Books of the year 2013

Great War histories, a biography of Margaret Thatcher and Donna Tartt’s long-awaited third novel were among the gems that seduced our contributors

Evening Standard Critics

14 November 2013

SARAH SANDS

As a Christmas read I would recommend the allegorical, faintly biblical, not quite Christian The Childhood of Jesus by J M Coetzee (Harvill/Secker, £16.99). A man and a child arrive in a strange land. The boy has a hold over adults he encounters. The plot has a momentum without ever being explicit. Its strangeness works best at a distance. When I read it earlier this year I loved the spare prose and the charisma of the boy but wondered what on earth it all meant. Yet it has stayed with me more than any other book this year. Honourable mentions must include Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher (Allen Lane, £30). Here was a political figure who cared about policy and ideas, with a poor grasp of “human interest” and almost no sense of humour, yet Moore shapes her into one of the greatest dramatic creations of our age. His service was to understand her so much better than she understood herself. Also, who would have thought a biography of Thatcher could be so funny? Finally, the great read: Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (Little, Brown, £20). You will finish Coetzee in a day, Tartt will last you until New Year, a Dickensian tale packed with wonderful characters. All three books will submerge you in other worlds.

A.N. WILSON

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography by Charles Moore. This huge book is worthy of its extraordinary subject. As an 18-year-old supply teacher at Grantham, Margaret had to teach the children swimming. Her technique, she informed a correspondent, was to stand on the edge of the pool, shouting and telling them they were doing it all wrong. Moore literally undresses her for us — good descriptions of her underwear. The best political biog to appear in my lifetime — a classic — a must. Hilarious, but also generous in its acknowledgement of something like her personal greatness. We’ll never see her like again — thank goodness.

ROBERT FOX

David Crane’s Empires of the Dead (William Collins, £16.99) is the most original, shortest and best written of the year’s tsunami of books on the impact of the Great War. It tells the story of Fabian Ware’s singularity of will in setting up the War Graves Commission, eventually leading to the great cemeteries of the Western Front, and countless other smaller burial sites, designed by Ware’s collaborators led by Edwin Lutyens. The project was, and still is, dogged by controversy. It cuts to the heart of how and why we choose to commemorate those fallen in battle, and why we find it so difficult.

MICHAEL PRODGER

The pioneering aviator Joseph Montgolfier called the balloon “a cloud in a paper bag” and Richard Holmes’s Falling Upwards (William Collins, £25), a picaresque history of ballooning, shows how they were used for everything from warfare and weather forecasting to exploration and showbusiness. Each flight was an act of derring-do. With The Goldfinch, her long, long-awaited third novel, Donna Tartt has created a story of Dickensian amplitude and stirred in genres, drugs and a stolen Old Master with controlled gusto.

ANDREW NEATHER

Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (Penguin, £10.99) is the best current reassessment of the causes of the First World War. Clark’s luminous study makes a clear case for why, almost 100 years on, the Great War remains so central. And while his scholarship is prodigious, it’s highly readable. Power Trip: A Decade of Policy, Plots and Spin by Damian McBride (Biteback, £20) is the political memoir of 2013: whatever your feelings about Gordon Brown’s former spin doctor — “McPoison” — he has written a racy, lucid and very well-informed account of the last years of New Labour.

CLAIRE HARMAN

Two novels this year stretched the bounds of historical fiction and were great page-turners too; Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (Doubleday, £18.99) and Jim Crace’s Harvest (Picador, £16.99). Atkinson’s ingenious story of one woman’s many passages through the 20th century is tender and surprisingly tense, given the fact that her heroine’s fate is to keep dying over and over again, and her skill is simply awesome. Crace’s threnody to a dying rural culture has something of the same dreamlike power, a story with an almost brutally simple arc that is also lyrical and thought-provoking.

