Andrew Barrow
I have had the curious privilege this year of having two excellent books dedicated to me, and though it would be churlish not to mention Hugh Massingberd's Daily Telegraph Third Book of Obituaries: Entertainers (Macmillan, £16.99) and Mary Killen's Your Social Dilemmas Resolved (Constable, £9.99), I can hardly choose them as my favourite books of the year. This honour must go to two great novels of the Thirties, Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart (both Penguin, £6.99). I read these classics for the first time this year and found them utterly absorbing.
For lighter perusal, I recommend A. A. Gill's The Ivy: A Restaurant and its Recipes. The Ivy just happens to be the place where Hugh Massingberd launched his Entertainers book this autumn at a lunch that went on till 6.15 pm.
Enough of this nonsense. The book I would like to be recommending this year is Piers Paul Read's formidable new novel about social, moral and family dilemmas under New Labour. Alas, I understand that Mr Read, who is uniquely equipped to write such a book, which would be a sort of sequel to his masterly A Married Man (Phoenix House, £6.99), has no plans to do so. Who, I wonder, will step into the breach?
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