Chapter and verse

Published on Sunday 9 December 2007 01:05

NICK BARLEY

Director of The Lighthouse, Scotland's national centre for architecture, design and the city

It would be over-simplistic to say that I enjoyed The Road by Cormac McCarthy (out in paperback this year). Its depiction of a father and his young son, walking forlornly through an ash-covered, post-holocaust America was by turns so bleak and so intimate that it was almost impossible to bear. Yet in McCarthy's grim prose resided a curious sense of redemption; that however horrific the outlook, we find ourselves gripped by familial love.

In my case, one of the expressions of that love comes through reading to my children, and this year we embarked upon Cressida Cowell's hilarious, exuberant books about a young Viking named Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, a reluctant left-handed hero with a pet dragon named Toothless. For my five-year-old son, Cowell's How To Cheat A Dragon's Curse was easily the best children's story he's ever encountered, and David Tennant's rendering of the story on the audio-book is truly a modern classic.

Professionally, I had the joy of working with Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein, Scotland's greatest 20th-century architects, and I think that our book of their work, Gillespie, Kidd & Coia: Architecture 1956-1987, produced in partnership with the Glasgow School of Art, is a worthy record of their brilliant output.

ROBIN MARSACK

Director of the Scottish Poetry Library

Bernard MacLaverty's flawless story 'The Trojan Sofa' - a domestic comedy more revealing than a dozen sober political analyses - in Matters Of Life And Death set a standard that was hard to beat this year. Those matters were Edwin Morgan's subjects, too, in A Book Of Lives, which showed our best poet to be as energetic, inquiring and technically inventive as ever. Poetry can give aesthetic as well as other pleasures when it comes in a beautiful shape, as in Feathers And Lime, Ken Cockburn's translations from German, elegant in a cream concertina.

ANNABEL GOLDIE

Leader of the Scottish Conservatives

Having an American flavour were The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson, very entertaining, and DC Confidential by Christopher Meyer, a fascinating and good read. Giving me a new slant on Billy Connolly was Billy by Pamela Stephenson, which I finally got round to reading. Unusual and original was The Interpretation Of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld and hauntingly memorable was Suite Franaise by Irne Nmirovsky. Far less sombre and enduringly funny was Narrow Dog To Carcassonne by Terry Darlington, a guaranteed pick-me-up.

JOHN BURNSIDE

Poet and author

A poem in Robert Hass's Time And Materials is titled 'Envy Of Other People's Poems'. I have to confess to envying many of the poems in this new collection, the work of a true master poet. If I could only recommend one book for the year, this would be it. If I could make everyone in the world read just one poem, it would be 'I Am Your Waiter Tonight And My Name Is Dmitri', the finest poem I have read in a very long time.

RICHARD JOBSON

Filmmaker

The concise painful words of Nicholas Taleb in his philosophical meditation The Black Swan trash the nature of unscientific projections. How do we know what lies around the corner? How do we mediate, prepare, console and prosecute? Simple answer: we can't. Taleb is smart, well read, irreverent, tough and iconoclastic. But guess what? He's vain and, as we say in these parts, a bit chippy about something cultural, something established, something that has nothing to do with him, all of which makes me like him and his book even more.

Bernard MacLaverty in his short collection Matters Of Life And Death is a man in touch with the micro world of Carver and Chekhov. Small, poignant stories pinpoint the absurdity of hatred, the overwhelming emptiness of loneliness and the heartbreaking mirror of hope. Moments of joy, slivers of mystery and an eruption of anger all lie carefully placed in this mixture of memory and ancient angst. His words are gentle, his themes are delicate, but the effect is crushing.

Laura Hird's Hope And Other Urban Tales is special stuff. Edinburgh under a black cloud. People engaging with madness, menace, fear, fun, joy, lies and bitter truths. The writer makes the city feel alive and utterly desperate at the same time. She's funny, profound, in control of her characters - who are out of control - and most importantly she feels fresh.

