Stephen Bayley
When Dylan Jones told me he was writing a book about ‘restaurant culture’, I pompously thought it might be an analysis of interior design, from Boulestin to Terence Conran, with notes on the waves of fashion that replaced pink prawn cocktail with charred wood-grilled sardines. But he has done something rather better. Table-Hopping: The Secret History of London Restaurants – from Langan’s to the Wolseley (Little Brown, £30) is an oral history. Jones, who made GQ into a stellar institution, has interviewed all the rascals and victims of the recently past London scene, so much of which he orchestrated. If you want to know who snorted what or who shagged whom in the Groucho’s loos, this is your ideal book. Unputdownable.
Helena Attlee’s The Fire in the Mountain (Particular Books, £25) is a follow up to her The Land Where Lemons Grow, a cultural history of the lemon and its relationship to Sicily. The new book is not quite as fine and original as its superb predecessor, but her account of life in a Sicilian village in the shadow of Etna is still astonishingly elegant, sensitive and insightful. A perfect cure for an English winter.
John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do (Faber, £20) is a pitiless comedy of ambitious metropolitan manners. It reads so true that within 30 pages I thought the author had been surveilling me, what with his asides about Audis and a hilarious rant against Ottolenghi. The book is justified for one description alone. The ludicrous Soho Farmhouse in the Cotswolds? ‘Butlin’s for cunts.’
Lanchester apart, I was not much impacted by fiction this year. But a first Penguin edition of The Great Gatsby, bought from Oxfam for £3, was a nice find. Novel readers today perhaps could not cope with such a plot, but worth the plod for that miraculous final sentence: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ Quite so.
Peter Parker
Those who have in recent years criticised the National Trust for its supposedly woke agenda can hardly have been reassured by a book titled A Queer Inheritance, promising ‘Alternative Histories’ of the organisation (Bloomsbury, £25). In fact, Michael Hall has written a measured, elegant and hugely entertaining account of those homosexual men and lesbians who have, from its very founding, been involved in the Trust or have handed over their houses to its care. He investigates the origins of the Trust, and chooses nine properties with queer connections for special attention, not all of them grand houses – there are particularly good chapters on E.M. Forster’s Piney Copse and T.E. Lawrence’s Clouds Hill. Also enjoyable are Hall’s descriptions of James Lees-Milne (recommended for his job with the Country Houses Scheme by his former lover Harold Nicolson) dealing with the often tricky ‘bachelor aesthetes’ whose properties he was recommending for acquisition.
Graham Robb
The poet Sudeep Sen has spent most of his life happily self-isolating in Delhi’s ‘drenched yolky heat’ and its air ‘like stale lentil soup’. In Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation (Pippa Rann, £19.99), he writes in haikus and cinquains, in prose, free verse and ‘micro-fiction’ of the ‘terrible beauty’ produced by climate chaos with its island-swallowing seas and stunning toxic skyscapes. His poetry is a million miles from the chronic tradition of admiring oneself in Nature. ‘Life’s dance continues – with or without us.’
One of Sen’s poetic points of reference is the similarly imagistic but infinitely more miserable Jewish Romanian poet Paul Celan, whose harrowing life in Parisian exile has been comprehensively researched by Anna Arno in Paul Celan (Harvard, £29.95).
Marcus Berkmann
I had a bit of a science fiction jag this year. Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (1973) bears up pretty well, although, having little visual imagination, I struggled to conceive of the interior of the vast alien spaceship as it barrelled through our solar system. I also enjoyed the first two volumes of James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse series (2011) and Caliban’s War (2012), giant, ambitious novels of alien protomolecules and political insurrection, in which people are always being bunged out of airlocks, apparently for fun. But they’re exhausting, and after each one you are ineffably drawn to the dark-brown furniture and 40-watt bulbs of Anita Brookner’s gloomy interior novels. Imagine Brookner writing a rip-roaring, action-packed space opera. No one would ever leave their cabins.
My best SF book of the year, though, was Andy Weir’s 2014 The Martian, in which an astronaut is stranded on the red planet and has to survive for more than a year before he can be rescued. Incredibly exciting – and will put you off space travel for life.
