Rose Tremain’s The Way I Found Her Sinclair- Stevenson was a wonderfully subtle Parisian pleasure and one

Rose Tremain’s The Way I Found Her (Sinclair- Stevenson) was a wonderfully subtle Parisian pleasure, and one of several British novels that show fiction’s state to be far better than that represented by the Booker shortlist. So is Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (Cape): the story of the two British shapers of America’s dividing line; this was worth the wait, even if it falls into longueurs at the end. Will Self’s Great Apes (Cape) was one of the few UK publications this year that was not dull, dull, dull.Malcolm BradburyRobert Hughes’ s American Visions (Harvill) isn’t simply a remarkable history of US painting, but a quite remarkable history of America itself. Best polemic: Mind Invaders edited by Stewart Home (Serpent’s Tail) for those who want to learn about the bizarre occult practices of the Royal Family and much worse. Best novels: liking A M Homes’s The End Of Alice (Anchor) will get you labelled a literary ambulance-chaser but it remains a brave attempt at a certain type of US academic, intertextual novel.

Best memoir: Laid Bare: wrecked lives and the Hollywood death trip (Amok) by John Gilmore, one of LA’s weirdest who has been close to everyone, from James Dean to Brigitte Bardot. Best biography: Utopia Parkway: the life and work of Joseph Cornell (Cape) by Deborah Solomon, despite a limited budget for art-work. If genuine – there has been some controversy on this point – it is a lost masterpiece of early travel writing, a gutsy, fascinating account of a 13th-century Italian merchant’s journey to China. Among modern travellers, few have ventured more courageously than Dea Birkett (Serpent in Paradise, Picador) whose sojourn on Pitcairn was a battle with claustrophobia and intrigue a thousand miles from anywhere.Elizabeth YoungBest newcomer: Slow Dance On The Fault Line (Flamingo) by Donald Rawley, a Truman Capote for MTV.

In The Cut by Susanna Moore (Picador) was the other novel that impressed me most this year.Charles NichollCertainly the most intriguing book of the year is The City of Light by Jacob d’Ancona, edited and translated by David Selbourne (Little, Brown). Compacted and capacious, hard-focused yet improvisatory, it triumphantly reignites the possibilities of what has often appeared to be a floundering, failing form. Teeming, engrossing, skilful, it proves that there is no such thing as a “good story”, only good writers with unlazy ears and an original approach. I was impatient to read Underworld, DeLillo’s new novel (Picador, January 1998) and I am impatient to recommend it as a culmination of his gifts.

Oswald’s Tale (Abacus) is a kind of companion volume to Gary Wills and Ovid Demaris’s outstanding New Journalistic rendering of the life of Jack Ruby, killer of the killer. Norman Davies’s Europe: a history (Oxford) – besides paying due attention to central and eastern Europe – is illustrated by little capsules with shrewd insights into events and people.Gordon BurnWho else would have had the nerve to take a tilt at the Lee Harvey Oswald saga so soon after Don DeLillo seemed to have sucked the guts out of it in Libra? Only Norman Mailer. Nigel Nicolson’s Long Life (Weidenfeld) is beautifully written: a friend’s life which ran parallel to mine at Balliol, in Italy and Yugoslavia during the war, later in Parliament and Sussex. During my last summer holiday, I read all of Turgenev’s novels and stories, and Emily Dickinson’s poems. Nevertheless, I derived great pleasure from three books published in the past 12 months: Juliet Barker’s The Brontes: a life in letters (Viking) gave me a new insight into the Bronte family; in particular, Patrick’s letters show how misleading a picture Mrs Gaskell painted of him.