Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent, gives her assessment of her favourite fiction of the year.
1 Stoner. By John Williams (Vintage)
All the art, power and purpose of fiction is contained within this majestic performance from a forgotten US writer. The third of only four novels from Williams,a Texan and career academic,it records the life of William Stoner, a farm boy who, seduced by English literature away from studying agriculture, becomes a second-rank college lecturer. He marries a beautiful malcontent who makes his life a lonely hell,while his professional self is destroyed by office politics and scandal.Originally published in 1965, it remains as breathtaking as it is subtle and sad.
2 Payback. By Gert Ledig (Granta)
In 1956, three years before the publication of The Tin Drum, Ledig, a disfigured survivor of the Battle of Leningrad, published this masterpiece, the second of his three novels. Set in an unnamed German city in the course of 70 minutes, the duration of a bombing mission, it records the fear, panic, honest cowardice and vicious brutality of individuals reacting to certain death as the bombs fall. Satanically black, it offers a devastating portrait of human chaos as created by one war, all wars.
3 Crabwalk. By Günter Grass (Faber)
German history continues to inspire and provoke the always daring Grass. But in this punchy,laconic and profound novel, he considers German suffering instead of war guilt by looking at a real life disaster, the torpedoing of the converted cruise liner, the Wilhelm Gustloff .Carrying some 10,000 refugees, the ship sank,leaving only 500 survivors. Described as the single worst tragedy in maritime history,it has been all but forgotten.Why? Because the wartime casualties were German. Aware of his country's long reluctance to rightfully lament its own war losses because of the legacy of national shame, Grass exposes its sideways approach to history – hence the title.
4 Agape, Agape. By William Gaddis (Atlantic Books)
A virtuoso time bomb from the grave by the US master, who died in 1998. This mellow novella, in the form of a death bed soliloquy, could be presented as his artistic manifesto. Its theme, that of art as fake or reality, preoccupied Gaddis for more than 50 years and dominated The Recognitions (1955). Agape, Agape is funny,razor-sharp and triumphs through its intense, slightly distracted narrative tone, that of an address, initially directed at the reader but, ultimately, at a particular listener.
5 Confession of a Murderer. By Joseph Roth (Granta)
The German narrator recalls living in Paris and the Russian café he frequented. On one memorable night, he is present as one of several Russians, a former spy, begins to tell his story. This is where the great Roth enters the world of Dostoyevsky, with flashes of inspired comedy. Also published this year was What I Saw –Reports From Berlin 1920-33, a volume of journalism from Roth, the supreme observer-cum-cynical romantic who, having chronicled the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was equally alert to the chaos and despair of the short-lived Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler. As this collection confirms, Roth the reporter, in the Berlin depicted in the paintings of Dix and Grosz, is as gifted as Roth the novelist.
6 Vernon God Little. By D.B.C. Pierre (Faber)
What remains to be uttered about this subversive, atmospheric début? Allow me to brag that having read it on New Year's Day, I saw it as a worthy disciple of John Kennedy Toole's epic A Confederacy of Dunces. Part philosopher, part Bart Simpson, Vernon, the maligned "why me?"anti-hero, dogged by ill-timing and bad luck, not only keeps his reader laughing, he brought much-needed humour to the annual Booker bunfight, not previously known for providing too many jokes.
7 Things You Should Know. By A.M. Homes (Granta)
Well, there's weird and there's dark and then there are the stories of this highly original and terrifying US writer whose specialist subject appears to be psychological stalemate. Her characters may not be likeable but that will not prevent readers feeling a disturbing affinity. These are cruel, if often impressive, stories, definitely not geared towards the faint hearted simply seeking entertainment.
8 Seek My Face. By John Updike (Hamish Hamilton)
Always guaranteed to irritate some readers but I must again praise Updike as a genius with a feel for language. His 20th novel is in the form of an interview in which an artist, more celebrated for surviving her two mad genius husbands than for her work, is forced to confront her past by an aggressive young female interviewer. Both a mediation on old age and on the ways in which experience and incident become a life, it is a subtle, sombre and oddly beautiful work.
9 A Sad Affair. By Wolfgang Koeppen (Granta)
First published in Germany in 1934, and banned, this is a magical, tortuous and tortuously funny, candid account of one young man's obsessive love-as-life-sentence for a girl who though not interested in her hapless suitor proves a surprisingly likeable siren with an interest in experiencing emotional suffering of her own.
10 Waxwings. By Jonathan Raban (Picador)
The very English Raban has cracked the puzzle that is the US and this low-key domestic drama about a mild Englishman, transplanted to Seattle with a brittle wife and a comfortable life that is about to fall apart, begins well and simply gets better. More of an observer than a natural storyteller, Raban is a fluent,deceptively eloquent writer who seems to have figured out life and living and the difficulties of love and need.