Andrew Rosenheim
I am slightly wary of rediscovered books touted as works of neglected genius and invariably find myself disappointed when it comes to reading them. John Williams’s 1965 novel Stoner, whose first reissue in 2006 was greeted rhapsodically by critics, is a case in point. I found it perfectly competent but slightly dull. The Tap Dancer by Andrew Barrow (HarperCollins, £9.99), however, reprinted a couple of years ago, was for me a genuine find. Elegantly written and beautifully paced, it features one of the great eccentric fathers, a rival in his mix of ferocity and near-madness to the splenetic father of Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited.
A very different book I also enjoyed is Spies and Other Gods (Baskerville, £20), the most recent offering by James Wolff, the pseudonym of a former British intelligence officer. It transcends the usual limits of its genre. Appealingly, Wolff is more interested in his characters than in tradecraft, though highly adept at describing both.
Andy Miller
Do you ever enjoy a novel so much that you wish it were being enthusiastically endorsed by someone other than book reviewers? Such was the case with The Palm House (Picador, £16.99) by Gwendoline Riley, a writer whose powers of observation and bleak sense of humour ought to appeal to an audience far beyond these pages.
At the other end of the compression scale, and in contrast, I Hear a New World, the second part of Alan Moore’s decades-devouring ‘Long London’ quintet (Bloomsbury, £22), deserves much more literary admiration than it has so far attracted. This is a novel that offers second helpings of everything.
Andrew Hankinson’s Felled: The Killing at Sycamore Gap (New Modern Arcade, £20) combines reportage and memoir to shed light on the most infamous arboricide in living memory. It also explores how and why a nation might find itself united in grief fora tree. In this angry, gripping book, Hankinson shows himself to be the natural heir to the late Gordon Burn.
David Crane
Living in the Shadow of Empire: Women and the China Consular World 1843-1900 by Andrew Hillier (Manchester University Press, £85).With the occasional remarkable exception, the women of empire have seldom enjoyed a good press. ‘Was this how they see us?’ a horrified Rumer Godden asked when she first read E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India; and the answer was, and is, a pretty solid ‘Yes’. ‘Frivolous, lazy, pampered and useless’ – it is this image that is challenged in Hillier’s study of the women who made their lives in the Treaty Ports and Legation of 19th-century China. The book certainly has its inevitable sprinkling of water colourists and amateur dramatics; but it is overwhelmingly a story of adaptability, resilience and surprising openness in the face of hardship, disease, infant mortalities, institutional snobberies and Boxer rebels that adds a mercifully feminine note to the stock history of testosterone-fuelled imperialism. Hillier’s unsung lives deserve to be more widely remembered.
Honor Clerk
A trio of books rooted in the history of Protestantism are moving, compelling and appalling in equal measure. James Runcie’s The Great Passion (2022) tells the story of a boy treble bullied at choir school in Leipzig and finding refuge in the house of J.S. Bach in 1726, the year in which he wrote the St Matthew Passion. The protagonist of Carys Davies’s Clear (Granta, £9.99), published in 2024 and set just after the Great Disruption in the Church of Scotland in 1843, is a minister sent to evict the sole inhabitant of a fictional island north of Shetland. And then there is Hellfire and Herring by Christopher Rush (2008), a hymn to life on the Fife coast in the 1940s and 1950s, where religion at its most dour is the counterpoint to the community’s dangerous livelihood.
Ruth Scurr
Andrea Wulf’s The Traveller (Allen Lane, £30) brings George Forster back from obscurity, animates his extraordinary life and delivers a powerful message to contemporary times about our shared humanity, irrespective of colour, culture or gender. Born in 1754, the son of a German naturalist, Forster began travelling as a child and joined Captain Cook’s second voyage around the world when he was 18. In advance of the French Revolution, he advocated for human rights and racial equality: ‘I thank God that there is such a delicious thing as human love in this world. It lifts us up; it chains us to each other, no matter how distant we are; it is the most comforting, happiest feeling in the world!’
Miranda Malins’s The House of Cromwell (HarperCollins, £25) takes the reader on a different kind of compelling journey, from the Wars of the Roses to the accession of the Hanoverians, resurrecting many forgotten voices from the past by exploring the familial connections between Thomas and Oliver Cromwell.
