BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS : the novel

Justine Jordan, The Guardian, Saturday 12 December 2009

A trio of novels heads the Christmas wish list this year: one for the head, one for the heart and one for the hairs on the back of the neck. Hilary Mantel's brilliant Booker-winning reimagining of Tudor England, Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate, £18.99), Colm Tóibín's tender study of emigration from smalltown Ireland, Brooklyn (Viking, £17.99), and Sarah Waters's enveloping haunted house story, The Little Stranger (Virago, £16.99), would each make Boxing Day complete.

But 2009 also saw plenty of other writers on top form. In JM Coetzee's recent work he had almost refined himself out of fiction, but Summertime (Harvill Secker, £17.99), the last in his trilogy of fictionalised memoir, sees a vivid re-engagement with family, belonging and apartheid-era Cape Town refracted through a series of interviews with various baffled lovers and friends of "the late writer John Coetzee". It's fascinating, funny and perceptive.
In The Year of the Flood (Bloomsbury, £18.99) Margaret Atwood returns to the world of Oryx and Crake with a rollicking dystopia that combines gentle mockery of human foibles in its eco-religious sect, God's Gardeners, with an urgent warning of environmental apocalypse.

On a more domestic scale, but no less nail-biting, Rachel Cusk's The Bradshaw Variations (Faber, £15.99) is a brilliant portrayal of family life, childhood's echoes and the isolating tug of personal ambition. She's a beautiful stylist, and this is her best novel yet. There's a mythic American family narrative in David Vann's Legend of a Suicide (Penguin, £7.99), which spins off from his father's death and childhood misadventures in Alaska in ways that are moving and darkly funny: this is a book to press on all your friends.

Armchair globetrotters should be delighted by Geoff Dyer's cunningly observed contrasting novellas, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Canongate, £12.99), which set hedonism at the Venice Biennale against a quest for enlightenment in India's holy city. One of my favourites of the year, meanwhile, was poet Tobias Hill's The Hidden (Faber, £12.99), which heads to an archeological dig in Sparta for a bravura exploration of classical mores, modern loneliness and the nature of terrorism. And last month Spanish writer Javier Marías completed his metaphysical trilogy of espionage and inference, Your Face Tomorrow -Poison, Shadow and Farewell,(Chatto & Windus, £18.99), a baroque extravaganza which melds Tristram Shandy with James Bond and is surely one of the major achievements of the last decade.
To read her short story selections link to the Guardian.
And for the children's books and poetry selections link here.