My Best Books

Hello,
I love children’s books not just for my children but for my own pleasure!
My favorite book for children read this year is “Youngen Finds Her Song” by Maria J. Andrade.
It is about a bird’s journey taken with her owl friend. My children 8-12 could easily relate to the main character, a female bird named “Youngen” who starts out with very little self confidence but not only finds her unique song and self respect but in the process she also discovers the power and majesty in nature! A great book about caring,earth stewardship and hope. It teaches kids about birds,insects,and a strange species, “Humans”- all with empathy and humor.

I shared it with my children’s teachers and they said the kids loved
the book and its accompanying CD with the voices of the story’s characters, music
and sound effects.

This post was submitted by Vilma Vegas.

From prizewinning poetry to bestselling thrillers, D-day to the credit crunch, Wolf Hall to a picturebook about a dying duck, our writers and guests pick the best of 2009

Julian Barnes

Laura Cumming’s A Face to the World (HarperPress) examines the subtleties of the transaction which occurs in the self-portrait: painters painting themselves, pretending to be looking at us, knowing we’ll be looking at them. Richly thoughtful, perceptive and well written, it’s that rare item: an art book where the text is so enthralling that the pictures, however necessary, almost seem like an interruption.

Having last year greatly admired Adam Foulds’s long poem The Broken Word, I uncharitably wondered whether his novel The Quickening Maze (Cape) might allow me to tacitly advise him to stick to verse. Some hope: this story of the Victorian lunatic asylum where the poet John Clare and Tennyson’s brother Septimus were incarcerated is the real thing. It’s not a “poetic novel” either, but a novelistic novel, rich in its understanding and representation of the mad, the sane, and that large overlapping category in between.

Sebastian Barry

This was the year for me of the two Colm/Colums, Colm Tóibín and Colum McCann, each in their differing ways realising the full height of their respective ambitions. Writers through many books sometimes tend towards a larger destination, and it is marvellous when you see them reaching it, because not only does it constitute a signal achievement, but suggests fresh journeys are being contemplated. Brooklyn (Viking) is the station for Colm Tóibín, and New York for Colum McCann in Let the Great World Spin (Bloomsbury). These are the books of profoundly gifted world writers, and in that strange way of great books are incontrovertibly “there”, radiant and right.

Antony Beevor

My book of the year is Javier Marías’s conclusion to his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy. Although an unashamed novel of ideas, Poison, Shadow and Farewell (Chatto & Windus) possesses an astonishing tension which makes it hard to put down. Marías’s observation in exquisite detail has prompted many comparisons to Proust, but his themes, including human corruption through state secrecy and power, could hardly be more contemporary. It is probably the most powerful and important novel to appear in European literature for some time.

William Boyd

Selina Hastings’s superb biography of Somerset Maugham, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (John Murray) ticks all the boxes an exemplary biography should. As well as being admirably thorough and scholarly it is also revelatory – not least about the wild sexual goings-on in the Villa Mauresque, Maugham’s palatial house on the Côte d’Azur. Hastings has the rare gift among biographers of being able to set a scene and establish a character with great vividness in a few deft lines.

Tormented Hope: Nine hypochondriac Lives by Brian Dillon (Penguin Ireland) is a short but fascinating study of literary and other celebrated hypochondriacs. These engrossing glimpses of the “fit unwell” include Charlotte Brontë, James Boswell, Andy Warhol and Marcel Proust (who must surely be the undisputed king of this particular neurotic hill). Written with great elegance and shrewd understanding, it illuminates a condition that probably all of us will suffer from at some time in our lives.

Anthony Browne

The two best illustrated books for me this year have both come from abroad, and both are stunningly original. Tales from Outer Suburbia (Templar) by Shaun Tan, from Australia, is a collection of 15 short illustrated stories all stemming from sketchbook doodles. It’s an unusual approach – most illustrations in books are reactions to the text, but here the pictures inspire the stories. They are all strange and beautiful. Duck, Death and the Tulip by Wolf Erlbruch (Gecko Press) is a superb picture book from Germany, that tells a gentle story of the relationship between Death and a duck. Death is portrayed as a sympathetic figure in a dressing gown who is with us all the time, but who only comes into Duck’s consciousness towards the end of his life. It is warm, poignant and witty.

AS Byatt

I have read three novels this year, all of which were disturbing, original and brilliant. They are A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (Faber), Vagrants by Yiyun Li (Fourth Estate) and The Blind Side of the Heart by Julia Franck (Harvill Secker). Moore describes the pains and hazards of child adoption in the American chattering classes. Yiyun Li describes the effects of the execution of a Chinese dissident on those around her. Franck begins with the abandoning of a child on a German railway station and tells the tale of his mother, damaged by the interwar years. All are heart rending; all find new and exciting ways of constructing a story.

Vince Cable

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson (Quercus). I was completely absorbed by the complexities of this Sweden-set page turner with its unlikely heroine, Lisbeth Salander: a wild and violent young woman with a personality disorder, bisexual tastes, an obsessive interest in advanced mathematics, a remarkable talent for computer hacking and a photographic memory that helps her to track down her quarry. The plot is not for the squeamish, centring on teenage prostitution, the Swedish establishment’s complicity in it and Salander’s personal crusade to punish male abusers following her own traumatic upbringing. The book is, on one level, a gripping thriller, on another a compelling morality tale about the abuse of power.

Jane Campion

Opportunity and Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw (both Cape). I read Grimshaw for the first time this year. She is a master with mystery, very contemporary and astute. These two books take the form of linked stories. They are elliptical, atmospheric and compelling in the way a good crime novel should be. There are complex love affairs, undercover detectives, doctors, adoptions, bad stepmothers and lost children. Her language is relaxed, spare and perfect.

Peter Carey

The final volume of The Paris Review Interviews has just been published and writers can once again be reminded that we are not the first to have ridiculous ambitions, doubts and difficulties. The four volumes together will make a generous gift for anyone who writes or reads. One volume would be not too shabby either.

Amit Chaudhuri

Judging the Man Booker International prize this year meant that I discovered many works, including Evan S Connell’s superb Mr Bridge and Mrs Bridge (both North Point Press). The winner, Alice Munro, herself published a new collection, Too Much Happiness (Chatto & Windus), in 2009, full of the acuity that age gives, but which she seemed to have come to possess incredibly early. The best writing from south Asia may have made the quietest entries: Aamer Hussein’s novella, Another Gulmohar Tree (Telegram Books), and Sunetra Gupta’s novel, So Good in Black. And one of the most compelling books about Africa this year was not a novel, but a study of censorship in apartheid South Africa, Peter D McDonald’s The Literature Police.

Jonathan Coe

Of the very few novels I’ve read this year, far and away the best was One Day, by David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton). It’s rare to find a novel which ranges over the recent past with such authority, and even rarer to find one in which the two leading characters are drawn with such solidity, such painful fidelity, to real life that you really do put the book down with the hallucinatory feeling that they’ve become as well known to you as your closest friends. Hard to imagine anyone encountering characters as well drawn as this and not recognising the extraordinary talent of the writer who has created them. Well, unless you’re a Booker judge, obviously.

In non-fiction I enjoyed Miranda Carter’s The Three Emperors (Fig Tree), which takes what should have been a daunting subject – the interrelationships between the rulers of the three great European powers in the run-up to the first world war – and through sheer wit and narrative elan turns it into engaging drama. Like David Nicholls, in fact, Carter has a notable gift for characterisation – a quality just as important in a popular historian as in a novelist.

Kiran Desai

The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, edited by Jeet Thayil, is a labour of love that gathers the Indian poets writing in English from the past and the present, from within India, from outside. While there may not be a firm geographical location to the experience of being an Indian poet, there is certainly a firm emotional one.

Proffering a view into a very different landscape of Indian poetry is David Shulman’s Spring, Heat, Rains (Chicago University Press), that weaves meditative fragments of his stay among the Telugu poets and intellectuals of Andhra with his research. I didn’t expect to be moved to tears by a scholarly book.

Aids Sutra, a collection of essays edited by Negar Akhavi (Vintage). I worked on one of these essays, interviewing the sex workers of Andhra Pradesh, famous for the Kalavanthulu caste of courtesans, but I am proposing this book for the strength of the stories behind these accounts. Mukul Kesavan, Sonia Faleiro, Salman Rushdie, William Dalrymple, Jaspreet Singh, Nalini Jones and Sunil Gangopadhyay are among those who record the tales of lonely truck drivers and HIV-positive lovers, Aids orphans, the women of Calcutta’s red light district, girls dedicated to the goddess Yellamma and initiated into prostitution. Their stories have the resonance of fiction, hard-won tales of transformation, of camouflage, compromise, humour.

Roddy Doyle

In Ireland, the good things are either brilliant, absolutely brilliant, or absolutely f***in’ brilliant. The Dublin that was by-passed by the Celtic Tiger is brought to vivid life in Trevor Byrne’s first novel, Ghosts and Lightning (Canongate). It’s brilliant. I also loved A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore (Knopf). It’s absolutely brilliant. A few pages into Richard Bausch’s Peace (Vintage), I decided I was reading one of the best books I’d read in my life. Two months later, I’m a bit calmer, but it’s still absolutely f***in’ brilliant.

Margaret Drabble

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes (Faber) is a fine and moving collection of stories, displaying his unique combination of the sad, the stoic and the consoling. It’s about failure, but it dignifies failure, and with it, the human condition. There is nobody like him. I am reading Amanda Vickery’s Behind Closed Doors (Yale), an evocative account of life in Georgian England, which celebrates the domestic arts and explores what we mean by home: how much we owe the historians who trawl through the illegible and scattered archives for us to assemble these alternative narratives of history. The history of needlework, which would have bored me unspeakably when I was a girl, now seems both interesting and important.

