Jessie Burton

Behold the Dreamers; The Good Immigrantm

My favourite novel was Imbolo Mbue’s bittersweet yet buoyant Behold the Dreamers (Random House), told through the eyes of a Cameroonian couple newly arrived in New York, as their fates tangle with those of their white Upper East Side employers. My best nonfiction read was The Good Immigrant (Unbound), a superlative set of essays by black, Asian and ethnic minority writers. I’d love to read Siri Hustvedt’s new collection, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women (Sceptre). Art, sex and neuroscience: sounds fab.

Rose Tremain

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible; All the Light We Cannot See

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (Faber) is an eye-popping accumulation of true stories of bribery and extortion from Putin’s Russia, a must read in today’s barbaric world. Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See (4th Estate) outran all else as my novel of the year. Set in France and Germany during the second world war, this is an epic work about bravery and the power of attachment. I want Doerr’s other books for Christmas please.

David Nicholls

Reunion; School of Velocity; All That Man Is; My Name Is Lucy Barton; The Lonely City

Two touching novellas about teenage friendship, Fred Uhlman’s reissued Reunion (Vintage) and Eric Beck Rubin’s first novel, School of Velocity (Pushkin Press), both made an impression, as did David Szalay’s brilliant stories in All That Man Is (Vintage). Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton (Viking) was a worthy follow-up to Olive Kitteridge and I also loved Olivia Laing’s mix of memoir and criticism, The Lonely City (Canongate). As to the Christmas list, it was going to include Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (Hamish Hamilton), but too late – I’m already some way through.

Maggie O’Farrell

Frantumaglia; Love Like Salt; My Name Is Lucy Barton

Frantumaglia (Europa Editions) is an absorbing, tantalising journey into the private world of Elena Ferrante. I was halfway through it when the unconscionable, unforgivable exposure of her identity occurred (and may that man, Claudio Gatti, never know peace again). Helen Stevenson’s frank and moving Love Like Salt (Virago) explores the vulnerabilities and strengths that have arisen from parenting a child with cystic fibrosis. I also loved Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton (Viking): she gets better with each book. I am hoping that someone will give me an advance copy of Karl Geary’s debut novel, Montpelier Parade (Harvill Secker), out in January, as I’ve heard it’s lyrical, brave and inventive – everything I look for in a novel.

Sebastian Barry

All We Shall Know; Lying in Wait

Donal Ryan, the king of the new wave of Irish writers, turned in a democratic work of genius this year, All We Shall Know (Doubleday). I was entranced by it. Buckled by it. Ditto the new queen of Irish crime, Liz Nugent, who terrified me with her immaculate thumbscrew of a novel, Lying in Wait (Penguin). Santa, please bring me Ali Smith’s perennially seasonal Autumn (Hamish Hamilton). She is, of course, Scotland’s Nobel laureate-in-waiting – and I can’t wait for her new book.

Jackie Kay

Autumn; Another Day in the Death of America; Say Something Back; Love of Country

Who do we turn to to tell the story of our time? Ali Smith’s Autumn (Hamish Hamilton) is bold and brilliant, dealing with the body blow of Brexit to offer us something rare: hope. Gary Younge’s Another Day in the Death of America (Guardian Faber) is a heartbreaking, shattering and searing indictment of the effects of the lack of gun control on the lives of 10 young people in a single day. Denise Riley’s Say Something Back (Picador) shows how grief keeps a different clock and is a churning yet exhilarating (because the poems are so good) exploration of loss. Her poetry gets to the heart. Madeleine Bunting, in Love of Country (Granta), explores the choppy history of the Hebrides and makes you feel you are there even if you have just left. I’d love a copy of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (Oneworld).

Taiye Selasi

Swing Time; Multiple Choice; Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun

I absolutely adored Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (Hamish Hamilton). Fairly perfect as far as literary novels go. Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice (Granta) is, to my mind, the best of what experimental fiction can be. And Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun (Cassava Republic Press) introduced me to one of my favourite literary characters ever. Dr Morayo Da Silva is a new best friend.