RICHARD GODWIN

Emily Berry’s debut poetry collection Dear Boy (Faber, £9.99) provided many moments of felicity. The range is huge, but there’s always a sort of manic precision to her language, from the generational The Way You Do at The End of Plays to the exceedingly funny The International Year of the Poem: “In January the price of poems hit $100/per poem for the first time” … I’ve also enjoyed ranging among the young, determinedly digital writers of the American “Alt-Lit” movement. Tao Lin’s Taipei (Canongate, £9.99) was dense but rewarding, while his earlier novel, Richard Yates (Melville House, order it from the US), just floored me — like a Samuel Beckett of Gmail chat.

RACHEL POLOSKY

Janet Malcolm’s Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (Granta, £20) is a series of lessons in how to pay real attention to words, images, other people and — trickiest of all — oneself. A lifelong New Yorker, she rereads the American “capitalist pastoral” that enchanted her in childhood, exposes Edith Wharton’s misogyny, and delights in the satire of Manhattan rich girls in Cecily von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl novels. Malcolm turns her own failures into art, ending the collection with a page and a half of abandoned autobiography. Her writing is a cool daylit room in which even broken things are perfectly arranged for contemplation.

SIMON JENKINS

No question what should be the book of the year. Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99) is the 1984 of the digital age. It describes the awful destination that lies beyond today’s world of Facebook and Twitter abuse, NSA interception and total camera surveillance. It is what happens when the corporations of the electronic era, supposedly funky and liberal, achieve ultimate power. Though a work of fiction, it sits alarmingly well alongside Eric Schmidt’s futurist documentary, The New Digital Age (John Murray, £25). Fact and fiction merge in dreadful warning.

DAN JONES

The publishing rush for books on the First World War began in earnest this year. The best I read was 100 Days to Victory by Saul David (Hodder, £20). David has fused a controlled, authoritative political and military history of the war with a series of affecting pen-portraits of those people — including members of his own family — whose lives were thrown into chaos by the fighting. I also enjoyed The Claims Office by Dai George (Seren, £8.99) — a brilliant new voice in British poetry whose debut is rich with Welsh wit, lyricism and spirituality. A little gem, full of promise.

JOHN PRESTON

The Curious Habits of Dr Adams by Jane Robins (John Murray, £20) is a vividly characterised, wonderfully atmospheric and thoroughly gripping account of the murderous exploits of Eastbourne GP Dr Bodkin Adams. As well as being a homicidal maniac, Adams was a tremendous greedyguts who had regular supplies of his favourite violet creams shipped to him from Charbonnel et Walker of Old Bond Street. In J M Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus, a man and a five-year-old boy struggle to find their feet in an unnamed country with very strange customs. Although it failed to trouble the scorers in terms of awards — partly because no one seemed too sure what it was about — this is one of Coetzee’s most mysterious and moving novels.

FRANCES OSBORNE

One of my favourite reads of this year has been Merivel by Rose Tremain (Vintage, £7.99), in which she re-acquaints us with her charmingly fallible 17th-century physician, Sir Robert Merivel. Now in the 1680s, some 15 years on from her first Merivel novel, Restoration, Sir Robert’s retainers are addled by age, and the court of his friend, Charles II, is fading. As his daughter leaves home, Merivel sets off for Versailles in pursuit of the patronage of Louis XIV and Tremain plunges us into the social, political and physical labyrinth and privation of the great palace.

TALITHA STEVENSON

Gary Greenberg’s The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (Scribe, £20) is a roaring bonfire of the vanities of contemporary psychiatry. The latest edition of the psychiatric “bible” of disorders, the DSM-5, came out this year and Greenberg uses his skills as a journalist and a psychotherapist to expose the scraps, scams and iffy thinking behind its pages. But the book of the year for me is George Saunders’s Tenth of December (Bloomsbury, £14.99). His stories combine formal thrills with excruciating humanity. There may be thousands of books published each month, but Saunders reminds me that a work of literature should astonish.

IAN THOMSON

Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I Jump: One Boy’s Voice from the Silence of Autism (Sceptre, £12.99) has been impossible to forget. The Japanese author was only 13 when he wrote this moving, revelatory report from the interior of his autistic mind. The novelist David Mitchell, in his introduction, commends a work of “transformative life-enhancing knowledge”, which is about right. Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo (Harvill Secker, £16.99), by Tim Parks, is a grouchy, often very funny hosanna to Italian railroad locomotion in all its rackety glory. British railways are by comparison overpriced, ineptly privatised and “manifestly unhappy”. Great stuff.

