Caroline Moorehead
Two best books of the year: The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany (Fourth Estate, £7.99), a sharp, humorous novel about the people who inhabit an old apartment block in downtown Cairo, once sumptuous and now fallen on less elegant times, who manipulate and intrigue their way through life against a backdrop of Islamists plotting revolution.
The Rebels (Picador, £12.99) is the third of Sandor Marai's novels to appear in English, a tale of four young men in a small town somewhere in Austria-Hungary in 1917, neither quite boys nor yet adults, fearful of what is to come and clinging to the last vestiges of childhood.
The most disappointing book was Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present, by Joanna Bourke (Virago, £25). More about the rapists than the raped,it is a compendium of statistics and facts, leaving a dismal picture of the cruelty that men — and women — are capable of inflicting on each other.
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