Carol Ann Duffy

Rain by Don Paterson (Faber) is the best collection of poetry to appear in years and establishes him as the major poet of the “New Generation” which first brought him to prominence. The long, meditative elegy for his friend, the late Michael Donaghy, is a heartbreaking triumph of feeling and intelligence; the poems on divorce and fatherhood are small masterpieces of near-unbearable lyric truthfulness. To read this book is to have the privilige of seeing a world-class talent assert itself, as Seamus Heaney did with North.

Geoff Dyer

What a year! So many great things came out that I’ll limit myself to a single genre: short stories. For sheer pleasure, Wells Tower’s debut collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Granta) is hard to beat. We’re always hearing about authentic new voices (they often sound incredibly like other, older voices) but Tower’s is exactly that. David Eagleman’s Calvinoesque Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Canongate) was mind-blowingly clever, funny and profound (quite a lot to have managed in just over 100 pages). Working in more traditional (albeit transatlantic) William Trevorish vein, James Lasdun proved himself to be a master of the form with the enthralling psychological subtleties of It’s Beginning to Hurt (Cape).

James Ellroy

I’ve long been impressed by Don Winslow’s novels and can’t quite understand why he’s not a household name. Wake up people – he’s the real deal, and The Gentlemen’s Hour (William Heinemann) is yet another sensational foray into the underbelly of San Diego with laidback PI Boone Daniels. 2009 has very much been the year of the accomplished debut. Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell (Little, Brown) is a firecracker of a novel. Fast and ferocious, it tells the tale of a former Mafia hit man turned doctor who has to use every trick in the book when his past catches up with him and the shit hits the fan. Cool, savage and inventive. And watch out for Stuart Neville. His first novel, The Twelve (Harvill Secker), sees a haunted former hit man exacting bloody revenge. It’ll knock you sideways. This guy can write.

Joshua Ferris

One of my favourite books of the year was Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Canongate). It’s as enjoyable as it is formally inventive, and everything about it – the art, the drugs, the sex, the bananas, and finally the oblique and moving spiritual renunciation – was compelling and ingenious. It’s a rare book that takes its comedy as seriously as its philosophy – or vice versa – but in Dyer’s best novel yet, he has done just that.

Richard Ford

Simply “writings” is how Ian Jack describes The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain, his wonderful collection of memoirs, essays, investigative articles, novelties, anecdotes, family mini-sagas, and a sweet trifle or two. And fair enough, since Jack is a superb and diverse writer, with a mind and eyes and a nose for virtually everything – and particularly for things “British”, a word, a concept and a spirit he musingly and amusedly seeks to anatomise, and to the passing of which he pays bittersweet but knowing tribute. Football, Thatcherism, old movie houses, trains, train wrecks, his Scottish parents and English brothers, chimneys, mass culture, mass disaster, the working man’s plight, the slow collapse of Christianity – for all this and a lot more, Jack is a remarkably readable and acute cultural critic and historian. He’s smart, proportionate, discerning and (rarest of rarities) decent. To me, this book is indispensable.

Jonathan Franzen

Alongside very satisfying rereadings of Anna Karenina and Primo Levi’s three great memoirs, my best book experiences of 2009 were with a pair of new American novels about money. How to Sell (Harvill Secker), by the young philosopher Clancy Martin, is a strange, dirty, inside look at the jewellery business which reads like a manic buying spree or a cocaine jag and ends so wrenchingly I still feel scarred by it. Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges (Constable), which will be published in January, is a deliciously sophisticated engine of literary darkness, seducing the reader into sympathy with a young Manhattan couple whose ascent to megawealth then takes them beyond the reach of anybody’s sympathy. Strong novels for a deep recession.

Antonia Fraser

The most brilliant literary biography I came across this year was unquestionably The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings (John Murray). Although long, it is in no sense too long – after all, we are looking at 90 thrill-packed (and occasionally horror-filled) years – and it is in any case a vivid, compelling narrative. The extraordinary range of Maugham’s life, both literary and personal, is amply demonstrated. I used to gobble up my parents’ copies of Maugham’s plays, novels and, above all, short stories when I was in my teens: Hastings is sending me back to them, which is surely the ultimate test of such a work. At the same time I no longer regret that I never tasted life at the Villa Mauresqe in the south of France. The chilling account of Maugham’s marriage to Syrie, and the subsequent events in which the ageing writer was induced to question his daughter’s paternity (quite erroneously) are better on the page, I feel, than in real life. I am much looking forward to reading The Letters of TS Eliot, edited by Hugh Haughton and Valerie Eliot (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). It seems an appropriate choice given that Eliot wrote the finest poem on the subject of Christmas, “The Journey of the Magi”, with the second line being “Just the worst time of year”.

John Gray

The most important book for me this year was James Lovelock’s The Vanishing Face of Gaia: a Final Warning (Allen Lane). Despite the book’s subtitle, Lovelock isn’t delivering any kind of ultimatum to humankind. He’s simply presenting the current global climate situation and its most likely development as he – the most prescient of scientists – sees it. It’s too late to stop global warming, but the planet is not going to die – it will save itself by reverting to a hotter state, without any regard for humans. The task for humans is to save themselves, and Lovelock has given us a handbook of human survival. Can we summon the will – and the clarity of thinking – that’s needed?

My other choice is a collection by one of the world’s most exciting living poets, Frederick Seidel’s Poems, 1959-2009 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Seidel writes as JG Ballard might have done had he written verse, with a kind of reckless yet deeply premeditated verve: “The twentieth century made it possible / For us more and more fictional characters to see / Real human beings being killed / And leave the theatre and live.” These lines from Seidel’s “Life After Death” give a taste of this astonishingly bold and gifted poet; the collection should be read in its entirety.

David Hare

There hasn’t been a better book about theatre for years than Free For All (Doubleday), Kenneth Turan’s unvarnished oral history of the disputatious working-class American theatre producer, Joe Papp. In the current climate of sullen formalism on both sides of the Atlantic, this collection of idealistic interviews with colleagues such as George C Scott and Meryl Streep reminds you of everything that’s vital and inspiring about the medium. In sharp contrast, Selina Hastings’s The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (John Murray) addresses the most filmed writer of all time. There have been 98 adaptations from Maugham’s work against Shakespeare’s mere 94. Maugham maintained a personal staff of 13, but his contradictions were crudely summarised by Harold Acton: “For those who seek a moral one stands clear: / Don’t marry if you happen to be queer.” Hastings is the cream of biographers and she can make profound things out of shallow ones.

Zoë Heller

I thought I knew everything I needed or wanted to know about Sarah Palin, but Going Rouge (OR Books), a collection of critical essays about the former vice-presidential nominee, turned out to be enormously entertaining and instructive. The book (timed to coincide with Palin’s memoir, Going Rogue) is published by a tiny, print-on-demand outfit, and it’s a great example of the sort of rapid-response, guerrilla publishing at which smaller houses excel. I also loved – and wept copiously over – Colm Tóibín’s quiet masterpiece, Brooklyn (Viking). This novel contains, among other things, the most compelling and moving portrait of a young woman I have read in a long time.

Alan Hollinghurst

I’ve been intrigued by what seems a new development in that slightly dreaded form, “the long poem” – three really vital books that wed the momentum of prose fiction to the imagistic concision of poetry. After Adam Foulds’s gripping re-creation of the Mau Mau rising, The Broken Word (Cape), have come two books from the excellent new CB Editions: JO Morgan’s Natural Mechanical, the 70-page biography of an adventurous boy from Skye whose feats of improvisation are related in easy but apt free verse, and Christopher Reid’s riveting The Song of Lunch, a tiny narrative disproportionately rich in exact observation, sorry comedy and controlled pathos. After reading Reid you start to wonder why fiction-writers bother with all the padding and padding about of prose.

Michael Holroyd

In a year of mostly reading fiction my great discovery has been Gold by Dan Rhodes (Canongate). It is mainly set in The Anchor, a Welsh pub resembling purgatory. The regulars hang out there in calm and agonising tedium avoiding the perils of life outside. This is an original novel, funny, dark, pitched somewhere between the pub novels of Patrick Hamilton and the early fiction of Beryl Bainbridge. It’s hilarious and heartbreaking.

Bahaa Taher’s novel Sunset Oasis (Sceptre) takes place in the Egyptian desert and traces with wonderful subtlety the cultural, historical and gender incompatibilities that inevitably lead to tragedy. It is a haunting but never despairing narrative.

I also much admired Michael Foss’s adventurous The Road Taken (Michael O’Mara). The plot follows an international road through drug-smuggling, prison and individual isolation, a journey guided by chance and instinct in search of “what life has to offer”. It’s a realistic rather than romantic story and very enjoyable.

Ian Jack

David Kynaston’s Family Britain, 1951-57 (Bloomsbury) is a bright and intricate tapestry woven from personal testimony and the official record, which deepened and enriched my understanding of my own childhood. Mark Thompson’s The White War (Faber) brilliantly narrates one of the cruellest and most neglected episodes in recent European history, when in 1915 Italy had a patriotic fit and went needlessly to war with Austria; more than a million lives were wasted for even less reason than usual. Roland Chambers’s The Last Englishman: the Double Life of Arthur Ransome (Faber) deftly examines a murky career that produced – amazingly – the clear, simple skies of Swallows and Amazons. In fiction, I found The Collected Stories of John Cheever (Vintage) completely unputdownable, though by the end I felt woozy and hung over with so much human frailty and booze.

AL Kennedy

Richard Bausch’s book Peace (Vintage) is a beautiful bit of writing: lean, compact and layered, darkly humorous. Bausch is lauded in the US but isn’t known well enough over here – he’s a hugely experienced author with an interest in human conflicts and complications of all kinds and this may be the book of his career. In Peace a straggling and increasingly divided party of soldiers wander in a freezing and barren landscape, wounded and ultimately hunted, lost in the midst of the second world war. The writing is lyrical and unflinching when it comes to acts of violence and betrayal and the moral ambiguity of everything a war touches. His sense of the main character’s interior life is startlingly complex and troubling, detailing moments of doubt, joy, self-deception and disgust. The narrative is infused with a deft grasp of metaphor and a kind of aching rage. A timely novel for the US and the UK.

