Ivor Roberts
British Ambassador to Ireland
Seamus Heaney's Beowulf (Faber, £14.99 in UK) is a wonderful reworking of this under-read thousand-year-old classic. Heaney describes Beowulf as part of his "voice-right", a claim fully vindicated by the fluency with which he conveys the flavour of the Anglo-Saxon original while adding occasionally a dash of his own local Ulster language. Misha Glenny's The Balkans 1804-1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (Granta, £25 in UK) is a genuine tour-de-force which combines scholarship and accessibility. Essential reading for all those who wish to pronounce on the Balkans but lack the historical perspective. Mandelson (HarperCollins, £19.99 in UK) by Donald MacIntyre is a fine pointilliste study of one of the most interesting and original figures - indeed, perhaps the onlie begetter - of New Labour by the best political commentator in Great Britain.
Book of the Century: A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust
Colm Toibin
Novelist, shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize for The Blackwater Lightship
THIS has been a vintage year for Irish poetry. Derek Mahon's Collected Poems (Gallery, £13.95) makes clear that Mahon's work, with all its irony, fine-tuning and command of form, has been an extraordinary achievement. Paul Durcan's Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (Harvill, £14.99 in UK) plays with the real and the surreal, the self and the Other, and the confusion from which we are trying to awake. It is a book to take to the bed with you. Gerard Fanning's second collection, Working for the Government (Dedalus, £5.95), combines a tone that is intimate and urgent with a formal reticence and an absolute care and respect for language. My prize for the best Irish new poem of 1999 is between Conor O'Callaghan for the title poem from his marvellous Seatown (Gallery, £6.95) and Anthony Cronin for the first poem, "The Need of Words", in The Minotaur (New Island, £8.99).
Book of the Century: The Golden Bowl by Henry James
Eveleen Coyle
Book editor and publicist
WE wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda (Picador, £15.99 in UK) by Philip Gourevitch is a stark and shocking account of the genocide in Rwanda, when 800,000 people were killed in 10 days in 1994 while the world turned a blind eye. Gourevitch very skilfully interweaves the history of that country with heartbreaking stories told by Rwandans who survived. In Charming Billy (Bloomsbury, £9.99 in UK) by Alice McDermott, the story all takes place in the aftermath of Billy's funeral. His was a life of tragedy, love, grief, hope, loneliness and alcohol, and it touched everyone around him. McDermott has a terrific ear for dialogue and draws marvellous characters. The lives of two contemporary American women living in different circumstances are interwoven with that of Virginia Woolf in Michael Cunningham's The Hours (Fourth Estate, £12.99 in UK). This is a tale of frantic survival, repressed passions and extraordinary self-deception. It is understated and full of longing.
Book of the Century: The Countrywoman by Paul Smith
Edmund Van Esbeck
Former rugby correspondent of The Irish Times and author of Irish Rugby: A History, 1874 - 1999
MAURICE Manning's biography of James Dillon (Wolfhound, £25) is a very good book about a leading politician in this country, a man whom I admire. I recommend this book as an enjoyable read that is not a whitewash job. Addicted (out in paperback this year, Collins Willow, £5.99 in UK) is by Tony Adams, the Arsenal and England footballer. It is a great study of someone who has overcome alcoholism to reclaim his career. One of the best sports books I have read for a long time.
Book of the Century: Ulysses by James Joyce
Peter Straus
Picador Publisher, an imprint of Macmillan
APART from those we published, I especially liked Jim Crace's brilliantly controlled Being Dead (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99 in UK), which gave death a good run for its money, and Salman Rushdie's storytelling genius with The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Cape, £17.99 in UK). As a debut, Our Fathers (Faber, £9.99 in UK) by Andrew O'Hagan was everything his fans could have wished for - meticulous, exact and uncompromising. But the book that haunts me this year is actually published in April next by Cape and is called Where Rivers Change Direction by Mark Spragg. Ostensibly a collection of essays about the West, it is the closest thing to Cormac McCarthy I have seen in ten years. Astonishing.