RACHEL JOHNSON

I was a judge of the Women’s (now Bailey’s) prize 2013 so have been very selective about non-fiction this year — but my non-fiction choice is so gripping it reads like a novel: Nicholas Shakespeare’s Priscilla: the Hidden Life of An Englishwoman in Wartime France (Harvill/Secker, £18.99). The author’s aunt was a blonde bombshell who was living in Paris, married to an impotent vicomte, when the Germans invaded and locked her up, along with 4,000 other Englishwomen, in a freezing internment camp. She escaped and then, in order to survive, used the only thing she had — her body. It makes me wonder what I would have done had the Germans succeeded in taking Britain in August 1940. I’m also saving up Sebastian Faulks’s Jeeves and the Wedding Bells (Hutchinson, £16.99) as a treat although my husband has warned me I am banned from reading it before lights-out as I am assured it is weepingly, bed-shakingly funny.

MARK SANDERSON

Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch is a great novel. A genre-bending, Pond-hopping picaresque, it explores the aftermath of an explosion in a New York gallery that sees 13-year-old Theo left without a mother and with a priceless painting. It has its flaws — overlong digressions, cartoon coincidences — but its depiction of grief is masterful and its evocation of a post-9/11 world magnificent. Above all, it considers the consolations of art. And it opens at Christmas. The Library: A World History by James W P Campbell and Will Pryce (Thames & Hudson, £48) is a global history of wisdom stores: their ceilings, stacks and secret doors. The glorious photography proves that rooms do furnish a book.

ANTHONY CUMMINS

The Tuscan novelist Filippo Bologna made me laugh with The Parrots (Pushkin Press, £14.99), in which three rivals for a book prize fight dirty to sway the panel; ploys run from Orlando Figes-style cyber-sniping to faked suicide (a publisher’s idea). Literary jealousy took a darker turn in Nicholas Royle’s First Novel (Cape, £16.99), a crafty puzzler that folds the Shipman murders into the tale of a no-mark writing tutor with a fetish for car sex under the Manchester flight path.

BRIAN SEWELL

Return of a King by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury, £9.99). Wherever this book is read, it will on every page transport the reader to the summer heat and bitter winter snows of Afghanistan, engulfing him in its violence, treachery and cruelty, its poverty and riches, not of today but in the 19th century when the British believed that control of that country would protect their interests in India. At one level it is a compendium of ripping yarns, but at another it is the work of a scrupulous historian telling, as though he were an eyewitness, a tale so pitiless and tragic that it should be read by every politician involved in our policies in Afghanistan now.

JEROME BOYD MAUNSELL

Janet Malcolm’s Forty-One False Starts, by the superbly sceptical and clear-eyed writer for The New Yorker, was a welcome reminder of Malcolm’s skills as a critic and journalist. Anyone interested in biography should read Malcolm; she also re-emerges here as a perceptive, fascinated, acerbic commentator on art and photography. Her style is dry and lucid; her craft perfectly honed. But it is her stance — her ability to set herself apart from the people and things she writes about, as well as from other critics — that makes the best of these pieces so effective and unique.

LEO ROBSON

Alwyn W Turner’s A Classless Society (Aurum, £25) is the latest addition to a recently fashionable genre that has been called — in the London Review of Books alone — “decade-speak”, “decaditis”, “decade-ism”, and “history as wine gums”. But Turner breaks what appears to be a law of the genre by covering a patch of new ground: “Britain in the 1990s”. At 600 closely printed pages, it is on the vast side — Turner’s books seem to have been growing as David Kynaston’s have been getting shorter — but then he does manage to describe, with sanity and a light touch, more or less everything that took place between Thatcher leaving Downing Street and Nick Bateman’s departure from the Big Brother house.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

