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.
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