Stranger than fiction

JANUARY

The usually dark and depressing opening of the year used to be given over to publishing titles like The Use of Speeches In Thucydides: not so nowadays. As well as G W Dahlquist's ripping yarn, The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters, we had Doris Lessing's The Cleft. Ursula Le Guin claimed it for the "literature of misogyny". Ten months later, Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature, hailed by the judges as "that epicist of the female experience".

The City of Literature's Kidnapped campaign was so successful – in graphic novel format, Scots language version and a tactful retelling for reluctant readers – that a year later, they announced that The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde would be the next title. City of Literature or City of R L Stevenson?

FEBRUARY

Edinburgh-born Stef Penney won the Costa award. As an agoraphobic she had used the British Library to research her novel, set in 19th century Canada. An e-spat broke out about the ethics of a writer setting her tale in a country she had never seen, though few complained that she hadn't lived in the 19th century either. It set a trend for surprise judgments: most prizes didn't go to the favourite, let alone the best. For the record, Nicola Barker's Darkmans gets my vote for "most overlooked book of the year".

MARCH

The StAnza festival staged a reading featuring 100 poets in a single day. The event ended with the wonderful Alastair Reid reciting his best-known poem, 'Scotland', and then burning it. Reid claimed he was sick of the poem, and that its final line "We'll pay for it, we'll pay for it, we'll pay for it" was no longer typical of Scottishness. To prove the point, Reid, now in his eighties, registered to vote in Scotland for the first time.

On the festival circuit, the highlight was a reviewers versus writers face-off in Melrose, and the low-point was Edi Stark trying to make Lionel Shriver cry on-stage at Aberdeen's WORD festival.

APRIL

April and September are the months where the big fiction titles are launched: this year, we had new work from former Booker winner Graham Swift, John Burnside, Blake Morrison, AL Kennedy and Ian McEwan, with On Chesil Beach

which the ferocious New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani slated as "small, sullen and unsatisfying". It sold more than 100,000, but failed to take any of big prizes as expected.

MAY

In a landmark ruling, US District Judge Richard J Holwell decided that people who had bought James Frey's "memoir" under the impression it was un-made-up should receive compensation. A full 1,729 readers applied for the cash, out of 2.3 million who bought the book. The ruling did not stave off the tidal wave of misery memoirs and explicit call-girl tell-all books. From Girl With A One-Track Mind to Please Daddy, Don't, the similarity was pity.

JUNE

The John Murray Archive opened in the National Library of Scotland. You wouldn't think that a cache of letters and account books would be so revealing and inspiring. Going through a replica of Murray's original front-door, a fusion of Victoriana and Sci-Fi subverts and seduces: Darwin asks his son to play the bassoon to earthworms, Livingstone's letters are stained with splashes of tropical rain and Jane Austen is not invited to a party to sell her books. There is even a coal fire grate, but you can't burn books in it, thankfully.

JULY

Civilisation stopped for a couple of days, because JK Rowling revealed who wins between Good and Evil in the final Harry Potter book. In a surprise twist, everyone lived happily ever after. Professor Terry Eagleton published the second edition of Ideology without fanfare, until it was noticed he likened Martin Amis's views on Islamism to "the ramblings of a British National Party thug". This year's best spat soon drew in Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, Chris Morris and many others, and looks set to run into the new year, when Amis publishes The Second Plane. Given the number of books exploring the complexity of Islam (Hans Kung, Hugh Kennedy, Zachary Karabell), Amis seems more and more on the back heel.

AUGUST

Ian Rankin's last – or at least latest – Rebus novel, Exit Music was launched. The excellent novel was overshadowed by a great brouhaha between Rankin and detective author Val McDermid, over Rankin's claims that female crime writers are more keen on ultra-violence than male writers. In her rebuttal, McDermid reminisced about wanting to grab a chain-store fiction buyer by the throat and call him a "stupid a***hole". Game, set and match to Rankin.

SEPTEMBER

The second wave of big names was released: Jonathan Coe, Jeanette Winterson, Michael Ondaatje… all of whom were already left off the "giant-slaying" Booker shortlist. McEwan squeaked through, to become the bookie's favourite. In Wigtown, far away from the supposed centres of power, the Reverend Ian Paisley launched its Book Festival, talking about the Wigtown Martyrs and the disgraceful state of the roads in Ulster.

OCTOBER

With more of a whimper than a bang, Anne Enright received the Man Booker Prize. The chair of judges, Howard Davies, said "it has an absolutely brilliant ending" (better than the ending of Darkmans, where a ghost and an immigrant sit down to play games of chance?). The entire shortlist failed to sell as much as glamour model Jordan's debut novel, Crystal.

NOVEMBER

Online bookseller Amazon revealed its latest innovation: the Kindle, a "paperless reading delivery format" – basically, an iPod that can carry lots of text files. So it is now possible to drop a library in the bath, rather than just a book. It emerged that Amazon, yet again, was rushing ahead of the legal status of books: the Kindle could be used to "file-share" – ie thieve – books. Short of JK Rowling stepping in, it seems inevitable that copyright will suffer the death by a thousand cuts. Norman Mailer posthumously won the Bad Sex Award, and we await whether or not the rest of his factional life of Hitler comes to light. I'd rather read The Naked And The Dead myself.

DECEMBER

Do Ants Have Arseholes? topped the Christmas list on-line, beating The Book of Poo, What Shat That? and countless other "lav-lit" books. The next round of book prize judges, as announced, shows there's a career beyond indie pop: Alex James will judge the Costa, and Lily Allen the Orange. Ian McEwan must be weeping into his royalty receipts. Was 2007 a vintage year? Given that I read great work by Steven Hall (The Raw Shark Texts), Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Gentlemen of the Road), Marie Phillips (God Behaving Badly) and Don DeLillo (Falling Man), I'd say it was a bit more than B+.

The biz prizes

The Man Booker: Anne Enright

The International Man Booker: Chinua Achebe

The Orange Prize: Chimamanda Ngozie Adochie

The Costa Award: Stef Penney

The Guardian First Book Award: Dinaw Mengestu

The Saltire Award: AL Kennedy

The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize: Sarah Hall

The Forward Prize for Poetry: Sean O'Brien

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: Cormac McCarthy

WISHFUL THINKING

Where are the great new Scottish novelists? Warner, Welsh and Kennedy are accepted wisdom now, how about a new charge of Scots scribes to set the heather alight this year?