Sarah Akhtar, Stoke-on-Trent
The best books take me to another world, and, in 2014, one of these journeys was to a place of terrorism and violence but also great love, owing to the exquisite prose of Nadeem Aslam in The Blind Man’s Garden (Faber). Later I travelled from Nigeria to the US with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Americanah (Fourth Estate), in which she tells a love story infused with social comedy and insights into what it is to be an immigrant today. Finally, I spent time with a Sikh community in Wolverhampton: in Marriage Material (Windmill), Sathnam Sanghera has skilfully reworked Arnold Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale (Vintage) to give the reader an insight into the life of a shopkeeper and the difficulties faced by second-generation Asians in Britain.
Kate Anderson, Upper Fulwood, Sheffield
If you love all things writing-related you will enjoy learning the history and development of the stuff in your pencil cases in James Ward’s Adventures in Stationery (Profile). It is a book that could lighten many a tedious work meeting as you observe the chewed Biros and Post-it notes in a new light. Paul Ewen’s novel How to Be a Public Author (Galley Beggar) centres on the protagonist’s meetings with real Booker prizewinners at literary events. His gloriously inept approaches burst the balloon of literary pretensions, while remaining deeply affectionate towards the writers and books.
John Beeken, Brighton
Many films, novels, plays and articles have been produced about national service, but Richard Vinen’s National Service: Conscription in Britain 1945‑1963 (Allen Lane) must be the definitive work on Britain’s peacetime conscription. Dealing with the political implications, the effects on conscripts, basic training and service in Cyprus, Malaya, Korea, the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya and the fiasco of Suez, it is a sympathetic and revealing account full of reminiscences – many hilarious, some brutal.
Sailing Close to the Wind by Dennis Skinner (Quercus) is a memoir of the Beast of Bolsover’s 40-odd years as an MP in what he calls the Palace of Varieties. He has endured eight prime ministers and has been called a dinosaur, but remains resolutely opposed to compromise and patronage.
Charles Boardman, Nottingham
I was impressed – and nourished – by Zia Haider Rahman’s masterly and expansive novel In the Light of What We Know (Picador), and also relished something at the minimalist end of the fiction scale, Can’t and Won’t by Lydia Davis (Hamish Hamilton), her collection of short pieces, some only a paragraph, or even a sentence, long. But I was most affected by Helen Dunmore’s The Lie (Hutchinson), in which a young man, still tormented by horrors in the trenches in the first world war, returns home to rural life. He takes a course of action that seems at the time to be the right thing to do but which has heartbreaking consequences. The closing paragraphs had me on the verge of tears.
Sue Brooks, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire
Horatio Clare’s Down to the Sea in Ships (Chatto and Windus) is a voyage on the Maersk Shipping Line and was a stark introduction for me to the outrage of the container shipping business. Everyone should read this book and say a prayer for the Filipino merchant seamen who make our lifestyle possible.
Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk (Jonathan Cape ) was an even more intense read. I found myself caught between its harrowing story and the exhilarating pleasure of the writing. The best solution was to ration the pages; I read it slowly over three memorable weeks.
Cornelius Browne, Dungloe, County Donegal
The polar caps may be melting, but this year a pair of icebound historical novelists found themselves on firm footing. Everland (Fig Tree) is the fictional Antarctic island to which Rebecca Hunt directs two expeditions separated by a century, the author’s real-life Arctic research trip bolstering her imagination to stunning effect. Arctic Summer (Atlantic) is the title of an abandoned EM Forster novel, resurrected by Damon Galgut for his portrait of the artist during his 14-year struggle to create A Passage to India – two great writers working a century apart, a masterpiece of a bygone era breathing life into one in our own time.
Michael Callanan, Birmingham
Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things (Canongate) bowled me over. It is exactly what its title suggests, disorienting in its ability to rocket along while also being mesmerisingly contemplative.
I’ve been amazed that Meg Wolitzer hasn’t had more acclaim for The Interestings (Vintage); she has written the great American novel without many people seeming to notice.
I’ve also enjoyed Brian K Vaughan’s Saga series (Image Comics), the third and fourth volumes of which have been published this year. It is a graphic novel with realist themes, about families that don’t get along, parenting and falling in love – only the characters happen to be flying through space in a tree pursued by bounty hunters. Fiona Staples’s illustrations are bold and full of colour.
