Everyone knows it's been a rich year for fiction.
Were it not for the requirement to place words side by side in a civilised fashion rather than type a string of titles as if composing an order for a bookseller, this piece would be as minimalist as a shopping list, which is essentially what it is. However, that not being an option, let me at least be brief.
The short story has had a field day these past 12 months, with superb collections from masters of the form: Graham Swift's England, And Other Stories (Simon & Schuster, £16.99), stands out for its stealthy wit and poignancy, as modern-day characters, and a few from the past, create a tapestry of the country that is both affectionate and troubling. Margaret Atwood is in high spirits in Stone Mattress (Bloomsbury, £18.99), a rambunctious, acidly funny collection that shows she remains one of the sharpest writers around. A quieter but no less satisfying collection is Rose Tremain's The American Lover (Chatto & Windus, £16.99), which ricochets between places and predicaments like a snipe outwitting a shotgun. Those interested in a more oblique take on relationships will enjoy Kirsty Gunn's Infidelities (Faber & Faber, £12.99), her original perspective as unnerving as it is acute. Finally, Richard Ford's creation Frank Bascombe, the most engaging literary hero to emerge from America since Rabbit Angstrom, returns in a collection of four seasonal stories in Let Me Be Frank With You (Bloomsbury, £18.99). Only the title could be improved.
From the mistress of the short story comes Ali Smith's dexterous, playful, deadly serious novel How To Be Both (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99). A book of two halves, whose protagonists come respectively from today and the renaissance era, it is a reflection, among other things, on art, love and grief. Another writer who inspires a following that is almost devout is Marilynne Robinson. The potent, understated Lila (Virago, £16.99) is the third in her acclaimed Gilead trilogy, in which she follows the fortunes of a child brought up in near destitution who marries a preacher, and begins to understand the world, and her once dismal place in it.
Faithful followers of Martin Amis, who are too wise to be put off by the hype and antimatter thrown in his path, have a treat in store, albeit an unsettling one. The Zone Of Interest (Jonathan Cape, £18.99) depicts a romance conducted in a concentration camp between a Nazi officer and the wife of the camp commandant. A vile subject, it's handled with Amis's typically steely nerve, his keen imagination finding an eery glimpse of normality even amid the moral abyss.
There is ugly politics of an entirely different kind in Peter Carey's absorbing Amnesia (Faber & Faber, £18.99). A maze of national resentments and deceits, this is the story of a half century and more of almost invisible enmity between Australia and America, that began with the Battle of Brisbane in 1943, and rumbled on throughout the 20th century. As one character reflects on his naivety about America's motives: "They saved us from the Japanese. We sacrificed the lives of our beloved sons in Korea, then Vietnam. It never occurred to us that they would murder our democracy." Fascinating, feisty, revelatory stuff.
Carey was inexplicably absent from the Man Booker shortlist, but his fellow citizen Richard Flanagan scored one for the team with his Second World War story, The Narrow Road To The Deep South (Chatto & Windus, £16.99). His haunting account of POWs working on the infamous Burma railway for once seems not to have had people muttering about the emperor's clothes and judges' befuddled wits.
Finally, one of the outstanding works of the year is Michel Faber's The Book Of Strange New Things (Canongate, £18.99), a title that could stand for almost all his novels. In this mature, sweeping, tender work, Faber blends science fiction and theology to astonishing effect. There could be no better novel with which to spend the festive period.
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