enigmatic complexities of its subject perfectly. It’s hard to imagine anything that will do Bowie better justice. Patience Gray (1917-2005) is the great original British cook and food writer. Her rackety, reclusive life is brilliantly realised in Fasting and Feasting by Adam Federman (Chelsea Green). This book will establish Gray as a wonderfully eccentric and visionary one-off. She is the British MFK Fisher – there can be no higher praise in literary/culinary circles.
Gordon Brown
Lincoln in the Bardo; Autumn; A Legacy of Spies; Dare Not Linger
Spending much of the year writing a book of my own has left me with a deeper and more personal understanding – and sympathy for – the challenges confronting authors. In fiction, I was impressed but challenged by the originality and scope of George Saunders’s Booker-winning story of grief and empathy, Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury) and enjoyed Ali Smith’s Autumn (Hamish Hamilton) (and now look forward to her Winter), but I would opt for John le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (Viking), not least for Smiley’s dramatic and surprising closing revelation of his reason for a life-time of spying – and lying. In autobiography, Nelson Mandela’s Dare Not Linger (with Mandla Langa, Macmillan) cannot rival Long Walk to Freedom – he died with it unfinished – but it reveals the struggles, setbacks and frustrations that to this very day thwart the progress of Africa. And Branko Milanović’s much underestimated Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Harvard), now being published in many languages, tells us more than any other recent book about the state of the world we live in and, at a time when hope is so urgently needed, offers us thought-provoking insights into the world we could become.
Roddy Doyle
To Die in Spring; Anything is Possible; Reservoir 13
The war is almost over, the Russians are getting nearer and two young men join the SS. A bad career move, but To Die in Spring is a wonderful, precise, very moving novel by German author Ralf Rothmann (Picador, translated by Shaun Whiteside). Anything Is Possible (Viking) is predictably great because it’s written by Elizabeth Strout, and brilliantly unpredictable – because it’s written by Elizabeth Strout. I like most of the books I read but, now and again, I read one I wish I’d written myself. This year it’s Reservoir 13 (4th Estate), by Jon McGregor. Its structure, pace, detail, tone, humanity – it’s a quiet masterpiece.
Jennifer Egan
Bystanders; Lincoln in the Bardo; Swing Time
Short story and thriller tend to be incompatible genres, but not in the hands of Tara Laskowski. Bystanders (Santa Fe Writers Project) is a spooky, quirky collection reminiscent of Roald Dahl: a mash-up of Hitchcockian suspense and campfire-tale chills. In Lincoln in the Bardo George Saunders has somehow managed to write a historical novel that hews deeply and movingly to archival fact while also being an all-out crazy spectacle of his own invention. Abraham Lincoln’s visit to his young son’s grave becomes the locus of a whirl of dialogue from around the cemetery: a puzzling, hilarious vortex of invention that only Saunders could pull off. The novel made me feel intimate with Lincoln, and that particular moment of history, in a way I never had before. Female friendship has become a literary focus in recent years, and Zadie Smith’s take on the subject in Swing Time (Hamish Hamilton) is my favourite. Tracing the evolution of a childhood friendship into adulthood, she bracingly portrays the compromises and bargains we all eventually make. Smith’s idiosyncratic gaze and keen, supple prose transform and elevate everything she touches.
Anne Enright
After Kathy Acker; Bluets; Midwinter Break
It used to be Plath, but now some part of every girl writer will want to be like Kathy Acker, especially those who are interested in pain; whether pain as kink or pain as artistic production. Her life was a hot mess, and these pages capture the heat of it. After Kathy Acker by Chris Kraus (Allen Lane) is hectic, less than objective, very much alive. A cooler, more serene take on the subject is to be found in Bluets by Maggie Nelson (Jonathan Cape), recently published in the UK for the first time. This discussion of the colour blue is a gorgeous read, almost religious in the way it defaults to the beautiful and the sublime. Addiction, religion and beauty are also themes in Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty (Jonathan Cape). This reads like a book about a long-married, monogamous couple on a city break in Amsterdam. Actually this is a book about a long-married, monogamous couple on a city break in Amsterdam. What has that got to do with the sublime? As it turns out, quite a lot.
