Elsewhere two outstanding novels touched on the life of Christ

Elsewhere, two outstanding novels touched on the life of Christ. Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces (Bloomsbury) is not just the year’s best novel written by a woman but its best novel per se. Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life (Picador) is the best primer I know for those wary of the Real Thing Deeply beguiling. I read Katiza’s Journey (Sidgwick & Jackson), Fred Bridgland’s skewering of Winnie Mandela, with fascination.

The Mother of the Nation devouring her children: a kind of Lady Macbeth of Soweto.Michael ArdittiAt least one jury got it right. My treat came in the form of The Pope’s Elephant (Caracanet) by Silvio A Bedini. The sad, mad and salutary tale of the little white elephant, Hanno and the jolly Medici Pope Leo X; Raphael and Luther have walk-on parts. A thriller, a love story and a deeply moving examination of a German conscience. Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth pastiche Mason & Dixon (Cape) is an exuberant return to form.

Philip Roth’s dark panorama American Pastoral (Cape) begins a trilogy which promises to rate among the great fictions of our time. In his monumental reassessment of Keats (Faber), Andrew Motion breathes fire into a pallid stereotype.Christopher HopeThe Reader by Bernard Schlink (Phoenix House (translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway) is a tender, horrifying novel that shows blazingly well how the Holocaust should be dealt with in fiction. The illustrations in Max Beerbohm Caricatures by N John Hall (Yale) are beautifully reproduced and the chatty text is a joy. Anyone enraptured with Joe Gould’s Secret by Joseph Mitchell (Cape), a poignant profile of a vintage New York eccentric, should seek out McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, with more addictive New Yorker pieces.

The circling, feints, lunges and sheer intimacy of boxing provide a haunting metaphor for the relationship. A sparse, melancholy, beautifully written book about the bruises life can inflict. “Joe” Carstairs was a bruiser of a different kind, a ferociously butch speed-boat fan who ended up as The Queen of Whale Cay (Fourth Estate). Kate Summerscale’s shrewd account of an heiress who slept with scores of women but lost her heart to a sinister male doll was the year’s most beguiling biography.Christopher HirstIt took an American publisher and author to produce a worthy celebration of the finest British caricaturist.