Books of the Year II

Peter Parker

The New Zealand novelist Catherine Chidgey ought to be much more celebrated in this country than she is. Do not be put off by the fact that The Axeman’s Carnival (Europa, £14.99) is narrated by a magpie; whimsy is entirely absent from this highly original, thrillingly dark and often very funny novel. The bird is adopted by the wife of a cash-strapped farmer and learns to speak, becoming an internet sensation and so providing useful income. At the same time, its guileless chatter includes picked-up phrases that inadvertently expose what is really going on in the household where it has made its home.

Treat of the year was Sheila Robinson’s Balance, Humanity and Nature (Random Spectacular, £27.50), a clumsily titled but beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated account of the life and work of this wonderful printmaker and illustrator, whose career has sometimes been overshadowed by the other (male) artists associated with Great Bardfield.

Daniel Swift

Caroline Lucas was the UK’s first Green party MP and also did a PhD in English Literature. Her Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story (Hutchinson Heinemann, £22) deftly marries the political and the literary. Ranging over the myths and visions of England and Englishness offered by poets, novelists and politicians including Edward Thomas, P.D. James, William Blake, Stanley Baldwin and Boris Johnson, she argues that our literary history gives us rich material from which to build a new sense of this country, our place in it and how we might face the future. Another England is idealistic, naive and freewheeling, as urgent and lively books often are. I loved it and it is certainly my book of the year.