JULIAN BARNES

I thought I knew France quite well, but two books this year reoriented me. That Sweet Enemy (Heinemann) by Robert and Isabelle Tombs is a binocular, Anglo-French, husband-and-wife account of three centuries of rivalry, suspicion and muted admiration; each country seeing the other as its scorned opposite, while often displaying remarkably similar virtues and vices. Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France (Picador) bears an elliptical title. A longer version might be: How cartographers, bureaucrats and tourists discovered that Paris was not the same thing as France, that most of the country never regarded itself as being part of France, and how the nation was created only by destroying or homogenizing those aberrant regions, whose singularities, once suppressed, were then celebrated as typically French. Both books are formidably impressive.

The rediscovery of Irène Némirovsky continues with David Golder (Vintage), the novel that first brought her fame eighty years ago. How can someone in her mid-twenties know so much, and write so well, about the harsh terms money dictates to love?

PETER GREEN

I have been a devoted admirer of Louis MacNeice’s exquisite, haunting and deeply ironic poetry ever since, almost seventy years ago, Tony Caro burst into my study at school, clutching a copy of Poems (1935), and proceeded to read me the whole of “An Eclogue for Christmas”. Yet for years Faber’s only memorial to one of their greatest poets was the cheap and overcrowded Collected Poems edited by Eric Dodds. Now, at last, they have made ample amends. The new Collected Poems, edited by Peter McDonald, is a beautifully produced and printed volume, which includes among its appendices, inter alia, all of Blind Fireworks (1929) and L. M.’s share of “Auden and MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament”. Satis superque. Among the rest of 2007’s offerings, seasonal bouquets to Zachary Leader’s monumental Life of Kingsley Amis (Cape), which gets everything except K. A.’s unique sense of humour, and Frederic Raphael’s Fame and Fortune (JR Books), a cold-eyed yet sympathetic look at the Cambridge denizens of The Glittering Prizes several decades on, still exchanging sharp witty aphorisms in a very different world. Lastly, a work I only got around to recently, Frank L. Holt’s superb and scary Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan (California), which should be required reading in the Pentagon: if Alexander couldn’t nail it down there, who could?

SEAMUS HEANEY

The Letters of Ted Hughes (Faber), selected and edited by Christopher Reid, are even better than his greatest admirers could have expected. Rammed with life in every line, spontaneous, sagacious, extravagant, they will not only be the best guide to his life and work, but will provide – like Keats’s, in comparison with which they more than hold their own – an education in the vocation of poetry. Much has been made of the Yeatsian element in Hughes’s devotion to the occult and the magical, but what also emerges here is a Joycean self-belief and clarity of artistic purpose from the very beginning.

Ciarán Carson’s The Táin (Penguin Classics) is a jubilant new translation of the Old Irish epic “The Cattle Raid of Cooley”, referred to in one of Hughes’s letters as “the prize item of my small library of essential literature”. It was given a classic rendering by Thomas Kinsella in 1969, and Carson considers his version both commentary and tribute to this earlier work. What he brings to the task is his own vernacular at-homeness in modern Irish, his brio as lyric poet, and his appetite for the heroic exaggeration and topographical lore of the original.

CRAIG RAINE

Every year, the British satirical magazine Private Eye publishes a page of sanctimonious tut-tutting over collective nepotism in Books of the Year. As you’ll see from my list, by the time I’ve read the books written by my friends (and “wasted” glorious hours reading my enemies), there isn’t a lot of time left. Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles (Century) was wonderful and wicked. (I am thanked in the acknowledgements.) Julie Kavanagh’s Rudolf Nureyev (Fig Tree) was a terrific hybrid of cool dance analysis and unflinching gossip. (My wife is thanked in the acknowledgements.) Rosemary Hill’s definitive biography of Pugin (Allen Lane) appeared at last. (I am thanked in the acknowledgements.) Adam Thirlwell’s Miss Herbert (Cape) was thrilling even after a third or fourth reading. (Yes, I’m there in the acknowledgements.) Christopher Reid, my oldest friend, produced and published a brilliantly original sequence of poems, Mr Mouth (Ondt and Gracehoper). Julie Maxwell’s You Can Live Forever was a fearless debut novel (a puff from me on the jacket). I read Joan Acocella’s incomparable occasional criticism, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon), with uninterrupted pleasure. (I sent her a fan letter about seven years ago, but we haven’t met. I would like to be her friend.) The impeccable insider expertise of Robert Craft’s Down a Path of Wonder (Naxos) taught me a great deal. (A total stranger.) What a year for my friends. (And the finger to the finger-waggers of Private Eye.)

RUTH SCURR

I think that Nicola Barker’s Darkmans (Fourth Estate) is the wildest, cleverest, most original novel published this year. I first discovered Barker when I reviewed Wide Open for the TLS in 1998. That book begins with a man standing on a motorway bridge, waving randomly at specific cars. Every time I drive on a motorway, I look up half expecting to see him. But even previous experience of Barker’s haunting imagination did not prepare me for the tour de force that is Darkmans.

My non-fiction choice is Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France (Picador). This book is the result of 14,000 miles on a bicycle and four years in libraries and archives. It is beautifully written and truly eccentric, seeking out the obscure or forgotten parts of a nation that – Robb argues brilliantly – is still discovering itself.

