Philip Hensher
The two books I enjoyed most this year were both out of the usual run. Who was the last person to publish a book of aphorisms? No idea, but Don Paterson’s splendid The Book of Shadows (Picador, £12.99) will probably discourage anyone from entering into rivalry for a good time to come. Startlingly insightful, funny, exotic and, of course, from the finest poet of his generation, irreducibly well-put, this was a book everyone should read. Simon Gray’s The Smoking Diaries (Granta, £12.99) was difficult to categorise; a ragbag of stories and reminiscences, it must be one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.
The best biography of the year was Peter Parker’s exemplary and constantly absorbing Isherwood (Picador, £25), one of the few biographies of such length which really deserved and justified its amplitude. The best novels were V. S. Naipaul’s extraordinary Magic Seeds (Picador, £16.99), David Mitchell’s highly original and dreamily satisfying Cloud Atlas (Sceptre, £16.99),
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