Spectator books of the year: Anna Aslanyan enjoys a passionate take on 21st-century London

My top title of the year is Satin Island by Tom McCarthy (Cape, £16.99), convincing proof that the best writers of our time are anthropologists, and that James Joyce, were he alive today, would be working for Google. I also enjoyed Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (Granta, £14.99), a self-deconstructing novel whose metafictional plot speaks of the nature of time and of things being endlessly interconnected. My non-fiction pick is Iain Sinclair’s London Overground: A Day’s Walk Around the Ginger Line (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99), the psychogeographer’s passionate take on 21st-century London, a place of perpetual change and chronological resonances.

For the most overrated books of the year, see the ‘hatchet issue’ of the London Review of Books (24 September), featuring reviews of Purity by Jonathan Franzen (Fourth Estate, £20) and A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (Picador, £16.99).