Jonathan Franzen

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jonathan Franzen. Photograph: Morgan Rachel Levy/The Guardian

Against all reason and cultural prognostication, people keep writing terrific novels. Three that stood out for me this year were John Wray’s Godsend (published in the UK by Canongate in January), Kate Greathead’s Laura & Emma (Simon & Schuster), and Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea (Doubleday). Godsend ridiculously posits that a teenage girl from Santa Rosa, California, might disguise herself as a boy and attempt to join the Taliban. It’s a book that has no right to work at all, but Wray’s storytelling is so taut, his prose so laser-etched, his psychology so audacious, and his wisdom so much the opposite of conventional, that it ends up working brilliantly. Greathead, too, in Laura & Emma has set herself a mighty challenge: to create sympathy for a disgustingly privileged Wasp family in New York. It’s a tough sell, and she makes it with masterly deftness, funny sentence by funny sentence. By the end, what seems to have been a casually episodic narrative reveals itself to be a moving and intricately braided story of two mothers. From a Low and Quiet Sea is similarly late-detonating. It tells the stories of three utterly disparate characters – a Syrian refugee, a feckless young Irish bus driver and a master of Irish graft – and proceeds to confound those of us who don’t like it when novelists withhold pertinent information. The book has stayed with me. All three of these books have stayed with me. I’m starting to wonder if we’re living in a literary golden age.

Hilary Mantel

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hilary Mantel Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

What could I choose, but Diarmaid MacCulloch’s masterly Thomas Cromwell: A Life (Allen Lane)? For those less Tudor, An American Princess by Annejet van der Zijl (Amazon Crossing, translated by Michele Hutchison) is the story of Allene Tew, a small-town banker’s daughter five times wed, to gamblers, stockbrokers and finally royals. Light and gracefully written, it dances through a century of history, costing out the American dream like a feminine complement to the National Theatre’s absorbing Lehman Trilogy.

Yuval Noah Harari

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yuval Noah Harari. Photograph: De Fontenay/JDD/SIPA/REX/Shutterstock

Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics (Allen Lane) changed my mind, or at least some of the ideas held in my mind. Pollan takes a fresh look at the controversial history of psychedelic drugs, highlighting their positive potential without hiding their dangerous side. It is all too easy for a spiritual quest for truth to mutate into a consumerist pursuit of excitement. Whatever one may think of psychedelics, the book reminds us that the mind is the greatest mystery in the universe, that this mystery is always right here, and that we usually dedicate far too little time and energy to exploring it. AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee (Houghton Mifflin) is a superb and very timely survey of the impact of AI on the geopolitical system, the job market and human society. Unlike most books of its kind, it is written from the perspective of China rather than Silicon Valley. It raises important concerns about the cataclysmic disruptions AI might cause, and avoids the naive techno-utopianism that reigns on both sides of the Pacific. If the AI superpowers enter an escalating arms race, whoever wins, humanity will be the loser. In Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (Penguin), Steven Pinker extols the amazing achievements of modernity, and demonstrates that humankind has never been so peaceful, healthy and prosperous. It is the most optimistic book I’ve read in a long time. There is, of course, much to disagree with and to argue about, but that’s what makes this book so interesting.

Nicola Sturgeon

Facebook Twitter Pinterest First Minister and SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Normally I’d steer clear of recommending prize winners, but this year’s Man Booker winner Milkman by Anna Burns (Faber) is outstanding and without a doubt my favourite book of the year. It’s the story of a young woman growing up in 1970s Belfast (though the city, like most of the characters, is not named), struggling to cope with the unwanted sexual attention of a paramilitary. It is an immersive and unsettling read that rewards perseverance through the first few pages, as the narrator’s voice establishes itself in the reader’s mind. In non-fiction, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Leadership (Viking) is an excellent portrait of the leadership traits, particularly through times of national challenge, of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Teddy and Franklin D Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Again, a timely and rewarding read.

