Cultura: You really must read . . .
The Booker prizewinner, Barack Obama's memoir or an introduction to the meaning of life - which books stood out for you in 2008?
Stella Alderton
Radlett, Hertfordshire
Impressed by Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, I was eager to read The Homecoming (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, translated by Michael Henry Heim). The narrator again travels from boyhood to maturity; the story again covers postwar Germany, up to the present day. But this novel is more complex and wide-ranging than The Reader: Schlink engages even more powerfully with the moral legacy of Germany's recent history.
Stan Allen
Birmingham
No one appears to be reading or recommending The Gone-Away World (Heinemann), the fantasy first novel of Nick Harkaway (John le Carré's son). Suspend disbelief after the first page and you won't want it to stop. The Booker judges didn't know what they were playing at when they gave the award to The White Tiger, which I found contrived and irritating.
Kate Anderson
Sheffield
Winton's strong voice and the importance of place surge through Breath (Picador), a terrific novel about surfing. Suddenly the allure of the perfect wave is understandable. Alongside wonderful descriptions of waves and fear, this is also a non-mawkish coming-of-age novel that deals with male friendships and the bond that comes from sharing a potentially dangerous activity.
Steven Bailey
Bognor Regis
Barack Obama's grandly titled The Audacity of Hope (Canongate) was first published in 2006. But he's now taken on a new importance. The book acts both as a personal statement - his reflections on faith, family and race - and as a considered analysis of the political system. Will his high-minded ideals be compromised by the messy practicalities of the American political process?
Sam Banik
London
Judt's Reappraisals (Heinemann), about our collective cultural amnesia, is an excellent anthology of essays on writers, humanists and Marxist intellectuals. Judt is enlightening on the political milieu of European nations, America's last half-century and Israel.
Steve Toltz's Booker-shortlisted debut, A Fraction of the Whole (Hamish Hamilton), is an elegantly written novel about a family of émigrés in Australia.
Natalie Barker
Leigh-on-Sea, Essex
Ross Raisin's debut novel, God's Own Country (Viking), is a darkly humorous yet haunting evocation of lost innocence. Sam Marsdyke is an adolescent loner whose aggressive defence against a hostile world becomes an attempt to transform his fantasies into criminal reality. The novel's force resides in the fact that Sam is peculiarly likeable, making poignant his final identification with the monster he has long been accused of being.
Robin Wilson's Lewis Carroll in Numberland (Allen Lane) is a surprisingly readable foray into Charles Dodgson's lifelong relationship with mathematics. Highly enjoyable, even for the most mathematically challenged reader.
Chris Birch
London
A book that mentions my name three times and refers to me in the introduction as a "sprightly 80-year-old" is bound to find a place on my crowded bookshelves. Its title is Letters to the Editor 2008 (Guardian Books). If you have been held incommunicado in, say, Belmarsh for the last year, there can be no more entertaining way of catching up on what has been happening in Britain and the world. The only puzzle is why my name was not included with David Hockney, Martin Amis and Tom Stoppard on the jacket.
Charles Boardman
Nottingham
Wonderful short story collections from Jhumpa Lahiri and Tobias Wolff, and Richard Holmes's masterly The Age of Wonder (HarperPress). For my novel of the year I choose Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Gallic Books), in which a middle-aged female concierge of a Paris apartment block is thrown together with two of the block's residents - a precocious young girl and a cultivated Japanese man - with surprising consequences.
Vidya Borroah
Belfast
Rose Tremain's The Road Home (Vintage) charts the journey taken by many immigrants who leave their country and loved ones to seek work here because there is none to be had at home. It tells the story of Lev, from an unnamed east European country, grieving for his dead wife, who has come to London to earn enough to support the young daughter and elderly mother he has left behind.
Phelim Brady
Normandy, Surrey
If you would like to meet William Shakespeare, visit his rooms in London and learn about the man, read Charles Nicholl's The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (Penguin). You will understand the darker plays better and catch a fascinating glimpse of the playwright caught in a domestic dispute between father and daughter.
