Books of the Year 2018
From autofiction to ‘unbooks’ and ‘Ancient Mariner novels’
TLS
This year’s contributors:
Terri Apter, Mary Beard, Lucy Beckett, Jonathan Benthall, Paul Binding, Beverley Bie Brahic, William Boyd, David Bromwich, Stephen Brown, Clare Carlisle, Alex Clark, Jonathan Clark, Paul Collier, Tim Crane, Diana Darke, Richard Davenport-Hines, Lydia Davis, Margaret Drabble
Esi Edugyan, Mark Ford, Roy Foster, Peter Green, Paul Griffiths, Rachel Hadas, James Hall, Michael Hofmann
Robert Irwin, Clive James, Gabriel Josipovici, Jonathan Keates, John Kerrigan, Adam Kirsch, Chris Kraus, Sam Leith, Claire Lowdon, Elizabeth Lowry
Eimear McBride, Keith Miller, Madeline Miller, Sarah Moss, Paul Muldoon, Jeremy Noel-Tod, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Parker, Marjorie Perloff, Rachel Polonsky
Theodore K. Rabb, Craig Raine, Frederic Raphael, Ritchie Robertson, Ian Sansom, Anna Katharina Schaffner, Lorna Scott Fox, Andrew Scull, Ruth Scurr, Tom Shippey, Elaine Showalter, A. E. Stallings, Tom Stoppard, Raymond Tallis, D. J. Taylor, Adam Thirlwell, Peter Thonemann, Adam Thorpe
Jesmyn Ward, Marina Warner, Edmund White, A. N. Wilson, Emily Wilson, Frances Wilson, Zinovy Zinik
TERRI APTER
While many books published this year explore links between social media and political control, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, in Cyberwar: How Russian hackers and trolls helped elect a President – what we don’t, can’t, and do know (Oxford), uses forensic scholarship on political persuasion to show how the Russians excelled in amplifying divisive rhetoric. I found Jamieson’s even-handed approach and detailed evidence both convincing and refreshing. one of her central points – that on many platforms malevolent manipulation can appear to come from trustworthy sources – identifies the key problem in social media. Another favourite is Sriya Iyer’s The Economics of Religion in India (Harvard), which reminds us of old truths – for example, that religion is a cultural ｅxpression of deep emotional and imaginative hunger (what Iyer calls “spiritual”) – while arguing that it is often “a rational economic response” to changing social environments. In so doing, Iyer gently but effectively challenges more narrow concepts of rational choice.
MARY BEARD
“Reaching the sea is a principle of civilization”, insisted Turkey’s Kemal Atatürk. The catalogue of an exhibition at the Pera Museum in 2018, Istanbul’s Seaside Leisure (İstanbul’da Deniz Sefası; Pera Museum), offers a surprising glimpse into the relationship of Istanbul’s residents with the sea, and how that changed between the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth. Although the English is occasionally a little shaky (the text is bilingual English/Turkish), the photographs and paintings of Turkish beach-goers, their costumes and their fun and games are a wonderful illustration of what Atatürk might (or might not) have meant, and a glorious example of history coming alive in the byways of popular culture. Closer to home, the catalogues of two London exhibitions should have a lasting impact beyond the temporary displays they record: Charles I: King and collector (based on the Royal Academy’s spectacular attempt to recreate the King’s art collection), and The Classical Now (Elephant; featuring some stunning images of the classically inspired objects shown at an exhibition at King’s College London, with some excellent essays on the continuing and sometimes unexpected dialogue between modern artists and antiquity).
LUCY BECKETT
Between 1945 and 1967, as the empire crumbled, Britain and America, openly and with skulduggery, contended for dominance in the Middle East. James Barr’s Lords of the Desert (Simon and Schuster), following his A Line in the Sand on the earlier struggle between Britain and France, is a thoroughly researched and splendidly readable account of this rivalry. Spies and buccaneer soldiers – more John Buchan than John le Carré – appear and disappear in the book, along with politicians and diplomats of variable effectiveness and wisdom. The consequences of the story, all over the Middle East, but particularly in Iran and Saudi Arabia, are with us still.
Nearly a century old but published this year as a new Penguin Classic, is Chagall’s illustrated memoir of his childhood in doomed Jewish Vitebsk, and of his early difficulties as an artist; My Life is as fresh, poignant and individual as his paintings.
JONATHAN BENTHALL
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), a towering enigma among social anthropologists, has met a triumphant biographer in Emmanuelle Loyer. A professor of contemporary history at Sciences-Po in Paris, she combines a redoubtable intellect and narrative flair with tireless research skills. Lévi-Strauss: A biography (translated by Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff; Polity) was first published in French by Flammarion (2015). Beyond the debates focusing on structuralism and the exotic that fascinated his contemporaries, his denunciations of cultural homogenization and estrangement from nature strike home today. Always disinclined to repeat himself, late in life he published provocative statements on such subjects as animal farming. The memory of butchers’ shops will, he thought, shock future generations as deeply as the sight of cannibal meals shocked sixteenth-century travellers. Loyer concludes that philosophers are currently more inspired by Lévi-Strauss’s legacy than anthropologists, with the exception of Amazonian specialists for whom Amerindians are spontaneous structuralists, on the same intellectual level as their ethnographers.
PAUL BINDING
The characters and events of the Estonian film-maker Ilmar Taska’s bestselling novel Pobeda 1946: A car called Victory (Norvik; translated by Christopher Moseley) form a microcosm of one war-shattered small country’s brutal appropriation by an expansionist power. The eponymous car (pobeda is Russian for victory) is a smart-looking post-war saloon conferring status on owners. Second-rate in both design and capacity, it perfectly symbolizes the orchestrated elitism of the Soviets in Estonia. Its appeal for a never-named small boy has tragic resonance. Philip Hensher’s The Friendly ones (Fourth Estate), chronicling two neighbouring families in Sheffield, indigenous English and Bangladeshi newcomers, is arguably his warmest, most artistically satisfying novel to date.
A Difficult Death: The life and work of Jens Peter Jacobsen by Morten Høi Jensen (Yale) is an incisive, informative, empathetic account of a major Danish writer: poet, Darwin apologist and translator, and author of the classic novel, Niels Lyhne, a creative influence on Rilke.
BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC
Will Eaves’s Murmur (CB editions) is a dive through consciousness, from the mundane to memory dreams, and beyond. The narrator – “Alec Pryor”/Alan Turing, the author – explores, from the inside, and with great scrupulousness, the mind’s unknowns (“at what point [does] unconscious material become conscious”) and the tragedy of Alan Turing. Knowing the story does not soften the ending.
Wendy Cope’s Anecdotal Evidence (Faber). Cope’s large subjects make for heart-pinching word-bites. Funny, yes (and some lyrics just plain lovely); also full of dark corners. Like Herbert, to whom she includes a homage, these poems say something true about our “fear, our anger and our love”.
W. S Graham’s New Selected Poems (Faber). A discovery. The art of the unsaid, with something of Wallace Stevens’s lightness.
WILLIAM BOYD
Having spent much of the past three years writing about a fictional piano-tuner I thought I had had enough of the instrument. Then along came Paul Kildea’s fascinating Chopin’s Piano: A journey through Romanticism (Allen Lane) and I was hooked again. The starting point for this beguiling journey is a somewhat basic piano – a pianino – made in Majorca in the 1830s on which Chopin composed and polished his 24 Preludes. Kildea uses this piano and its fate as a magical objective correlative to examine not only Chopin and his oeuvre but also to explore an unconventional history of Romantic music and the work of Wanda Landowska, the person who ensured the pianino’s near-miraculous survival. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”, Emily Dickinson advised. Limpidly written, effortlessly learned, copiously illustrated, Chopin’s Piano is a perfect illustration of how the best histories often emerge from left field.
