From a meditation on walking Britain's ancient paths to an epic American novel, from reportage on life in a Mumbai slum to a blockbuster biography of LBJ ... writers choose their books of the year

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie



Tobys Room

Eghosa Imasuen's Fine Boys (Farafina Books, available on Kindle) is, simply put, a very good read. It is about middle-class life in 1990s Nigeria, boys coming of age amid the lure of violence and the pull of young love. It is moving, funny and emotionally true.

Pat Barker's Toby's Room (Hamish Hamilton) is magnificent; the characters have psychological depth, and she deals, in an honest, knowledgeable way with gender and art during the first world war. I finished it eagerly, wanting to know what happened next, and as I read, I was enjoying, marvelling and learning.

Simon Armitage

I've become a big fan of the short novel of late, something about the length of a day return from Leeds to London, so Denis Johnson's Train Dreams (Granta) was always going to appeal. Stark and terse, it's the story of 1920s lumber-man Robert Grainier, whose existence is consumed by America's uncontrollable expansion. He is pioneer, dreamer, everyman, and his life among the trees, forest fires and bawdy towns speaks both of paradise and apocalypse, all told with Johnson's maverick approach to grammar and structure.

Often overlooked as a poet now, Stephen Spender wrote over a million words of journal entries. The index of New Selected Journals: 1939-95 (Faber) reads like a cross between Who's Who and a London restaurant guide, but name-dropping and menu choices aside, some of his later writings as body and spirit begin to fail are touching and humane.

In Meme (University of Iowa Press) Susan Wheeler intercuts fragmentary poetic reflection with snatches of vernacular phrasing ("wait I'm not done fucking yet") to explore broken relationships – parental, romantic and with the self. The overall effect is dazzling, upsetting at times, and like nothing I've read before.

Diana Athill



Kathleen Jamie, Sightlines

There's been an embarrassment of riches this year, but here are two to be treasured and reread. In Tom Lubbock's Until Further Notice, I Am Alive (Granta) he regrets that no "teaching how to die" is available. His own awe-inspiring book is just that. It is unforgettable and profoundly valuable. While Kathleen Jamie's Sightlines (Sort Of Books), a collection of brilliant and enticing essays about natural phenomena, tingles with life. John Berger called her a "sorceress", and so she is.

William Boyd

Two tremendous new collections by two of my favourite poets enlivened this year's reading. Jamie McKendrick's Out There (Faber) displays all his prodigious strengths – a roving, quirky erudition, spectacularly precise observation and a beguiling, shrewd wit. And Christopher Reid, after the triumph of The Song of Lunch shows in Nonsense (Faber) that he is the modern master of the long narrative poem – at once wryly amusing and moving. Both these poets superbly exemplify Coleridge's definition of the form: "The best words in their best order."

Donald Rayfield's Edge of Empires (Reaktion Press) is a wonderful history of Georgia, lifting the lid on that country's torrid, rambunctious past (and present). Impeccably researched, limpidly written and full of insight.

AS Byatt



Lawrence Norfolk, John Saturnall's Feast

There were four novels I confidently expected to see on the Man Booker lists, or even as the winner. Philip Hensher's Scenes from Early Life (Fourth Estate) is an extraordinary feat of imagination, telling of the birth of Bangladesh in colour and light. Lawrence Norfolk's John Saturnall's Feast (Bloomsbury) is a brilliant, erudite tale of cookery and witchcraft in 1681.

Patrick Flanery's Absolution (Atlantic) is a wonderfully constructed and gripping novel about betrayal and shadows in South Africa. Grace McCleen's The Land of Decoration (Chatto & Windus) is both sinister and sharply intriguing, with a completely convincing 11-year-old narrator caught in fundamentalism, school persecution and the edge of the miraculous. None of them resembles anything else. The fact that none of them was on the Man Booker lists may simply indicate that we are going through an extraordinarily various and imaginative period for British fiction.

Rachel Cusk



The best book I read this year was Karl Ove Knausgaard's A Death in the Family (Harvill Secker); in fact, I continue to read parts of it at regular intervals. It is both an account of mid-life and of childhood remembered from mid-life, with the death of the author's father bringing these two periods into relation. It is what might be called a work of extreme autobiography, and is full of artistic, moral and technical daring. Knausgaard's commentaries on painting, particularly on Rembrandt's self-portraits, are very beautiful. The idea that a self-portrait arises out of an abandonment of the notion of solace underpins Knausgaard's own self-portrait; yet solace is precisely what it offers.