Book of the Century: Ulysses by James Joyce
Ed Moloney
Irish Journalist of the Year; earlier this year he won a notable court victory against attempts by the RUC to force him to surrender notes of interviews with a man charged with the murder of Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane
IF there is such a thing as reincarnation, I would like to come back as David Halberstam, a majestic writer and the quintessential chronicler of American life. His latest work, Playing for Keeps - Michael Jordan and the world he made (Random House, $14 in US), is about US basketball legend Michael Jordan, a particular rolemodel for my son, Ciaran, but quite honestly I read anything and everything he writes. Another US writer whose lifestyle and talent I covet is Bill Bryson. While Halberstam tackles the serious issues of American life, Bryson pokes fun at all of that country's idiosyncrasies and de-mythologises its icons. Made in America (Minerva, £6.99 in UK ) is very necessary and very funny. A photograph is worth a thousand words, a good political cartoon ten thousand. Sometimes Ian Knox, resident cartoonist for the Irish News in Belfast, is brilliant. Culture Vultures - Political Cartoons, 1990-1999 (Blackstaff, £5.99 in UK) gathers some of his best. I loved his cartoon the day after the RUC was awarded the George Cross - a drawing of a pair of regal hands handing over the medal with the words: "Thank you and Goodbye". Perfect.
Book of the century:The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake
Antony Farrell
Publisher, Lilliput Press
BORGES is Argentina's delightingly polymathic late master of Latin-American letters. Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Eliot Weinberger (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, due out in Ireland next year) is a sumptuous gathering. Along with Colin Thubron, Jonathan Raban is England's best travel writer. In Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings (Picador, £16.99 in UK) he voyages again, mapping his interior as well as Canada's Pacific coastline - poignant, and devastatingly good.
Book of the Century: Ulysses by James Joyce
Ben Barnes
Artistic director of the Abbey Theatre
MICHAEL Cunningham's The Hours (Fourth Estate, £12.99 in UK) is inspired by Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway but it quickly slips free of these moorings as its exquisite, graceful prose refracts the lives of three women through the prism of a single day. It was my favourite book of 1999. As a fan of Scott Fitzgerald I was fascinated to read Amanda Vaill's biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy, who were the reallife characters upon whom Fitzgerald based Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night. I avoided this book for so long because of its gushing and sentimental title, Everybody Was So Young (Warner Books, £9.99 in UK), but it proved to be a sweeping and richly anecdotal account of a marriage and an era, and taught me once again not to judge a book by its cover - or indeed its title. Irish works - both just out this year in paperback - I most enjoyed were The Catastrophist (Review, £6.99 in UK) by Ronan Bennett and Two Moons (Review, £6.99 in UK) by Jennifer Johnston.
Book of the Century: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
John Bowman
Broadcaster and historian
I ENJOYED Gillian McIntosh's The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Cork University Press, £15.95). It draws on conventional historical sources but also on literature, broadcasting and popular culture to cast light on how the Ulster unionists see themselves. Especially recommended for those who reckon they have an infallible analysis of the Ulster Question. Another book I enjoyed was Eunan O'Halpin's Defending Ireland: the Irish State and its Enemies since 1922 (OUP, £25 in UK). It's a reminder of how many forces were intent on mischief - and worse - to undermine the democracy that was established 80 years ago. Even readers well familiar with 20th-century Irish political history will glean many new insights from this highly original approach. Jancis Robinson's second revised edition of her Oxford Companion to Wine (OUP, £35 in UK) represents an outstanding scholarly achievement. And she clearly enjoyed her visits to cellars as well as libraries for purposes of research. She may not be the most influential wine writer, or the most expert in individual regions, but this publication surely establishes her as the greatest all-rounder in a very distinguished field.
Book of the Century: The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell
Patricia Quinn
Director of the Arts Council
THE Irish Architectural Review Vol. 1 1999 (no price given), produced by the inestimable Gandon Editions of Kinsale, gave me a lot of pleasure. It provides a wonderful overview of Irish architecture today, and for the layperson provides a real insight into the kinds of design issues architects confront in making new buildings or restoring old ones. I particularly like the prominence given to the client's comment in each entry: until we recognise the critical role of the educated public, architecture will make slow progress in Ireland. A new American translation of Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma (The Modern Library, £20.95 in UK) brought back to one of my favourite authors. Like a really good picture restorer, Richard Howard has given a fresh perspective on a great masterpiece from the past, which also happens to be a really good read. Joan McBreen's The White Page/An Bhileog Bhan (Salmon, £9.99) is a fine piece of book production from Salmon Press. It is on my Christmas-present list. Wonderful to see such an interesting and varied collection of Irish women poets of this century.