Brett Anderson

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brett Anderson Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

This year, I loved Bitter by Francesca Jakobi (W&N), an incredibly moving novel about a mother’s guilt and shame at her inability to bond with her son. It is a beautifully woven tale that tilts with issues of class and race and religion. The reader’s feelings towards the protagonist always balance somewhere between pity and indignation, never drifting towards any simplistic sense of certainty. In the vein of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, The Incurable Romantic (Little, Brown) is a compilation of the real-life case studies of a clinical psychologist, but here focused on the tenebrous world of obsessive love. There is a danger that this kind of book can come across as dry and unengaging, but Frank Tallis draws his characters with such wit and skill that at times it reminded me of novels such as The Collector or Enduring Love.

Val McDermid

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Val McDermid Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Judging the Man Booker prize brought many delightful surprises this year. Apart from those, I’d recommend Stuart Turton’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle to anyone who loves complexity and conundrums; Elly Griffiths’ The Stranger Diaries (Quercus) for lovers of gothic suspense, tempered with one of the most engaging detectives I’ve encountered in a long time; and Lou Berney’s November Road (HarperCollins), which shows that the Kennedy assassination remains fertile ground – conspiracy theory meets a bittersweet love story.

Ian Rankin

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ian Rankin Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Skin Deep by Liz Nugent (Penguin) is a twisted thriller, reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith. A scarred woman brings chaos to those around her, but Nemesis is coming. Kill ’Em All by John Niven (W&H) is like Martin Amis’s Money retooled for the age of Trump; a gleefully vicious and vulgar satire on the music industry, fame and greed. Robin Robertson’s The Long Take (Picador) is a 200-page narrative poem about a second world war veteran seeking a living in LA and trying not to succumb to PTSD. Beautifully realised and filled with memorable imagery and phrasing to die for.

Katherine Rundell

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Children’s writer Katherine Rundell Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

The two children’s books I loved most this year are also two of the children’s books I’ve loved most this decade. One is The Murderer’s Ape, by Jakob Wegelius (Pushkin), out this year in paperback – a fast-paced adventure story told from the point of view of a brilliantly clever and impeccably polite ape, Sally Jones. The other, Hilary McKay’s The Skylarks’ War (Macmillan), is a rare thing: a story that traverses a decade in 300 pages, a book about the first world war that feels utterly fresh, and a portrait of kindness and courage that never dips into sentimentality. McKay is always a joy and this is her best book yet, I think.

Chris Ware

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chris Ware Photograph: Alamy

Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina (Granta) is not only a step forward for comic strip literary fiction, but a book that shows, as well as tells, the slippery horrors of our post-truth reality. In Olivier Schrauwen’s mind-inverting masterpiece Parallel Lives (Fantagraphics), the cartoonist’s alien abduction branches into a series of funny and frightening psychosexual ruminations on the nature of relationships that feel as fresh and strange as human life actually is. Manga pioneer Tadao Tsuge’s awkward, unsentimental and sometimes Chekhovian short comics from the 1960s and 70s delineate the violent, desperate wanderers of postwar Tokyo’s red-light districts. In Slum Wolf (New York Review Comics), translator Ryan Holmberg, one of the world’s finest comics writers, smoothes out the folds and expertly sets the historical scene so that readers (and graphic novelists like me) find they still have a whole lot to learn.

Jackie Kay

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Poet Jackie Kay Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Suzanne Batty’s States of Happiness (Bloodaxe) is an extraordinary collection that explores mental anguish. It begins with a complex sequence of poems in memory of her twin sister, who died of a rare degenerative disease. Though the book is dark and disturbing, it is also filled with chinks of light. The poems are as compelling as any thriller and full of insight and empathy. Nadine Aisha Jassat’s Let Me Tell You This (404 Ink) is a punchy, powerful debut collection that investigates what it means to be of dual heritage. The poems capture with real panache the secret lives of women, and they’re poignant, too. Pretend You Don’t Know Me (Bloodaxe), by South African Finula Dowling, is a witty and wise collection of new and selected poems. Her sequence about her mother’s dementia is very touching. Elsewhere, these vital works will have you crying with laughter.