William Dalrymple
Nandini Das’s This Little World (Bloomsbury, £25) is a wonderful gallery of precisely drawn yet constantly surprising Tudor and Stuart portraits, like an album of perfect Nicholas Hilliard miniatures that dazzle with their cosmopolitan attitudes and globalised lives. Taking us from English Jesuits in Goa to Italian Renaissance scholars in Oxford via an English eunuch in Ottoman Constantinople and a Kentish Samurai in 17th-century Edo, this is a perspective-altering take on a world we usually think of in far more domestic terms.
Maryam Aslany’s Peasants: Makers of the Modern World (Bloomsbury, £25) has earned a place in that short shelf of books which genuinely make you see the world anew. The author has thought deeply, read widely, travelled globally and observed minutely to produce a work whose insights turn our preconceptions upside down. In often exquisite prose, illuminated with brilliant shafts of scholarship, she has written a book that is as profound as it is wide-ranging and, potentially, world-changing.
Ben Moser’s Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History (Fourth Estate, £25) is a brave, passionate, thoughtful, moral and humane book. This is an important contribution to the growing debate on the ethics of Zionism, as angry and urgent as it is heartfelt and moving.
Kim Ghattas is one of the best informed, most intelligent and eerily prescient writers on the Middle East, able to bring clarity to the most complex scenarios. She is also a wonderful storyteller. The Best Kind of American (Bloomsbury, £25) is a brilliant, tightly focused and intricate piece of non-fiction, a Levantine In Cold Blood.
Andrew Lycett
This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Bloomsbury, £18.99). It takes a special talent to depict the moral compromises demanded by a corrupt, semi-feudal society touched at so many levels by its relationship with the West. Such is Pakistan. Mueenuddin showed his gifts in his short story collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. That was 16 years ago, and the wait for its successor has been worth it. From the start it is gripping, recalling Rudyard Kipling’s Kim in its portrait of young Bayazid, who, rootless and parentless in the souks of a thrillingly evoked Rawalpindi, is taken on by the kindly owner of a tea and curry stall, and so begins his unusual ascent towards influence and power.
Nicholas Shakespeare’s Frame 37 (Harvill, £20) is also about influence and power, but cast in the tenser environment of an American election. Shakespeare is a master of the sophisticated literary thriller, being familiar not just with the politics but the clubland and collegiate practices of the US and Latin America. There is added joy when he gives himself licence to write about the natural world.
Frances Wilson
The two memoirs I have enjoyed most this year explore the cost of fame on the immediate family. Paul de Zulueta is the grandson of Daphne du Maurier, great-grandson of the matinee idol George du Maurier and great-great-grandson of the illustrator and novelist Gerald du Maurier, each of whom was driven by demons and suffered from deep melancholia. In Last Night I Dreamt (Virago, £25), de Zulueta approaches his heritage with modesty, curiosity, insight and wells of sympathy.
Liza Minnelli’s Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! (Hodder, £25) is a study of matrophobia, the fear of becoming your mother. There is nothing that Minnelli is not willing to reveal about her ambivalence towards Judy Garland, for whom, from the age of six, she acted as an in-house psychoanalyst. The strength of this near-mad memoir is its internal chaos: Minnelli both loved and hated Garland, and there is no attempt to make either party look pretty.
Philip Hensher
The novels I most enjoyed this year had the underrated qualities of ingenuity and resourcefulness. Francis Spufford’s glorious Nonesuch (Faber, £9.99) is a mash-up of historical specificity, literary homage and riotous alternate-world fantasy. Just as confident is Joanna Kavenna’s Seven (Faber, £16.99). It’s hard to make a book revolve around an imaginary game with very carefully specified rules, but this made me long for a commercial spin-off. It had the resourceful and evasive quality of Italo Calvino – a total joy.
There was a rush of excellent biographies of English novelists – Anita Brookner, Barbara Cartland, Saki – but I think the two books that have stayed with me most are histories of short historical episodes. David Kynaston’s latest volume in his ‘New Jerusalem’ series, Deep into the Sixties (Bloomsbury, £25), gave the firm impression of examining the moment our world was forged and placing it exactly in 1965-6. And David Torrance’s exceptional history of the General Strike of 1926, The Edge of Revolution (Bloomsbury, £20), unlike most academic histories, was soaked in the rhythms and words of the speech of individuals.
