Books of the Year I — chosen by our regular reviewers

Philip Hensher

There were some very good novels this year, but they came from surprising directions. It is astonishing that one as original as Kate Barker-Mawjee’s The Coldest Place on Earth (Conrad Press, £9.99) couldn’t find a major publisher. A friend recommended this wonderfully controlled and evocatively written novel about a heart coming to life in the depths of Siberia. 

I always enjoy Mick Herron’s half-arsed spy thrillers, but Bad Actors (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) took a big step into literary excellence. The dazzling, Conrad-like structure turned an entertainment into a major literary statement. Sheila Llewellyn’s Winter in Tabriz (Hodder & Stoughton, £8.99) was a revelation – long considered and slowly overwhelming with its sense of time and place (Iran, 1979). Someone else who has written magnificently about Iran is James Buchan. His A Street Shaken by Light (Mountain Leopard, £16.99), not about Iran but about a Scotsman on the make, is the first of a cycle. It is one of those historical novels that evokes not just a past time but a lost way of speaking.

I shouldn’t really comment on Penguin’s short story anthologies since I’ve edited three myself, but Patrick McGuinness’s two-volume The Penguin Book of French Short Stories (£30 each) is outstanding – even if it left out George Sand.

In non-fiction, I liked Keiron Pim’s life of Joseph Roth, Endless Flight (Granta, £25) – a work long wanted in English and capably carried out. Graham Robb’s France: An Adventure History (Picador, £25) might be the book that I was assigned to review which I enjoyed the most. I ordered Betsy Balcombe’s memoirs of Napoleon in exile on the back of it, which is always a good indicator.

I’m a year late, but Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar (Granta, £9.99) was a knockout: a responsible history of places that at the time aspired to nothing more than a few hours of lurid fun and total oblivion.