Charlotte Mendelson

Penguin Modern Poets: If I’m Scared We Can’t Win; Odes

This year, I rediscovered poetry. Yes, I know. It all went wrong with the first new Penguin Modern Poets: If I’m Scared We Can’t Win (Penguin); soon, it was Emily Berry for breakfast and Anne Carson on the bus. Then came Sharon Olds’s Odes (Vintage), whose paeans to testicles, pudenda and merkins are interspersed with acts of breathtaking linguistic daring. Buy one for Granny; that will pep up Christmas morning. I would passionately like to receive a book token: hours of rumination; perfect happiness. Failing that, a supermarket sweep with a real trolley. Or Pushkin Press’s new translation of Gaito Gazdanov’s The Flight: his writing has been described as “if Nabokov wrote thrillers”. I’m hooked.

Rachel Joyce

You Will Not Have My Hate; Girl Up; Mothering Sunday; This Must Be the Place

In bewildering times, reading is solace. You Will Not Have My Hate (Harvill Secker) is a blazingly beautiful memoir written by French journalist Antoine Leiris after his wife was killed in the Bataclan terrorist attack. A glimmer of hope in the dark. Having heard Laura Bates speak this year, I have bought Girl Up (Simon & Schuster) for every teenage girl (and boy) I know; savvy, no-nonsense practical feminism. I loved the spare beauty of Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday (Scribner), along with the dazzling This Must Be the Place (Headline) by Maggie O’Farrell. And for Christmas? I am hoping for Echoland (Harvill Secker), the new novel from the extraordinary Per Petterson.

Paula Hawkins

The Book of Memory; The Natural Way of Things

In The Book of Memory (Faber), the sole woman on death row in a Zimbabwean prison reflects on family, guilt and redemption. Petina Gappah’s first novel is a witty and tender account of a life in a country undergoing momentous change. The Natural Way of Things (Atlantic), Charlotte Wood’s shocking feminist dystopia, sees 10 women, all of whom have been involved in sex scandals with powerful men, held in a remote prison in Australia. Beautiful and savage – think Atwood in the outback. The book I’d like to receive for Christmas: Ali Smith’s Autumn (Hamish Hamilton). I’d like to read it while the tumultuous events of this summer are still fresh in the mind.

Maggie Gee

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?; The Many Selves of Katherine North; The Schooldays of Jesus

For Christmas brain food I recommend two brilliant explorations of animal minds, Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Granta) and Emma Geen’s dizzyingly original debut novel, The Many Selves of Katherine North (Bloomsbury). Reading JM Coetzee can be grim but is never pointless. The Schooldays of Jesus (Harvill) turns around one of those rare, gifted children who even their parents cannot understand. There’s a horrible shock in the middle, but it will keep you philosophically and morally on the edge of your seat throughout. Please give me the Private Eye Annual 2016 to cheer me up.

Kirsty Wark

His Bloody Project; Cartes Postales from Greece

His Bloody Project (Contraband) by Graeme Macrae Burnet, which was shortlisted for the Booker, grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let you go. This multilayered novel about a 19th-century murder near Applecross is as heartbreaking as it is desperate and it tickles me that people all over the world will now have a lexicon of old Scots words to spice up their vocabulary. If His Bloody Project is dark, then Victoria Hislop’s Cartes Postales From Greece (Headline) is right up there with it, despite its sunny title. This is a treasure trove of wonderful fictional stories that took me deep into the country. For Christmas, I will give my daughter Alexandra Shulman’s Inside Vogue: A Diary of My 100th Year (Fig Tree) on the strict understanding that I get a copy of my own right back. That’s Boxing Day sorted out.

Salley Vickers

The Little Red Chairs; Madonna in a Fur Coat; My Name Is Leon; The Ring of Truth; Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts

My novel of the year is unquestionably Edna O’Brien’s brilliantly acute The Little Red Chairs (Faber), inexplicably absent from the Man Booker list. Also, Madonna in a Fur Coat (Penguin) by Sabahattin Ali, a seemingly slight love story, written in the 1940s but only translated from the original Turkish into English this year. It’s short but has the kind of indefinably powerful impact of The Great Gatsby; and Kit de Waal’s searing debut about an estranged nine-year-old boy, My Name Is Leon (Viking). Two heart-breakers. In nonfiction, the erudite and extraordinary Roger Scruton has written a terrific book on Wagner, The Ring of Truth (Allen Lane) and Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts (Allen Lane) by Christopher de Hamel must be the most exquisitely produced book of the year. Scrupulously scholarly yet utterly absorbing, as well as beguilingly lovely to behold. I am hoping some kind person will give me Beethoven for a Later Age (Faber) by Edward Dusinberre, the first violinist of the brilliant Takács Quartet, who promises to take me through Beethoven’s 16 string quartets, in the hope that it will help me to finally choose which I shall have at my funeral.