Pankaj Mishra

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images

Bluntly cutting through much condescending nonsense written about millennials, Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days (Little, Brown) describes how many of their private neuroses are socially constructed – strategies of survival in the bleak world they have inherited from their elders. The monographs of Byung Chul-Han, including What Is Power? and The Expulsion of the Other (Polity), can be read as companion pieces to Harris’s book. Whether analysing the smartphone or the notion of beauty on Instagram, this Korean-born German philosopher always has astute things to say about the many seductive forms of coercion and conformity today. Maria Tumarkin’s shape-shifting Axiomatic (Brow) deploys all the resources of narrative, reportage and essay. It is a work of great power and beauty. With mainstream journalism investing most of its analytical energy in the foggy concept of populism, the most illuminating historical and sociological explanations of our age of crisis have come from small magazines and university presses. Kathleen Belew’s superbly comprehensive Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard) – which argues that a white power movement emerged as a reaction to the Vietnam war – supplants all journalistic accounts of America’s resurgent white supremacism. Few writers of fiction have chronicled American power and its psychic costs as steadily and briskly over the decades as Deborah Eisenberg. Your Duck Is My Duck (Ecco), her first collection of stories in 12 years, describes with eerie prescience many circles of America’s current moronic inferno.

Olivia Laing

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Olivia Laing Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

I gave up Twitter this year, with two immediate consequences: I started dreaming again and recovered a ferocious appetite for reading. Evenings, it turns out, are long. Like everyone, I loved Sally Rooney’s beautifully observed Normal People (Faber). I also finally read Eve Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company, first published in the 1970s but recently reissued by New York Review Books. It is funny, sexy and then suddenly brutal, like a shark attack at the beach. As for poetry, I fell hard for Amy Key’s Isn’t Forever (Bloodaxe), a gorgeous, sad box of delights about intimacy, bad bodies, sorrow. Like Babitz, Key is adept at linguistic surprises, charting women’s lives with a savage delicacy. But my favourite book, and you’d better be quick, is Blueprint, a tiny edition of photographs by the New York artist Mary Manning (JMS). Manning is truly a genius at unregarded, everyday beauty. Everything on the planet has been Instagrammed by now, and yet her casual, seemingly unstudied photos have the capacity to make the familiar world look absolutely new.

Viv Albertine

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Viv Albertine, musician and author Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

Written in 1962 and reprinted again this year, every word, every sentence, every full-stop of Cassandra at the Wedding (Daunt) by Dorothy Baker had me in its clutches. I love books about small moments stretched out so wide you can observe the nuances and air bubbles that usually go unnoticed. Baker’s writing is immediate, strong and modern. She plumbs the deep emotional truth of human beings. Such sweet agony. The Secret Lives of Colour (John Murray) by Kassia St Clair is beautifully presented with the edges of the pages tinted different hues. The book is simply about colour. But colour is not simple. The history, geography, politics, scandals and influence of colours and shades are documented here with a lively and knowledgeable voice. With references from Jessica Rabbit to Lord Mountbatten, from Greek poets to slavery, this is a fascinating read. You can dip into specific colours or read it straight through like I did.

Yotam Ottolenghi

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chef, restaurateur and food writer Yotam Ottolenghi Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

An Anarchy of Chillies by Caz Hildebrand (Thames & Hudson) is bold and bright, each variety given its own unique design, represented with brilliant illustrations. It’s a must for anyone who’s serious about their chillies, their graphic design, or both. Lateral Cooking by Niki Segnit (Bloomsbury) is all about confidence: confidence in skill, flavours and technique. Knowledgeable and humorous, with a focus on flavour and technique, this cookbook is informative, useful and sure to become a kitchen bible to many. Gill Meller’s latest cookbook Time (Quadrille) is poetic and romantic – a string of beautiful recipes guide you through the seasons. Fig and seville marmalade buns are perfect for a warming winter breakfast while fried mackerel with tomatoes, garlic and herbs are quintessential summer.