Jerard Bretts
Milton Keynes
David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (Fourth Estate) is a mammoth reimagining of the story of Hamlet set on a dog-breeding farm in Wisconsin. Lyrical, absorbing and wise, it must be the closest anyone came in 2008 to writing the "Great American Novel".
In non-fiction, Charlotte Higgins's It's All Greek to Me (Short Books) is a wonderful introduction to ancient Greece. She brings the world of Homer, Herodotus, Plato and Sappho vividly to life, making it clear how relevant their works are to our own world of fragile democracy and warfare.
Jane Butler
London
Thomas Glavinic's Night Work (Canongate) takes a science-fiction cliché - the solitude of the only survivor of a global catastrophe - and turns it into a compelling exploration of death, memory and the hunger for consolation. In Elizabeth, Shakespeare and the Castle: The Story of the Kenilworth Revels (Zoilus Press), Ronald Binns provides a gripping account of what went on during the legendary royal entertainments at Kenilworth in the summer of 1575. He examines the intriguing possibility that the young Shakespeare was there, watching the galaxy of Tudor talent.
Michael Callanan
Birmingham
The best book of the year was The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (Faber) by Junot Díaz. How could only one author recommend it in this year's picks? Díaz is the future of writing.
Philip Acree Cavalier
Salisbury, North Carolina, US
Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 (Simon & Schuster) deserved its place on the Booker longlist. Smith evokes a Stalinist world in which murder is not allowed to exist and in which trying to catch a mass murderer is therefore next to impossible. He captures the suffocating quality of Stalin's Russia, where almost no one could be trusted.
Morag Charlwood
Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex
It has been a good year for short stories. Shena Mackay's The Atmospheric Railway (Cape) weaves fabulous tales, in sensual prose. With In the Driver's Seat (Vintage), Helen Simpson continues her deft exploration of the clichés of modern middle-class life. Her portraits of characters on the edge are drawn with wit, compassion and economy.
Simon Clarke
London
Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals (Quercus) portrays the difficult life of a 12-year-old Montreal girl - her heroin addict father, her time in care and as a prostitute. It is a highly original work and, despite the subject matter, written with much humour.
In non-fiction, Fishing in Utopia by Andrew Brown (Granta) is a wise, respectful and wonderfully written book in which the author returns to Sweden, where he lived both as a child and in his 20s, to try to define his relationship with the country.
Marge Clouts
Gloucestershire
Aleksandar Hemon's third novel, The Lazarus Project (Picador), is a moving parallel narrative: a Bosnian refugee arrives in Chicago in 1992 - as Hemon himself did - and becomes absorbed by the tragedy of an earlier refugee, a young Jew who had escaped the Kishinev pogrom only to be shot by the Chicago chief of police.
Max Dunbar
Manchester
My favourite non-fiction title of 2008 was Nick Davies's Flat Earth News (Chatto & Windus). In an age when so much hype surrounds the media, this experienced journalist exposes with hilarity and horror the debasement of his profession.
Paul M Eastwood
Stamford, Lincolnshire
I seem to have spent the year in the company of alcoholics in Soho. It started with Nigel Jones's biography of Patrick Hamilton, Through a Glass Darkly (Black Spring Press). Hamilton presented to the world the debonair man about town, but as this memoir reveals, he was far more interesting. Rereading Hangover Square, Hamilton's finest work, inevitably led to sharing a glass or two with Julian Maclaren-Ross via Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia, his biography by Paul Willetts. Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman all enthusiastically endorsed this laconic writer.
Gil Elliot
London
The books of the year lists contained multiple tributes to various Booker contenders, but only a couple of mentions of the actual winner. Yet Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (Atlantic) is everything a novel should be - it breaks new ground, in an audacious style and form. The book crashes outwards with cocky street-humour, identifying the humiliated and broken lives that sustain India's new wealth, and exposing the disgusting disparity between the lives of the rich and poor.
