Books of the Year | 20 November 2010

Philip Hensher


The English novel I liked best this year was Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (Cape, £18.99) — humane, rueful and wonderfully resourceful in its wit. Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (Fourth Estate, £20) was simply a marvel of technique, observation and sympathy. At the other end of the artistic spectrum, Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories (Hamish Hamilton, £20) were a must for anyone seriously interested in the means of fiction. All three were, among other things, masterpieces of comedy.

The memoir of suffering now has its own section in bookshops. Few of them deserve one’s attention, but Candia McWilliam’s magnificent What To Look For In Winter (Cape, £16.99) transcends its apparent category through the beauty and freshness of its language, and the stoic nobility of its spirit. That, and Edmund de Waal’s gripping The Hare With Amber Eyes (Chatto, £16.99) showed that what counts in a memoir is not experience alone, but intelligence and an ability to write.

The best biography of the year was Philip Ziegler’s rather straight-faced life of Edward Heath (Harper Press, £25). Simon Winder’s Germania (Picador, £18.99) was a wonderfully entertaining voyage into terra incognita — the German nation, its history and geography, hardly mentioning the Nazis. I love Germany, and Winder’s untidy, idiosyncratic but always interesting book both confirmed old interests and sparked off new ones. The German nation should award him the Verdienstkreuz without delay.

Jonathan Sumption

It has been a good year for historical writing about the ‘long’ 18th century. The appearance of Thierry Lentz’s book on Napoleon’s Hundred Days, Les Cent Jours: 1815 (Fayard), completes the author’s magnificent five-volume history of the public career of Napoleon, which now ranks as the best modern account. Unusually for a work on this subject in French, it is wholly objective and even shows some interest in the rest of Europe’s experience of the great despot.