Books of the year 2002

Cannabis and cowgirls, Zola (but not Zadie), 'Embers' rather than Amis: these are the books that appealed to our exacting band of critics this year

Justin Cartwright

Justin Cartwright

Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari (Hamish Hamilton), an account of his journey from Cairo to Cape Town, is vintage Theroux, with an unexpected dash of humanity. I also loved Balthasar's Odyssey by Amin Maalouf (Harvill), a rather fantastical but witty tale of a 17th-century merchant facing the Year of the Beast. AC Grayling's collection of essays, The Reason of Things: Living with Philosophy (Weidenfeld), is excellent.

Christopher Fowler

The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin (Faber): an eerie, wet-black world of sooty viaducts and clanking locomotives, illuminated in a murderous conspiracy of a plot, graced with style, wit and the sharp taste of a lost time.

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination by Peter Ackroyd (Chatto): a fascinating cultural history of what it means to be English, and a wonderful companion volume to London: the Biography.

Do Not Pass Go by Tim Moore (Yellow Jersey): hailed as "the new Bill Bryson", Moore provides an ideal balance of travel, anecdote and dry wit as he hops around the London sites of a 1930s Monopoly board.

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich (Granta): how does the American underclass survive on the minimum wage? Journalist Ehrenreich finds out by joining them in a shocking, illuminating odyssey.

Best New Horror 13 ed Stephen Jones (Carroll & Graf): throw preconceptions aside and discover the vast dark heart of new fiction, 23 stories plus an overview, necrology and useful addresses.

Alan Sillitoe

First, William Kennedy's Roscoe (Scribner), a saga of city politics and corruption in Albany, NY, and an unforgettable love story. Out at the same time was The Albany Cycle, two fat volumes containing all six novels, a whole world of its own. Clive Sinclair displays his usual brilliance in Meet the Wife (Picador), the ultramodern bound up with classical allusions. A new man, Edward Wilson, gives us, and with many thanks from me, A River in May (Arcadia), the best Vietnam novel ever, which everyone should read. Born American, Wilson now has British nationality and lives in East Anglia. Finally, Fast and Louche (Profile), Jeremy Scott's enthralling autobiography: wit and pathos finely balanced, an unbeatable combination.

Maggie O'Farrell

The books I liked most this year were all first novels. Jon McGregor's Booker-longlisted If nobody speaks of remarkable things (Bloomsbury) is the best book I've read in a long time: profound, daring and beautifully fragile. I also enjoyed Chloe Hooper's sinister and sensual A Child's Book of True Crime (Vintage), Bella Bathurst's wonderfully horrifying snapshot of teenage girls, Special (Picador), and Mary Lawson's compelling and moving Crow Lake (Chatto).

Mark Bostridge

Blake Morrison's Things My Mother Never Told Me (Chatto) is a very different book from his father memoir, but no less of an achievement as he skilfully evokes the civilian world of the Second World War and his mother's hidden life.

Sarah Waters's Fingersmith (Virago) is a novel of twists and turns from a wonderful novelist still only in her 30s.

Lewis Carroll: Photographer, eds Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling (Princeton): the first comprehensive publication of all Carroll's photographs. Not just little girls, but an astonishing glimpse of Victorian England.

Frank McLynn

White Mughals by William Dalrymple (HarperCollins) was an impressive work, lifting some odd corners on the 18th-century British East India Company. Geoffrey Moorhouse's The Pilgrimage of Grace (Weidenfeld) showed England in 1536 at one of those "what if?" crossroads and incidentally revealed the loathsome Henry VIII in all his demonic full fig. Roy Hattersley's A Brand for the Burning (Little, Brown), a life of John Wesley, proved that this author has cornered the market in religious charismatics. But maybe my overall favourite was the tour de force of popular history, The Victorians (Hutchinson) by AN Wilson.

