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Www.Guardian.Co.Uk - Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieSet during and after the Lebanese civil war, Rawi Hage's extraordinary De Niro's Game (Old Street) is about the bravado and betrayal of two friends. Hage bends the English language to his will, mixes poetry and history, and never forgets the humanity of his characters. José Eduardo Agualusa's The Book of Chameleons, translated by Daniel Hahn (Arcadia), is told from the point of view of a gecko, but there is nothing gimmicky in this beautiful book about an Angolan albino who invents alternate pasts for his clients. It is a grown-up story about memory, about the reinvention of the past, about a country getting to know itself again, and told in such exquisite language that I wished I could have read it in the original Portuguese.Monica AliI loved Sebastian Faulks's Engleby (Vintage), which contains the best and funniest description of a dinner party I have ever read. Joseph O'Neill's Netherland (Fourth Estate) is so beautifully written I immediately bought a couple more copies to give to friends. Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader (Profile) would make a perfect stocking filler for just about anyone. Any fans of The Wire suffering withdrawal symptoms should load up on Richard Price (one of the show's writers), starting with Clockers and including his recent offering, Lush Life (Bloomsbury).Tariq AliI was much impressed by two debut novels by south Asian writers who, unlike many local counterparts, write about things that matter. Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Cape) is a surreal thriller dealing with the assassination of a Pakistani military dictator. At times incredibly funny, it also, like a Buñuel film, captures the sinister side of life. Tahmima Anam's The Golden Age (John Murray) explores the painful birth-pangs of Bangladesh through the eyes of a family wrecked by the war.Ronald Fraser's magisterial history Napoleon's Accursed War (Verso) is a brilliant view from below of the popular Spanish resistance to French invasion, in what the insular Brits still call the Peninsular war, when the term "guerrilla" came into common currency. One of the great epics of the 19th century, properly recovered for the first time by Fraser in all its ambiguities and tragedies, along with its popular heroism, it's continuously moving, without a trace of sentimentality.Sebastian BarryThere is a very special sort of gratitude you can feel for a book so formidably well written that it has you anxious to get back to it and pining a little to be away from it, and one such book for me was Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland. I read it in proof, when a book is strangely innocent and even vulnerable I suppose, and when for a brief and possibly foolish moment you can feel that you are the only reader. But as it turned out, the rest of the planet felt the same about it, hurrah. I also admired greatly the achievement of two Irish books, Disguise by Hugo Hamilton (Fourth Estate) and Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden (Faber). The Australian master Alex Miller published a book of sober beauty called Landscape of Farewell (Allen & Unwin), and in Canada Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is another novel of gratitude-inspiring prose. Jonathan BateJG Ballard's memoir, Miracles of Life (Fourth Estate), is a miracle of prose and of modesty. Second, an audiobook. Poetry needs to be heard aloud. By no means all poets are their own best readers, but Ted Hughes was. The British Library double CD The Spoken Word - Ted Hughes: Poems and Short Stories offers a treasure trove of BBC recordings from throughout his career. Most literary reputations nosedive in the first decade after death; that of Hughes has rightly soared.William BoydThe most original novel I read in 2008 was Gordon Burn's Born Yesterday (Faber). It is a highly sophisticated take on the news that was served up to us by the media in 2007. Burn's great gift is to make us see these events - that we were all very aware of - anew, through the filter of his fiction. No one has written more shrewdly and knowingly about popular newspaper culture than Burn, but with this novel he taps into something more profound and sinister.The most original novel of 1842, Nicolai Gogol's Dead Souls, has achieved a magnificent rebirth in 2008 through Donald Rayfield's superb new translation (The Garnett Press). Rayfield's translation is one that Vladimir Nabokov would unreservedly admire and is accompanied by dozens of superb, hitherto unseen illustrations by Marc Chagall. A big, beautiful book and a mould-breaking classic reinvigorated.Gordon BrownOne book I've been recommending to friends and colleagues lately is Tony Badger's new book on Roosevelt, FDR: The First 100 Days (Hill & Wang). It's a classic example of how a work of history can illuminate the issues we're dealing with today. What it brings out with such clarity is how Roosevelt, faced with an economic crisis of unprecedented severity, was prepared to put aside conventional policy approaches and, instead, had the courage to innovate and improvise to see what would work. The imagination and humanity at the heart of some of the great New Deal innovations - such as the Tennessee Valley Authority or the Civilian Conservation Corps - changed American politics for ever, and shaped the future of progressive politics across the world. At the same time, this book illustrates FDR's skills as a communicator and a political operator, which earned him the public support and political space he needed for his programme to succeed. It's a brilliantly written, compelling and moving portrait of the man, and it's another outstanding example of how British historians add so much to the field of American history.AS ByattOne biography: Jackie Wullschlager's endlessly absorbing account of Chagall and European life, wars, arts and ideologies (Chagall: Love and Exile, Allen Lane). I still don't love Chagall, but every page of this tale is enthralling, gripping and strange. Three novels. Philip Hensher's The Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate), about Sheffield in the Thatcher years. Hensher understands people and he understands politics. He understands the wise, the mean and the absurd. Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog (Chatto & Windus), which is one of the best-written books I've read for years. She writes with clarity and wit and thoughtfulness. And Nadeem Aslam's powerful Afghanistan novel The Wasted Vigil (Faber). This book is terrifying. It is also tragic and beautifully written, and changes the reader.Carmen CallilI have spent many happy hours reading So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald (Fourth Estate). Until a biography of this genius comes along, we have these letters, so ironic, idiosyncratic and beautiful. Because her letters are full of the stuff of every day and because her life straddled the last century (she died in 2000), her correspondence presents both a public and private portrait of an age. And every letter made me think: if Jane Austen had been permitted to live a century or two later, had lived in England through two world wars and had been allowed to take part in the ups and downs of domestic and literary life, she would have been just like Penelope Fitzgerald. Alastair CampbellI missed Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamish Hamilton) when it came out in hardback, but picked up the paperback at City airport a few months ago. It was one of those rare occasions when I wanted the flight to be longer so I did not have to stop reading. The narrative device - the entire novel is just one side of a conversation between two strangers in a Lahore café - could have been very limiting. But it is the perfect vehicle for a beautifully written story that builds in intensity to a climax that has you thinking long after the book is closed. Jonathan CoeSebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture (Faber) deserved all the attention it got, and more. Much has been written about the beauty of Barry's prose, but what really impressed me about this novel was its exquisite plotting, the way it threw a brilliantly calculated curve ball at the reader in its closing pages, and then finished with a satisfying click. I also loved Andrew Crumey's Sputnik Caledonia (Picador), the most impressive achievement yet from a still undervalued writer: in its combination of dystopian science fiction with warm but unsentimental childhood memoir, it struck me as being firmly in the tradition of - and worthy of comparison with - Alasdair Gray's Lanark. Talking of Gray, he was lucky this year to find a first-rate biographer in Rodge Glass, whose Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography (Bloomsbury) is a thorough, loving portrait of the artist as quirky genius.Margaret DrabbleDavid Lodge's Deaf Sentence (Harvill Secker) is a touching and humane treatment of deafness, disability and ageing, at once sad and stoic and intermittently witty, and, as always with Lodge, it is readable and accessible: a fine addition to his oeuvre. Adam Mars-Jones's remarkable novel Pilcrow (Faber) is also about disability, written with bravura and an extraordinary and inexplicable joyfulness. Ma Jian's Beijing Coma, translated by Flora Drew (Chatto & Windus), is almost unremittingly tragic, and made me feel quite ill, but was well worth the effort - bravely published, bravely translated, a grim and important novel about a crisis in world history.Dave EggersDexter Filkins's The Forever War (Bodley Head) is the best piece of war journalism I've ever read. He paints a portrait of war that is so nuanced, so filled with absurdities and heartbreak and unexpected heroes and villains, that it makes most of what we see and hear about Iraq and Afghanistan seem shrill and two-dimensional by comparison. And yet, as tragic as the events he describes are, the book manages to be a thing of towering beauty.Anne EnrightIt is hard to think of someone better suited to the task of interviewing Seamus Heaney than Dennis O'Driscoll, who is himself a poet of great tact and rigour. Stepping Stones (Faber) is a deeply nourishing book in which Heaney remains as completely open and entirely elusive as he has always been. Helen Garner was my favourite discovery of the year, though she has been annoying her native Australia for a long time now. She has a voice of great honesty and energy, and The Spare Room (Canongate), which is about a friend's inconvenient illness, manages to be both compassionate and cross at the same time. I also loved How Shall I Tell the Dog? (Profile), a series of letters from Miles Kington to his (and my) wonderful agent Gill Coleridge, in which he pitches ideas for books about dying - which was, in fact, what he was doing at the time. This is such a classy, funny book. What a great, great way to go. Richard FordA Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945 by Vasily Grossman, translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vonigradova (Pimlico) - by the author of the astonishing (and epic) novel Life and Fate. These are Grossman's raw yet eloquent cables, sent to the Red Star, as the Nazis pushed savagely into, and then were forced (as savagely) out of, the Soviet Union, along the great eastern front that stretched almost from Moscow to the Black Sea. Writing about war would seem, by definition, not to be inspiring. But this is.Molly Fox's Birthday is an old-fashioned (seeming) novel, about a bountiful subject - our human character and our need to imagine it rather than assume it. Deirdre Madden's prose is crystalline, understated, apparently effortless and artfully suitable. She really does not remind me of anybody I've read before. And yet, like other formidable writers - Mavis Gallant, Margaret Atwood, even Elizabeth Bowen come to mind - she is after something intrinsic and riddling but essential in us all, something that probably doesn't exist until we've read every word this book contains. It is ambitious work. Madden is a first-rate novelist.? Season's readings (next): recommendations from Antonia Fraser to Jackie KayBest books of the yearBest booksFictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Season's readings: writers and politicians pick the best reads of 2008 | Books | The Guardian {...} A novel about cricket in New York, interviews with a Nobel poet, and a Hollywood memoir by a chimp . . . writers and politicians pick the best of 2008 {...} Published: November 29, 2008, 12:01 am - Indexed: November 29, 2008, 11:26 am - Page Size: 91KB |