1 Just as Annie Proulx's powerful short story, Brokeback Mountain, dwarfed all other fiction last year, J. M. Coetzee's magnificent Booker winning Disgrace (Secker) seems likely to dominate all end of year round ups. Academic and serial womaniser, the twice divorced and now ageing David Lurie finally sees both his appeal and luck run out, when a casual affair embarked upon with a student ends badly for him. What could have been a routine tale of bad behaviour featuring a highly unsympathetic central character, is elevated to high art by the graceful prose, characteristic detachment and suppressed anger of one of the world's finest living writers.
2 ANNIE PROULX is another major international artist and, while the tough Wyoming stories collected in Close Range (4th Estate) are admittedly over-shadowed by the inclusion of the above mentioned Brokeback Mountain, such is the overall quality of these unrelenting variations on the theme of lives gone badly wrong, that several confirm Proulx's daring, dangerous approach to fiction is both visionary and brutally realistic.
3 THE oddball surrealism and black humour of Howard Norman's The Museum Guard (Picador) creates an unforgettable atmosphere against which deadpan narrator DeFoe Russet acts out his unrequited love for the lovely if wilful Imogen, caretaker of the nearby Jewish cemetery.
4 THAT most underestimated of English writers, Jim Crace, took even his admirers by surprise with his profound sixth novel, Being Dead (Viking), which charts the story of a middle aged couple after their vicious murder. In death, they emerge as victims of an old secret.
5 AT A TIME when Irish novelists are bloated with praise, Christopher Nolan's The Banyan Tree (Phoenix House), which gently chronicles the life of Westmeath woman Minnie O'Brien and her passage from a young girl who catches her man with a mousetrap to that of an old widow making sense of memory, is a beautiful book and reveals a new maturity and ease in Nolan's prose.
6 EVER the victim of her ceaseless output Joyce Carol Oates, can, when on form, shape her urgent, life-based narratives into exciting prose poems. Broke Heart Blues (Virago) not only explores the myths of US life in the 1960s as seen through the collective experiences of a group of high school classmates who become obsessed with a handsome outsider who enters their world, it is also a lament for youth and lost hopes and is one of her best books.
7 THREE stories intermingle in Michael Cunningham's The Hours (Fourth Estate) which takes as its ruling motif Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway. As graceful as a ballet, this is a brilliantly evocative, layered narrative of time shifts about women's lives.
8 SUSAN MINOT'S Evening (Chatto) is cool, understated but no less moving for that. As the detached Ann Lord lies dying, she revisits a life built around three marriages and several tragedies, all of which take second place to a weekend love affair she had some 40 years earlier. It may have made her life but it also ruined it, leaving her strangely dehumanised and easier with things than people. It is an unnervingly exact performance from the author of Mon- keys.
9 GERMAN writer Ingo Schulze's 33 Moments of Happiness (Picador) is a virtuoso celebration of the mighty Russian literary tradition. Echoes of various Russian masters from Gogol, to Chekhov, to Bulgakov are present but there's no doubting Schulze is an original - and this delightful collection pulsates with life.
10 US master Richard Ford has never concealed his admiration for one of Russia's greatest writers and The Essential Tales of Chekhov (Granta) offering a choice of 20 stories, including Ward No 6, is just that - a book to keep by your side for life.
11 ANYONE wondering if the great tradition proves too weighty a burden for young Russian writers of the present need look no further than Victor Pelevin, whose latest novel, The Clay Machine-Gun (Faber) with its mix of madness, history, philosophy and comedy, confirms that the subversive satire of Russian literature is alive and as good as ever.
12 BOOK number three from J K Rowling - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Bloomsbury), follows our likable young trainee wizard through a difficult school year during which his life is under threat. Rowling knows that children aren't wimps and nor is Harry who is currently one of my heroes.
13 THE best of traditional travel writing is represented by Colin Thubron's subtle, thoughtful journey through one of the strangest, most desolate places on earth. In Siberia (Chatto) is black and depressing, but it is also often funny and always humane in the hands of the bewildered, sympathetic Thubron.
Seamus Heaney: Beowulf reiterates his genius for translation
14 BEOWULF remains one of the enduring literary and linguistic adventures for students of Old English and Seamus Heaney's inspired translation published by Faber not only revitalises an ancient and exciting masterpice, its earthy Northern voice reiterates his genius as a translator.
15 AUTHOR of Danube, Claudio Magris turns his unique elegiac blend of learning and curiosity on the borderlands of Istria and Italy in his seductive Microcosms (Harvill).
16 AS MUCH personal meditation and self discovery as sea voyage from Seattle to Alaska Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau: A Sea and its Meanings (Picador) is a candid, good natured tour de force on love, life and death.
17 AUSTRALIAN Robert Hughes is a shrewd, opinionated art critic with a definite sense of humour. His casual, amateur angler's memoir A Jerk on One End (Harvill) celebrating the art of fishing, is witty, self effacing and provocative, it also confirms that Hughes never stops thinking or looking - especially when fishing.
18 IN YET another poor year for biography Judith Thurman's superlative Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Bloomsbury) gives a masterclass in the much maligned genre. Thurman is a perceptive, fair and unusually witty biographer and this intelligent book should also direct readers to return to Colette's work.
19 NATURALIST David Cabot's Ireland (Harper Collins) is an ambitiously authoritative guide to this country's varied geography, flora and fauna. It also defers to the naturalist tradition as pioneered by Praeger and others. A worthy companion volume to Frank Mitchell's classic Reading the Irish Landscape, Cabot's Ireland is particularly good on Irish birds.
20 FOR all its beauty, do not be fooled into thinking archaeologist Peter Harbison's The Golden Age of Irish Art (Thames and Hudson) is just another gorgeous coffee table book. This is a serious work of scholarship which explores Ireland's glorious, often overlooked medieval artistic legacy. The history of Ireland between the years 600-1200 AD may be traced through Harbison's astute analysis of the manuscripts, stonecarving, particularly the high crosses, and metalwork through their iconography. Looking for the definitive Christmas present? Here it is - the Irish Book of the Year.