Penelope Lively

Exposure; Golden Hill

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I was enthralled by Helen Dunmore’s Exposure (Windmill) – such a skilful recreation of a time and a climate of mind and a real page-turner. Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill (Faber) is nothing short of a masterpiece; 18th-century New York came alive for me and I say this as someone who doesn’t usually care for historical novels. The book I would most like to be given at the moment is Gillian Beer’s forthcoming Alice in Space (University of Chicago Press).

Julian Baggini

At the Existentialist Café; The Dream of Enlightenment

Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café (Vintage) places 20th-century European philosophy in the context of the lives of its protagonists and Bakewell herself, making both the content and the relevance of its often difficult ideas remarkably clear. Anthony Gottlieb’s lucid The Dream of Enlightenment (Allen Lane) also locates the thinkers in their time, which enables us to see their importance for us now more clearly. Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air (Vintage) tops my longlist of books I’d like for Christmas.

Katie Roiphe

Shelter in Place; The Underground Railroad

In these Trumpian times, two powerful and depressing books that have haunted me this year are Alexander Maksik’s Shelter in Place (Europa Editions), a strange, dark and beautiful novel about violence, mental illness and love, and Colson Whitehead’s fantastic novel about slavery, The Underground Railroad (Fleet). The book I am most hoping to get for the holidays and read under palm trees is Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Transit (Vintage), since I loved Outline and have been waiting for it for ever.

Mark Haddon

The Sellout; The Arab of the Future

I’ve already sung the praises of Emma Cline’s The Girls (Chatto & Windus) and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene (Vintage) so I’ll recommend Paul Beatty’s Booker-winning The Sellout (Oneworld), a hilarious, anger-fuelled cadenza that feels as if it were written in one manic burst. If you’re pressed for time, I suggest Riad Sattouf’s two-volume graphic novel The Arab of the Future (runner-up: The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg (Vintage)). For Christmas? A new Chaucer, please. My 1977 FN Robinson paperback (The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer) has finally disintegrated.

Mariella Frostrup

The Confines of the Shadow; Waking Lions; Reputations

Away from my weekly book diet for Open Book, I’ve been looking beyond our borders and found myself deeply engrossed by André Naffs-Sahely’s translation of Alessandro Spina’s thinly disguised memoir The Confines of the Shadow (Darf), charting the transformation of Benghazi from sleepy Libyan backwater to the major metropolis in an oil-rich kingdom that it became by the 1960s. Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s Waking Lions (Pushkin Press) was another window to a secret world, set among the North African migrant population in contemporary Israel and beautifully translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston. Reputations by the renowned Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez was another gripping morality tale that was much bigger in scope than its slim volume might suggest. I’m currently summoning the courage to read a much-praised memoir of loss, Shannon Leone Fowler’s Travelling With Ghosts (Simon & Schuster), which is published in February 2017 and looks set to provide refuge from family mayhem during the Christmas holidays.

Tom Holland

The Essex Serpent; Following On; The Making of the British Landscape

The two books I most enjoyed were Sarah Perry’s eerie historical thriller, The Essex Serpent (Profile), and Emma John’s funny and touching memoir of supporting the England cricket team in the 90s, Following On (Wisden). The book I most admired was Nicholas Crane’s The Making of the British Landscape (Weidenfeld & Nicolson): as panoramic as it is revelatory, it does what it says on the tin. As for the book I’d like for Christmas: an advance copy of Andrea Carandini’s comprehensive two-volume survey, The Atlas of Ancient Rome (Princeton University Press), would be good.

Rupert Thomson

The Return; What Belongs to You; The Visiting Privilege

In The Return (Viking), Hisham Matar undertakes a quest for his father, imprisoned by Gaddafi. The intelligence and grace of Matar’s writing is fuelled by a fierce and valid rage. What Belongs to You (Picador) charts the relationship between a young English teacher and a Bulgarian hustler. It’s the specificity of Garth Greenwell’s observations that give this debut novel its emotional power. Joy Williams is a stone-cold 100% American original and The Visiting Privilege (Profile), her collected short stories, is a treasure trove of high-octane prose and surreal wit. For Christmas? Marina Abramović’s Walk Through Walls (Penguin).

