Cressida Connolly
Annie Freud's poetry collection, The Best Man That Ever There Was (Picador, £8.99), has been a highlight of 2007. It's hard to believe that these troubling, hilarious, totally original poems are her first. I shan't forget her reading at the Cheltenham book festival: before three rows of A-level students from the Ladies' College, a gleeful Freud extolled the delights of cigarette smoking (I love it'), then recited the title poem, which describes eating plover's eggs and turbot with a lover in a grand hotel; but not until he'd beaten her naked buttocks. Wicked, sexy and always surprising.
The book I'll be giving everybody for Christmas is Psychogeography (Bloomsbury, £16.80) by the inimitable Will Self, with illustrations by Ralph Steadman. It's a collection of Self's walkabout journalism, from Venice to Manhattan. The world looks much stranger after an afternoon within its pages.
Antonia Quirke's Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers (HarperCollins, £7.99) came out in paperback this year. I loved this strange hybrid of film criticism and amourous autobiography.
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