The best books of 2017

Rohan Silva

Jeffrey Eugenides’s beautifully written collection of short stories Fresh Complaint (4th Estate, £16.99, buy it here) is not only the best thing I’ve read all year — it also couldn’t be more 2017, featuring transgender teenagers, rape allegations on campus and much more besides.

Michael Burleigh

Richard McGregor’s stunningly good Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of US Power in the Pacific Century (Allen Lane, £20, buy it here) tackles how the interplay of Chinese assertiveness with Trump’s dissolution of US power is fundamentally altering the balance of power in this vast region.

One to read with Trump on the loose in the region and constant chatter about war with China in Washington. McGregor’s brilliant book is packed with insights, especially on the complex Sino-Japanese relationship, the gist of that being that past history should be our teacher rather than master. Will a more powerful China learn magnanimity, one wonders.

David Sexton

It is partly due to Claire Tomalin’s extraordinarily generous encouragement when she was literary editor of the Sunday Times that I have had a career in literary journalism. Her memoir, A Life of My Own (Viking, £16.99, but it here), presents her own biography partly as if it were that of one of her other subjects, seamlessly, evenly, even when she is describing the most traumatic events, such as the death of her husband, the suicide of one of her daughters, and learning of her father’s hostility to her from birth, just as much as when she is celebrating the pleasure and happiness that her family and professional life have brought her. Her composure throughout is inspiring anew.

By far the most compelling political book of the year was Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe (Bloomsbury, £18.99, but it here), which raises the debate beyond current squabbles to what’s really happening now to European civilisation: fearless, truth-telling, and masterfully organised. I read it through one summer night without stopping. Don’t hold an opinion about this book if you have not read it. As always.

Jane Shilling

Mr Lear, A Life of Art and Nonsense (Faber, £25, buy it here) by Jenny Uglow. The Owl and the Pussycat, the Jumblies, the Old Man with a Beard — the characters in Edward Lear’s nonsense verse have beguiled generations of readers with their captivating exuberance and melancholy. Jenny Uglow’s beautifully illustrated biography explores with affectionate precision the life of a poet and artist whose anarchic imagination embraced the strangeness of the world and made it his own.

Mozart’s Starling (Corsair, £14.99, buy it here) by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. On May 27, 1784, Mozart was passing a bird-seller’s shop in Vienna when he heard a starling whistle a phrase from his as yet unperformed Piano Concerto No 17 in G. The anecdote inspired writer and naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt to consider the relationship between starlings, music and language in a scholarly and delightful book, whose pages are enlivened by the subversive presence of her pet starling, Carmen.

George Osborne

Here are two books that have helped us interpret our confusing world this year. The first is the fiery new novel by Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire (Bloomsbury, £16.99, but it here), which takes us from the suburban streets of Wembley to the killing grounds of Islamic State-ravaged Raqqa. Shamsie tackles issues of terrorism, political showboating and jihadi recruitment in London through the prism of a classic two-sides-of-the-track love story.

One person who has been warning us of the dangers of not confronting Islamist ideology for many years is Niall Ferguson, the historian who more than most connects our age to its past. His latest work, The Square and The Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power (Penguin, £25, buy it here), is an ambitious and illuminating attempt at a different kind of history — the history of the network. It shows how loose groups of friends, fellow travellers and ideologues have often succeeded in shattered the existing established order. As we’re finding out today, it’s left to the rest of us to pick up the pieces when they do.

Claire Allfree

Fever Dream (Oneworld, £7.99, buy it here) by Samanta Schweblin. Although I read it several months ago, this Argentinian novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, is still lurking like a particularly noxious hangover. It takes the form of a conversation between a teenage boy and a dying older woman but it’s also a nightmare dispatch from modern-day Argentina, every page stuffed with horrors. It’s dazzling, unforgettable, and deeply strange. I’ve never read anything like it.

Robert Fox

Mark Mazower’s What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home (Allen Lane, £20, buy it here) is a deep dive into the story of his family, particularly his father and his grandfather, Max, who grew up in the Pale of Settlement for Jews on the borders of imperial Russia, in what is now Poland and Lithuania.

Max Mazower was an activist in the Bund of Jewish Workers, which eventually lost out to the Bolsheviks, in the same years that Joseph Conrad wrote The Secret Agent. The story of the Mazowers, their blood relatives and connections, is the reality check to the worlds romanticised and fictionalised by Conrad, John le Carré and Robert Harris. They suffered and survived world wars, revolution, show trials and holocaust.