Jenni Murray

The Essex Serpent; Girls & Sex

The book I loved this year was The Essex Serpent (Profile) by Sarah Perry – a stunning historical novel. As far as nonfiction goes, it’s Peggy Orenstein’s Girls & Sex (Oneworld). It’s a vital work for parents and teachers of teenagers, outlining how little girls know about their own pleasure centres and how they seem to believe they’re only there to please the boys and not themselves. On my want list is Stef Penney’s Under a Pole Star (Quercus). She’s a wonderful storyteller.

Linda Grant

Love By All Sorts of Means; My Name Is Lucy Barton

I met Beryl Bainbridge a few times and her biography, Love By All Sorts of Means (Bloomsbury), by Brendan King completely gripped me. It made me intensely nostalgic for a time when literary life consisted mainly of drinking and fucking. Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton (Viking) was the standout novel of the year – a visceral account of the relations between mother and daughter and the unreliability of memory. I would like to be given Booker prize-winner Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (Oneworld).

Helen Simpson

The Invention of Angela Carter; Rotten Row; Light Box

My book of the year is Edmund Gordon’s thorough and timely biography, The Invention of Angela Carter (Chatto & Windus): fascinating. Two top new short-story collections: Petina Gappah’s Rotten Row (Faber) does for Harare now what Dickens did for Victorian London, with lethal comic relish and rage; KJ Orr’s Light Box (Daunt) contains 11 elegant, thoughtful and quietly powerful stories, which continue to expand in the mind after reading. Under the tree? The Start of Something: The Selected Stories by Stuart Dybek (Vintage), please.

AM Homes

Miss Jane; Hag-Seed; Eileen; Homesick for Another World

Brad Watson’s Miss Jane (Picador); a bittersweet southern pastoral, the story of a forgotten woman written with unearthly beauty. If Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor had a child, it would be Brad Watson. Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (Hogarth) pays homage to the Bard’s Tempest while delivering a passionately original, heady, often musical modern remix. Ottessa Moshfegh’s thrillingly playful Eileen (Vintage) is scary, smart, uncomfortable. Her story collection, Homesick for Another World (Jonathan Cape), comes out in January. And what do I want for Christmas? Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta) by Madeleine Thien.

David Kynaston

The Econocracy; Diary of a Wartime Affair

No new book spoke more to me than The Econocracy (Manchester University Press) by Joe Earle, Cahal Moran and Zach Ward-Perkins. A plea for the economics profession to abandon sterile, model-driven neoclassical dogma and return to the old verities (Hayek as much as Keynes) of pluralism and human agency, it is a remarkable, perhaps game-changing contribution by three young Manchester graduates. Diary of a Wartime Affair (Viking) by Doreen Bates does what it says, essentially a tale of the Blitz and fucking (her 1940s word, not mine), in a startlingly frank and readable way. For Christmas, please, Margaret Drabble’s new novel, The Dark Flood Rises (Canongate): the urgently needed voice of the tough-minded liberal.

Geoff Dyer

The Girls

Emma Cline’s subtle reimagining of the Manson cult, The Girls (Chatto & Windus), was the most hyped debut novel of the year – and it fully lived up to its promise. The story is told by an ordinary middle-aged woman who looks back on her life as a moderately unhappy teenage girl in California. Paddling in the shallows of 60s freak-outery, she finds herself pulled into a crazed and welcoming riptide. This happens with such subtlety – verbal psychological, historical – that the safety of the shore remains simultaneously in view and hopelessly out of reach. For Christmas, surely one of my so-called friends will have the common decency to give me a signed copy of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run (Simon & Schuster).

Marina Warner

Measures of Expatriation; Grow a Pair: 9½ Fairytales About Sex; The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition

Measures of Expatriation by the Trinidadian-British poet Vahni Capildeo (Carcanet) gives a long, searching look at dislocation and plurality and polyvocality and diasporas: it’s a very singular and powerful collection. Joanna Walsh is marvellously mischievous in Grow a Pair: 9½ Fairytales About Sex (Readux Books). And The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition by the medieval Egyptian Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri (Penguin) spills over with insatiable curiosity at its most irrepressible: an elixir for dark days.