I loved James Salter’s beguiling, brilliant, worldly, sexy novel All That Is (Picador, £18.99); the addictively violent yet elegaic novel of the Old West, The Son by Philipp Meyer (Simon & Schuster, £14.99); Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch — truly a deliciously compellingly dazzling jewel about beauty, fate and life; and Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter (Two Roads, £17.99) is a superb novel of war, love and US special forces. In history, I’m reading Margaret Macmillan’s majestic,masterly portrait of the road to cataclysm The War That Ended Peace (Profile, £25); Peter Heather’s The Restoration of Rome (Macmillan, £30) is a gripping account of a brutal and exciting period of Rome that most peole don’t know. And for an unforgettably terrifying portrait of tyrannical monstrosity: Gadaffi’s Harem: The Story of a Young Woman and the Abuses of Power in Libya by Annick Cojean (Grove, £16.99).

JANE SHILLING

Saul David’s 100 Days to Victory is military history for people who think they’re not interested in the Great War. David’s snapshot approach — describing the events of 100 significant days in the First World War — brings a brilliantly personal perspective (his own great-uncles fought and perished in the war) to a subject that too often vanishes into a welter of mud and blood. John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son (Yellow Jersey Press, £12.99) is an interestingly wayward memoir, exploring in essayistic form the vibrant mixture of equine beauty and human ugliness to be found on the racetrack.

FLORA FRASER

I salute Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Half a Yellow Sun, her 2006 novel about rich and poor and English in Nigeria during the Biafran war, seemed a perfect book, and Olanna, its heroine, a girl for all time. Now Adichie’s Americanah (4th Estate, £20) a compelling story including teenage love in Lagos and African expat life here and across the Atlantic, renders that earlier offering juvenilia. As Elizabeth Bennet is to Emma Woodhouse, so Olanna is to Ifimelu, female lead in Americanah. But Obinze is no gentlemanly Mr Knightley …

INDIA KNIGHT

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is the best novel I’ve read in years, by miles. However, unless everyone’s gone mad (or is crazed with jealousy, ahem), they’re all going to say The Goldfinch. My other book of the year is Rachel Cooke’s stunningly interesting and clever and funny Her Brilliant Career (Virago, £18.99), about 10 pioneering women of the 1950s, which I am giving everyone for Christmas. But she’s my friend, so that probably doesn’t count either. So: Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life (Viking, £12,99), by Nina Stibbe. Stibbe was the nanny to the sons of the editor of the London Review of Books in the mid-Eighties. These are her letters home to her sister, written from the frontline of literary London. They are brilliantly beady and often hysterically funny. A real life-enhancer of a book, plus “the nanny” turns out to be a writer of genius, which is an excellent joke in itself.

MELANIE MCDONAGH

Ronan Fanning’s book on the conflict between Britain and Ireland this time last century, Fatal Path (Faber, £16.99) is genuinely important; a must-read if you take the subject seriously. He argues — incontrovertibly, in my view — that Britain allowed the threat of violence to trump the democratic politics of Home Rule and so laid the foundations for the conflicts that followed. Britain doesn’t come out of it well. Actually, this is a book that makes me really, really angry.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL

I have just published my Irish Diaries and my Irish publisher Kathy Gilfillan sent me a wonderful novel, The Spinning Heart, by Donal Ryan (Doubleday Ireland, £12.99). The backdrop is the economic crisis in Ireland, and the impact upon people’s lives and relationships. It is beautifully written and one of the techniques — multiple narrators — gave me the confidence to do the same with my novel, My Name Is. Since writing novels I read more fiction than non-fiction now, but my favourite non-fiction book was Duncan Hamilton’s biography of George Best (Century, £20). There have been plenty of books about Best but there is a richness and depth to this one that makes it better than most.

WILLIAM LEITH

I loved J Robert Lennon’s rather spooky novel Familiar (Serpent’s Tail, £11.99). On the way back from visiting her son’s grave, a woman has a funny turn; when she gets back home, everything is subtly different. And her son’s not dead. It’s a story Hitchcock might have made. Also good: 419 BY Will Ferguson (Head of Zeus, £16.99) in which a Canadian guy has his life wrecked by Nigerian scammers.

