Nothing marks the Christmas season more clearly than the newspapers filling up with books of the year recommendations from authors and journalists. In publishing, these new books are called 'frontlist', and our publicity, sales and marketing teams go to herculean efforts throughout the year to get them noticed, so it's incredibly satisfying when books we've loved make the cut.

But what about the rest of the books we publish? Those books we call 'backlist'? (For people who work with words this is lame terminology isn't it? I'd love to hear better suggestions). These are the books that live spine-out on the bookshop shelf, forlornly trying to catch your eye while their new brothers and sisters bathe in the front-of-store limelight or sprawl belly-up on the tables. As a classics editor I'm obviously interested in giving older books a chance. So I've asked authors and journalists which not-new* books they've read this year and which they would press into our hands …

*Criteria - it had to have been published over a couple of years ago and it didn't have to be a Vintage book

Irvine Welsh, novelist

Iceberg Slim's Pimp: The Story of My Life (Canongate) was the book that determined the ghetto persona, which has massively influenced popular culture through music and film. In terms of that influence he's probably the most dominant writer since Shakespeare.

Mohammed Hanif, novelist and journalist

This Ramadan, I read 10 Graham Greene books and realised that half the world's problems could be solved if every army officer and every journalist in the world were made to read The Quiet American. The rest can be explained if everyone reads England Made Me (Vintage Classics).

Helen Simpson, author

Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (Vintage Classics) is a very long novel which locked me in a reading trance for several weeks (or was it months?) earlier this year. Its central protagonist, young Hans Castorp (stolid and touching), visits a Swiss sanatorium for a week and ends up staying seven years, during which time he enjoys an epic flirtation with morbidity

DH Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love: Adam Foulds' old books of the year. Photograph: © Bettmann/Corbis

Adam Foulds, novelist and poet

Rereading DH Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women In Love (Penguin Classics) has been profoundly refreshing for me this year. These two connected novels, among the best ever written, excite me with the possibilities of fiction and calm me with the grand, monumental presence of great achievement. These novels have everything: narrative substance, intensely felt landscapes, humour, tenderness, deep human insight, intellectual argument and language that is alive at every point. They are as near as anything to Lawrence's own vision of the novel as 'the one bright book of life.' They are full of life. I'll be rereading them again soon.

Lionel Shriver, novelist

W Somerset Maugham's The Collected Short Stories (Vintage Classics). Maugham still has a surprisingly modern feel to his prose, and many of his stories are long and complex enough to qualify as near novels. Hugely readable - no need to clear away any cobwebs - these stories maintain an astonishing consistency of quality and draw you in right away. Best of all, the four fat volumes could keep you in bedside reading for the next year.

John Self, blogger

My choice has to be Maeve Brennan's The Springs of Affection (out of print), first published in 1998, and which gathers her best stories published in the New Yorker between 1953 and 1973. These tales of families in Dublin are full of eye-opening moments and eye-watering details; Brennan never flinches from her duty to show her characters in the reality of their anger, frustration and unhappiness. She is a precursor of sorts to Richard Yates: her stories unwaveringly observed, and beautifully put. They have the ring of truth, and they hurt.

Tessa Hadley, novelist

I've just re-read The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy (Penguin Classics) for the first time since I was a girl. I was besotted with Hardy's novels when I was a teenager - for a while I hated everything modern and longed for a more authentic life closer to nature. I changed my mind about that; and then for years I couldn't enjoy Hardy's peculiar lumpy prose, his ponderous Victorianisms, the references to classical gods. His style felt too home-made. Now I've learned to understand the subtle beauty of that same lumpiness. The Return of the Native is a raw, ragged, bitter book with an unfinished feel - there's a very dramatic ending but not enough middle, somehow. Everything happens on the surface - these are people whose inner lives aren't differentiated from their outer behaviours. They act out their doom like tragic kings and queens - and yet there's also the wonderful down-to earth materiality of it all, destiny turning on tiny ordinary details of daily routine and work. I love the materiality of the novels again just as I did when I was young, the substance of the physical world translated so wonderfully effortfully into words.