Chris Mullin

Redeemable; The History Thieves

It’s been a vintage year for political memoirs, but the most memorable book I have read this year is Redeemable (Bloomsbury) by Erwin James, who served 20 years for his part in two murders and who clawed his way back from a very low place to lead a useful and productive life. I also enjoyed The History Thieves (Granta) by Ian Cobain, an account of Britain’s obsession with official secrecy. For Christmas, I would like John le Carré’s memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel.

James Graham

The Good Immigrant, Reclaiming Conversation

I was deeply affected by The Good Immigrant (Unbound), a vital and often bitingly funny series of personal essays. My favourite is Vinay Patel’s boyhood struggle to embrace any faith and cure his fear of death, something that kept me awake as an angsty kid too. Also, MIT professor Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation (Turnaround), on how communication technology is, ironically, harming our ability to meaningfully connect. At Christmas I’d like to read At the Existentialist Café (Vintage) by Sarah Bakewell.

Alan Johnson

The Knives; Conclave

My two favourite books of 2016 were both thrillers. The Knives (Faber) by Richard T Kelly has a home secretary as the central character. Very few people will be able to testify to its authenticity. I can and I do. A cracking read. Robert Harris is incapable of writing a substandard novel. In the first 100 pages of Conclave (Cornerstone) nothing much happens. Then the pope dies and Harris demonstrates the depth of his research. What follows is all the more gripping for the trouble the author has taken to set the scene. Would someone please buy me Commonwealth (Bloomsbury) by Ann Patchett for Christmas.

Teju Cole

La Calle; Float; House of Lords and Commons

Alex Webb’s shadow-dazed photographs are unmistakable. La Calle (Thames & Hudson) is his love song to the streets of Mexico. Anne Carson’s newest book of poems, Float (Jonathan Cape), is not exactly new, not a single book, mostly not poems. In 23 slender chapbooks, she pinpoints the collision of oracle and anachronism. Ishion Hutchinson’s House of Lords and Commons (Macmillan) was the best new collection of poems I read this year. His imagistic fluency equals his moral imagination. For Christmas, I would like Jameel Jaffer’s The Drone Memos (The New Press), a nice counterweight to the hosannas ushering Obama from office.

Donal Ryan

Days Without End; Lying in Wait; Nothing on Earth

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Some of my favourite books this year were Sebastian Barry’s beautiful, savage, life-affirming masterpiece Days Without End (Faber); Liz Nugent’s chilling, brilliantly clever page-turner Lying in Wait (Penguin) and Conor O’Callaghan’s elegant, haunting Nothing on Earth (Doubleday). I have high hopes of being given a (hopefully signed!) copy of the legendary rugby player Paul O’Connell’s memoir The Battle (Penguin).

Steven Pinker

Progress; Utopia for Realists

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In a year in which the left and right advocate destructive and chaotic policies because they think the world is collapsing, Johan Norberg’s Progress (Oneworld) reminds us that headlines are misleading and that history and data show that life has been getting radically better in every way. In Utopia for Realists, Rutger Bregman says let’s think outside the cube and consider how best to take advantage of the changes that economics and technology are bringing. Not everyone will agree with all four prescriptions, but Bregman gets us thinking in new ways. For Christmas, I would like Eyes Wide Open! 100 Years of Leica by Hans-Michael Koetzle (Kehrer Verlag).

Curtis Sittenfeld

Today Will Be Different; Hungry Heart

I’m currently reading Today Will Be Different (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) by Maria Semple, a novel about an intelligent, disagreeable Seattle mother, and I’m finding it hilarious. I also loved both the humour and poignancy in Jennifer Weiner’s essay collection Hungry Heart (Simon & Schuster). I’d be delighted to receive the literary murder mystery You Will Know Me (Picador) by Megan Abbott as a Christmas gift. It’s set in the world of competitive gymnastics and has received rave reviews. I heard Abbott speak recently and she was terrifically smart and entertaining.

