Philip Hensher
The fiction I liked best all year was Nicola Barker's Wide Open (Faber, £12.99), William Trevor's Death in Summer (Viking, f15.99), and Martin Amis's knockout col- lection of short stories, Heavy Water (Cape, £14.99), his best book since Time's Arrow.
In the end, I loved Ralf Koenig's prob- lematical and idiosyncratic Jago (Rowohlt, DM. 19.90), the most recent evidence of the long German obsession with Shake- speare. I wish someone would translate him. Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters (Faber, £14.99) was too tremendous for words; not to be excerpted, but cumulatively over- whelming.
A good year for biography was topped by Hilary Spurling's stunning book about Matisse's early career (Hamish Hamilton, £25) and Patrick Marnham's very enter- taining life of Diego Rivera (Bloomsbury, £20). Jeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything (Headline, f14.99) made me laugh a lot with its portrait of a sort of insanity — I particularly commend the tale of his epic attempts to import rendered horse fat into America to fry some chips. And I got a lot out of Christine Noelle's book about the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, State and Tribe (Curzon, £45); like many people, I expect, I had never quite managed to sort out the dynastic relations of the ruling families in 19th-century Afghanistan, and this was a book of exem- plary clarity and usefulness.
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