DAVID BROMWICH
“Their important stories”, writes Seymour Hersh in Reporter (Allen Lane) about the Associated Press journalists whose bureau he joined in 1965, “seemed to me to be exquisite wire service matter – just fact after fact, with no analysis, presented in clean, spare prose under rat-a-tat pressure.” In his great books on the My Lai massacre and the Cheney–Bush regime of war and torture, Hersh was both the disciple and master of an ascetic morale of the newsroom. Reporter keeps to a different pitch, anecdotal, intimate without ever turning to confession, and as surprised by the author’s mainly lucky life as any reader could be. By the way – only it is not quite by the way – Hersh records his regret at his occasional failure to do the right thing. Like all good memoirs, this one shows more than it says, and is a work of conscience as well as memory.
STEPHEN BROWN
Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (Michael Hofmann’s translation; Penguin) puts you in the mean streets and meaner lives – and minds – of its 1920s underclass. There’s nothing sympathetic about what the characters do, and yet they’re so damned human, it’s impossible not to share in what they feel. I have also been dipping into Harold Nicolson’s Diaries and Letters, which covers some of the same period, but from a perspective so different (surely there never was a person so well connected to the upper reaches of art, politics and society) it might be from a different planet.
CLARE CARLISLE
I discovered Rachel Cusk’s trilogy this summer, rushing out to buy Kudos (Faber) in hardback after rapidly devouring Outline (2014) and Transit (2016). These three novels are like a long glass of water in a heatwave: one glides effortlessly through Cusk’s prose, though there’s depth and darkness beneath its impeccable surface. Outline encounters a series of characters through the eyes and ears of a barely there travelling narrator, Faye. Through this form Cusk accomplishes something almost impossible: conveying the transparency of subjectivity, how being a self is like a channel through which experience flows. While Transit lapses just a little into a more conventional narrative form as Faye rebuilds her life in London, Kudos sets off again for the cool heights achieved in Outline, then ascends even higher, offering a remarkable meditation on being a woman in this world. Kudos to Cusk: this is philosophical fiction with a beautifully light touch.
ALEX CLARK
This year brought me my Ancient Mariner novel, the book I’m destined to traipse around fervently pressing into people’s hands; that it hasn’t scooped prizes all over the shop amazes and affronts me. It’s Samantha Harvey’s The Western Wind (Cape), which takes us to a tiny Somerset village at the end of the fifteenth century, and to the beginning of Lent. There’s been a murder, and a priest must attempt to solve it from the confessional, itself a contentious recent addition to the church. That bare bones summary hardly suggests the novel’s breathtaking exploration of guilt, communal and individual, secrecy and power, nor Harvey’s intricate, enfolded narrative structure. It made me gasp, and when I’d finished it, I started it again.
JONATHAN CLARK
Across the developing world, capitalism is born free, lifting millions out of poverty and into literacy; but across the First World, it is everywhere in chains, stigmatized for its effects on the environment, gender relations, inequality and growth. How should we analyse this situation? Jesse Norman’s Adam Smith: What he thought, and why it matters (Allen Lane) is a historical study, but more; it engages Smith with present-day debates among economists, political scientists and philosophers. For Norman, Smith’s key ideas are human sympathy, not cold acquisition; rejection of protectionist market-rigging, not adulation of wealth. Norman contends that “the preservation of commercial society requires the reform of capitalism”, learning from Smith. Following the 2008 crash, as the UK contemplates a crossroads, one signpost pointing towards Venezuela, another towards Brussels, a third towards Singapore, this elegant and wide-ranging reassessment by a successful politician has special significance. Who now owns the interpretation of Adam Smith subtly influences our next turn.
PAUL COLLIER
I have found three books really valuable. The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (Penguin), arms us against the latest folly wafting in from the culture of the American campus. The belief system they describe entraps young minds, so the people who most need to read this book will be “kept safe” from doing so. Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich (Oxford), is a wonderfully illuminating exposition of how advances in reading ancient DNA have upended our ideas about past population movements and human interaction. The re-peopling of Europe from Central Asia around 2500 BC; the return influx to Eastern Africa; and the contrast between integration in East Asia and persistent fragmentation in South Asia are remarkable revelations. on the economy, Crashed, by Adam Tooze (Allen Lane), is an erudite and profoundly important account of a disaster that has neither been understood nor addressed.
TIM CRANE
Julian Jackson’s biography Charles de Gaulle: A certain idea of France (Allen Lane) is a gripping and insightful account of the man who was at the heart of all the main events of French (and therefore European) history in the twentieth century. De Gaulle was a huge and complex character, at once magnificent and slightly absurd – he had this tendency to identify with France itself. The description of Macmillan’s (unsuccessful) attempts to persuade de Gaulle to support Britain’s entry into the Common Market in the early 1960s has a particular poignancy today. De Gaulle argued that if Britain joined the Common Market, “the cohesion of all its members would not last for very long, and it would take on the appearance of a colossal Atlantic community under American dependence and direction”. He was wrong on the second point, and maybe on the first too.
DIANA DARKE
It is rare to find a book that brings the complex history of the Middle East to life. Beautifully written by a young Palestinian growing up on the Gaza Strip, The Words of My Father: A memoir by Yousef Bashir (Haus) is a deeply personal narrative imbued with a clarity which surprises at every turn. Bashir’s homage to his peace-loving father, and his friendships with Israelis after he is shot, show a way forward in what has arguably become the world’s most intractable conflict. The sheer humanity of his story made me weep buckets.
RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES
Max Hastings’s Vietnam: An epic tragedy 1945–1975 (William Collins) is a stunner. The vitality of the research, the keen eye for eloquent detail, the brisk sense and (for it is the only word to use) the virile prose all meet Hastings’s usual mark. He shows compassion and contempt, but never sloppy judgements or indignant screeches. The totalitarianism of the Hanoi regime, the corruption in Saigon, the experiences of Vietcong guerrillas, villagers, and South Vietnam soldiers as well as those of US troops enrich his story. Hastings’s indictment of Washington policy after the South Vietnamese military coup of 1963 is lethal. America’s prolongation of the war was a mutilating act of self-harm which took generations to heal. It happened because US policymakers lied to the electorate, which is usual enough, but more culpably also lied to close colleagues and lied to themselves. In this sense, at least, Brexit is Britain’s Vietnam.
LYDIA DAVIS
Recently, my reading has included some good memoirs: first there were two sharp and lively books by Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues (translated by Nick Davies; Daunt) and Family Lexicon (translated by Jenny McPhee; New York Review). Then came another (out this coming January), which must be my rave for the year. The starting point for Linn Ullmann’s “novel” Unquiet (Norton) was a series of interviews she did with her father in his old age, then put aside. Passages transcribed from these halting conversations (eccentric, passionate, abruptly abandoned) intersperse Ullmann’s own detailed recollections of moments in her complicated life with her father, (separated) mother and father’s many other children. In its very form replicating the fitful progress of memory, it is written and translated (from the Norwegian, by author and translator) with care, insight, a keen sensitivity to the value of every word, and a generous embrace of human strengths and weaknesses. I had the rare experience, as I read it, of at once admiring the way it was written and being engrossed in the story.
