Books of the Year | 12 November 2011

A further selection of our reviewers’ favourite reading in 2011

Richard Davenport-Hines

Amidst the din, slogans and panic of modern publishing, my cherished books are tender, calm and achieve a surpassing eloquence by dint of tightly controlled reticence.

Anthony Thwaite’s Late Poems (Enitharmon, £10) are written by a man of 80. Each of them is word-perfect: some recall dead parents; others foreshadow Thwaite’s death; and throughout there is the clear, crisp wisdom, pensive sadness and absence of confessional self-pity that show a mastery of language and feeling.

Amos Oz’s Scenes from Village Life (Chatto, £12.99) is set in an Israeli pioneer village which is being chi-chied with boutique wineries as jackals circle in the surrounding countryside. The landscape and routines of Tel Ilan are sumptuously evoked. Oz’s characters might be drawn from Chekhov: their lives seem an irresoluble muddle of sorrow, baffled hopes and missed chances; his compassion for them makes the reader care deeply about them, too. This is a wise, beautiful and enduring book.

Cressida Connolly

Nicola Shulman’s study of Sir Thomas Wyatt and his times, Graven With Diamonds (Short Books, £20), is both sparkling and scholarly. Nothing I’ve ever read about the court of Henry VIII has made it so vivid. For the first time one could really grasp Anne Boleyn’s wit and intelligence, both of which she must have needed, to keep the king off for seven years — seven years! — until they could marry. The book is marvellous about Wyatt’s poetry: indeed, about the point of poetry in general. A gem.

I loved the young German writer Judith Herman’s short story collection, Alice (Clerkenwell Press, £8.99).The stories are beautifully written, very precise in their detail, yet enigmatic.

Finally, a novel, New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani (Dedalus, £9.99). Don’t be put off by the unwelcoming title: this is an extraordinary book, as good as Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and with a similar mystery at its heart.