Hilary Spurling
My book of the decade, never mind the year, is Elizabeth Goldring’s Holbein (Yale, £40). Hans Holbein started out as a versatile young operator who could turn his hand to anything, from book illustration or mural painting to a tabletop fountain spurting rosewater from the nipples of the nymphs who supported it. But the core of this book is Holbein’s portrayal of diplomats, courtiers and spies – the influencers and hag-ridden powerbrokers surrounding Henry VIII. It was Holbein who perfected what became then and ever afterwards iconic images of Henry in majesty, his sumptuous outfits of slashed, brocaded and bejewelled silk or velvet distracting attention from the small, mean mouth and cold eyes in his fleshy face. ‘I can make seven earls from seven peasants,’ said Henry, who never underestimated the phenomenal power of his court painter, ‘but I cannot make one Hans Holbein out of seven earls’.
Boyd Tonkin
Deeply learned as well as entertaining, Daniel Hahn’s If This Be Magic (Canongate, £25) explores ‘the unlikely art of Shakespeare in translation’, with a merrily erudite cluster of the brave souls who bring Shakespeare into Korean, Swahili, Welsh and Thai as well as French, German and Spanish etc.
Ace translator and scholarly wit David Bellos left us late last year. Ninety-Three (Penguin Classics, £20), his swashbuckling version of Victor Hugo’s terrific novel of the Vendée revolt against the French Revolution, was his typically pacy and vivid swansong.
In 1726, Alexander Pope finished his money-spinning translation of the Odyssey and hosted best buddies Jonathan Swift and John Gay at his smart riverside villa in Twickenham. Hester Grant’s warmly engaging The Twitnam Summer (William Collins, £25) traces and celebrates the friendship that nurtured Gulliver’s Travels, The Beggar’s Opera and The Dunciad.
Naomi Alderman
My favourite book of the year was Nonesuch (Faber, £9.99) by Francis Spufford, an author who is always a tremendous treat. This is a sort of children’s book for grown ups, full of excitement, fun, fantasy and magic, but also a very real evocation of life during the Blitz with the nostalgia stripped out. The real and the unreal side by side is perhaps my favourite genre.
Discord by Jeremy Cooper (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £14.99). Cooper has spent a life in aesthetics and all his characters live through art. In this novel, a composer and a saxophonist try to work together to create a new piece. One of them is falling in love with the other while unaware that the other can’t stand them. Delicious.
A Deadly Episode by Anthony Horowitz (Cornerstone, £9.99) is the sixth novel in the Hawthorne & Horowitz series. I greatly look forward to these every year. Horo-witz writes a version of himself as a character, the Watson to Hawthorne’s Holmes. There are teasing invitations to read them as romans à clef, little hints that they might be about the real world of publishing or, in this case, TV adaptation. Horowitz’s wife is a TV producer, and he writes all his own adaptations himself. It’s very funny, and the plotting is superb.
Anne de Courcy
Desperado by Elisabeth Kehoe (Unicorn, £25) tells the story of Clare Sheridan, a woman who so blatantly flouted the conventions of her world that it is hard to believe she enjoyed not only a brilliant career but also social success. Born in 1885, she was launched into the Edwardian world of privilege and rigid social etiquette, where discretion was the primary virtue, only to turn herself into a successful sculptor and an even more effective femme fatale. Her lovers included Lord Birkenhead, Trotsky, Mussolini and Charlie Chaplin. Add in her journalistic scoops, travel writing and novels and you have a heady mix.
Jonathan Sumption
For my money the historical book of the year is Lyndal Roper’s Summer of Fire and Blood (Basic Books, £30), a beautifully written account of the German peasants’ revolt of 1524-5. It is one of the forgotten crises of European history, yet it was the continent’s greatest popular rising until the French Revolution. This is historical scholarship at its best.
