We asked a few friends, critics, fellow publishers and authors to tell us about their books of the year. No rules about publication date. Just things they'd enjoyed. They’re very good. Let’s get straight to it!

 

 

 

 

Alan Warner’s novel Their Lips Talk of Mischief (Faber) is the cracking tale of two struggling wannabes living pitifully and thinking big in high-rise Acton in the early 1980s. Douglas comes down from Scotland and meets charismatic, caustic Llewellyn and together they aim to take the literary world by storm. Beneath the humour is a strong vein of melancholy, reminiscent of Withnail and I; as in that film, we intuit that only one of them will make it. In poetry, Philip Terry’s inspired take on Dante’s Inferno (Carcanet) transposes the action to the University of Essex, making this a witty, ribald and erudite satire on campus politics. And for younger readers, Jonathan Stroud continues to enthrall with the second in the Lockwood and Co series, The Whispering Skull (Doubleday). It’s a thrillingly scary story about a trio of savvy kids running a supernatural detective agency.

 

Very tediously (in terms of originality rather than reading experience) my books of the year are the first three English translations of Knausgaard’s struggle (Vintage). I came to the series late, utterly devoured what’s currently available, and cannot wait for volumes 4, 5 & 6. If literature is about softening the borders between yourself and other people, as George Saunders has elegantly suggested, then this is where the author's chief magic lies. I now have a very good idea of what it is to be, and to have been, Karl Ove Knausgaard.

 

Other books that hugely impressed me this year were Agota Kristof's The Notebook, available for the first time in English via the wonderful CB Editions, in particular for its brilliantly shocking ending. There was a great, nasty little Colombian novel called In the Beginning Was the Sea (Pushkin) by Tomás González published by Pushkin Press: the disintegration of a relationship and utopian ideals in an agrarian backwater. I was in Brazil earlier this year and was massively impressed by Peter Robb’s A Death in Brazil (Bloomsbury): a brilliant combination of travelogue, social history and a close-up examination of the deeply corrupt presidency of Fernando Collor de Mello.

 

My non-fiction book of the year is Nairn's London (Penguin Classics) by Ian Nairn. Originally published in 1966 and recently reissued in faithful facsimile by Penguin, it's certainly the best book about London ever written. Nairn was a bibulous and shambolic genius, a wonderful topographical writer and a melancholy poet – a beneficial Eeyore in a world of silly Tiggers.

 

 

 

This was very much an Elena Ferrante year for me. Having previously read the superb, wrenchingly visceral The Days of Abandonment, I embarked on the three currently translated volumes of her Neapolitan Quartet (Europa Editions). At once a decades-spanning epic centred on a working class quarter of Naples, and a narrow-eyed appraisal of a lifelong but often fractious friendship between two women, this series offers plenty of the traditional pleasures of novel-reading, while also being very alive to the risks of writing, and of self-knowledge. Read Days of Abandonment, so you know what Ferrante is capable of, then start the good, long haul with My Brilliant Friend. I also thoroughly enjoyed Joan Sales’s Uncertain Glory, a novel of the Spanish Civil War only now translated from the Catalan for Maclehose Press. Sales fought for the Republicans, and was censored under Franco, but this is hardly a partisan account. It’s factionalism, not factions, that breeds war, Sales shows, but war still leaves plenty of time to fret over love, and god, and friendship.

 

Jonathan’s first novel, Randall, was published by Galley Beggar Press in June 2014 (£11) 

 

 

Three books I have really enjoyed this year, all short story collections published by small presses, are: Above Sugar Hill by Linda Mannheim, a gritty collection set in the Washington Heights district of New York (Influx Press); Posthumous Stories by David Rose, subtly experimental stories written in finely-wrought, measured prose (Salt); and The Syllabus of Errors by Ashley Stokes, an interlinked collection suffused with romantic longing for inter-war Eastern Europe (Unthank Books).

 

Rowena’s first short story collection, Smoked Meat, was published by Flambard Press in 2012 (£8.99, http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/smoked-meat/). Her Galley Beggar Singles Club short story can be purchased here.

 

 

Both The Dig (Granta) by Cynan Jones and The Wake (Unbound) by Paul Kingsnorth were books with an overwhelming sense of time and place; both deeply rooted in the British soil and brimming with the whiff of fecundity and the threat of violence. The former’s language was sparse and taut, the latter’s tense and dizzying. They were novels so good it is hard as a writer myself not to be overwhelmed with jealousy.