Gareth Evans
London
The books that seemed most welcome this year came from three writers closely associated with London, offering a range of fiercely personal works. The unstoppable city chronicler Iain Sinclair produced three fine titles. The Firewall (Etruscan Books) delivers a "selected poems" from three decades, while Buried at Sea (Worple Press) riffs in multiple forms on the culture of the south coast. After a long period out of print, his Kodak Mantra Diaries, about Ginsberg's 1967 visit, was reissued in a special edition by Beat Scene.
The woefully under-appreciated Nicholas Royle was also busy with two distinctive novellas, The Appetite (Gray Friar Press) and The Enigma of Departure (PS Publishing). The prolific poet and novelist Jeremy Reed created The Grid (Peter Owen), an ignored speculative fiction of rare imaginative reach.
Audrey Fogelman
Rutland
As a fairly innumerate non-scientist, I am perversely drawn to books about maths and science and usually abandon them with ignorance intact. However, Quantum by Manjit Kumar (Icon) is so well written that I now feel I've more or less got particle physics sussed. Quantum transcends genre - it is historical, scientific, biographical, philosophical.
Anne Fowler
Surrey
I quickly became immersed in The Black Madonna of Derby by Joanna Czechowska (Silkmill Press), the story of a Polish immigrant family. The daughter is especially intriguing, as she grows up and learns to reconcile her desire to fit into English life with the Polish aspects of her family life.
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury) gives a fascinating insight into life in Afghanistan, especially into the lives of women. A moving but not depressing read.
Kate Gunning
London
I'm a sucker for literary biographies and autobiographies, and there were two that stood out this year. The first was Miracles of Life (Fourth Estate), JG Ballard's startling, moving and unforgettable life story, focusing on his boyhood in Shanghai and the shock of his coming to England as a teenager.
The second was The Semi-Invisible Man (Cape), Julian Evans's vast and vastly enjoyable portrait of the great travel writer and novelist Norman Lewis.
Jeremy Hayes
Snodland, Kent
Bloody Old Britain by Kitty Hauser (Granta) is a biography of the Marxist geographer and archaeologist OGS Crawford. Born in 1886, Crawford served in the Royal Flying Corps during the first world war, where he developed his skills of landscape observation. He later worked as archaeology officer with Ordnance Survey. The book takes its title from one of the same name, written by Crawford but never published. It was a rant against 1930s Britain and what he saw as its shoddy goods, poorly built houses, bad service and landscape destruction. A lively biography of the sort of person I remember from my childhood in the 50s - the well-educated, opinionated, unmarried, eccentric Englishman.
Jennifer Hewit
Kidderminster
There are gardening books for looking up facts and advice, and much rarer ones that are to be read for the quality of the writing. The Morville Hours by Katherine Swift (Bloomsbury) is the most outstanding recent example of the latter. Although it describes the creation of her garden in Shropshire, it ranges widely over archaeology, history, people, animals, geology. All this within, but not constrained by, the framework of a medieval Book of Hours.
Martin Hills
Chichester
Mick Imlah's The Lost Leader (Faber) is a breathtaking romp through Scottish history and myth, right up to the poet's own times. Prince Charlie, Braveheart, rugby players, soldiers, drunks, family and friends feature in narrative and anecdotal poems of dazzling variety and originality. In Palestine Walks (Profile), we learn that Sarha means "to roam freely, without restraint": Raja Shehadeh, a lawyer from Ramallah, recounts a series of progressively interrupted walks through a contracting homeland, stolen and despoiled under occupation. A lyrical, heart-rending testimony to a human, political and ecological disaster.
Liz Hoffbauer
Old Hunstanton
I nearly drove some people mad by reading out excerpts from The Discovery of France by Graham Robb (Picador). As a Francophile, I thought I knew France, but this was full of amazing new facts, some horrific and some hilarious. A wonderful read.
