Books of the year

Bowie and Sinatra, Picasso and Matisse, Napoleon and Hitler, the Marquis de Sade and ... Kenneth Starr? Independent writers and guest contributo rs choose the books that have given them most pleasure in 1998

Geoff Dyer

Novelist and critic

Before reading Sir Vidia's Shadow (Hamish Hamilton), I was not a fan of Paul Theroux, but this instantly notorious memoir of his friendship with VS Naipaul was a wonderfully belated introduction to his talent. Theroux's portrait of a writer - and, on the basis of this testimony, a thoroughly loathsome human being - is as vivid as any ever written. This loathsomeness has come to contaminate Naipaul's own writing, but perhaps the highest compliment we can pay Theroux is that the Vidia of these pages is as powerfully realised as a character in the latter's best fiction. I've long been an admirer of Lorrie Moore; her Birds of America (Faber) is an exquisite collection of stories by a writer at the peak of her form.

Rick Stein

Restaurateur

Ever since I read Beautiful Swimmers: watermen, crabs and Chesapeake Bay by William W Warner (Little, Brown, US), I've had a thirst for books which make the business of fishing more than just a passing interest. Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm (Fourth Estate) also did that, but none more successfully than Cod: a biography of the fish that changed the world by Mark Kurlansky (Cape). The incredible importance of cod in the economic development of North America, coupled with the startling fact that the Basques were already fishing the Grand Banks when Columbus "discovered America", makes for intriguing reading. Covering the general demise of fish stocks, the book is disturbing and moving. I read a review of Namedropper by Emma Forrest (Arrow) while on the way to London for a fish meeting. I set myself the task of reading it from the point of view of how someone of 51 could be interested in the angst of an 18- year-old character and a 21-year-old author, but the book is a complete delight. It shows to me that growing older doesn't mean a thing.

Carole Angier

Biographer and critic

This has been such a good year for biography that I cannot name all my choices. At the top, though, comes Hilary Spurling's The Unknown Matisse (Chatto), a book which will defy the dictum that books cannot change the world. Together with its future second volume, it will change 20th-century art history, and therefore 20th-century history. Two other splendid combinations of biographer and subject are Richard Holmes's second volume, Coleridge: darker visions (HarperCollins), well worth the wait, and Michael Ignatieff's Isaiah Berlin (Chatto). And for sheer beauty, as well as melancholy, W G Sebald's meditation on art, history and isolation, The Rings of Saturn (Harvill).

Charlotte Cory

Novelist

1998 was the year I went interactive, so my first "book" choice is Ceremony of Innocence, a CD-rom extravaganza based on the mysterious correspondence of Griffin and Sabine by Nick Bantock. The funniest book by far this year has been Clinton: The Starr Report (Orion). Those of us who trade in fictions could never compete. Nor will pizza ever taste the same again! Far more intriguing sex and scandal is to be found in Graham Rawle's Diary of an Amateur Photographer (Picador), a whacky collage of a book about a nerdish glamour photographer. A beautiful book of photographs, Irish Houses and Gardens by Sean O'Reilly (Aurum Press), taken from the archives of Country Life, had me crossing the Irish Sea a few weeks ago. It's a mesmerising record of faded grandeur. Finally, I have re-read all 91 of Somerset Maugham's stories and concluded that he was a complete genius. His stories about colonial life in the Far East are especially haunting.

Emma Hagestadt

Critic

A good year for transatlantic stalwarts. Annie Proulx's Christmas stocking- sized novella Brokeback Mountain (Fourth Estate) is a near- perfect hymn to life on the open range. Carol Shields's Larry's Party (Fourth Estate) winningly explored the interior of life of the menopausal male. The Last Resort (Chatto), Alison Lurie's first novel for 10 years, is a wonderfully waspish account of how a couple of ageing academics abandon their fir-green dressing gowns for a winter break in Florida's Key West. British novelists can take a spikier view of relationships. Particularly entertaining paperback reads included Liz Jensen's Ark Baby (Bloomsbury) - ape man meets Northumbrian slappers - and Lesley Glaister's puckish novel of fathers and daughters (and other lovers), Easy Peasy (Bloomsbury). As respite from wanabee Bridgets, singletons got real in Mavis Cheek's Getting Back Brahms (Faber) and Stella Duffy's Singling Out the Couples (Sceptre).

