James Delingpole
I'm sorry, I know he's a fine writer, but no way did Ian McEwan deserve to win the Booker with Amsterdam (Cape, £14.99). It's too slight, its attempts at humour often fall painfully flat and it's definitely the most overrated book of the year, apart perhaps from Alex Garland's ineffably tedious and pseudy The Tesseract (Viking, £9.99). The prize should have gone either to Beryl Bainbridge's Master Georgie (Duckworth, £14.99) or, failing that, to Giles Foden's superb debut, The Last King of Scotland (Faber, £9.99), an imaginative recreation of Amin's Uganda so beautifully researched and executed that it made me wonder why I bother even trying to write fiction.
My year's most enthralling, uputdown- able read was Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm (Fourth Estate, £6.99), espe- cially the bit which tells you exactly what it's like to drown; and a firm favourite remains Keith Douglas's Alamein to Zem Zem (Faber, £7.99), a lucid, poet's-eye view of his experiences of tank warfare in the Western Desert. It is terribly poignant when you learn that he was killed in Nor- mandy.
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