After the Reich by Giles MacDonogh (Basic Books) is a gloomy catalogue of atrocities perpetrated on Germans by eastern and western Europeans and Americans after the war, and an examination of the initial chaos of the occupation of Germany; it makes you realise that war in Europe then differed little from war in Africa now.
Gerry Jeffers
Dublin
The African children who are the central characters in Uwem Akpan's debut short story collection, Say You're One of Them (Little, Brown), linger long after you put the book down. We encounter modern-day slavery through the eyes of a 10-year-old boy. A Nigerian bus journey in the company of Jibril/Gabriel, a teenager with a Muslim-Christian identity, brilliantly captures ethnic tension.
Freda Keys
County Antrim
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry (Faber) is by far the best book I have read this year. The nature of memory, with its distortions and shifting emphases, is finely handled. The voice of the central character, Roseanne McNulty, is sure and marked by "an inexplicable joy", which transcends all the suffering and humiliation she has undergone. Set in County Wicklow in the 1950s, it portrays rural life, its hardships and consolations, with unerring delicacy.
Bridget Khursheed
Melrose, Roxburghshire
The Glass Swarm by Peter Bennet (Flambard Press) is a most original, erudite and human collection of poems placed in Bennet's familiar and alchemical Northumbrian home landscape - a worthy Poetry Book Society Choice.
Kate Lathan
Cornwall
The sudden appearance of a third Marilynne Robinson, Home (Virago), required an immediate trip to the bookshop. Glory has relinquished her career and foundering relationship to return to small-town America to care for her ageing father. Jack, the most prodigal of sons, also returns, unkempt, unsettled and fleeing a past. Complex and subtle with luminous prose, it is a deeply satisfying read.
Ian Lee
London
It seems wrong that a book about death should be so enjoyable, but Julian Barnes's Nothing to Be Frightened Of (Cape) is stimulating, moving and philosophical, holding humour and perspicacity in an exquisite balance. I read it in April, 18 months after my wife's early death. In characteristically elegant prose, it weaves the subject of death back into the fabric of life.
Terry Lempriere
Warrington
I thoroughly enjoyed Andrew O'Hagan's The Atlantic Ocean (Faber), a collection of superbly crafted essays covering a period of about 15 years since the early 1990s. The Atlantic is the common background: events and people include the James Bulger case, Hurricane Katrina, the assassination of JFK, George Bush, Tony Blair and Marilyn Monroe. I particularly enjoyed the more parochial pieces about the "Scottish Injury" and the Glasgow sludge boat.
Darran McLaughlin
London
I'm amazed that no one in the books of the year roundup mentioned McMafia by Misha Glenny (Bodley Head), which demonstrates the inextricable connection between legitimate business and the criminal underworld in our hyper-globalised economy.
Anne Mills
Tonbridge, Kent
Here in Kent, we have a particular interest in Adam Nicolson's Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History (HarperPress), an eloquent and poetic account, with insights into the relationship between the owners and the National Trust.
Susan O'Connor
Liverpool
Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places (Granta) allowed me to travel to wonderful landscapes while I was recovering from foot surgery. I also enjoyed Tobias Wolff's collection Our Story Begins (Bloomsbury): "Nightingale", especially, is absorbing, lyrical and shocking.
Stephen Parkin
London
The Paris Review Interviews (Canongate) delivered another impressive list of writers, including Jean Rhys in the year she died and Evelyn Waugh - circumspect, cigar-smoking and wearing white pyjamas. Many thanks to Faber for its list of print on demand titles (faber.co.uk/faberfinds), a highlight in a year dominated by TV and sports personalities writing about themselves.
Jane Partridge
Devon
André Aciman's Call Me By Your Name (Atlantic) will have you weeping for times lost and relationships severed. Let yourself be drawn into Elio's and Oliver's relationship, experience their pain, sense of urgency and regret. This book will lodge itself in your mind.
