BOOKS OF THE YEAR

A final selection of the best and most overrated books of the year, chosen by some of The Spectator's regular contributors

Patrick Leigh Fennor

Peter Hopkirk's Quest for Kim (John Murray, £15.99) is vital for someone like me who reads Kim every two years: a brilliant jigsaw with few pieces missing. Peter Levi's A Bottle in the Shade (Sinclair-Stevenson, £17.99): a marvellous and poetical evocation of the Western Peloponnese. James Lees-Milne's Fourteen Friends (John Murray, £19.99). Some of the people in this acutely observed picture gallery are famous, some well known, some rescued from oblivion, but all fascinating, and here and there they overlap with the huge cast of The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (Hodder and Stoughton, £25), brilliantly edited by Charlotte Mosley. Impossible to put down. Jock Murray's A Gentleman Publisher's Commonplace Book (£9.99) is a captivating, discursive ramble to be picked up again and again. No need to cite the publishing house. In Clear Waters Rising: A Mountain Walk Across Europe (Viking, £18) Nicholas Crane describes an almost incredible journey from St James of Compostela to the Golden Horn on foot every inch and seldonr out of the clouds.

Gavin Stamp

Architectural history produces little that is really new, just revisions of standard inter- pretations. But exciting new material is now coming out of post-Soviet Russia, particularly concerning that enigmatic architect of Pavlovsk and at Tsarskoe Selo, Charles Cameron. 'I am captivated by Cameron the architect, by birth a Jacobite, educated at Rome. . . 'wrote Catherine the Great to Voltaire. We know-ails in London used to snigger that Cameron was in fact a fraud: he may have told the Tsarina that he was one of the Camerons of Lochiel in exile for his beliefs — and what could be more romantic in 18th- century Europe? — but we knew he was a bounder, born in London, who put his builder father in prison for debt.

Now Dmitry Shvidkovsky comes along and in his book The Empress and the Archi- tect (Yale, £29.95) shows that the truth is more complex, that Cameron may well have had real Jacobite connections. After all, when he needed craftsmen in St Peters- burg to work on his projects, he advertised not in London but in Edinburgh. This is a most beautiful and enthralling book by a brilliant Russian historian that makes a strong case for the true greatness of Cameron. It also tells a largely unknown story of Russia's debt to Scotland and it should appeal not just to those haunted by the tragic beauty of that extraordinary country.

The worst? Surely In This Dark House (Viking, £17), Louise Kehoe's shrink- wrapped character assassination of her father, the émigré Russian architect Berth- hold Lubetkin, because it mixes self-indul- gent fiction with some truth.

Anne McElvoy

The best book of 1996 was without doubt the first volume of Viktor Klemperer's memoirs covering the period 1933-45. Written as a secret diary by a Jewish historian, it follows the fate of the author, his wife and friends as the Third Reich transforms them from members of an esteemed intellectual elite in Dresden to inhabitants of the designated Judenhaus — the last step before transportation to the camps. Klemperer — whose writings were suppressed in East Germany — emerges as the Pepys of Hitler's Germany, observing its gigantic horrors and petty grotesqueries with pathos and wit. It is due for publica- tion by Weidenfeld next year as The Diaries of Viktor laemperer.

By chance, the book I liked least this year tackles exactly the same period. Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (Little Brown, £22.50) is an unsparing audit of atrocities and the willingness of ordinary people to participate in them. Things go awry when he seeks to use his evidence to indict the entire German nation and Ger- manness itself for the Holocaust. The methodology is dangerously muddled, facts and interpretations selected at random. Where Klemperer builds up his account of life under the Swastika from nuances and the unspoken, Goldhagen is all certainties and denunciation. The result is that the for- mer account, written under daily threat of arrest and death, is far more generous and revealing than that concocted 50 years later in the safety of an American study.

Francis King

The most memorable new novel to come my way this year — a mysterious absentee from the Booker short-list — was Colm Toibin's The Story of the Night (Picador, £15.99). Set in Buenos Aires around the it's not that unusual. We've all got mobile phones down here time of the Falldands war, its only defect is that it is not really a novel but three novel- las — one about its hero's relationship with his overbearing widow of a mother; one about his sinister involvement with a couple working in Buenos Aires for the CIA; and one about his love affair with a man infect- ed, like himself, with Aids. Toibin writes with exemplary vividness and lucidity.

I greatly enjoyed Michael De-la-Noy's Mervyn Stocicwood: A Lonely Life (Mow- bray, £16.99). On the one occasion when I met Stockwood, he struck me as vain and silly. De-la-Noy skilfully and generously brings out not merely what was preposter- ous in the character, but also what was shrewd and even, on occasions, wise.

My most disappointing (though not worst) book of the year was Alec Guin- ness's My Name Escapes Me (Viking, £17). This 'Diary of a Retiring Actor' shows Guinness in such retiring form that he has totally effaced himself. What he has to say about the people whom he meets can only give a bad name to charity.

Jane Gardam

The best novels I have read this year are Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (Duck- worth, £14.99) and Beryl Bainbridge's Every Man for Himself (Bloomsbury, £14.99). Alias Grace makes almost every other new novel seem slight. Disturbing as ever, Atwood always writes a different book and never disappoints. It is the grim story of a reprieved 19th-century murderess of 16 who spends 20 years in asylums and a peni- tentiary, yet it is full of her exciting, brave young life before her fall, if fall she did, for there is a question mark. It reads and is written like a big, 19th-century historical novel, somewhere between George Eliot and Wilkie Collins, but more explicit. A landscape of Canadian middle-class life in Toronto and the clearings, new to most I'd think. Asked after a lecture in Vancouver whether she is more interested in social reform or in writing entertaining novels, Atwood said, see no conflict there'.

Every Man for Himself is a terrifying book which would not leave me for a week after- wards and still haunts. The Titanic has never really sunk out of sight. Not for late night reading. One book I want for Christ- mas and shall give is Richard Mabey's Flora Britannica (Sinclair-Stevenson, £30), lovely to look at, delightful to know and packed with folklore as well as fact. I also want and shall give Alberto Manguel's History of Reading (HarperCollins, £25). Inspired sub- ject, and reads like a wonderful conversa- tion with a cheerful and learned friend.