Spectator Books of the Year: The story that’s too funny for the Man Booker Prize

I loved Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton, £12.99). It’s a short, characteristically oblique story of a young woman in southern Spain with her crapulous mother, there to attend a dodgy-sounding, marble-adorned medical establishment where they hope to find — at last — a cure for the mother’s inability to walk. It’s no surprise it didn’t win the Man Booker prize, because as well as being elegant and deeply strange, it’s hummingly funny throughout. As we all know, prize juries regard jokes as a distinct disadvantage.

I’m reviewing the year’s cricket books at the moment for next April’s Wisden, and the outstanding volume so far has been The Grade Cricketer, by Dave Edwards, Sam Perry and Ian Higgins (Melbourne Books, £14.99). This is actually even funnier than Hot Milk, a faux-memoir by a low-level Australian cricketer of modest talents, who knows that scoring runs and taking wickets matter less than the possession of a good ‘rig’ (body) and a decent grasp of Anchorman quotes.