Ruth Padel

Poet

Poetry's rollercoaster year (see Birthday Letters and the Laureate's death) has continued to the blackly bitter end. OUP brought out one of the year's best new collections in the very week its management betrayed Oxford's own history, demonstrating academe's increasing isolation from creativity, and extinguished one of the best poetry lists in the country. In My Life Asleep, Jo Shapcott, one of the jewels in OUP's disgraced crown, mixes meditations on identity with mischievous lyrics in weird voices, and love poems based on Rilke's "Roses". Shapcott's "roses", an erotic bunch of lyrically strong-minded vaginas, talk back to men: I wish they'd have a go at OUP's treacherous Finance Committee. In his wonderful Selected Poems, Michael Longley, a diamond in Cape's poetry crown, gathers 30 years of poems about love, nature, war and death. His unique lyric voice is always alert to the wary life of the past in the present (Homer's Troy in war-shattered Belfast), and shy animal life in the meadowsweet of a darkened Northern field.

Roger Clarke

Critic

Philip Hensher's Pleasured (Chatto) did just that: a sublimely structured and sophisticated novel set in 1988 Berlin in which Hensher cleverly conflates the drug culture of the Summer of Love and the imminent demise of Checkpoint Charlie. Ian McEwan with a sense of humour - yikes, there's no stopping this man. I also felt Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma (Flamingo) was finally far more the work of a novelist than of a pop-culture critic. It shows a new maturity in the grizzled Gen-Xer. John Waters' Director's Cut (Scalo) proved to be a fabulous treat, a photo- montage from the director of Pink Flamingos, full of visual quirks, gags and chucklesome electronic hysteria.

John Sutherland

Professor of English, UCL

There are so many books published in the Nineties that good books get buried under the bad. The mathematics are simple: 2,000 titles (on average) are published every week, with around 50 reviewed in a paper such as The Independent. For me, the three best books of the year are: (1) The Baltimore Case by Daniel J Kevles (Norton). This is not, as may seem, a work of American urban history. David Baltimore was the Nobel Prize-winning biologist caught in a Kafkaesque process in which he was (falsely) accused of the most heinous of modern crimes - sexism. His career was practically ruined. Adrian Johns's The Nature of the Book (Chicago) is, in my view, the most lucid and persuasive account of the new kind of knowledge produced by print in its genesis period, the 16th and 17th centuries. A work to rank alongside McLuhan. Alison Winter's Mesmerized: mind and authority in Victorian Britain (Chicago) respectfully examines mesmerism as science, not pseudo-science or the bastardised Uri Geller performances associated with the term. A landmark in the history of science scholarship.

Orlando Figes

Historian

A good year for military history. Antony Beevor's Stalingrad (Viking) is well researched and very readable. Richard Overy's Russia's War (Allen Lane) is a more than useful complement. Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War (Allen Lane) is a very clever piece of revisionist scholarship on the First World War, even if it only half persuades. I also much admired Mark Mazower's Dark Continent (Allen Lane), a series of essays on 20th-century Europe that enlighten and disturb. For thrills, I recommend Robert Harris's Archangel (Hutchinson).

Lisa Appignanesi

Novelist and critic

Daniel Menaker's novel The Treatment (Faber) gave me great pleasure. Not only is it a wise, witty and beautifully crafted coming-of-age book, but it features the best and most outrageous shrink in the post-Freudian canon. Marina Warner's No Go the Bogeyman (Chatto) is a rich feast of a volume. No one knows more about the myths, tales and large dollops of art and popular culture which go into the shaping of our imagination. She subtly teases out the uses we make of fear in a salutary study for our terror-stricken and horror-mongering turn of the millenium. Finally, the love and knowledge Malcolm Bowie demonstrates in Proust Among the Stars (HarperCollins) makes this the book for existing and would-be buffs.

