Books of the Year II — chosen by our regular reviewers

David Crane

If nothing else, this has been a good time for catch-up. Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (translated by Walter Wallich, Persephone Books, £13) was a treat. But the real discovery of the year was an author I had never heard of, Wallace Breem. He seems to have spent his life as a librarian in the Inner Temple but found time to write three historical novels, one of which, The Leopard and the Cliff (Faber Finds, £13), set during the Third Afghan War of 1919, is up there with the very best novels of military life: vivid, tense and deeply moving, with a central character who has a touch of Guy Crouchback about him.

For those of us who never got to the exhibition, Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company edited by William Dalrymple (The Wallace Collection, £18.75) is a wonderful reminder of what we missed.

Graham Robb

The adventurous realism of Anna Keen’s Turneresque drawings of a dissolving monumental city in London: The Metamorphosis (Unicorn, £25), with an essay by Edward Lucie-Smith and the artist’s own contemplative commentary, reminded me of the multimedia paintings of Victor Hugo, another admirer of ‘the Black Babylon’.

Don DeLillo’s frighteningly funny The Silence (Picador, £11.99) begins with a crash landing. The novel was virtually finished when the pandemic struck and screen time became more important than ever. In The Silence, the screens have all gone blank. Some vast digital malfunction has occurred:

‘The pauses were turning into silences and beginning to feel like the wrong kind of normal,’ Martin said. ‘Are we living in a makeshift reality?… A future that isn’t supposed to take form just yet?’

DeLillo’s 17th novel celebrates the muted hysteria of intelligent human beings in the face of universal calamity.

Hilary Spurling

My favourite book is On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming (Chatto, £16.99). Published last year, it is part mystery, part memoir, part hymn to the majestic expanses of the author’s native Lincolnshire.