Competition time!
As the top five is so tantalisingly near you can almost smell the foxed pages and slanted boards, I thought a little competition might be in order.
Simply guess the top 5 books according to me and win a copy of each!
Post them in an ordered list in response to this post. You have until midnight (UK time) 30 November to formulate a response.
The judging criteria is that the novels must have been first published in English in the UK between 2000 and 2009. No author has more than one book in the top 5 and Ian McEwan is ineligible.
If there is a tie, the correct order will be taken into account. If things are still equal at that stage, a play off will be cobbled together, possibly to be televised on Sky Arts.
Here is a list of the books already selected. Don’t vote for them, they’re not in the top 5.
Good luck!
6. Night Watch – Sarah Waters (2006)
7. Remainder – Tom McCarthy (2006)
8. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugendies (2002)
9. The Time of Our Singing – Richard Powers (2003)
10.Unless – Carol Shields (2002)
11. The Road – Cormac McCarthy (2006)
12. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen (2001)
13. Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon (2000)
14. That They May Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern (2002)
15. Fingersmith – Sarah Waters (2002)
16. Gould’s Book of Fish – Richard Flanagan (2002)
17. The Ministry of Special Cases – Nathan Englander (2007)
18. The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster (2005)
19. My Revolutions – Hari Kunzu (2007)
20. Wash This Blood Clean from my Hands – Fred Vargas (2007)
21. The Confessions of Max Tivoli – Andrew Sean Greer (2004)
22. The Human Stain – Philip Roth (2000)
23. GB84 – David Peace (2004)
24. Dancer – Colum McCann (2003)
25. What is the What – Dave Eggers (2006)
26. The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga (2008)
27. The Crimson Petal and the White – Michel Faber (2002)
28. Gilead – Marilynne Robinson (2004)
29. A Fraction of the Whole – Steve Toltz (2008)
30. The Quick and the Dead – Joy Williams (2000)
31. Falling Man – Don Delillo (2007)
32. Lark & Termite – Jayne Anne Philips (2009)
33. History of Love – Nicole Krauss (2005)
34. Oxygen – Andrew Miller (2001)
35. It’s All Right Now – Charles Chadwick (2005)
36. Embers – Sandor Marai (2001)
37. The Last Samurai – Helen DeWitt (2000)
38. The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz (2007)
39. The Testament of Gideon Mack – James Robertson (2006)
40. The Bear Boy – Cynthia Ozick (2005)
41. Murder on the Leviathan – Boris Akunin (2005)
42. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami (2005)
43. Netherland – Joseph O’Neill (2008)
44. The People’s Act of Love – James Meek (2005)
45. After the Fire, A Still Small Voice – Evie Wyld (2009)
46. The Horned Man – James Lasdun (2002)
47. Timoleon Vita Come Home – Dan Rhodes (2003)
48. The King is Dead – Jim Lewis (2003)
49. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffeneger (2003)
50. Callisto – Torsten Krol (2007)
Thursday, 26 November 2009
Wednesday, 25 November 2009
50 best novels of the 2000s: 10 to 6
10. Unless – Carol Shields (2002)
By rights, Unless is a book I should intensely dislike. It features a middle aged writer, for a start, it is primly first person present tense, and includes a daughter who drops out from society. But Carol Shields, like Philip Roth, has a way of looking anew at such hackneyed, care-worn concerns.
Unless is a story of loss, of grief and of endings and beginnings. The prose is always subtle, cleverly nuanced and can knock you out with the merest flicker. Just on the first page, the husband of the central character is described as “losing his hair nicely”. It tells you everything you need to know about the two characters in four words; and everything about Shields as a writer.
If any writer has taken the mantle of Jane Austen and spun it into a modern context, it is Shields. She takes the mordant, ironic eye of Austen and twists it into something all of her own. In Unless she adds a dark, cancer-black seam of humour that Austen, I feel sure, would have admired. It is a novel of passion and ideas, of humanity and scotched hope. It’s also one of the best books you’re ever likely to read.
9. The Time of Our Singing – Richard Powers (2003)
Richard Powers has defeated me so many times with his novels that though I was excited about The Time of Our Singing, I did worry that this was going to be another book of his that I admired without loving and once again didn’t finish. I needn’t have bothered worrying. This is just awesome stuff, truly spellbinding in every way. There’s a famous quote about writing about music being like dancing about architecture, which is made to look like sagging bollocks when you read about the music you can’t hear in The Time of Our Singing.
The premise is awkward when spelled out on the page. A German-Jewish man meets a black American woman, they fall in love and have a pair of twins. The twins become famous musicians, bringing ancient music back to modern ears. But though this all sounds somewhat absurd, Powers brings it fulsomely to life, each character real, full-blooded and unique. And though you are never too far away from Powers’ admirable intellect, his learning is always lightly sprinkled and interestingly divulged.
The end of The Time of Our Singing is probably my most favourite ending in contemporary fiction. Unexpected, emotionally side-swiping and somehow plausible, it brings to a close a novel that has the perfect pitch of Ella Fitzgerald, matched to the literary finesse of Scott Fitzgerald.
8. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugendies (2002)
When I reached the end of Middlesex, I wanted to give it and its author a round of applause. It seemed that kind of novel; a book that was larger than life, in the way that life has a nasty habit of being. It remains a novel of realised ambition, fully the book that it wants to be and fully realising its potential. I can still recall the scenes during the New Jersey riots and feeling as though parachuted into that warzone.
Cal is a character it is hard to forget, not just because of their intersexed personality, but because Eugenedies imbues him/her with such life and energy it’s a genuine wrench to leave him/her at the end of the book. As a marriage of zestful prose, sparkling plot and stunning characterisation it’s very hard to beat.