JAMES ROBERTSON

Author

Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain is a masterful survey of the social and political changes of the past 60 years. Marr has a wonderful ability to distil complex events and personalities into a few telling sentences, and does so throughout this book with his usual acute perception and good humour. Afterlands by Steven Heighton is an austere, strangely beautiful novel based on the true account of how, in 1871, 19 survivors from a failed Arctic expedition drifted south for six months on a slowly melting ice floe. I also enjoyed one of Neil Gunn's last books, Blood Hunt, first published in 1952 and reissued this year by Polygon. It's a tale of murder, concealment and revenge which addresses all of Gunn's abiding concerns with the essence of life and death, renewal, hope and humanity's place in the natural landscape.

AL KENNEDY

Novelist and winner of this year's Saltire Prize

My Book of the Year would be Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast - the slouch hat-wearing journalist who just broke the Labour lobbying scandal - again. If you're tired of newspapers that can't afford to pay for real investigative journalism - or are too scared and/or lazy to countenance it - Palast is your man. On Osama, on Big Oil, on Chavez, on how the media work (or don't), Palast is sharp, magnificently well-informed and very funny. He'll tell you why Bush didn't win the 2000 election, why he knew Bush would steal 2004, and he predicts more skulduggery for 2008. He tells you things you never, ever wanted to know about politics, human nature and the way the world works. He makes you feel as if you've just woken up.

NICOLA MORGAN

Novelist

Blame my children's author brain: for me nothing beats the best teenage novels. But I can read grown-up books too, and my picks are James Robertson's The Testament Of Gideon Mack and Nikita Lalwani's Gifted. But back to teenage books... First, Ally Kennen's riotous Berserk, about an unlovely yet oddly loveable boy who corresponds, partly as a joke, with a man on death row. Second, outstandingly original and clever, is a novel told entirely in notes on a fridge door between a teenage girl and her mother, who is diagnosed with cancer. Life On The Refrigerator Door, by Alice Kuipers, is often unbearably moving. These everyday notes convey the whole relationship, from mundane and bitter mother-daughter arguments to the enduring love that those arguments can't destroy.

JACKIE KAY

Poet

From The Word Go (Nick Drake) is the best poetry book I've read all year. It contains a moving sequence of poems about the death of the poet's Czechoslovakian father; tender, surprisingly funny and memorable, these poems never shy away from the complexities of grief. I also loved two newcomers: Suzanne Batty's The Barking Thing and Claire Shaw's Straight Ahead. Both women write brilliantly about mental illness. Lavinia Greenlaw's The Importance Of Music To Girls captures adolescence brilliantly; acute and unputdownable, you can wolf it down in a few hours.

CLARE ENGLISH

Presenter, radio presenter of The Book Caf

I am very lucky. I have a job where I get to read heaps of books from different genres, some of which I probably wouldn't have bought myself. The amazing thing is that I can honestly count on one hand the books I didn't enjoy in some way over the past 12 months. Amid the gems from this year's crop was Denise Mina's The Last Breath, which provided a fantastic central character in feisty journalist Paddy Meehan, who gets dragged into the investigation of her former boyfriend's death. Lots of humour and grizzly content, so the perfect combo for me. And for laughs, pick up a copy of Delete This At Your Peril by Bob Servant. He's not real, but his e-mail correspondence with the spammers is. It's wonderful to see him wind them up.

MARK COUSINS

Author and film writer

Best fiction: Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje, for sentences like "...we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue." That's me down to a T.

Best non-fiction: Stupendous, Miserable City by John David Rhodes, about urban design in Rome and the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Gripping.

RODDY WOOMBLE

Idlewild frontman

Tove Jansson's great unsung novel Fair Play was the best book I've read all year. She's more famous for creating the Moomins, but her three novels for adults are all quiet classics in their own right. Fair Play is a book about friendship and the passing of time, about how we get to know ourselves through the ones we love, and how we helplessly think we can order things and control our fates. Jansson's motto was labora et amare - work and love. It's a novel that gently holds a mirror toward the reader on these subjects.