 

Landscape seemed to play a major part in all the books I enjoyed this year: Out Stealing Horses (Vintage) by Per Petterson, Goat Mountain by David Vann, the short story Mrs Fox (Faber) by Sarah Hall, the catalogue that accompanied painter George Shaw’s exhibition The Sly And Unseen Day at The Baltic in Newcastle from a few years back and Firefly (Vintage) by Janette Jenkins, a short novel about Noel Coward’s dying days in exile in Jamaica.

Three books from the last quarter century that I finally discovered and enjoyed very much were Climbers by M John Harrison, Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson by Jonathan Coe and Ulverton by Adam Thorpe.

 

Ben’s most recent novel, Beastings, was published by Blue Moose Books in 2014 (£8.99, http://bluemoosebooks.com/books/beastings). His two Galley Beggar Singles Club short stories can be purchased here  and here. 

 

 

 

Here are my picks for 2014:

 

When The Professor Got Stuck In The Snow, Dan Rhodes (Miyuki Books, 2014)

 

Often provocative and always very funny, Dan Rhodes’s latest novel centres around a pre-eminent evolutionary biologist who just happens to be called Professor Richard Dawkins. It’s Rhodes at his satirical best; I hope it gets a wider audience beyond its limited hardback run.

 

The Limits, Alice Miller (Shearsman Books (UK)/Auckland University Press (NZ))

 

A wonderful poetry collection, and a book I’ve gone back to again and again throughout the year. It’s filled with terrific scenes and observations, exploring landscapes (such as the Antarctica, where Miller spent time), and personal boundaries.

 

 

Neal Jones is an English artist who writes some terrific stuff. I’m a regular follower of his ‘recent writing’ blog, which tackles everything from David Hockney at the RA, to allotment cheats, to his ‘loving swell for the bicycle’. Terrific takes on nature, art and life. And I love his paintings/sculptures too.

 

 

 

Three of the novels I’ve enjoyed the most this year have all been very long. I loved The Son (Simon & Schuster) by Philipp Meyer, an epic, blood-soaked inter-generational western, very much in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy. I was also thrilled by David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks even if some of the trans-dimensional genre-bending got a bit much towards the end, but the ‘Amis spoof’ section was one of the funniest literary satires I’ve read since How To Be A Public Author. I was also thrilled by Marlon James’ 700 page epic A Brief History of Seven Killings (One World), a fictional reworking of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley and its consequences: if you’re interested in Jamaica, reggae, politics, gangsters, patois or the spread of crack cocaine, this book is a must, a collage of different voices and characters, all extremely impressive. Rob Doyle Here Are The Young Men (Bloomsbury) was also superb, a disturbing and compelling portrayal of male alienation and destruction in Dublin. Finally, I was fortunate to read a proof of I’m Jack by Mark Blacklock, due out next year with Granta. I’m very interested in novels that blur the boundaries between fiction and history, reportage and story, and this re-telling of the Ripper hoaxer is fascinating and compelling on many levels. A strong, experimental novel, keep an eye out for it next year, I think it’s going to be big.

 

James’ second novel, Sunshine State, was published by Little Brown in 2011 (£7.99, http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/james+miller/sunshine+state/7441315/). His Galley Beggar Singles Club short story can be purchased here. 

 

 

In a very rich reading year, T.H. White’s The Goshawk (NYRB Classics) stands apart as a book I’ll never forget. I’ve always had a slight obsession with hawks (I’ll recite Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Windhover at the drop of a hat), and had no idea T.H. White – who wrote the Arthurian romp The Once and Future King, a great favourite of mine – had once tried to train a goshawk. The book is an account of man and bird developing an intense co-dependency as White trains the ill-tempered young Gos by 16th century methods that largely involve sleep deprivation for both of them. It’s a curious kind of love affair, and one lent an awful poignancy in the context of White’s own unhappy personal life.

 

As a prose stylist White is shockingly overlooked. To say the prose is beautiful is to damn with faint praise, since it goes beyond mere beauty into a reading experience so visceral, so vivid, that at one point – as White, deranged with weariness, cradles the bird’s breast in his palm – my jaw actually dropped. In places it’s also blissfully funny, as Gos takes his first bath, or throws yet another temper tantrum – and the austringer’s vocabulary is strange and lovely litany. 

 

Of course, later in the year Helen McDonald’s deservedly acclaimed memoir H is for Hawk (Jonathan Cape) came out, paying homage to The Goshawk, and it’s made me so happy to think of Gos finding a new companion in McDonald’s hawk, Mabel.