MARGARET DRABBLE
Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall (Granta) characteristically interweaves the distant past and the immediate present. The author has a gift for taking us back in time in a mixture of historical fiction, ghost story and sharp contemporary observation. Here we return to the Bog People and Hadrian’s Wall, through the experiences of Silvie, teenage daughter of an amateur archaeologist and deluded lover of Ancient Britain, a bus driver by trade. He has been commandeered to join a small field study party of a professor and his students who spend their time gathering burdocks and berries and killing rabbits and catching bony fish, while Silvie’s abused mother does the unpalatable cooking on a griddle in an authentic Iron Age manner. Moss’s feel for ancient landscape is keen, but it’s always a relief in this narrative to sneak off to Spar with its multi-packs of Hula Hoops and fun-sized Mars Bars. Moss paces her story well.
ESI EDUGYAN
Michael ondaatje’s Warlight (Cape) is a rare and beautiful thing – a deeply retrospective novel about war secrets that feels neither overstated nor overly ethereal. In sumptuous prose, ondaatje limns the psyche of a man still trying to make sense of his complicated relationships and the mysteries surrounding his absent parents. one of the most absorbing books I’ve read all year.
MARK FORD
I greatly enjoyed the latest collection of Ian Seed’s beautifully crafted prose poems, New York Hotel (Shearsman); Seed’s micro-narratives and oblique parables are at once droll and haunting, as unpredictable as quicksand, and as elegant as the work of those masters of the prose poem, Max Jacob and Pierre Reverdy (both of whom Seed has translated). I also recommend two superb volumes by poets, like Seed, as European as they are British: Michael Hofmann’s One Lark, one Horse and Jamie McKendrick’s Anomaly (both Faber).
ROY FOSTER
I am immersed in Guy Beiner’s riveting Forgetful Remembrance: Social forgetting and vernacular historiography of a rebellion in Ulster (Oxford), just published. Beiner is an astonishing scholar whose dissections of Irish historical memory have already made his name. His new book looks at the processes of historiographical amnesia regarding the 1798 Rebellion in the north of Ireland, employing a huge intellectual range, and in extraordinary detail – while remaining intensely readable, with a Borgesian quirkiness. The “rites of oblivion” explored here echo powerfully down to the present, and future. Colm Tóibín’s Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: The fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce (Viking) is psychologically astute, historically suggestive, and often very funny. Tóibín shows a Jamesian ability to deconstruct family relationships with a scalpel, throwing new light on three great writers. Irish history is given another twist in Martina Evans’s linked narrative poems, Now We Can Talk Openly About Men (Carcanet): a sharply idiomatic reflection of the Irish revolution and Civil War through monologues by two women. “Miss Babe Cronin, Dublin, 1924” opens: “It was very bad breeding from the word go” and is unputdownable thereafter. Reading her is like listening at the keyhole of history.
PETER GREEN
As novelist, screenwriter and controversial essayist, with a background of Cambridge classics and philosophy, Frederic Raphael for some years has been drawing on the notebook jottings of a lifetime to produce, in a series entitled Personal Terms, not autobiography, but “the world from my point of view”. Both that point of view and many of the sharply sketched portraits he dashes off have provoked indignation: Against the Stream (Carcanet), the seventh volume of the series, will be no exception. It covers the 1980s, the world of Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War (why, Raphael wonders, didn’t they save that war’s vast expense by buying out the residents at £100,000 each?). A hilarious and disillusioned page-turner, this book still pinpoints its celebs with shrewd panache: Warren Beatty “may be intelligent, but either has little culture or else takes care not to be caught going through customs with it”. Tennis, anyone?
PAUL GRIFFITHS
Three books that are all in a sense memoirs: Pierre Boulez, in Music Lessons (Faber), drawn from the lectures he gave at the Collège de France in his fifties and sixties, brings his theorizing to a stupendous culmination of over 600 pages. Engaged with music as construct and communication, the book is almost a (Boulez) composition itself, full of ideas coursing in spirals of elaboration.
Most of Jon Fosse’s Scenes from a Childhood (Fitzcarraldo) are very short. one that’s not is haunting, but the miniatures startle for how the personal becomes universal, often on a keen grammatical switch.
Gerald Murnane’s concern is not to recapture the moment but to explore why it has stayed. From fragments of coloured glass in Border Districts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) the narrator, seamlessly and with precision, follows memory’s traces.
RACHEL HADAS
That the fifty-seven poems in A. E. Stallings’s rich new collection Like (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) are arranged in alphabetical order makes sense. Life doesn’t come at us in neat thematic packages; why should a book of poems? The arrangement lies within each poem’s artful dapple of dark and light. Stallings writes complex, nuanced, entertaining poems in a variety of apt forms: blues for the refugee crisis; ottava rima about a grumpy hunt for a lost toy; a sestina that rings thirty-nine changes on the eponymous title word. That “like” nods to Facebook on the one hand and Homeric similes on the other is typical of Stallings’s uncanny ability to collapse time. Many poets these days are writing urgent political poems, but no one else evokes our Iron Age with Stallings’s serious levity and learned sprezzatura.
And speaking of the Iron Age, Stallings’s new translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days (Penguin Classics) – witty, gritty, and unsettlingly relevant – is not to be missed either. Toil; corruption in high places; injustice; the prevailing sense that things are getting worse – none of these prevents the Muses’ chosen poets from doing their indispensable and soul-refreshing work.
JAMES HALL
The Renaissance Nude, edited by Thomas Kren (Getty), is a readable, wide-ranging and thought-provoking reassessment of a much masticated topic. The catalogue to an exhibition currently at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, it will be coming – in sadly mutilated form – to the Royal Academy in the spring. Rather than being fixated on Humanist Italy, the essays underscore the key role played by Christian iconography and by Northern Europe, especially French rulers who, it seems, have always been partial to a bit of porn. It turns out that the Council of Trent’s proscribing of lascivious imagery was all the work of a French cardinal – the two may be connected. Here the definition of the male and female nude is usefully expanded to include topless imagery: the front cover is the pneumatically bare-breasted Melun Madonna by Jean Fouquet (not coming to London). We learn interesting things about the social history of nudity (the best place to see naked bodies was the bathhouse), Ovidian poetry, Neoplatonic alibis and the depiction of witches. There are works in many media, including illuminated manuscripts. Prospective readers be warned, however: the emphasis is libertarian rather than puritanical, Kenneth Clark rather than John Berger, California rather than Bible Belt.
MICHAEL HOFMANN
Life is what happens between Michael Lewis books. I forgot to breathe while reading The Fifth Risk (Norton), about what laughingly were called the “transition teams” (briefly involving Chris Christie) smoothing the handover of power in various great American offices of state. The mixture of the cavalier, the clueless, the shambolic and the malign that characterizes the presidency of Dismal Swamp is shown in flamboyant (in)action. on a more serious note, the US rarely appears as spacious, gifted, virtuous and flat-out eccentric as it does in Lewis’s encounters. Raccoons led by dodos.
One’s anxiety never sleeps, but it was brilliant to be diverted from it over a couple of nights by Sally Rooney’s two novels, Conversations with Friends and Normal People (both Faber). With simple words and plain sentences, Rooney generates power and unpredictability. Her dialogues and sequencing are exceptional.