7. Remainder – Tom McCarthy (2006)
The only thing that eventually came of my first and unpublished novel, The Safety of Sunday, was an introduction to Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. An agent was interested in the book and we met at his private members’ club in Soho. He was very excited about the novel (he would later revise this opinion and quite rightly; my book was a sack of shit. Better than Ian McEwan’s Saturday, but that’s another story) and Justin Lee Collins and Alan Carr were on the next table. I thought fame and fortune beckoned. The agent told me the story of Remainder’s checkered publication history and I was sent a copy. It was like opening a door of a humid house and an arctic blast coming through. This, I realised, was the future of British fiction.
Remainder is special because it understands that being avant-garde doesn’t mean you have to be an ass. My reaction to it was visceral: I could smell the oil at the garage, the liver frying in the frying pan, the sweat in the shirt of the fixer who believes in the project as much as the narrator. It is a novel of astonishing sensory intuition and a book that grips you both with its intelligence and its plotting. Writers like Tom McCarthy are the future: they understand the modern world in a way the likes of Amis and McEwan never could. And this is the book that set the benchmark, the line in the sand. If I was setting a course on the modern novel, this would be one of the first set texts.
6. Night Watch – Sarah Waters (2006)
For me Sarah Waters is the novelist of the decade. I simply couldn’t not exclude either of her two novels on this list; it wouldn’t have been right. So here we are, Sarah Waters: the finest writer of the new millennium.
The Night Watch is, I think, Waters’ masterpiece. Taking the home front of the Second World War and making it her own is no mean feat, but to write with such empathy and understanding about such a diverse range of characters is just astonishing, frankly. The roll of the nylons, the smell of cabbage, the black-out screens, this is an engulfing experience and one that ruins other novels set at the same time. No one has conjured up that world so completely and with such exactitude. Structurally impressive and written with deft grace, The Night Watch is a book that only Sarah Waters could write.
By rights, Unless is a book I should intensely dislike. It features a middle aged writer, for a start, it is primly first person present tense, and includes a daughter who drops out from society. But Carol Shields, like Philip Roth, has a way of looking anew at such hackneyed, care-worn concerns.
Unless is a story of loss, of grief and of endings and beginnings. The prose is always subtle, cleverly nuanced and can knock you out with the merest flicker. Just on the first page, the husband of the central character is described as “losing his hair nicely”. It tells you everything you need to know about the two characters in four words; and everything about Shields as a writer.
If any writer has taken the mantle of Jane Austen and spun it into a modern context, it is Shields. She takes the mordant, ironic eye of Austen and twists it into something all of her own. In Unless she adds a dark, cancer-black seam of humour that Austen, I feel sure, would have admired. It is a novel of passion and ideas, of humanity and scotched hope. It’s also one of the best books you’re ever likely to read.
9. The Time of Our Singing – Richard Powers (2003)
Richard Powers has defeated me so many times with his novels that though I was excited about The Time of Our Singing, I did worry that this was going to be another book of his that I admired without loving and once again didn’t finish. I needn’t have bothered worrying. This is just awesome stuff, truly spellbinding in every way. There’s a famous quote about writing about music being like dancing about architecture, which is made to look like sagging bollocks when you read about the music you can’t hear in The Time of Our Singing.
The premise is awkward when spelled out on the page. A German-Jewish man meets a black American woman, they fall in love and have a pair of twins. The twins become famous musicians, bringing ancient music back to modern ears. But though this all sounds somewhat absurd, Powers brings it fulsomely to life, each character real, full-blooded and unique. And though you are never too far away from Powers’ admirable intellect, his learning is always lightly sprinkled and interestingly divulged.
The end of The Time of Our Singing is probably my most favourite ending in contemporary fiction. Unexpected, emotionally side-swiping and somehow plausible, it brings to a close a novel that has the perfect pitch of Ella Fitzgerald, matched to the literary finesse of Scott Fitzgerald.
8. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugendies (2002)
When I reached the end of Middlesex, I wanted to give it and its author a round of applause. It seemed that kind of novel; a book that was larger than life, in the way that life has a nasty habit of being. It remains a novel of realised ambition, fully the book that it wants to be and fully realising its potential. I can still recall the scenes during the New Jersey riots and feeling as though parachuted into that warzone.
Cal is a character it is hard to forget, not just because of their intersexed personality, but because Eugenedies imbues him/her with such life and energy it’s a genuine wrench to leave him/her at the end of the book. As a marriage of zestful prose, sparkling plot and stunning characterisation it’s very hard to beat.
7. Remainder – Tom McCarthy (2006)
The only thing that eventually came of my first and unpublished novel, The Safety of Sunday, was an introduction to Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. An agent was interested in the book and we met at his private members’ club in Soho. He was very excited about the novel (he would later revise this opinion and quite rightly; my book was a sack of shit. Better than Ian McEwan’s Saturday, but that’s another story) and Justin Lee Collins and Alan Carr were on the next table. I thought fame and fortune beckoned. The agent told me the story of Remainder’s checkered publication history and I was sent a copy. It was like opening a door of a humid house and an arctic blast coming through. This, I realised, was the future of British fiction.
Remainder is special because it understands that being avant-garde doesn’t mean you have to be an ass. My reaction to it was visceral: I could smell the oil at the garage, the liver frying in the frying pan, the sweat in the shirt of the fixer who believes in the project as much as the narrator. It is a novel of astonishing sensory intuition and a book that grips you both with its intelligence and its plotting. Writers like Tom McCarthy are the future: they understand the modern world in a way the likes of Amis and McEwan never could. And this is the book that set the benchmark, the line in the sand. If I was setting a course on the modern novel, this would be one of the first set texts.
6. Night Watch – Sarah Waters (2006)
For me Sarah Waters is the novelist of the decade. I simply couldn’t not exclude either of her two novels on this list; it wouldn’t have been right. So here we are, Sarah Waters: the finest writer of the new millennium.
The Night Watch is, I think, Waters’ masterpiece. Taking the home front of the Second World War and making it her own is no mean feat, but to write with such empathy and understanding about such a diverse range of characters is just astonishing, frankly. The roll of the nylons, the smell of cabbage, the black-out screens, this is an engulfing experience and one that ruins other novels set at the same time. No one has conjured up that world so completely and with such exactitude. Structurally impressive and written with deft grace, The Night Watch is a book that only Sarah Waters could write.
