Daniel Swift
I spent too much of this (and last) year reading anaemic updatings of Shakespeare plays: pale novels which borrowed plots and missed points and, oddly, always misunderstood the minor characters. After these, Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young (Galley Beggar Press, £9.99) came as a relief and a surprise. Her novel is big, beautiful, and most of all bold: a rewriting of King Lear, transplanted to modern day Delhi, which is both a dazzlingly original reading of the play and a full novel in its own right. A masterpiece, and by a long way my book of the year.
Graham Robb
Mike Lankford’s genial and sassy biography Becoming Leonardo: An Exploded View of the Life of Leonardo da Vinci (Melville House, £19.25) has none of the stuffiness of that exhausting genre. Little is known about the day-to-day Leonardo, but Lankford’s passionate, intelligent speculations bring the shadow to life.
Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor (Picador, £16.99)
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