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The best books of 2018

With 2018 drawing to a close, our writers and contributors have taken their pick of the 2018 literary bunch - and compiled a list which makes the perfect inspiration for your holiday reading.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Great espionage novels are not genre pieces but studies of betrayal, dishonour, expediency, loyalty — the darkness of human nature, the subjects of all literature. Unsurprisingly, it’s hard to find good ones but I just finished two of the highest quality.

Firefly by Henry Porter (Quercus, £7.99) is brilliant; the brutal hunt for a terrorist jihadist and the long agonising and heartbreaking journey of a young refugee from Syria. Porter is a veteran journalist who turns out to be one of our best thriller writers.

Beside the Syrian Sea by James Wolff (Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99), a debut by an ex-spy, is superb: an adventure from London to Lebanon and Syria and the desperate struggle for survival in the face of war and betrayal. Wolff is a new maestro.

Phoebe Luckhurst

I galloped through Lisa Halliday’s Assymetry (Granta, £14.99), which tells two parallel tales: one, a pacy, titillating account of the affair between the gauche seductress Alice, who works in publishing and a Pulitzer Prize-winner 45 years her senior (said to be modelled on Philip Roth); the second, a more languid story about the life of an Iraqi-American economist, Amar.

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And Jonathan Coe’s Middle England (Viking, £16.99) sparkled with all the acuity of his best novels — in my opinion, What a Carve Up! and The Rotters’ Club. It is populated with vivid characters and the social commentary was at times uproarious and always on-the-money, without ever feeling didactic.

Justin Marozzi

Just when we thought there was nothing more to say about Churchill, along comes Andrew Roberts with Churchill: Walking with Destiny (Allen Lane, £35), a somehow original, magisterial, rounded and vim-filled study of Britain’s most celebrated statesman to prove us all wrong.

Two books on the Islamic world particularly stood out for me: one serious, one naughty, both important. One-time Islamist Ed Husain took on and savaged the extremists with wit and wisdom in The House of Islam: A Global History (Bloomsbury, £25), while Alex Rowell put the booze, debauchery, tolerance and pluralism back into the faith with Vintage Humour: The Islamic Wine Poetry of Abu Nuwas (Hurst, £18.99), his light-touch study of Baghdad’s eighth-century precursor to Lord Byron and one of Islam’s most dazzlingly talented, free-spirited, sexually omnivorous Bad Boys.

Frankie McCoy

She woz robbed! Actually, I don’t believe Sally Rooney’s Normal People (Faber, £14.99) should have made the Man Booker shortlist: it’s far too good to be lumped in with a bunch of books you need a PhD in arcane philosophy to plough through. Instead, Rooney’s second novel is one you read in three days flat, a Tube stop-missing, escalator-reading tale of frustrated love between two Irish teenagers, Connell and Marianne. Rooney’s style is pure poetry, sparse and heartbreaking, and writing this three months after I finished it I find my chest still aches for the pair of them.

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As it does for the tragic, Lear-like downfall of Truman Capote, as depicted in decidedly bonkers style in Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott’s Swan Song (Hutchinson, £12.99) — a debut novel fictionalising the alcoholic author’s epic fall from New York society grace. It’s as deliciously gossipy as it is wretched, and Greenberg-Jephcott’s unique rendering of Capote’s squealing drawl of a voice is unforgettable.

George Osborne

Ben Macintyre’s tale, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War (Viking, £25), about how Britain recruited a top KGB agent and then rescued him from the centre of Moscow, is one of the most exciting things I have ever read. Real life is so much more outlandish than fiction.

I also greatly enjoyed Jonathan Coe’s Brexlit novel Middle England. I’ve always loved the characters we first met in The Rotters’ Club — even though one of them calls me a c*** in this latest novel. I’m very forgiving ...

Michael Burleigh

Two books on special forces caught my eye. Geoff Dyer’s Broadsword Calling Danny Boy (Penguin, £7.99) is an arch-deconstruction of Where Eagles Dare, which most of us have seen too many times. Set in the wintry Bavarian Alps, its anachronisms include Clint Eastwood’s teddy boy haircut and a German helicopter that did not exist in the Second World War. Eastwood had to be reminded not to twirl his Luger before holstering it.

By contrast, General Cedric Delves’s Across An Angry Sea: The SAS in the Falklands War (Hurst, £20) is the sobering reality of that extraordinary 1982 campaign. Unlike many SAS shoot-’em-up books, this one about raids aborted as well as successful is humane and sensitive in tone, while admitting that war is “nine parts cock up”, despite all the democratic planning by teams who were always on first-name terms.

