Writers and critics make their picks of 2006: part one (original) (raw)

Monica Ali
I've spent far too much time this year reading kitchen books. One that I particularly enjoyed was Anthony Bourdain's collection, The Nasty Bits (Bloomsbury), especially his commentaries on his own essays in which he tends to say: "I think I had my head up my ass when I wrote this thing." Another was Molecular Gastronomy by Hervé This (Columbia University Press), which brings the instruments and experimental techniques of the laboratory into the kitchen. In fiction, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (Fourth Estate) was outstanding.

Tariq Ali
Patrick Cockburn's The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso) is an excellent account of a disastrous imperial war and should be required reading for the newly elected Democrats in the US Senate and House of Representatives. America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier by Robert Vitalis (Stanford University Press) is a devastating critique of the oil giant Aramco and how strike-breaking and racism cemented the US-Saudi relationship. Atiq Rahimi's exquisitely crafted novel, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear (Chatto & Windus), describes two days in Kabul. The native communist regime is crumbling and the Soviet Union is about to invade. Rahimi's prose poem evokes the terror of the period, which would lead to endless war and destruction.

Diana Athill
Jenny Uglow's Nature's Engraver (Faber), a life of the wonderful wood engraver Thomas Bewick, is beautifully produced and gives a portrait of a man so lovable and admirable that getting to know him well is a life-enhancing experience. William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal (Bloomsbury) describes the siege and destruction of Delhi in 1857, drawing largely on hitherto untranslated material from the National Archives of India and often using the voices of people who were there. It is a book as important as it is impressive.

Julian Barnes
A minimum (if rarely achieved) requirement for any novel is to make the reader think, yes, of course, it is/must have been exactly like that. Irène Némirovsky's evocation of the chaos after the fall of France in 1940, Suite Française (Chatto), is far more than that: the work of a genuine artist, pitiless in articulating the moral faults of the French. John Updike's Terrorist (Hamish Hamilton) got some sniffy, snooty reviews, but is his best novel for some years: the world he has so richly evoked over decades now seen through the eyes of one who wants to destroy it. Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (Bantam) should be read by everyone from atheist to monk. If its merciless rationalism doesn't enrage you at some point, you probably aren't alive.

William Boyd
Elizabeth Bishop addicts have made do with the slim but inexhaustibly rich Complete Poems for decades. The prospect of a new volume this year, quarried from her notebooks, drafts and rejects, was overwhelmingly toothsome. And so Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke- Box (Carcanet) duly proved: another few dozen limpid, profound poems to keep us going. Compared to Bishop, Paul Muldoon is monstrously prolix, but his latest collection, Horse Latitudes (Faber), is positively narcotic - alluring, baffling, fascinating. Nigel West's latest book on the world of spies, At Her Majesty's Secret Service: The Chiefs of Britain's Intelligence Agency, MI6 (Greenhill Books), is a revelation - not least because I discovered, to my total astonishment, that I actually knew one of the chiefs quite well.

Billy Bragg
London: City of Disappearances edited by Iain Sinclair (Hamish Hamilton). One of the most important facets of identity is sense of place. Here London becomes a magical city with Sinclair as the mage. England in Particular by Sue Clifford and Angela King (Hodder) reveals England to be the sum of everything within its bounds - from prefabs to promenades, gravestones to kerbstones, salt-marshes to synagogues. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: a biography by Christopher Hitchens (Atlantic) is a timely book reminding us that the notion of human rights as inalienable has strong roots in our radical tradition.

Melvyn Bragg
I was not the only one surprised by the omission of Howard Jacobson's Kalooki Nights (Jonathan Cape) from the Booker shortlist. Here he is at the top of his form in a comic/tragic epic. Jenny Uglow's book on Thomas Bewick, Nature's Engraver, is quite magnificent. Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (Viking) is yet another triumph for a biographer who goes from strength to strength.

