This weekend sees the first of two Sunday Times Books of the Year issues, which features the distilled wisdom and judgement of our most discriminating critics. This year, as well as recommending more than 70 first class reads in a whole bunch of categories (Fiction, Sport, Gardening, Biography, Art and Cookery), we've singled out a book in each field for special gold-star praise.

Some of the choices will seem obvious: Ian McEwan's thoroughly deserved presence at the top of Peter Kemp's list of favourite 2007 novels will not come as a shock to anyone with the vaguest interest in fiction. Other picks should make you sit bolt upright and rewrite your letters to Father Christmas before it's too late.

Bee Wilson, in her round-up of food books, has elevated a deliciously unconventional book by the South London shopkeeper, Sally Butcher, above publishers' darlings like Jamie, Nigella and Hugh. Butcher's Peckham cornershop, Persepolis, is devoted to Iranian food, and her book PERSIA IN PECKHAM: Recipes from Persepolis has set us dreaming of sour cherry jam and broad bean pulao.

I also like the sound of Nick Pitt's favourite sports book, LEFT FOR DEAD by Nick Ward and Sinead O'Brien, a grippingly terrible tale of catastrophe at sea, set during the 1979 Fastnet race. Imagine Touching the Void, with the icy waters off Ireland standing in for the Andes...Then draw the curtains, heap another log on the fire and curl up deeper in that armchair.

On December 2nd, we will list our favourite children's books, plus the best of the year's crop of memoirs, photograph books, history and humour.

1. Pick of the year's fiction, chosen by Peter Kemp

ON CHESIL BEACH by Ian McEwan
Cape £12.99

Focusing with high-fidelity acuteness on a fateful couple of hours in the honeymoon suite of a genteel Dorset hotel in 1962, this brilliant short novel is a triumph of finesse and nuance. As a period piece, the book shimmers with semi-satiric irony. As a story of two admirable young adults kept apart by inhibitions and the pressure of their pasts, it is deeply affecting: elegantly structured, subtly written and brimming with imaginative sympathy.

2. Pick of the year's biographies, chosen by Christopher Hart.

STANLEY: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal
Faber £25

Jeal's magnificent life of Henry Morton Stanley, like all the best biographies, manages to be several things at once: a rehabilitation of this most courageous of Welshmen, too often lazily dismissed as a racist, imperialist brute; a terrifying depiction of King Leopold's Belgian Congo; and a brilliant account of Stanley's travels.

3. Pick of the year's art books, chosen by Frank Whitford

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