Book of the Century: A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust
Neil Belton
Publishing director at Granta, and author of The Good Listener: Helen Bamber - A Life Against Cruelty
JEAN-Paul Kauffmann's book about Napoleon on St Helena, The Dark Room at Long Wood (Harvill, £12 in UK), evokes a dictator's despair and loneliness in his island prison. Ian Kershaw's Hitler (Penguin, £12.99 in UK) is a great piece of scholarship. A glib, angry, pampered dropout patched Social Darwinism into the tatters of German militarism and antisemitism, and believed he could remake humanity. Ciaran Carson's The Twelfth of Never (Gallery, £7.95) is a wonderful exploration of Irish history that fuses dreams, ballads, hymns and autobiographies.
Book of the Century: The Collected Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett
John Tuomey
Architect; he and his partner, Sheila O'Donnell, were finalists in the Mies van der Rohe Award for European Architecture and were shortlisted for this year's Stirling prize for a school building in Ranelagh, Dublin
IN W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (out in paperback this year, Harvill, £6.99 in UK) we are taken on a journey around the flat landscapes of the coast of East Anglia but somehow the horizon of the narrative extends across time and space to encompass the story of the end of empire and the death of the industrial revolution in England. The book is also a beautiful object in itself with photographs forming an integral part of the reading of the text. I was completely absorbed by Toward the End of Time (out in paperback this year, Penguin, £6.99 in UK) by John Updike. Set in 2020 in the comparative calm of a post-nuclear American suburb, the story tracks the interior life of an ageing man in a world gone wrong. The plate steel sculptures at Richard Serra's exhibition, Torqued Ellipses, in the Dia Gallery in New York are among the most beautiful things I've seen. Reading the interview with Serra in the catalogue (Dia Centre for the Arts, New York, £22.50 in UK) gave me a different understanding of the power of the work. The sculptor achieved a new kind of space by working with old-fashioned geometry. The process of making the giant twisted shells revealed the tragic decline of the American shipyards.
Book of the Century: A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Misha Glenny
Broadcaster, historian and author of The Balkans
IMAGINING the Balkans (OUP, £17.99 in UK) by Maria Todorovo is a breakthrough historical consideration of external perceptions of the Balkan region. This should do for the Balkans what Said's Orientalism did for the Middle East. I finally caught up with one of the great gaps in my literary education - Buddenbrooks (Minerva, £8.99 in UK) by Thomas Mann is a wonderful account of the slow but inexorable decline of a German bourgeois family in the 19th century.) I include the first three Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling (Bloomsbury, £6.99 and £10.99 in UK) for their heroic, if but partially successful, role in persuading my nine-year-old son away from computer games.
Book of the Century: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Sheila O'Flanagan
Novelist, bond-dealer and Irish Times columnist; her most recent novel is the bestseller, Suddenly Single
SOMETIMES Colin Dexter's obsession with spelling and punctuation can be irritating, and sometimes his plots leave a little to be desired. The Remorseful Day (Macmillan, £16.99 in UK) wasn't the greatest of them by any means. But the development of the characters was excellent. There were hidden depths to old favourites like Strange and Lewis and, rightly, Morse wasn't softened despite his imminent demise. It's not perfect but it was one of this year's most satisfying. I'm fascinated by the east/west cultural differences in Memoirs of a Geisha (Vintage, £6.99 in UK) by Arthur Golden, which I only managed to read this year. I was particularly interested to see how Golden would rise to the challenge of writing from the perspective of a geisha.
Book of the Century: The Motley Fool Investment Guide by David and Tom Gardner
Niall O'Dowd
Founding publisher of Irish America magazine and the Irish Voice newspaper in New York
THE Great Shame (Chatto and Windus, £25 in UK) by Thomas Keneally is an extraordinary account of the Irish expatriate experience in the last century in both Australia and the United States. Ireland in Quotes (O'Brien, £19.99) by Conor O'Clery is an indispensable guide for every journalist who needs to know who said what, when and where. Isaac's Storm (Fourth Estate, £16.99 in UK) by Erik Larson is a cautionary tale about how weather "experts" misread the 1900 hurricane which hit Galveston, Texas, and left an estimated 10,000 dead, causing the greatest natural disaster in the US this century.
Book of the Century: If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
Philip Casey
Poet and novelist; his most recent novel is The Water Star
THE much-lamented Michael Hartnett died this autumn, and his death has sent me back to read his work as a whole. His Selected and New Poems (Gallery Press, £12.95) is an essential book for any poetry lover's shelf until his Collected Poems are published, hopefully in 2001. Its epigraph is one of the world's great poems, and indeed Hartnett is a poet of world stature, as the recent Poetry Ireland Night for him proved beyond any doubt. If you look for the glow of human warmth in writing - and I value it first and foremost - then look no further than The Draughtsman and the Unicorn, stories by Anthony Glavin (New Island, £6.99). There's a lot more to them, of course, like insight, humour and sheer craft. Give yourself a treat. It's impossible to ignore Dermot Healy's achievement in Sudden Times (Collins Harvill, £15.99). Its tautly-strung language, danger and comic asides make it something unique. An essential novel.
