Spectator Books of the Year: An autobiography that makes the mundane seem outlandish

Island Home: A Landscape Memoir (Picador, £12.99) is an all-too-brief autobiography by the novelist Tim Winton. He sees Europe with the eyes of an extra-terrestrial, finding nature ‘impossibly fertile’ and the Alps ‘claustrophobic’. As an unhappy schoolboy in Western Australia, he explored the violent, delicate landscapes which cars have erased, rendering ‘the outlandish mundane’. Winton’s dry, physical descriptions have the opposite effect.

Hannah Kohler’s The Outside Lands (Picador, £12.99), the tense saga of an American family at the time of Vietnam war, struck me as the work of a seasoned American novelist though, apparently, she grew up on the south coast of England and this is her first novel.