 

Sarah’s first novel, After Me Comes The Flood, was published by Serpents Tail in 2014 (£11.99, http://www.hive.co.uk/book/the-after-me-comes-the-flood/19011847/)

 

 

Historical novels do not usually appeal but The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound) is a time-machine of a book – once you know how to work the controls. The hybrid and part-imagined language of its narrator, Buccmaster of Holland, first repels then mesmerises as it takes the reader inside the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. The book’s no exercise in linguistic fireworks however, but rather a strange and uncompromising exploration of power as it shifts from one class to another.  The doomed efforts of the resistance are further amplified by the ghostly unresponsive setting of the East Anglian Fens. How did this book not win a prize? Skip forward nine hundred years and victim has turned aggressor in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (Penguin Modern Classics), my favourite discovery this year. The Anglo-Saxon tanks and detention camps may have gone but bitter memories of struggle, torture and betrayal haunt a Gikuyu village as Kenya gets ready to celebrate Independence day. Written from multiple viewpoints in clear unfussy prose, this is another meditation on power and the many human responses it provokes. Eventually Ngugi wa Thiong’o jettisoned English altogether. Perhaps, like the narrator of The Wake, he felt able to express himself fully only by rejecting the language of conquerors.

 

James’ first novel, Why I Went Back, is forthcoming with Andersen Press. His Galley Beggar Singles Club short story can be purchased here. 

 

 

This year I had a great time with Nikesh Shukla’s second novel, Meatspace (The Friday Project) – a really sharp, funny satire on social media, overflowing with ideas and revealing in its later parts especially an unexpected emotional heft.  Another highlight was Salena Godden’s memoir, Springfield Road (Unbound).  I’ve always loved Godden’s poetry, and here she writes beautifully about her childhood, about what she remembers, half-remembers and doesn’t remember at all; every page scintillates with her lyric craft.  My nomination for book of the year, though, must go to The Wake (Unbound) by Paul Kingsnorth.  An account of the English apocalypse of 1066, Kingsnorth’s novel seems to me the sort of uncanny masterpiece that makes you feel slightly weird about the fact that its author is still alive.  It leaves you with the impression that somehow it must have always been out there, inevitable and elemental, only waiting to be found.

 

Anthony’s first novel, The Weightless World, will be published by Galley Beggar Press in June 2014. 

 

 

Perhaps, given where I’m writing this, I should speak first about a book from last year. I re-read A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (Galley Beggar Press) on the beach in Italy this summer and the second reading confirmed my view of it as a novel of rare beauty and profound truth. I am teaching it to my MA students next year and can’t wait to embark upon a third reading. I also read another old book that has stayed with me – Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries. I finished it by the banks of the River Wharfe as I waited to take the stage at Ilkley Literature Festival in October. A novel that gives a whole life in 350 spellbinding pages. Finally a mention of two extraordinary debuts: Zia Haider Rahman’s exquisite In the Light of What We Know (Picador) and Hermione Eyre’s extraordinary po-mo historical novel Viper Wine (Jonathan Cape).

 

Alex’s third novel, In Love And War, was published by Faber in 2014 (£14.99, http://www.hive.co.uk/book/in-love-and-war/18860667/). His Galley Beggar Singles Club short story can be purchased here. 

 

 

 

 

N+1’s No Regrets, a pamphlet of women discussing reading, has led to many interesting conversations about books and how we talk about them, as well as providing countless recommendations. I enjoyed the lightness and quiet of Hiromi Kawakami's Strange Weather in Tokyo (Portobello) and the nervy energy and bravado of the kids at Café Quito in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (Picador). I put a few people off reading Marilynne Robinson’s Home (Virago) because I was such a wreck afterwards and had to take to my room to calm down; I read Lila (Virago) alone, late into the night. This year I re-read Nina Power’s brilliant One Dimensional Woman, as well as Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be and was struck again by the singularity of Heti's voice. I'm not a fan of most ‘long’ culture (theatre, exhaustive exhibitions) but I do like long books, and have just started Rebecca West’s epic Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, which I'll probably still be happily working though this time next year. 

 

Coming late to the party, this year’s surprise was Kevin Brooks’ The Bunker Diary (Penguin) which was dark, compelling and quite ruthless in its chronological decomposition of guilt, desire and agency. The story draws on numerous elements of contemporary incarceration mythology and our recurrent news stories of kidnappings – take your pick from the random imprisonment of people in hidden cellars, CIA torture chambers, oppressive regimes in the Middle East, Latin American disappearances, Austrian cannibals – the themes echo and gain power in this disturbing book – and they are combined with an additional chill of some reality game none can escape from.

 

I am also a late adopter of Haruki Murakami, though I shall now be catching up after reading Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Harvil Secker) – some are suggesting that this isn’t a typical or exceptional work from this remarkable writer, but I found it mesmerizing and haunting. Part detective story, part coming of age tale told in reverse and part love story. Here is a personal mythology of hope, loss and change with friends from the past (and, indeed, past selves) and the imperatives of new friends and lovers in the present. Mixed in with this are characters that come to define moral choices and turning points in Tazaki’s personal narrative. The central character is hugely appealing and carries the weight of missed chances, torrid self-discovery and shocking injustice with warmth, gentleness and humility.