Morag Charlwood, Shoreham‑by‑Sea, West Sussex
The text of King Charles III (Nick Hern Books), Mike Bartlett’s five-act future-history play, is in Shakespearean mode, with heightened eloquence, iambic pentameter and comic relief. It is a sardonic yet affectionate look at the hazards of our unwritten constitution.
Andrew Bromfield’s translation of Hamid Ismailov’s The Dead Lake (Peirene Press) captures the poetry of loss in a contemporary telling of tragic human and environmental desolation on the Kazakh steppes. Beautiful and heart-rending.
Dawn Churchill, Belper
The most important non-fiction book I have read this year is Austerity Bites: A Journey to the Sharp End of Cuts in the UK (Policy Press) by Mary O’Hara, an exposé of the effects of cuts in welfare on the most vulnerable in society. This book should be read by all politicians: it might even ignite a spark of humanity in the hearts of some.
My poetry book of the year is Division Street by Helen Mort, which won the Aldeburgh prize. She was born in the year the miners were defeated, and her work reflects the divisions that still exist in her native Sheffield. The collection, however, is much more than this, demonstrating delicacy, originality and maturity.
Marge Clouts, Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire
Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (Simon & Schuster) edited by father and son Anthony and Ben Holden, includes powerful choices of work by Auden, Housman, Hardy and Larkin, but lesser known poets such as James Arlington Wright and many translated poets (Brecht, Rilke, Cavafy) feature, too. In dark times, sometimes only poetry can cut it.
David Runciman’s The Confidence Trap (Princeton), a history of democracy in crisis from the first world war to the present, is original, riveting and illuminating.
Des Cranston, Portstewart, Northern Ireland
Sheila Hale’s majestic contribution to art and 16th-century social history Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice (HarperPress) covers a huge landscape of history, politics and religious tensions as well as the artist’s technique, subject matter, family life and influences until his death in his 80s in 1576. A satisfying and important work.
Paul Eastwood, Stamford
Mistrust of the establishment is rife in society, which makes reading Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Bloomsbury) all the more chilling. Philby drank in the right bars and joined the right clubs: he avoided detection in part because his interrogators saw him as “one of us”. Thrilling Cities, an ideal companion piece from the same era, is a collection of Ian Fleming articles reissued by Vintage Classics. Armed with a round-the-world ticket, the former-secret service man produced essays that were no tourist guides, unless you were looking for the seedier side of life. They provide snapshots of the arrogant Englishman abroad.
David Fothergill, East Riding
Josep Pla was a 21-year-old student when he wrote his 1918/19 diary in Catalan. For the next 45 years he polished and embellished it, adding observations, reminiscences, descriptions of landscapes and stories, before it was finally published in 1966. Thanks to Peter Bush’s scintillating translation, it was published in English this year as The Gray Notebook (NYRB) – a 638-page paperback to dip into whenever and wherever, describing a Catalan way of life almost 20 years before the Spanish civil war dismantled it irrevocably. Don’t be deterred by the length: you’ll find yourself wishing Bush would translate the other 45 volumes of Pla’s work.
Andy Freeman, Grimsby
The highest standards of scholarship, inspirational subject matter and her wonderfully clear spoken-voice style combine to make the groundbreaking Common People: the History of an English Family (Fig Tree) by Alison Light my book of the year. Starting her journey with just a few scraps of her own family history, she takes us on an emotional search involving archive visits and historical discoveries that resurrect the Heffrons, the Whitlocks, the Lights and the Smiths from the last two centuries. Where they lived, their migrations and their jobs – sailors, needlemakers, servants, bricklayers, barmaids, farmworkers – are all vividly described in Light’s democratic genealogical study. Why should the wealthy “own” the past?
Richard Gilyead, Saffron Walden
I like novels of ideas, and David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (Sceptre) is full of them. A contorted tale of possessed minds that runs from the distant past to the near future, this mutant offspring of varsity farce and mystical adventure reads like a complicated dream you half remember before waking. Possession was also a theme of The Three by Sarah Lotz (Hodder & Stoughton). Four simultaneous plane crashes leave three (or is it four?) surviving children. How did they survive? And why? Lotz employs a reportage style to explore the resulting media and religious frenzy.
Catriona Graham, Edinburgh
The best novel for me was Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest (Vintage), which works on so many levels – exploring the dehumanising effects of targets-driven bureaucracy, the human capacity to adapt to the unspeakable, the ethics of balancing ends and means – as well as being full of stories, many of them vignettes really, of courage and love. Jérôme Ferrari’s The Sermon on the Fall of Rome translated by Geoffrey Strachan (Quercus) tackles a century of French history and its many conflicts, as well as the debasing effects of tourism on those who service it. Focusing on Corsica, but taking in Paris, Algeria and French colonies in Africa, its portrayal of the many accommodations we make with “circumstance” is both humorous and poignant.