Max himself left Russia for good in 1923, settled in Highgate and largely kept silent about his past. Mazower uses all his brilliant forensic historian’s skills to scour archives across Europe, family letters and journals, and a long interview with his own father to put this staggering story together.

Dan Jones

Black Tudors: The Untold Story (Oneworld, £18.99, buy it here) by Miranda Kaufmann was that rare thing: a book about the 16th century that said something new. I also loved To Catch A King: Charles II’s Great Escape (William Collins, £20, buy it here) by Charles Spencer — authoritative narrative history with the pace of a Jason Bourne film.

Arifa Akbar

In the Days of Rain (4th Estate, £16.99, buy it here) is Rebecca Stott’s astounding memoir of her father’s life, and her own, in a fundamentalist Christian cult, and is written with the rigour of a historian and the eye of a novelist. First Love, Gwendoline Riley’s novella (Granta, £8.99, buy it here), savagely reveals the fault-lines in a marriage yet gives it poetry too.

Katie Law

The most important book I read this year was The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray, about why Europe is done for. Unprecedented levels of migration, a continent that has lost faith in its identity, collective guilt about our colonial past, declining birth rates and the demise of traditional Christian values are all playing their part, he explains, compounded by the abject failure of multiculturalism. Balanced and compelling.

Lionel Shriver’s novella The Standing Chandelier (Borough Press, £9.99, buy it here) was terrific, skewering the notion that the sisterhood beats all, and doing so much more eloquently than all the rubbish grip-lit currently doing the rounds.

Picture book of the year must surely be Blue Planet II (BBC, £25, buy it here) by James Honeyborne and Mark Brownlow, a worthy souvenir, and more, of the TV series we are glued to.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

John le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (Viking, £20, buy it here) is a brilliant novel of deception, love and distrust to join his supreme espionage canon — an elegaic meeting of our tawdry past and splintering present through a reinvestigation of how Smiley artfully exploited a case that cost the life of a beautiful woman — by our greatest novelist, long overdue for the Nobel Prize.

Ron Chernow’s Grant (Head of Zeus, £30, buy it here) is a superb, compelling biography that redefines the alcoholic failure who became Abraham Lincoln’s victorious general and a fine president.

Justin Marozzi

As a reminder of how not to prosecute a war in a far-off place that has confounded the best efforts of many foreign powers over the centuries, Theo Farrell’s masterful account of Britain’s ill-fated adventure in Afghanistan, Unwinnable: Britain’s War in Afghanistan 2001–2014 (Bodley Head, £25, buy it here) is surely the last word on the subject.

Since we all need some Christmas cheer and lest we all wring our hands and give up on the Muslim world entirely, Isambard Wilkinson’s Travels in a Dervish Cloak (Eland, £19.95, buy it here) reminds us forcefully, and with elegance and humour, of the many-layered delights of Pakistan, a country that simply cannot be reduced to newspaper headlines of terrorism and corruption.

Melanie McDonagh

Thomas Dilworth’s account of the life and works of David Jones — David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet (Cape, £25, buy it here) — is pretty well the perfect biography. It does justice to an artist who has been quite unaccountably overlooked by posterity; perhaps being a genius in several modes — painting, engraving, poetry — confuses critics. He was in the trenches of the Great War longer than any other British artist. A wonderful life.

Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (Allen Lane, £25, buy it here) is Anne Applebaum’s devastating account of Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture in Ukraine which killed 4.5 million people in a de-facto, willed genocide. New archival sources enables her to expose the sheer horror of this enforced famine, the by-product of his war on the kulaks. Coruscating.

Claire Harman

“The minute they become dead they can teach us everything” — with this in mind, Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley set out to chart Deaths of the Poets (Cape, £14.99, buy it here) in a rollicking mixture of literary biography, commentary, travelogue and anecdotage, much of it deeply amusing. Do we prefer poets who die young and tragically to aged pen-pushers like Eliot? What, they ask, is the price of poetry? This is definitely one for the egghead’s Christmas stocking.

Anyone who loves the poetry of Thom Gunn will want to have the new Selected Poems which Faber brought out this year (£16.99, buy it here), with its terrific introduction by Gunn’s most thoughtful interpreter, Clive Wilmer, and the novel inclusion of extracts from his essays, interviews and unpublished letters, all in portable size.

Anne McElvoy

In The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart (Princeton University Press, £32.95, buy it here) Mitchell Cohen examines the interplay of the two, from Monteverdi’s exploration of Machiavelli in The Coronation of Poppea and Mozart’s sly support for insubordination in the Marriage of Figaro to ongoing allegories of political power in Wagner.

