Ted Hughes tops critics' league table

Lindesay Irvine writing in The Guardian

For those in a hurry to find last year's "must reads", Booktrust has obligingly boiled down the reviewers' books of the year into one handy league table. After totting up 1,600 recommendations, the independent reading charity has found that The Letters of Ted Hughes was the title most frequently chosen as book of the year by newspaper critics.
Revealing both personal and critical passions, the late poet laureate's letters are written - about everything from astrology to Sylvia Plath - with just as much gusto as his poetry. Reading them for the Observer, Blake Morrison hoped that the book would see "the applause resound for one of England's greatest poets".

Although deemed to be rather less revealing than had been hoped, Alastair Campbell's The Blair Years, the spin doctor's characteristically hardbitten account of his time steering the government's public profile, still made second place.
The preference for non-fiction continued in the rest of the recommended reads with Hermione Lee's biography of Edith Wharton, Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin and David Kynaston's Austerity Britain proving popular with the reviewers.

Among the recommend novels, preeminent was Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, his farewell to alternative ego Nathan Zuckerman. The Man Booker prize-shortlisted title, Nicola Barker's Darkmans, received twice as many mentions as the winner, Anne Enright's The Gathering.

The publisher Faber came out best from the critics' picks with its titles chosen more than any other publisher. While doing well from Ted Hughes, it also benefited from having a broad range of titles in the table, from Daljit Nagra's poetry collection Look We Have Coming to Dover! to Clair Wills' history of Ireland That Neutral Island to Michael Dibdin's last book End Games.

Most chosen titles:

Letters of Ted Hughes by Christopher Reid (11)
The Blair Years by Alastair Campbell (9)
Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee (8)
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore (7)
Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre (7)
Exit Ghost by Philip Roth (7)
Austerity Britain by David Kynaston (7)
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes (7)
God's Architect by Rosemary Hill (7)
Moro East by Sam and Sam Clarke (7)
River Cottage Fish Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (7)
My Manchester United Years by Bobby Charlton (6)
The Lodger by Charles Nicholl (6)
Darkmans by Nicola Barker (6)
Graham Greene Letters by Richard Greene (6)
Winnie and Wolf by AN Wilson (6)
Letters of Noel Coward by Barry Day (6)
Nureyev by Julie Kavanagh (6)
Autobiography by Eric Clapton (6)
Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (5)
The Discovery of France by Graham Robb (5)

Most chosen publishers:

Faber (93)
Allen Lane (78)
Jonathan Cape (77)
Bloomsbury (75)