ROBERT IRWIN
My book of the year is thoroughly obscure, wonderfully barmy and was first published in 1923. But I have been looking for it for years and this year it has been reissued by a Mexican publisher, Berbera Editores. El velo de Isis: Las mil y una noches ocultistas is by Mario Roso de Luna (1872–1931), the “Red Magician of Logrosán”, Theosophist, Freemason and astrologer. Besides translating the works of the founder of Theosophy, Helena P. Blavatsky, into Spanish, Roso de Luna also produced this wonderfully misguided and detailed Theosophical reading of The Thousand and one Nights. His exegesis, which runs to almost 400 pages, exercised a decisive and unhelpful influence on Rafael Cansinos-Asséns’s three-volume translation of the Nights into Spanish, published in 1954–5. This was the first Spanish translation made directly from the Arabic. (The poet, novelist and essayist Cansinos-Asséns was the admired literary master and friend of Borges.)
CLIVE JAMES
The biggest drag about being old and ill simultaneously is that you fall behind the literary action, so that you wind up trying to help launch the career of Chaucer. My apologies, then, for continuing to discover the poetry of U. A. Fanthorpe: I always thought her poem about Paolo Uccello was a miracle but now I can see that there are several others that almost match it. At the rate I go on consulting its pages, her Penguin Selected Poems will end up being in more pieces than I am. Is there another woman poet so good at the historical stuff? There is, and her name is Gjertrud Schnackenberg, whose Bloodaxe collection Supernatural Love (Poems 1976–2000) teems with thought-packed things, and thing-packed thoughts, that even Fanthorpe would have had to bless for their richness. Schnackenberg has everything except (a) a snappy name, and (b) a recital voice powerful enough to overcome the uproar of gerbils mating. Listen to her on YouTube and you’ll think that the Americans are developing a new weapon: Stealth people.
GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI
My book of the year is in fact twenty-two books – the twenty-two novels Muriel Spark published in her lifetime and which have been reissued in this, her centenary year, by Polygon in a splendidly designed set, each novel introduced by a different writer, the whole masterminded by the indefatigable Alan Taylor. Re-reading many of them, often stimulated by the introductions, I was moved, dazzled and made profoundly happy by these remarkable works.
The Israeli novelist Dror Burstein is a very different kind of writer from Muriel Spark (well, who isn’t?), but I think she would have enjoyed his new novel, Muck (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, beautifully translated by that fine poet, Gabriel Levin). A devastating but also hilarious superimposition of the biblical Book of Jeremiah on contemporary Middle Eastern politics, it is a novel that transcends its occasion and will, I suspect, go on being read for a long time to come.
JONATHAN KEATES
Empire as unmitigated arrogance and exploitation is too simple an answer for David Gilmour in The British in India (Allen Lane). The depth of his research uncovers nuance and complexity among colonial lives in the subcontinent and a startling degree of osmosis between the imperial cohort and the cultures it dominated. Comparably exotic is the world of Martin Cullen’s The Estancia (Adelphi), almost a novel, not quite an autobiography, evoking the Argentinian writer’s precocious childhood amid a flutter of flamboyantly memorable matriarchs. Ian Thomson’s Dante’s Divine Comedy: A journey without end (Head of Zeus) encapsulates everything we need for the ultimate poetic voyage from Hell to Paradise by way of Purgatory. Visiting a lost planet is James Pope-Hennessy in The Quest for Queen Mary (Hodder and Stoughton). These incisively contextualized, often hilarious interviews for his 1957 biography, conducted among minor Windsors, German princelings and pensioned-off courtiers, reveal royalty as a genuinely alien life form.
JOHN KERRIGAN
In his lucid, wide-ranging Natives (Two Roads), the rapper Akala shows how race, class and the legacies of empire shape life in Britain today. Like other books published this year aimed at making more of us woke, such as Afua Hirsch’s less persuasive Brit(ish) (Cape), Akala’s study interweaves sociological analysis with memoir. Half-Scottish and half-Jamaican by heritage, he challenges cultural assumptions and highlights their consequences, is trenchant about structures of disadvantage, and is discouraging, in the end, about the future. Those who want their sociology more firmly slanted towards autobiography should go for the related insights to be found in The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah (Scribner). The chapters which deal with Zephaniah’s childhood and borstal years are heart-wrenching and inspiring.
ADAM KIRSCH
The Canadian writer Sheila Heti is often grouped with other writers of “autofiction”, such as Rachel Cusk and Ben Lerner. How Should a Person Be? (2012), was subtitled “a novel from life”, and its characters and scenes are ostensibly based on real people and events. This year, Heti published Motherhood (Harvill Secker), a book that has no subtitle and doesn’t need one; it goes beyond questions of genre, and could best be described as a philosophical essay in the tradition of Montaigne. As she ponders whether or not to have children, Heti thinks clearly and originally about profound issues of vocation, responsibility, identity and what it means to be true to oneself. Spending time in the company of a serious mind is one of the chief pleasures of fiction, and that is what Motherhood provides, even as it does away with most of the apparatus of storytelling.
CHRIS KRAUS
Writing from the San Gabriel Valley city of Alhambra, Sesshu Foster is a teacher, community activist and East LA’s unofficial poet laureate. His City Terrace Field Manual (1996) was a paean to his childhood, growing up with six siblings a few miles away. His new collection, City of the Future (Kaya Press), published this year, is a kind of sequel. In it, he describes a neighbourhood riddled by decay, gentrification and militarized raids on the homes of immigrant activists. Foster’s poems are brilliant, inventive and passionate, functioning by turns as investigations, homages, documents and rants. His poetic extravagance recalls Ishmael Reed, but Foster writes with a razor-sharp focus and physical intensity. As Ammiel Alcalay noted in Bomb, City of the Future is “an unflinching indictment of what Foster calls ‘the apartheid imagination’, a state that ‘requires no location, no physical body; because it has its laws, records, court buildings, cells, conversations, and life’”.
SAM LEITH
If a good metric for a book of the year is the extent to which you find yourself urging it on other people, Catherine Lacey’s debut short story collection Certain American States (Granta) scores highly. Lacey isn’t widely read yet, I don’t think, but she will be. These struck me as quite remarkably original and good. She’s the deftest sentence-maker I’ve read in ages, and what’s more she’s properly funny.
Non-fictionwise I was moved by Helen Parr’s Our Boys: A paratrooper’s story (Allen Lane), learned from Jesse Norman’s Adam Smith: What he thought and why it matters (Allen Lane) and wish I’d learned more (or held more in my head) from Adam Tooze’s Crashed: How A decade of financial crises changed the world (Allen Lane). Mostly, though, I’ve been boring the pants off people about Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind: The new science of psychedelics (Allen Lane), in the hopes one of them will hook me up with a megadose of psilocybin. No luck yet. Perhaps readers can help.
CLAIRE LOWDON
There’s lots to love about contemporary autofiction, but not its repetitive element of manifesto: the insistence, in Rachel Cusk’s words, that “making up John and Jane” is “fake and embarrassing”. As an antidote, I welcomed Lisa Halliday’s smart, stylish, surprising novel Asymmetry (Granta). The first half has been widely read as autofiction, recalling Halliday’s affair with Philip Roth. When the protagonist Alice tells the Roth-figure that “writing about myself doesn’t seem important enough”, he counsels her to use her own material, to “forget about world affairs. World affairs can take care of themselves”. From the second half, narrated by an Iraqi-American economist detained at Heathrow, we gather that Alice/Halliday does not follow this advice. Look, her novel so lucidly says – you can do it like this, and like this. It’s a heartening reminder that you can do it any way you like, as long as it’s good.