Richard Ford



Lionel Asbo Photograph: Cape

Lionel Asbo (Jonathan Cape) by Martin Amis – it'd be quite enough for this terrific, boisterous novel just to piss off all the rumpled grumpies and tight-knickered critics who like to tell us what's funny and what's serious (they're almost always wrong). But this novel manages to be both funny and serious, and (as always with Amis) to be very, very on-the-money about the culture – and not just British culture – and along the way to get at what we're uncomfortably thinking and don't want others to know we're thinking. Satire? Fairy tale? Send up? There's not enough of it for me. Amis does the reader a brilliant, generous (and cathartic) favour.

Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica edited by Anthony Thwaite (Faber) – I don't ordinarily like reading people's letters. Usually, too many punches get knowingly, smirkingly pulled. Larkin, of course, is different: hilarious, pathetic, niggardly, mischievous, baiting, amusingly domestic, insincere, placating and occasionally loving, and brilliant, incisive and true; he's us, in our best and worst selves – written better than we could write it. Why else would a critic argue that he's the "best-loved poet of the past 100 years"? In these letters, no less than in his poems, he stands rather nakedly before us – only this time with a damp dish towel over his wrist, the room gone a bit too cold, thinking about listening to the radio from bed.

Ancient Light by John Banville (Viking) – this sumptuous novel has also inspired a lot of chin-pulling and critical brow-furrowing about its "relation" to other Banville novels, and its apparent self-consciosness, and mirroring, and to its being about story-telling itself and the role of memory, blah, blah, blah. Me, though – I just read it for the sentences and the smarts, and for the copious sexy parts, and for the absolutely edge-of-my-chair exhilaration over just what the author might write on the next page. I had, occasionally, to stop reading it, just so I could look forward to going back. Not many experiences provide that much pleasure; and very rarely do we find it available anymore in novels.

Jonathan Franzen



I was taken with a couple of Brazilian novels, not new this year but new to me. Chico Buarque's Budapest (Bloomsbury) is exactly the literary collision it sounds like, South America meets Central Europe, but what a delicious recipe for a story this turns out to be. Buarque's the real deal, hilarious and innovative and deftly profound. The premise of the novel is ridiculous – a Brazilian ghost writer completes his self-effacement by disappearing into Budapest – but Buarque sells it so well that, by the end, your own existence feels equally ridiculous.

Bernardo Carvalho's Nine Nights (Vintage) is also a hybrid, of fiction and historical fact, and it seems for a while to be treading Heart of Darkness ground, telling the story of a real-life American anthropologist who killed himself in the Amazon in the 1930s. About halfway through, though, it kicks into a more powerful gear. Carvalho starts bringing urgent news of a modern Brazil coming to full consciousness of its double identity as colonised and coloniser, and he deploys his fact/fiction hijinks to produce an ending that is still haunting me, months later.

John Gray



Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

If you want a truly innovative and radical perspective on reshaping the economy, read Robert and Edward Skidelsky's How Much Is Enough: The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life (Allen Lane). The book has not yet received the wide attention it deserves, but I found the way it applies to some of Keynes's boldest ideas about economics and the good life thought-stirring and extremely refreshing. Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Hamish Hamiliton) is also a meditation on the good life, but one that unfolds in walking as Macfarlane recounts his own peregrinations and those of other wanderers, now and in the past. Powerfully evocative and beautifully written, The Old Ways is a vividly ruminative travelogue, including among its many delights a wonderfully perceptive section on the poet of pathways and roads without ends, Edward Thomas.

David Hare



Two books from 2012 may well be read in 50 years' time. In an abject year for journalism, Katherine Boo's portrait of a Mumbai slum, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Portobello), the result of three years' honest witness among the disadvantaged, sets a gold standard for exactly what a gifted reporter may still do alone. You put it down enraged, entertained and richly informed about people who live in makeshift quarters at the end of an airport runway.

Another lasting achievement is David Thomson's The Big Screen. It's always claimed that the greatest critics are the ones other critics admire, but Thomson is that almost unknown phenomenon: a critic practitioners admire. The Big Screen is a one-volume history of the moving image. Nobody else could match its sweep, its erudition, its discernment or its warmth. Give it to anyone who wants to learn about cinema.

