The Books Of 2013 - Online Exclusives

Hugh MacDonald, Herald Chief Sports Writer

It was a year to be reminded of the consistent brilliance of the best. First, one has to hail Canongate's decision to republish William McIlvanney's crime trilogy, beginning with Laidlaw (£7.99). Like the best crime fiction, it is not crime fiction at all, but a device to explore the light and the dark. Robert Harris, too, produces a brilliant, insightful investigation of the Dreyfus case with An Officer And A Spy (Hutchinson, £18.99). Like Le Carre in his early years, Harris seems condemned as a writer of "entertainments" but his art is to draw affecting characters and match them with a plot that is rendered both comprehensible and faithful to history. William Dalrymple's Return Of A King (Bloomsbury, £20) is an examination of the first Afghan wars that reminds us that world leaders are sentenced to remember nothing.

Ruth Wishart, journalist

In the beginning there was Country Girls, the first of a trilogy of novels which entranced the world and shocked the native and then still repressed Ireland of Edna O'Brien's childhood. Then, last year, came Country Girl (Faber, £8.99), a memoir of an exotic life lived with the most glamorous co-stars in the legendary London of the 60s and beyond; a sumptuous memoir about which she spoke with mesmerising whimsicality this year's Edinburgh Book festival. But even more of a treat is The Love Object (Faber, £20), eight of her short stories collected and published this autumn, reminding us, were we needing it, what a master craftswoman she has always been. Politicians' memoirs and meanderings, on the other hand, are mostly to be avoided with the exception of master diarists like Alan Clarke. A glittering exception is Alan Johnson's This Boy (Bantam, £16.99), a beautifully written, immensely touching account of a childhood lived in poverty where the only constant was uncertainty. That and the unstinting love of two remarkable woman: a mother who battled ill health and domestic violence, and a sister who assumed responsibility for the family on the mother's early death. Health warning: this should not be attempted without a ready supply of extra-strength tissues to hand.

Alan Taylor, writer

Return Of A King: The Battle for Afghanistan (Bloomsbury, £25) by William Dalrymple is not only a great, groundbreaking history book, it's a tale worthy of Rudyard Kipling and George MacDonald Fraser. Its subject is the first, farcical British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 in which many Scots played significant roles. Reading it, you cannot help but wonder how on earth our forebears ever managed to build an empire let alone hang on to it for so long. John Updike's Collected Early Stories and Collected Later Stories (Library of America, $75, two volumes) comprise nearly 2000 pages on every one of which there is ample evidence of Updike's fecund imagination and linguistic verve. The Professor Of Truth (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99) by James Robertson is that rarity in Scottish literature: a convincing, compelling and compassionate fictional response to a contemporary event, namely the Lockerbie atrocity.

Brian Morton, writer

I live within a mile of open sea on three sides, though I have to climb a hill to see blue water. So Philip Hoare's The Sea Inside (4th Estate, £18.99) was a gift, a combination of author and title that promised much and keeps delivering more. Not just a sequel to his award-winning Leviathan, it finds this obsessive swimmer negotiating industrial disjecta off the south coast, chasing whales (benignly) in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and sifting through a strange gallery of human flotsam and jetsam, cast up on home and foreign beaches by the imperial tide. A book that reminds us how much we're shaped by water and that, like the sea itself, changes every time it's revisited.

Harry Reid, writer and columnist

Freedom And Faith by Donald Smith (St Andrew Press, £14.99) is a fascinating meditation on Scotland's spiritual identity. It becomes a little preachy towards the end, but much of it is profound. George McKechnie, a former editor of the Herald, has expanded his doctoral thesis on the Scottish intellectual George Malcolm Thomson into a biography which is also an acute study of Scotland's identity crisis between the wars (The Best Hated Man, Argyll, £15.99). This book has great relevance for today's Scotland. Mark Peel's delightful biography of the winsome and slightly scatty Shirley Williams (Biteback Publishing, £25) is a scrupulously researched and very readable book about modern Britain's best- loved female politician.

Ian Bell, writer and columnist

Even a staunch Beatles fan was liable to approach Mark Lewisohn's Tune In (Little, Brown, £30) with trepidation. The volume, first in a trilogy, comes in at 946 pages. It could have wound up as a triumph of research over writing. Instead, as art and craft, it's impeccable. Lewisohn tells all, but tells it in a manner that is the antithesis of the usual pop biography. Here real people, the ordinary transformed into something unique, emerge from the fog of "legend". It ought to be forbidden to recommend a book you haven't finished, but with two-thirds gone, Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch (Little, Brown, £20) would have to collapse utterly to fail. "Dickensian" is one less-helpful word, but this feels like the novel she was meant to write. Enthralling. Finally, congratulations to Canongate for ending a scandal by putting William McIlvanney back in print. I had them all, but I read them again. That's public service publishing.

Rosemary Goring, Herald Literary Editor

Peter Davidson's Distance And Memory (Carcanet, £14.95) is one of the most magical, exquisitely written and thoughtful works of memoir I have read. This paean to the north east of Scotland is filled with brilliant discussion of art, culture and people. A work of solace, elegy and ideas, it is remarkable. A novel that fizzes with attitude is Antonio Pennacchi's The Mussolini Canal (Dedalus, £12.99). The story of a peasant family moved from the north of Italy to the dreaded Pontine marshes south of Rome during Mussolini's reign, it is portrait of poverty, pragmatism and passions, told in a seamless series of recollections by a decidedly partisan narrator. Tribute must also be paid to James Robertson's beautifully plangent The Professor Of Truth (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99), the heart-wrenching tale of a man searching, years on, for the facts about the airplane bombing in which his wife and daughter died.

Iain Macwhirter, columnist

The Resurrection Of William McIlvanney wasn't the title of a book, but it was one of the publishing events of the year. Canny publishers Canongate hoovered up the author's back catalogue of classic crime novels, like the Laidlaw trilogy from 1977, which incredibly had been out of print. No better excuse to revisit the originator of tartan noir and still the master. Gary Mulgrew's Gang Of One was a true story that no one could have made up. Incarcerated in a Texas jail for defrauding the National Westminster Bank, he discovers a penal world that has been remade in the image of Hollywood. This was Shawshank Redemption meets Wall Street. Historical novels are fashionable again thanks to Hilary Mantel, but I've read none better than After Flodden (Polygon, £14.99) by Rosemary Goring. Dark tales of treachery and bloodshed following Scotland's greatest battlefield defeat. Hopefully, not a metaphor for life after the independence referendum.