Marcus Field

No book has made me laugh or gasp so much this year as James Pope-Hennessy’s The Quest for Queen Mary (Hodder, £25). This remarkable volume contains the interviews and notes made by Pope-Hennessy during his research for his magisterial biography of the Queen’s grandmother, published in 1959.

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These papers, which were sealed for 50 years and are edited by Hugo Vickers, make for a fascinating insight into the royal family and the biographical process. Pope-Hennessy’s first impressions of Sandringham — “preposterous…tremendously vulgar and emphatically, almost defiantly, hideous and gloomy” — give a taste of the book’s pleasures.

I also enjoyed Rachel Trethewey’s Pearls Before Poppies (History Press, £20), a moving account of the Red Cross Pearl Appeal of 1918. Among the donations was a pearl worn by the Countess of Rothes as she escaped the Titanic; another was from a grieving mother, who wrote: “I send it in memory of a pearl beyond all price already given, my only son.”

Jane Shilling

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99). Tokarczuk won the 2018 International Man Booker prize for her novel, Flights, but for readers new to her work, Drive Your Plow (the title is a quotation from William Blake) is an exhilaratingly readable introduction.

In a remote village near the Polish/Czech border, a series of middle-aged men meet horrible deaths. The narrator, Mrs Dusezjko, a retired teacher, takes a keen interest in their presumed murders, and decides to investigate with the help of her equally eccentric neighbours. Translated with mordant wit by Antonia Lloyd Jones, this is a provocative and darkly comic fiction.

How Shostakovich Changed My Mind by Stephen Johnson (Notting Hill Editions, £14.99) — in 2006 the BBC music broadcaster Stephen Johnson had a memorable encounter with Viktor Kozlov, a clarinettist who played in the desperate 1942 premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in the besieged and starving city of Leningrad. The meeting inspired this haunting personal essay on the resonance of music in dark times, elegantly published as a handsome small hardback.

Douglas Murray

Two great biographies covered the good and the bad this year. Andrew Roberts’s Churchill: Walking with Destiny sets off at a roaring pace (as its subject deserves) from the start: moving, inspiring, magnificent.

Less written about in English (this is the first full biography for two decades) but equally important is the subject of Victor Sebestyen’s Lenin the Dictator (Weidenfeld, £25). Some people might assume they know enough about these two characters. Both books — not to mention current events — suggest that we don’t know nearly enough.

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Dunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper of Sinjar (Serpent’s Tail, £10.99) consists of first-hand testimony of Islamic State’s treatment of the Yazidis. It will spoil your week but it is worth it to remember that the atrocities that marked Churchill and Lenin’s era have not stopped in our own.

Claire Allfree

I’ve been enjoying dipping into Laura Shapiro’s What She Ate (Fourth Estate, £14.99), which offers six tidbit portraits of six different women from history, including Eva Braun and Dorothy Wordsworth, through their dramatically different relationships with food. Particularly pleasurable is the chapter on the English novelist Barbara Pym, whose characters often display an agility in the kitchen that would have astounded Elizabeth David, and who as a writer understood perfectly that what a character chooses to cook or eat says all you need to know about their state of mind. I read it longing for “half a lobster and a glass of chablis at Scott’s”.

Hermione Eyre

I’d nominate Paper Cuts by Stephen Bernard (Cape, £14.99). It’s a literary memoir which is unforgettably fleet, stinging and painful. Lara Feigel’s Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing (Bloomsbury, £20) made Doris Lessing instantly contemporary, a bravura close reading, as easy and intimate as a conversation.

Melanie McDonagh

Perhaps not the best books of the year but these are illuminating about the frankly alarming condition of our politics: Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World, by the political scientist William Davies (Cape, £16.99), describes how emotion took over from reason in contemporary populism, especially in the young.

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Similarly, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind (Allen Lane, £20) shows how the very idea of a university has been subverted by the cult of offence taking.

But for a finely written, stimulating take on a familiar subject, there’s Churchill: Walking with Destiny by my friend Andrew Roberts.

Susannah Butter

It’s been a strong year for both fiction and memoirs by women. Highlights included Rose Tremain’s account of growing up, Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life (Vintage, £14.99). With a few carefully chosen words, Tremain has a remarkable ability to convey vivid feelings and paint complicated characters, whose impulsive behaviour had an enduring effect on her. I was left feeling bruised and keen to read her 2010 novel Trespass, informed by her chronically selfish mother.

But what’s really taken the edge off the trials of 2018 has been a book of verse. John Cooper Clarke’s first poetry collection in six years, The Luckiest Guy Alive (Macmillan, £9.99), is pacy, punchy social satire. Reading it is like spending a night at the pub with your funniest friend, who also happens to have an astute take on everything from the state of the high street, to metrosexuality and the NHS.

