THE HEAVY ARTILLERY OF American fiction is moving in on what was probably the defining event of the new century. This year those hoary old howitzers Philip Roth and Don DeLillo produced grim novels about 9/11 and its reverberations. In Roth's brilliant Exit Ghost (Jonathan Cape, £16.99/offer £15.29), we rejoin Nathan Zuckerman, angst-ridden writer and hero of four previous novels, just as he decides to leave his country retreat for Manhattan. Zuckerman is in flight from old age, illness and uncertainty, and his entire life could be taken as a metaphor for America's lost innocence.

Don DeLillo's Falling Man (Picador, £16.99/£15.29) tackles the day itself in the moments after the impact — like the first stirrings of creation after the Big Bang. Keith walks out of the rubble, an ash-streaked ghost, clutching a stranger's briefcase. He returns to Lianne, the wife he left, and is a kind of Martin Guerre, a stranger in a familiar body with whom a new life might be possible. This, too, is quite brilliant. Neither master is at his absolute best, but here are great minds, expressing demanding ideas in superb prose. At a time when so many novels published are complete crap, these are qualities to be treasured.

Blake Morrison's South of the River (Chatto, £17.99/£16.19) is also concerned with the spirit-ual state of the modern world. It's a gloriously observed slice of middle-class life in South London; drenched with melancholy and often very funny — especially when inside the heads of Nat, the failed playwright, and his uncle, an old Tory struggling gamely with the decline of his engineering business.

Britain is becoming a nation of outsiders, and Rose Tremain's The Road Home (Chatto, £16.99/ £15.29) looks at us through the eyes of a latter-day Candide. Lev, a 43-year-old widower from somewhere in Eastern Europe, travels to London to seek his fortune. Tremain paints an outsider's city of hostile streets and lost souls in search of love. This is a superb, highly original piece of work by the true successor to Elizabeth Taylor (that's the revered novelist, not the film star), heavily fancied to win the next Costa Prize.

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Britain's best-loved personalities tell the Times what they will be reading at Christmas

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• The Times Christmas choice: fiction

• The Times Christmas choice: crime

• The Times Christmas choice: history

• The Times Christmas choice: audiobooks

BACKGROUND

• The Times Christmas choice: children aged 2-10

• The Times Christmas choice: gardening

• The Times Christmas choice: art

• The Times Christmas choice: memoirs and autobiographies

• The Times Christmas choice: graphic novels

The theme of the stranger in a strange land has been big this year. Casey Han, heroine of Min Jin Lee's stunning debut, Free Food for Millionaires (Hutchinson, £11.99/£10.79), is the daughter of working-class immigrants. Her years at Princeton have given her rich friends and a lust for the good things in life, but she has no job. When she falls out with her parents, she must carve her own way in a world of Wasps.

An exiled person can carry the past like a ball and chain. In Helen Oyeyemi's The Opposite House (Bloomsbury, £12.99/ £11.69), Maja is a black Cuban who came to London at the age of five, bringing only one memory — a woman singing. Twenty years later she is a singer herself, pregnant for the first time and increasingly haunted by the voices of history. And history is one note sounded in Fire in The Blood (Chatto, £12.99/ £11.69), another resurrected novel by Irène Némirovsky, author of Suite Francaise — and another jewel. An old man recalls his life in a small French village, and it's an intricate weaving of love, death and the handing down of dark secrets.

On an altogether lighter note — because man cannot live by deep stuff alone — the feelgood novel of the year has to be Paul Torday's delightfully unexpected Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Phoenix, £7.99/£7.59), with a title that neatly expresses the plot. Yes, the Yemen — scientist Dr Alfred Jones is about to embark on the dottiest quest of his life.

The great Alan Bennett, meanwhile, imagines something even more unlikely in his divinely comical novella The Uncommon Reader (Faber/Profile, £10.99/£9.89) — the Queen as an advanced literary critic. When one suddenly becomes an avid reader, one makes some very surprising discoveries. This is an essential Christmas present for bookish types who enjoy laughing (not all do). They may also appreciate Jeanette Winterson's wacky and inventive The Stone Gods (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99/£15.29), in which young lovers travel hopefully to a planet that is just like Earth, 65 million years before we ruined it.

The latest three in the Canongate Myths series would adorn any stocking (£12.99/£11.69 each). It was a great and simple idea, to ask leading writers to revisit ancient myths. In particular, Ali Smith's interpretation of a tale in Ovid, Girl Meets Boy is as fresh and pungent as new paint. And if you loved Yann Martel's Booker-winning Life of Pi, you simply must have this extremely handsome new edition (Canongate, £25/£22.50), with paintings by Tomislav Torjanac, which shows how happily the verbal and the visual harmonise.

Bestsellers 2007

1 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
Bloomsbury, £17.99
Everybody's favourite boy wizard gets ready to leave school at last.

2 The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld
Headline Review, £7.99

3 The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
Penguin, £7.99

4 Anybody Out There? by Marian Keyes
Penguin, £7.99

5 The House at Riverton by Kate Morton
Pan, £7.99

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