Robert Louis Stevenson's memorial on Corstorphine Road, Edinburgh. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is AL Kennedy's old book of the year. Photograph: Duncan Hale-Sutton/Alamy

AL Kennedy, author

Every now and then I return to Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Penguin Classics) and it always, thus far, stands a rereading. The subtle humour, the density and beauty of the prose, the layered narrative, the great central concept - it's just a lovely piece of work from a very fine writer and very fine man

Viv Groskop, journalist

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (Vintage Classics) is my all-time favourite novel. It features a tortured writer and his glamorous muse, the devil and his adorably evil black cat and, improbably, a conscience-stricken Pontius Pilate. Funny, bonkers, profound, life-changing.

Andrew Motion, novelist and poet

The Selected Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins (out of print, but Poems and Prose available from Penguin Classics). You go to Hopkins' prose - as you go to his poems - expecting to feel delighted by the brilliance of his perception of things in the natural world. Bluebells, clouds, the flow and flex of streams: all these things, and many more, are never the same for us once we've seen them through his eyes. What seemed to me equally remarkable, reading the Selected Prose again, was how inextricably these ways of seeing are combined with his ways of reading other writers, and of devising his own theories as a poet. Here the particular focus of his attention is on listening, not seeing - but it shows the same extraordinary attention to detail, and the same knowledge of how details can be accumulated to create an encompassing vision of the world

Steven Poole, author and critic

This year I started - and rapidly finished - Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series (Titan Books) of novels in the genre, previously unknown to me, of "military SF". It's the thrilling saga of a nearly-crushed force battling its way home from deep within enemy territory, laced with deadpan satire about modern warfare and neoliberal economics. Like Xenophon's Anabasis - with spaceships

Alex Preston, novelist and critic

What a great idea! How rare it is that a newly-published book represents the brightest moment of the year's reading. In 2012, I read wonderful novels by Vasily Grossman and Bohimul Hrabal, beautiful short stories by Elizabeth Taylor and Nikolai Leskov, and continued to work my way through the work of the late, great but near-forgotten Tony Parker - who is a (very) British Studs Terkel.

But my book of the year was the slender and ravishing So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell (Vintage Classics), an astonishing novel by one of the great American authors. It reminded me of Philip Roth's Nemesis in its attenuated narrative voice, its extraordinary control and its near-swamping wash of nostalgia. An exercise in restraint which nonetheless leaves you breathless, joyful, evangelical. I have pressed it upon my nearest with ferocious enthusiasm.

The Penguin Book of Comics is Bryan Talbot's old book of the year

Bryan Talbot, graphic novelist

The Penguin Book of Comics, published in 1967, had a huge effect on me. Though already a 15-year-old comic reader, it was the first book I read about the history of the medium and, through it, I discovered many artists and comics and fascinating facts. It didn't just say to me that sequential art could be taken seriously but also, given the year and the fact that top psychedelic artist Alan Aldridge was the co-author, comics were cool. I go back to it most years – I referred to it this year while putting together a presentation.

Adam Thorpe, novelist and poet

This year I caught up with a Faulkner that I had somehow missed: The Wild Palms (Vintage Classics). This is a very daring novel that tells two quite separate stories in alternating parts, separated by 10 years. The New Orleans tale of the adulterous couple is all emotional passion, which in the narrative of the escaped convict on a boat in the Mississippi floods is transformed into astonishing descriptions of the waters and the physical battle to stay alive. The reader is left alone to find parallels and echoes, without any hints from the author. Further proof that the classics are way more adventurous than almost anything produced by our contemporaries.

Alex Clarke, journalist

Every year, I take Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (Vintage Classics) on holiday with me, and every year, I bring it back again unopened. The spirit is always there, but the flesh has proved weak. Until this year, when something clicked and I realised it was now or never. I'd be lying if I said I'd finished it (as a friend remarked, it is a very big mountain). But thus far, this tale of two cousins marooned in an airy sanatorium is quite brilliant, weird and frighteningly immersive.

Candia McWilliam, novelist

A Portrait of Zelide by Geoffrey Scott (Harper Perennial) is the "not new" book I loved that wasn't a re-read, though I at once did re-read it. This is how to write biography, so within the character under consideration that you meet them, know them, miss them, fear for them; as a story of high feminine intelligence and of heartbreak it is exemplary . Benjamin Constant among others has a more than walk-on part and steals one's love.