Operas, the author argues, change their political meanings according to their setting, and the deep research and clear prose here hit a high C.

Johanna Thomas-Corr

There have been too many great novels this year — Alan Hollinghurst, George Saunders, Elif Batuman — to pick just one. So I’m going with verse because I’m still haunted by

Stranger, Baby (Faber, £10.99, buy it here) by Forward Prize-winning poet Emily Berry. “A mother’s death lasts a lot of years,” she writes in her second collection, which is about grief, estrangement and the question of where parent ends and child begins.

Nick Curtis

Amid the woefully overpraised stuff I have toughed my way through this year, I did enjoy Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible (Viking, £12.99, buy it here) — piercing, sort-of short stories that comprise a sort-of sequel to the excellent My Name is Lucy Barton.

I liked Tom Rachman’s rapid-response take on liberal anguish, Basket of Deplorables (riverrun, £8.99, buy it here) and enjoyed romping through Robert Harris’s Munich (Hutchinson, £20, buy it here) but my literary year was mostly meh.

Matthew d’Ancona

Robert Peston’s WTF: What Have We Done, Why Did It Happen, How Do We Take Back Control (Hodder, £20, buy it here) is a fascinating exploration of the new political landscape and that rarest of things: a successful blend of personal reflection and objective analysis.

I also loved Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker (Allen Lane, £20, buy it here) an appropriately eccentric biography of the post-punk author that restores her to her rightful place in the literary history of the past 40 years.

Richard Godwin

I was so pleased that George Saunders won the Booker for Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury, £18.99, buy it here). He’s like literary psilocybin, scaring the bejesus out of you before revealing the world anew.

And I loved the cumin-scented stories in Syria: Recipes from Home (Trapeze, £25, buy it here), as collated by Itab Azzam and Dina Mousawi from Syrian women on the refugee trails. So much more than a cookbook.

Ian Thomson

Two books with a Latin American flavour: one poetry, one a novel. Paranoid Narcissism! (Odilo Press, £25, read it here) by the Buenos Aires-born poet and journalist Miguel Cullen is a witty, thrillingly metropolitan verse collection that shimmers with a London imagery of reggae, raves and “sunsets like ratatouille”. A N Wilson is a fan; Cullen is an avant-garde poet to watch.

Gonzalo C Garcia’s debut novel We Are the End (Galley Beggar Press, £14, buy it here), set largely in the Chilean capital of Santiago, casts a jaundiced eye on the world of computer-gaming and disappointed love. I was swept up the dizzy-making, pleasurably nutty prose and the sarcastic, sweet-sour humour.

Susannah Butter

Sally Rooney’s debut novel Conversations with Friends (Faber, £14.99, buy it here) was an absorbing confessional about the emotional connections around sex, in both heterosexual and lesbian relationships, where the power balance isn’t clear. Rooney has a light touch, a talent for recounting conversations and for making you feel the heavy weight of her characters’ secrets. She doesn’t shy away from politics either.

Heather, The Totality by Matthew Weiner (Canongate, £14.99, buy it here) showed that the Mad Men creator and writer is also an accomplished novelist. It’s a gripping story that felt like a John Cheever for Trump’s America, weaving in contemporary concerns about inequality with a study of a long marriage, with plenty of enjoyable echoes of Don Draper and Betty’s relationship.

Rosamund Urwin

Thanks to Henry Marsh, “scalpel-lit” has turned into a burgeoning sub-genre, but it was a memoir from a palliative care doctor, Your Life in My Hands by Rachel Clarke (Metro, £8.99, buy it here), that I most enjoyed this year. Clarke sets out the effects of chronic under-funding on the NHS and explores our last days, yet, thanks to her lively writing and love for her profession, still made me wonder if it wasn’t too late for me to retrain too.

In The Day That Went Missing (Harvill Secker, £14.99, buy it here), Richard Beard gives an account of watching his brother drown when they were both children. It is more than just a study on grief, exploring memory and the savagery of the stiff upper lip. No book has moved me more this year.

William Leith

One of my favourite books this year, and definitely the most useful, was Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker (Allen Lane, £20, buy it here). He tells us all sorts of things about sleep and dreaming. Now I go to sleep much earlier and feel much better for it.

I also liked What Doesn’t Kill Us by Scott Carney (Scribe, £14.99, buy it here) who explains why it’s good to jump into cold water, among other things. I believe him. One day, I tell myself, I will act on his advice.