Jah Wobble

The Lowlife by Alexander Baron (Harvill) was reissued last year. It's a novel written from the perspective of a gambling addict, and Baron captures Harryboy's compulsion perfectly. It really is feverishly paced stuff. The book also has great personal resonance for me, particularly when Harryboy's sojourns into the East End proper from Hackney are documented.

Platform by Michel Houellebecq (Heinemann): so much has already been said about Houellebecq, and of course you can't say you like his books without, reluctantly, entering the debate. I happen to think he's one of the few good living novelists: undeniably brave, as well as honest. Much of what he has to say is pretty ugly; however, I don't think he simply looking to shock and offend.

Emma Tennant

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (Serpent's Tail): a classic of existential literature.

Clara by Janice Galloway (Cape): beautifully written, semi-fictional account of Clara Schumann's life of sacrifice and of her joint career with her husband.

Little Infamies by Panos Karnezis (Cape): short stories based on a typical Greek village, unicorns and all.

Matthew Branton

Guerrilla Growing: Marijuana Outdoors by Jorge Cervantes (order from marijuanagrowing.com, $15) The relaxation of cannabis prohibition this year wasn't specific on how many plants constitute a bust and how many a caution. With this book you don't need to worry, since your main concern outdoors is protecting your buds from rabbits, snails and dog-walkers. Donning waterproofs to plant inside nettle clumps is a particularly good idea, as is hoisting a Gro-Bag up a tree.

Spike Milligan's War Diaries (Penguin):

I found a box set of these this year. An antidote to Band of Brothers, and probably more realistic.

Inferno by Patrìcia Melo (Bloomsbury):

São Paolo's finest returns to the favelas of her first novel, The Killer, for a blistering, risk-taking narrative concerning the way it is.

AC Grayling

God: the Biography by Alexander Waugh (Review): colourful, funny, deep and perceptive, this is a book everyone should read, especially (on pain of being flung into eternal flames) those attracted to organised superstition.

Who's Sorry Now? by Howard Jacobson (Cape): dark, funny, deep and perceptive, this is the novel that should have won the Booker, and will become a classic of erotic complexities and their rewards and punishments.

The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years 1914-1970 ed Nicholas Griffin (Routledge): a great life is here revealed in its subject's own words, most written spontaneously, and still as fresh as the hour that prompted them; insightfully annotated and introduced, giving the best biographical account of Russell to date.

Of Men and their Making: the selected non-fiction of John Steinbeck (Allen Lane): essays by a fine writer and highly observant mind, celebrating friendship and the art of reporting life with honesty and exactness: a collection full of good things.

The Pilgrimage of Grace by Geoffrey Moorhouse: popular history in the best readable tradition of Macaulay and Bryant, showing Henry VIII's distinctly unattractive side, and recounting an extraordinary tale of popular uprising.

Elaine Feinstein

The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, trs Peter Constantine (Picador), includes much previously unknown work, Babel's early diary, and his daughter's own moving memoir. Babel is a powerful witness to human brutality and tenderness alike, and this book is a true monument to that extraordinary fusion of Russian and Jewish genius which enriched the 20th century. The poems in Ruth Padel's Voodoo Shop (Chatto) seemed to me among the most extraordinary of the year, their surface glittering with unexpected images, their passionate intensity unmistakably that of a rare original voice. And lastly, I recommend Emma Tennant's Felony (Cape), an intriguing novel which looks behind Henry James's The Aspern Papers, to James's relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson, and, while exploring the secrets of Claire Clairemont's household, reminds us wittily of the many transgressions inherent in both biography and fiction.

Iain Sinclair

Tom Clark's biography of fellow poet Ed Dorn, Edward Dorn: A World of Difference (North Atlantic Books) demonstrates that great American lives continue to be lived, beyond the mess of celebrity – in harsh places, restless movement, with eyes wide open. Dorn's acerbic take on oil wars and political piracy has never been more pertinent, less heard.