AS Byatt
Jenny Uglow's Nature's Engraver is written with precision, imagination and tact. The Bewick engravings are beautifully reproduced. No one gives us the feel of past life as she does. I love Margaret Atwood's wickedly funny and painful stories in Moral Disorder (Bloomsbury), which must be one of the best titles this year. And Don Paterson's Orpheus (Faber), which is, as he claims, a rendering not a translation of Rilke's poems, manages to combine Paterson's wonderful ear for plain English with Rilke's lucid and unearthly singing voice.

Carmen Callil
Andrew O'Hagan's Be Near Me (Faber), the story of a troubled priest in our troubled times, is beautiful, an adjective it is usually dangerous to use in describing a novel, particularly when its setting is decayed industrial Ayrshire. An unputdownable novel, but it's the writing and the wry humanity that make it shine. Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (William Heinemann) is superb. So much I didn't know about the European history of my own times, told with genius, awe-inspiring breadth of knowledge and those occasional idiosyncrasies of belief or opinion that make the very best historical reading. In a vague attempt to turn myself into a green human being, I read Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries (Fourth Estate) every week. If he says it's in season, I buy it; if not, all food flown from afar is eschewed. I've become rather tired of apples, but he is a great cook, and a delicious writer.

Simon Callow
Bruce Benderson's harrowingly autobiographical The Romanian (Snowbooks) is one of the most devastating and unsparing accounts of amour fou I have ever read, providing at the same time an extraordinary glimpse into Romania's past and present. I read it at the same time as Andrew Holleran's Grief (Hyperion), a novel which - haunted by reflections on Henry Adams as a widower and Mary Lincoln's aimless life after her husband's assassination - deals calmly and wisely, in exquisite pellucid prose, with some fundamental truths. Both these books deal with gay life, but from diametrically opposite points of view. Finally, Ian Buruma's fine and subtle Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (Atlantic), while specifically and illuminatingly about some Dutch responses to Muslim extremism, has chilling resonances for all of us.

John le Carré
I had little heart for novels this year, partly because I was writing one of my own, but mostly because I couldn't take my eyes off the Bush-Blair night walk into global catastrophe. Of the rash of belated exposés that go some small distance to redressing the failure of America's mass media to report anything like the truth, I recommend Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower (Allen Lane) for the genesis of al-Qaeda, and for the bureaucratic rivalry between America's intelligence services which handed Osama the victory; Thomas E Ricks' Fiasco (Allen Lane) for the mismanagement of the Iraqi invasion, which handed Osama another; and Frank Rich's The Greatest Story Ever Sold (Penguin Press US) for how a diet of lies was forced down the throats of the American people in order to march them off to war. We Brits do those things so much better, don't we?

Shami Chakrabarti
Two books really put children's rights on the map this year. Camila Batmanghelidjh's Shattered Lives (Jessica Kingsley) is a heart breaking adult apology to some of the most abused children in our society. Libby Brooks's The Story of Childhood: Growing up in Modern Britain (Bloomsbury) presents a rounded picture of children's lives that challenges us all better to respect and protect young people. Sue Townsend's Queen Camilla (Michael Joseph) is hilarious and begins with a quote from yours truly that grants me the erudition of my dreams rather than my talents. Long live fiction.

Kiran Desai
Atiq Rahimi's Earth and Ashes (Vintage): a narrative twisted to indicate the tragedy of a nation where no move can be the right move any longer, where the perversity is so deep that even members of a family cannot but distrust each other. A new translation of Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star (Harvill), pertinent once again now we're back to discussing the machinery of dictatorship, of institutionalised distrust. This book charts the destruction of bohemian life in Chile, the corruption of poetry. Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men (Viking) is a marvellous novel of a child's experience of Libya, another dictatorship, another lot of books being burned.

Geoff Dyer
To check that I hadn't responded over-enthusiastically first time around, I re-read John Haskell's American Purgatorio (Canongate) when it came out in paperback earlier this year. If anything, this weird, cross-continental road trip was even better second time around. Why it was not a huge bestseller is completely beyond me. Michael Hofmann's translations of Durs Grünbein's selected poems, Ashes for Breakfast (Faber), introduced me to the world of a brilliant, Brodsky-steeped genius I'd never even heard of before. I also enjoyed - and learned a lot from - Pankaj Mishra's travels round the Indian subcontinent in Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (Picador).