ELIZABETH LOWRY
My choice is Volume II of the Letters of Sylvia Plath (Faber), whose publication this year completes the set. More brilliantly than anyone, Plath demonstrates what T. S. Eliot calls the poet’s ability to form “new wholes” out of disparate experiences. Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil have produced the first complete text of all her known correspondence: every extant readable word Plath wrote to her mother as well as previously unpublished letters to the family of her husband, Ted Hughes, and her friends and mentors in literary London and America; some 1,400 letters in all. Plath’s epistolary style, as the editors suggest, is “as vivid, powerful, and complex as her poetry, prose and journal writing”, giving us a dizzying glimpse of the breakneck creative process of October 1962 that produced the Ariel poems – her final collection, which would, as Plath correctly predicted, make her name.
EIMEAR McBRIDE
Jamie Quatro’s novel Fire Sermon (Picador) was superb. Uncomfortable, ambiguous, erotic, theological, inconclusive and formally uncertain, it left many critics flailing over how to deal with it, beyond remarking that Quatro is a Christian and isn’t that sort of thing very outdated now? However, Quatro’s skilful synthesis of issues as complex and diverse as sexual desire, rape within marriage, the incongruity of contemporary Christianity’s persistent moralizing about sex and sexuality while the world goes to hell in a handcart, and grief at the loss of serious thought about non-denominational spirituality, is far richer than such a tag can describe. on top of this is her first-rate prose and old-fashioned ability to tell a story. The reader needn’t believe what Quatro’s characters believe in order to believe in them, or become consumed by their concerns, which is the mark of great fiction indeed.
KEITH MILLER
This year I have been strongly impressed or impacted – more so than I have noticed happening for a while – by a series of art exhibitions. I’d like to ask that their catalogues be admitted, even though I realize they somehow aren’t quite books in the sense that’s called for here (and aren’t necessarily perfect qua exhibition catalogues). But they serve well enough as souvenirs of, and metonyms for, the events they document: the big Andreas Gursky retrospective at the Hayward Gallery; Walls at the Museo dell’Ara Pacis, Rome (Casa Editrice Treccani); the Oceania show at the Royal Academy; and Silver Lake Drive (Thames and Hudson) by Alex Prager at the Photographers’ Gallery.
Back in the reassuring realms of the belle-lettristic, I particularly enjoyed I Am Dynamite!, Sue Prideaux’s zesty biography of Nietzsche (Faber); This is Memorial Device by David Keenan (Faber); and Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart (Hamish Hamilton).
MADELINE MILLER
The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne (Doubleday) knocked the breath out of me with its narrative brio and force. It is laugh-out-loud funny, tragic, laceratingly sharp, and full of complex and brilliantly evoked characters. It tells the story of Cyril Avery, born to an unwed mother and adopted by wildly unfit parents, who must come of age and come to terms with his sexuality in repressive mid-century Ireland. The story of his journey is page-turning, hilarious, heart-rending and hopeful. Go read it.
I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé (University of Virginia Press) is forty years old, but it was new to me, and it completely gripped me. Condé conjures a complex and vivid life for a woman both maligned and forgotten by history. The novel takes us from Tituba’s childhood in Barbados as the biracial daughter of a slave, to her role in the famous Salem trials, to her life after, struggling against the hypocrisies and injustices of her world as she goes. Even though I read the book months ago, Tituba’s ferocious voice has lingered in my mind.
SARAH MOSS
I always like Samantha Harvey’s writing and enjoyed the unexpected subject as well as the cold beauty of the writing in The Western Wind (Cape), set in a remote village in the fifteenth century. It’s billed as a murder mystery and I suppose that’s one way of reading it, but for me it was a finely crafted and unusual novel about suspicion, faith and hierarchy in a haunting setting. I found Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry (Granta) sharp, timely and refreshing – there are so very many novels about the sufferings of the Great Man of Letters and his consumption of pretty young women that even the idea of an uncompromisingly clever book from the woman’s point of view seems daring, but the second half shifts the ground under the first exactly as it should. I’ll be putting it on students’ reading lists as soon as the paperback comes out.
PAUL MULDOON
I was reminded of the extraordinarily vital tradition of Irish humour by four books published this year. The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, edited by Maebh Long (Dalkey Archive), allows us an unbuttoned view of this shapeshifting genius. As its title suggests, Craic Baby: Dispatches from a rising language (Apollo), is a worthy successor to Darsach O’Séaghdha’s Motherfoclóir: Dispatches from a not so dead language: it’s a wonderful blend of rudeness and erudition. one doesn’t always associate humour with poetry yet Nick Laird’s “To the Woman at the United Airlines Check-In Desk at Newark”, from Feel Free (Faber), shows this exceptionally gifted poet extending what is by now a real range. Last but not least is Wendy Erskine’s Sweet Home (Stinging Fly), a collection of deft, depth-charged short stories set in her native Belfast.
JEREMY NOEL-TOD
Some of the best essayists writing today are poets. Threads (Clinic), a beautiful, urgent pamphlet by Bhanu Kapil, Sandeep Parmar and Nisha Ramayya, interweaves their shared experiences as women from Indian subcontinental families with critical proposals for “nomadic” (Parmar) and “Tantric” (Ramayya) poetics. Prose under pressure becomes poetry, as in Kapil’s unforgettable sequence on white poetry-reading culture, “Avert the Icy Feeling”.
Will Harris’s poem “Flow” was nominated for a Forward Prize this year, but the wise, wide-ranging mini-chapters of Mixed-Race Superman (Peninsula Press) deal with his life before verse, replaying a Nineties-Noughties youth when Keanu Reeves and Barack Obama presented alternative role models to an Anglo-Indonesian adolescent, in a small-press softback as neatly designed as it is written.
The funniest book I read this year was the one-man mass-observation of Round About Town (Uniformbooks) by Kevin Boniface, a Yorkshire postman with a poet’s eye: “choppy little puddles are breaching their potholes”.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Among the most memorable books I’ve read this year are: Henri Cole’s Orphic Paris (New York Review), part memoir, part brilliant commentary on poetry, art, Paris; Tracy K. Smith’s Wade in the Water (Penguin), poems with memoirist content, apocalyptic undercurrent; Tommy Orange’s There There (Harvill Secker), debut novel, audacious and sprawling, Native American epic writ small; Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black (Serpent’s Tail), yet more audacious and sprawling, a tale of an odyssey in slavery-era America by a wildly imaginative Canadian novelist; David T. Hanson’s Waste Land (Tavener Press), ravishing photographs of ravaged American landscapes with an eloquent foreword by Wendell Berry; Emmet Gowin’s Mariposas Nocturnas: Moths of Central and South America, a study in beauty and diversity (Princeton) – indeed, a book of astonishing beauty; and several slender, elegantly designed collections of short stories of the uncanny (Uncertainties Vol. 1, 2, 3) published by Swan River Press (Dublin).