Ali Smith

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ali Smith Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

I’ve been giving thanks all year for the crucial act of contextualisation in Sarah Churchwell’s Behold, America (Bloomsbury), which reveals language, history and consequence as all joined at the hip; and for Lyndsey Stonebridge’s Placeless People (Oxford), a stunning study as much of literature’s own “endurance beyond the nation, and its worldly capacity to conjure up human community out of despair” as of migrant refuge and the powerplay of state refusal of refuge, via the 20th century’s great writers of displacement. Also, a book of essays by Alexander Nemerov, Summoning Pearl Harbor (David Zwirner) works like poetry on history, nationality, memory and aesthetic form and in a unifying and liberating meditation opens all their closures. In fiction I was taken with Helen McClory’s On the Edges of Vision (404 Ink). Her edgy stories transmit the strangeness of realities in a way that’s comforting precisely because so unsettling. She’s a writer completely unafraid. I was also left amazed, again, at the blitheness, the nonchalant courage, with which Kate Atkinson – whose new novel Transcription (Transworld) is another formal high-wire act – regularly renews, as if it’s second nature, the possibilities of the novel form.

Robert Macfarlane

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Robert Macfarlane, nature writer Photograph: REX

Richard Powers’s The Overstory (Heinemann) is among the best novels I’ve read this decade. I would describe it as a towering redwood were it not so committed to a model of complex and reciprocal relations between humans and the more-than-human world. Better thought of as a teeming ecosystem or biome of a novel, then, which enacts in its structures a version of the symbiosis it advances as an ethic. Beyond its experiment in form, it is dazzlingly written at the levels of the sentence and the sequence (the book’s understorey). Powers is as brilliant on trees and arborescence as he has been in past novels on music, AI and neuroscience. The novel arrives at a time when deforestation in the name of “growth” has become a flashpoint for protest politics in Sheffield, Germany (Hambach), India (Delhi) and dozens of other countries; despite its deep-time perspective, it could hardly be more of-the-moment. Daegan Miller’s This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent (Chicago) stands as analytical counterpart to Powers’s novel: a fascinating, often hopeful journey through the landscape histories of “vibrant resistance” – anarchism, anti-slavery movements, social-justice activists – that have sprung up across North America over the last two centuries. Rebecca Solnit’s Call Them By Their True Names (Granta) is another vibrantly resisting work, that calls out euphemism (“climate change” should be “climate violence”) and celebrates good naming where it is practised. Lastly, like many readers I was gripped by Guy Gunaratne’s remarkable debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City (Tinder), with its complex cast of lonely Londoners and its brave, poetic polyphony of voices.

Kamila Shamsie

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/The Observer

Anna Burns’s Milkman is one of the funniest books of the year. It seems necessary to say that because of all the talk about “difficulty” that surrounds it. It’s true that it isn’t a book to read quickly – but that’s because there’s so much in it to savour. Its understanding of what violence can do to a community, and the cost of being a woman in a society so marked by male violence, is acute. In the midst of its wisdom and humour and insight, you really want to know what’s going to happen to its characters.What’s going to happen with these characters is something you ask yourself in Michael Ondaatje’s mesmerising Warlight (Cape) without any belief that you can answer the question. Ondaatje’s ability to swerve in unexpected directions, in ways both playful and serious, is on brilliant display in his post-second world war novel of a boy and his sister who are abandoned by their parents to be raised by thieves and conmen – Ondaatje conveys with equal facility the anarchic pleasures of an adolescence without restraint and captures an emotionally cut-off adulthood that pays the price for such an untethered upbringing.

Ben Schott

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ben Schott Photograph: Dini von Mueffling

Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking (Abrams) by Jason Logan is a remarkable book on the alchemy of inkmaking – yes, making your own inks – that combines science, art, craft and foraging. You will never again look at rust, soot, peach stones, or fag ends in the same way. As President Obama’s photographer, Pete Souza was one of the very finest official White House snappers. In his provocative Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents (Sphere), he contrasts pictures of the 44th incumbent with vignettes from the administration of the 45th to caustic effect. Mark Dery’s Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey (William Collins) is a detailed, devoted and highly readable biography of the illustrator who – from The Doubtful Guest to The Curious Sofa – defined and embodied a world of camp, gothic hilarity.