Ian Kershaw

Three works by well-known historians have impressed me greatly. Antony Beevor’s D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (Viking) has all the qualities that have made his earlier works so successful: an eye for telling and unusual detail, an ability to make complex events understandable, and a wonderfully graphic style of writing. Andrew Roberts achieves a marvel of concision in producing a splendidly written, comprehensive new history of the greatest conflict in history, The Storm of War (Allen Lane) – particularly good in its insights into Axis strategy. And just when you think there is nothing to add to our knowledge of Churchill as a war leader, Max Hastings makes you think again in his Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45 (HarperPress). I enormously enjoyed his beautifully painted “warts-and-all” portrait of Churchill as seen by contemporary observers.

Naomi Klein

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill (Black Swan). Here in my city of Toronto, I see its yellow cover everywhere – perched on laps in doctors’ offices, propped up on tables in cafés, dissolving the minutes on street cars and in airport lounges. More than once I have seen it start a shy conversation. “What page are you on?” “Don’t you love her?” “Her” is Aminata Diallo, the gorgeously drawn protagonist of Lawrence Hill’s masterpiece. Diallo’s extraordinary life story as a midwife and teacher encompasses the sweep of the transatlantic slave trade, from capture through emancipation to resettlement on two continents. While never once feeling like a history lesson, Hill goes after not just the cruel traders and owners but also some of the supposed liberators, challenging myths cherished in both Canada and Britain. In Canada, where Hill is from, this stunning novel has already sparked a rare national conversation. In Britain it could stand a visit to a few more doctors’ offices.

Hari Kunzru

One of the most moving pieces of non-fiction I read this year was Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night (Scribner), his memoir of growing up in Kashmir during the insurgency. Hindu nationalists would like to use the ethnic cleansing of the Pandits as a casus belli for renewed hostilities with Pakistan, and most Indians won’t confront the serious human rights abuses committed by the army. Peer humanises the geopolitical issues and reminds us why peace in Kashmir is important, not just to India and Pakistan, but to the world.

In fiction, I was pleased to see the recognition given to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate), which effortlessly solves the considerable technical problems in writing a historical novel.

David Kynaston

Bobby Robson’s death was a stark reminder of lost values, but Football Nation: Sixty Years of the Beautiful Game (Bloomsbury) by Andrew Ward and John Williams refuses the easy, hand-wringing, “declinist” route. Instead, it shows a game still capable of knitting together communities and offering hope and a sense of identity in otherwise often bleak, unyielding environments. The product of hundreds of interviews across all parts of the game, and years of intensive research and reflection, this is a warm, humane, genuinely pioneering slice of social history.

John Lanchester

My favourite new novels of the year were Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate), Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer (Canongate), and Brooklyn (Viking) by Colm Tóibín. The enormous differences between these books is proof, if it were needed, that there is no such thing as “the novel”, only the novels that novelists write – proof too that there’s life in that old dog yet.

Jonathan Lethem

For me, impossible not to vote for JG Ballard’s Complete Stories (WW Norton) – I agreed to write about it for my hometown newspaper, thinking I could bat something out on my teenage recollection of Ballard’s greatness, but decided to crack the book open and soon found myself swallowed inside. Reading the entire volume in sequence, as I did, two or three stories a night for most of July and August, became a kind of mind-meld, and Ballard’s complete tales revealed themselves to me not only as a great, obsessive fictional voyage, but an epic covert autobiography of the writer behind them.

Hilary Mantel

Mysteriously underrated among this year’s novels was MJ Hyland’s This Is How (Canongate); but then, Hyland’s talent in itself is mysterious. How does she, while fixing our attention on external events, make us so complicit in her characters’ internal worlds: so stickily enthralled, so nervously guilty? Patrick Oxtoby, the main character here, is a young criminal who claims to have very few emotions, yet his violent, dislocated story arouses strong emotion in the reader. Maria Hyland is like no one else writing today; her work is spare, ungiving, a challenge. At the same time, it is deeply humane.

Brian Dillon’s case-study Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin Ireland) deals with invalid artists and thinkers, from James Boswell to Glenn Gould. Some of them limped around being geniuses, complaining the while; some of them, like Proust, simply operated from their beds. It’s so good that, after reading it, I needed a lie-down.

David Mitchell

A Nobel prize is no guarantee of gripping, don’t-notice-the-page-numbers-fly-by writing, but Orhan Pamuk’s first novel since his trip to Stockholm, The Museum of Innocence (Faber), is a compelling, aching, heavy-hitting and beautiful thing. I’m a year late (quite punctual, for me) in recommending John Burnside’s austerely poetic novel Glister (Jonathan Cape), set in a town as alien-yet-familiar as someone else’s dream, and months after finishing the book I am still under the spell of its strange ending. Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger is one of the best ghost stories of the decade, let alone 2009, which plays upon, and bends, (and electrocutes!) the reader’s expectations. A favourite science book of the year is Lewis Wolpert’s How We Live and Why We Die: The Secret Lives of Cells (Faber), a crisply-written and thoughtful layman’s guide to the extraordinary stuff we – and all life – are made of.

Andrew Motion

There a vogue at the moment for books describing personal and “well-written” encounters with the natural world – for all kinds of good and understandable reasons. Tim Dee’s The Running Sky (Jonathan Cape), which contains the record of his “birdwatching life” is one such – but so much better than most, it seems in a class of its own. This is largely because it combines the necessary sensitivity with deep expertise, which acts as a kind of anchor. The effect is to place the human in a web which involving all other creatures, and birds especially. It is a chastening as well as an enchanting book. Weeds and Wild Flowers (Faber), one of two books of poetry published this year by Alice Oswald, has much the same effect, and for similar reasons: the work integrates sympathy with knowledge, often (in the poem “Snowdrop”, for instance) with an affect of amazing beauty.

Audrey Niffenegger

My favourite book this year was The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters. A middle-aged doctor gradually insinuates himself into the life of the Ayres family; they are the owners of a once stately, now crumbling but beautiful house, Hundreds Hall. Waters writes with great restraint and precision of how the house begins to turn on the family with poltergeistian aggression. It’s a terrific consideration of the ravages of class in post-war Britain, and a ripping ghost story, too. Two other excellent books are On Monsters (OUP), by Stephen Asma, a very readable and surprising history of every sort of monster, from the Biblical to the biotechnical, and Generosity (Atlantic), by Richard Powers. Powers is one of the best writers working now, and Generosity is full of agile sentences and odd characters. It features a young woman who is always simply happy; this strikes all the other characters as being so unusual that she soon comes under the scrutiny of scientists and the media.

Joyce Carol Oates

In the realm of spectacular literary scholarship and criticism there has been nothing to approach Elaine Showalter’s magisterial A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (Virago). Showalter is the ideal guide through this maze-like landscape: she is sympathetic, informed, canny and at times very funny – as in her commentary on Gertrude Stein. This is the most imaginative and brilliantly executed book of Showalter’s fearless career.

Charles Gross’s A Hole in the Head: More Tales in the History of Neuroscience (MIT Press) is a fascinating compendium of medical and science history wonderfully written, entertaining and informative, with striking, at times rather lurid photographs testifying to our enthrallment, over the centuries, with the mysteries residing within our own mostly unknowable brains.

Sheila Kohler’s Becoming Jane Eyre (Penguin) is an ingeniously imagined, meticulously researched and beautifully composed novel that immerses us in the seemingly fragile, secretly iron-willed character of the remarkable Charlotte Brontë.

It’s heartrending to realise that John Updike will no longer be among us. Two of his posthumously published books – the story collection My Father’s Tears and the poetry collection Endpoint (both Hamish Hamilton) – appeared shortly after his death in January. The stories are elegantly crafted in Updike’s distinctive style, bittersweet, nostalgic and fearless in their confrontation with mortality; the poems include the utterly stunning sequence Updike wrote on his deathbed.

Andrew O’Hagan

Tom Leonard has been publishing poems since three years before I was born, and his volume Outside the Narrative: Poems, 1965-2009 (Etruscan Press) is a masterpiece of political engagement and memorable speech. His poems written in Glaswegian are brilliant moral beauties, as perfect in every way as the lyrics of Hugh MacDiarmid or the best of William Carlos Williams. My prose book of the year is without a doubt The Eitingons by Mary-Kay Wilmers (Faber). A completely riveting story of the author’s wider family – one man’s role in the assassination of Trotsky, another one’s involvement in the Freud Circle, and a third’s in the New York fur business – it is a book that turns out to be shadowing the 20th century itself. And there are other shadows, not least the shadow of the author herself, who appears and disappears so stylishly and funnily in the pages of this book. Carefulness, patience, irony, indirection – all the great prose virtues are here. It’s the kind of book that Joan Didion or Sybille Bedford might have written if the story of their family turned out to have bridged so many famous concealments.

Jeremy Paxman

I once got into a particularly pointless correspondence with the Royal Mail about why they were happy to issue sets of stamps to commemorate snooker-players or guinea-pig enthusiasts but wouldn’t do something similar to mark great British intellectuals. It was a trick question: we don’t really do “intellectual”, unless it has the word “wanker” attached. Well, this year the Mail came up with a collection of “Eminent Britons”. Inevitably three of them were sportsmen, but at least Samuel Johnson got his place in the sun. The bigger, more permanent, testament to the great man was Samuel Johnson, by Peter Martin (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25), a highly compassionate piece of work which not only enjoys his wit but explains his manic energy and shares his anxieties.

David Peace

Twelve good books from one bad year: Bad Vibes by Luke Haines (Windmill); Heartland by Anthony Cartwright (Tindall Street); When the Lights Went Out by Andy Beckett (Faber); Ice Cold by Andrea Maria Schenkel (Quercus); Still Midnight by Denise Mina (Orion); The Coming Insurrection by the Invisible Committee (Semiotext); The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave (Canongate); Dirty Leeds by Robert Endeacott (Tonto); Looking for the Light through the Pouring Rain by Kevin Cummins (Faber); Blood’s a Rover by James Ellroy (Century); Sex & Violence, Death & Silence by Gordon Burn (Faber); Bad Penny Blues by Cathi Unsworth (Serpent’s Tail).