PETER PARKER
Jane Stevenson’s Baroque Between the Wars (Oxford) is a witty and elegant account of an alternative style in the arts to the mainstream Modernist one of “simplification and streamlining”. It was largely the creation of women and homosexual men, who during the 1920s and 1930s created art, architecture and interiors that embraced such “baroque principles” as “copiousness, extravagance, exuberance, and virtuosity”. Richly peopled with complex networks of talented lesbians and decorative young men on the make, all of them hiding in plain sight, this wide-ranging and hugely entertaining book perfectly combines aesthetic and social history. I also greatly admired and enjoyed Kester Rattenbury’s The Wessex Project (Lund Humphries), a highly original study of the lifelong influence on Thomas Hardy of his architectural training, not only as someone who remained actively engaged with current debates about the preservation and restoration of buildings, but as a novelist and poet. Absolutely fascinating.
MARJORIE PERLOFF
E. Randol Schoenberg, the grandson of the composer, has put together a remarkable document called The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and their contemporaries, 1930–51 (University of California Press). An assemblage of diaries, letters and speeches detailing the sometimes friendly, more often poisonous relationships between these three very different exiles from Hitler (neighbours in the Riviera section of Los Angeles), it tells the story of Mann’s composition of his famous novel, whose Faustus was modelled on Schoenberg, treating the latter’s twelve-tone method as emblematic of the new Fascism. Adorno was the middleman, providing Mann with little essays on difficult musical compositions, including Schoenberg’s, which Mann appropriated without attribution. When Schoenberg learned the truth, he began a bitter lawsuit against Mann and never spoke to Adorno again. The conflict between these three artist-intellectuals gives a startling new picture of class, ethnic and nationalist divisions within the celebrated community known as “Weimar on the Pacific”.
RACHEL POLONSKY
I recently overheard a student of international relations at an Ivy League college declare that she would never visit Russia because, she said, “I know too much about it”. So I welcomed the openness to experience of Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country: An American abroad in a post-American world (Corsair). Hansen describes the “shattering and shame” she felt when she moved to Istanbul and learned to see her country as it is seen from the Near East. Her pain becomes another manifestation of “American innocence [that] never dies”. If Not Critical (Oxford) is a collection of lectures given at Cambridge University by Eric Griffiths (edited by Freya Johnston) on, among other things, Hamlet, Dante, Kafka, Primo Levi, “Lists”; “Timing” and “Timeliness”. Griffiths, whose work was tragically stopped by a stroke in 2011, died months after this publication. He was a brilliant and devoted teacher who shaped many minds.
THEODORE K. RABB
Military history has not been much in fashion during recent decades. Yet war has remained central to writing about the past ever since Thucydides and Xenophon. It is encouraging, therefore, that an excellent example of the genre was published in 2018: John Hosler’s The Siege of Acre, 1189–1191: Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, and the battle that decided the Third Crusade (Yale). Exhaustively researched, including lists of the protagonists; acutely analysed; beautifully written: it is a classic example of a decisive encounter narrated, explained and given its full due. That the TLS also chose to review a book that demonstrates how warfare affects all of society (Steven Gunn’s The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII, Oxford; reviewed June 29) emphasizes the importance of the topic. one can only hope that this field, like diplomatic history, is beginning to earn again the attention that it once – deservedly – enjoyed.
CRAIG RAINE
One Lark, one Horse by Michael Hofmann (Faber), who is sixty-one. Hofmann’s title is taken from a Jewish joke – about lark pâté, a delicacy its maker can only afford if he adulterates each lark with a whole horse. Accordingly, the poems are uncompromisingly prosaic in their treatment of ageing – of being ontologically passé, of meagre memories, of belonging in spirit to a bygone era of laced-up footballs and Brylcreem. “Cooking for one”, conjures the absent-minded automism that confuses cooking with washing up – with a squirt of washing-up liquid added to five potatoes. One Lark, one Horse is defiantly small potatoes. “Governments continue to refine their populations” – a singing line to set beside Tennyson’s “A pamphleteer on guano and on grain” from “The Princess” or the concluding flourish of “Enoch Arden”: “And when they buried him the little port / Had seldom seen a costlier funeral”. Wryly pedestrian, comprehensively joyless. I laughed a lot.
FREDERIC RAPHAEL
Julian Jackson’s A Certain Idea of France (Allen Lane) is a meticulous haul through a life of grandeur and bluff. De Gaulle is revealed to be scarcely less “Florentine” than François Mitterrand. Not many laughs, but an inadvertent one when the General is said to be reading Conrad’s Lucky Jim (sic). De Gaulle’s myopic vision of Europe and its ineradi- cable nationalisms now looks shrewdly pres- cient, hélas. The Correspondance (1944–59) between Albert Camus and Maria Casares stretches to more than 1,200 pages (Gallimard). Will such letters, at such length, ever be written again in a world of tweeters? Camus is much more anxious than his actress lover and quite different from the virile goalkeeper/playboy depicted by the envious Sartre. Ann Lawson Lucas’s Emilio Salgari, una mitologia moderna tra letteratura, politica, società (Olschki) recalls an era, before the Great War, when literature and popular journalism first fused in the work of a prolific, precocious, self-made Veronese Jules Verne-cum-H. G.Wells.
RITCHIE ROBERTSON
Anyone interested in the Enlightenment, or Islam, or both, should read Alexander Bevilacqua’s The Republic of Arabic Letters (Harvard). Bevilacqua begins by vividly describing how early modern European scholars hunted for Arabic books in Near Eastern cities, and how they transmitted great stores of Arabic learning to the West. Eventually Edward Gibbon drew on this material for a portrayal of Muhammad which Bevilacqua finds humane and psychologically subtle. After decades of polemic, it is a relief to find Western writers on Islam receiving fair (not uncritical) treatment.
Seeking guidance to our present discontents, I benefited especially from David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends (Profile). Runciman suggests that democracy is undergoing a midlife crisis which it will probably survive. He considers such flawed alternatives to democracy as pragmatic authoritarianism and restricted voting rights. And he shows by example that serious issues can be discussed searchingly in a conversational style.
IAN SANSOM
I was in the slow readers group at school and remain a slow reader still, so some of my books of the year are the books of last year. I remain deeply troubled by June Caldwell’s debut collection of short stories, Room Little Darker (New Island), and deeply envious of Brian Dillon’s essays in Essayism (Fitzcarraldo). Michael Hughes’s Country (John Murray) struck me as this year’s most daring Troubles novel and David Batterham’s Dear Howard (Redstone Press) made me laugh. But there were two genuine eye-openers: Liberating the Canon: An anthology of innovative literature, edited by Isabel Waidner (Dostoevsky Wannabe), which does what its title suggests; and Will Eaves’s Murmur (CB Editions), a novel about Alan Turing so good and so strange it makes one want to shout.
ANNA KATHARINA SCHAFFNER
The two most masterly and constructively disturbing novels I have read this year are Sally Rooney’s Normal People (Faber) and Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling (Fourth Estate). Yet my book of the year is an “un”-book of the year, as it sums up so succinctly many of the things that are wrong about our present moment. Jordan B. Peterson’s bestselling 12 Rules for Life: An antidote to chaos (Allen Lane) refashions self-help into a weapon in the culture war. Peppered with biblical diction and neat little factoids about “human nature”, it reassures his target readership – alienated white males who have a problem with political correctness and equality legislation – that they are the victims of a “postmodern” conspiracy that vilifies masculinity. Peterson peddles two dangerous myths: Will and reason rule supreme, and, as a consequence, it is we alone who are responsible for both our mental and our financial well-being (dismissing, as he does, the role of social factors in the shaping of our personalities, anxieties and chances of success).
