Culture

Does size matter? This year my go-to stocking filler will be the pocket-sized Grow a Pair by Joanna Walsh, from Readux Books: 64 pages of unadulterated pleasure ($4.99). Walsh’s collection of hilarious, nimbly interlinked ‘fairy tales about sex’ (‘The Three Big Dicks’, ‘The Princess and the Penis’) is a comic gem to set beside Nicholson Baker’s slim masterpiece Vox (1992), a book about phone sex. Make like Monica Lewinsky and give Vox to the Bill Clinton in your life, or treat yourself and go solo: either way, both these books will make you laugh, blush, and nod in delighted — if risqué — recognition. Not so good on sex was Eimear McBride’s highly anticipated The Lesser Bohemians (Faber, £16.99).

Back in 2006, David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, hired me as guide for his first trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to research The Mission Song. Evenings were spent on the terrace of the Orchids Hotel in Bukavu, watching pirogues languidly traverse Lake Kivu, ice cubes clinking in respective glasses of Scotch. It was easily the most entertaining ten days of my life, despite the stonking hangovers. Cornwell proved to be a thespian manqué. The wry, extremely funny anecdotes about his career as diplomat, spy and writer, his charming conman father, his peripatetic childhood and his encounters with the likes of Yasser Arafat, Richard Burton and Rupert Murdoch were all gloriously enriched by the fact that he can do all the voices.

As events unfolded this year, it was reassuring to read superb non-fiction that celebrated expertise. Two stand out. Trials: On Death Row in Pakistan (Penguin, £16.99) tells how Isabel Buchanan, fresh from a law degree, applied her feeling and intelligence to apprentice in a jurisdiction which, by 2014, saw a person executed every day. Ed Yong’s magnificent revaluation of bacteriology, I Contain Multitudes (Penguin, £20), counsels humility for student doctors like me: modern medicine’s pathogens may be the future’s therapeutics. And then there is Mark Greif’s Against Everything (Verso, £16.99), which — as its title suggests — matches brilliant critique with improbable optimism.

Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 (Borough, £16.99) is set in a bankrupt America where the middle classes are foraging to survive. All aspects of the dystopia are thoroughly and chillingly imagined — but without ever losing the psychological plausibility of a gripping family saga. My other favourite novel was Jonathan Unleashed (Bloomsbury, £14.99), Meg Rosoff’s first work for adults. For some writers, twentysomething Jonathan’s inability to ‘cross the huge gulf between childhood and adulthood’ might be evidence of male inadequacy. Rosoff, though, shows how right he is to be scared about growing up, in an exhilarating read that makes abiding pessimism very funny indeed.

Best novel: no question, Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen (Atlantic Books, £13.50). A Florida comcrime (I just made that word up) which makes you feel better about the US in a year when that’s been tricky. You can be sexually saucy and inoffensive — a lesson Donald has never learned. It’s been a crowning year for our best living literary critic, Sir Christopher Ricks. His long campaign for Bob Dylan to be taken seriously in a literary way has triumphed. His edition of The Poems of T. S. Eliot with his co-editor Jim McCue, (Faber, two volumes, £26 each) is (literally) monumental and will last for as long as poetry is read. Peter Parker’s Housman Country: Into the Heart of England (Little Brown, £19.99).

Novelists can’t merely tell cracking tales. We’re supposed to save the world. At the University of Kent, a student implored me to inscribe The Mandibles with instructions for ‘how to keep this from happening’ — for the feverish young man now vowed to devote his life to preventing my new novel’s debt-fuelled near-future financial collapse. And I thought I was just doing a book signing. I wrote, ‘To keep this from happening, pay your bills. To cash in on this happening, get as deeply into debt as possible.’ The next student proffered a tiny spiral notebook, in which I was to jot ‘three things that are really important’.

Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (Bodley Head, £30) is an impressive and fascinating read. I have no idea what Lutherans have made of it, but for those of us who have harboured an irrational dislike of this extraordinary and unpleasant man, it’s a comfort to know we weren’t completely wrong. It’s taken me a long time to come across her, but it’s hard to imagine there is a better short-story writer than Deborah Eisenberg. All unmistakably hers, all intriguingly different, and almost all brilliant, her Collected Stories (Picador USA, £17.75) brings together 30 years’ work that shows no sign of going off in quality.