Terry Philpot
Surrey
Alex von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer (Pocket Books) has the epic sweep that its subject warrants: the struggle for Indian independence, which redrew the subcontinent's boundaries and plunged it into chaos, resulting in a million dead and the world's largest ever movement of population. The personal and political are finely balanced as Tunzelmann explores the triangular relationship of three of the players in this extraordinary drama: Louis and Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru.
Both Melissa Benn's One of Us (Chatto & Windus) and Robert Harris's The Ghost (Arrow) are compulsively readable novels about modern Labour politics. Harris never fails with another thriller that surprises on almost every page and delivers a denouement that leaves the reader open-mouthed. Benn's novel weaves politics and ambition with family drama to create a work that historians may come to admire as much as literary critics.
Ronnie Randall
Radcliffe-on-Trent, Nottingham
A Freewheelin' Time by Suze Rotolo (Aurum), the artist who was Bob Dylan's girlfriend when he made the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album, and who appears on the album cover, is an immensely rich evocation of Greenwich Village in the 1960s. Her portrait of Dylan is sympathetic but realistic, without either recrimination or hero-worship. The Believers by Zoë Heller (Fig Tree) is a novel set in New York about a dysfunctional leftwing family whose fundamental beliefs are thrown into disarray by a family crisis. Heller's characters are drawn with quirky and authentic detail.
Jill Sanderson
Lispole, County Kerry
Deer Hunting With Jesus: Guns, Votes, Debt and Delusion in Redneck America by Joe Bageant (Portobello). Take a look at the Guardian map of the US election - it shows a solid block of Republican support in middle America. Low wages, poor education, costly housing, third-rate medical care, substandard media and entertainment facilities encourage general apathy and low expectations. The lawyer, the real estate agent, the medic and the factory executive are all implicated in this ruthless dissection of local vested interests. Religious fundamentalism is graphically described, as is the historical background to gun ownership rights.
Peter Savage
London
The Blue Manuscript by Sabiha Al Khemir (Verso) is a remarkable novel, skilfully and imaginatively weaving history and human lives across time and continents. It's mainly set in Egypt on an archaeological excavation in search of the "blue manuscript". As an international team dig deeper in the earth, excavating layer after layer, they dig deeper into themselves and their relationships with "the other".
Fred Sedgwick
Ipswitch
Edna Longley's marvellous The Annotated Poems of Edward Thomas (Bloodaxe). I have known these poems for decades, but Longley, with her immaculate ear for the sound of words, especially Thomas's half-rhymes, and her empathy for this troubled poet, has produced a book that makes earlier editions redundant. For once it doesn't matter that the introduction and notes together take up more pages than the poems: the notes make you read the poems again and again with increasing understanding and enjoyment.
John Shields
Wilmslow, Cheshire
Day by AL Kennedy (Vintage) is rewarding in the way that difficult books often are. The revisiting of the past is evoked in a multilayered narrative that I found very moving. Siri Hustvedt's The Sorrows of an American (Sceptre) is hugely impressive, thanks to her measured prose, psychological insights and narrative mastery.
James Smith
London
I have chosen two European novels that sparingly dissect the secrets and resentments at the heart of rural families. In Berlin Poplars by Anne B Ragde, translated by James Anderson (Harvill Secker), family members, scattered both emotionally and geographically, return reluctantly to the isolated Norwegian farm of their birth as the matriarch approaches death. The Twin, by Gerbrand Bakker, translated by David Colmer (Harvill Secker), is an understated portrayal of a lonely man struggling to look after his ageing father, but it is also a paean to the Dutch countryside. The literal translation of the book's Dutch title - "It's Quiet Upstairs" - better conveys the heart of this quietly profound novel.
Tim Smith
Worthing, West Sussex
With thanks to an article in Review, I have been reading the novels of Henry Handel Richardson. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (Penguin Classics) is a brave and wonderful book drawn from the life of the author's father in 19th-century Australia. A great joy of this year has been The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by GB Edwards (Penguin), a fictional life based entirely on Guernsey - little incident, but completely mesmerising.