LORNA SCOTT FOX
My top two books are about women. While flashing the odd feeble male, what Fish Soup (Charco Press) – a collection by the Colombian star Margarita García Robayo – does best is drill from all angles into a type recurrent in today’s Latin American fiction: the affectless girl, damaged and damaging. Seldom have we met her so compellingly adrift. The tackiness of the Caribbean coast and its discontents are marvellously rendered by the translator, Charlotte Coombe, who also achieves the holy grail: a natural-sounding slang.
In Silver Press’s reissue of Talking to Women, we hear the almost unedited, already period voices of eight writers and artists and one worker, conversing with their friend Nell Dunn in the man’s world of 1964. They come across as sisters and strangers at once: the difference with today’s attitudes inspires now relief, now regret. Dunn asks the questions any woman, or sometimes person, would want to be asked.
ANDREW SCULL
Edith Sheffer’s Asperger’s Children: The origins of autism in Nazi Vienna (Norton) is a deeply disturbing, thoroughly researched account that exposes the complicity of Hans Asperger in the murder of children suffering from what he called autistic psychopathy. The recovered voices of some of the children and their desperate parents are particularly chilling.
RUTH SCURR
Keith Thomas’s In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and civilization in early modern England (Yale), covers three centuries of English politeness, refinement and supposed proper behaviour, from the Reformation to the French Revolution. Thomas examines the ways self-congratulatory conceptions of English civility and civilization shaped international trade, colonialism, slavery and racial discrimination. He quotes extensively from the widest range of primary sources, aligning himself with the natural philosopher and chemist Robert Boyle “in thinking it better to quote contemporaries in their own words rather than resorting to the inevitable distortions of paraphrase”. He acknowledges that his book, focused on one particular country, is unfashionable at a time when “global” and “transnational” history dominate; but there is nothing universal about manners.
Antonia Fraser’s The King and the Catholics: The fight for rights 1829 (Weidenfeld) brings the story of Catholic Emancipation alive. She deals deftly, and needless to say politely, with a vast cast of characters, marshalling them into a compelling narrative that calmly, but fiercely, lambasts religious intolerance.
TOM SHIPPEY
The most important and impressive work of collective scholarship for many years has to be the two-volume Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, edited by Joep Leerssen (Amsterdam University Press). Not only did romantic nationalism power the unification of Germany and Italy, and conversely create nations from the break-up of empires, it was a great instigator of art in every medium. The Encyclopedia accordingly presents a matrix of some thirty “Cultural Currents” (including mythology, the historical novel, national drama), and some fifty “Cultural Communities”, German and Danish, Gaelic and Galego. Hundreds more entries deal with prominent individuals, all meticulously cross-referenced. It’s a work to dip into, for amusement, or learn to use, for scholarship. Transnational, multimedial, a shock on every page. Look at the bottom diagram on p207, and muse on the effects of comparative philology!
ELAINE SHOWALTER
No book this year got to me like Lisa Halliday’s dazzling, ingenious first novel Asymmetry (Granta). Constructed as three independent sections, it begins in 2003 with the story of Alice, a young editor in New York who plunges into an affair with Ezra Blazer, a famous, generous and very controlling writer, based on Philip Roth, with whom Halliday had a relationship; moves to the alarming narrative of Amar Jaafari, an Iraqi-American man detained in the passport-control holding room at Heathrow in 2008; and ends with the revealing transcript of a 2011 Desert Island Discs interview with Blazer. Funny, frightening, packed with literary excerpts and allusions, musical references, baseball and history, the parts intricately connect. Halliday pays shrewd, affectionate tribute to “Blazer” and awards him the Nobel Prize Roth deserved but never got. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the heir to Roth turns out to be a woman who brilliantly ignores his advice?
A. E. STALLINGS
“Just by being there, the border is an invitation”, says Kapka Kassabova in Border: A journey to the edge of Europe (Granta). Her lyrical memoir-cum-history of borderlands among Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey, has only become more topical, as the Turkish/Greek land crossing for migrants is increasingly as treacherous as the Aegean. “Homer is new and fresh this morning, and nothing, perhaps, is as old and tired as today’s newspaper”, Charles Péguy has quipped. Correspondingly, with our soul-wearying ceaseless news cycle, Homer has never seemed fresher: consider Emily Wilson’s lean, dawn-clear translation of the Odyssey. Madeline Miller’s Odyssey-inspired novel Circe (Bloomsbury) pairs beautifully with it: “the horse-shouldered river gods crowded in beside the fish-pale nymphs and their lords of salt”. Dick Davis’s welcome Love in Another Language: Collected poems and selected translations (Carcanet) embraces a career where original poetry and translated Persian verse weave together into a single life, translation as border and as invitation.
TOM STOPPARD
Among books published in 2018, two which found a ready audience in me were The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien (edited by Maebh Long for Dalkey Archive Press) and Breaking News by Alan Rusbridger (Canongate). In his letters to cronies especially, Brian O’Nolan’s voice (“I have been thinking over the question of a pen-name and would suggest FLANN O’BRIEN”, to his publisher, November 1938) comes through like the real stuff. Rusbridger’s subtitle, The remaking of journalism and why it matters is a true prospectus. Well written and unskimped, this will be a painful document when we wake up one morning with nothing to read at breakfast except our smartphones.
But the high plateau of my year was my catching up with Simon Winder. Danubia and Germania (both from Picador) are an idiosyncratic, often funny fusion of history writing, travel writing and disrespect.
RAYMOND TALLIS
I’ve been reading and reading about Nietzsche, the man and the philosopher, for over half a century. I thought, therefore, I had nothing much new to find out about his life, his thoughts, or his influence. Sue Prideaux’s luminously intelligent, witty, and sympathetic biography I Am Dynamite! (Faber) has proved me wrong. Don’t, by the way, be put off by the daft title.
I haven’t yet read most of what is deemed essential reading, so a book has to be very special to justify being re-read, particularly if it weighs in at 1,200 pages of small print. A History of Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch (Penguin) – self-described as “a candid friend of Christianity” – is such a book, occupying much of this autumn as it did summer 2016. His monumental account traces what he calls the “personality cult” of Jesus from its roots in Greek thought. Essential reading for believers and infidels alike.
D. J. TAYLOR
Like the TLS reviewer, I wasn’t entirely sure that the material gathered together by Jane Stevenson in her Baroque Between the Wars: Alternative style in the arts, 1918–1939 (Oxford) counted as “baroque”: all the same, the patterns that she contrived to weave out of subjects as widely dispersed as the Sitwells, Arthur Machen, Ronald Firbank and Coco Chanel were endlessly fascinating.
A similar corralling of some very disparate talents was achieved by Martin Gayford in his Modernists & Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney & the London painters (Thames and Hudson). Books about Orwell seem to fall from the presses at the rate of two or three a month. The one I enjoyed most was David Ryan’s George Orwell on Screen (McFarland), which punctiliously assembled every adaptation, documentary and “docudrama” brought to film and television alongside a great deal of amusing commentary.
ADAM THIRLWELL
I loved Deborah Eisenberg’s stories Your Duck Is My Duck (Ecco). She’s brilliant with sentences, but more importantly she’s brilliant with structures: she can make a story so much more stretched and multiple and therefore rich than I imagined. I always thought you needed the length of a novel to perform experiments with time, but I was wrong. Another book which is undoing a lot of my usual thinking is Emmanuel Carrère: Faire effraction dans le réel (POL), edited by Laurent Demanze and Dominique Rabaté: a new panorama of essays about Carrère’s writing, with a suite of unpublished scripts, letters and texts by him. I’m convinced that Carrère’s grand rejection of fiction, his commitment to the first person, is at once wonderful and mistaken. But I need to work out why. Deborah Eisenberg’s stories, I guess, might represent one first stage in a future argument.