Robert Harris



Robert A Caro, The Passage of Power

My book of the year, by a landslide majority, was The Passage of Power, the fourth volume in Robert A Caro's vast life of Lyndon B Johnson (Bodley Head). The adjective "Shakespearean" is overused and mostly undeserved, but not in this case. LBJ emerges from this biography as a fully rounded tragic hero: cowardly and brave, petty and magnificent, vindictive and noble, a man of vaunting ambition and profound insecurities. Caro marries profound psychological insight with a brilliant eye for the drama of the times. Two examples stand out. One is his account of John F Kennedy's assassination as seen – or rather not seen – by Johnson, who had his head pressed to the floor of his limousine by a secret service agent, and who was literally dragged to a safe room in the Dallas hospital: a more riveting narrative than any fiction. The other is the mutual loathing between LBJ and Robert F Kennedy, which will presumably reach its full, poisonous flowering in Caro's fifth volume. I can't wait.

There is a risk that nominating as my book of the year a 759-page tome on the evolution of attitudes to wealth between the fourth and sixth centuries will look like a shameless attempt to get myself into Pseuds' Corner. I hope, though, that readers will trust me when I assure them that Peter Brown's Through the Eye of a Needle (Princeton University Press) is a masterpiece on every level: one that can be read with as much pleasure by someone who knows nothing about late antiquity as by an emeritus professor in the subject. That it is a great work of scholarship goes without saying; but it is also wise, warm and populated by a truly amazing cast of characters. At a time when books on money are two-a-penny, Brown's book sets the gold standard.

Michael Holroyd



Rose Tremain, Merivel: A Man of His Time

The most powerful novel I have read this year is Jérôme Ferrari's Where I Left My Soul, translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan (Maclehose Press). It is a devastating story that shows how the victims of torture often become torturers themselves. The most enjoyable novel was Rose Tremain's Merivel: A Man of His Time (Chatto & Windus), which is a wonderfully entertaining sequel to her Restoration. Among biographies, I particularly admired the subtlety and skill of Maggie Fergusson's Michael Morpurgo: War Child to War Horse (Fourth Estate). This is a story full of family problems which she confronts with insight and sensitivity.

It's been a whirlwind year for me so finding time to read has been difficult. However, I managed to consume Shadow of Night (Headline), Deborah Harkness's follow up to A Discovery of Witches, and what a rich, thrilling and educational tale it is. I graduated in history, so I appreciate the depth and detail Harkness brings to her work. Of course she's a professor in the subject, and knows whereof she speaks. The second in her All Souls trilogy, Shadow of Night finds Diana Bishop, an American academic and spellbound witch, transported to Elizabethan England on the trail of an ancient, missing alchemical manuscript and hoping to glean lessons in witchcraft at a time when such practices could be considered, at best, risky. She is accompanied by Matthew Roydon, a vampire with a well-hidden agenda, and acolyte of the mysterious School of Night. From 16th-century London to Sept-Tours in France and on to the seat of the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague, we journey with Diana and Matthew in search of the document. It's a captivating and romantic ripping yarn.

Hari Kunzru



A History of Bombing Photograph: Granta

I have a notebook where I write down everything I read and watch, the art I see, and so on. Looking through it I see I read very few newly released books this year. One revelation in fiction was Nanni Balestrini's The Unseen (translated by Liz Heron, Verso) an extraordinary novel about the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s. He's hugely famous in Italy, but frustratingly very little has been translated. I was also powerfully affected by Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing (translated by Linda Haverty Rugg, Granta) which feels, as we move into the era of drone warfare, compelling and morally urgent.

In fiction published this year, Denis Johnson's Train Dreams (Granta) was the best thing I read. Despite its brevity, it manages both to look closely and widely, tracking the history of a labourer who loses his family while at the same time chronicling in miniature the history of the American west. It's compulsive and, finally, unspeakably eerie.

The best non-fiction was John Jeremiah Sullivan's collection of essays: Pulphead: Notes from the Other Side of America (Vintage). Whether he's writing about the southern literary tradition or smoking pot in Disneyland, the man is astute, funny and wonderful company.

The big book of the year in poetry for me was Louise Glück's Poems 1962-2012 (out in the UK in February). She relies almost exclusively on lineation and tone for her effects, and writes spare, pointed lyrics of remarkable power. And Chris Ware's Building Stories (Jonathan Cape) was masterful, beautifully constructed, beautifully drawn tales of domestic boredom, agony and bliss.