Laurie Taylor

Sociologist and broadcaster

It is a devastating comment upon the insular nature of contemporary sociology that there have been so few critical analyses of the effect upon our personal and social lives of the new information age and its changing patterns of work. But just when you thought that there was no effective antidote to the unholy up-beat alliance of management theorists and technological determinists, along comes Richard Sennett's magnificent examination of the downside of this brave new world of flexibility and risk, The Corrosion of Character: the personal consequences of work in the new capitalism (Norton). Those with a little time left over from their increasingly hectic working lives will find comfort in the gentle insights about human nature which pervade Yi-Fu Tuan's Escapism (Johns Hopkins), and even the exceptionally busy should be able to find the few minutes necessary to snatch some consolatory advice from Celia Haddon's astute collection of aphorisms, One Hundred Ways to Serenity (Hodder).

Hilary Mantel

Novelist

Question: can publishers feel shame? David Caute had to set up the Totterdown Press to self-publish his provocative, scathing, and gruesomely funny novel Fatima's Scarf. Hovering on a magical prayer-mat somewhere between Bradford and Cairo, this spirited narrative of the clash of Islamic and Western values subverts our pieties about the Rushdie affair, and ambushes the unwary reader at every turn. The first paragraph alone has more energy and edge than the whole output of many of our accepted wits. Give it to your friends as a compliment to their intelligence. Another wit, upsetting and anarchic, is Grace Ingoldby, whose Bring Out Your Dead (Peter Owen) I nominate as this year's most underestimated novel. Ingoldby is a stylist and an ironist: a true original.

Christopher Hope

Novelist

Victoria Glendinning's Swift (Hutchinson) gives a splendid likeness to the great gloomy Dean - sharp and sympathetic. She shows Jonathan Swift as lonely, frantic and horribly funny; a mixture of sadness and vituperation, with some very odd ideas about women. All the things that did the damage - and also made him great. Justin Cartwright's Leading the Cheers (Sceptre) is a novel about going home to America - and finding the place haunted by ghosts of yourself and your friends when young, along with the Redskin ghosts who haunt American prosperity. It is funny and tender and does the essential thing: it speaks for the dead. Fatima's Scarf by David Caute (Totterdown Press) is a terrific novel . A tale of everyday bigotry in the heart of England, it scared off every publisher who saw it and so Caute published it himself. It takes in the Rushdie affair, Asian values and Western hypocrisy in an outrageous attack on self-importance, bores and book-burners.

John Walsh

Writer

My big Christmas immersion will be in the second volume of Richard Holmes's matchless revivification of Coleridge, Darker Visions (HarperCollins), but the biography I most enjoyed in 1998 was Mark Amory's Lord Berners: the last eccentric (Chatto), less for the portrait of the polymorphously silly Gerald Tyrwhitt than the more generally farcical Sitwells-and-Firbank ambience of literary England between the wars. For similar reasons, I loved Paul Theroux's wickedly total recall of VS Naipaul's snobbery, petulance and vainglory through three decades of peculiar "friendship" in Sir Vidia's Shadow (Hamish Hamilton). In a disappointing year for fiction, in which Ian McEwan's otherwise delightful Amsterdam (Cape) was spoiled by its awful O Henry-ish ending, the most accomplished debut was Giles Foden's The Last King of Scotland (Faber), a vivid evocation of Seventies Uganda and the "naked visceral attraction" a terrible dictator could hold for a Western liberal doctor. And Barney Hoskyns's brief, sparkling Glam!: Bowie, Bolan and the Glitter Rock Revolution (Faber) reminded us precisely why, 25 years ago, we all drew gold circles on our foreheads and pretended to be bisexual.

Michael Arditti

Novelist and critic

While publishers fight to sign ever younger, sexier and more modish writers, the finest novels to have come my way this year have been by three veterans: David Storey's A Serious Man (Cape), at once a fascinating summation of a life's work, a searing account of mental fragility, and a ringing endorsement of the power of art; Maureen Duffy's Restitution (Fourth Estate), an intensely thought-provoking exploration of national and personal identity with persuasive portraits of life in modern London and wartime Berlin; and Susan Hill's The Service of Clouds (Chatto), a quietly passionate study of family tragedy written in luminous, impressionistic prose.