Lionel Shriver

The Nix; The Vegetarian

I got a big kick out of Nathan Hill’s impressive first novel, The Nix (Picador), out in the UK next year. Hill’s zeitgeisty portrayals of video game addiction and customer-oriented university education are brilliant. I also loved the haunting 2016 International Man Booker prizewinner, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (Granta). Meantime, I’d like Santa to mend a gaping hole in my education and stuff Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer (Vintage) in my stocking (thanks for the tip, SC).

Rohan Silva

Slow Burn City; Stalin and the Scientists

I usually spend my time reading novels, but this year I was lucky to be a judge of the Baillie Gifford prize, so my reading was dominated by nonfiction. From that pile, I’d heartily recommend Rowan Moore’s brilliant Slow Burn City (Picador), as well as Simon Ings’s Stalin and the Scientists (Faber). That said, I’m excited about getting back to fiction in 2017 and I’d love to wake up on Christmas morning with Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (Hogarth) nestled in my stocking.

Louise Doughty

The Good Immigrant; Another Day in the Death of America; Today Will Be Different

With political turmoil on both sides of the Atlantic focusing on race and migrancy, two books published this year could not be more timely: the essay collection The Good Immigrant (Unbound), edited by Nikesh Shukla, and Another Day in the Death of America (Guardian Faber) by Gary Younge. After that you might need some light relief, amply found in Maria Semple’s Today Will Be Different (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). For Christmas, I would like two things: Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (Europa Editions) and for the worm who publicised her real identity in newspapers around the world to find his turkey as dry, flavourless and pointless as his “exposé”.

Damian Barr

What Belongs to You; Homegoing

Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You (Picador) manages to condense the physical and metaphysical nature of longing and desire into prose that turned me on and broke my heart. A classic. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (Viking), published in teh UK next January, follows the descendants of slaves and slavers from 17th-century Ghana to the US of Black Lives Matter. Encompassing events major and minor, but skilfully skipping the civil war, it humanises big issues by giving us unforgettable characters. It could not be more relevant or needed. For Christmas, I’d like You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams (Rizzoli) by Alan Cumming.

Bill Bryson

The Invention of Nature; I Contain Multitudes; A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived

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I was one of the judges who selected Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature (John Murray) for this year’s Royal Society Insight Investment science book prize and it remains my book of the year in practically every nonfiction category – science, nature, biography, history. I also very much enjoyed and admired I Contain Multitudes (Vintage) by Ed Yong and A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived (Orion) by Adam Rutherford. The book I most want for Christmas is the satisfyingly hefty The Making of the British Landscape (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) by the ever-reliable Nicholas Crane.

John Gray

Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea; Recalled to Life: A Consumptive’s Diary, 1911

Teffi’s Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea (Pushkin Press, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler) recounts the flight of the author as she fled the Bolshevik revolution in a single pair of silver shoes. Light, witty and elegiac all at once – I found it captivating. Llewelyn Powys’s Recalled to Life: A Consumptive’s Diary, 1911, (the Powys Society, edited by Peter J Foss) records Powys’s return from a Swiss sanatorium to his home in Somerset. Expressing the emerging philosophy of someone who spent his adult life never far from death, it also presents a vivid picture of pre-1914 rural England. Georges Simenon’s The Hand (Penguin, translated by Linda Coverdale) is another of Simenon’s newly translated romans durs, which I’d love to be given for Christmas.

Alex Preston

The Underground Railroad; Golden Hill; Who Killed Piet Barol?

It has been the year of the Backlisted Podcast for me, in which Andy Miller and John Mitchinson invite guests to revive forgotten literary classics. I’ve adored discovering the work of Barbara Comyns, Jill Tweedie, Denton Welch and Nella Larsen, with Miller and Mitchinson the perfect genial, bookish hosts. As far as new novels go, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (Fleet) and Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill (Faber) were my picks of the year and I was glad to see Richard Mason’s exquisite and gripping Who Killed Piet Barol? (Orion) getting such excellent reviews. For Christmas, will someone buy me everything Kathleen Jamie has ever written? I’ve just finished Sightlines (Sort of Books) and I’m in love with her…

Hilary Mantel

The North Water; My Name Is Lucy Barton

In a brilliant year for fiction, I’ve admired the gleefully gruesome excesses of Ian McGuire’s The North Water (Scribner) and the nuanced restraint of Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton (Viking.) For a frivolous Christmas read, I’d choose Sali Hughes’s Pretty Iconic: A Personal Look at the Beauty Products That Changed the World (4th Estate).