Annie Proulx

Every decade or so I discover a book that makes me feel I’ve been waiting for it all my life. Elena Kostioukovitch’s Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is one of these books. The Russian author is a translator who has lived in Italy for years. Her rich book is an omnium gatherum of historically significant food, the extraordinary diversity of Italian cuisine. She illuminates geography, trade routes, art, ethnicities, pleasures of the table, husbandry, archaeology, religion, etymology, pirates, feasts, architecture, monasteries, mosaics. We learn of the gangster’s last pleasure and the Slow Food movement, the Mediterranean diet, the intricacies of pastas married to enhancing sauces. This fine book is a painting in words of the deepest bonds between local foods, ceremony and people.

Philip Pullman

The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker (Thames & Hudson) is publishing at its most creative and spectacular. Every single letter of this great letter-writer is here, together with (and this is the point) every single drawing or sketch that van Gogh included, reproduced with beautiful clarity. But even more: since the story of his life is that of the development of a visual sensibility, every painting or print that he mentions as having seen is also reproduced, on the same page as his reference to it. Simply as a piece of book design, this takes the breath away; but to read the letters, and watch this passionate, clumsy, brilliant, earnest, suffering genius find his way towards the work he was going to be world-famous for, is to be – if you have a soul at all – wonderstruck. If this were 10 times the price, it would still be worth it.

The other magnificent work is the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (OUP). Instead of starting with a word and showing its history, as the great OED does, this starts with a meaning and – instead of just bunging a lot of synonyms together – shows how that meaning came to be expressed, every word that belongs in that category being shown with the date of its first appearance. You could spend years browsing in this wonderful pasture, and no one should even consider writing a historical novel without it there on the desk.

Simon Schama

The way things are, you either want to drink deep of the financial hemlock or brush it aside for something less creditcrunchy. Weirdly and wonderfully, Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (William Heinemann) about central bankers before the great depression, is so spellbindingly written, so humane in its understanding of the doomed protagonists and what they wrought that you can’t get enough of the story. It’s also a masterclass in historical narrative in everything that counts: the big picture, the critical event, the psychology of institutions, and is shot through with tragic irony without ever over-determining the awful outcome. I suppose a novel that starts, unforgettably with Nagasaki in 1945 doesnt exactly count as light relief. Nam Le’s The Boat (Canongate) has (at least) three stories that will shake you through and through. Any writer who borrows a piece of a Capote book title is asking for it, but Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Bloomsbury), set in worlds of rich and poor, east and west, has such razor sharpness and lyric tenderness that it gets away with it. Anyone writing “you only had to see her disjoint a chicken to know the depths and heights of her carnality” gets my vote.

Kamila Shamsie

Two books, entirely different save for their shared ability to use surface simplicity to mask (for a time) vast depths of emotional and psychological complexity, stood out – Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (Viking) and Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver (Sort of Books). Jansson’s tale of two women, and a dog, in the cold Nordic winter deserves as wide a readership as her beloved children’s books featuring the Moomins.

Of course, there’s much to be said for books which present their dazzling effect from page one – Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (Bloomsbury) is a glorious, thumping tale of intersecting lives, told in language which all but sings.

Elaine Showalter

Two of my favourite novels this year were sequels. Jane Gardam’s The Man in the Wooden Hat (Chatto & Windus) retold the story of the marriage of the Hong Kong ex-pats Sir Edward and Betty Feathers, first narrated from his point of view in her memorable Old Filth (2005), by making Betty the centre. Admirers of the first novel will find Betty’s version, another stylish, Woolfian examination of a long marriage, enriches and complicates their understanding, but the book also stands on its own. Maggie Gee’s My Driver (Telegram), a follow-up to her novel My Cleaner, reverses the plot of the first book, taking its white British writer Vanessa Henman to Uganda where her former cleaner, Mary Tendo, has also become a writer. Like Gardam, Gee brilliantly negotiates the explosive racial territory of the British abroad with feeling, observation, humour and art.

Ali Smith

“Dying isn’t as easy as some people think! Those nasty little gods of life are forever clapping me back into existence. Do you believe in fairies? Please just say no.” This is a complete short story, “Tinkerbell”, from The Tiny Key by Frances Gapper published beautifully by Sylph Editions. I very much like Gapper’s precise, startlingly odd short stories.

Don Paterson’s latest collection of poetry, Rain (Faber), written in memory of his friend and fellow poet Michael Donaghy, takes him further down into the underworld, even beyond his own and Rilke’s Orpheus poems, to a place which pits wits against nothingness. It suggests a new poetic, one of resigned vivacity. It leaves its readers knowing why humans have the urge to make things rhyme. Its combination of throwaway and vital, and the hopeless honesty, the wryness and the conscious slightness with which he holds these poems against the dark, make Rain a piece of life.

Tom Stoppard

The first instalment of Beckett’s letters – The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940 (CUP) – and the second of Isaiah Berlin’s – Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960 (Chatto & Windus) were two essentials, one to be mined, the other sieved, and both annotated almost to excess, as they should be. But for sheer informative pleasure I recommend the reprint of the Shell Country Alphabet by Geoffrey Grigson (Particular Books), into which every dip is lucky.

Colm Tóibín

Mary-Kay Wilmers’s The Eitingons (Faber) is a secret history of the 20th century in which members of her family played a crucial role – one in the fur trade after the Russian revolution; another as an early disciple of Freud’s; and a third, an agent of Stalin’s, who set up the assassination of Trotsky. The fact that this last one was the most fun, or at least the most fascinating, is an aspect of the book’s originality. I found the book a riveting piece of story-telling.

The best novel I read this year was Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (Hamish Hamilton), which tells the story of an ungrateful immigrant, filled with angst and attitude, in a Montreal which could be Kafka’s Prague. It is a dark book, narrated with verve and brilliance. It made me jump for joy.

Paul Durcan’s Life is a Dream (Harvill Secker) is a generous selection of his poetry over the past 40 years, and displays his skill, his importance and his bravery, his willingness to tackle difficult public matters but also to explore with eloquence and fierce honesty the most private areas of the self.

Claire Tomalin

Keith Thomas’s The Ends of Life (OUP) looks at the English from the 16th to 18th century, and asks what people thought of work, food, friendship, honour, gossip, whether they would be remembered after death, and other deep questions. It is full of surprises, packed with information that no one else could have found, and so witty and absorbing that a pang of disappointment came over me when I turned over eagerly for another chapter and found myself in the notes. More to come, I hope.

Michael Braddick’s God’s Fury, England’s Fire (Allen Lane) reached me this year in paperback, a history of the English civil wars that tells you what it was like for common people, soldiers, citizens, parish constables, women, to live through the debates and battles that tore their world apart. It’s good on the king too, and is altogether an original and remarkable piece of historical writing, and should become a classic.

John Carey’s William Golding (Faber), drawing on literally millions of words of unpublished journals and stories, brings that extraordinary novelist to startling life, frightened, brutal, brave, drunken, dissatisfied with success, and possessed of a rare imagination. Carey’s masterly account makes one want to see The Lord of the Flies republished in its original form, with the religious bits that were cut out restored.

David Vann

Broken by the past, the characters in William Trevor’s Love and Summer (Viking) know each other through signs both too small and too large, all perception out of proportion, which is the brilliance of Trevor’s vision. It’s an extremely tense read; I felt constantly afraid. But there’s a generosity to his vision, and a surprising rightness. I also loved Penelope Lively’s gorgeous Family Album (Fig Tree).

Sarah Waters

My most entertaining read this year was James Lever’s Me Cheeta (Fourth Estate), a brilliant satire on the Hollywood memoir which manages to be funny, caustic and genuinely moving: I loved this book, and have been recommending it like mad.

I also very much enjoyed Coventry (Maia), by Canadian author Helen Humphreys: a short, spare, powerful novel, set during the single night in November 1940 when Coventry was devastated by Luftwaffe bombing.

Jeanette Winterson

Rain by Don Paterson (Faber). I love his work and this is just the best. Poetry for the gut and the mind by way of the heart. “I will know nothing of my life but its mysteries.”

The Case For God by Karen Armstrong (Bodley Head). Forget Richard Dawkins – just read it with an open mind.

A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland (Granta). Against the noise and the trash comes this meditation on silence; what it is, what it means, why we need it. Beautiful.

The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital by Dan Cruickshank (Random House). Belle de Jour for the 18th century. Funny, fantastical, full of impossible facts and scandalous stories. Scholarly, but also the ideal stocking (and suspender) filler.

Wu Ming

Since 2000, Giuseppe Genna has written some of the most daring books in the New Italian Epic canon. While his early efforts were thrillers, his following books grew increasingly ambitious, eg Dies Irae (2006), a visionary tome set in the 1980s, dealing with the mysteries of Italy’s First Republic. In 2009 he published two titles. Le Teste (Mondadori) is a chilling, creepy, post-thriller on decapitation and Milan’s hopeless decadence. Italia de Profundis (Minimum Fax) blends faction and prophecy to explore our nation’s state of dismay: “Italy is a place I unlearned how to love.”

Compiled by Ginny Hooker.

Jay Parini shudders at the thought of President Palin

Sarah Palin is a figure of fun on the American left, easily lampooned as a know-nothing, gun-toting ex-beauty queen who loves God and the red, white and blue above pretty much anything else except for Todd, her macho husband, who races snowmobiles across the Alaskan tundra. To the American right, she represents family values and a nostalgic return trip to the Reagan era, when America “stood tall”. Her folksiness strikes them as refreshing.

I was as eager to read Going Rogue as any of the 300,000 people who bought it on its first day out in the US: could this woman be as foolish as she seemed during the campaign? Certainly her television interviews with Katie Couric on CBS put the nails in her coffin. She appeared shockingly ignorant of policy matters, and could recall the names of no newspapers that she read with any regularity. Her chief claim to fame in international affairs was a view of Russia from the shores of Alaska. (You can actually swim to Russia from Alaska, she tells us in her new book, as if this somehow mattered.)

