BOOKS THAT WILL KNOCK YOUR SOCKS OFF (1 OF 2) BOOKS OF THE YEAR

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Dec 3, 2006

Vicky Featherstone, director, National Theatre of Scotland I WAS blown away by David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas with its multiple narrators, but in his fourth novel Black Swan Green (Sceptre, GBP16.99) he finds greater focus with an evocative and authentic voice for a young teenage boy at the time of the Falklands war. It's an achingly sad novel and will connect deeply with anyone who's ever had to grow up, but especially those who come of age in the early 1980s. And it has one of the most beautiful descriptions of the act of writing that I've ever read.

Kirsty Wark, broadcaster ANDREW O'Hagan's BeNear Me (Faber, GBP16.99) was one of the most intelligent, tender and challenging books I have read. Set in a small Ayrshire town (of a kind I know well), it's both the story of the reaction of the town to the arrival of a cultured English Roman Catholic priest and his own emotional journey. O'Hagan is an occasional guest on Newsnight Review and Julie Myerson is on more regularly, but I would have picked his and her book regardless. Myerson's latest novel The Story Of You (Jonathan Cape, GBP14.99) explores the impact of grief as the narrator Rosy conjures up a long-past encounter and brings it into her real workaday world.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road (Picador, GBP16.99) should be on everybody's Christmas shopping list. The American landscape is desolate after some kind of disaster; the dead lie where they perished. A man and his son try to make it to the coast, hiding from marauding road gangs, foraging in abandoned houses for food and water. It is a warning, but it is the intimacy between father and son that marks this book out.

Dr Richard Holloway, director of Creative Scotland THE blockbuster of the year has to be William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal (Bloomsbury, GBP25), a study of the 1857 Delhi uprising against the Raj. Not least of its many virtues is the way it demonstrates the dynamic interconnection between historical events that go on reverberating down the centuries.

Today's Taliban are the great great grandchildren of the rebels of 1857. An intellectual blockbuster of 2006 was undoubtedly Daniel C Dennett's Breaking The Spell (Allen Lane, GBP25), an exhilarating attempt to explain religion as a natural phenomenon.

It's a bracing read for anyone interested in religion, though his definition of the subject is a bit too narrow for this reader. Brenda Maddox's latest biography, Freud's Wizard (John Murray, GBP25), is another stimulating read. It's an honest but affectionate life of Ernest Jones, the Welsh doctor who rescued Freud from the Nazis and brought him to London.

George Galloway, MP I HAVEN'T read a better analysis of where we are going politically and where we have come from than Simon Jenkins's Thatcher And Sons (Allen Lane, GBP20). The premise, with which I concur absolutely, is that Thatcher's successors, her sons, are carrying on the family policies.

Ominously, the most devoted son is Chancellor Gordon Brown. His profligacy as chancellor is minutely detailed. Absolutely necessary reading. I also enjoyed, if that's the right description, Fiasco (Allen Lane, GBP25), by Thomas Ricks, The Washington Post's Pentagon correspondent, a devastating and brutal dissection of the Iraq catastrophe. It's just a pity his paper didn't tell us all this before the war started. And a perfect stocking filler is my own Fidel Castro Handbook (MQ Publications, GBP14.99).

Alain de Botton, author ILEARNED a lot from Lewis Hyde's The Gift (Canongate, GBP15), a study of how artists are evaluated in societies like our own where a high income is taken as the principal measure of success. The veteran New Yorker writer John McPhee published Uncommon Carriers (Farrar Straus Giroux, GBP12.99), a set of interconnected essays about the ways in which cargo is transported around the world. There's a particularly memorable description of how lobsters are carried by UPS. MA Screech, the great translator of Montaigne's Essays into English, has published a fresh translation of Rabelais's Gargantua And Pantagruel (Penguin Classics, GBP16.99), which blows off the cobwebs, explains the jokes and lets us appreciate the genius.

Peter Howson, artist HAVING read Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (Bantam, GBP20), I felt stronger in my faith than ever before. Dawkins does more for religion than any great evangelist could: he's gone so antireligion it's funny now. I really enjoyed TheGift (Canongate, GBP15) by Lewis Hyde. The basis of the book is that a work of art is a gift, which is a great thing to read but causes problems as my collectors want my work for nothing now. He traces the history of art from biblical times, showing how it became a commodity that changes hands for huge amounts of money. I don't agree with everything Richard Holloway says in How To Read The Bible (Granta, GBP6.99), but I can't avoid someone whose writing is so honest.

Laura Hird, author OVER the past few years I've been lucky enough to feature several stories by BBC Short Story competition winner A Igoni Barrett on my website, several of which are included in his brilliant debut short story collection, From Caves Of Rotten Te e t h (Daylight, GBP7.99). Another great short story collection I'd recommend is Un-buttoning The Violin (Banipal, GBP3.95), which anthologises the work of four excellent Arab writers Joumana Haddad, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, Ala Hlehel and Abed Ismael in translation. The book's publication tied in with a well-received tour of these writers in the UK earlier this year. Taras Grescoe's TheDevil's Picnic (Macmillan, GBP12.99) in which he roams the world, trying food, drugs and drink that are illegal and considered dangerous by various authoritarian governing bodies, is also a great read.