Books of the year 2014

Emily Maitlis

The most straightforwardly enjoyable novel was You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Faber, £12.99), an astute, nail-biting narrative about a New York shrink who counsels unhappily married women — hence the title — only to discover her own husband is not exactly a saint.

As astute and nail-biting in another way was Marion Coutts’s The Iceberg (Atlantic, £14.99), a memoir of losing her husband, the art critic Tom Lubbock, to a vicious form of brain cancer. An exploration of love and what it means to lose language, the book was deservedly shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize but, undeservedly, didn’t win.

Katie Law

The book I have loved best, and have gone back to again and again, has been Michael Longley’s The Stairwell, (Cape, £10), his collection of poems partly for his “dear twin” brother Peter, who died in 2012, partly a sequence of moments from his own life with his friends and family. The elements meet in the stairwell, the place in the house that leads both up and down. Love and knowledge of Homer ripples across the top of almost every one of them, even now, as he says “that the repertoire/goes underground”. Sebastian Barry has said of Longley: “I read him as I might check the sky for stars.”

Adam Nicolson

I loved William Atkins’s The Moor: Lives, Landscape, Literature (Faber, £18.99) for its facts, its fancies and its peaty boots. It’s a quirky and appropriately rambling pilgrimage through the history and topography of England’s wildernesses — a fabulous read.

The other book that particularly gripped me this year was Roz Chast’s strip-cartoon memoir of her parents’ descent into decrepitude, Can’t We Talk About Something More PLEASANT? (Bloomsbury, £18.99), a harrowing but sometimes painfully hilarious book, brilliantly observed and courageously honest about the indignities of old age. But don’t read it at Christmas.

Claire Harman

The most striking and, I think, useful book I read all year was Do No Harm (Weidenfeld, £8.99) by brain surgeon Henry Marsh, a fascinating look inside the head of a man whose job it is to fiddle around in ours. He acknowledges that surgeons are arrogant, that they play God, but that they are also afflicted by despair, sorrow and doubt. He is scathing on NHS bureaucracy and his picture of doctors doing their best but essentially flailing in the dark made me respect the profession more.

Richard Benson’s The Valley (Bloomsbury, £25) is an intriguing and moving history of his maternal family and the coal-mining industry in Yorkshire’s Dearne Valley over 100 years. He has a colloquial, unadorned style and an uncanny ability to imagine himself into the minds of his forebears.

Nick Curtis

Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God (Yale, £18.99) is a cracker; he’s probably the only academic who could rattle through 300 years of intellectual history to show how one movement after another has tried to discard God and failed, and make it funny. The book concludes with the two modern takes on the God question: Islamic fundamentalism and the secular vacuities of postmodernism. Poor God.

Melanie McDonagh

My political book of the year was John Campbell’s Roy Jenkins: A Well Rounded Life. Meticulous, fluent and well paced, it is full of resonance for the Labour Party today. I also loved the long-awaited Letters to Véra (Penguin Classics, £20), Nabokov’s letters to his beloved wife, which constitutes a moving portrait of a love story that lasted almost half a century and has at least as much to tell us about the great novelist as his celebrated correspondence with Edmund Wilson.

For its sheer originality and intellectual stimulation, I was captivated by Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harvill Secker, £25), as was Damien Hirst, who praised the book when I interviewed him for ES magazine.

Matthew D’Ancona

My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s preposterous and epic memoir cut deepest this year — particularly the second book, A Man in Love (Harvill Secker, £20). Required reading for new fathers, I’d say.

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else (Verso, £12.99), James Meek’s dispatch from the great British fire sale, is an admirable and alarming piece of reporting that leaves you feeling like a vulnerable national asset yourself.

Richard Godwin

In The Smile Revolution in 18th-century Paris (OUP, £22.99) Colin Jones takes something recondite — changing perceptions of the smile in a time of profound change — and fashions from it a fascinating history that weaves together art and dentistry, literature and the guillotine.

I also liked very much the venerable artist David Gentleman’s In the Country (Full Circle Editions, £25). Richly illustrated with his own pictures and undemonstratively written, it is a gentle paean to the Suffolk countryside where he has a home. It’s an exceptionally lovely piece of book-making too.

Michael Prodger

Jonathan Beckman’s How to Ruin a Queen (John Murray, £20) is a wonderfully enjoyable account of one of the most audacious cons ever perpetrated — a plot to steal a huge diamond necklace supposedly belonging to Marie-Antoinette.

I realise that anybody choosing Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices as one of their books of the year risks being sectioned, but much to my surprise this turned out to be a brisk, chatty and even gossipy record of her time as US Secretary of State.

John Preston

Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud (Bloomsbury, £16.99) was an absorbing, gripping, atmospheric novel of friendship and war, set in delightful Southwold and chiming with the First World War centenary.

The paperback edition of Making It Happen by Iain Martin (Simon & Schuster, £16), a colourful account of the near-total collapse of Royal Bank of Scotland and the 2008 banking crisis, came out this year. As a tale of how human frailty can cause enormous destruction it takes some beating. Sadly, it is all too relevant still.