Quick to see their problem, the McCain people did their best to make sure the Alaskan governor had as little contact with the press as possible. It got so bad, Palin informs us now, that a couple of times she had a friend in Alaska “track down phone numbers for me, and I snuck in calls to folks like Rush Limbaugh” and other rightwing media pals. Even on her own campaign jet, her handlers refused to let her talk with reporters at the back of the plane. “No! Absolutely not – block her if she tries to go back!” they cried.

To bolster his right flank and attract women voters, John McCain had cynically opted for a running mate who was, by any stretch of the imagination, unqualified for a position a heartbeat away from the presidency. The reality of Palin seems to have taken him by surprise.

Certainly the “real” Palin shines through her memoir, which seeks to position her for a run at the presidency in 2012. Let’s give her credit where it’s due. She quite properly defends her right to run for public office without sacrificing her role as a mother. Referring to the fact that another woman (a federal judge) criticised her because she often held her Downs syndrome baby while campaigning, she writes bravely: “I’m a mom. He’s my baby. Who is this woman to say I cannot hold my baby in public? No one told me that running for office means a woman candidate has to switch off her maternal instincts and hide her children from view. If that’s required, then count me out.”

Part of Palin’s appeal lies in her frankness as well as a fierce consistency. In choosing to give birth to her last child (she knew well in advance that he had Downs syndrome), she stuck by her deeply rooted principles. Similarly, as governor of Alaska, she didn’t cave in to her own faction on the matter of benefits for same-sex couples. She stood firm, explaining that the law required her to support these benefits, even though she personally disapproved of them. “As governor, I meant to follow the law,” she writes. There is something admirable in that.

Yet Palin often seems petty as well as mean-spirited. For instance, she refers to one of her political opponents in Alaska as “a wealthy, effete young chap” who did his best to defeat her. She puts him down with hardly a flicker of regret: “He would go on to host a short-lived radio show while blogging throughout the day, all of which were major steps up from a previous job as our limo driver at Todd’s cousin’s wedding.”

In this vein Palin settles many scores, heaping scorn on her enemies in Alaska, in the media generally, and certainly the McCain camp, where everyone was apparently determined to silence her. The persistent bitterness of her tone is unappealing.

The prose is gee-whiz folksy, with purple tinges now and then, as when she describes the setting of the Alaska state fair: “With the gray Talkeetna mountains in the distance and the first light covering of snow about to descend on Pioneer Peak, I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything smalltown America with rugged splashes of the last frontier.” Palin’s ghostwriter seems to be saying: “Look, Sarah! No hands!” (Buried in the voluminous acknowledgments section at the back of the book are hearty thanks to Lynn Vincent “for her indispensable help in getting the words on paper”.)

In a rambling final chapter, called “The Way Forward”, Palin urges Americans to rush back to the simpler world of Reagan and his “morning in America”. Like her hero, she prefers small government to big, except where the military is concerned. One can never have enough weapons or soldiers. Overall, there is little of substance here: Palin avoids talking about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan; says nothing on Israel and the Palestinians. Iran and North Korea fail to attract her attention.

In Palin’s snug and self-satisfied world, hockey and basketball matter more than global warming or the spread of nuclear weapons, and a man is judged by his vehicles. (She says of Todd, whom she met in high school: “Not only was he one of the only kids in town who owned his own ride – he owned two, the Mustang and a 1973 Ford F-150 long-bed pickup that he used to haul a pair of Polaris snowmachines.”) In the course of more than 400 breathless pages, one learns enough to shudder at the thought of President Palin.

Jay Parini’s The Last Station will be published by Canongate in February.

The actor and polyglot Luis d’Antin van Rooten turned classic nursery rhymes into 18th-century French poetry in Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames (hint: try saying it out aloud). Here we publish his version of Jack and Jill, with scholarly notes, as well as a reading of the text by the publisher Patrick Janson-Smith

‘”Sorry I’m a bit late,” Newland said, though both he and Ellen knew that what he was really saying was that he loved her deeply, yet did not want to compromise her by making her his mistress.’

When Newland Archer opened the door at the back of the box, the curtain had just gone up on the garden scene. “Darn it,” he thought. “I have arrived 10 seconds unfashionably early. All New York knows you are not supposed to make your entrance until Marguerite is two bars into her aria.” Newland’s annoyance dissipated when he realised that no one who was anyone in New York society had witnessed his horrendous faux pas.

During the interval he turned his gaze towards his beloved, the divine May Welland, seated in the Mingott box opposite, and frowned when he saw that her cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, was in her party. How very awkward! What would New York think of the reintroduction of the scarlet woman into society? Yet how typical of the Mingotts to be so brazenly protective of their own! No matter! He would rise above New York’s pettiness and his reputation would be unstained!

Archer made his way to the Mingott box and sat down next to May. They looked into one another’s eyes and felt no need to speak. Their thoughts were as one. Newland knew that May had understood he wished their betrothal to be announced that very night at the Beauforts’ party.

The engagement would normally have been quite the talk of New York, yet it was the return of Mrs Mingott’s other grand-daughter, the Countess Ellen, that dominated the conversation of the finest salons.

“I hear she left her husband and hid with his secretary for a year before returning to New York,” said Mr Sillerton Jackson. “Quelle scandale! How racy these Europeans are!”

“How dare you, sir!” Newland exclaimed. “You will find she left her husband to escape his beatings.”

“No matter,” replied Mr Sillerton Jackson. “A New York wife would take a beating in private. I find myself most compromised by our acquaintance as you are to be married into the Mingott family.”

Mr Sillerton Jackson’s sentiments were echoed throughout New York society and for several weeks it appeared as if no one would attend the Mingott ball, until Mrs Archer, sensing the shame that might accrue to her own family by her son’s impending engagement to a Mingott, persuaded her cousins, the van der Luydens, New York’s most powerful family, to invite the Countess to tea.

“Thank goodness for that,” New York society sighed. “We can go to the Mingotts’ party after all.”

Sitting in his office some months later, Newland was irritated to be summoned to see his employer, Mr Letterblair. Although nominally engaged as a lawyer, Newland had far better things to occupy his mind than the grubbiness of commerce; there was the compelling question whether New York was wearing its waistcoats with one or two buttons undone this season.

“Mrs Mingott has requested your assistance,” said Mr Letterblair. “It appears that the Countess Olenska is seeking a divorce. The family find that most embarrassing.”

Archer understood the gravity and delicacy of the situation and took a carriage to the Countess’s residence. “You must realise that New York will expel the Mingotts from society if you pursue this action,” he said, “and that my engagement to May will also make me an outcast.”

The Countess looked down, a maelstrom of emotion racing through her bosom. “Very well,” she said. Newland sensed the passion beating in his own breast. “I must see you again soon,” he implored.

“Come and see me for 10 minutes in a few months’ time when I am staying in Skuytercliff,” she whispered, overwhelmed by feelings that could not be expressed in New York society. “And now I have a party to attend.”

Newland urged his horses on as the carriage raced along the coast road. “Sorry I’m a bit late,” he said, though both he and Ellen knew that what he was really saying was that he loved her deeply, yet did not want to compromise her by making her his mistress.

“I’ve got to go now,” Ellen replied, “I have to fend off Beaufort’s unwanted attentions”, though both she and Newland knew that what she was really saying was that she loved him deeply, yet did not want to compromise him by becoming his mistress.

Rocked by the intolerability of the situation, Newland took a few more weeks off work to go to Florida to see May. “We must get married this year,” he begged her. “You only want to do that because you are frightened you may go off me,” May replied. “Don’t think I am unaware that you once had feelings for a Mrs Rushworth. If you have any outstanding obligations to her, then I am happy to release you from your promise to me.”

Newland felt a surge of love for May. Particularly as she didn’t seem to have guessed the true nature of his feelings for the Countess. “No, my darling,” he declared. “It is you whom I adore.”

“Why do we have to honeymoon in Europe?” May enquired, as they docked in London. “Because it is our Henry James moment,” Newland replied.

“Well, I shall be quite glad when we are back in America”.

Locked in the loveless marriage decreed by New York, Newland was tormented by his passion for Ellen, a passion made still more tormented by New York having turned its back on her once more for refusing her husband’s offer of a reconciliation.

“We should not see quite so much of Ellen now,” said May. Had she sensed his true feelings for Ellen, Newland wondered. How strange that the emancipation he admired so much in Ellen he should seek to deny to May!

Newland hurried to Boston. “It’s been two years since I last saw you and I wanted us to spend another five minutes together,” he cried, touching Ellen’s hand. They kissed, a kiss that announced both of them accepted they might have intercourse some time in the next few years.

“I will throw off the shackles of New York and elope with Ellen,” Newland boldly wondered.

“I’m pregnant,” said May, having secretly been aware of her husband’s feelings for Ellen all along. “Maybe I won’t be going anywhere after all,” Newland muttered.

“I am returning to Europe,” Ellen announced, and all New York breathed a sigh of relief at such a satisfactory conclusion to the affair.

Twenty-six years later, Newland stood outside Ellen’s Paris apartment with his son, Dallas. May had died some years earlier and Dallas had suggested they make the visit now that New York society was so much more casual in its mores.

“Come on up,” said Dallas.

“I don’t think I will, after all,” said Newland. “The imagined love is so much more real. And besides she’s probably a right minger now.”

From Tom Wolfe to JK Galbraith, the banker-turned-novelist gives the inside deal on the best investments you can make in financial reading

David Charters is a former diplomat and investment banker, who left the City after 12 years of working on many large international flotations and privatisations. He has published six novels and is best known for his best-selling Dave Hart series of satires, set in the fictional world of “Grossbank”. Where Egos Dare is the fourth instalment, published on 14 September.