Tuesday, 24 November 2009
50 best novels of the 2000s: 20 to 11
Here we go. The last novels not to make the top ten. Will Ian McEwan's Saturday take the top spot (no. it's shit)? Will there be an absence of novels that I haven't read? (Yes, I can see them from here). But will this at least give you an opportiunity to think: I haven't seen that on one of the five billion end of decade lists? (I hope so).
20. Wash This Blood Clean from my Hands – Fred Vargas (2007)
About five months before this book was published, I discovered Sjowall and Wahloo’s Martin Beck series of crime novels. I was hooked on them, hooked by their sense of ennui as much as their plotting. It made me look for novels outside of my usual genre, made me think that though I enjoyed crime fiction, it wasn’t just a sort of guilty pleasure: something that when done right is palatable. I now read a lot of crime, some of it (Ian Rankin’s Exit Music and The Naming of the Dead, James Lee Burke’s The Tin Roof Blowdown to name just two authors who could easily have featured on this list) could easily have featured on this list, but not one crime novel has had the same effect on me as this one, the first Fred Vargas novel I read.
It’s hard to describe just why this is such a special book. Yes, there is an element of the great cop dramas, yes there is the oddness of Twin Peaks, yes there are great characters; but explaining how she gets the atmosphere and the erudition into her works seemingly by stealth is so much more difficult. You read this book breathless, both in readerly appreciation of the plot and pacing, but also in thrall to the sense of place and strangeness that Vargas places on her scenes.
Oh and while we’re at it, Sian Reynolds should also be congratulated for consistently creating translations that read like no such thing. They are awesome, as is Ms Vargas. If you've never read her, you are missing out on one of the great joys of literary life.
19. My Revolutions – Hari Kunzu (2007)
One of the problems about having a monster advance for your debut novel is that it’s easy to poison readers against you even before you've had a book out. With Hari Kunzru it was different. I wanted to like his stuff (I’d heard him on the radio and on the TV and he seemed intelligent and enthusiastic about books) but for some reason I couldn’t engage with his novels: My Revolutions changed all that.
Kunzru’s book has ambition, it has grace and it has fervent understanding of the differences between a nation twenty years ago and the nation it is now. Of all the novels on this list, this is the one that I would say encapsulates some of the pressing issues of the last thirty years (ultra leftist movements, Thatcher, New Labour) and makes superlative fiction of it. A novel that had its plaudits, but not at the level this excellent book deserves. Deserves to be studied and looked at as living piece of fiction and as a piece of art.
18. The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster (2002)
The New York Trilogy is one of my all time favourite books. The Music of Chance is also a winner. I really ummed and ahhed over this one, as The Brooklyn Follies is also a joy. In the end though, this was the book that reminded me that Auster was worth reading after the let down of Timbuktu. And that took some doing.
The Book of Illusions has all the tropes you’d expect from Auster: authorial tricks, that sly, laconic way of writing he has, fate intervening in the most unexpected place, but it also has a warmth that some of his other novels have lacked. My best friend said about Auster’s most recent novel (Invisible, and another worth reading book) he’s the most easy to read difficult author there is. Well said, Mr Oliver Shepherd.
17. The Ministry of Special Cases – Nathan Englander (2007)
For a while in 1999, I was obsessed by Nathan Englander’s debut story collection, For The Relief of Unbearable Urges. And then, like Junot Diaz, he just disappeared. This book came out some eight years after the stories and about twenty pages in I was disappointed. I expected fireworks, something explosive. What I got was smaller scale, at least initially, and I wasn’t hooked enough to plough on. I gave it ten more pages. Then ten more, and ten more again, and then I was so engrossed – in the plot, in the characters, in the prose – that I just kept on with it. I still remember the feeling of loss when it ended.
The Ministry of Special Cases is one of those rare books that tells you about a period of history that you are not perhaps familiar with, but makes you eager to know more. It is an astonishing achievement.
16. Gould’s Book of Fish – Richard Flanagan (2002)
Flanagan is somewhat hide-bound by the fact that it’s hard to know what you’re going to get from him. This isn’t a criticism of him, more it’s a criticism of how we like to pigeon-hole writers. All of his books, especially The Sound of One Hand Clapping, are worth reading; but nothing quite matches this stunning, intoxicating book.
Historically charged, ludic and visceral, Gould’s Book of Fish is a novel of savage beauty – much like the nascent Australia that inspires much of the book. Few novels burn with such passion and spit and ire, and still fewer convince in the interior and exterior worlds we create for each other and ourselves. Gould’s Book of Fish does things of which other novels simply couldn’t conceive.
15. Fingersmith – Sarah Waters (2002)
Waters is technically the best British writer we have. I don’t know anyone who writes such sentences, such scenes, draws such memorable characters. In Fingersmith she often astonishes with a detail, with a plot shift, with a telling piece of dialogue – and still she manages to make her books compulsive page turners. The problem, if there is one, is for the reader trying to slow down to enjoy the richness of the sentences without jumping ahead to see what happens. I still smile thinking of the moments I reached the end of a section, only to realise within a few pages of the next section that I wasn’t privy to the whole facts. Simply brilliant.
14. That They May Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern (2002)
People seem to have forgotten about this book, but personally it was a novel that opened me up to a different kind of writing. I am a city person, always will be, and there’s nothing more likely to put me off a book than a blurb talking about the countryside, isolated communities or the pastoral life. This book changed my opinion. I was rapt, by the conversations, the easy simplicity of the prose, by the yearning of it all.
Depicting a year in the life of a small Irish community, That They May Face the Rising Sun is as full of life as any city novel and as perceptive as any novel published in the first years of this century. The Barracks and Amongst Women may be better known, but this is the novel that I think shows McGahern’s greatest gifts.
13. Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon (2000)
Almost ten years after reading this book I can still see the panels it sketched in my mind. At the World’s Fair, the submarines, the creative processes. Chabon’s best book should have been The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, but somehow that misfired despite its great potential. There are no such misfirings in Kavalier and Clay. It – along with several other books – showed the literary establishment that story would be dominant over the next decade; and that beautiful writing – and Kavalier and Clay certainly has that – didn’t need to be beautiful for its own sale.
12. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen (2001)
For all its grasping at the nettle of greatness, for all its earmuffs, gloves and blindfolds, The Corrections was only really a partial success. But – and this is the point – Franzen’s novel fizzed with a sort of fuck-you ambition, with a zeal which said “I can do this.” And Franzen certainly could. The section of the novel on the cruise ship is probably the single best piece of writing this decade. The badgering of Gary Lambert to admit that he is depressed is something I return to often. Franzen went for it and stretched the novel in the new millennium, but the odd bum notes (the eastern European segments and those at that vegetarian restaurant thing) just edged it out of my top ten. Perhaps on another day it would have snuck in. But not today.
11. The Road – Cormac McCarthy (2006)
A book so celebrated it doesn’t take me to expound upon why it matters. All I’ll say about it is the moment when they find the underground bunker I wept like a baby; wept because of the simple beauty of McCarthy’s description of the cans of food and the beds, but also because you knew such happiness was fleeting. It is of course a modern classic. But, like The Corrections, it didn’t quite make it into the top ten. It makes the top ten interesting at least...
20. Wash This Blood Clean from my Hands – Fred Vargas (2007)
About five months before this book was published, I discovered Sjowall and Wahloo’s Martin Beck series of crime novels. I was hooked on them, hooked by their sense of ennui as much as their plotting. It made me look for novels outside of my usual genre, made me think that though I enjoyed crime fiction, it wasn’t just a sort of guilty pleasure: something that when done right is palatable. I now read a lot of crime, some of it (Ian Rankin’s Exit Music and The Naming of the Dead, James Lee Burke’s The Tin Roof Blowdown to name just two authors who could easily have featured on this list) could easily have featured on this list, but not one crime novel has had the same effect on me as this one, the first Fred Vargas novel I read.
It’s hard to describe just why this is such a special book. Yes, there is an element of the great cop dramas, yes there is the oddness of Twin Peaks, yes there are great characters; but explaining how she gets the atmosphere and the erudition into her works seemingly by stealth is so much more difficult. You read this book breathless, both in readerly appreciation of the plot and pacing, but also in thrall to the sense of place and strangeness that Vargas places on her scenes.
Oh and while we’re at it, Sian Reynolds should also be congratulated for consistently creating translations that read like no such thing. They are awesome, as is Ms Vargas. If you've never read her, you are missing out on one of the great joys of literary life.
19. My Revolutions – Hari Kunzu (2007)
One of the problems about having a monster advance for your debut novel is that it’s easy to poison readers against you even before you've had a book out. With Hari Kunzru it was different. I wanted to like his stuff (I’d heard him on the radio and on the TV and he seemed intelligent and enthusiastic about books) but for some reason I couldn’t engage with his novels: My Revolutions changed all that.
Kunzru’s book has ambition, it has grace and it has fervent understanding of the differences between a nation twenty years ago and the nation it is now. Of all the novels on this list, this is the one that I would say encapsulates some of the pressing issues of the last thirty years (ultra leftist movements, Thatcher, New Labour) and makes superlative fiction of it. A novel that had its plaudits, but not at the level this excellent book deserves. Deserves to be studied and looked at as living piece of fiction and as a piece of art.
18. The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster (2002)
The New York Trilogy is one of my all time favourite books. The Music of Chance is also a winner. I really ummed and ahhed over this one, as The Brooklyn Follies is also a joy. In the end though, this was the book that reminded me that Auster was worth reading after the let down of Timbuktu. And that took some doing.
The Book of Illusions has all the tropes you’d expect from Auster: authorial tricks, that sly, laconic way of writing he has, fate intervening in the most unexpected place, but it also has a warmth that some of his other novels have lacked. My best friend said about Auster’s most recent novel (Invisible, and another worth reading book) he’s the most easy to read difficult author there is. Well said, Mr Oliver Shepherd.
17. The Ministry of Special Cases – Nathan Englander (2007)
For a while in 1999, I was obsessed by Nathan Englander’s debut story collection, For The Relief of Unbearable Urges. And then, like Junot Diaz, he just disappeared. This book came out some eight years after the stories and about twenty pages in I was disappointed. I expected fireworks, something explosive. What I got was smaller scale, at least initially, and I wasn’t hooked enough to plough on. I gave it ten more pages. Then ten more, and ten more again, and then I was so engrossed – in the plot, in the characters, in the prose – that I just kept on with it. I still remember the feeling of loss when it ended.
The Ministry of Special Cases is one of those rare books that tells you about a period of history that you are not perhaps familiar with, but makes you eager to know more. It is an astonishing achievement.
16. Gould’s Book of Fish – Richard Flanagan (2002)
Flanagan is somewhat hide-bound by the fact that it’s hard to know what you’re going to get from him. This isn’t a criticism of him, more it’s a criticism of how we like to pigeon-hole writers. All of his books, especially The Sound of One Hand Clapping, are worth reading; but nothing quite matches this stunning, intoxicating book.
Historically charged, ludic and visceral, Gould’s Book of Fish is a novel of savage beauty – much like the nascent Australia that inspires much of the book. Few novels burn with such passion and spit and ire, and still fewer convince in the interior and exterior worlds we create for each other and ourselves. Gould’s Book of Fish does things of which other novels simply couldn’t conceive.
15. Fingersmith – Sarah Waters (2002)
Waters is technically the best British writer we have. I don’t know anyone who writes such sentences, such scenes, draws such memorable characters. In Fingersmith she often astonishes with a detail, with a plot shift, with a telling piece of dialogue – and still she manages to make her books compulsive page turners. The problem, if there is one, is for the reader trying to slow down to enjoy the richness of the sentences without jumping ahead to see what happens. I still smile thinking of the moments I reached the end of a section, only to realise within a few pages of the next section that I wasn’t privy to the whole facts. Simply brilliant.