Aamer Hussein

Critic

Mimi Khalvati's long poem Entries on Light (Carcanet) comes first. Shimmering fragments of subjectivity and sweeping visions of the lived landscapes of language, love and loss, coalesce. Reviewers heralded the glory of short fiction; Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain (Fourth Estate) and AS Byatt's Elementals (Chatto) bore them out, but I'll go for my neighbourhood and the underrated Carlo Gebler's W9 and Other Lives (Marion Boyars): this man, like Pritchett and Trevor, really has the knack. Novels I recommend: Gebler's How to Murder a Man (Little, Brown), a drama of love, revenge, and justice in rural Ireland; Christa Wolf's re-take on the Greeks, Medea (Virago). Two fine debuts: Rabih Alameddina's Koolaids (Abacus), a reflection on civil war, art and disease; James Bradley's Wrack (Review), a re-imagining of Australian histories. Reprint: Sara Suleri's exquisite memoir Meatless Days (Flamingo).

Pete Davies

Writer on sport

Every night when we finished another chapter, my children - Joe, 8, and Megan, 5 - howled for more. Carol Hughes's Jack Black And The Ship Of Thieves (Bloomsbury) is a glorious adventure story, like Jules Verne recast by Terry Gilliam, and we all loved it. John M Barry's Rising Tide (Touchstone) is an enthralling history of the great Mississippi flood of 1926. Pitting awesome natural forces against heroic engineers and a corrupted social order, Barry's book has an epic power and scale. The best thriller of the year was James Lee Burke's Sunset Limited (Orion), and the best football book, by a country mile, was Alyson Rudd's achingly funny Astroturf Blonde (Headline).

Charles Nicholl

Travel writer

The unexpected pleasure of the year was Neil Parsons's King Khama, Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen (University of Chicago Press), a meticulous reconstruction of a journey through England in 1895 by three African chiefs from Bechuanaland (now Botswana), seeking sympathy and support against the incursions of Cecil Rhodes. Given the vast literature of Victorian travel in Africa, it is refreshing to see it all the other way round. The story is beautifully told: sometimes poignant, sometimes comic, ultimately heartening. Less unexpected was the excellence of James Hamilton-Paterson's reissued Playing with Water (Granta). Written in his characteristically terse yet shimmering prose, the book seamlessly weaves together an account of his sojourn on an uninhabited Philippine island, and a memoir of his post-war British childhood.

Beryl Bainbridge

Novelist

In the last 12 months I've read more newly published books than in as many years, mainly because I've spent a lot of time on trains. The ones that gave me the most pleasure in terms of excellence of writing, plot and sheer readability were AN Wilson's Dream Children (Murray), Paul Bailey's Kitty and Virgil (Fourth Estate), and Amanda Foreman's Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (HarperCollins). Lastly (I only bought it two days ago), Ethel and Ernest (Cape), a subtle and affectionate memoir in words and pictures of his parents by Raymond Briggs, surely the only chap capable of bridging without strain the credibility gap between adult and child. I hate talking about worst books. Ranulph Fiennes Fit For Life (Little, Brown) isn't bad in itself, but just goes on about how to be healthy. No ciggies, no chips, no alcohol... He doesn't mention that of the five in 1912 who perished on their way back from the South Pole, Taff Evans liked his drink, Edward Wilson had TB yet smoked, as did Oates, Bowers and Scott. It was the weather that killed them, not a fatty diet or fags.

Duncan Fallowell

Travel writer

Elaine Feinstein's Pushkin (Weidenfeld) is exactly the same length as Robin Edmonds's biography of 1994, and has an identical cover, too. It supersedes it less on account of the new archive material (which relates largely to the man who killed Pushkin in a duel), and more because of Feinstein's greater poetic sensitivity. The authorised Lawrence Durrell (Faber) by Ian McNiven was dreadful, so thank goodness Gordon Bowker's unjustly neglected biography of 1996, Through the Dark Labyrinth, came out in paperback (Pimlico). The Guest From The Future (John Murray) by Gyorgy Dalos examines the famously brief and fateful meeting in St Petersburg between Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin. The book subtly gets it right: she is a major figure, he's a bit of a twit.