Kevin Harvey, Nottingham
The only book I managed to finish this year, and I started several, was Geoff Dyer’s Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George HW Bush (Visual Editions). Part memoir, part off-beat ethnography, this genre-bending text offers a beady glimpse into a remote and secret world regulated by its own precise codes of conduct. What fun it is to follow the wryly observant Dyer, a rangy six-footer, as he navigates his way through a confounding network of low-ceilinged walkways and finger-trapping hatches, all the while encountering the ship’s sundry personnel (from chaplains to captains), whose stories he extracts with a playful, but never insincere, fascination.
Martin Hills, Chichester
Ranging from “the downhill part” back to “the golden years”, Romany and Tom (Bloomsbury) is Ben Watt’s affecting account of the lives of his parents: Tom, a dour Scotsman and jazz musician who led a briefly highly successful big band, and the flamboyant Romany, an actor turned celebrity journalist who became confidante to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. A picture of the parents’ prime years emerges through letters, documents and memorabilia, as well as Watt’s own memories. He also includes their children’s efforts to exercise beneficient responsibility over the fiercely independent Romany and Tom as they grow old. It is a book of great sensitivity and psychological insight.
John Horder, London
Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk is a masterpiece. It combines her obsession with flying goshawks, her father’s death and TH White, the author of The Sword in The Stone and The Goshawk, with emotional honesty and transparency. Rosemary Tonks’s self-agonising is at the heart of her Collected Poems: Bedouin of the London Evening (Bloodaxe). She died aged 85 in April this year after a long period away from the literary scene, and publisher Neil Astley’s persistence in getting this book out is a story in itself.
Kate Johnson, Mirfield, West Yorkshire
Why Niall Williams’s History of the Rain (Bloomsbury) did not win every literary prize is baffling: it provided the most satisfying read of 2014. It is a novel about books and being a bookish, serious reader, as well as about family, Irish village life, devotion and weather, invariably rain. Books rarely make me weep nowadays, but this one did, for all the right reasons – its sublime and funny prose is totally engaging. I could not bear it to end.
Martin Jones, New Barnet, Herts
This year I started Georges Simenon’s 75-novel Maigret series. The dominant theme of the books seems to be that if you let this big, obstinate man study the details of a crime long enough, patterns will form and logic and human understanding does the rest. A year ago, Penguin committed to publishing new translations of all 75 Maigret novels over the next five years. The first batch cover the early 1930s; I cannot wait for more of these slim, perfect novellas with their elegant front covers to emerge.
Cyril Kavanagh, Kingston
The English and Their History by Robert Tombs (Allen Lane) is a magnificent panoramic view of English history written with gusto and lucidity. The chapters on the Whig/Tory political complexities of the 18th century are excellent: that constitutional conflict resonates to the present day.
Walter Benjamin deserves to be more celebrated, and Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Harvard), is a step in the right direction. It is an efficient introduction to his work and legacy while also offering a detailed account of Benjamin the man, his strengths and weaknesses and the world he lived in. It is also a deeply poignant story of his struggle to survive in a hostile Europe and his tragic suicide at the age of 48.
Sue Keable, Cambridge
In Ian McEwan’s The Children Act (Jonathan Cape), Fiona Maye, a leading high court judge in her 50s, is forced to come to terms with her childlessness and a rift in her marriage while she also tackles the problematic case of a teenage boy who is refusing crucial medical treatment on religious grounds (he is a Jehovah’s Witness). McEwan, as ever, writes with tenderness and sagacity. Nina Stibbe’s Man at the Helm is the funniest book I have read for a long time – three young children (and their dog) try to find a new husband for their 31-year-old divorced mother in an unfriendly English village in the 1970s. It is flawlessly written, frothy and delightfully quirky – a gem of a book.
Kate Lathem, Cornwall
John Carey’s The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books (Faber) appears to be light but is stuffed with erudite insights into literature and the pleasure of books. Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (Picador) is a hugely accomplished first novel – a story about friendship and love that is packed with information, this time about banking and international relations. I was stunned by its brilliance and range; I hope Professor Carey would approve of it, too.