Dorn's role as cultural troubleshooter informs Chris Petit's undervalued thriller The Human Pool (Scribner). Here is an artfully contrived backstory, Wall Street and the Nazis, that exists not as a heritage set but as a way of showing us where we are. Present corruption feeding on remembered pain. Ghosts with voices will continue to whisper until the last banker unlocks the final strongbox.

The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (Bloomsbury) proves that transcribed talk – between editor/sound-designer Murch, and novelist Michael Ondaatje – can be absorbing, informative, unexpected. Mutual respect, bright memories (nice book design) make this project sing.

Ostensibly about film (but really about everything), my find of the year was Manny Farber's Negative Space (Studio Vista, 1971). I'd forgotten that film-writing could be so intelligent, grouchy, humane – and throwaway. Style and substance in a wild final fling before the dead hand of media studies and critical dogma put the lights out.

Matthew Sweet

Chloe Hooper's A Child's Book of True Crime – a hothouse thriller blessed with a lubricious and disturbingly unreliable heroine – was the smartest début in fiction, though the Hungarian Sándor Márai's Embers (Viking) proved well worth the 60-year wait for an English translation. Another Magyar subject, Charles Drazin's Korda: Britain's Only Movie Mogul (Sidgwick and Jackson), was an engrossing memoir with a scoop story about the film producer's espionage activities. But Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men (Faber) was in a class of its own: a whole world – one of fire balloons, dephlogisticated air and robotic horses – lived on its pages.

Stephen Knight

Paul Muldoon's Moy Sand and Gravel (Faber) is as dazzling as his previous work: dextrous, poignant, ambitious. A major poet, Muldoon continues to outshine his contemporaries. I also enjoyed the vitality of David Constantine's Something for the Ghosts (Bloodaxe), which brilliantly belies the melancholy of his material. His work is a hidden treasure: go and look for it. Finally, Anna Wigley's unfashionably quiet début The Bird Hospital (Gomer) deserves to be noticed. Her nature poems are haunting.

Suzi Feay

Two of the most interesting and accomplished novels of the year didn't even make it as far as the Booker longlist, never mind the shortlist: Justin Cartwright's White Lightning (Sceptre) and Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist (Hamish Hamilton). Both have been shortlisted for Whitbread prizes. Martin Millar's novel Suzy, Led Zeppelin and me (Codex) is a delirious ode to first loves both carnal and musical. Claire Tomalin's wonderful life of Pepys (The Unequalled Self, Viking) was perfectly judged, a critical but never mean-spirited biography, and so vivid it sent me on a literary pilgrimage to his house off the Strand.

Murrough O'Brien

Anyone who feels that a good book should slam you up against a wall and ravish you will adore Philip Hensher's The Mulberry Empire (Flamingo). Episodic, quirky, humane and horrible, this tale of the first Afghan war tears through the ranks of conventional criticism like some battle-blind elephant. Its faults are legion – pointless digressions, loose ends, an unpalatable archness of tone – but these enrich the book's unwholesome beauty.

There are fangs in the smile of the Mediterranean sun, and no one has pointed them out better than Panos Karnezis. Little Infamies, his collection of short stories, is an extraordinary evocation of the surreal world of Greek village life, where bureaucracy does not spare even corpses, where a widower can turn his two daughters into pets in payment for their mother's death in childbirth.

Michele Roberts

Marina Warner's new collection of stories, Murderers I Have Known (Chatto), sparkles with her inimitable and sophisticated style. These tales, both crisp and lyrical, form a cosmopolitan mixture of art history, magic, fairytale and urban myth. Patricia Duncker's book of essays Writing on the Wall (Pandora) sweeps across Gothic horror and romance, Angela Carter's contested feminism and contemporary writing, to exhilarating effect. Mary Laven's Virgins of Venice (Viking) is accessible, scholarly and thought-provoking. Ma by Gaston-Paul Effa (BlackAmber Books) is a lyrical, poetic meditation on motherhood, suffering and exile.

