Andro Linklater
Jim Crace's Quarantine (Viking, £16.99) was by a country mile the best fiction I read this year. Not since the death of Angela Carter has an English novelist succeeded in harnessing the wild, disorderly element of the English imagination to story-telling with such authority. A great novel. None of the pieces in Ahead of its Time, edited by Duncan McLean (Cape, £9.99), touches this high mark, but this repellently designed collection of early works by Scots writers like Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner, first published in the 1990s, gives a genuine flavour of the sprawling demotic vigour of the latest wave of writing north of the border. Finally, with couplets like this, 'He stared. Lust bristled up his thighs/ And poured into the roots of his teeth,' Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid (Faber, £7.99), a retelling of the poet's Metamorphoses, has caught perfectly the original's knowing passion.
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