PETER THONEMANN
A great flock of migrant cranes in an Anatolian water meadow, wheeling this way and that, crying out as they settle in tumult – this was the image that sprang to Homer’s mind as he pictured the Achaean army pouring out onto the plain of Troy. one of the most attractive traits of the Greeks and Romans is the evident interest and pleasure that they took in birds, whose behaviour they observed with startling attention and affection. Jeremy Mynott’s Birds in the Ancient World (Oxford) is an absolute joy, beautifully written and gloriously illustrated.
If Homer had lived in Oxford, it wouldn’t have been cranes; his similes would have been built around the tiny, screaming, sickle-shaped miracles that materialize out of a blue sky over Grandpont each May. David Lack’s peerless Swifts in a Tower (Unicorn) has just been reprinted in a gorgeous updated edition as part of the RSPB’s Oxford Swift City project. If you’ve not read it, you have a real treat in store.
ADAM THORPE
Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room (Cape) immerses you in the life of a high-security women’s prison in California, its central character Romy – accused of killing her stalker – both gritty and fragile. This was not a subject I thought would grip me, but in Kushner’s firm hands I was entranced. Much of the book is autobiographical – while never in prison herself, Kushner was the daughter of Beatniks and allowed to roam the dodgier areas of San Francisco as a teenager. The characters range from bullet-headed killers to a well-meaning male teacher whose ambiguities are brilliantly done. Romy’s trans friend Conan, “shoulders as broad as the aisle, and a jawline beard”, is delightfully free of the politically correct, while the style veers excitingly from straight narrative to scribbled lists like whimpers of despair.
JESMYN WARD
Heavy (Bloomsbury) by Kiese Laymon is so beautifully written, so insightful, so thoughtful, so honest, so vulnerable, so intimate. I cried for at least thirty of the first sixty pages. I felt flayed throughout, and this was true from the first paragraph.
Kiese reckons with all that harrows black Mississippians as we attempt to grow up in America: racism, sexism, misogyny, sexual assault, homophobia and transphobia. But the folks Kiese writes about find joy, too, because we refuse to be defined by our trauma. Our people are tender, wise, loving, funny and compassionate, too.
Heavy is a gift wherein Kiese shares his story and the stories of those he loves, his mother and grandmother, family and friends, so we readers can know our own selves, our own stories better. This is not only how we all survive growing up in America, but how we heal and work our way towards the lives and land we deserve.
MARINA WARNER
In Loss Sings (Sylph), James E. Montgomery offers spare, luminous renderings of threnodies by the seventh-century poet Tumadir Bint ‘Amr for her two brothers killed in battle, and interleaves them with keen prose meditations on personal suffering. Giorgio Agamben, philosopher of the grimmest realities, offers an unexpected tribute to the Commedia dell’arte figure of Pulcinella – Mr Punch’s Italian avatar. Affectionately and ebulliently, Agamben upholds gloomy wit as the ultimate resist- ance (Pulcinella [ovvero Divertimento per li regazzi], nottetempo; translated by Kevin Attell, Seagull). Peter McNeil, in Pretty Gentlemen: Macaroni men and the eighteenth-century fashion world (Yale), explores fantastic foreign fashions at home, the author inquiring most entertainingly and illuminatingly into the politics of selfhood, maleness and class. I relished Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Fitzcarraldo), a barbed, shrewd parodic eco-noir, while Robert Aickman’s bizarre and creepy tales have been wonderfully exhumed in Compulsory Games, edited by Victoria Nelson (New York Review).
EDMUND WHITE
I was most impressed by Caroline Weber’s Proust’s Duchess (Knopf), a brilliant study of the three elegant women Proust based the Duchesse de Guermantes on. Years of research in family archives never opened before make this social history at its richest. It’s also very, very funny.
A. N. WILSON
The Book of the Year, perhaps of the decade, has to be Matthew Sturgis’s Oscar (Apollo) which captures the wit, the loveability, the dramatic genius, the insane self- destructiveness, the originality of Wilde. It knocks spots off its prolix predecessor by Richard Ellmann, not least because it gives so much attention to the Irish upbringing, the schooldays and the time at Trinity. I never felt more sorry for Constance Wilde than when reading this book, and I think that’s because Sturgis is so good at evoking the tender closeness between man and wife, and the deep fondness Wilde had for his children. Members of the Bosie Appreciation Society will not enjoy this rendering, but you can’t please everyone. Sturgis, biographer of Sickert and Beardsley, is the greatest chronicler of the 1890s we have ever had. This book, which has a truly Wildean elan, outshines even those masterpieces.
EMILY WILSON
I had a couple of days this year immobilized by muscle sprain, and the perfect reading turned out to be My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Cape), a book about a woman who spends a year trying to sleep full-time. Ottessa Moshfegh makes a laugh-out-loud page-turner out of this unpromising premiss; it’s also the best 9/11 novel I’ve read. A. E. Stallings had two books out this year and I loved both of them: a translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days in rhyming couplets (Penguin), and Like (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection of original poetry that uses clever play with language and mythic allusion to create moving evocations of time, parenthood and contemporary life. It was a big year for creative retelling of myth and pre-modern literature; a favourite was Madeline Miller’s Circe (Bloomsbury), a distinctive, lyrical novel about power, agency and responsibility, from the point of view of this crafty, much-misunderstood goddess.
FRANCES WILSON
In 1977, James Atlas published an acclaimed Life of the poet Delmore Schwartz, who died drunk and derelict aged fifty-two. He found in his subject, Atlas says in The Shadow in the Garden (Pantheon), a dark double: “his unrealisable expectations, his piercing loneliness, his literary ambition, his dread of failure”. His next subject was Saul Bellow, and here Atlas found little with which to identify. Bellow was – by his own admission – a monster and Atlas focused, so his critics complained, less on the literary genius than the human failings. So had he, Atlas asks in these pages, been unfair on Bellow? “Hadn’t it been my job? To imagine another’s pain?” In argument with his former self, Atlas considers the cost of art. Were Bellow’s novels worth it? The loused-up friends, the screwed-up sons, the five marriages? And was his own biography of Bellow worth the devotion, the disappointment? Written with heroic candour, every soul-skinning sentence of The Shadow in the Garden is worth it.
ZINOVY ZINIK
“My stories are basically advice to an individual on how to act in a crowd”, says Varlam Shalamov (1907–82), the Russian Primo Levi, who had spent fifteen years in Stalinist labour camps. That’s why in our age of idealistic mass obsessions and lynch-mob ideologies Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories (New York Review) are as instructive as ever – in the insightful new translation (the first of two volumes) by Donald Rayfield. Unlike Solzhenitzyn, Shalamov didn’t believe that the coercive labour experience is redemptive. In his little stories the individual under barbaric conditions could be coerced to confront his true self, ugly or otherwise, sometimes imperceptibly dithering between harrowing reality and the absurd. That makes Shalamov amazingly close to contemporary “experimental” fiction. I’ve been following Diane Williams’s stories for many years – there are no epiphanies there, but each of them removes the firm ground of mundane reality from under your feet with the same magic as in Shalamov’s tales. The Collected Stories of Diane Williams are now published by Soho Press.