Kate Kennedy’s Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound (Apollo, £10.99) belongs in a different world but defies classification. Her account of the fate of the lost cellos of great players, several of them victims of the Holocaust, is part detective story, part travelogue, part musicology and part autobiography. The whole is interspersed with reflections on the luthier’s art, on the science of sound and on the extraordinary relationship between particular instruments and the artists who play them. The cello’s sound goes straight into the bloodstream in a way that no other instrument achieves. It deserves its poet.
Claire Lowdon
The birth of my son has had me reaching for some baby-themed reading matter this year. The new(ish) parents in your life will appreciate the compulsively readable Cry When the Baby Cries (Jonathan Cape, £25), Becky Barnicoat’s frank, funny graphic memoir – ‘like a graphic novel, but true – and also a bit graphic’. And an old favourite, Anne Enright’s Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood (2022), was perfect company at 2 a.m., swerving as it does from the sacred (the proximity of the newborn soul) to the deliciously sacrilegious (‘How to Get Trolleyed While Breastfeeding’).
Antony Beevor
The Cauldron by Simon Sebag-Montefiore, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25), an account of the development of the Middle East from 1900 right up until this year, is the author’s most important and impressive book to date. The outcomes of two world wars transformed the region from a realm of decaying multicultural empires to one of supposedly modern nation states. These carve-ups, imposed from on high, produced divisive consequences as communities were split, forced together or pushed aside. It led to often over-simplified myths of monsters and victims which were bound to poison local relationships and attract outside intervention still further. As the region was already a focal point of religious, geo-political and economic rivalries, events such as the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the 9/11 attack on the twin towers were explosions which created their own political tsunamis. To tackle such a tangled and often bewildering history was ambitious, to say the least; yet The Cauldron is a triumph of balanced judgment and vivid narrative.
Nicholas Lezard
The first and most obvious choice is Howard Jacobson’s Howl (Jonathan Cape, £20), which is about a Jewish father whose daughter denounces and discards him because of their differing positions on the conflict between Israel and Gaza. I gather this is not an uncommon phenomenon these days. But I was amazed by how Jacobson managed to extract comedy from such a fraught situation. It is an astonishing achievement – although we should be used to that from Jacobson by now.
Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries (Suhrkamp Verlag, £50). The only version currently available is a bilingual edition, running to 1,352 pages, with German on the facing pages; but I gather Faber has plans to publish a fully English version, which would be most welcome. For the Beckettian, these diaries are essential and fascinating. We see Beckett mooching around Germany and discovering himself during the rise of Nazism. His disgust and alarm are plain.
Mark Cocker
For its immense sweep of cultural geography and history, I loved The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and its Empires (William Collins, £25) by Sophie Pinkham. The American scholar has converted Russia’s massive forest belt into a lens through which to explore the world’s largest and most long-troubled nation. I also enjoyed Andrew Bloomfield’s Wetland Wings: The History of Holkham Marsh and Its Birds (Holkham, £40) for its blend of love and deep knowledge focused on a single English nature reserve. And I cannot leave out Insects of Britain and Europe by Thomas C. John, Peter Mullen and Paul D. Brock (Wild Guides, £25). Full of beauty, carefully curated data and – at last! – English names for the 3,000 species covered, this hugely ambitious book is powerful advocacy for the ‘little things that run the world’.
Justin Marozzi
One of the quirkiest books I have read in years was Mariusz Szczygiel’s Gottland (Linden Editions, £12.99),beautifully translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Madly digressive and never po-faced, it skewers the idiocies and cruelties of communist Czechoslovakia with exuberant hilarity.
Two books on the Middle East stand out this year. On Syria, Anand Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage (Pluto Press, £25) was a heartbreaking account of the transition from the abattoir of the Assad dictatorship to the short-lived honeymoon of revolutionary freedom. If anyone still doubts the evil of the Iranian revolutionary regime, they should read Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati’s Stolen Revolution (Viking, £22). The fact that Tehran continues to run rings round the Trump administration is a catastrophe.
More encouragingly, it is difficult to look past Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon and his Marshals (Allen Lane, £40), a galloping charge through the martial career of Europe’s great dictator, told with typical verve, precision and chutzpah. What a nest of vipers.
Comments