Lara Feigel

The Lesser Bohemians; Transit; The Invention of Angela Carter

This has been a particularly enjoyable year for reading, reminding us that brilliance and pleasure can coincide. I loved Eimear McBride’s energetic, sensuous The Lesser Bohemians (Faber), which has opened up new possibilities for writing about sex. I was also dazzled by Rachel Cusk’s Transit (Jonathan Cape), which I found a more generously life-filled novel than its predecessor, Outline. Cusk has perfected the brilliant, dark humour possible with a narrator apparently oblivious to the comedy of the scenes she’s describing. We’re now in the season of long-awaited biographies. I would enthusiastically recommend Edmund Gordon’s subtle, empathetic account of Angela Carter, The Invention of Angela Carter (Chatto & Windus), and am hoping that Christmas will bring a copy of Artemis Cooper’s Elizabeth Jane Howard (John Murray).

SJ Watson

What Belongs to You; The Muse; Flâneuse

This year, I’ve loved Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You (Picador), a novel that finds the poetry and beauty in cruising lavatories for sex. Jessie Burton’s The Muse (Picador) is both elegant and as gripping as a thriller, even better than her first. And Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse (Chatto & Windus) reminded me of the importance of occasionally wandering the city alone and without purpose. I’m always ridiculously happy to find books under the tree and this year I’m hoping for Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City (Canongate).

Helen Dunmore

The Gustav Sonata; Transit

I loved Rose Tremain’s The Gustav Sonata (Vintage), about a lifelong friendship between two boys who first meet in kindergarten in postwar Switzerland. The layers of story are engrossing and beautifully put together. A novel to savour and reread. Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Transit (Jonathan Cape), is one of her best. Her emotional penetration and gift for black comedy are combined into a moving exploration of lives lived in solitude, struggling to connect. The book I’d love for Christmas is Nicholas Crane’s The Making of the British Landscape (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

Joe Dunthorne

Multiple Choice; The Underground Railroad

This year, I was very happy to discover Alejandro Zambra. His new book, Multiple Choice (Granta), brilliantly translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, manages to blend Oulipian poetry, funny-sad short stories and choose-your-own-adventure, thus combining pretty much all my interests in one book. From there, I found his tiny and heartbreaking novella, Bonsai, which is the best thing I’ve read in ages. For Christmas, I’m hoping someone will give me the new Colson Whitehead novel, The Underground Railroad (Fleet). He’s a writer I love who is always changing, always taking risks.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

The Return; Golden Hill

In 1989, Hisham Matar’s father, an anti-Gaddafi dissident, disappeared into a Libyan dungeon. What makes The Return (Viking) outstanding, though, is not its highly charged subject matter but its subtle and ingenious structure, and the patient attentiveness with which Matar observes and listens. A humane and haunting book. Francis Spufford is a writer of brilliantly unconventional nonfiction. Golden Hill (Faber), his first novel, set in 18th-century New York and crowded with malcontents and misfits, is a treat.

Melvyn Bragg, author and broadcaster

Trumpet; The Epic of Gilgamesh

I’ve been reading a great deal of Jackie Kay’s work recently. Trumpet (Macmillan), a novel about a jazz man who is actually a woman, was reissued this year: a rich, taut and compelling novel by a fine writer. A Picador classic. I’d also recommend The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin), translated by Andrew George. In this verse translation, what scholars claim as the first great work in world literature arrived vividly in our century. It is a miracle of reclamation from scattered cuneiform tablets and sends out ripples to the Old Testament, Homer and Beowulf. For Christmas, I would like David Hockney’s A Bigger Book, just £1,750 from Taschen.

Katharine Norbury, author

Climbing Days; The Marches; Ice Diaries

In Climbing Days (Faber), Dan Richards brings a Jerome K Jerome-like levity to the task of recreating the climbs of his mountaineer great aunt. Rory Stewart’s The Marches (Jonathan Cape) is an excellent meditation on the borderlands between England and Scotland, while at the bottom of the world Jean McNeil completes her trio of books on the polar regions with the powerfully atmospheric Ice Diaries (ECW Press). Top of my Christmas list is Karen Lloyd’s much-lauded exploration of Morecambe Bay: The Gathering Tide (Saraband).