MATTHEW D’ANCONA

The first volume of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher managed to achieve the near-impossible: it exceeded expectations that lesser authors would have found dauntingly high. The writing is superb, the analysis gripping and the narrative style equal to its subject. As a cinemaniac, I also loved Peter Biskind’s My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles (Metropolitan, £17.29), a study of genius and a page-turner that confirms Biskind’s status as an unrivalled sage of popular culture. The enduring grip of Welles upon the imagination was only reinforced by this wonderful book.

ROSAMUND URWIN

The journalist Andrew Solomon spent a decade writing Far From the Tree (Chatto, £30) and boy, does it show. A 700-page tome, it explores the ways parents react to children who are unlike them, set apart by difference or disability. Challenging and intelligent, it should be required reading for anyone hoping to have a baby for the message “parenting is no sport for perfectionists” alone. On the novels side, I’d recommend Dirty Work by Gabriel Weston (Cape, £14.99). The tale of a gynaecologist performing abortions, it is gripping, well-researched and elegantly written — but definitely not for the squeamish.

ALEX VON TUNZELMANN

The books I love most make me laugh, cry and think, and A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (Canongate, £8.99) did all of those. Many authors try to weave together historical and present-day narratives, with mixed results. Ozeki does it with extraordinary inventiveness and keeps all the stories gripping. It’s very difficult for adult authors to write authentically about teenagers but her Japanese-American schoolgirl Nao rings completely true. I’ll also give an honourable mention to Where’d You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple (Phoenix, £8.99), an extremely funny and ultimately moving farce about a quirky American family falling apart over a holiday to Antarctica.

NICK CURTIS

My absolute favourite read this year was Beautiful Ruins (Penguin, £8.99), Jess Walter’s gracefully clever, Captain Corelli-ish jaunt through 1960s Italy and present-day America. The description of Richard Burton and his enormous head was one of the most evocative and hilarious passages I’ve read in a long time. And I’m ashamed to say I got more pleasure than is decent from Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (Harvill Secker, £16.99). A self-consciously cool mash-up of motorbikes, art and unpleasant Italian politics, but it worked for me.

JOHANNA THOMAS-CORR

I was dazzled by the energy and verve of Damian Barr’s memoir, Maggie & Me (Bloomsbury, £14.99). Barr had a turbulent childhood, growing up tall, asthmatic and gay in working-class Ravenscraig as his family experienced unemployment, illness and poverty in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. However, if he reveals so much as a smidgen of self-pity he is the first to recognise it and laugh at it. I’ve been shoving copies into people’s hands all year. It’s not often that a book review ignites the imagination more than the source material, but it’s so often the case in James Wood’s The Fun Stuff and Other Essays (Jonathan Cape, £18.99). Whether describing the “lush antiquarianism” of Alan Hollinghurst or mauling Paul Auster, he’s always making a passionate and instructive case for great writing.

KATIE LAW

Stephen King showed a tremendous return to form with Doctor Sleep (Hodder, £19.99), his sequel to The Shining. In it we discover what happened to little Danny Torrance when he grew up — and how he fought his biggest demon of all — his battle with the booze. As much King’s story as Torrance’s. And any publication in English of another book by Tove Jansson is cause to celebrate — and Sculptor’s Daughter: A Childhood Memoir (Sort of Books £9.99) is a small gem, a perfect Christmas present. Interlinked stories, not entirely autobiographical but, like her Moomin tales, dark and beautifully written in the sparest prose.

DAVID SEXTON

I can only endorse the praise for Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, J M Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus, and Charles Moore’s Margaret Thatcher: these are books that have stayed with me too. I was also thrilled finally to have in English Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Leopardi, edited by Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino (Penguin, £50), a vast hodge-podge of aphorisms, memories, citations and philosophy by the greatest Italian poet since Dante, a volume of 2,500 pages that took seven translators seven years to complete. The funniest book, I thought, was Bitter Experience Has Taught Me: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury by Nicholas Lezard (Faber, £9.99) and not only because he is an acquaintance: it’s such a treat to have mere print make you laugh out loud, as Lezard does, page after page.

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