Ian Thomson

It was a good year for memoirs. Christopher Howse’s Soho in the Eighties (Bloomsbury, £20) vividly conjured an old louche Soho of bohemian pubs, steamed-up caffs and a vaudeville sauciness. Soho at the dawn of Thatcherism was not the hipster playground it is today. Low-lifers and high-lifers alike lurched into the Coach and Horses on Greek Street, where the Spectator columnist Jeffrey Bernard held court. The book, a mosaic of character sketches and colourful gleanings, is a sweet-sour documentary of a now vanished world.

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I also loved The Estanica (Adelphi, £20) by Martín Cullen, a memoir of life in early Fifties Argentina under the dictatorship of General Péron and his wife Evita. Cullen’s eccentric land-owning family, as tight-knit as any Scottish clan, cling for dear life to their estancias deep in the pampas. A Proustian elegy to a lost past, the memoir is a delight to read, and often very funny.

Claire Harman

Last Stories by William Trevor (Viking, £14.99) is much more than a tidying-up exercise following the writer’s death in 2016. It’s a book about letting go: most of the stories were written when Trevor was in his eighties and there’s a sense of unmooring about them which is both exciting and disturbing. Not all of them work (at least, not in characteristic ways), but Giotto’s Angels and The Women are among his very best.

And I also really enjoyed a debut story collection from another terrific Irish stylist, Joseph O’Neill, Good Trouble (4th Estate, £12.99), full of a sort of agitated humour and relish for absurdity which seems to fit the current mood extremely well.

William Moore

Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor — the true-life espionage story of Oleg Gordievsky — is riveting. The book’s thrilling grand finale, which details the stages of his mad escape across the Russian border, raises the question: who needs spy fiction when real history is this well written?

For lovers of early-modern English history, a new book by Keith Thomas (Religion and the Decline of Magic; Man and the Natural World) is always cause for celebration. For his latest, In Pursuit of Civility (Yale, £25), Thomas covers the country’s ever-changing codes of behaviour between 1530 and 1789. The result is as entertaining as it is erudite.

Charlotte Ross

I did enjoy Crudo (Picador, £12.99), Olivia Laing’s short, sharp, sometimes shocking take on the chaos of current affairs. When the world is disintegrating at pace, there are worse ways to make sense of it all than by asking yourself, “What would Kathy Acker do?” As Laing kind of does.

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On the subject of cracking up, any female-on-the-verge will appreciate the hair-curlingly candid and side-splittingly funny observations of The Midult duo, Emilie McMeekan and Annabel Rivkin. Their first book, I’m Absolutely Fine!: A Manual for Imperfect Women (Cassell, £16.99), wears its considerable wisdom lightly.

Nicholas Lezard

Louisa Young’s You Left Early (Borough Press, £14.99) is a brave, honest and beautiful book about the author’s love affair — “love affair” doesn’t do the reality justice; it was more of a great passion — with a gifted pianist, who also happened to be an alcoholic; and, indeed, a good friend of mine. Not much of a distinction as he made good friends easily. But it means I can vouch for the veracity of the account.

Alba Arikha’s Where to Find Me (Alma Books, £12.99) is a short novel that feels longer in the best kind of way. Its rich and knotty plot goes from Nazi-occupied Paris, to post-war Palestine, and contemporary London, and picks apart the legacy of war, persecution, and revenge. Arikha is shaping up to be a major writer, if she isn’t one already.

Julian Glover

Our Place: Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife Before it is Too Late? by Mark Cocker (Cape, £18.99). It is easy to be angry about environmental destruction; easy to demand change without hope but in this potent, elegant and influential telling of the story of what we have done to England’s wildlife, Mark Cocker achieves something more: a reasoned tone in a radical cause. If you care about our country, read it.

Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 by Max Hastings (William Collins, £30). Big books about big battles aren’t for me but this is different. Hastings downplays his time as a young reporter in Vietnam but it informs everything about this book, which is about a place and a time as well as a doomed strategy. It is particularly strong on the origins of the war in the French empire and reminds readers (as many don’t) that the government of North Vietnam was even fouler than that of the corrupt, US-backed South.

Johanna Thomas-Corr

I’ve heard many critics say 2018 wasn’t a great year for fiction but there were at least a dozen novels that I’ve really cherished. Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Anna Burns’s Milkman (Faber, £8.99) reinforced my sense that Ireland is producing some of today’s most exciting literary talent.