14. That They May Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern (2002)
People seem to have forgotten about this book, but personally it was a novel that opened me up to a different kind of writing. I am a city person, always will be, and there’s nothing more likely to put me off a book than a blurb talking about the countryside, isolated communities or the pastoral life. This book changed my opinion. I was rapt, by the conversations, the easy simplicity of the prose, by the yearning of it all.
Depicting a year in the life of a small Irish community, That They May Face the Rising Sun is as full of life as any city novel and as perceptive as any novel published in the first years of this century. The Barracks and Amongst Women may be better known, but this is the novel that I think shows McGahern’s greatest gifts.
13. Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon (2000)
Almost ten years after reading this book I can still see the panels it sketched in my mind. At the World’s Fair, the submarines, the creative processes. Chabon’s best book should have been The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, but somehow that misfired despite its great potential. There are no such misfirings in Kavalier and Clay. It – along with several other books – showed the literary establishment that story would be dominant over the next decade; and that beautiful writing – and Kavalier and Clay certainly has that – didn’t need to be beautiful for its own sale.
12. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen (2001)
For all its grasping at the nettle of greatness, for all its earmuffs, gloves and blindfolds, The Corrections was only really a partial success. But – and this is the point – Franzen’s novel fizzed with a sort of fuck-you ambition, with a zeal which said “I can do this.” And Franzen certainly could. The section of the novel on the cruise ship is probably the single best piece of writing this decade. The badgering of Gary Lambert to admit that he is depressed is something I return to often. Franzen went for it and stretched the novel in the new millennium, but the odd bum notes (the eastern European segments and those at that vegetarian restaurant thing) just edged it out of my top ten. Perhaps on another day it would have snuck in. But not today.
11. The Road – Cormac McCarthy (2006)
A book so celebrated it doesn’t take me to expound upon why it matters. All I’ll say about it is the moment when they find the underground bunker I wept like a baby; wept because of the simple beauty of McCarthy’s description of the cans of food and the beds, but also because you knew such happiness was fleeting. It is of course a modern classic. But, like The Corrections, it didn’t quite make it into the top ten. It makes the top ten interesting at least...
Sunday, 22 November 2009
50 best novels of the 2000s - 30 to 21
Here we are. The business end of the list starts in a couple of days...
30. The Quick and the Dead – Joy Williams (2000)
I read this book for three reasons. It had a quote from Don Delillo on the front, the jacket image was a David Hockney painting and on the back was a quote from Raymond Carver. I devoured it in two sittings. It’s funny, heart wrenching and just that kind of tear-stained Americana that I just can’t help but fall for every time. Williams writes immediate sentences, sentences that are effortless yet superbly crafted. It’s a book more people should discover.
29. A Fraction of the Whole – Steve Toltz (2008)
Novels that strive to be funny are so often like those people who claim to be zany or mad: they are often neither of those things, but instead intensely irritating. A Fraction of the Whole manages to sidestep this pitfall by being genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. Toltz understands the frustrations, annoyance and dispiriting nature of family life – particularly for the male relationships within that unit – and sets it as springboard to explore everything from the wisdom of crowds to the necessity of hatred. It is the heir to A Confederacy of Dunces in its blend of high intentions and superb humour. It may be a touch overlong, but every page holds a joy all of its own.
28. Gilead – Marilynne Robinson (2004)
At an event at Foyles in late summer, Adam Foulds gave the assembled crowd something to gasp about when he said that Gilead wasn’t such a great novel. I could sort of see what he was getting at, even though he was hopelessly wrong. The reviews both here and in the States suggested that this was a masterpiece, a worthy companion to her debut Housekeeping. At first I wasn’t convinced. It is slow, workmanlike even, and I put it down several times before picking it back up again. And then it sort of worked its magic on me, somehow illuminating just how subtle and yet passionately written it really is. John Ames is a rich character: rich in detail, in emotion and in faith. And for him alone, it would be remiss not to read this superlative novel.
27. The Crimson Petal and the White – Michel Faber (2002)
I fear historical fiction – and there is something about faux-Victoriana which particularly sticks in my craw (blame AS Byatt: I do). But the very opening paragraph of Faber’s dense, consistently inventive novel immediately sets the record straight. He tells us we think we know what to expect, but we do not. That we are aliens from another time, set to spy on the sins of the past. And how right he is! This tale of tarts with hearts, of pornographic libraries and cunning plots is what historical fiction should be like: fresh, light on extraneous period detail just for the sake of it, and instructive both of its time and our own.
26. The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga (2008)
After about 50 pages of Adiga’s first novel, I thought it didn’t have a hope of winning the Booker. Basically because it wasn’t the usual smoke and magic realism mirrors that we’ve come to expect from Indian novels, and because I loved it so much. It is feisty, idiosyncratic, compelling and slightly unnerving. I believe that Adiga has the same passion, fire and insider/outsider eye that elevated Orwell’s best novels from merely good to the truly great. When people have long forgotten the novels of DBC Pierre and Arundhati Roy, the only question raised about Adiga’s books will be why so many people found the award a surprising decision.
25. What is the What – Dave Eggers (2006)
I imported a load of copies of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at Charing Cross Road Waterstone’s when I heard about it from an American friend. I read it and thought it was interesting and annoying. I read You Shall Know Our Velocity and thought pretty much the same. What is the What, however, just came out of nowhere, a non-fiction novel (but still a novel, just as much as the next book on the list is) that simply staggered me with its depiction of another man’s life, another man’s long and dangerous journey. It’s the novel that delivered on all Eggers’ promises to be something more than a Zeitgeist jumping hipster.