Elif Shafak

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elif Shafak, novelist and political scientist Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

One of my favourite books this year was Robin Robertson’s The Long Take (Picador). Crossing genre boundaries, it is a moving, melancholic and strangely inspiring poem that tells the story of a D-Day veteran as he travels across three big cities in the US. He is a broken flâneur, a man stuck between worlds, and this is a book about the invisible wounds we carry with us everywhere; about not being able to go home, yet still finding the courage, or the animal instinct, to carry on. Rachel Cusk’s Kudos (Faber), the last in her trilogy, stayed with me long after I had finished it. Composed of a series of conversations, it is captivating and incredibly well written. Olivia Laing’s Crudo (Picador) is simply mesmerising, not only in the way in which it enters the mind of an iconic woman, Kathy Acker, but also for its originality, inventiveness and chutzpah. And Richard Holloway’s Waiting for the Last Bus (Canongate) is a real gem: a tender book, brimming with wisdom, beauty and compassion. Reading Holloway is like taking a long walk in the countryside – afterwards, you understand the world better, you feel less lonely.

John Banville

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Banville Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Henry Hardy has self-effacingly devoted the larger part of his professional career to the editing, promoting and celebrating of the work of Isaiah Berlin. In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure (IB Tauris) looks back over his long labours of love with fondness, a fine dry wit and a light salting of justified irritation at those entrusted with Berlin’s posthumous affairs. The second part consists of Hardy’s own philosophical response to Berlin’s theories on matters such as plurality, religious belief and our shared human nature. A wonderful book on a wonderful subject. It would surely take the staunchest of bird fanciers to stand up for the poor old seagull – or plain gull, as it has become, since it took to the dumps – but that is what Tim Dee does, and does persuasively, in his fascinating, funny and bravely titled Landfill (Little Toller). To say his book is about gulls would be like saying that Lolita is about paedophilia. Sue Prideaux’s ill-advisedly titled I Am Dynamite! (Faber) is the biography Friedrich Nietzsche has been crying out for since the day he lost his reason and embraced a horse in a Turin square in 1889. Prideaux brings a calm and steady light to bear on this most incandescent of philosopher-poets, with illuminating results. Her book is a disgracefully entertaining read into the bargain.

Mark O’Connell

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mark O’Connell Photograph: Rich Gilligan/Wellcome Book Priz/PA

A novel that really got under my skin this year was Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Cape), a work of delinquent brilliance about a bereaved young woman who, with the help of a quack GP and an array of cures for the condition of consciousness, spends an entire year in hibernation in her New York apartment. It’s relentlessly dark, frequently very funny, and establishes Moshfegh as a uniquely gifted diagnostician of contemporary absurdity. And then there was Sally Rooney’s Normal People (Faber), which, like everyone else who read it, I consumed at reckless speed and with rare pleasure. Rooney has a mysterious ability to pull the reader in – gently, casually, inexorably – to her world on the very first page. She writes with a distinctive combination of lightness and absolute seriousness of purpose. I can’t remember the last time I got so personally invested in the lives of invented people. (Actually, I remember exactly when it was: it was last year, with Rooney’s previous book, Conversations with Friends.) In non-fiction, the book that has burrowed most deeply into the recesses of my brain was New Dark Age (Verso) by the artist and critic James Bridle. The more sophisticated technology has become, Bridle argues, and the more our lives are saturated with information, the less capable we are of understanding our world. It’s unsettling; people have taken me to task for encouraging them to read it and causing them to lose actual sleep. But for all its bleakness, it has illuminated the present for me like no other recent book I’ve read.

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• This article was corrected on 3 December 2018. Helen McClory’s most recent edition of On the Edges of Vision is published by 404 Ink. An earlier edition was published by Queen’s Ferry Press.