Dave Eggers
The book that I keep pushing on people is Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner Book Company). July has one of the strangest and most hilariously alienated (did I just put those two words together?) brains of anyone I've read, and at the same time her protagonists are all so hopeful that one day their very odd and desperate lives will change. If you liked her movie, you will like these stories even more - much more. If you didn't like her movie, you will still like these stories. Unless you're humourless and sour, in which case you should move to that country where they banned Borat.

Richard Eyre
Colum McCann's Zoli (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is an ambitious and wonderfully realised story of the clash between communist ideology and Gypsy ethos in post war Slovakia - a feat of imagination as much as research. Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (Alfred A Knopf) reads like fiction, but sadly it isn't. It graphically describes the barely credible story of the establishment and disintegration of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad: a tragic tale of naivety, hubris, waste and wilful ignorance.

Jonathan Franzen
Peter Carey's new book, Theft (Faber), is a first-rate fix for Carey cravers. It's the story of an out-of-fashion and out-of-control Aussie painter and his hilarious, brain-damaged brother, and it is bloody in every sense: familial, profane, brutal, primary-coloured, heartbreaking. Sample sentences: "He was a licky dog. He liked a toss, a good fall over in the grass. By dint of playing he got ticks all lined up, dug into the edges of his floppy ears like cars parked outside a Kmart or Sydney Leagues Club." Carey and his writing are licky like this dog.

Antonia Fraser
Christopher Clark's Iron Kingdom: the Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (Allen Lane) introduced me to a subject that I didn't know I cared about. But then this book, written with great clarity and vigour, is apparently the first major book devoted to the fortunes of Prussia from its first obscure beginnings, via the triumphs of the 19th century, down to its ignominious disbandment after the second world war. I was completely hooked. Sarah Bradford's Diana (Viking) might, in a sense, also be described as chronicling a rise and a downfall. It's a very sad story, I found, although the marriage of Diana and Prince Charles was probably no more unhappy than many similar dynastic marriages throughout history. (Think Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette: at least this modern marriage was swiftly consummated.) Bradford tells it eloquently but it's her admirable detachment that leaves one pitying all, not one, of the characters involved.

Mark Haddon
Alison Bechdel's father was a closeted, gay funeral director. Fun Home (Cape) is the story of their complex and tangled relationship. It could have been shocking or self-pitying. In fact, it's understated and warm and filled with hundreds of satisfying details that made me go straight back to the beginning as soon as I'd finished. It's also a graphic novel. Except that it's not a novel. Or very graphic, given the subject matter (someone is going to have to invent a decent name for this flourishing genre). This is literature. In pictures.

David Hare
Most writing about fashion is repellently snobbish, rooted in the 1950s, and designed to prove the writer's imagined superiority to the common herd. All the more welcome is Alicia Drake's account of the lifelong rivalry between Yves St Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld. The Beautiful Fall (Bloomsbury) is founded in the refreshing notion that how people work and how they live may be related. Proust is clearly the presiding spirit: Drake is out to prove that what the world thinks shallow may be profound. I think she succeeds.

Eric Hobsbawm
Donald Sassoon's enormous, unique and encyclopedic The Culture of the Europeans from 1800 to the Present (HarperCollins), is a monument to streetwise and cosmopolitan scholarship. Sun Shuyun's The Long March (HarperCollins) investigates what became the foundation myth of communist China by following the route of the Red Army asking questions, consulting local archives and interviewing survivors. Deborah Valenze's extraordinarily original The Social Life of Money in the English Past (Cambridge University Press) removes the history of money from the economists and inserts it into the lives of people who cannot quite understand it but find they have to live by it. The issues it raises go well beyond 18th-century Britain.