Tony O'Reilly

Chairman, Independent Newspapers plc

John Ehrman's massive work on Pitt the Younger has a harrowing final scene in which Pitt, on his death bed at 46, cries: "Oh that it were for England." He felt he had failed and that Napoleon's victories at Ulm and Austerlitz represented the triumph of France and the isolation of England. How wrong he was; how great his reputation is today. The chronicle of the next eight years leading to Waterloo is traced in Alistair Horne's extraordinary book How Far from Austerlitz? (Papermac). Horne combines a gripping eye for detail with provocative sources and objectivity. He leads you to the conclusion that although Napoleon could forge temporary alliances, particularly of a family nature, he could never make permanent friends. The end was inevitable, though punctuated by flashes of Napoleonic brilliance. Wellington's five-year Iberian campaign leads to Napoleon's penultimate defeat, his escape from Elba and the final battle with the Allies at "Quatre Bras", or Waterloo, as it will be forever called. Waterloo shaped the map of Europe for almost a century and Horne's wonderful book shows the reason why. When Napoleon died in 1821, in exile on a lonely rock in the South Atlantic, the ever-disloyal Talleyrand is quoted as saying: "It is no longer an event, it is only a piece of news."

Lachlan Mackinnon

Poet and critic

Two books of poems and a biography particularly stood out. One was Paul Muldoon's Hay (Faber), which showed how the poet's famous obliquity is now married to an occasional and startling emotional directness. Each book Muldoon publishes is conceived as a unit and becomes an event; the playful sadness of this one is engrossing. Andrew Motion's Selected Poems 1976-1997 (Faber) rewrites some poems for the sake of clarity; they are fascinating, but the book will bring to new readers a full sense of the limpid, very English note of sorrow with which this fine poet regards the world. Park Honan's very readable Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford) is excellent on background, consolidates our knowledge and prepares readers for the debate about Shakespeare's religion which is beginning to absorb Shakespeareans.

Peter Parker

Critic and biographer

The Warhol Look: glamour, style, fashion (Bullfinch Press), which was published to accompany the hugely enjoyable exhibition at the Barbican Centre, is not a catalogue, but an engrossing book in its own right. Warhol blurred both consumerism and art, and saw the genuinely radical drag-queen aesthetic of The Factory gradually becoming mainstream. Personally, I'd rather have the Joe Dallesandro from Trash than the one in the Calvin Klein ads, but this book celebrates both incarnations. Sumptuously produced, lavishly illustrated, this also proved to be the bargain of the year. I also had no idea what a good writer Gary Indiana was until I read Resentment (Quartet), a brilliantly observed panoramic novel set in Los Angeles during the Menendez Trial. The book makes demands on both the reader's patience and stomach, but it is also very funny indeed, and I found myself laughing and recoiling in equal measure.

Carol Birch

Novelist and critic

This year, The Life of Thomas More (Chatto) once again illustrates Peter Ackroyd's brilliant ability to conjure up another age. An incisive and spirited biographer, he catches the incredible diversity of More, the profound seriousness and endless humour. He conveys a world-view alien to ours without any taint of the patronising modern tendency to rewrite history in our own image. Hilary Mantel shows a similar ability in her novel The Giant, O'Brien (Fourth Estate), though here her depiction of Ireland and London in the 18th century has a decidedly mythical tang about it. Blending the Irish bardic tradition, the freak show and the uneasy co-dependence of grave-robber and anatomist, it compels from its misty Gaelic opening to its powerful end.

Shena Mackay

Novelist

I have read a great many books this year in the course of often pleasurable duty. Here are some I read purely for pleasure: Kitty and Virgil by Paul Bailey (Fourth Estate), Restitution by Maureen Duffy (Fourth Estate), Pleasured by Philip Hensher (Chatto), Trespass by DJ Taylor (Duckworth). These vastly different novels all evoke recent history, British and European, in enthralling narratives hallmarked with their authors' individual insight, humour and poignancy. The heartbreaking subject matter of Clive Sinclair's A Soap Opera From Hell (Picador), the deaths of his wife and other family members, is handled with grace. Even in describing his ordeals as a latter-day Job, Sinclair's sardonic humour is in play. Throughout an intellectually and geographically wide-ranging collection of essays, wisdom and humanity inform the sharp observations of a unique writer.