Terry Lempriere, Warrington
The most informative and satisfying read of the year for me was Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France by Caroline Moorehead (Chatto & Windus), a reasoned and sympathetic account of events in the French Massif Central region between 1940 and 1944. The events still arouse controversy today, and this account of how villagers in the isolated area combined to protect and save many hundreds of people is bravely told. It is, as the book’s introduction says, a story of courage, faith, and morality – but also fallibility of memory.
My fiction book of the year was The Bone Clocks, an enthralling genre- and time-hopping page-turner; its wicked humour and incisive critique of our present and possible future worlds is riveting from beginning to end.
John Perry, Broomfield, Chelmsford
Being primarily a reader of realist fiction I was unsure whether Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (Hamish Hamilton) would appeal to me. However, the widespread critical acclaim persuaded me to buy a copy – and I’m very glad I did. A genuinely inventive novel about duality, and demonstrating how the novel form itself can be both playful and serious, it would have been a worthy winner of the Man Booker prize. In Graham Swift’s first collection of short stories for more than 30 years, England and Other Stories (Simon & Schuster), he provided a thoroughly engaging portrait of a multifaceted England. Swift portrays his characters with empathy and an unwavering eye.
Jane Quilter, Sheffield
I am not sure about the best book of the year – but Counterpart by Rorie Smith (Tan Tan Books) could certainly qualify as the oddest book of the year. Our reading group was completely split. Is it non-fiction or fiction? Is it memoir or novel? There is Parkinson’s disease, an armed robbery, a bizarre manuscript, a long walk across Europe – even, it seems, a plot to kill a certain eminent person with a crossbow. All written in the form of a simple and endearing family memoir.
Katharine Robbins, Leeds
The challenges of old age and reflections on the past are key to Emma Healey’s dementia detective novel Elizabeth Is Missing (Viking). Ben Watt’s memoir, Romany and Tom (Bloomsbury), movingly tells of his parents’ lives together, from jazz clubs to care homes, and of their impact on him. The interactions between humans and animals are key to Patrick Barkham’s Badgerlands (Granta). It considers our changing attitude to badgers over the centuries and introduces us to an extraordinary range of current enthusiasts: it’s not all Wind in the Willows. Across the Atlantic, Karen Joy Fowler’s novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, brings some unexpected twists and turns to family life.
John Shields, Wilmslow, Cheshire
The historical research in Stevie Davies’s Awakening (Parthian) is impeccable, but it is her mastery of storytelling that is its greatest asset. The novel is set in the 1860s and focuses on two sisters from a strong Baptist tradition in an age of great religious fervour and social upheaval. There is joy, humour and heartbreak; I loved it. He Wants by Alison Moore (Salt) has a stark style and blends past and present in a way that allows revelations to slip by almost unnoticed. It was a shock at the end to realise how much I cared about the protagonist.
Michael Solan, Nettlesworth
Paul Trynka’s Sympathy for the Devil: The Birth of the Rolling Stones and the Death of Brian Jones (Bantam) is a life of the founder of the Stones that took me back to 1964 and an explosive performance by the band at Newcastle Odeon. Jones, then, was as much the rebellious public face in the band as Jagger. Trynka chronicles a self-destructive man in turbulent times. At the end of the 60s, Jones, now an ex-Stone and the victim of his own excess, died aged 27. It’s an absorbing tale of an all-too-human, gifted musician and flawed man – the antithesis of today’s anaemic, manufactured pop idols.
Alison Starling
Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (Vintage) is an absorbing read whether you’ve read Fitzgerald’s masterly novels or not. Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (Abacus) has divided readers and critics (and my book group), but I loved it, especially her vivid re-creations of an uptight family in an elegant Manhattan apartment and an increasingly chaotic one on an unfinished housing estate on the edge of Vegas. I heard Stephen Grosz talking about his book The Examined Life on the Radio 3 programme, Private Passions. Grosz’s true tales from the psychoanalyst’s couch have stayed with me and should be read by everyone who wants to understand what makes us who we are.
Martin Stott, Oxford
Jans Ondaatje Rolls and Ann Chisholm’s The Bloomsbury Cookbook (Thames & Hudson) is as much social history as recipe book. The “Bloomsberries” may have been the foodies of their day, but they were profoundly ignorant of all aspects of food production and preparation. The book combines food paintings, prose, gossip and recipes. From a different perspective and taking a much longer historical sweep, Margaret Willes in The Gardens of the British Working Class (Yale) discusses the struggles of creating a “blessed plot” from cottage gardens and allotments. She brings it to life through the words of people such as Joseph Turrill, small-time market gardener and diarist, who was a neighbour of Lady Ottoline Morrell in Garsington. It is a horticultural history of the people employed as the cooks and gardeners of the intellectuals.