24. Dancer – Colum McCann (2003)
I remember talking to someone from McCann’s publishers the day after the Booker shortlist came out in 2003. He couldn’t understand why Dancer hadn’t been nominated; neither could I. Dancer is simply divine; a real tempest of a novel that combines beauty, sexuality with history and politics. It is unflinching as a portrait of Rudolf Nureyev, but also as a portrait of a time.
23. GB84 – David Peace (2004)
I wanted to ensure that authors only had one book on this list. For the most part, this was easy: in the case of three authors it was agonising. In only one case did I ignore this rule because I couldn’t imagine the decade without them. For David Peace it was a straight fight between The Damned Utd and GB84 – and to me, Peace’s novel of the Miner’s strike is simply too powerful, even up against the force of nature that is Brian Clough. The comparisons to Ellroy are justified, but as no one has had the balls to take on the underside of British life like Ellroy has about the American, it seems to me that we should applaud Peace all the more. I read it in Memphis, Tennessee, and GB84 brought back that time with such clarity it seemed to shut out the humidity and everything else that was going on.
22. The Human Stain – Philip Roth (2000)
I read the revealing part of The Human Stain in Congleton library. I had to read and re-read the paragraph over and over again. Coleman Silk is black? Roth, now you’re just shitting me. But he hit a home run with The Human Stain, a novel that could perhaps have been his masterpiece if he hadn’t already written American Pastoral. Funny, rude, politically suspect and with some of his great ancillary characters (the crushed Vietnam vet especially) The Human Stain is Roth wagging a finger at an America that he recognises only tangentially.
21. The Confessions of Max Tivoli – Andrew Sean Greer (2004)
I rejected Greer’s first novel (The Path of Minor Planets) for publication in the UK. It was interesting but all over the place. The Confessions of Max Tivoli wasn’t looking good either. The conceit of a man aging backwards had been done by Fitzgerald, and also a few years earlier by Gabriel Brownstein. But Greer’s book is so lush, so powdered and decadent the similarity of the plots becomes utterly immaterial. This is stunning writing, stunning plotting, with a yearning sense of romance that runs through the narrative like a heavy perfume. His later novel, Story of a Marriage, is also a wonderful novel, but I would not take back my time spent with Max Tivoli.
30. The Quick and the Dead – Joy Williams (2000)
I read this book for three reasons. It had a quote from Don Delillo on the front, the jacket image was a David Hockney painting and on the back was a quote from Raymond Carver. I devoured it in two sittings. It’s funny, heart wrenching and just that kind of tear-stained Americana that I just can’t help but fall for every time. Williams writes immediate sentences, sentences that are effortless yet superbly crafted. It’s a book more people should discover.
29. A Fraction of the Whole – Steve Toltz (2008)
Novels that strive to be funny are so often like those people who claim to be zany or mad: they are often neither of those things, but instead intensely irritating. A Fraction of the Whole manages to sidestep this pitfall by being genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. Toltz understands the frustrations, annoyance and dispiriting nature of family life – particularly for the male relationships within that unit – and sets it as springboard to explore everything from the wisdom of crowds to the necessity of hatred. It is the heir to A Confederacy of Dunces in its blend of high intentions and superb humour. It may be a touch overlong, but every page holds a joy all of its own.
28. Gilead – Marilynne Robinson (2004)
At an event at Foyles in late summer, Adam Foulds gave the assembled crowd something to gasp about when he said that Gilead wasn’t such a great novel. I could sort of see what he was getting at, even though he was hopelessly wrong. The reviews both here and in the States suggested that this was a masterpiece, a worthy companion to her debut Housekeeping. At first I wasn’t convinced. It is slow, workmanlike even, and I put it down several times before picking it back up again. And then it sort of worked its magic on me, somehow illuminating just how subtle and yet passionately written it really is. John Ames is a rich character: rich in detail, in emotion and in faith. And for him alone, it would be remiss not to read this superlative novel.
27. The Crimson Petal and the White – Michel Faber (2002)
I fear historical fiction – and there is something about faux-Victoriana which particularly sticks in my craw (blame AS Byatt: I do). But the very opening paragraph of Faber’s dense, consistently inventive novel immediately sets the record straight. He tells us we think we know what to expect, but we do not. That we are aliens from another time, set to spy on the sins of the past. And how right he is! This tale of tarts with hearts, of pornographic libraries and cunning plots is what historical fiction should be like: fresh, light on extraneous period detail just for the sake of it, and instructive both of its time and our own.
26. The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga (2008)
After about 50 pages of Adiga’s first novel, I thought it didn’t have a hope of winning the Booker. Basically because it wasn’t the usual smoke and magic realism mirrors that we’ve come to expect from Indian novels, and because I loved it so much. It is feisty, idiosyncratic, compelling and slightly unnerving. I believe that Adiga has the same passion, fire and insider/outsider eye that elevated Orwell’s best novels from merely good to the truly great. When people have long forgotten the novels of DBC Pierre and Arundhati Roy, the only question raised about Adiga’s books will be why so many people found the award a surprising decision.
25. What is the What – Dave Eggers (2006)
I imported a load of copies of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at Charing Cross Road Waterstone’s when I heard about it from an American friend. I read it and thought it was interesting and annoying. I read You Shall Know Our Velocity and thought pretty much the same. What is the What, however, just came out of nowhere, a non-fiction novel (but still a novel, just as much as the next book on the list is) that simply staggered me with its depiction of another man’s life, another man’s long and dangerous journey. It’s the novel that delivered on all Eggers’ promises to be something more than a Zeitgeist jumping hipster.
24. Dancer – Colum McCann (2003)
I remember talking to someone from McCann’s publishers the day after the Booker shortlist came out in 2003. He couldn’t understand why Dancer hadn’t been nominated; neither could I. Dancer is simply divine; a real tempest of a novel that combines beauty, sexuality with history and politics. It is unflinching as a portrait of Rudolf Nureyev, but also as a portrait of a time.