My novel-reading year has been dominated by Barbara Pym, starting with Excellent Women (Virago, £8.99). Pym is usually likened to Jane Austen, but her hilarious situation comedies and recurring characters constantly reminded me of Balzac. Island Home: A Landscape Memoir (Picador, £12.99) is an all-too-brief autobiography by the novelist Tim Winton. He sees Europe with the eyes of an extra-terrestrial, finding nature ‘impossibly fertile’ and the Alps ‘claustrophobic’. As an unhappy schoolboy in Western Australia, he explored the violent, delicate landscapes which cars have erased, rendering ‘the outlandish mundane’. Winton’s dry, physical descriptions have the opposite effect.

The Vanishing Man (Chatto, £18.99) by Laura Cumming is a moving memorial, written in the wake of the death of the author’s father. An impassioned celebration of Velázquez and a snapshot of the snobberies of the art world in the mid-19th century, it’s a cracking good story to boot. By contrast, a slow read rather than a page-turner, Ann Wroe’s Six Facets of Light (Cape, £25) is a compendium of art, literature and science that takes you from Fra Angelico and Eric Ravilious, Milton and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Einstein, Newton and Clerk Maxwell. A book for winter.

My novel of the year was What Belongs to You (Picador, £12.99), Garth Greenwell’s slender, poised, clear-eyed and devastating account of the depths to which unrequited sexual obsession can lead you, particularly if you become entangled with a rent-boy in Sofia. I also enjoyed and admired Aravind Adiga’s funny and touching Selection Day (Picador, £16.99), in which cricketing prodigies in Mumbai face googlies from both bowlers and life. And Tom Bullough’s densely and thrillingly written Addlands (Granta, £14.99), which traces the lives of a farming family on the Welsh borders through 70 years.

I loved Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton, £12.99). It’s a short, characteristically oblique story of a young woman in southern Spain with her crapulous mother, there to attend a dodgy-sounding, marble-adorned medical establishment where they hope to find — at last — a cure for the mother’s inability to walk. It’s no surprise it didn’t win the Man Booker prize, because as well as being elegant and deeply strange, it’s hummingly funny throughout. As we all know, prize juries regard jokes as a distinct disadvantage.

Far and Away: How Travel Can Change the World is a collection of pieces by the American essayist Andrew Solomon (Chatto, £25). From Moscow to Mongolia, Antarctica to Afghanistan, Solomon observes the world and reflects what he sees both on himself and on his own country. Resilience, hope, flux: Solomon has an outsider’s eagle eye. A dazzling volume. I also enjoyed On Reading, Writing and Living with Books (Pushkin Press, £4.99). This slim tome is among the first of a gorgeous new series culling extracts from the shelves of the London Library, an institution which celebrates its 175th birthday this year. Authors anthologised include Virginia Woolf and George Eliot. In half an hour, this book delivers the fruits of many days cruising the stacks in St James’s Square.

Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (Hogarth, £16.99), her modern version of The Taming of the Shrew, came as a surprise: the funniest book she has written, much funnier than Shakespeare. Private Eye considers that I should not praise Ferdinand Mount because I was at Eton with him but we never spoke to each other there, so perhaps it is acceptable to mention his English Voices: Lives, Landscapes and Laments 1985–2015 (Chatto, £15.99): a large volume of his reviews, I think literally without a dull page. Otherwise, I have been catching up on good books I have never got round to.

I’ve chosen two very different stories of young American lives. In Another Day in the Death of America (Guardian/Faber, £16.99), the journalist Gary Younge anatomises American society and its squandered potential by means of a simple conceit: he chose a random date in 2013 and investigated the lives of those children and teenagers shot and killed on that day. It’s a profoundly important piece of reportage, seemingly written with restraint but devastatingly powerful. Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock’s debut, The Smell of Other People’s Houses (Faber, £7.99), is a gorgeous young adult novel, interweaving the lives of four teenagers in small-town Alaska in the 1970s — their community, their struggles and joys.