Anthony Daniels
J. G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come (Fourth Estate, £17.99) is a dyspeptic vision of a dystopian Britain that has already half-arrived. He is a close observer of our national malaise: indiscriminate consumerism combined with a sense of entitlement, and therefore of resentment. His profound understanding of the place of the teddy bear in our national life made me laugh.
Bruce Clark’s Twice a Stranger: Greece, Turkey and the Minorities They Expelled (Granta, £20) is a brilliant, subtle and very moving exploration of the ironies of modernisation and nationalism in Greece and Turkey. Greek Moslems were deemed Turks, and Turkish Orthodox deemed Greek, and expelled from their ancestral homes accordingly. Yet another painful reminder of man’s inhumanity to man.
Sam Leith
There were a lot of old favourites performing well this year in fiction. Martin Amis’s gulag story House of Meetings (Cape, £15.99) was terrific, though he must be sick to his new back teeth of hearing it accorded the back-handed compliment ‘a return to form’.
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