Bernardine Evaristo
When We Speak of Nothing; Kingdom of Gravity; Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
When We Speak of Nothing by Olumide Popoola (Cassava Republic) is a linguistically inventive and deliciously original debut novel about a young, transgender protagonist who travels to Nigeria to find his father. Kingdom of Gravity by Nick Makoha (Peepal Tree) is an electrifying debut poetry collection that skilfully resurrects the terror of Idi Amin’s dictatorship from this British writer who fled Uganda as a child. Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge (Bloomsbury Circus). This political, accessible and uncompromising book has got people talking about race and racism in Britain.
Matt Haig
The Best We Could Do; La Belle Sauvage; The Secret Life of Cows
I have just finished reading The Best We Could Do (Abrams), a hauntingly beautiful illustrated memoir by Thi Bui. It tells the story of Bui’s Vietnamese family fleeing their home country after the fall of South Vietnam and arriving in America. It’s a mesmerising tale, given extra power by the art on every page. Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage (David Fickling) was a total, thrilling, immersive, Homeric delight – not just a return to a world, but an enriching of one. It is a triumph of imagination, and I can’t wait for the rest of the trilogy. I also loved Rosamund Young’s The Secret Life of Cows (Faber). It’s a plea for us to appreciate the complex inner lives of our inquisitive, loving, bovine friends, whom we arguably exploit more than any other creature on Earth – from what we wear on our feet, via our Sunday roast, to what we pour on our granola. It also makes the great point that we should not judge animal intelligence in relation to our own.
Philip Hensher
The 7th Function of Language; The House of Government; The Sparsholt Affair
Laurent Binet’s The 7th Function of Language (Harvill Secker, translated by Sam Taylor) was the most outrageously entertaining novel of the year, a defamatory fantasy about the supposed secret lives of eminent post-structuralists. A joy. Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government (Princeton) is a humane masterpiece, rendering the colossal scale of Stalin’s brutality not in numbers but in individual lives, and a single Moscow apartment building. There are pages I don’t think any reader will ever forget. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair (Picador) is startling, radical, embedded in tradition but entirely new in final effect – the novel that other novelists were all talking about this year.
Mark Lawson
Ma’am Darling; How Not to Be a Boy; Little Me; This Is Going to Hurt
It is intended entirely as a compliment to say that Craig Brown’s Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret (4th Estate) is astonishingly odd – a cross between biography and satire that perfectly displays Brown’s rare skills as journalist and parodist. A notoriously erratic genre – the comedian’s memoir – yielded two unusually classy examples: How Not to Be a Boy (Canongate) by Robert Webb and Little Me (Canongate) by Matt Lucas. Each writer found an elegant structural alternative to the usual cradle-to-Bafta-award trot-through, and, in examining deep miseries (the death of Webb’s mother, the imprison-ment of Lucas’s father), explored the transformation of pain into comic creativity in a way far beyond the stereotype of the melancholy clown. This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay (Picador) is so clinically funny and politically important for supporters of the NHS that it should be given out on prescription.
Robert Macfarlane
Wind Resistance; Thoreau and the Language of Trees; Mural
Karine Polwart’s Wind Resistance is unlike anything else I’ve read or heard this year: a new form or forms altogether, really, for it exists as an “immersive musical essay” published by Faber Drama; an album of songs called A Pocket of Wind Resistance with Pippa Murphy; and, formerly, a solo stage show at the Lyceum theatre in Edinburgh. Its subjects include motherhood, geese, moorland, gneiss, migration and deep time, and it manages to make a politics of protest out of its phenomena, as well as a poetics of beauty. It’s extraordinary work. I was also differently fascinated by Richard Higgins’s Thoreau and the Language of Trees (University of California) and Mural, the translation of two of Mahmoud Darwish’s great, long, later poems by Rema Hammami and John Berger (Verso).
Val McDermid
Days Without End; The Long Drop; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The book that has left the most profound impression on me this year is Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End (Faber). It’s a love story, a profound dissection of the horrors of war and a lesson in the hidden side of history, but its impact comes from the dense, rich, imaginative use of language. Absolutely captivating. Another writer whose narrative style elevates her work is Denise Mina, whose The Long Drop (Harvill Secker) revisits a dark episode in Glasgow’s past through the lens of one long drunken night when two men – one a killer, one a bereaved husband and father – confront what lies between them. Mina navigates the uneasy territory between fact and fiction with consummate grace. With Muriel Spark’s centenary on the horizon, I’ve been revisiting her work, and the third book of the year for me is unquestionably The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Penguin Modern Classics). It has all the Spark trademarks: dark humour, a non-linear time frame, a sardonic and bleak view of human nature, and a talent to entertain.