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I loved Andrew Miller’s Now We Shall Be Entirely Free (Sceptre, £18.99), a finely wrought cat-and-mouse thriller set during the Napoleonic Wars that didn’t get the attention it deserved. And Andre Aciman’s profound, transporting novel, Enigma Variations (Faber, £12.99) made me consider the extent to which we humans are at the mercy of our secret and suppressed desires. To that end, we should all read William Davies’s Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World, a concise, penetrating exploration of the role played by negative emotions in our recent politics and culture.

David Sexton

I loved Sally Rooney’s Normal People, the novel that should have won the Man Booker Prize. I read it twice and was all the more affected the second time. She has an extraordinary way of knowing just what to say, simply but authoritatively, that reminds me of Muriel Spark.

Around the World in 80 Trees by Jonathan Drori, illustrated by Lucille Clerc (Laurence King, £17.99) is the most delightful and appealing book, full of surprises, a great gift for any kind of tree-lover. How did avocados ever disperse their huge seeds? Probably by being swallowed whole by giant ground sloths, now long extinct.

A book I have enjoyed reading almost every day recently is Once Upon a Snowstorm by Richard Johnson (Faber, £6.99), the story of an intrepid boy who loses his dad in a snowy forest but makes friends with a bear: beautifully illustrated and entirely wordless, inviting more storytelling from the reader every time.

David Goodhart

Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift (Allen Lane, £25), about what happens when whites cease to be the majority in most western countries, opened new territory in the discussion of ethnic attachment, too often seen as something that only minorities are concerned about. It is a challenging read and full of revealing aspects of rarely discussed ethnic history, but is ultimately optimistic about this historic change.

More prosaically political is Paul Collier’s The Future of Capitalism, (Allen Lane, £20), which is full of good ideas for reforming post-Brexit Britain from the “hard centre”. Collier is an academic who has read every relevant research report and happily slashes and burns his way through many of the cherished ideas of both the centre-Right and the centre-Left.

Lucy Hunter Johnston

Sally Rooney’s Normal People was the book I pressed on all friends — OK, passing acquaintances, my hairdresser and strangers on the bus — this year. The writing is fresh, witty and dark, but crucially the flawed characters feel completely, painfully, real. Rooney’s ability to write sparse yet compelling dialogue is unrivalled; I’m not sure any other author this year so perfectly captured the quiet tension of intimacy.

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While we’re still waiting for the seminal #MeToo novel, Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion (Chatto. £14.99) was a prescient pit stop. It’s a coming-of-age story, of sorts, about political awakenings, imperfect women and power dynamics. The ending will leave you simmering with impotent rage, which sounds about right for 2018.

Katie Law

Among the profusion of books on genetics and neuroscience, the one that stands out is Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are by Robert Plomin (Allen Lane, £20). Plomin is an American pyschologist and behavioural geneticist at King’s College London, who is leading the way in the field of polygenic scoring. so-called because thousands of genes in an individual’s DNA can now be analysed to predict a vast number of traits, from likely caffeine consumption and sleep patterns to general intelligence and personality. Inevitably controversial, it’s going to be a game-changer.

And I was charmed by Christopher Skaife’s autobiography, The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London (4th Estate, £14.99), which reveals wonderful insights into these beguilingly intelligent birds that only the most devoted keeper could have.

Nick Curtis

I’m doubtless among many who will cite Imogen Hermes Gowar’s vivid and involving The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock (Harvill Secker, £14.99) as a highlight of the year — its Georgian texture richly drawn, its characters vivid, the plot darting off in surprising directions the moment it threatens to get stale.

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At the opposite end of the spectrum, Why We Get the Wrong Politicians (Atlantic, £9.99) by the Spectator journalist Isabel Hardman was a brilliantly lucid explanation of the systemic problems in our electoral system that make policy-making and government such a mess.

Robert Fox

Gianrico Carofiglio’s The Cold Summer (Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99), a tale of intrigue and plot in Puglia is more than a Mafia vs cop thriller. It is a wonderful portrait of Italy’s south today. The cast is led by beguiling Left-leaning Carabiniere Pietro Fenoglio, a devotee of Bertrand Russell, Camus and Italo Calvino. The sly side comments of this overlooked author, a former judge and senator, make him a contemporary Italian George Orwell.

Ben Schott’s Jeeves and the Ace of Clubs (Hutchinson, £16.99) is peerless in its wit, elegance and silliness. It is the most successful homage to PG Wodehouse’s Wooster and Jeeves stories to date. The footnotes are a joy of misplaced erudition. More of the same, please.

Matthew d’Ancona

My books of the year are Jamie Susskind’s Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech (Oxford, £20), the most interesting exploration yet of the political realities in the digital era, and Olivia Sudjic’s masterly first work of non-fiction, Exposure (Peninsula Press, £6), which examines the phenomenon of anxiety with rigour and compassion.