John Lanchester

Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

Peter Campbell was a friend and colleague for a quarter of a century, so there was never much doubt that the book which meant most to me this year would be Artwork (Profile), a selection of his LRB covers and other paintings. There's a calm and melancholy and emotional intelligence in his work, which has all the more impact for being gathered together. I sometimes find collections of a single artist's work a little claustrophobic, but that isn't the case with Peter; that must be related to the spaciousness of his mind, his openness, which he could convey extraordinarily well in painting as well as in his writing. There's also the fact, which seems to be more highly valued by laymen than by the pros, that his pictures are very pleasing to look at.

Book production was an interest, and a skill, of Peter's, and I think he would have been very impressed by Wine Grapes: A Complete Guide to 1,368 Vine Varieties, Including Their Origins and Flavours by Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding and José Vouillamoz (Allen Lane). This thousand-plus-page monument combines 21st-century science with the ambition, scale and authority of 19th-century scholarship. It may be the nerdiest wine book ever published (and, trust me, that's a competitive title) but it's also a work of astounding scholarship, and as a piece of book-making, is an outright masterpiece.

Another sorely missed friend, Ian Hamilton, makes a startling appearance in Ian McEwan's highly entertaining Sweet Tooth (Jonathan Cape), as forceful and as cool in the book as he was in real life, and in the same Soho pub, too.

Other new works of fiction I enjoyed this year were Zadie Smith's sweeping NW (Hamish Hamilton) and Colm Tóibín's powerful The Testament of Mary (Viking).

Mark Lawson

In a year when the past and present affairs of broadcasting dominated headlines for months, figures from the medium provided three splendidly entertaining books. Ban This Filth!: Letters from the Mary Whitehouse Archive (Faber), edited by Ben Thompson, finds the morality campaigner comically wrong on many matters but impressively prescient about pornography and paedophile TV personalities.

A front-of-camera superstar, Clare Balding, offers stonking royal and showbiz anecdotes in the sharply charming memoir My Animals and Other Family (Viking), while a behind-camera legend, Phil Redmond, gives a masterclass in media studies in Mid-Term Report: From Grange Hill to Hollyoaks via Brookside (Century).

James Fenton's Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968-2011 (Faber) finds a senior poet displaying retrospective and contemporary power; while a junior one, Julia Copus, demonstrates both technical virtuosity and autobiographical courage in The World's Two Smallest Humans (Faber).

Translated into English three decades late, Silent House (Faber) confirms Orhan Pamuk as one of the greatest and most prophetic of political novelists, and a timely reprint of Gore Vidal's Collected Essays (Abacus) is some consolation for the loss this summer of a dazzling writer and talker.

Jonathan Lethem

Magnificence

I'm just finishing up Magnificence (WW Norton & Co), Lydia Millet's third and concluding book in her unnamed trilogy (with How the Dead Dream and Ghost Lights). The books manage to function as three elegant, darkly comic, slim novels with overtones variously of Muriel Spark, Edward Gorey and JG Ballard, full of contemporary wit and devilish fateful turns for her characters, and then also to knit together into a tapestry of vast implication and ethical urgency, something as large as any writer could attempt: a kind of allegorical elegy for life on a dying planet. Ours, that is.

Yiyun Li



Seven years ago, I had the good fortune to watch a young woman, Amy Leach, defend a collection of essays about nature in front of a committee. From what angle do you approach the world in your writing, one scholar asked: are you an environmentalist, are you a Christian writer, what right do you have to represent sea cucumbers and peas and ostriches and constellations, and – oh, how one has to face this most profound and profoundly absurd question as a writer – what are you? Marilynne Robinson, who sat on the committee too, joined the conversation with a polite yet firm rebuttal to the scholar's question, quoting aptly John Donne: "All things that are, are equally removed from being nothing."

What a joy now to be able to bring together both Marilynne Robinson's essay collection When I Was a Child I Read Books (Virago) and Amy Leach's collection Things that Are (published in the US by Milkweed Editions this year and out in the UK next June) as two of my favourite books of the year. The clear-sightedness and articulacy of the two writers; their fearlessness in tackling the questions and issues of our time and other times, our species and other species; their ardent curiosities; their connection to Emerson, Emily Dickinson, to name two of their intellectual forebears – all these remind us how books written not from timidity or narrowness make us feel more alive than we would allow ourselves to imagine. But above all, it is satisfying (and I'm grateful, too, as one of her pupils) to know that Robinson has created a space under which the next generation of writers can continue the exploration.

