Allan Massie's books of the year

Graham Swift is probably still best known for Waterland, published almost 30 years ago. I rather think he is now out of fashion. Certainly Wish You Were Here received less attention that it deserved. Swift has the admirable ability to write literary novels about characters who would never read such books. He presents us with a complete world, one which his inarticulate characters struggle to understand. William Empsom wrote that ‘the central function of imaginative literature is to make you realise that other people act on moral convictions different from your own’. Graham Swift does just that.

The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung is a novel that everybody interested in contemporary China should read. Written in a flat journalistic style (in translation at least) it presents a vivid, intelligent and disturbing picture of the world’s emerging super-power, a society where economic freedom co-exists with continuing political repression, a place where vast change has been accepted in order that there should be no essential change.