Gabriel Josipovici

Critic and novelist

Al Qahira moans "the victorious one" and in Cairo: The City Victorious (Picador), Max Rodenbeck has managed what, to my mind, even Jan Morris in her acclaimed Venice failed to do: to bring a city to life in all its sprawling, noisy, many-layered reality, and to convey the sense we get living there of a past impinging on the present; of a present in flux. One of the

world's great cities has at last found its portraitist and biographer. Timothy Hyman's Bonnard (Thames & Hudson) also rises triumphantly above its genre. Hyman is excellent on Bonnard's "life and times", but the real strength of the book lies in the fact that it is written by a painter and so manages to convey the feel of Bonnard's painterly struggles with each work, and of his painterly solutions. Finally, Aharon Appelfeld's The Iron Tracks (Schocken Books): not one of his very best, but still a cut above most fiction I read.

Carol Rumens

Poet

Consignments of visions and revisions were supplied by Richard Dawkins's Unweaving The Rainbow (Allen Lane) and Don Cupitt's After God (SCM Press). I plucked from an airport rack Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo (Vintage), and so began that happiest journey through a new and trustworthy imagination. In poetry, Ian Duhig's Nominies (Carcanet) was a particular delight. The most over-hyped book of 1998 was Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters (Faber).

DJ Taylor

Novelist and critic

Fifteen years in the making and almost embarrassingly lavish in scope, Peter Davison's monumental edition of George Orwell: The Complete Works (Secker, 20 volumes) made everything else look puny. But I liked Julian Earwaker and Kathleen Becker's meticulously arranged Literary Norfolk: An Illustrated Companion (Chapter Six), the excellence of whose critical forays belies its modest title. Violet Powell's memoir The Departure Platform (Heinemann) seemed more funny and less snobbish than certain critics alleged.

John Campbell

Biographer

In a field increasingly dominated by politicians' potboilers (Alan Clark, Roy Hattersley), some of the best contemporary history is being written by working journalists. Hugo Young's This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair (Macmillan) is thoroughly researched as well as vividly written, an unanswerable indictment of the failure of the whole political class over 50 years to confront Britain's future honestly. I have read three books about the Bard this year, but the one I was looking for was Park Honan's Shakespeare: a life (Oxford University Press), the most exhaustive, meticulous, usually scrupulous (though occasionally over-speculative) piecing together of the extraordinarily few known facts of Shakespeare's life. Fascinating detective work. Finally, Harry Thompson's Peter Cook: a life (Sceptre) is not your usual showbiz muckrake, but a real biography, the desperate story of a comic genius who could not maintain his early brilliance but was still one of the most influential figures of our time.

Penelope Lively

Novelist

I was surprised that William Trevor's Death in Summer (Viking) was not on the Booker shortlist. This novel is vintage Trevor - its spare accuracy such that the narrative sweeps you along, and only later do you become aware of the subtleties behind the text. It feels a strange, sad story that seems suspended in time; it could be now, or 40 years ago - and the construction is masterly. Barbara Trapido's The Travelling Hornplayer (Hamish Hamilton) looked like a Booker bet, too, so it's good to see that it is up for the Whitbread. She writes with such verve and originality and is also adept at construction, so that a formal framework gives timeless overtones to a cast of up-to-the-moment characters.

Frank McLynn

Historian

Surely there can never have been a better decade for biography. One keeps expecting the bubble to burst, but every year more and more first-rate lives appear. It is particularly invidious to have to select from 1998's embarrassment of riches, so the following are merely my favourites, rather than "the best", whatever that might mean. So: Smithy: the life of Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith by Ian Mackersey (Little, Brown), an exemplary study of a pioneer aviator; Lawrence: the uncrowned king of Arabia by Michael Asher (Viking), the apogee of the "footsteps" approach. Though not strictly speaking a biography, Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum (Macmillan) was more illuminating than the massively researched academic tomes the Fuhrer seems to attract.