Ian Thomson

The Belfast writer Ciaran Carson's new translation of Dante's Inferno (Granta) is a corker. Bits of vulgar burlesque ("squit", "palooka") move wonderfully with the rough grain of Dante's speech, and sustain the stabbing beat of the original.

Robert Edric's novel Peacetime (Doubleday), set on the Fenland coast in 1946 is a powerful meditation on betrayal and friendship. Edric writes in a glacial, dispassionate prose that eschews histrionics; why this book failed to scoop the Booker, I don't know.

Pinochet in Piccadilly (Faber), Andy Beckett's account of Anglo-Chilean relations, was undeservedly panned by some critics. Whatever its drawbacks (leftist bias, political naïvety), the book is a wonderfully atmospheric amalgam of travel and reportage. I do hope Pinochet has enjoyed it.

Sarah Waters

Kathy Page's The Story of my Face (Weidenfeld) is one of the most unsettling, compelling novels I've read in ages, and should appeal to fans of classy thrillers and literary fiction alike. Francis Spufford's The Child That Books Built (Faber) is a bookworm's memoir, an analysis of children's fiction and a stimulating meditation on how and why we read, all rolled into one. Elizabeth Jane Howard's enormously engaging Slipstream (Pan) does everything a good autobiography should. And for lovers of kitsch, I can heartily recommend Alisa Surkis's and Monica Nolan's The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories (Kensington Books, NY), a collection of spoof pulp fictions which gives new meaning to the phrase "unbridled lust".

Johann Hari

I defy anybody to read Matthew Parris's Chance Witness (Viking) and not fall slightly in love with him. He writes with such simple, unpretentious beauty that I was tempted to lick the pages he writes on.

On the fiction front, Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby (Cape) is as deliriously, deliciously insane as his début, Fight Club, which is just about the highest praise I can bestow. And anybody with even the slightest interest in theatre will find Alan Ayckbourn's The Crafty Art of Play-Making (Faber) irresistible.

Scarlett Thomas

The best novel I read this year was Lili by Annie Wang (Macmillan) which, in crackling, provocative prose, tells of a young, rebellious misfit trying to find her place in post-Cultural Revolution Beijing. The only other novels I read this year with the same level of energy, spirit and authenticity were Twelve by Nick McDonell (Atlantic), Kelly & Victor by Niall Griffiths (Cape) and Special by Bella Bathurst. The Horned Man by James Lasdun (Cape) is also excellent: a complex, unsettling and very original début. The most important – and moving – book I read was The Algebra of Infinite Justice (Flamingo), a collection of Arundhati Roy's passionate political essays. Roy doesn't pretend to be objective about those subjects – mass annihilation, destruction, corruption, misery – that right-wing economists and war-mongers seem happy to represent in terms of statistics, if at all.

Kevin Le Gendre

A Love Supreme by Ashley Kahn (Granta): a brilliant follow-up to Kahn's story of the making of Miles Davis's jazz classic Kind Of Blue. He analyses John Coltrane's landmark with the same verve and intelligence.

Deep In A Dream by James Gavin (Chatto): a vivid, engrossing account of the chemically-assisted downward spiral of trumpeter Chet Baker, one of a long list of jazz tragedians.

Matt Thorne

2002 was the year of the difficult second novel. Of the three most prominent (Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man, Donna Tartt's The Little Friend and Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex), Middlesex (Bloomsbury) is the best, a genuine classic. Best newcomer was Andrew Holmes's Sleb (Sceptre): very twisted and very funny. Sarah Waters's Fingersmith (Virago) should've won the Booker, and Scarlett Thomas's Going Out (Fourth Estate) was extraordinarily accomplished, a real triumph for this underrated author.

Ruth Fainlight

One of the most absorbing books I read this year was Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters, ed and trs AD Skinner (Harvard). Scholem, best known for Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, left Germany in 1923 for Palestine, and soon after helped found Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace), which believed in a future bi-national Jewish-Arab government. The subjects of his concern and the people he

corresponded, and sometimes quarrelled, with – Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt (among others) – give an irreplaceable overview of the 20th century.