Buy David Charters books at the Guardian bookshop

“What’s different about the City is the numbers. They all have a lot more zeros on the end. This means that when things go well – and sometimes when they don’t – the people who work there can demand bonuses which also have a lot of zeros on the end. And the people who determine the bonuses (the bosses) are happy to go along with it because it means that they, in turn, will have to be paid more. Granted, the work is stressful, difficult and demanding, and the hours can be very long, and of course it’s highly competitive. But so are a lot of other jobs. The difference is in those zeros. There’s also almost no job security, however big the firm.

“So with huge rewards on the one hand and sudden death on the other, it’s hardly surprising when the City brutally exposes the fault lines in human nature. Greed, fear, ruthlessness and impatience are a lethal cocktail. And of course people behaving badly make for great fiction and wonderful villains. They may not be attractive, but they are rarely dull. And, as we have all learnt to our cost, the City matters. When things go wrong in the Square Mile we all get to pick up the tab. So here are my top 10 picks to educate and entertain you about what really goes on there.”

1. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

For my money, the “Big Daddy” of financial fiction, a truly gripping tale of the slow, systematic tearing apart of the opulent facade that a New York investment banker calls his life.

2. Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis

A superbly written, City perennial that shows you the inside workings of a high octane investment bank at the peak of its power, complete with rampant egos.

3. Free to Trade by Michael Ridpath

Financial fiction definitely does not need to be dull, and Ridpath is a master storyteller. Coincidentally, along the way it is surprising how much you pick up about how the City works (and sometimes doesn’t).

4. Black Cabs by John McLaren

When investment bankers travel in cabs, they assume the driver hears nothing, sees nothing, spots nothing – to their cost, in this tale of the little guys getting one over on the men in suits.

5. Freud in the City by David Freud

Bankers are human, or at least some of them can be. David Freud’s account of his City career is delightfully self-deprecating but at the same time illuminating.

6. The Great Crash, 1929, by JK Galbraith

The naked emperors waltzing down Wall Street and along Threadneedle Street might have been given shorter shrift if more of our politicians and regulators had read this book. The similarities to recent events will surprise and probably horrify you. Will we ever learn?

7. The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson

A very readable account of the evolutionary history of money and financial systems, made accessible and interesting without being patronising. And yes, it really is a jungle out there.

8. Simple But Not Easy: An Autobiographical and Biased Book About Investing by Richard Oldfield

Oldfield is something of an anomaly in the City: an investment guru with a great track record, who is also a thoroughly decent bloke with his feet firmly on the ground and a lot of common sense – or at least that is how he comes across in this excellent Plain Man’s Guide to investing.

9. The Long and the Short Of It: A Guide to Finance and Investment for Normally Intelligent People Who Aren’t in the Industry by John Kay

Does what it says on the cover, rather brilliantly, and wins my award for the book I’d most like to have written myself.

10. Free Lunch: Easily Digestible Economics by David Smith

If you only ever read one book about economics – for which I could easily forgive you – make it this one. Smith for Chancellor!

Faber, £9.99

A rehearsal room at the National Theatre, set up as WH Auden’s Oxford rooms in 1972

Carpenter: I want to hear about the shortcomings of great men . . . We stand on their shoulders to survey our lives . . . (As Donald, the actor playing Carpenter) . . . Yes?

Kay (stage manager): I’m afraid the director can’t make it today.

Fitz (actor playing Auden): Are we doing the sucking off scene today?

Henry (actor playing Britten): Have you bought in a cake?

Fitz: Did you see my Lear? I was marvellous.

Kay: Oh shit! It’s Neil. The author.

The Author: You’re not going to cut more of my words, are you?

The Digested Read: More than you would ever have imagined.

Kay: Shall we start again from when Carpenter arrives at Auden’s lodgings?

Carpenter: I had come to interview Auden for a biography I was writing . . .

Auden: I suppose that’s as good a way as any of setting the scene, but I still feel the audience might find it contrived.

The Author: Stop picking on me and leave my text alone.

Carpenter: Can you tell me why you stayed in America during the war?

Auden: You’re at it again, dear boy . . . (As Fitz) I’ve lost my place . . . Oh yes . . . (As Auden) It was because I was in love with Chester. (Clock strikes 6.30) Is that the time? Take your trousers off.

Carpenter: Why?

Auden: Because you’re here to let me suck your cock.

Carpenter: But I’m with the BBC.

Auden: My point entirely.

The Author: Oi! I didn’t write that line.

The Digested Read: I’m sorry. I thought anyone could join in.

The Bed: They can. I’m Auden’s bed.

Stuart: And I’m the rent boy. Though I may be rather more middle-class than you were expecting.

Carpenter: Shall I say something didactic about the acceptance and practice of homosexuality in the 1970s now?

Auden: I’d rather you just let me suck his cock.

Carpenter: Yes, yes. Did you know Britten was in town today? He’s having trouble with Death in Venice and I thought you might be able to help him.

Auden: Caught you doing it again . . . But never mind, show him in.

Kay: It’s your cue, Henry.

Henry: These biccies are good. (As Britten) Have you seen the Spenders?

Auden: Everyone’s seen the Spenders. But how can I help? I am rather out of fashion now, you know. I just write cosy poems. I hate almost everything I’ve ever written. It’s just a habit now.

Britten: The people of Aldeburgh still love me but the last thing I composed that was universally liked was The War Requiem. Now I’m struggling with Aschenbach. People say it’s the same old story. They don’t like it. Boyish innocence corrupted.

Auden: But of course it is.

Britten: It’s not. Aschenbach is seduced by the Ideal of Beauty.

Auden: You are deluding yourself. You must tell it as it is. Let the music do the work for you.

The Music: Benjie loves us. We will serve him to the end.

Donald: I hate the fact I’m just sitting around here on stage. It’s obvious to everyone my character is just a device to hang the story around.

Auden: I won’t deny it. And the play has been much more involving since Benjie and I were allowed time to discuss our poetry and music. So, if you don’t mind, we’ll return to matters of truth, artistic freedom and talent’s desire to self-question and destroy itself with age.

Stuart: That’s what you think. I want my voice heard. God stand up for the rent boys who serviced the artistic greats.

Carpenter: Good for you. You understand the biographer perfectly.

Fitz: Can’t we end with some of Auden’s poetry?

Stuart: No chance.

The Author: What have you all done to my play?

Kay: I think we’ll stop here for today.

Digested read, digested: The Habit of Artifice.

Christopher Nicholson’s The Elephant Keeper goes up against Hilary Mantel, Colm Tóibín and Penelope Lively in shortlist for £5,000 award

A touching story of an 18th-century boy’s love affair with an elephant, which has so far attracted little critical attention, has this evening found itself pitted against three literary heavyweights for one of the UK’s leading book prizes.

Christopher Nicholson, a former community development worker, has been shortlisted for the Costa novel award alongside Penelope Lively, Colm Tóibín and this year’s Booker prize winner, Hilary Mantel. The shortlist was one of five announced for this years Costas, awards that unashamedly reward the year’s most enjoyable books across different categories: novel, first novel, poetry, biography and children’s book.

Nicholson’s The Elephant Keeper was one of the most eye-catching. The judges described his book about a stable boy who develops a deepening relationship with Jenny, an elephant, as “an unusual and absorbing story – a real discovery.” It was one of a record number of 155 entries for the category with Mantel’s bestselling doorstopper about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall, unsurprisingly one of the four shortlisted books.

Many will be pleased to see Tóibín’s Brooklyn nominated after it just missed out on the Booker shortlist, and there will be a similar reaction for Lively. She was one of several former Booker winners who was not even longlisted for the prize this year, although her novel Family Album was warmly praised by many reviewers including Joanna Briscoe in the Guardian, who called it “one of her most impressive works”.

Nicholson’s novel, written in the language of the period, has slipped under many critics’ radar. He admitted: “It’s a surprise, I didn’t even know my publisher had entered it.” He described The Elephant Keeper, his second novel, as a historical fairy tale – “it’s not asking the reader to implicitly believe everything” – telling the story of 12-year-old Tom Page and his strengthening feelings for the elephant, which he chooses above his girlfriend.

Nicholson, who also spent 15 years as a producer for the BBC World Service, said he was fascinated by elephants, “one of the most powerful of all animals and yet one of the most empathetic.”

For the first time there are two posthumous Costa nominations, one of which is for Siobhan Dowd in the children’s book category for Solace of the Road. Judges said they were captivated by Dowd’s story of a troubled teenager who embarks on a road trip back to her mother. Dowd died of cancer in August 2007 and all royalties now go to a fund for disadvantaged young people set up in her name.

Also on the children’s shortlist is a novel that tackles a big, controversial subject: Anna Perera’s Guantanamo Boy tells the story of Khalid, from Rochdale, who is arrested on a visit to Pakistan and soon finds himself in the US detention camp. Perera, who is married to Dire Straits founder David Knopfler, said she felt honoured to be shortlisted. “I didn’t sleep a wink last night, I was completely flabbergasted.”

She was moved to write the novel – her first for teenagers – after attending a gig for the charity Reprieve where the plight of child detainees at Guantánamo was raised. “I didn’t know they were held there and the idea of a book went through my head. I started to research the subject and came across millions of pages of information on the internet.” The more Perera found out, the more scandalised she became. “It is almost laughable, extraordinary and inhumane that juveniles are held there.”

The other two contenders are Mary Hoffman for Troubadour, and Patrick Ness, a regular Guardian reviewer, for The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking: Book Two).

The other posthumous nomination is curmudgeonly playwright and novelist Simon Gray for Coda, the last volume of his freewheeling “smoking diaries” in which he writes of life after his diagnosis for cancer (although he died of an aneurysm).

Other biography nominations are Graham Farmelo’s account of the life of Paul Dirac, an outstanding yet extremely weird physicist; William Fiennes’ memoir of growing up in a magical, moated castle, The Music Room; and Caroline Moorehead’s Dancing to the Precipice about the fabulously named 18th-century Versailles noblewoman Lucie de la Tour du Pin.