J G Ballard

Novelist

Lindbergh by A Scott Berg (Macmillan) was the best biography I read this year, an enthralling account of this heroic but flawed man who made the first solo flight across the Atlantic but stumbled when his feet touched the ground. A shy, publicity-hating loner, Lindbergh was unable to cope with his immense fame, and became a pro-Nazi sym- pathiser. A uniquely 20th- century tragedy. I read two highly enjoyable film books, Beneath Mulholland: thoughts on Hollywood and its ghosts, by David Thomson (Little, Brown), is a collection of essays, stories and speculations by one of the best film critics working today, the purest distillation of the Hollywood dream. The Birds by Camille Paglia (British Film Institute) is a mythographic analysis of Hitchcock's film, written with all Paglia's energy and intellectual sweep. Hugely entertaining.

Miranda Seymour

Biographer and novelist

I'd like to give everybody copies of Beryl Bainbridge's best novel for years, Master Georgie (Duckworth) and of AS Byatt's delectable feast for the mind and the imagination in her short stories, Elementals (Chatto). Biography lovers would get Richard Holmes's Coleridge (HarperCollins, both volumes), Kathryn Hughes's magnificent biography of George Eliot: the last Victorian (Fourth Estate), Jane Dunn's fine Antonia White (Chatto), Michael Ignatieff's witty, sensitive, self-effacing life of Isaiah Berlin (Chatto) plus the first volume of Hilary Spurling's superb life of The Unknown Matisse (Hamish Hamilton). No marks to Sebastian Faulks's publishers for trying to ensure his novel a place on Christmas lists by sending out copies to contributors with the expressed hope that we would mention it. It's not his best book, but it didn't deserve this. Nor, certainly, did he.

Andrew Davies

Novelist and TV writer

A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler (Chatto) - a richly pleasurable read, weaving extraordinary patterns out of apparently ordinary lives. If you've never read this author, start now, and if you like this one, there are plenty more, all good. This one might make a good movie of the quiet and delicate sort (nudge, nudge). Trollope's The Way We Live Now (Penguin or OUP) was a surprise, a dark and savage picture of the human jungle, with Melmotte the biggest beast, strongly resembling Robert Maxwell. My next year's project for adaptation. And Sue Kreitzman's Complete Low-Fat Cookery (Piatkus): original but sound ideas, strong bright flavours, and it seems to do the business. I've lost over a stone. Mind you, I did knock off the booze as well.

Jan Morris

Travel writer

I shall remember three books in particular for giving me unexpected pleasure in 1998 - two of them new, one of them old. The Evolution of the Grand Tour (Frank Cass) is by Professor Edward Chaney of the Southampton Institute and I fell for its irresistible enthusiasm. Chaney has a profound scholarly knowledge of Anglo-Italian historical relationships, but he is also a writer full of surprise and discursive curiosity, and I found this compilation of his writings a most beguiling delight. Francine du Plessix Gray's At Home with the Marquis de Sade (Chatto, February 1999) surprised me too, because it left me rather fond of the old pornographer. I knew very little about the women in his life, who sometimes remained astonishingly loyal through all his degradations, and (a bit late in the day, I know) for the first time I saw him as a libertine far more sinned against than sinning. Those were my two new books. My old one was Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (Penguin or OUP).

Anthony Beevor

Historian

Alexandra Richie's history of Berlin, Faust's Metropolis (HarperCollins), is everything one could want from such a book. Berlin is a fascinating subject, and Richie's study is balanced, scholarly, well-written and never dull. The weight is in the physical mass of the book - nearly 1,200 pages - not the reading. She has a wonderful eye for detail and, most important of all in a story which stretches from the time of Charlemagne to today, a grasp of the essential. I very much doubt that it will ever be equalled, let alone surpassed. Amanda Foreman's Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (HarperCollins) is a startlingly impressive debut. Georgiana, born a Spencer and rising to become a fashion star, led what is now called a dysfunctional existence. Foreman wisely avoids any obvious modern parallels. Instead, she combines scholarly and imaginative research with an enviable prose and well-paced storytelling. It is not surprising that the book has enjoyed such a success.

