Books of the year II: more choices of reading in 2023

Ruth Scurr

In Ways of Life (Jonathan Cape, £30), Laura Freeman channels the spirit of the art critic and collector Jim Ede. She traces the origins of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge – not a museum, nor art gallery, more a cabinet of curiosities – through Ede’s own life, his work for the Tate, the other houses and countries he lived in and the artists he cared for and wrote about.

In Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations (Simon & Schuster, £30), Simon Schama argues that ‘all history is natural history’, and introduces a rich cast of protagonists who pushed forward the frontiers of science for the good of humanity, regardless of national, territorial boundaries. ‘There are no foreigners, only familiars,’ Schama asserts: a powerful message for our troubled times.

Peter Parker

Why is it that women write such good novels about the two world wars? If Alice Winn isn’t yet quite in the league of Olivia Manning, Susan Hill, Shirley Hazzard, Jennifer Johnston and Pat Barker, her In Memoriam (Viking, £14.99) is nevertheless an extremely assured and engaging contribution to this genre. Two boys at a public school, fearful of admitting their love for each other, set off for the Western Front and find themselves in some of the worst battles of the war, described here in horrifyingly visceral detail. Having long ago written a non-fiction book about public schools and the first world war, I approached this novel with some scepticism; but Winn barely puts a foot wrong and has a remarkable feel for the complicated emotions of her two protagonists. Drawing upon the literature of the trenches and the pitifully short lives of those who marched away from Winn’s own alma mater, Marlborough College, this was easily the most affecting novel I read this year.