In the poetry category the Australian wit Clive James is nominated for a volume of verse he wrote over five years, Angels Over Elsinore. Then there is Katharine Kilalea for a debut book, One Eye’d Leigh and two other well-established poets: Christopher Reid for A Scattering and Ruth Padel for Darwin: A Life in Poems.

The final category is for first novel and the shortlisted writers are Ali Shaw for The Girl with Glass Feet – longlisted for the Guardian first book award – Rachel Heath, for The Finest Type of English Womanhood; Peter Murphy for John the Revelator; and Raphael Selbourne for Beauty.

In total, 592 books were entered for the Costas, previously known as the Whitbreads. The category winners will be announced on January 5, each winning £5,000, before the main prize – won by novelists Sebastian Barry last year and AL Kennedy in 2007 – is presented on January 26.

The shortlists have been decided by five three-person judging panels with a diverse range of names including actor Neil Pearson, broadcaster Fiona Phillips, crime writer and poet Sophie Hannah, historian Robert Lacey and writer William Nicolson. The final judges will be made up of one member from each panel and four other people announced next month.

The 2009 Costa book award shortlists in full are:

Novel award:

Penelope Lively for Family Album.

Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall.

Christopher Nicholson for The Elephant Keeper.

Colm Tóibín for Brooklyn.

First novel award

Rachel Heath for The Finest Type of English Womanhood.

Peter Murphy for John the Revelator.

Raphael Selbourne for Beauty.

Ali Shaw for The Girl with Glass Feet.

Biography award

Graham Farmelo for The Strangest Man The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius.

William Fiennes for The Music Room.

Simon Gray for Coda.

Caroline Moorehead for Dancing to the Precipice.

Poetry award

Clive James for Angels Over Elsinore.

Katharine Kilalea for One Eye’d Leigh.

Ruth Padel for Darwin: A Life in Poems.

Christopher Reid for A Scattering.

Children’s book award

Siobhan Dowd for Solace of the Road.

Mary Hoffman for Troubadour.

Patrick Ness for The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking: Book Two).

Anna Perera for Guantanamo Boy.

Colleagues laughed when a young journalist in Palestine announced his intention to tell the story of that region though cartoons. Twenty years later, Joe Sacco is one of the world’s leading exponents of the graphic novel form…

In his books, Joe Sacco always draws himself the same way: neat and compact, a small bag slung across his body, a notebook invariably in his hand. At a single glance, the reader understands that he is both reporter and innocent abroad, an unlikely combination that propels him not only to ask difficult questions, but to go on asking them long after all the other hacks have given up and gone home. You sense in this black-and-white outline, too, a certain taut, physical alertness. Should there be trouble, he is, it seems, ready to run.

The expression on his face, however, is more difficult to read. Sacco keeps his eyes permanently hidden behind the shine of his owlish spectacles; anyone wishing to gauge his deeper emotions must rely instead on his bottom lip. Basically, this lip has two modes. When he is frustrated, bewildered or angry, it moves stubbornly forward and its corners droop. When he is happy, contentedly drinking beer, say, or mildly flirting, it peels back to reveal his teeth, which are big and rabbity and exceedingly un-American, as if crafted from a piece of old orange peel. 

Is his eyelessness intended to send some kind of subtle message regarding the reliability of the reporter-narrator? Sacco, who in real life has elfin features and brown eyes, and is sitting next to me at a gleaming white table in the offices of his London publisher, winces. “It is deliberate now,” he says. “But it certainly wasn’t in the beginning. If you look at the first few pages of [my first book] Palestine, you’ll see that I didn’t used to be able to draw at all! Also, back then, I really was more like a tourist than a reporter and I suppose the way I drew myself reflected that. I was this naive person who didn’t know where he was going or what he was doing. Since then, I’ve learned how to behave; nowadays, it would be a lie to make myself seem too bumbling.

“But some people have told me that hiding my eyes makes it easier for them to put themselves in my shoes, so I’ve kind of stuck with it. I’m a nondescript figure; on some level, I’m a cipher. The thing is: I don’t want to emote too much when I draw myself. The stories are about other people, not me. I’d rather emphasise their feelings. If I do show mine – let’s say I’m shaking [with fear] more than the people I’m with – it’s only ever to throw their situation into starker relief.”

Thanks to publishing hyperbole, writers often get called “unique”. But Sacco’s work truly is, combining as it does oral history, memoir and reportage with cartoons in a way that, when he started out, most people – himself included, at times – considered utterly preposterous.

Twenty years on, though, and the American cartoonist is widely regarded as the author of two masterpieces: Palestine, in which he reported on the lives of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza in the early 1990s, with flashbacks to 1948, the beginning of the first Intifada, and the first Gulf War; and Safe Area Gorazde, which describes his experiences in Bosnia in 1994-95. Palestine won an American Book Award, and has sold 30,000 copies in the UK alone (this is a huge figure for a comic book, let alone a political comic book).

“With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco,” wrote Edward Said in his foreword to the complete edition of Palestine (it was originally published as a series of nine comics). Safe Area Gorazde, following ecstatic reviews in which Sacco was named Art Spiegelman’s heir apparent and tipped to win a Pulitzer, won the 2001 Eisner Award for best original graphic novel. 

Footnotes in Gaza, his new book and his first long narrative for six years, returns Sacco to Palestine and, being rooted as much in the past as in the present, is perhaps his most ambitious work to date. But why go back? Aren’t there plenty of crises to report elsewhere?

He shrugs. All he knows is that, a few years ago, he felt a fresh “compulsion” to write about Gaza; events in the territory had left him feeling “agitated”. So in 2001, he and journalist Chris Hedges travelled there on assignment for Harper’s magazine. The idea was that they would go to one city and focus on its history alone. Sacco suggested Khan Younis. In the back of his mind, he dimly remembered something he had read in Noam Chomsky’s book, The Fateful Triangle, about an incident during the Suez crisis in 1956 in which a large number of Palestinian refugees were killed by Israeli soldiers.

“We asked around, people confirmed the story, and we thought it important for the history of the town,” says Sacco. “But when Chris’s piece was published, they cut Khan Younis out. Well, that further agitated me. I know the big picture is important but the big picture is made up of a lot of smaller things. It’s a shame when those things get lost. It seems… unfair. I wanted to look at it myself. According to the UN, 275 people died in Khan Younis: why did that figure deserve to return to obscurity?” 

In 2003, he went back. But once there, Sacco found himself becoming increasingly interested in another incident that had occurred around the same time – November 1956 – in the neighbouring town of Rafah. According to a couple of sentences in a UN report, scores of Palestinian civilians had also been shot by Israeli forces there during a procedure that should have been standard (the Israeli soldiers were screening Rafah’s men in the hope of finding terrorists). Sacco wanted to know what had happened. Had the Israelis, as the UN report surmised, simply “panicked and opened fire on the running crowd”? Or was it more complicated than that?

Moreover, what effect had this incident had on the collective memory of Rafah, now once again in brutal conflict with the Israeli army?

In Rafah, almost all men of military age had reputedly been caught up in the incident so there were likely to be survivors still living whom he could interview at length. As a result, Footnotes in Gaza is divided in two. A first, shorter section investigates the killings at Khan Younis, and a second, longer section is devoted to events in Rafah.

“Both towns stand in for all those places, all those things, that are more widely left out of history. They’re footnotes, but these were also an important day in some people’s lives.”

Footnotes in Gaza features all Sacco’s trademarks. For a start, there is the author himself, one minute infuriated beyond all endurance by checkpoint bureaucracy, the next delightedly scoffing honeyed Arab pastries; unlike many reporters, Sacco is as interested in the process of getting the story as in the story itself, a fact which only serves to remind you of how highly filtered and polished most “news” is.

Then there are the people he meets. Sacco’s ear for the way Palestinian men talk is as sharp as ever (as Edward Said has put it, they exchange their tales of suffering the way fishermen compare the size of their catch). Ditto his nose for lies and embellishments. As usual, his fixer – this time, his right-hand man is called Abed – takes a starring role, his tenacity seeming to surprise even his employer at times. Best of all, there are the moments when Sacco covers a page with one or two large frames, these bigger, more panoramic drawings capturing not only the claustrophobic scrum of a single, 21st-century Rafah street, from aerials on corrugated tin roofs down, but also the way it might have looked when Palestinian refugees arrived there in 1948 (he used old photographs as the basis for these drawings and has rendered the land dry, empty and bleakly forbidding). 

But Footnotes is also a darker, less humorous book than Palestine; Sacco calls it “sombre”. It’s not only that the old men and women he interviews are describing such painful events. Footnotes is punctuated by a sense of history repeating itself or,  perhaps, of history failing ever to stop, not even for the merest breather. As someone in Gaza tells Sacco: “Events are continuous.”

You look at his drawings of hundreds of men sitting in a pen one day in 1956, under armed guard, no food, no water, their hands on their heads, and you could be looking at an equivalent atrocity at almost any time before or since, and in any number of places. “There are only so many ways you can skin a cat when it comes to screening people so you can kill them,” says Sacco. “It was a horrific incident in and of itself but it is also representative of any number of other incidents, even if I’m reluctant to make direct comparisons myself.”

Meanwhile, life in present-day Gaza grinds on. We see Sacco and his room-mate, Abed, listening to mortar fire, braving the curfew (the book is set before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza) and witnessing the demolition of homes. The book is haunted by a ghostly presence called Khaled, a man wanted by the Israelis. Always on the move, he has not had a proper night’s sleep for several years. In Sacco’s drawings, Khaled’s features – his hawkish nose and long chin – cast impossibly long shadows over the rest of his face, leaving the reader unnervingly unsure whether he is to be feared or pitied. 

Joe Sacco was born in Malta in 1960. His family emigrated, first to Australia and then, finally, to America when he was just a boy; his parents, who were socialists, were worried about the influence of the Catholic church on Maltese life. Sacco believes that the experiences of his parents had a big impact on his career. “In Australia, there were a lot of Europeans and they would all meet up and the commonality was the war. You heard a lot about it. I guess I realised conflict was just a part of life.”