MATTHEW FITT

Author and National Scots Language Development Officer

Mark Corner's glisterin English translation o Zdenek Jirotka's 1942 classic Saturnin gies a insicht intae the Gowden Age o Bohemia.

A hermless young Prague gentleman innocently taks on a new butler, Saturnin. Tae improve his maister's staundin in 1920s Czech society, Saturnin spreids a rumour that his employer is a kenspeckle Big Game hunter newly hame fae Africa. Soon the Heid o Prague Zoo is chappin the young man's door tae invite him tae track doon and capture an escaped lion...

ALISON PEEBLES

Actress and director

Has to be Rudolf Nureyev: The Life, a massive book, carefully researched by Julie Kavanagh, who writes with unapologetic admiration while revealing the monster behind the man. Rudolf was cruel, vicious and arrogant, but he was also an artist of great beauty and charisma, his dancing combined sexuality and athleticism with animal magnetism, grace and courage... and he blew a kiss at me when I bumped into him at the Gate Cinema in London in 1978. From an ego the size of the universe to A Spot Of Bother by Mark Haddon, about ordinary personal crisis, written with his unique humour and profound observation.

ROBIN HARPER

Leader of the Scottish Green Party

Like a well-written crime thriller with plenty of twists and turns, tantalising plot sequences, well-observed local colour? Buy One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson. Bill Bryson's Shakespeare is a must for all lovers of the Bard - a myth-busting insight that is as close as we can get to who the man really was, written with true empathy and admiration for the subject. Get Luath Press's publishing list for Scottish work, especially their recent 100 Scottish Poems To Be Read Aloud - let's have more of these.

LAURA HIRD

Author

Cynthia Rogerson's wonderfully eccentric Love Letters From My Death-Bed was achingly funny and deeply touching. Based around an under-occupied hospice in a hippy backwater of California, it has a great cast of complex, lovingly rendered oddballs. My travelling companion this year has been Michael Palin's The Python Diaries: 1969 - 1979 which I'm savouring, enjoying reading about conflicts and dynamics within group, even early on. Short story-wise, Canadian writer and editor Matthew Firth's incredibly sexy and gritty Suburban Pornography And Other Stories took some beating.

BEST SPORT

The William Hill Prize this year went to Provided You Don't Kiss Me, Duncan Hamilton's account of 20 years with Brian Clough, above. (He also hit the headlines due to his widow's anger at his representation in a novel by David Peace). A surprise hit was Anthony Holden's Bigger Deal, which updated his previous year on the Poker circuit with equal sardonic touches and pen-portraits. Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places is not just an account of mountaineering and wilderness endurance, but a memoir, a travelogue and one of the most poetic books of the year. Highly acclaimed as well was Richard Moore's In Search Of Robert Millar, introducing a wonderful note of enigma and mystery into a genre more usually associated with self-promotion and ghosted memoirs. As for less 'win' orientated sports writing, Michael Simkins' Fatty Batter: How Cricket Saved My Life (Then Ruined It) is a delightful and witty account.

BEST POLITICS

Alastair Campbell's The Blair Years caused most excitement this year: perhaps more in the expectation than the delivery, as he admitted they have been judiciously edited. Posterity will have to wait for the whole story. The departure of Blair was given a triumphal twist by Anthony Seldon (Blair Unbound) and Gordon Brown's succession was heralded in his own anthology of personal heroes Courage, while David Cameron was dissected in a biography, Cameron: The Rise Of The New Conservative, by Francis Elliott and James Hanning. Peter Oborne's The Triumph Of The Political Class might prove uncomfortable reading for modernisers of all stripes. Robert Draper had unprecedented access to George Bush for his memoir, Dead Certain, and the polemic of the year must be Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine - though its ire often hides its ideas.