Jon McGregor
Too Much and Not the Mood; The White Book; There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé
One of the great pleasures and surprises of our digital reading age has been the resurgence of the essay. Who predicted that, in all those Computers Are Killing Literature thinkpieces we’ve had to endure? There have been some excellent essay collections this year, many of which carry pieces that started life online, and I’ve been learning new ways to think about the world, and to write about it, from such wonderful writers as Yiyun Li, Reni Eddo-Lodge and especially from Durga Chew-Bose in her collection Too Much and Not the Mood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). I’ve barely started reading The White Book by Han Kang (Portobello, translated by Deborah Smith), but I can already tell it will be one of my books of the year. Delicate and thoughtful and concise and dense and strong; this is the kind of writing I like to read slowly. A man (of course) recently claimed that 2017 had been “a thin year” for poetry; this has certainly not been the experience of attentive readers. As well as new collections from the likes of Sinéad Morrissey, Emily Berry, Maria Apichella and the very thrilling Ocean Vuong, I have particularly enjoyed getting my head around the playful rhythms and deadpans of Morgan Parker’s There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Corsair).
Hollie McNish
The Things I Would Tell You; Daemon Voices
The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write (Saqi), edited by Sabrina Mahfouz. I did not choose this book because it was written by women or Muslim women or minority voices. I chose it because the first story I read moved me to tears by the second page, the second story almost made me vomit, the poems made me up my game and the essays were a much needed education. Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling (David Fickling), by Philip Pullman. Reading these essays feels almost naughty to me – as if I’m sneaking into a year of lectures and classes with one of the masters of this art that I really should be paying a lot to attend. Here, Pullman shares advice, secrets, thoughts in such a down-to-earth, friendly manner, it almost makes me want to weep. I wondered if it would be too formal, overly intellectualised reading – and I was so happily, pleasantly excited it wasn’t.
Pankaj Mishra
Women and Power; Sex and Secularism; Sour Heart; Swimmer Among the Stars; New People
In the first annus horribilis of Trump, I found myself reading more periodicals than books – and small magazines rather than the mainstream journals. Gauging the political and cultural earthquakes of our time, such shoestring publications as n+1, the Point, the Baffler, Dissent and Jacobin seemed far more intellectually agile and resourceful than their rich cousins. Mary Beard’s Women and Power (Profile) and Joan Wallach Scott’s Sex and Secularism (Princeton) offer a series of bracing and illuminating reflections on a whole culture of oppression that ought to have been exposed much earlier. Other insidious hierarchies are revealed by Jenny Zhang’s collection of stories, Sour Heart (Bloomsbury Circus), which deliciously subverts conventions of “immigrant literature”. I greatly admired the imaginative range and adventurousness of Kanishk Tharoor’s stories in Swimmer Among the Stars (Picador), and I also very much enjoyed Danzy Senna’s New People (Riverhead), a witty and stylish novel about the allure and perils of racial belonging.
Blake Morrison
Ghosts of the Tsunami; Mayhem; Between Them; Anything is Possible; The Unaccompanied
When a giant quake and wave hit Japan in 2011, almost all the children who died came from one primary school. Richard Lloyd Parry’s Ghosts of the Tsunami (Cape) describes the errors that led to the tragedy and the efforts of bereaved parents to uncover the truth. Sigrid Rausing’s taut, scrupulous, self-accusing memoir Mayhem (Hamish Hamilton) recounts the story of her sister-in-law’s death from a drug overdose: instead of tabloid sensationalism, we watch a family tragedy unfold. Richard Ford’s Between Them (Bloomsbury) is a loving, late-life tribute to his father Parker (a travelling salesman) and mother Edna: concise, contemplative and evocative of a lost America. The linked stories in Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible (Viking) are among the best fiction I’ve read this year, and the poems in Simon Armitage’s The Unaccompanied (Faber) the best verse.
Ian Rankin
The Intrusions; The Dry; The Long Drop
The Intrusions by Stav Sherez (Faber). This talented British author of intelligent crime novels has been under the radar too long. His latest is a Silence of the Lambs for the internet age as a serial killer stalks his prey online, entering and controlling their lives. Chilling and utterly convincing. The Dry by Jane Harper (Abacus). A cop heads home to the drought-stricken Australian outback when an old schoolfriend takes their own life. A mystery from their shared past comes to the fore and enmities (and relationships) are rekindled in a book that has atmosphere to spare, as well as a pleasing number of twists and turns. Elegant and gripping. The Long Drop by Denise Mina. The ever-reliable Mina deserves all the awards she has already won for this, her latest novel. It details one tense night shared by a murderer and the man whose wife and daughter he killed. Games are being played as the two drink their way around late-1950s Glasgow. Remarkably, it is taken from the true story of Peter Manuel, one of the last men to be hanged in Scotland. Absorbing and filled with insights, this is a bravura performance, a true original.