11 The Good Doctor. By Damon Galgut (Atlantic Books)
Aside from selecting the best book as the winner, this year's Booker panel also got it right in shortlisting this fine novel by this gifted South African. It is an evocative, understated book, with echoes of Graham Greene, in which an older man, with a cargo of personal failures of his own, looks on as a distracted young idealist attempts to change things in the new South Africa, in which apathy appears the surest form of survival.
12 Judge Savage. By Tim Parks (Secker and Warburg)
Judge Daniel Savage has done well, too well, the not-quite-white adopted son of English parents, he has made the most of his colour, and women love him.He has always obliged but now he feels it's time to reform and hold on to his very English, snobbish and pathetic wife. Ordinary human niceness holds no allure for Parks and in this, his 11th novel, he again avails of the tough candour, anger and ugly human traits that served him so well in the 1997 Booker short-listed Europa and the equally excellent Destiny (1999).
13 The Light of Day. By Graham Swift (Hamish Hamilton)
Having long worked the territory of ideas and questions, not answers, Swift turned to the ordinary with his Booker-winning Last Orders (1996), and remains there with this calm,c onvincing, near-confessional study of the way one shadow-man's ordinary life, as narrated in an ordinary voice, spins on an event that finds cohesion in his enduring sense of guilt.
14 The Parts. By Keith Ridgway (Faber)
Just when it seems that every second Irish novel is an almost-funny gag sandwiched between the demands of the stand-up circuit, here is the most convincing Irish comic novel since At Swim-Two-Birds. Ridgway's Dublin is a chaotic Hades of sexual frustration, loss, regret, bitter remorse and apathy. So what's new? Ridgway skilfully juxtaposes earthy, raucous and at times surreal comedy with staggering instants of grace and sadness. For all the shouting, there is also silence, as the vividly drawn characters pause to consider their pathetic lives.
15 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. By Mark Haddon (Jonathan Cape)
Part murder mystery, part odyssey through the hopes and fears of a troubled autistic boy, Haddon quite brilliantly evokes the innocence and the brutal truths without condescending to his narrator or compromising his reader.
16 Brick Lane. By Monica Ali (Doubleday)
A Booker frontrunner even before publication, Ali's engaging début tells the story of Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi girl, and her personal odyssey from village life to a London flat courtesy of an arranged marriage to an older man. Evolving from girl to disappointed woman she remains sympathetic, but this wry, human novel really soars through the inspired characterisation of the tragi-comic loser, husband Chanu.
17 One Day. By Ardashir Vakil (Hamish Hamilton)
Not quite an Indian novel, not quite a British one, this second novel from Vakil stands between the two cultures and avoids the stereotypes. The tensions are personal, not cultural, as a mixed-race marriage, born of defiant romance, comes under pressure. Acted out over 24 hours, it has darkness and light and succeeds through its glimpses of real human fear.
18 The Kite Runner. By Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury)
In spite of howler-sized coincidences capable of making Dickens blush, this best-to-be-read-at-one-sitting novel, with its heavy feeling of memoir, and the topical weight of Afghanistan's desperate recent history, is clunky and uneven but so readable. It is unexpectedly compelling in its examination of fathers and sons and, more importantly, truth, lies, cowardice and cruelty.
19 My Life as A Fake By Peter Carey (Faber)
Great title for an autobiography except that this is a cunning novel, albeit one based on a real-life 1940s Australian literary hoax.True, this is not the best of the ever-inventive Carey – there are narrative gaps large enough for an elephant to saunter through –but, as ever, he writes so well that you simply sit back and have fun.
20 The Soldiers of Salamis By Javier Cercas (Bloomsbury)
Fiction and history stride shoulder to shoulder through this entertainingly daring return to the bloody chaos that was, and remains, the Spanish Civil War. Cercas takes a gesture, a single act of detached humanity, and explores an unlikely survival while carrying out an investigation that draws on a number of clues.
21 My Name is Red By Orhan Pamuk (Faber)
Last but not least is the winner of this year's IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award.This is as rich, as eccentric and as funny a burlesque jaunt through the lies, politics and truths of art as any reader is ever likely to encounter, and it comes complete in a magnificent tapestry of Turkish history and culture alongside the ongoing tension of East meets West, with a murder
thrown in for good measure.
Non-fiction: the top five
Seabiscuit. By Laura Hillenbrand (Fourth Estate)
W. B.Yeats: A Life, Vol II – The Arch-Poet. By R.F. Foster (Oxford University Press)
The Speckled People. By Hugo Hamilton (Fourth Estate)
Tara and the Ark of the Covenant. By Mairéad Carew (Royal Irish Academy)
The Mind in the Cave. By David Lewis Williams (Thames and Hudson)