Ray Snape
York
Women's Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack (Seren) is a remarkable anthology of women's poetry of the highest quality, beautifully themed and modulated. There are names familiar (Dickinson, Mew, Duffy, Boland) and less so (Clare Pollard, Kimiko Hahn); poets under 40 (Stephanie Bolster, AE Stallings) and poets who died too young (the richly rewarding American Jane Kenyon).
Jean Spiers
Beckenham, Kent
During the second world war in Britain, members of the armed forces and officials were forbidden to keep diaries concerning their war duties. It was a prohibition that was widely ignored, and diaries are at the centre of Andrew Roberts's Masters and Commanders (Allen Lane) - a fine, stylish account of the struggles between Churchill, Roosevelt, Alanbrooke and Marshall over the strategic direction of the war. Roberts contends that when three of those four were in agreement, the other was in effect forced into consensus. With four out of five German soldiers killed on the eastern front, he also shows where the war was won, and by whom.
Philip Spinks
Stratford-Upon-Avon
Martin Amis's The Second Plane (Cape)is a powerfully written and provocative view of a free society's response to terrorism. Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night (Yale) is a beautifully written set of musings on libraries, a book to savour. Dry Store Room No 1 by Richard Fortey (Harper Perennial) is a delight; I'll never look at the Natural History Museum in the same way again. It is a secret history written by someone who loves his subject and who is generous in letting the reader into his world.
Tereza Stehlikova
London
The work of the great Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky is explored and celebrated in Tarkovsky, a vast book edited by Nathan Dunne (Black Dog), and in Robert Bird's Andrei Tarkovsky (Reaktion). The artist's own luminous polaroids appeared in the beautifully produced Bright, Bright Day (White Space). Soul (New York Review Books) gathered eight works from another Slavic giant, Andrei Platonov. Works of great tenderness and insight in the face of oppression, they're brilliantly rendered by one of the great translators of our time, Robert Chandler, and his team. It features a striking afterword by John Berger, who has also contributed to the lyrical and insightful essay collection Matters of Life and Death (Radcliffe) by the exceptional GP and medical activist Iona Heath.
Gareth Storey
London
James Frey's A Bright Shiny Morning (John Murray). Like many others, I had written Frey off and ignored his second novel - My Friend Leonard - after the scandal surrounding his "memoir" A Million Little Pieces, but he's made a brilliant return. Frey's prose is outstanding and the interlinked narrative and structure centring on Los Angeles makes for addictive reading.
Anne Summers
London
The Visible World by Mark Slouka (Portobello) moves between wartime and contemporary Czechoslovakia, and the postwar America of Czech exiles. The narrator is the child of parents displaced by history, trying to penetrate the mystery of the lives they had before he existed, a time traveller between the present and a past that has locked itself tightly around all of them. This is gracefully written, but also a dark and demanding experience.
Simon Surtees
London
Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition by Richard Holloway (Canongate) is a profound, moving analysis of the capacity within human beings for the extremities of evil, suffering and love.
Bill Swainson
London
In a strong year for poetry, which included Mick Imlah's long-awaited second collection, The Lost Leader, and Mark Doty's Theories and Apparitions (Cape), I played catch-up with an exciting new beginning and an unexpected and tragic end: Frances Leviston - Public Dream (Picador) - was the sure-footed tyro and the late, greatly lamented Mahmoud Darwish - The Butterfly's Burden (Bloodaxe), superbly translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah - was the past master. In fiction, Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project spliced together mutually revealing stories of the perils of emigration to the US in the early 20th and 21st centuries, while in non-fiction The Journal of Hélène Berr (MacLehose Press) saw the vital rediscovery of a young Jewish woman's heartbreaking diary of Nazi-occupied Paris.