From the start, Elaine Feinstein's accomplished and warmly human poems have dealt with the timeless issues: love, family, separation and death, and in her Collected Poems and Translations (Carcanet), it is also a great pleasure to re-read her fine translations from Russian. Jane Duran's father was an officer of the Spanish Republican Army. In the final days he escaped aboard a British naval ship and never returned to his country. Nor did he ever speak about his experiences. Taking that silence as her subject has produced the compelling Silences from the Spanish Civil War (Enitharmon).

Two first novels by poets held my attention: Neil Astley's The End of My Tether (Flambard), a quirky combination of detective story, compilation of British folklore and diatribe against factory farming; and Judith Kazantzis's Of Love and Terror (Saqi), with its varied locations, vivid descriptive writing and convincingly obnoxious, yet – to the book's cast of otherwise intelligent female characters – seemingly irresistible hero.

Jo Shapcott

My poetry book of the year has to be Paul Muldoon's Moy Sand and Gravel for its extraordinary mixture of clarity, bravura and grace. Kamila Shamsie's latest novel, Kartography (Bloomsbury), is still sizzling in my imagination: it's a love story, set in Karachi, and full of politics and cultural conflict as well as those shadowy maps of the heart and of the mind. Kathleen Jamie's prose writing is utterly luminous, as you'd expect from her poetry, but Among Muslims (Sort of Books) is much more than a well-written travel book, and its insights are even more urgent in the light of the dangerous and criminal crudity of President Bush's approach to the region. Finally, Ruth Padel's collection of "Sunday Poem" columns from this newspaper, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (Chatto) is a must for anyone new to poetry. Her generosity and enthusiasm are gloriously infectious.

Robin Buss

It was a bumper year in 2002 for French literary anniversaries. The leading exponent of Naturalism, Emile Zola, died in September 1902 and the great Zolaist Henri Mitterrand arranged for the final part of his three-volume biography to come out spot on time: Zola, L'Honneur, 1893-1902; I am saving it for the Christmas holidays and beyond. Two friends, rivals and major figures in the Romantic movement, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, were born in 1802. Claude Schopp, an indefatigable editor and promoter of the second of these, managed a revised edition of his enjoyable biography for the bicentenary. Dumas, a man of huge appetites and energies, remains one of the great unexplored domains in French literature, the author of countless novels and plays, as well as journalism, memoirs, poetry, history, travel books, works on cookery and much beside. This year, Schopp also published an edition of Viva Garibaldi, Dumas's colourful account of how a planned voyage round the Mediterranean turned into an episode of gun-running for Garibaldi, who rewarded him with a year's lease on a palazzo in Naples, and the post of director of excavations and museums. Altogether, a bicentenary well worth celebrating. (All published by Fayard, Paris.)

Sue Gaisford

Observing a tiny insect crawling determinedly across his paper, Ogden Nash rejoiced. "No-one can tell", he wrote, "how pleased I am to find / On any sheet the least display of mind." It's been a very good year for displays of mind. Umberto Eco's is blazoned in all its gambolling erudition in his flamboyant novel Baudolino (Secker), as vast, baggy and compendious as Tristram Shandy and very nearly as much fun. In the opposite corner, following The Mariner's Star (Review), Candida Clark uses a minuscule fragment of canvas upon which to paint a delicate, poetic and unforgettably moving miniature of grief and resignation.

Away from fiction, there is no resisting the considerable mental muscle of two collections of essays. In Nobody's Perfect (Picador), Anthony Lane selects pieces from his 10 years as film critic of The New Yorker. Frequently prowling miles away from film – into Legoland for instance – he consistently surprises and delights with a heady blend of erudition and effervescence. And Jonathan Franzen's essays, How to be Alone (Fourth Estate), are as remarkable for their frankness as for their satirical, cynical and often very funny perceptiveness.