Alan Hollinghurst
The novel that has most haunted me this year is Jean Echenoz's Ravel (Minuit) - a mere 120 pages of limpid prose describing two periods in the great composer's life, his visit to America in 1928 and the later years when a cerebral disease slowly deprived him of the ability to write or remember, culminating in his death in 1937 after an unsuccessful brain operation. More than anyone I know who has written fiction about a real artist, Echenoz displays a miraculous balance of tact and insight. In its economy, clarity, melancholy wit and deep undertow of feeling, Ravel is beautifully conformable with the work of its subject.

John Humphrys
The Mission Song (Hodder) by John le Carré: le Carré can do no wrong in my book. This isn't his best - good though it is. Literary snobs dismiss le Carré as a mere page-turner. What they mean is he's a great storyteller. That's high praise.

John Irving
The thing about Philip Roth is, he is unafraid; he doesn't care if he pisses you off, and that aspect of his writing infuriates our weakest, most conventional critics. In Everyman (Cape) there is Roth's consistently elegiac tone of voice interrupted by his live-and-kicking humour. I have adopted the novel's last sentence as a response to politics, most other books I read, and almost all the films I see. "Just as I feared from the start."

Ian Jack
Philip Roth's Everyman crams the author's usual concerns - sex, death, paternity, Jews - into a novel that's no longer than a long short story, but it's beautifully, memorably done and I read no better stretch of prose fiction this year. Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land (Bloomsbury), another American novel infused with mortality, takes a longer way round, as befits a younger man, but many parts of it are Ford at his best. Gavin Stamp's The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme (Profile) distils the first world war into the story of Lutyens's great but under-celebrated monument at Thiepval. Stamp's sympathy and clarity make this much more than a monograph of architectural history.

Naomi Klein
Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC (Zed Books) by William Gumede: I happened to be in South Africa when Gumede's book came out, and watched as it inspired apoplectic fits of rage (and clandestine delight) at the highest reaches of the ANC government. This is a definitive account of how one of the greatest liberation struggles of our time failed millions of people in whose name it fought.

Hari Kunzru
Among the slew of books claiming to explain the mess we've made of the Iraq war, one stands out - Rory Stewart's Occupational Hazards (Picador). This is an illuminating day-to-day account of what it was actually like trying to perform the absurd task of imposing "democracy" on Maysan province, where he served as deputy governor. Jonathan Franzen's memoir The Discomfort Zone (Fourth Estate) was a great pleasure, containing some perceptive and beautiful writing about family and childhood. George Saunders has been ploughing his usual conceptually comic furrow with the collection In Persuasion Nation (Riverhead). At his best, Saunders reads like Barthelme or Coover, and can be funnier than either.

Nick Laird
I loved Ashes for Breakfast, a selected poems by the German writer Durs Grünbein, which Michael Hofmann has translated. Grünbein is an astonishingly fecund writer - there are throwaway lines in here that other poets would make whole poems from - and Hofmann makes the thing live in English but also lets the language be fresh and strange. It's a great book. I thought Michael Frayn's The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe (Faber) was also great. Reading it felt like someone was refurnishing my mind. And last Sunday I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road (Picador) in one sitting. It's terrifying and unflinching and brilliant.

Hermione Lee
Reading 112 novels for the 2006 Man-Booker prize didn't leave much time for other books of the year. But I did get happily sidetracked by Seamus Heaney's enchanting, place-haunted, violence-shadowed District and Circle (Faber), full of "mouthwatering words of mouth". I admired Carmen Callil's marvellously researched uncovering, in Bad Faith (Cape), of the Nazi collaborator Louis Darquier, which taught me a huge amount about Vichy France. But my great book of the year was Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land, his Ulysses, a long, painstakingly attentive, humanely comical celebration of the mid-life of his New Jersey real-estate salesman, Frank Bascombe, an American citizen at odds with, and at home in, America, whose story, so wonderfully written in every breath of every sentence, will teach you how to lead a well-examined life "on the human scale" - and how to leave it.

· Read part two here

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