Robert Macfarlane

Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

Artemis Cooper's biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor (John Murray) is an outstanding account of an extraordinary life; tender and evocative, without ever hardening into hagiography.

Hunger Mountain (Shambhala Press) by David Hinton – whose translations of classical Chinese wilderness poetry I have been reading since I was a student – is a very different kind of book about walking: a meditative series of foot-journeys through upstate Vermont and the intellectual landscapes of Chinese philosophy.

Lastly, Ted Benton's entomological opus Grasshoppers & Crickets (Collins New Naturalists) led me into the weird world of British orthoptera, with their edible nuptial gifts, "mate-guarding", harems and extraordinarily complex songs. No field or meadow will seem or sound the same again.

Hilary Mantel

Widely praised but in no way over-praised, The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (Sceptre) is a novel by a young ex-soldier who served in Iraq, and is remarkable for its intensity of both feeling and expression. In this book about death, every line is a defiant assertion of the power of beauty to revivify, whether beauty shows itself in nature or (later) in art. Graves, Owen and Sassoon would have recognised this war and the strange poetry it has bred.

There is contested territory also in Naomi Alderman's The Liars' Gospel (Viking), a visceral retelling of the events surrounding the life of Jesus. Her would-be messiah is a puzzling drifter marginal to his own story; the ferocity of Barabbas and Judas seizes the narrative and occupies its centre ground.

Pankaj Mishra



Anyone interested in modern Indian literature – its history and prospects, how it has been made and frequently unmade – cannot afford to overlook Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's Partial Recall, a representative collection of essays from one of India's best poets and critics. Ananya Vajpeyi's Righteous Republic: The Political Foundation of Modern India (Harvard) radically advances our understanding of political traditions in a major non-western country. Revisiting an apparently pivotal event in the history of modern imperialism, Partha Chatterjee's The Black Hole of Empire (Princeton) grippingly uncovers a larger history of power and statecraft.

I found Paul Elie's Reinventing Bach (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) to be a stimulating and enjoyable account of how and what we hear when we listen to this great composer. An excellent new translation by Michael Kimmage of Wolfgang Koeppen's Journey Through America (Berghahn Books) alerted me to this wonderful German novelist.

Set in present-day London, Genie and Paul (Myriad Editions), a superb first novel by Natasha Soobramanien, contemporarises with brilliant effect the 18th-century French classic Paul et Virginie. I was also entranced by Marina Warner's encyclopedic and pathbreaking study, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (Vintage).

Blake Morrison



Behind the Beautiful Forevers Photograph: Portobello

As a western journalist writing about a Mumbai slum, Katherine Boo had many barriers to overcome. But Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a triumph. She doesn't preach, she's not voyeuristic and rather than intrude on the action she saves the story of her own involvement for the afterword.

Most fiction pales in comparison – not Richard Ford's Canada, though. Despite the material (a bank robbery and two murders), it's the least sensational of novels, gently paced and even in tone. "Through all these memorable events, normal life was what I was seeking to preserve for myself," the narrator says, and the co-existence of ordinariness and evil is part of the point.

Christopher Reid's collection Nonsense is memorable both for a bravura 60-page narrative describing the journey of an academic widower and for the definitive poem about espresso coffee ("little cup of melancholy, / inch-deep well of the blackest / concentrate of brown").

Andrew Motion



Two of the Mighty Dead have been brought back to life in exemplary fashion: Shakespeare in Lois Potter's The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (John Wiley), which very cleverly uses expert theatre-knowledge as a way of making her enigmatic subject seem plausibly substantial; and Keats in Nicholas Roe's John Keats: A New Life (Yale), which puts the poet properly in his place. And Barry Cunliffe's beautiful and enthralling Britain Begins (Oxford) puts us all in our place.

David Nicholls



Zadie Smith, NW

This was the year I reset my alarm in an attempt to read more, and I'm delighted that I did. I loved Laurent Binet's smart, original HHhH (Harvill Secker) and, despite never having watched more than 30 seconds of baseball, thoroughly enjoyed Chad Harbach's funny, moving The Art of Fielding (Fourth Estate). Zadie Smith's NW was a fine London novel, Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways sent me out on many long walks, and I was both amused and appalled by the anti-hero of Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (Granta). I finally got round to Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dodd's A Monster Calls (Walker) and found it quite devastating, and also discovered the under-rated US novelist John Williams. Stoner (NYRB Classics) is a sort of mid-west Jude the Obscure, and Butcher's Crossing is like a western by Joseph Conrad; both wonderful books, beautifully written.

