25 NOVEMBER 2006, Page 42

S AM L EITH There were a lot of old favourites performing

well this year in fiction. Martin Amis’s gulag story House of Meetings (Cape, £15.99) was terrific, though he must be sick to his new back teeth of hearing it accorded the back-handed compliment ‘a return to form’. As was David Mitchell’s lovely evocation of childhood, Black Swan Green (Sceptre, £16.99). He’ll be sick of people telling him it wasn’t as good as Cloud Atlas, but boo to them. And hooray for Stephen King, whose new novel Lisey’s Story (Hodder, £17.99) was gripping and scary and moving. I’m just about to get properly to grips with Mark Z. Danielewski’s dizzyingly inventive rotational road trip, Only Revolutions (Doubleday, £20), on a road trip of my own. Great services to lovers of poetry were done by John Haffenden and Alice Quinn. The first edited William Empson’s ceaselessly clever and spiky letters (OUP, £40), as well as completing his magnificent biography (OUP, £30). Quinn, the poetry editor of the New Yorker, drew the uncollected work of the peerless Elizabeth Bishop together in Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box (Carcanet, £16.95).