BEST FICTION

It's difficult to single out only a few titles in a year that saw new work from Don DeLillo, Jonathan Coe, Jeanette Winterson, Kate Mosse, Hari Kunzru, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Lethem, Ian McEwan and Graham Swift; however, two new voices, Steven Hall, below, (The Raw Shark Texts) and GW Dahlquist (The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters) managed the crossover between 'literary' fiction and rip-roaring page-turner. That both are to be filmed is hardly surprising.

Nicola Barker's Darkmans might well be remembered as the best novel not to win the Booker - it's hallucinatory, satirical and scintillating.

A more traditional but just as haunting novel was Ben Markovits' Imposture, about celebrity and forgery in the Regency (a sequel is coming in January).

And at last Dave Eggers, who showed so much promise with A Heart-Breaking Work Of Staggering Genius, fulfils it with What Is The What, a harrowing account of refugees, their hopes and compromises.

BEST CHILDREN

With The Deathly Hallows, JK Rowling finally concluded the Harry Potter sequence, to the delight of fans and the relief of others. If you're looking for a replacement, then China Miville's Un Lun Dun bursts with imagination and adventure, and has a suitably complex message. In other series, Young Bond is up to Hurricane Gold and rival teen spy Alex Rider faces off with the Snakeheads in Anthony Horowitz's latest.

For younger readers, The Incredible Book-Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers is great fun; as is Matthew Fitt, James Robertson and Karen Anne Sutherland's Katie's Moose a'keek-a-boo book' in Scots. Nicola Morgan continues the adventures of Bess and Will in The Highwayman's Curse, set in Galloway after the Killing Times.

BEST SCOTTISH

Again, a year with many excellent offerings from our best writers. AL Kennedy's Day is her most accomplished and ambiguous work to date; telling the story of a rear-gunner who finds himself, and loses everything, in the war. John Burnside's The Devil's Footprints introduced a more redemptive note to his rural, gothic materials, while Ali Smith was in ravishing form with Girl Meets Boy, a retelling of the myth of Iphis with bags of joie-de-vivre. Rebus finally retired in Ian Rankin's Exit Music, in an ingeniously plotted and emotionally satisfying end to the series... for now. But if you really want to appreciate the diversity of Scottish writing, then Robert Crawford's Scotland's Books is a magisterial study, intellectually dazzling and never academically foostie.

BEST HISTORY

Andrew Marr's A History Of Modern Britain garnered superb reviews, not just for its ambitious arc, but also for its journalistic detail. As much murder mystery as historical study, James and Ben Long's The Plot Against Pepys brilliantly evoked a little-known aspect of the great diarist's life.

Alison Light's Mrs Woolf And The Servants put Bohemian liberation in the context of domestic service, and convincingly showed how a "room of one's own" is always easier with a copious staff.

At the other extreme, Daughter Of Heaven by Nigel Cawthorne was unbelievable history, charting the rise of Wu Chao, the only woman to become Emperor of China (and a horrific prospect that was). Hugh Kennedy's The Great Arab Conquests shows how Islam transformed from local sect to imperial power in a mere century: and it's not a stereotype of jihad and scimitars.

BEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY

As per always, there were plenty of new books by the likes of Jordan and Sharon Osbourne, with a particularly rich seam of rock memoirs (Clapton, Ronnie Wood, Pearl Lowe, Pattie Boyd, Pete Doherty's scrap book). Of all of these, A Bit Of A Blur by Alex James, right, is the best written and most honest. Clive James gave a kind of memoir of the mind in his wide-ranging book of enthusiasms, Cultural Amnesia, and Helen Mirren opted for a patch-work of personal photographs and short paragraphs with In The Frame. Of a more bookish hue were both the Collected Letters of Ted Hughes and another waspish and wistful collection of Diaries by James Lees-Milne.