Lawrence Norfolk



Two dystopian thrillers to begin with. The Uninvited by Liz Jensen (Bloomsbury Circus) reworks John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos into a dark parable of psychotic children and their hapless parents, while Peter Heller's The Dog Stars (Headline) might be described as an airborne version of The Road crossed with a post-apocalyptic romance. Both engage deep emotions to spine-chilling (and suspenseful) effect.

The strangest and most strangely beguiling book I read last year was Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman (Pushkin Press), in which a young literary translator arrives in a 19th-century German town and finds himself unable to leave. It is an alluring parable about how otherness at once kindles and defeats desire.

Finally, another encounter with otherness: Bunting's Persia is reissued this year by Flood Editions and collects translations made by Basil Bunting of medieval Persian poetry. These lines were translated from original verses by Manuchehri, who wrote more than 1,000 years ago.

Much do I wonder at one whom sleep bears away

where there is yet a bottle of wine in the house

and yet more wonder at him who drinks without music …

Edna O'Brien



The Yellow Birds Photograph: Sceptre

In the great tradition of Hemingway and Tim O'Brien, Kevin Powers's exquisitely written The Yellow Birds draws us in to the combat zones of Iraq: the watch, the wait ("Stay alive, Stay alert"), the bungle, the slaughter and the irreparable aftermath. It should be essential Christmas reading for Tony Blair, George W Bush and their cohorts.

In sumptuous language, Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis (Faber) depicts the hallucinogenic sensibilities of those trapped in the opium rooms of Mumbai and by extension, the city itself, with its assortment of broken and stranded people, doomed to live in the shadows.

Sharon Olds's taut and beautiful poems in Stag's Leap (Jonathan Cape), explore the civil war of love and hate in the marital heart. As its title suggests, Sam Riviere's book of poems 81 Austerities (Faber) has a wry, sardonic touch, with, however, an underlying power that signals a gifted new voice.

Jeremy Paxman

This was a wonderful year for non-fiction. The Secret Rooms by Catherine Bailey (Viking) is a compelling story of a family secret. It's been five years since her last piece of work, Black Diamonds (Viking), and I now see why, for this is a remarkable piece of research which throws a bright shaft of light on powerful people, hypocrisy and the first world war.

And the funniest book of the year for me was Dear Lupin: Letters to a Wayward Son (Constable & Robinson), a collection of brilliantly written letters from a world-weary father (Roger Mortimer) to his feckless son, Charlie. They could offer a money back guarantee if you don't laugh – the publishers' money would be safe.

Annie Proulx



David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

The Passage of Power is the fourth volume of Robert A Caro's huge and intimate study of Lyndon B Johnson, the deeply flawed president who pushed through a civil rights law and became mired in the Vietnam war. A major work of history and biography.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (Bodley Head) by David Quammen is a cliffhanger account of dangerous zoonotic viruses spilling over from animals to humans, and the researchers who study these pathogens.

America's Other Audubon (Princeton Architectural Press) by Joy M Kiser is the story and reproduction of a rare 19th-century book, Genevieve Jones's Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, today considered a masterpiece. It is a soulless reader who will not be moved by the artist's tragic story.

Philip Pullman



The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane contains one of the creepiest ghost stories I've ever read. Quite apart from that, it's a beautifully written, moving, thrilling account of a number of walks Macfarlane took along ancient tracks and pathways in Britain and further afield, shod and barefoot, alone or with a companion. It reminded me of the astonishing variety of things you can see when you go at walking speed, and of how strange and rich the world is.

Philip Hensher's The Missing Ink (Macmillan) is barmy, delightful and spot-on. He laments the decline of handwriting, not in a precious way, not because he wishes everyone were a quill-wielding aesthete, but because it's a human activity that could be forgotten, or ignored, or done badly, or done well, and why not do it well? He also celebrates the great Marion Richardson, whose handwriting patterns used to delight me when I was eight or nine. I'm with him all the way.