George Saunders
The Locals; Reservoir 13; Kill All Normies; How to Behave in a Crowd
The Locals by Jonathan Dee (Corsair). A compassionate look at the American middle class and what is happening to it and the ways, right and wrong, in which it is responding. Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor. An original and very moving tour de force, in which the author manages to simultaneously speed time up and slow it down, while also gently outing our readerly hunger for drama, violence and (too) simple closure. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle (Zero). This short head-butt of a book taught me more about recent political events in a single rich evening of reading than I’ve learned in this entire last and very unpleasant year of obsessively monitoring cable TV, and confirmed for me something I’ve been feeling for a while now, namely that social media is a toxin we are gleefully and cluelessly injecting into ourselves, even as we ask, “Why are we getting so mean and stupid?” How to Behave in a Crowd by Camille Bordas (Tim Duggan). I read this book early in the year, and have carried it around in my mind like a talisman during a busy period of travelling and not-writing, as a reminder of a simple truth, for when I get back to work: good writing is joyful and exists for the purpose of making enjoyment and fun for the reader.
Kamila Shamsie
The Story of a Brief Marriage; The Unwomanly Face of War
Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage (Granta) is a devastating novel. Set over 24 hours in the middle of a war zone, focused almost entirely on the thoughts and experiences of a man who knows death is coming for him, it’s unlike anything else I’ve read. Sticking with the theme of war, Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War (Penguin) is an oral history of women who fought in the second world war. And it’s brilliant.
Ali Smith
East West Street; Days Without End; Home Fire; Tell Me How it Ends
What a year. I started it with Philippe Sands’s East West Street (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), which examines the meaning and importance of law, of the words that go to make it and of life lived well versus life lived foully. It does this personally, universally, locally and internationally with an eye to what unites and protects us from the power-madness of a divide-and-rule mentality that’s once more, right now, courting catastrophe. I think it’s one of the finest books I’ve yet read. Then there’s Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Bloomsbury Circus). Occasionally you know that one of the writers alive at the same time as you has written the book they were born to write. With Barry, it’s as if every book he writes is a bit like this – and then there’s this novel. It’s a masterpiece. Barry writes warmth so that warmth is a form of truth. Home Fire has lit a light that’ll never go out; Shamsie’s version of Antigone reveals the ancient tragedy we’re living right now. Plus, Valeria Luiselli, can I just shout her name out? A novelist of a rare vitality, whose latest work, Tell Me How It Ends (4th Estate), is an essay about humanity with its back up against the border wall, and is so true and moving that it filled me with hopeless hope.
Jeanette Winterson
Testosterone Rex; Women and Power; Still Life with Feeding Snake; The Lost Words
Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds by Cordelia Fine (Icon). This is a barnstormer! Rightful winner of the Royal Society science book prize. It’s time to stop blaming stone-age brains and testosterone for gender differences, and look at patriarchy. A polemic with all the facts, figures and research papers any feminist or male essentialist will ever need. And it’s funny. Women and Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard. I have just read this one and had to include it. From the Greeks to Hillary Clinton, 115 rocket-fuelled pages on how power structures at every level exclude and silence women. History helps us to realise we’re not crazy feminists. It’s time to change the world. Still Life with Feeding Snake by John Burnside (Cape). The world is such a mess. These poems concentrate on still-ness, on time that isn’t haste. They deliver a zen remedy of calm alert. The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris (Hamish Hamilton). Gorgeous to look at and to read. Give it to a child to bring back the magic of language – and its scope. Written as a thumbs down to the Oxford Junior Dictionary – that dismal Gradgrind publication of utility without beauty or imagination – The Lost Words is a kingfisher of a book – coloured, soaring, in flight, and with a fish in its mouth.
- What have you enjoyed reading in 2017? Send your choices in 150 words or fewer to readers.books@theguardian.com or Readers’ Books of the Year, Review, the Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU (include name and address), to arrive no later than Monday 11 December. Or leave your suggestions below. We will publish a selection in the paper and online on Saturday 30 December.