ELAINE SHOWALTER

Exit Ghost (Cape), the fifth novel Philip Roth has published in this century alone, is another breathtaking performance, which fearlessly confronts the endgame of the writer. What does it mean for the writer to feel, like Keats, that he has outlived his time, that he is “living a posthumous existence”? Exit Ghost is a meditation on literary mortality, a tirade against literary critics and opportunistic scandal-hunting biographers; it’s also a terminal revisiting of Roth’s avatar Nathan Zuckerman and his failed romances with the writer E. I. Lonoff and the Anne Frank fantasy-figure, Amy Bellette. If this is Roth’s twilight, as he hints, he is illuminating it with blazing masterpiece after masterpiece.

The other book I greatly admired this year, Arnold Rampersad’s elegant and unsparing biography Ralph Ellison (Knopf), deals with another classic American writer. But while Ellison preceded Roth in his struggle to explain American identity through the lens of a minority culture, he lacked Roth’s inventiveness and discipline. In the forty years after Invisible Man, as the awards piled up and the tributes reached a crescendo, he was unable to finish a second novel. His life, however garlanded, is a tragedy next to Roth’s triumph.

CLIVE SINCLAIR

In Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost – not one of my books of the year – Nathan Zuckerman denounces the art of biography, and vows to prevent a young practitioner from publishing one about his former mentor, E. I. Lonoff. By spooky coincidence Roth’s novel appeared at the same time as a biography of Bernard Malamud, generally acknowledged as Lonoff’s original. Bernard Malamud: A writer’s life by Philip Davis (Oxford) triumphantly pulls the rug from beneath Zuckerman’s feet. Its author, a professor of English at Liverpool University, reveals things a careful reader of Malamud had always suspected, but scandal is never his purpose: the lived life is presented only to gain a better understanding of the examined life. Davis shows how Malamud forged a new idiom – Yinglish, he calls it – which perfectly echoes the strangled emotions of the tongue-tied. My other book of the year is an American novel first published in 1983, but just reissued as a movie tie-in. Ron Hansen’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Souvenir Press) tells a familiar story, but in an idiom that is as unusual and unique as Malamud’s, and captures perfectly the dangerous charm of its anti-hero.

ALI SMITH

There’s been nothing in English quite like Nicola Barker’s Darkmans (Fourth Estate) – except maybe Barker’s own novel, Behindlings (2002); Barker is an original, linguistically, formally and stylistically, and her take on history and contemporanea is a gamble that pays off with a brand new revelation of chronology’s darkness and light. Another novelist whose originality will always be her hallmark, Jeanette Winterson, published one of her finest novels this year; The Stone Gods (Hamish Hamilton) is a blend of wit, yearning and grief whose rolling, open structure argues optimism in the face of grave loss. And here’s to two small crucial presses: Hesperus Press, whose edition of Beppe Fenoglio’s A Private Affair makes available this strange, memorable and tough novel about the Italian Partisans, written by a contemporary of Calvino who died in 1963 at the age of forty; and Pushkin Press, who, in a fruitful association with the translator Len Rix, have been bringing the works of the great early twentieth-century Hungarian novelist, Antal Szerb, into English for the first time, this year with Szerb’s final novel, Oliver VII, written on the cusp of the Nazi foulness which prematurely ended his life – a work that is a piece of sweet, shining good humour outfacing history’s dark.

MICHEL TOURNIER

Fifteen years ago Amélie Nothomb burst on to the French literary scene with the provocatively titled novel, Hygiène de l’assassin. This young Belgian woman, who was born in Japan, has since published a novel a year, notably Stupeur et tremblements, which won her the Grand Prix de l’Académie française (in 1999). Ni d’Eve, ni d’Adam (Albin Michel) is her opus no 16. The new novel is, in my view, the best of the lot. On November 5, I voted in Nothomb’s favour for the Prix Goncourt 2007, but unfortunately I was the only one to do so.

Stupeur et tremblements already revealed an intimate knowledge, tinged with humour, of the inhabitants of Tokyo. Ni d’Eve, ni d’Adam tells the story of a love affair involving a young European woman and a young Japanese man, told in the first person by the young woman. It is both funny and gripping because it is so brutally truthful and utterly unexpected. She meets him after he answers an ad offering French language lessons. Everything that happens between the two occurs on the level of language and words, and we discover with delight the fundamental role that vocabulary and phrase structure play in the exchange of expressions of love. We are suddenly made to realize, after a thousand misunderstandings and displays of verbal precision, that literature – from Shakespeare to Goethe and Victor Hugo – is the true progenitor of love. Are people who are mute capable of love? That’s a big, and a cruel, question.

ROWAN WILLIAMS

Just a year after the centenary of the birth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the most famous Christian victims of the Third Reich, we have the English version of the volume in the Collected Works dealing with his time as a pastor in London in the 1930s (London, 1933–1935, Fortress Press) – a monument of scholarship which gives enormous insight into the formation of a rare mind, and into the ins and outs of church reactions to Hitler in Germany and the UK in those years.

Still with this period – A. N. Wilson’s Winnie and Wolf (Hutchinson) is a high-risk fiction about Hitler’s relationship with Bayreuth and the Wagner family, which fully justifies its risks in a moving and disturbing narrative, whose climactic scene in 1945 Bayreuth as refugees roam the streets in cast-off Wagnerian costumes is unforgettable.

Helping us to contemplate what we’d rather not see, William T. Vollmann gives us in Poor People (HarperCollins) a haunting series of vignettes of the reality of poverty across the world which manages not to be voyeuristic or patronizing, and leaves a heap of profoundly uncomfortable questions about the global market.

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