Ian Rankin

Keith Ridgway, Hawthorn & Child

The novel that has impressed, mesmerised and bamboozled me most this past year is Hawthorn and Child by Keith Ridgway (Granta). It begins as a police procedural, then spins outwards, never quite coming back to explain the mystery. Along the way we learn that a secret cabal of wild animals may underpin life in contemporary London, we hang out at art exhibitions, visit an orgy at a gay sauna, and wallow in gorgeous (if unsettling) writing. A novel or a series of loosely connected short stories? I don't really care. Whatever it is, it's great.

Lionel Shriver



Two novels stand out for me in 2012: TC Boyle's San Miguel (Bloomsbury), an involving historical read and yet another illustration of this author's astonishing range. There seems to be no subject or genre that Boyle won't tackle with brio. I'd also recommend Lawrence Osborne's The Forgiven (Hogarth), a haunting story of expats in Morocco that has really stayed with me. In retrospect, I wonder if the clash between the locals and the western interlopers in this novel arises not because they don't understand each other, but because they do.

In non-fiction, Edward Luce's Time to Start Thinking: America and the Spectre of Decline (Little, Brown) changed my vision of the American future, and not for the better. If Luce is right, there's bound to be a knock-on effect in the UK, so Britons have no reason to read about the increasingly dire situation across the pond with any glee.

Helen Simpson



Alice Munro, Dear Life

Some artists – Titian and Verdi, for example – wax stronger with age, and Alice Munro, now in her 80s, is one of their number. The 10 stories and four quasi- autobiographical pieces in her new collection Dear Life (Chatto & Windus) are as deep and surprising and unsparing as any that she has written. In "Dolly", a passionate love triangle, the protagonists are in their 70s and 80s – "'We can't afford rows,' he said. No indeed. I had forgotten how old we were, forgotten everything. Thinking there was all the time in the world to suffer and complain."

Ahdaf Soueif



Two novels available only in Arabic. First, The Confessions by Rabee Jaber. Jaber won the 2012 International Prize for Arab Fiction for The Druzes of Belgrade, but I was totally gripped by this early, slight novel, possibly the most humane and understated take that I've read on the Lebanese civil war. And When the Queen Falls Asleep by Huzama Habayeb: a brilliant novel of the Palestinian diaspora. Funny and gritty, and bursting with life and humour.

A Card from Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp (Bloomsbury) is a small masterpiece; in close-up, a warm and intimate portrait achieved with the most minimal, impressionistic strokes, in wide-angle what its author calls "a zigzag path through the 80s". With lots of those original and revelatory turns of phrase prized by readers of Clapp's Observer theatre reviews.

Richard Parkinson is assistant keeper of the pharaonic collection at the BM and his approach to his subject is empathetic and imaginative. In Eloquent Peasant, he sees the continuity of life in Egypt, uses modern photographs to make points about the ancient text and brings the poem to life and relevance through a full and accessible commentary.

Diarist, nature-lover and lawyer, the Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh allows more of his anger to blaze through in the pages of Occupation Diaries (Profile) than he did in his award-winning Palestinian Walks. Shehadeh is always honest, elegant and a heart-wrenching pleasure to read.

Kate Summerscale



Sarah Wise, Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England

Elizabeth Jenkins's Harriet (Persephone) is a fictional account of a true crime, "the Penge Mystery" of 1877, in which a slow-witted young woman was apparently starved to death by her husband and his family. First published in 1934 and reissued this year, Jenkins's novel is a superb, gripping portrait of moral corruption. For more Victorian horror, I recommend Sarah Wise's Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England (Bodley Head). Wise is a terrific researcher and storyteller. Here she has woven a series of case studies into a fascinating history of insanity in the 19th century.

Colm Tóibín



The emotional power of Richard Ford's Canada arises from a sense of grief and loss embedded in the writing, and the imaginative sweep of the book, which enters the spirit of a sensitive, vulnerable and intelligent teenage boy and by implication enters the spirit of America itself.

Paul Durcan's Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being (Harvill Secker) is a book filled with contemporary life, but the poems also have a way of evoking enduring human values, in all their odd tones and surprising textures, as much as the contemporary moment.

Michael Gorra's Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (WW Norton & Co) is literary criticism at its most lucid and engaging, as it shows James embarking on his great work and displays Gorra, filled with enthusiasm and insight, as the book's most ideal and intelligent reader.