Deborah Moggach

Novelist

My greatest treat this year has been a new collection of stories by the always miraculous Lorrie Moore, Birds of America (Faber). Filled with both larkiness and despair, they are pure bliss. It's been a strong year for novels, a fact largely unreflected in the Booker shortlist. For the Whitbread prize, we had to read 55 novels and, apart from our own shortlisted books, I admired many more. Among them was Shena Mackay's The Artist's Widow (Cape): wonderfully astute about old age and callow youth, as it casts a beady eye over current artistic pretensions. I caught up with Jane Hamilton's A Map of the World (Bloomsbury) and two hugely enjoyable works of non-fiction, Simon Schama's Embarrassment of Riches (HarperCollins) and Jenny Uglow's Hogarth (Faber).

Mary Allen

Arts executive

My two favourite books of this year have both been non-fiction. The best travel writing goes beyond descriptions of places and events. The Happy Ant-Heap by Norman Lewis (Cape) consists of around 20 short stories, spanning four continents and 70 years. Each individual episode or character - visiting a smoked ancestor in New Guinea, or eating aphrodisiacs in Cuba - encapsulates a way of life, and Norman Lewis observes these lives with a dry humour that makes his accounts of disappearing civilisations all the more moving. My other favourite book is about cooking. As a fervent eater, and an enthusiastic but indifferent cook, I found Nigella Lawson's How to Eat (Chatto) a gloriously sensual wander through the possibilities of food. This book goes far beyond being a collection of recipes: ingredients are discussed, different approaches pondered, and some of the recipes read more like seduction than instruction. Not just a book for the kitchen.

Christopher Hirst

Critic

It's been a good year for armchair salts. A book virtually baked with rime, The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger (Fourth Estate) is an instant maritime classic. So, in its finny way, is Cod: a biography of the fish that changed the world by Mark Kurlansky (Cape). Down with the Old Canoe by Steven Biel (Norton) is an absorbing account of how the Titanic has repeatedly re-surfaced as a metaphor. Back on dry land, Picture by Lillian Ross (Faber), about John Huston's butchered film of The Red Badge of Courage in 1949, is a wonder- fully droll, dazzlingly observed classic of New Yorker journalism. Sadly, Here But Not Here (Faber), Ross's account of her secret life with that magazine's editor, William Shawn, turned out to be a soggy cri-de-coeur. Half in love with their finger-popping style, half disgusted by their Vegas hedonism, Shawn Levy's Rat Pack Confidential (Fourth Estate) is as sharp and knowing as Frank Sinatra's smile.

Gordon Burn

Novelist/true crime writer

Probably the most inventive book I read this year was Billy Kluver's A Day With Picasso (MIT Press), which combines forensic thoroughness, scientific method and art history in a most strange and compelling way. Kluver's starting point is a set of 24 photographs which, by going to indefatigable lengths of on-the-spot measure and sleuthing, he establishes were taken on the afternoon of 12 August 1916 in Paris by Jean Cocteau, less than two weeks after Cocteau returned from fighting on the Somme. The photographs focus on Picasso as a central figure in the cafe life of Montparnasse, not yet monumental, and still in the process of inventing himself. Amplified by Kluver's obsessively detailed text, they represent a heroic feat of reconstruction which recreates the period better than many very much longer books. I won't be alone in picking Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes, but I pick it anyway on the basis that it is the one book I have been reading all year and know I will go on reading into the future.

Boyd Tonkin

Independent literary editor,

The Pritchett Century (Chatto) sampled some of the highlights from matchless Sir Victor's 60-year career in fiction, memoirs, criticism and travel. Among new British novels, Rupert Thomson's Soft (Bloomsbury) should have reached one shortlist or another: newcomers should check out his backlist for a holiday treat (all Bloomsbury). Mixing fiction and history, W G Sebald - East Anglia's great German writer - hits an austere perfection with The Rings of Saturn (Harvill). In The Corrosion of Character (Norton), Richard Sennett again raised sociology to the realm of art with a wise, funny account of life in our new high-risk, low-loyalty workplaces. Read it before they downsize you. Talking of wise and funny (and succinct, too), Little, Brown issued the Collected Stories of that evergreen New Yorker, Grace Paley.