Mark Simpson

Bitter Eden by Tatumkhulu Afrika (Arcadia): a novel based on the author's experience of PoW camps during the Second World War, written in a prose-poetry that is as tough and tender as the passions he narrates.

24 Hour Party People by Tony Wilson (Channel 4 Books): rather better than the movie, as Wilson is more interesting than Steve Coogan and much funnier than Alan Partridge. It's full of provocatively pretentious literary quotations and the repeated catchphrase: "If you haven't heard of Baudelaire, that's fine. But you really should read more."

Stevie Davies

For me, two high points of the literary year were rediscovered mid-20th century masterpieces, the Hungarian Sándor Márai's uncanny novella, Embers and the German Wolfgang Koeppen's The Hothouse (Granta). Márai's chilling fable of Doppelgängers is at once timeless and an oblique take on the origins of Nazism in a degenerate Habsburg Empire. Koeppen's novel (1953) is a nihilist, mock-Wagnerian reflection on the unacknowledged corruption of post-War Germany.

Geoff Dyer

The most stimulating book of the year was in some ways the most eccentric-seeming: The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. Even at its most technical and detailed, their discussion tells much about art and perception. David Thomson's New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Little, Brown) is utterly indispensable – even for those who already have the old editions. Last year a number of people picked the reissue of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road as their book of the year. At the time I'd never heard of him or it but, in addition to the novel, I would press Yates's Collected Stories (Methuen) on you with all the zeal of the recently converted.

Rachel Holmes

Stupid White Men by Michael Moore (Penguin): all the dirty truth you need to know about the parlous state of modern America. Moore's irreverent exposé of "Thief-in-Chief" George Bush's power élite is fulminating, crammed with devastating facts and quite simply side-splittingly hilarious.

The Devil's Rope: A Cultural History of Barbed Wire by Alan Krell (Reaktion): this engaging essay contains all you need to know about barbed wire and its place in the social imagination. Krell draws on art, literature, film and advertising to illustrate the prevalent role of barbed wire in modern experience.

The Kalahari Typing School for Men (The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency) by Alexander McCall Smith (Polygon): the steely Miss Marple of Africa returns in the fourth novel in this justly acclaimed detective series. Precious Ramotswe, the founder of Botswana's only detective agency, solves the problems in people's lives, supported by McCall's crystalline and beautiful prose.

Don't Let's go to the Dogs Tonight: an African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller (Picador): a profoundly personal story about growing up in war-torn Zimbabwe, Malawi, and finally Zambia. Fuller's deftly original memoir of a white African childhood is clear eyed, gently ironic and deeply moving.

William Sutcliffe

William Boyd's Any Human Heart (Hamish Hamilton) is a rich and satisfying read, broad in scope, with wise and heartfelt insight into friendship, love and the passage of time. He is one of the very few British novelists who can relate a strong narrative without sacrificing intellectual or emotional depth. The most promising first novel I read this year was Susanna Jones's The Earthquake Bird (Picador), a sly, deft and touching literary thriller that didn't get the attention it deserved. Paperback of the year, without a doubt, is Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (Fourth Estate): a stupendous achievement, worthy of every column mile of hype. When future generations are looking for one novel to explain the early 21st century, this will be it.

Mark Timlin

First, a nasty little tale of a bent London copper who moonlights as a hitman: The Business of Dying by Simon Kernick (Bantam). Also on Bantam is a brutal story of murder and torture in Africa by Jeffrey Lee: Dog Days. Absolute Rage by Robert K Tanenbaum (Simon & Schuster) is a good old-fashioned revenger. It's set in a coal-mining community in the American deep South, where a last-ditch Vietnam battle is fought out deep in the mountainside. Finally, for all fans of flares, kipper ties and Ford Consuls, try Sweeney: The Official Companion by R Fairclough & M Kenwood (Reynolds & Hearn). It's just the thing for a trivia competition when the turkey and Christmas pud have gone down.