Claire Tomalin



Simon Armitage, Walking Home

Two witty books by poets have been companions to me this year. Simon Armitage's Walking Home (Faber), an account in prose of how he took on the Pennine Way, held my interest to the end, partly because I was so pleased it wasn't me stumbling up, down and over the terrible terrain, assailed by stinging rain and blinding fog, and having to read poems to those who cared to come and listen in the evening – and also because Armitage makes a really good read out of his comfortless adventure. Christopher Reid's new volume, Nonsense, is as good as his A Scattering and as funny as The Song of Lunch. There is now no English poet whose work I look forward to as much as Reid's: he has a voice purely his own, and a mastery of prosody. Whether he is making you laugh or smile or shudder, what he writes is the real thing.

Sue Townsend



Have you ever seen Mr Magoo standing on the end of a girder, arms outstretched over the void? Well, I'm Mrs Magoo. I've not been able to read a book without a magnifier since I turned into her 10 years ago. But I didn't stop buying books – hardbacks for preference. I like the weight and the heft of Canada by Richard Ford. It is written with a quiet, hypnotic brilliance that almost had me weeping with envy. I particularly like the opening lines, which take you by the throat and drag you through the narrative: "First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later." At its heart are the Parsons, a dysfunctional 1950s American family. Thank God for dysfunctional families. They are to fiction what donkeys are to haulage.

Rose Tremain



Richard Davenport-Hines, Titanic Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew

In a year that marked the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, Richard Davenport-Hines's Titanic Lives (HarperPress) was by far the most gripping book on the subject. From his eerily powerful first lines about the iceberg – "There were no witnesses. It didn't look like a moment from history" – he manages to maintain an extraordinary forward momentum, yet at the same time rescue from the deep the biographies of hundreds of people. It was also the first account of the disaster to make me see that the people in the lifeboats were terrified, not only because of the terrible spectre of the sinking ship and the screams of the dying, but also because they didn't know whether they, too, would yet perish. We know that the Carpathia is going to rescue them; they didn't. Davenport-Hines's sense of what to reveal when is perfectly tuned.

A footnote on Tom Wolfe's Back to Blood (Cape), reeling from a Brit-crit smacking: I want to tell readers that there is more dynamism, risk-taking and crazed energy in Wolfe's writing than in all the Brit novels I've read this year.

Jeanette Winterson



Marina Warner's Stranger Magic is as absorbing, wise and playful as the Arabian Nights tales themselves. A book about the triumph of imagination over experience. Don Paterson: Selected Poems (Faber). Been reading him for 20 years. Never disappointed. His poetry is a love affair with life – wide glorious chaotic life. Poetry that "sheds veil after veil". AM Homes: May We Be Forgiven (Granta). Forget the boys talking to each other. This is the great American novel for our time. Adam Phillips: Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (Hamish Hamilton). Freud and Shakespeare brought together for an extended rumination on happiness and hatred. Othello would rather murder the world than change.

Slavoj Žižek



In Praise of Love

What I read with greatest pleasure in 2012 were the two short books by Robert Pippin, the first among American Hegelian philosophers: Hollywood Westerns and American Myth (Yale University Press) and Fatalism in American Film Noir (University of Virginia Press). Surprisingly for the author of more than a dozen studies of Hegel's logic and phenomenology, the books are about US popular culture: the first deals with the problem of passage from the violence of the Wild West to the modern rule of law in classic westerns (The Searchers, Red River), while the second, dedicated to the problem of subjective agency and fate in film noir, culminates in a perspicuous reading of Tourneur's classic Out of the Past. A Hegelian analysis of western and noir – can one imagine a better combination of philosophy and pleasure? Not to mention the fact that Pippin's political conclusions are unexpectedly radical: the western book clearly demonstrates how the move to the rule of law has to rely on illegitimate violence.

In a more romantic mood, I hope that Alain Badiou's In Praise of Love (Serpent's Tail), a bestseller in France, will repeat this success in English. The book is exactly what its title indicates: a celebration of passionate sexual love against superficial hedonism. The true transgression today is no longer sex, but a dedicated commitment to love.

And I was glad that Jo Nesbø's The Bat (Harvill Secker), the first in the series of Harry Hole thrillers, is finally available in English. Henning Mankell, whose latest novels seem to be losing their creative edge, has found a worthy successor in Nesbø's dark police procedurals taking place in a depressive Ingmar Bergman landscape. His later novels, with The Snowman arguably the best among them, bear witness to how there can be more art in a good detective novel than in pretentious "serious" novels.

• Compiled by Ginny Hooker.

• This article was amended on 29 November 2012, inserting Pankaj Mishra's name above his selection of titles.

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