Sam Leith
Nicola Barker's visionary epic, Darkmans (Fourth Estate, £14.99), is a really strange and lively and unsettling book that at first I hated, then loved, and now can't get out of my head. For steely humour, bleak exactness of evocation and fastidious prose, it's hard to match A. L. Kennedy's Day (Cape, £16.99). I also loved Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union (Fourth Estate, £17.99), a divine gumshoe romp set in an imaginary Jewish homeland in Alaska.
My non-fiction book of the year is the Letters of Ted Hughes (Faber, £30). Brilliantly edited by Christopher Reid, these are gasp-makingly revelatory and electrically written. Hughes's austerity, humour, generosity, love of nature and craziness animate every page — and they transformed my assumptions about what Hughes was like; he's warmer and funnier than you'd think. They're let down by a sketchy index, but the in-text apparatus is excellent. You emerge at the end like someone staggering out of a good production of King Lear.
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