23. GB84 – David Peace (2004)
I wanted to ensure that authors only had one book on this list. For the most part, this was easy: in the case of three authors it was agonising. In only one case did I ignore this rule because I couldn’t imagine the decade without them. For David Peace it was a straight fight between The Damned Utd and GB84 – and to me, Peace’s novel of the Miner’s strike is simply too powerful, even up against the force of nature that is Brian Clough. The comparisons to Ellroy are justified, but as no one has had the balls to take on the underside of British life like Ellroy has about the American, it seems to me that we should applaud Peace all the more. I read it in Memphis, Tennessee, and GB84 brought back that time with such clarity it seemed to shut out the humidity and everything else that was going on.
22. The Human Stain – Philip Roth (2000)
I read the revealing part of The Human Stain in Congleton library. I had to read and re-read the paragraph over and over again. Coleman Silk is black? Roth, now you’re just shitting me. But he hit a home run with The Human Stain, a novel that could perhaps have been his masterpiece if he hadn’t already written American Pastoral. Funny, rude, politically suspect and with some of his great ancillary characters (the crushed Vietnam vet especially) The Human Stain is Roth wagging a finger at an America that he recognises only tangentially.
21. The Confessions of Max Tivoli – Andrew Sean Greer (2004)
I rejected Greer’s first novel (The Path of Minor Planets) for publication in the UK. It was interesting but all over the place. The Confessions of Max Tivoli wasn’t looking good either. The conceit of a man aging backwards had been done by Fitzgerald, and also a few years earlier by Gabriel Brownstein. But Greer’s book is so lush, so powdered and decadent the similarity of the plots becomes utterly immaterial. This is stunning writing, stunning plotting, with a yearning sense of romance that runs through the narrative like a heavy perfume. His later novel, Story of a Marriage, is also a wonderful novel, but I would not take back my time spent with Max Tivoli.
Thursday, 19 November 2009
50 novels of the 2000s - 40 to 31
The next batch for your perusal. I also thought you might like some stats on the final standings.
The most nominations come from the year 2005 (7); the least from 2009 (3).
The nominations come from 14 different countries.
Women make up just under a quarter of the entries (12).
Only one author has more than one novel in the top 50.
So on with the run down . . .
40. The Bear Boy – Cynthia Ozick (2005)
The Puttermesser Papers was one of my favourite books from the nineties. The Bear Boy didn’t sound so promising (no golems here). But in this tender, occasionally disturbing coming of age tale, Ozick proves her versatility and her tremendous storytelling powers. A different class from start to finish, it’s a book that makes you yearn for a New York you could never know.
39. The Testament of Gideon Mack – James Robertson (2006)
One of the most inventive and curious novels I’ve read, with a beautifully controlled and dextrous way of describing the inner and outer worlds. Robertson imbues the narrative with so many superb images – disappearing and reappearing stones, the devil's shoes – and so much tension between what is real and what is imagined, that it’s difficult not to be swept up by its crackling prose. If you didn’t read it because it was a Richard & Judy pick: shame on you.
38. The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz (2007)
Drown is one of my favourite story collections and had a huge influence on my reading habits back when I first read it in 1996. Oscar Wao, however, didn’t quite hit me where I thought it was going to. It is a great read, wonderfully executed and superbly detailed. It’s also funny and uses footnotes properly, instead of just as some kind of Po-Mo affectation. I wanted to love this more, but unfortunately it’s merely very good rather than great. Which is still awesome, obviously.
37. The Last Samurai – Helen DeWitt (2000)
A hundred times the book that The Curious Incident... or any number of the genius kid books we’ve had inflicted on us over the decade, The Last Samurai (or The Seventh Samurai, as my proof copy has it) is a touching, beautifully written and utterly believable evocation of a the inner struggle of a boy who understands ancient Greek, but doesn't know who is father is. This is how you do erudite without being tricksy. This is how you do intelligent without being smug. This is how you write the kind of book Jonathan Safran Foer imagined Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close would become.
36. Embers – Sandor Marai (2001)
Male friendship isn’t tackled enough in serious novels. There’s a kind of unspoken devotion and bond that makes such a relationship different to any other kind. Basically it’s a lot like Brokeback Mountain without all the fucking, and Embers manages to express these feeling expertly. It’s dark a brooding affair, and one that makes for great winter reading.
35. It’s All Right Now – Charles Chadwick (2005)
Tom Ripple is the closest we’ve ever had to a English Rabbit Angstrom. He’s an astonishingly normal man, a devote of American crime shows, of cosy suburban living, of regular middle class life. But he is also a lens through which we see thirty years of English contemporary life, and a voice that is stunning in its insight, its exactitiude and its emotional intelligence. It's All Right Now deserves far more recognition than it got at the time, and has received since.
34. Oxygen – Andrew Miller (2001)
Miller’s first two novels were historical and I rather gave them a wide berth; but Oxygen was something quite different. Four characters, all coping with their own strains and stresses, their own failings and mortality – and yet it wasn’t in any way depressing (unlike his follow up, The Optimists). A truly special piece of work, Oxygen is a book I hadn't thought about in years, but once remembered came back to me with almost astonishing clarity.
33. The History of Love – Nicole Kraus (2005)
Nicole Kraus is married to Jonathan Safran Foer. In their house, she wears the literary trousers. Leo Gursky, the mute at the heart of this book is nonetheless a teller of tales, of love stories that cross generations and decades. It is energetic, witty and shamelessly romantic. It should be read, delighted in and savoured.
32. Lark & Termite – Jayne Anne Philips (2009)
This tale of families – those we create and those we are born into – is the first I reviewed for a national newspaper. I was lucky that I got a book so rich and so deftly written. Phillips writes a kind of mythologized Americana, a fuzzy, beat-up kind of place that is at once familiar yet ultimately unknowable. It is, in the truest sense of the word, haunting
31. Falling Man – Don Delillo (2007)
After his two superlative novels of the nineties (Mao II, Underworld), Delillo’s output in the 2000s was somewhat slight. Both The Body Artist and Cosmopolis were not vintage stuff by any stretch, though as with all of Delillo’s work there was always something wonderful to be found. Falling Man is not as good as Underworld or Mao II (few novels are, to be fair) but that’s not to do it a disservice. The opening scene of Keith leaving the aftermath of 9/11 is one of the best things he has written, right up there with Underworld’s opening. The novel’s conclusion in Las Vegas is also the kind of exemplary prose married to ideas we have come to expect from Delillo. What comes inbetween is, however, a little messy, a little underdeveloped. While it’s not his best book, it does remind us that there is no one – and I mean no one – who is better when they’re at the top of their game.
