MY TOP 30 FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2005

IT’S been an astounding year for literary fiction. Yes, it’s that time of year again. And the established names in British fiction were out in full force: Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. Also there were a couple of excellent débuts by Daniel Alarcón, Diana Evans, Peter Hobbs and Jim Lynch. Here then are my picks for the 30 best books of the year.

NOVELS
Arthur & George (Jonathan Cape) / Julian Barnes
A Long Long Way (Faber & Faber) / Sebastian Barry
Never Let Me Go (Faber & Faber) / Kazuo Ishiguro
Beyond Black (Harper Perennial) / Hilary Mantel
Saturday (Jonathan Cape) / Ian McEwan
The People’s Act of Love (Canongate) / James Meek
Dancing in the Dark (Secker & Warburg) / Caryl Phillips
Rules for Old Men Waiting (Chatto & Windus) / Peter Pouncey
Shalimar the Clown (Jonathan Cape) / Salman Rushdie
The Accidental (Hamish Hamilton) / Ali Smith
On Beauty (Hamish Hamilton) / Zadie Smith
The Angel of Forgetfulness (Viking) / Steve Stern
Divided Kingdom (Bloomsbury) / Rupert Thomson

STORIES
Here is Where We Meet (Bloomsbury) / John Berger
Ghost Town (Bloomsbury) / Patrick McGrath

BEST DÉBUTS
War by Candlelight (HarperCollins) / Daniel Alarcón
The Harmony Silk Factory (HarperCollins) / Tash Aw
26a (Chatto & Windus) / Diana Evans
The Short Day Dying (Faber & Faber) / Peter Hobbs
The Ha-Ha (Little, Brown) / Dave King
The Highest Tide (Bloomsbury) / Jim Lynch

POETRY
Where Shall I Wander: New Poems (Ecco) / John Ashbery
Legion (Faber & Faber) / David Harsent
Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press) / W.S. Merwin

NONFICTION
Quicksands: A Memoir (Hamish Hamilton) / Sybille Bedford
Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (Shoemaker & Hoard) / Robert Dessaix
The Year of Magical Thinking (Fourth Estate) / Joan Didion
Findings (Sort of Books) / Kathleen Jamie
Memoir (Faber & Faber) / John McGahern
Istanbul: Memories of a City (published in the U.S. as Istanbul: Memories and the City) (Faber & Faber) / Orhan Pamuk (trans. from the Turkish by Maureen Freely)
13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (Alfred A. Knopf) / Jane Smiley
Two Lives (Time Warner) / Vikram Seth