 

Mine as follows: 

 

(1) The Voice Imitator (University of Chicago Press) by Thomas Bernhard. I discovered Bernhard this year after a twitter conversation with Chris Power. The Voice Imitator is an incredible work. No story is longer than three paragraphs, yet evokes so much more narrative than most full-length novels do. The world of The Voice Imitator, to me, is a cold, brutal one with occasional bursts of light and relief. There is a lot of dark humour in this book, which I loved. As short story collections go, this one is a blinder. 

 

(2) The Way Inn (Fourth Estate) by Will Wiles. I am a big fan of Will’s writing, having hosted him on my Resonance FM literature show Mapping The Metropolis a number of times. The Way Inn is a delightfully surreal and witty exploration of the mid-budget hotel chains. The perspective Wiles has on the tiny details in hotels, from the linen to the carpet patterns of the corridors, is enchanting and eye opening. The switch of pace in the final third makes this book a sudden page-turner, which keeps you up at night.

 

(3) Fishing in the Aftermath (Burning Eye) by Salena Godden. This is Salena’s collected poems from twenty years of performance and debauchery in London. Her recent memoir, Springfield Road (Unbound), which is poignant and heart-breaking (also published in 2014) is fantastic, but it’s in the upfront, brash and drunken words of Salena’s poetry where I find myself revisiting time and time again. If you ever need inspiration to get writing, or live the bohemian life you’ve wanted to, reading Fishing in the Aftermath will provide it in pint-fulls.

 

Of the novels I’ve ploughed through this year, the stand-out new releases have been Jenny Offill’s Dept. Of Speculation (Granta/Vintage) and Michel Faber’s The Book Of Strange New Things (Canongate). The fragmented, tottering structure of The Dept. Of Speculation mirrors perfectly the narrator’s sense of bewilderment at a suddenly troubled marriage; you quite literally bare witness as she clutches at straws. (It also – like all the best tragedies – has moments of wild comedy: ‘Studies show that 110% if men who leave their wives for other women report that their wives are crazy.’) There isn’t much humour in Faber’s novel, on the other hand, but I was bowled by the careful, sympathetic characterization of a born-again Christian and his increasingly tortured questionings as he takes on the role of missionary on a newly colonized planet. I came away with a sense of the miracle of our bodies, and also the ultimate fragility of existence: there are humans and aliens in this novel, but, weeks after reaching the end of it, the differences between the two seem increasingly blurry.

 

Erm, what else? One of the joys of setting up Galley Beggar’s new digital classics range is the pile of previously unread, stellar books stacked up at my bedside. Highlights have included Barbara Comyn’s unsettling The Vet’s Daughter (where the discovery of occult powers, coupled with a bullish father, leads to disaster), and Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle’s joint memoir Being Geniuses Together. Robert McAlmon set up Contact Editions in Paris in the 1920s; he published and funded Hemingway, Joyce and Stein (and was ill-served by all of them – Hemingway gave McAlmon a bloody nose; Stein stole half the print-run of The Making of the Americans; and Joyce called Being Geniuses Together ‘The office boy’s revenge’). Nevertheless, the Lost Generation and its entourage sparkle in McAlmon’s recollections, and it’s a fascinating insight into the publishing machinery behind an epochal period in writing. 

 

Finally, for holiday reading – Sam  has decided that Don De Lillo’s Underworld is possibly the best book of the past 25 years, so I’ll probably be curled up with that over Christmas. I’m also really looking forward to picking out likely looking festive treats (the BBC’s adaptation of Mapp & Lucia?) in The Radio Times. 

 

 

I’ve read so much stuff that my brain aches. Going back to those mounds of manuscripts, piles of paperbacks, something beginning with ‘h’ of hardbacks just makes me want to weep. I can’t even think of a word beginning with ‘h’, let alone talk about literature. I know I’ve read some good books. I read The Dig (Granta) by Cynan Jones and wanted to cry because it was good, not because it was another fucking book, but I’m past that now. Now I just want to drink and watch Friends. Okay, I also enjoyed Little Egypt (Salt) by Lesley Glaister and Vanishing by Gerard Woodward, but I’m too tired to tell you about them. Actually, the best thing I’ve read has been Harry Potter, out loud, at bedtime with my daughter. That has been joyful. There must be some others too. God knows what though. Pass me the Xanax. 

 

 

 

(Image from here.)