Book of the Century: Ulysses by James Joyce
John Banville
Novelist and Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times
ON Bullfighting by A.L. Kennedy (Yellow Jersey Press, £10 in UK) is a superb study not so much of the sport - art? - of bullfighting, as of the ways in which life defines itself in opposition to death. Masterful. The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief by James Woods (Cape, £16.99 in UK) is a collection of literary studies, which may not sound exciting, though it was one of the year's most thrilling reads. Francis Wheen's Karl Marx (Fourth Estate, £20 in UK) is a shrewd, informed and entertaining biography of a thinker who is going to be far more influential in the new century than anyone would have thought 10 years ago, when European communism imploded.
Book of the century: Chamber's 20th Cen- tury Dictionary
Tony Doyle
Actor; he appears in Ballykissangel Four Fathers, a new drama starting next week on ITV
I READ Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Inter- views 1964-1999 (Faber, £9.99 in UK), edited by Christopher Murray, because I hoped it might reveal more about the man himself, and it is advisable to be as well-informed as possible about a writer, in case you work with him! e du Soleil, is a more intriguing title, suggesting that what you see really conceals what remains hidden.I love the conclusion of Colum McCann's novel, Songdogs (Phoenix, £5.99 in UK): "Memory is three quarters imagination; all the rest is lies." The scope of the book is huge, and the journey courageous and colourful.
Book of the Century: Amongst Women by John McGahern
Mary Raftery
Co-author with Eoin O'Sullivan of Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland's Industrial Schools; she produced, directed and wrote the acclaimed RTE television documentary series, States of Fear
TWO books this year stand out in the memory. Colm Toibin's The Blackwater Lightship (Picador, £14.99 in UK) is a wonderfully intense novel. Its characters are so intimately drawn that I was almost left with a desire to phone them up and ask them how they are all getting on. It deals beautifully with the deep and lasting impact of both what is said and left unsaid within families. The Good Listener by Neil Belton (out in paperback this year, Phoenix, £7.99 in UK) is searingly insightful into the manner in which systems and states are capable of behaving with unspeakable cruelty.
Book of the Century: If This is a Man by Primo Levi
Dennis O'Driscoll
Poet, critic and Lannan award winner; his latest collection of poetry is Weather Permitting
SEAMUS Heaney cried Beowulf with such honed power that the Anglo-Saxon masterpiece lodged in the consciousness with the force of a damascened sword. At the end of a year that brought memorable new work from Vona Groarke, Anne Haverty and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Joan McBreen's invaluable directory, The White Page/An Bhileog Bhan (Salmon, £9.99), fills in the blanks for anyone curious about twentieth century Irish women's poetry. In the Selected Poems of 1999 Nobel laureate Gunter Grass, translated by Michael Hamburger (Faber, £9.99 in UK), a married couple "deduct each other from income tax" and aborted embryos "worry about their parents' future".
Book of the Century: Poems 1913-1956 by Berthold Brecht
Tom Hyland
Co-ordinator of the East Timor Campaign and winner of a 1999 People of the Year Award
WHEN the Acacia Bird Sings (Mercier, £6.99) by James O'Halloran is a must for anyone who wishes to understand the pain of separation suffered by migrants and refugees. If ever a book should be on the national curriculum, this is it. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Vintage, £8.99 in UK) by Dee Brown is a classic book which has had a huge influence on me. Let the words of Black Elk be the compass by which our individual and collective actions are guided: "I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from the hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream . . . The nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no centre any longer, and the sacred tree is dead."
Book of the Century: The Redundancy of Courage by Timothy Mo
Padraig O Snodaigh
Publisher, Cosceim; he is also a poet and historian
O SNODAIGH INCHICORE Haiku (Riposte Books, £5) is a lovely limited edition as a farewell to a grand sad man and a great poet, Michael Hartnett. Ciaran Murray's Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature (Verlag der Buchhandlung, £22 in UK) is a readable, new, fascinating, tautly-argued account of the influence of Japan on Romanticism and its ramifications into the politics of literature and the literature of politics, with Temple, Addison and Pope as major foci. Dan is Scor/Venti e Una Poesia (La Vallisa, Bari, £20) translated from Irish to Italian with copious notes, by Rosangela Barone and Melita Cataldi, is a beautiful hand-produced celebration of Irish poetry from Dallan Forgaill in the sixth century to Pearse Hutchinson in this century. Irish and Italian texts face each other and all are enhanced by coloured lithographs by Mildred Cullivan, Stephen Lawlor, Anna Maria Caracciolo and Frances Ferrovecchio.