Dorrie Swift
London
I'm a David Lodge fan, so I couldn't wait for Deaf Sentence to come out in paperback (Harvill Secker). I love the variety in this novel as it tackles deafness, growing old, retirement, suicide and relationships, with forays into linguistics, poetry, religion and Beethoven. The prosaic and the bizarre occur alongside each other and there are some wonderful scenes that are both farcical and poignant. I marvelled at how Lodge managed to weave all this into a coherent story that had me eagerly turning the pages, and at his ability to make you imagine what it might feel like to be deaf.
Jill Theis
Battle, East Sussex
I enjoyed The Bolter by Frances Osborne (Virago), a biography of Idina Sackville. Osborne is George Osborne's wife and the great-granddaughter of Idina, whose brother, the ninth Earl De La Warr, inspired Bexhill's De La Warr Pavilion of 1935. Osborne shares with the reader her intimate knowledge of Idina's adventures, often culled from family diaries, during her "dazzling troubled life" in London and Kenya.
Helen Walker
Brentford, Middlesex
Gordon Burn's writing always manages to make me feel as though he were me. Born Yesterday: The News As a Novel (Faber), weaving news stories from 2007 into a fictionalised tale of connections, coincidences and accidental voyeurism, generates a palpable feeling of unease. It features the author himself as a background character, moving through the book and events of the year, looking more closely than we ever have time for and in the process exposing how the media have come to dictate the national discourse about who we are and how we should be living.
Michael Walling
Enfield
It was a joy to discover Alexis Wright's epic Aboriginal novel Carpentaria (Constable), at once a family chronicle, a social document, a fantasy, a spiritual meditation and the realisation of myth in the contemporary world. No less vast in its ambition, though many pages shorter, is Terry Eagleton's The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction (OUP). Following on from his brilliant (and long overdue) demolition of Richard Dawkins, this is a magnificent jeu d'esprit. Eagleton even manages to make Schopenhauer accessible and (a still greater feat) funny.
Terry Ward
Wickford, Essex
In the 1960s, as a teenager living in Romford, I subscribed to IF Stone's Weekly. Forty years later, I have now read Myra MacPherson's impressive biography All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist IF Stone (Scribner). Stone spent his career challenging government deception and press complicity. He campaigned against fascism and McCarthyism, and in support of civil rights and in opposition to the war in Vietnam. Stone covered stories the mainstream press ignored. A number of famous American journalists began their careers helping him to publish his magazine. In his retirement he taught himself ancient Greek in preparation for writing his powerful book The Trial of Socrates. Stone was a man who made a difference, a true American hero.
Vivien Whitaker
Dronfield, Derbyshire
Zany Zuzu's Petals by Sue Hepworth (Snowbooks) is a delight. Partying in the hot tub with a broken leg, paying for your funeral in advance so you can spend the "divi" . . . the humour is warm and distinctively northern. The hero, a provocateur in cycling shorts, highlights the essentials in life and got me thinking about my own priorities.
Alan Willis
Portsoy, Banffshire
As some of my ancestors originated in the Old Nichol area of London's Bethnal Green, Sarah Wise's new book, The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum (Bodley Head), was an essential read this year. It is an incisive account of people struggling to survive in formidably difficult circumstances.
Selected Translations by Ted Hughes has been edited and introduced by Daniel Weissbort (Faber), and is out in paperback this year. This book is a compelling collection of poems, translated from a variety of languages, both classical and modern. Jennifer Haigh's latest novel, The Condition (Harper), is a deft exploration of the emotions and experiences of an American family over recent decades.
Angus Wilson
Ashford, Kent
Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s by Alwyn W Turner (Aurum) is in three parts, driven by the chronology of the political leadership of Heath, Wilson and Callaghan, but the chapters are thematic: the environment, unions, obscenity, race and sexualities. These are signposted by lyrics from popular songs, quotes from fiction and dialogue from television. The title was not voiced by a politician, of course, but was a headline in a newspaper.
Mary Worrall
Birmingham
The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams (Virago). Why has one sister become a recluse and spent 40 years alone and isolated in the grand decaying family home waiting for the return of the other? Not a nice story, but compelling . . . creepily magical!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/27/fiction-bestbooks
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