The pick of the year

Looking for the perfect book to give someone this Christmas? Read on for our reviewers' recommendations...

Edwina Currie The best fiction this year found its way onto the Man Booker shortlist, but I think Colm TóibÃn's The Master (Picador, £16.99) was cheated of the prize. Whether you like Henry James or not, it's a wonderful evocation of an old man at the end of his life as he reflects on love and loss. The winner, Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (Picador, £16.99), at first angered me with its savagely amoral portrayal of gay life in the Thatcher era. But it soon drew me in and, by the end, the parallels between personal and official selfishness and disaster were clear and haunting. Stick with it, it's a remarkable book.

AN Wilson

John Betjeman: The Bonus of Laughter

Life of Graham Greene, 1955-1991

Hillier quotes whole telephone interviews with Barry Humphries, for example, rather than giving us their purport in a couple of paragraphs. So, three cheers for the biography of Olivia Manning: A Life (Chatto, £20) by Neville and June Braybroke, whose succinct tale weighs in at a mere 300 pages, including the index, and which gives you a sensible account of a fascinating and still undervalued writer. Having read their well-researched and well-written book (tidied up for publication by Francis King) the reader has time to go back and read Manning herself. Anyone who waded through the fashionable triple-decker, doorstopper biographies of other writers would not have time to read any other books all year.

David Sexton Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One(Simon & Schuster, £16.99) are written in the way he talks, the way he sings: he tells it his way, not the way of the world. And Lyrics 1962-2001 (Simon & Schuster, £35) is a handsome new edition of the lines. Generation Kill by Evan Wright (Bantam, £12.99) is the most radical of the embedded books to have come out of Iraq: journalist Wright accompanied a young marine platoon from the Kuwait border all the way to Baghdad, as they blasted their way through combatants and civilians alike.
David CesaraniNo book that I read this year more completely enfolded me in another time and place than A Tale of Love and Darkness (Chatto, £17.99) by Amos Oz, brilliantly translated by Nicholas de Lange. Oz recalls his childhood in Jerusalem with a haunting mixture of candour, lyricism and bitterness. He takes us deep into European Jewish history and Israel's collective psyche. Michael Hofmann is another translator of genius who this year brought us Gert Ledig's The Stalin Organ (Granta, £8.99), a shattering novel of Germany°s war against Russia. For stripping war of any glamour and exposing the sheer physical horror of modern conflict it deserves to stand next to Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. I hugely enjoyed reading Julia Donaldson's The Giants and the Joneses (Egmont, £4.99) to my seven-year-old daughter. It had humour, suspense and an invented language that enthralled us both.
Justin MarozziIraq has lapped up all our attention this year so we should welcome Christopher de Bellaigue's thoughtful study of her equally important and troublesome neighbour to the east. In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran (HarperCollins, £20) is a charmingly written book which pokes about in the shadows of contemporary life in this politically stultifying country and reveals what a catastrophic failure the Islamic revolution has been. Staying in the Muslim world, Giles Milton has written a book which almost revels in the exquisite cruelties inflicted by the 18th century Moroccan Sultan Moulay Ismail, Prince of the Faithful and Overcoming in God, on his countrymen. The laboriously entitled White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) is the tale of one of history's strangest shipwrecks, as improbable as it was inauspicious. Fascinating, gruesome and most definitely not for the squeamish.
Mark Sanderson Martin Booth, who died in February, was born in Essex but grew up in 1950s Hong Kong. Gweilo (Doubleday, £16.99), a memoir about his childhood in the far-flung outpost of the British Empire, is his finest work. Full of local colour and packed with incident, it also reveals how the sevenyearold grew to hate his father but love his mother even more. Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman (Faber, £12.99) is a big, bold Australian novel about everything from child abduction to the the hell of unrequited love. It's one of those rare works of art that makes you realise the world is both a simpler and more complex place. How it failed to make even the longlist of this year's Man Booker Prize is a mystery. Richard Juhlin's 4,000 Champagnes (Flammarion, £40) is a superb guide to "bottled sunshine". So much fizz, so little time (and money).
Paul BarkerA penetrating shaft of light into the way people live, Anne Tyler's latest novel, The Amateur Marriage (Vintage, £6.99), is set, like much of her work, in an unglamorous side of workday Baltimore. But Tyler's delicate, unsentimentalfictions trounce those published by dozens of noisier, overtouted talents. The title is as brilliant and plangent as the book itself. All marriages are DIY jobs, of course. Like many another couple, Michael and Pauline Anton go to the altar after what began as a chance meeting. But their often rocky marriage, in tightknit city and slack-knit suburbia, acquires an Araldite adhesion which no disaster can wholly unstick. The meanings of this beautifully written novel - told in a series of cinematic close-ups, from the 1940s to the present - reach far wider than Baltimore. I shed a tear as I finished the Antons' story.

Charlotte Moore

The Victorian House

My Heart Is My Own

DJ Taylor
Philosopher Richard Wollheim died last year, shortly after completing
Germs (Waywiser Press, £13.99) an acutely evocative memoir of his early life, spent in bourgeois Surrey but with an enticing Mittel European cast. I also very much enjoyed Alexander Waugh's Fathers and Sons (Headline, £20) - not so much for the sidelights cast on father and grandfather, but for the portrait of Waugh's great-uncle Alec, a champion satyromaniac and writer of second-rate books, who probably deserves a biography to himself. One of my favourite novels was Justin Cartwright's The Promise of Happiness (Bloomsbury, £16.99) - a different focus from what has gone before, but containing all the usual intimations of loss, despair and sorrowing over past time.

Jeanette Winterson
David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (Sceptre, £16.99). Wonderful fiction, the real thing, by which I mean ambitious for the form and using language as a powerful concentrate. Fiction has to do more than tell a story - its concerns should also be poetic and symbolic. This certainly applies to Don Paterson, whose new book, The Book of Shadows (Picador, £12.99) fuses prose and poetry into a cross between a duel and a meditation. I loved Matt Haig's first novel, The Last Family in England (Cape, £10.99) and my multibuy this Christmas is Nigella's Lawson's Feast (Chatto, £25) as clever and inspiring as ever.