Chris Blackhurst

The most memorable new novel I’ve read this year was about dementia: Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey (Viking, £12.99). Remarkably adept for a debut, it is sensitive, charming and cleverly constructed.

In non-fiction, comedian Amy Poehler's Yes Please (Picador, £16.99) is a joy. She has particularly smart advice on how to ignore the internal whispers that give rise to self-loathing; it should be piped into the girls’ changing rooms at every secondary school.

Rosamund Urwin

James Ellroy’s Perfidia (Heinemann, £16.99), his first novel in five years, is a return to his earlier LA noir setting on an epic scale. The trademark machine-gun style is occasionally exhausting but this minutely plotted saga of murder, racism and corruption after the Pearl Harbor attack is still utterly gripping.

David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (Sceptre, £20) is perhaps the most ambitious book yet from this wildly inventive novelist, in six parts set across six decades. Despite almost over-extending himself with a tale of metaphysical battles across centuries, it’s an extraordinary piece of storytelling.

Andrew Neather

Jonathan Meades’s wayward memoir, An Encyclopaedia of Myself (4th Estate, £18.99) is a sulphurously brilliant alphabetical stroll though the seamier byways of the author’s youth in post-war Salisbury. The subjects of his virtuoso divagations include uncles, sudden death, the nastiness of post-war British food and architecture, canals, bogus majors — and lists.

Proust’s voluminous correspondence has been exhaustively mined by scholars, but 26 of the novelist’s letters have remained unpublished until now. Lettres à sa voisine (Gallimard, €14.50) collects Proust’s letters to his upstairs neighbour, Mme Marie Williams. His theme is, mainly, the creative anguish inflicted on him by the Williams’s noisy workmen, but in the epistolary spaces unoccupied by pained remonstrations about the din, a poignant, late-blooming friendship developed. Never can neighbourly chagrin have been more gracefully or amusingly expressed.

Jane Shilling

Average is Over by Tyler Cowen (Penguin USA, $26.95) is a truly original take on the polarisation of society among high and low earners as a result of technological progress and the increasing access of the worldwide population to quality education and knowledge.

This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz (Faber, £7.99) is an outstanding collection of short stories, a small window into the life of Dominican migrants in the US along the theme of infidelity amid the hardship. It’s mostly crude, “comic-like” writing, though tenderness creeps up throughout the stories with real poignancy.

Miriam GonzÁlez Durantez

The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1957-1965 (Cambridge, £30) intriguingly revealed for the first time details of Beckett’s 30-year relationship with the translator Barbara Bray but it is no less enthralling for showing, on every page, just how inventively and incisively he wrote always, even in casual correspondence. “It will soon all be over and the foolishness as if never been,” he says to a patron, just like that. Beckett’s rendering of Happy New Year? “All the best for the new jolt beginning of the buckled old wheel.”

Otherwise I was most moved by The Iceberg, Marion Coutts’s account of the last two years of her husband Tom Lubbock after his diagnosis with a brain tumour: the most precisely loving memoir I have ever read. She has invented her own way of writing here from new.

David Sexton

I admired Gerard Russell’s Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (Simon & Schuster, £20) about seven minority religions in the Middle East. A subtle blend of history and reportage, the book is essential for anyone curious about the Alawites, Druze and Yazidis.

Justin Marozzi’s Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood (Allen Lane, £25) is an impassioned plea on behalf of whatever vestiges of humanity and culture still exist in the beleaguered and strife-torn Iraqi capital. Both books are impressive testimony to the enduring strength of British travel writing.

Michael Burleigh

Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, a scamper through the whole of human history from the Big Bang to the internet age, was probably the most ambitious history book of the year. Certainly it was the most thought-provoking. I also found it nihilistic and faintly depressing, but that did not detract from the dispassionate brilliance of the historian at work.

Of the more conventional history releases I particularly enjoyed Charles Spencer’s Killers of the King and Helen Castor’s Joan of Arc, both beautifully written and meticulously researched.

Novels? James Ellroy’s Perfidia towers above everything else.

Dan Jones

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent’s Tail, £7.99). Yes, I know it was on the Booker shortlist but I enjoyed this delightful/heartbreaking romp about family life through an unexpected prism. Plus: The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton (Picador, £12.99) — short and sweet; The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Little, Brown £20) — long and delicious. And The Sandman by Lars Kepler (Blue Door, £16.99) was so frightening it nearly gave me a nervous breakdown.

Emilie McMeekan

I couldn’t have loved Crooked Heart (Doubleday, £14.99) by Lissa Evans more if I’d tried — I finished it and went straight back to the beginning. It’s about a clever small child and a hard-nosed woman during the war. I also loved Man at the Helm by Nina Stibbe (Viking, £12.99), about a single mother with two little girls in an English village in the 1970s. Nina’s writing sometimes makes me almost choke with laughter.

India Knight

Napoleon the Great by Andrew Roberts. The emperor must have been the most energetic multi-tasking person of all time. Even on distant battlefields he would fire off countless letters with instructions, for the the Comédie-Française for example, or the setting up of an orphanage for girls. This enthralling account of his rise and fall is packed with such details. Whether or not he was “great” will continue to be debated — I was convinced, just — but there is no doubt that this is a great biography.

Miriam Gross