Hermione Eyre, novelist and journalist

My not-new book of the year was The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley (Vintage Classics). It's a clear, level-headed history of the mass hysteria that affected the 17 nuns of an Ursuline convent in 1634. Unlike the exorcists who displayed the deranged nuns for the public's edification, the book does not capitalise on their suffering. It isn't sensationalist. Moving forward in a strict chronology Huxley calmly explains the political and religious abuse which led to the nuns' exploitation. It offers a good analysis of religious mania, as well as showing, in the downfall of Urbain Grandier (played by Oliver Reed in Ken Russell's adaptation of the book) how dangerous it could be to snub Cardinal Richelieu.

I read this as research because the lead character of my historical novel-in-progress, Sir Kenelm Digby, was possibly amongst the visitors who went to see the unhappy Ursuline sisters. Certainly his friend Thomas Killigrew visited. Sir Kenelm, startlingly ahead of his time, believed that their possession was psychological rather than spiritual; three hundred years later, Huxley makes the same case in magisterial detail.

Geoff Dyer, author

The book whose praises I'd like to yell as loudly as possible from this particular rooftop is Arda Collins' It is Daylight (Yale). I heard her read from this in Iowa City a couple of weeks ago and bought it right away. It's a book of poems but can be read as a fragmented novel whose narrator exists in some kind of fugue state. Funny, weird, brilliant and absolutely wonderful.

Willa Cather's story of the Nebraskan prairie, My Antonia, is Sara Wheeler's old book of the year. Photograph: Ryan McGinnis/Alamy

Sara Wheeler, author

I rediscovered Willa Cather's My Antonia (Virago) – the ultimate frontier novel and a perfectly judged evocation of the black earth of Nebraska. Heaven,.

Stuart Evers, novelist and critic

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (Vintage Classics) had a profound effect on me this year: immediately I wanted to read all of Faulkner. It is an astonishing and overwhelming novel that deserves to be read as much as it is praised.

Evie Wyld, novelist



Let us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (Penguin Classics) is a strange mix of journalism and poetic, novelistic narrative, set in the Deep South during the depression. The book started out as a magazine article, but both Evans and Agee became involved in the lives of the people they were staying with and it turned into a long and intense book. In parts it is just a list of clothes or the objects in a home, and suddenly it'll almost turn into a love story or a tragedy. It's part everything, and it's deeply haunting.

Nick Clee, editor of Book Brunch

Iris Murdoch's The Nice and the Good (Vintage Classics) offers one of the most compelling illustrations I have found of the gulf between apparently liberal, well-intentioned behaviour and true goodness. The caricature of Murdoch's novels is that they consist of preposterous plots, about privileged and cerebral characters, whose fates have little consequence. Not here. In particular, there is the figure of John Ducane, whose illusions about himself Murdoch exposes with compassionate but unsparing intelligence. An apparently humdrum encounter in the final pages is, in my view, the most shocking moment in modern fiction.

Lisa Allardice, editor of the Guardian Review

This year I was very pleased to make the acquaintance of two fictional (or quasi-fictional in the case of Colette) women from the early 20th century, whose experience and outlooks in opposing ways embody the feminist revolution to come.

Snobbish, priggish and racist – Mrs Bridge is an unlikely, and in many ways unlikeable, heroine. Evan S Connell's 1959 debut novel chronicles the uneventful life of a dutiful Kansas City housewife and mother of three children between the two world wars. While her greatest worry seems to be if the guest towels are in order or what to cook Mr Bridge for supper, an unutterable sadness and loneliness pervades every spartan line. As the American novelist Joshua Ferris writes in his irresistible introduction this is nothing short of "a fully fledged existential nightmare".

Mrs Bridge is the original desperate housewife. Written with devastating economy (the influence of Connell's epigrammatic chapters can be found in Zadie Smith's NW), this novel is a quiet masterpiece of empathy, irony and comic understatement. The ending – as banal and absurdly meaningless as Mrs Bridge's entire existence – is heartbreaking.

Detailing – and how! – a summer spent in Provence, Colette's A Break of Day (1928) is another seemingly slight portrait of a middle-aged lady doing nothing very much (gardening, walking her dogs, flirty with the handsome locals). But in complete contrast to the gentle tragedy of Mrs Bridge's unlived life, La Naissance du Jour is a triumphant, unapologetic celebration of a strong, sensual, gloriously unencumbered woman in her prime. Where Mrs Bridge's life – morally, emotionally and spiritually - is all about circumscription and restraint, Colette extols expansion and abandon. She has been compared to a 20th-century female Montaigne, and it is true that her books, and especially this one, offer a manual on how to live fearlessly and joyfully – greedily alive to every sensation and experience.

