Nine books for a desert island, distant planet, or home

Beware: David Nicholls' Us could have you both laughing and crying out loud

The inclusion of Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things (Canongate, £18.99) on this list of the best fiction of 2014 comes with a sad caveat.

This is Faber’s sixth dazzling and different novel and, he says, his last. “I wanted each of my books to be very different from the other, and I feel I have pulled it off as many times as I can before I start to repeat myself,” he said in an interview in this paper in November. In the novel, a Christian missionary has travelled to a newly colonised planet, leaving behind his beloved wife while he preaches to the converted – a settlement of surprisingly credible indigenous creatures. With echoes of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it broaches complicated issues of environmentalism, imperialism and faith, raising many questions as well as a lump in the throat.

If I were off on a mission to a faraway planet, I would definitely take Us by the One Day and Starter for Ten author David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton, £20). This touching story of a man trying to hold his family together on a doomed Grand Tour of Europe had me laughing and crying out loud on a train. I particularly liked “Chapter 32: many strange horses in our salty bedroom”, in which our hopeless hero gamely practises his French.

Some of the best fiction of the year has been of the short variety. A L Kennedy couldn’t write a dull sentence if she tried, and the stories in All the Rage (Vintage, £8.99) are perfectly, uniquely her. In “The Practice of Mercy”, a woman watches a dog chasing fish: it “snapped at the water, pressed its head full under and then shook itself free again, empty-mouthed, in a big startle of light that arced all round before landing in rings and sparks.” It’s a privilege to read such a brilliant writer at the top of her game. Equally exciting is Graham Swift, whose collection England and Other Stories (Simon & Schuster, £16.99) shows what a confident writer can do when he gets his teeth into a good subject: modern Britain. We’ll have a story from the book in these pages next Sunday.

A new Diana Souhami novel always promises an interesting ride, and this year, Gwendolen (Quercus, £16.99) didn’t disappoint. Souhami told The IoS that she thinks her fictional “rescue” of the heroine of Daniel Deronda will infuriate George Eliot purists, but it shouldn’t do. This retelling from the woman’s perspective is a grand tribute – if Eliot were to pop up in 2014, as she does in a cameo appearance in the novel, I bet she’d be tickled pink.

One of the inexplicably underrated novels of 2014 was The Unwitting by the American writer Ellen Feldman (Picador, £14.99), whose previous work (Next to Love, Scottsboro …) has shown a flair for exploring America’s dark political past. This political thriller takes the Kennedy assassination and the McCarthy witch hunts as a backdrop to explore the human angle behind E M Forster’s maxim: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” I’d have liked to see it on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize, which this year opened for the first time to American authors.

Nevertheless, a strong Booker shortlist included the wonderful How to be Both by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99) – a multi-textured palimpsest of a novel that focuses either on a young girl or a Renaissance painter, depending on which version you buy. A book that makes readers talk excitedly about the novel form is a fine thing indeed. Richard Flanagan’s worthy Booker winner The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Chatto & Windus, £16.99) managed to contrast a sensual love story with the horror of work on Burma’s “Death Railway”, built by prisoners of the Japanese during the Second World War, to create a beautiful thing.

Also shortlisted was We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent’s Tail, £7.99), my novel of the year. It’s not generally done for a critic to describe a work of fiction as “loveable”, but try to find a reader of this novel who doesn’t say that she loved it. I won’t give away the early “twist”, which is to do with the narrator’s strange and absent sister, but I will say that it’s a novel all about family, childhood, love and betrayal, and you really should read it to find out the rest.