Book of the Century: Aisling Ghear: na Stiobhartaigh agus an tAosLeinn 1603-1788 by Breandan O Buachalla
Sile De Valera
Minister for Arts, Gaeltacht, Heritage and the Islands
WATCHING the River Flow (Poetry Ireland, £11.99), an anthology of 100 poems in English and Irish from the 20th century, edited by Noel Duffy and Theo Dorgan, has just been published. Ten poets were asked to select poems from specific decades and the end result is an eclectic and idiosyncratic collection which illustrates the depth and diversity of Irish poetry. Lindbergh (out in paperback this year, Pan, £7.99 in UK) by A. Scott Berg is a brilliant biography which deservedly won a Pulitzer this year. I have a personal interest in the subject as my father has always been interested in aviation and my grandfather, Eamon de Valera, had his first-ever taste of flying in a plane piloted by Lindbergh himself. My final choice is Jennifer Johnston's Two Moons (Review, £6.99 in UK), a magical story of love told in the compelling and beautiful style that Jennifer has made her own.
Book of the Century: The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing edited by Seamus Deane (I hope to see its one major flaw, the under-representation of women writers, corrected sooner rather than later when the long-awaited fourth volume appears)
Andrew Miller
Novelist; his novel Ingenious Pain won the 1999 Dublin IMPAC award
A.L. Kennedy's On Bullfighting (Yellow Jersey Press, £10 in UK) is a powerfully felt and highly personal essay that takes us from a window-ledge in Glasgow to the bullring in Seville. A study of public pain and private courage. Simon Armitage's All Points North (Penguin, £6.99 in UK) is full of droll vignettes of northern life - brilliantly observed, touching and funny. In Lost in Translation (Vintage, £6.99 in UK), Eva Hoffman describes the emigration of her Jewish family from Poland to North America in 1959, when she was thirteen. A penetratingly honest account of exile and assimilation.
Book of the Century: The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
Sarah Flannery
European Young Scientist of the Year, whose book, In Code: a Mathematical Journey, will be published next year by Profile Books
SIMON Singh's Fermat's Last Theorem (Fourth Estate, £6.99 in UK) is enthralling, not alone for the story it tells of Andrew Wiles's great seven-year struggle with cracking this famous old problem but also because it gives glimpses of the great mathematicians of the past. It contains very well crafted pieces which are bound to attract some young people to this science of which I have unwittingly found myself a champion. Furthermore it is a very human story, relating, among other things, the death of the young genius Taniyama, whose conjecture was instrumental in paving the way for Wiles. It also tells of the latter's anxious year searching for the vital patch which put his work beyond doubt. Now I've got his latest, The Code Book (Fourth Estate, £16.99). At the moment I am reading Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum (Minerva, £8.99 in UK). Why? Because I'll have an opportunity to meet him at the Nobel Prize ceremony next week, so I thought the least I could do was read something which he had written.
Book of the Century: To Kill a Mocking- bird by Harper Lee
Tommy Tiernan
Comic; he appears in Small Potatoes on Channel 4 and hosts the Stand Up Show
A LOT of people fantasise about leaving their families and becoming famous lovers. Intimacy (Faber, £6.99 in UK) by Hanif Kureshi is the inside story of an obsession and the thoughts that go through one man's mind the night he leaves his wife and two kids for another woman. Awful and painful but, it seems, honest and unavoidable for the man concerned. Frasier is not my favourite TV show, but in The Best of Frasier (Channel 4 Books, £9.99 in UK) the writing is excellent, the jokes are sharp and often very clever. Reading this means you don't have to endure any bad acting. Allen Ginsberg was a lovely, open-hearted poet, generous and uncensored. In Death and Fame, Last Poems (Penguin, £7.99 in UK), he talks about being sick, embracing death and pooping in his pants, all with a sense of humour. His final poem, "Things I'll not Do", was written just before he lapsed into a coma and died. It is sad and positive at the same time. Brilliant.
Book of the Century: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
