Books of the Year | 9 November 2017

A.N. Wilson

Elmet by Fiona Mozley (John Murray, £10.99). It is difficult to convey the full horror of this spellbinding first novel. The young author, a medievalist, presumably knows the no less violent Njál’s Saga. Elmet, though set in the modern age, concerns timeless protagonists who have contrived to live outside the normal modern settings. Dad is an ex-prisoner, who earns his living as a prize-fighter — at illegally organised, very bloody bare-knuckle fights. Somehow he and his children manage to build a house on land belonging to a sinister figure called Mr Price, without any bureaucrats from the local planning office materialising to ask what he is up to. Price wants his revenge, and when his own son meets a bloody end, he exacts it. What is so memorable is the sense of utter desolation of this family. They are as outside our world as Lear and Edgar on the Heath.

Frances Wilson

Three remarkable biographies appeared this year. A.N. Wilson’s Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker (John Murray, £25) was as bold, audacious and entertaining as I knew it would be; the reviews less so. Sixty years ago, C.P. Snow condemned the existence of ‘two cultures’ who won’t speak to one another and it seems that nothing much has changed. Historians and literary critics still approach the sciences at their peril.

In the annoyingly brilliant merry-go-round that is Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret (4th Estate, £16.99), Craig Brown gives a new spin to royal biography, and this is a double book: a collage of Princess Margaret and a snapshot of the age that invented her.

Molly Keane, Sally Phipps’s life of her mother (Virago, £20), is as fresh and true and eccentric as any of Keane’s novels, and shows just how good biography can be in the hands of a natural writer.

Anna Aslanyan

Malacqua, Nicola Pugliese’s only novel, was discovered by Italo Calvino, who said in 1977: ‘This is a book with a meaning and a force and a message.’