Michael Sumsion, London
Laurent Seksik’s The Last Days of Stefan Zweig (Salammbo Press) is a subtle, tender and muted rendering of the final months of Zweig’s life – a book that warranted wider exposure. Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life (Zero) is a bracing, elegiac dissection of “hauntology” and the cultural atemporality of our age. However, two novels touched and enthralled me more than anything else this year. Ali Smith’s How to Be Both is a slippery, formally audacious work that spins a good yarn while bending gender and genre; it deserved to win the Booker. Equally compelling is Boyhood Island (Vintage), the latest volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series of epic confessionals. A work that initially oscillates between boredom and exhilaration, frequently within the same page, it is both fearsome in its stark candour and gripping in its painstaking dedication to verisimilitude.
Simon Surtees, London
Andrew’s Brain (Abacus) by EL Doctorow was a quirky meditation on modern American history centred around 9/11. It managed to be profoundly moving but also riotously funny in a surreal way. No one – neither Bush nor Rumsfeld – gets off lightly. Orfeo (Atlantic) saw Richard Powers back on form. He asks questions about whether radical creativity might be moving away from avant-garde arts and into science, using the Orpheus myth as a metaphor. It is a tour de force that should please musicians and scientists alike.
Dave Taylor, Hampshire
Anger Is an Energy (Simon & Schuster) by John Lydon is a heartfelt, honest and witty autobiography that paints a vivid portrait of his extraordinary life so far. Still creating powerful and passionate music with the underrated Public Image Ltd, he remains true to his working-class roots. Stuart Clark’s Is There Life on Mars? The 20 Big Universe Questions (Quercus) is an engrossing, mind-expanding and accessible introduction to some of the key questions about cosmology.
Liz Taylor, East Garforth, Near Leeds
Max Adams’s The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria (Head of Zeus) is my book of the year. I turned to it as part of my continuing love affair with the county of Northumberland, second only to Yorkshire in its beauty and heritage. It’s a fascinating and courageous book that makes connections between the two counties and dares to debunk some of the assertions made, and myths created, by the north’s greatest ever historian, the Venerable Bede. It is essential reading for every Yorksumbrian as we dare to dream of devolution for the north.
Genevive Terry, Exeter
Fourth of July Creek (William Heinemann) is a magnificently accomplished first novel by Smith Henderson. Set in Montana in 1979-1981, it’s a book in which grim things happen and unsympathetic characters abound. I would also choose All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (Faber). As often with Toews’s writing, the poignancy of this story is accentuated by its autobiographical source and its droll humour. It tells the story of two Canadian Mennonite sisters, one determined to kill herself, the other as determined to keep her alive.
Michael Walling, Enfield
I would nominate two terrific novels from Australia. Fiona McFarlane’s The Night Guest (Sceptre) is both a touching study of encroaching dementia and a crime thriller – you really don’t know what’s going to happen next. Another Australian novel won the Booker, Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, but I also loved the unofficial runner-up, Ali Smith’s How to be Both, and read the “Eyes” half before “Camera”: it felt satisfying that way round, with the emotional climax of the end also making sense of the opening. I’d love to know what it’s like to unravel it the other way … but of course, I’ll never get the chance.
Terry Ward, Wickford, Essex
Of the 100 non-fiction titles I have read this year, James Meek’s Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else (Verso) is the one that stands out. Earlier this year, George Osborne gave permission to the Chinese Sovereign Wealth Fund to purchase 9% of the shares of Thames water, then he thanked the Chinese for having confidence in the British economy.
My favourite novel was The Undertaking (Atlantic) by Audrey Magee in which a German soldier on the Russian front marries a woman whom he has seen in a photograph but never met. It portrays a powerful relationship amid the collapse of civilian Germany and wartime Russia.
Cavan Wood, Lindfield, West Sussex
This was an interesting year to publish John Campbell’s biography of one of Britain’s best known liberal politicians Roy Jenkins (Cape). You can imagine him being delighted at the Equal Marriage Act and moves toward devolution, but in despair over the anti-immigration and anti-Europe debates. In his personal life, he had a strong marriage as well as two mistresses. Campbell has produced a superb account of a fascinating man who, in the words of the biographer’s subtitle, had “a well-rounded life”.
• Thanks to all the readers who wrote in.
