JG Ballard:The most interesting novel of the year was Alex Garland’s The Tesseract, a moody psychological tale set in the Philippines, and an intriguing follow-up to his bestselling The Beach. Could Garland be the new Graham Greene? He is now 28, Greene’s age when he wrote Stamboul Train. Will Garland head for the Hollywood Hills or delve even deeper into more private terrain? One clue: his mother is a noted psychoanalyst. The best biography I read, and my book of the year, was Lindbergh by A Scott Berg, a fascinating account of the brave but deeply flawed aviation pioneer.
Peter Conrad: The novels I most admired were Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus, a drawlingly mesmeric anthology of Australian yarns, and Jim Shephard’s Nosferatu in Love, which lyrically reimagines the brief career of the film director FW Murnau. The best biography I read was Richard Osborne’s Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music, which judiciously disentangles the great conductor’s tortuous loyalties and treats him as a flawed, ambiguous hero, the personification of our tragic times.
Patricia de Lille: I don’t really get much time to read, so I read in between my busy schedule or when I’m on a long flight. This year, I’ve enjoyed reading The Eleven Commandments by Jeffrey Archer. The book is about a spy and a director of the CIA, who abuses her powers and uses the spy to do her dirty work. The writer’s well-crafted words reveal how people can manipulate others, using dirty tricks to fulfill their own interests – things that happen in our daily lives.
Shaun de Waal: The book that gave me the most pleasure this year was Tacitus’s Annals of Imperial Rome – riveting. That reading was sparked by Alan Massie’s enjoyable Augustus, Tiberius, Caesar trilogy. Of locally published work, Antjie Krog’s book about the revelations of the truth commission, Country of My Skull, was both the most demanding and the most rewarding. And Etienne van Heerden’s Kikuyu is a very impressive novel.
Nadine Gordimer:This year, my discovery of a writer I’d not read was Jos Saramago -and this was before he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Of the two Saramago novels I’ve read, The History of the Siege of Lisbon has become my runaway contender for book of the year. Of course it is not a history book at all, in any sense. The reluctant hero is a proof- reader in a publishing house who reverses the ”truth” of a history of the triumph of the Portuguese over the Moors by inserting a ”no” in the text where there was a vital ”yes”. This bold act of a humble functionary changes his life, propels him into a passionate contest between narrative and iconoclastic philosophical inquiry into what we believe is human history. It is also beautifully erotic (as opposed to any confusion with pornographic).
Stephen Gray: The book of the year has to be, for me, Edmund White’s novel The Farewell Symphony. It truly is a great memorialisation of a happy way of life that has become extinct.
Paul Hanmer:The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, 1988 winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The book is about the people whose collective endeavour made possible the biggest shift in global human reality in our age – the knowledge that we have the ability to wipe out the known world in a split- second. It is also ironic that most of these scientists and theoreticians were Jews who fled from Hitler.
Richard Ingrams: I choose Tom Bowers’s Fayed: The Unauthorised Biography, a work of great power if not brilliant prose, which exposes the corruption not only of Fayed but of politics, press and police. It is a sinister and farcical story, ending with the death of Diana which, had it been written as fiction, would have been dismissed as fantastic and absurd. But this is the world we live in.
Ronnie Kasrils:Commando by Deneys Reitz, an enduring and racy narrative of the Anglo-Boer War as experienced by a young combatant who learnt to ride, hunt and swim almost as soon as he could walk. As lively as when it was first written, the beauty and harshness of our country leaps from every page. If only the Boers had realised that freedom is indivisable we could have attained democracy much sooner.
Baleka Kgositsile: A Proper Marriage by Doris Lessing brilliantly looks at what happens when men go to war and women remain behind with babies. It explores race relations and class and gender issues. It is interesting that through the writer’s eye we discover tensions in a white community which are not apparent to blacks.
Sibongile Khumalo:Value in the Valley by Iyanla Vanzant. This motivational book is the most inspirational, insightful and empowering. It pulled me up, helped me focus better on issues. Importantly, it has helped me understand that the two most fundamental emotions are love and fear. All our actions and expressions are motivated by an unconditional love of the human spirit or a fear of it, and what it is we need to be aware of to get past our fear, in order to express love.
Hanif Kureishi: Richard Osborne’s biography, Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music, is a vast, unflinching tome, the story of a fascinating man in difficult times. The clashing and merging of centuries, technologies and orchestras is expertly told. The scope, range and quality of Don DeLillo’s magnificent novel Underworld shows – along with Philip Roth’s recent work – how much life there is in the old form yet.
Hermione Lee : The book of this year must be Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, a great work of elegy and tribute, paradoxically made up of violent drama and delicately precise memory, grandiose fatalism and self-lacerating guilt, baffling rectitude and heartbreaking candour, deep grief and wry comedy. The worth of the book matches up to the myth that’s being made of it.
Tony Leon:The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes. The subtitle explains it all – Why Some Are So Rich and Some Are So Poor. This book should be compulsory reading over the Christmas period for both the Cabinet and Cosatu’s national executive, because the subject matter is of overriding importance and it is written in such clear and concise language.
Kathy Lette: In the great tradition of the English social and political novel comes John Mortimer’s A Sound of Trumpets. His is the authentic voice of the new semi-detached English middle class: kind but ironic, holding on to humane values as a hedge against anarchy or the return of Thatcherism.
Zola Maseko: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. What makes it a good book is that it revolves around incidents in real life that one comes across again and again. It is universal story of class struggle and racial and religious clashes.
Zanemvula ‘Zakes’ Mda: My favourite books this year have been by Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera. Her books deal with issues such as the oppression of black women. Under the Tongue explores betrayal in families between father and daughter – something that has not been dealt with in our literature. In Without a Name, she deals with the experience of one women, who, during the war, was driven to the city, which contained the promise of freedom, only to find oppression.
Zim Ngqawana: In Civilisation or Barbarism, Cheikh Antha Diop has demonstrated, from the linguistic to the archeological, from the historical to the philosophical, that Egypt experienced a black civilisation and blacks are rightful heirs to Egypt’s proud legacy. In order for us to move in an Afrocentric manner, we will need to learn from the history of Egypt.
Edmund White: Alan Sheridan’s Gide restored my interest in this favourite of my adolescence – and revealed the wildly active sex life of France’s leading moralist.
Malcolm Bradbury: The first volume of Richard Holmes’s Coleridge (1989) was acknowledged as one of the great modern biographies, of an obscure and difficult figure, an intellectual magician and sometimes a fool, whom Holmes brought to new comprehension. The second volume, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, completes the narrative and the interpretation. The rounding out of a fascinating life, this is a truly fine book.
Jan Morris:Three books I have much admired in 1998: Lords of the Horizons by Jason Goodwin, a wonderfully tumultuous history of the Ottoman empire; Lord Byron’s Jackal, David Crane’s biography of that endearing fraud Edward Trelawny; and Jon Stallworthy’s Singing School, a lovely autobiographical analysis of a poetic upbringing.