He decided to be a reporter and did a journalism degree at the University of Oregon (he still lives in Portland). His early jobs, however, were so indescribably boring – he worked initially for the journal of the National Notary Association – that he soon decided he’d be better off working for himself. First, he set up his own comics magazine. Later, he had a staff job on the Comics Journal. As far as his own drawing and writing goes, his influences include George Orwell and  – this makes such perfect sense – Bruegel. 

It was in the early 1990s, while he was living in Berlin, that he became interested in the Middle East. “I didn’t have some grand plan. I just felt like I needed to go there and see for myself. It’s so under-reported in America. At the time, I was trying to make a living as a cartoonist. I thought to myself: I can’t just be some adventure tourist but maybe it is conceivable that I could do a comic about it. But I didn’t even know if I would have the guts to go into the West Bank! This is how naive I was: I was bumbling around in East Jerusalem for a few days and I met a tourist who’d been to Nablus in a taxi. Oh, I thought: I could just get a taxi! I was pretty sheepish about telling people what I was doing. If I met a journalist or someone from an NGO, I was always afraid they would laugh – and one or two did.”

Did he seriously believe he could make a living from this kind of work? “I’ll be honest. I thought it was commercial suicide, writing about Palestine. I was cutting my own throat! It came out in nine issues and each one sold progressively worse. The last one sold under 2,000 copies in the US. That’s when I thought: OK, I really made a mistake. When I did the next book [Safe Area Gorazde], I decided to do it as a single volume, simply so I wouldn’t get demoralised as I went along.”

It was Safe Area Gorazde that changed his fortunes. “Most American journalists agreed with my position on Bosnia and it was incredibly warmly received. The New York Times named it a notable book of the year and I received a Guggenheim fellowship, which really helped me financially. So when Palestine came out in a single volume, it had a new life. It sold 60,000 copies in America and it was widely translated. It has long since outsold Safe Area Gorazde. I think it’ll be the book I’m remembered for.” 

In the years since, Sacco has published several more tales from Bosnia, among them the brilliant The Fixer: A Story From Sarajevo, and he has reported from Iraq and Ingushetia for newspapers and magazines. He is now at work on two projects: a 48-page comic for the Virginia Quarterly Review about African migrants who attempt to get into Europe via Malta, and a story for Harper’s about Camden, New Jersey, currently the poorest city in the US.

When he’s not travelling, he treats his work “exactly like a proper job… I have to: Footnotes in Gaza took me four years. I have to produce at a certain rate and stick to a rigid two pages every five days. I don’t story-board. I hardly even sketch anything out. I draw directly on to the board with my pencil. It’s all hand-drawn. If I make a mistake, I cut out the panel and cut and paste the old-fashioned way”. 

Nevertheless, he is often away from home for long periods. In his books, he sometimes depicts himself gazing dreamily at a pretty girl in a bar. Has his career played havoc with his private life? “It played havoc with my life until I was almost 40. I have a girlfriend now and a mortgage, which feels pretty odd, but for about a 10-year period I was just so broke. I had to ask friends and my parents for money. It’s difficult to have a personal life when you’re broke because you can’t afford to go out, and it isn’t that attractive, either; people get fed up pretty quickly.” 

It seems to me, though, that Sacco must be quite tough; even when things are at their most difficult in Gaza or Bosnia, they never really seem to get him down. “Well, I know I’m going to leave,” he says. “If I knew I was trapped the way people in Gaza are trapped, their lives simply closed down, maybe I would go insane. That’s not to say that my stomach doesn’t get a little twisted up as I’m going in and as I’m leaving. I love Gaza. I wouldn’t say I see physical beauty in it. It’s more to do with its people and my experiences with them: that physical closeness that you can’t really avoid. Things are so hard there but – wow! – they always feed me the most amazing food.” Still, for the “sake of my own sanity” he is planning on stepping away from war reporting in the near future. He is planning a graphic memoir about the Rolling Stones. 

Will he one day return to Gaza for a third time? Or perhaps he could look at the conflict from Sderot or some other town on the Israeli side. “It depends on what I feel in my gut. There are lots of places in the world where things are pretty bad. When I read about them, though, I have to wait for the story to work on me. With Bosnia, it took a full year for that to happen. But I do feel Palestinians have been misrepresented in the America media over a long time; we’ve internalised all sorts of things about them.

“With Footnotes, I want people to appreciate the lost molecules of conflict: the details and sideshows that only exist until the people who remember them die. But I also want them to remember, when they’re watching the news, that it comes to them out of context and that history always comes back to haunt you. An incident can resonate for a whole century or even longer.”

As he considers the weight of all those years, his eyes narrow and I think to myself how good it is to be able to see them at last. 

Nabokov’s incomplete last novel shows flashes of brilliance, but why it was published remains unclear, says William Skidelsky

This is a book that wouldn’t exist if its author had had his way. Shortly before his death in 1977, Vladimir Nabokov instructed his wife, Vera, that she should destroy the novel he’d been working on if he didn’t live to complete it. When, having spent the rest of her life procrastinating, Vera died in 1991, responsibility for the unfinished manuscript devolved to the couple’s son, Dmitri. He too spent many years fretting before deciding, in his seventies, to go against his father’s wishes and publish the book. This undeniably handsome – but also problematic – volume is the result.

Nabokov drafted his novels in pencil on index cards before handing them over to a secretary to type up. In order to reflect The Original of Laura’s embryonic nature, the publishers have reproduced all 138 written-on cards, setting each in its own right-hand page, with the text running in type below. They have come up with the further ingenious trick (or gimmick, depending on how you look at it) of giving the cards perforated edges. This means that the reader can, if so inclined, detach them from the pages and rearrange them in his or her preferred order.

Actually, though, you’d only conceivably want to do this with around half the cards, because the first 60 or so are clearly in the right order. They tell a coherent story which suddenly breaks off and the remaining cards are little more than a collection of jottings. Presumably, some of these would have found their way into the completed novel, but many others would have been discarded. This is why the phrase “A novel in fragments”, which is how the publishers have chosen to describe The Original of Laura, is slightly misleading. The book is actually a completed draft of roughly half of a (very slim) novel and a series of notes towards the rest.

In his introduction, Dmitri Nabokov describes the work as an “embryonic masterpiece”. Is it? Well, it certainly is in many respects a fascinating document. At first, the story centres on an affair between an unnamed “man of letters” and a nubile 24-year-old with “squinty nipples” called Flora. This is hardly new territory for Nabokov, but he gives it a clever twist: the story he is telling emerges as only the “original”, or raw material, of a novel that has subsequently been written about the affair, in which Flora’s name has been changed to “Laura”. The narrator informs us that this other book, My Laura, “was begun very soon after the end of the love affair it depicts, was completed in one year, published three months later, and promptly torn apart by a book reviewer in a leading newspaper”. He notes that it went on to become a bestseller.

What we are being presented with, then, is a kind of literary conjuring trick. We are invited to believe that we are reading not a made-up story but a slice of real life, before it was brushed up, elaborated upon and turned into fiction. Only, of course, this is nonsense, because the work that we are reading is also a fiction, itself presumably based upon some other “original” whose nature we can only guess at. The book thus poses a chain of “originals” and duplicates, potentially stretching into infinity. If Flora is the original of Laura, who is the original of Flora?

There is something rather brilliant about this idea, which is at once simple and dizzying, as postmodern conceits should be. And Nabokov pulls it off with the nonchalance of someone tossing a ball in the air. It seems likely that, had Nabokov finished it, The Original of Laura would indeed have been an important work, if not necessarily a masterpiece.

Yet the problem is that he didn’t finish it and, in fact, he was a long way from doing so. About halfway through the book, it seems that Nabokov ran into creative difficulties, because the initial narrative breaks off and the text mutates into something different: the agonised internal monologue of Flora’s fat neurologist husband, Philip Wild, who, we gather, suffers from unbearably sore feet. (Nabokov, at this time, also suffered from recurring foot pains, in addition to the bronchial illness that eventually killed him.)

Wild, we learn, has a recurring fantasy of “self-deletion”: he imagines himself as a stick drawing on a blackboard, which he then begins rubbing out, from his painful feet upwards, a process that brings him “ecstatic relief”. Once again, this is an interesting idea, but it is hard to see how, in the context of this novel, it could have been fully realised. Wild’s fractured monologue doesn’t easily slot into the story that Nabokov has thus far been telling; it is almost as if it belongs to another book.

There are other things to appreciate about The Original of Laura. The style is not vintage Nabokov (he was by this point in sharp decline), but there are some nice touches. A pre-coital Laura locates a pair of morocco slippers that are “foetally folded into their zippered pouch”, an image that manages to be both sweet and faintly obscene. And Nabokov’s ornate vocabulary is predictably fun, especially when applied to body parts. Referring to Flora’s naked back, Nabokov writes of the “mobile omoplates of a child being tubbed”, which, again, is creepily delicious.

Further entertainment is provided by Dmitri Nabokov’s pompous, atrociously written introduction. Having laboured all his life in the long shadow cast by his father, Dmitri is clearly determined to make the most of his minute in the spotlight. He casts himself as a latterday Max Brod, charged with a decision of monumental importance whose consequences will reverberate through literary history.

For a man with such an obvious inferiority complex, his tone is remarkably haughty. He harps on about the “lesser minds” and “individuals of limited imagination” who have presumed to conjecture about Nabokov’s true wishes in relation to the manuscript. Yet he reveals his own literary ignorance by having an absurd pop at Henry Miller, whose Parisian publisher, he grudgingly notes, Nabokov was forced to share – the indignity! – when Lolita was rejected in America. The thing that you really want Dmitri to provide – an honest account of his reasons for publishing The Original of Laura – is missing. Instead, he takes refuge in windy evasions, telling us that he was guided in his preservation of the manuscript “not by playfulness or calculation, but by an otherforce I could not resist” – whatever that means.

He also doesn’t say anything about money, which is surely no accident. It seems likely that this book will have a more significant impact on the size of Dmitri Nabokov’s bank balance than it ever will on the world of letters.