Philip Hen sher
The book I loved best all year was Daljit Nagra's wonderfully inflected collection of poems, Look, We Have Coming to Dover! (Faber, £6.99). When I had finished it, half the book turned out to have been half-committed to memory. David Kynaston's improbably entertaining history, Austerity Britain: 1945-1951 (Bloomsbury, £25), made enterprising use of unusual sources and was an unexpected popular success. The novels I liked best were Charlotte Mendelson's lovely family romance, When We Were Bad (Picador, £12.99), and Michael Chabon's knockout alternate-world fantasy, The Yiddish Policemen's Union (Fourth Estate, £17.99). I went back and read all of Chabon for the first time — he is the most wonderfully vaudeville performer. The two books with the real tang of greatness about them were Ted Hughes's selected letters (Faber, £30) and Gunter Grass's sublime memoirs, Peeling the Onion (Harvill Secker, £18.99). Their huge literary merit was somehow swallowed up in absurd speculation about guilt and truth; speculation which, of course, this painfully truthful and searching book contained within itself in immeasurably more honest forms.
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