Books of the Year - Online Extras

Joyce Gunn Cairns, artist

Simon Callow’s My Life In Pieces (Nick Hern, £9.99) is a glittering and glorious Who’s Who of theatre. With breathtaking erudition, warmth, humour and compassion he introduces the reader to a vast panoply of actors, directors and script writers, covering several decades of distinction. From his intellectually demanding exposition of the work of Stanislavsky, to his moving account of the memorial service for Paul Scofield, to his hilarious anecdotes about pantomime, there is never a dull moment. Ron Ferguson’s George Mackay Brown: The Wound And The Gift (Saint Andrews Press, £19.99) is a brave and beautiful exploration of the life and creative genius of the poet in which Ferguson dismantles the myth that success equates ease; he introduces the reader to the poet’s struggle with the black dog of depression, and does so with warmth and sensitivity, never voyeuristically, and never losing sight of the beauty of the poet’s creation.

Judy Moir, literary agent

After the towering achievement of last year’s And The Land Lay Still by James Robertson (Penguin, £9.99) - a novel of exceptional ambition and cultural acuity, as well as obsessive readability - it would be difficult to be equally inspired by any other Scottish novelist, but Ali Smith is always a joy to read. She’s provocative, full of glittering insights, intriguing tangents and stylistic verve, so I highly recommend her latest offering, There But For The (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99). For Scottish non-fiction, you couldn’t fail to be impressed by Scotland: Mapping The Nation (Birlinn and the National Library of Scotland, £25) by Christopher Fleet, Margaret Wilkes and Charles WJ Withers. A large format, heavy tome, over 250 glossy pages, it is sumptuously produced with a glorious array of maps and fascinating text - it’s the kind of book to dip into and relish for decades to come. Finally, this year I discovered the Russian-American writer Gary Shteyngart, hailed as a comic literary genius. Super Sad True Love Story (Granta, £7.99) is indeed a terrifically wicked and affecting satire, brimful with scathing wit, and I’ll likely treat myself to his other two novels this Christmas.

Robin Robertson, poet and editor

I am greatly looking forward to reading the new translation of Madame Bovary by Adam Thorpe (Vintage, £18.99). Flaubert described his great work as a poem, so it is fitting that a poet and novelist of Thorpe’s stature should turn his hand to it. This has been another strong year for British poetry, with David Harsent’s Night (Faber, £9.99) and John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone (Jonathan Cape, £10) out in front, for me, so far. The Christmas break may allow me the chance to sit down with Lavinia Greenlaw’s The Casual Perfect (Faber, £12.99) and Alice Oswald’s Memorial (Faber, £12.99) -- two books of which I have heard great things.

Lesley McDowell, author and critic

I’ve always liked door-stoppers, mainly because I hate it when a great book ends. This year there were quite a few, and my favourite novel of them all was the door-stoppiest of the lot, Cedilla by Adam Mars-Jones (Faber, £20). The length and the comparisons to Proust might put some readers off, but Mars-Jones’s literariness is the easeful kind, irresistibly warm and inviting. I also liked very much Jane Harris’s Gillespie And I (Faber, £14.99), set in the art world of 19th-century Glasgow, and was disappointed and bemused that both she and Mars-Jones appeared to have frightened off the Booker judges this year. Alan Hollinghurst made it to the longlist with The Stranger’s Child (Picador, £20) and for the exquisite first 100 pages anyway (the rest slightly falls away) he deserves a major prize. My favourite non-fiction was Fiona MacCarthy’s The Last Pre-Raphaelite (Faber, £25) which fulfilled all my expectations, both about the standard of the biography itself as well as of the Pre-Raphaelite world.

Hugh MacDonald, chief sports writer of The Herald

In 1914, Edward Thomas was a 36-year-old father of three who made his living by writing reviews and indulging in hack work. He was a depressive and prone to sudden rages and unexplained absences from his family. Three years later he died on a First World War battlefield, leaving behind a body of great poetry that had been provoked by the conflict. Matthew Hollis in Now All Roads Lead To France (Faber, £20) has produced a brilliant, even inspiring biography on a beguiling poet and extraordinary, if troubled, man. It is a story told with marvellous insight but with a compassion that never ignores the more difficult sides of Thomas’s personality. And it leads one back to the poetry itself. Afghantsy: The Russians In Afghanistan 1979-89 by Rodric Braithwaite (Profile, £25) has an obvious contemporary significance and is compelling in its ability to explain the overwhelming poltical, religious and social difficulties of a landscape mired in unending conflict.

Sheena McDonald, journalist

Roger Moorhouse’s Berlin At War (Vintage, £9.99) provides a fascinating perspective on the Second World War experiences of the residents of a city not disposed towards Nazism. Tom Devine’s To The Ends Of The Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora (Allen Lane, £25) admirably demonstrates how history is written when no living witnesses still live. Chris Mullin’s political diaries covering 1994-99 are artfully entitled A Walk-on Part (Profile, £25) - this role sanctions limitless mischief. (Scotland’s current First Minister scrapes a single walk-on entry which refers to his 1996 Westminster mileage allowance - “why on earth he needs to drive everywhere History - in different forms - dominated my year’s reading. Roger I can’t imagine”). But the outstanding 2011 book is The Emperor Of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg (translated from Swedish by Sarah Death, Faber, £14.99), a fictionalized account (based on meticulous contemporary chronicling) of life in the Lodz ghetto between 1940-44. Aside from depicting human behaviour at its most extreme and without a shred of sentimentality, it exemplifies what fiction can do that reportage does not. It engages the emotions, and so animates history - with unforgettable clarity and immediacy. I read that historian Simon Schama dismissed it as “a... tedious... 672-page cautionary footnote”. So this year I also learned that historians are not inviolate!

Adrian Turpin, director of the Wigtown Book Festival

Something old, something new. First published in 1970 and voted “Book of the Century” by the Faroe Islanders, Hedin Bru’s The Old Man And His Sons (Telegram, £7.99) is a tremendous black comedy about what happens when a centuries-old subsistence economy comes head to head with the modern world. Forced to rely on his self-serving sons after he buys a chunk of whale meat he can’t afford, old man Ketil is -- in the proper sense of the word -- a truly pathetic creation. It’s the kind of book that makes you wonder what other gems are out there, invisible through lack of translation. Hannah Pittard’s impressive debut novel The Fates Will Find Their Way (Heinemann, £12.99) begins with the disappearance of a 17-year-old girl from a small American town one Halloween, then follows the reverberations through the lives of her male schoolmates into adulthood. Rich in atmosphere and ingenious in its form, Pittard’s grown-up mystery testifies to the power of fantasy, projection and nostalgia in our lives.