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

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

Dan Rhodes, author INa literary climate where young writers are so often praised for their (yawn) maturity, it was a real pleasure to read the resolutely un-grown-up Hound Dog (Jonathan Cape, GBP14.99) by Richard Blandford. Squalid, raucous and wildly entertaining, this tale of a renegade Elvis impersonator would make an ideal stocking-filler for the surly teen in your life. Amelie Nothomb is a bit more sensible, but in her case that's not such a bad thing.

The Life Of Hunger (Faber, GBP9.99) must be about her 100th quasi- autobiographical slim volume, but it's always fun to take a journey inside her extraordinary Belgian brain. This is deluxe navel- gazing. And it's heartwarming to see The Slaves Of Solitude (Constable & Robinson, GBP7.99) by the mighty Patrick Hamilton back in print, where it belongs.

Mark Cousins, film critic and broadcaster ATthe beginning of the year I adored Joan Didion's The Year Of Magical Thinking (HarperPerennial, GBP7.99) and Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad (Canongate, GBP7.99). Atwood's encomium on Lewis Hyde's The Gift (Canongate, GBP15) made me read it, after a summer of bad news and bleak times. Hyde's book lifted my spirits and turned me back into myself. The best paragraphs I read this year were in Alan Warner's The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven (Jonathan Cape, GBP11.99).

China On Screen: Cinema And Nation (Columbia University Press, GBP17), by Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, made me look at Chinese movies in new ways.

James Meek, author WHILE I read it, John Burnside's A Lie About My Father (Jonathan Cape, GBP12.99) transplanted itself into that curious region of memory usually reserved for recollection of my own dreams and nightmares. As unlikely as truth and as true as the well- imagined, with a poet's concern for language and a novelistic scope of time, space and narrative, it becomes immediately a part of the literary landscape; one of those high lochs only visible after a long foot journey, from which you come back changed.

There are novels, and there are metanovels the sum of a novelist's life work. I'm not sure which is the greater delight from Alan Warner's excellent The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven (Jonathan Cape, GBP11.99): the book itself, an evocation of modern middle- class southern Europe as plausible as it is lyrical; or the sense that the arch is still rising and the keystone of Warner's life work is yet to come.

Lady Antonia Fraser, historian ANY year when there is a new Ian Rankin, his work must be a strong contender for my most enjoyable book of the year.

TheNaming Of The Dead (Orion, GBP17.99) is one of his very best: who but Rankin would make a riveting mystery out of the G8 summit? There remains the hideous question of Rebus's looming retirement. I can only quote Glck's Orfeo in his famous lament on the subject of loss: Che faro senza [Euridice]? (What shall I do without him? ) Ruth Scurr's Fatal Purity: Robespierre And The French Revolution (Chatto & Windus, GBP20) is an extremely intelligent, wellresearched book with elements of the detective story. What happened to turn the earnest, liberal revolutionary who believed in universal suffrage into the leader of the Terror? Another notable historical biography, Catherine The Great: Love, Sex And Power by Virginia Rounding (Hutchinson, GBP20), tells the gripping story of the longestruling Russian monarch. Both of the latter, incidentally, are first books: very encouraging for the future of historical biography, a subject, of course, about which I am particularly passionate.