The most nominations come from the year 2005 (7); the least from 2009 (3).
The nominations come from 14 different countries.
Women make up just under a quarter of the entries (12).
Only one author has more than one novel in the top 50.
So on with the run down . . .
40. The Bear Boy – Cynthia Ozick (2005)
The Puttermesser Papers was one of my favourite books from the nineties. The Bear Boy didn’t sound so promising (no golems here). But in this tender, occasionally disturbing coming of age tale, Ozick proves her versatility and her tremendous storytelling powers. A different class from start to finish, it’s a book that makes you yearn for a New York you could never know.
39. The Testament of Gideon Mack – James Robertson (2006)
One of the most inventive and curious novels I’ve read, with a beautifully controlled and dextrous way of describing the inner and outer worlds. Robertson imbues the narrative with so many superb images – disappearing and reappearing stones, the devil's shoes – and so much tension between what is real and what is imagined, that it’s difficult not to be swept up by its crackling prose. If you didn’t read it because it was a Richard & Judy pick: shame on you.
38. The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz (2007)
Drown is one of my favourite story collections and had a huge influence on my reading habits back when I first read it in 1996. Oscar Wao, however, didn’t quite hit me where I thought it was going to. It is a great read, wonderfully executed and superbly detailed. It’s also funny and uses footnotes properly, instead of just as some kind of Po-Mo affectation. I wanted to love this more, but unfortunately it’s merely very good rather than great. Which is still awesome, obviously.
37. The Last Samurai – Helen DeWitt (2000)
A hundred times the book that The Curious Incident... or any number of the genius kid books we’ve had inflicted on us over the decade, The Last Samurai (or The Seventh Samurai, as my proof copy has it) is a touching, beautifully written and utterly believable evocation of a the inner struggle of a boy who understands ancient Greek, but doesn't know who is father is. This is how you do erudite without being tricksy. This is how you do intelligent without being smug. This is how you write the kind of book Jonathan Safran Foer imagined Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close would become.
36. Embers – Sandor Marai (2001)
Male friendship isn’t tackled enough in serious novels. There’s a kind of unspoken devotion and bond that makes such a relationship different to any other kind. Basically it’s a lot like Brokeback Mountain without all the fucking, and Embers manages to express these feeling expertly. It’s dark a brooding affair, and one that makes for great winter reading.
35. It’s All Right Now – Charles Chadwick (2005)
Tom Ripple is the closest we’ve ever had to a English Rabbit Angstrom. He’s an astonishingly normal man, a devote of American crime shows, of cosy suburban living, of regular middle class life. But he is also a lens through which we see thirty years of English contemporary life, and a voice that is stunning in its insight, its exactitiude and its emotional intelligence. It's All Right Now deserves far more recognition than it got at the time, and has received since.
34. Oxygen – Andrew Miller (2001)
Miller’s first two novels were historical and I rather gave them a wide berth; but Oxygen was something quite different. Four characters, all coping with their own strains and stresses, their own failings and mortality – and yet it wasn’t in any way depressing (unlike his follow up, The Optimists). A truly special piece of work, Oxygen is a book I hadn't thought about in years, but once remembered came back to me with almost astonishing clarity.
33. The History of Love – Nicole Kraus (2005)
Nicole Kraus is married to Jonathan Safran Foer. In their house, she wears the literary trousers. Leo Gursky, the mute at the heart of this book is nonetheless a teller of tales, of love stories that cross generations and decades. It is energetic, witty and shamelessly romantic. It should be read, delighted in and savoured.
32. Lark & Termite – Jayne Anne Philips (2009)
This tale of families – those we create and those we are born into – is the first I reviewed for a national newspaper. I was lucky that I got a book so rich and so deftly written. Phillips writes a kind of mythologized Americana, a fuzzy, beat-up kind of place that is at once familiar yet ultimately unknowable. It is, in the truest sense of the word, haunting
31. Falling Man – Don Delillo (2007)
After his two superlative novels of the nineties (Mao II, Underworld), Delillo’s output in the 2000s was somewhat slight. Both The Body Artist and Cosmopolis were not vintage stuff by any stretch, though as with all of Delillo’s work there was always something wonderful to be found. Falling Man is not as good as Underworld or Mao II (few novels are, to be fair) but that’s not to do it a disservice. The opening scene of Keith leaving the aftermath of 9/11 is one of the best things he has written, right up there with Underworld’s opening. The novel’s conclusion in Las Vegas is also the kind of exemplary prose married to ideas we have come to expect from Delillo. What comes inbetween is, however, a little messy, a little underdeveloped. While it’s not his best book, it does remind us that there is no one – and I mean no one – who is better when they’re at the top of their game.
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
The 50 Novels of the 2000s - part one: 50 to 41
Everyone's doing the best of the decade, so as a bandwagon jumping exercise I thought I'd do the same. I suspect my list will not be that earth-shattering, but I hope you find some interesting titles that you might ordinarily not have bothered to read. Links will take you to Waterstones.com. I don't get paid on it, just thought it would make it easier to see why I liked the book so much. And remember, these are novels only. No short stories, no poetry and no bloody polemics. Dates refer to the year of original UK publication.
50. Callisto – Torsten Krol (2007)
A snortingly funny and clever book, the kind of thing that Vernon God Little would have loved to have been. Similar in many ways to Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole, this is a satire on contemporary culture which is wise and witty enough to work.
49. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffeneger (2003)
I cried in the office at the end of this confusing yet winning tale of love across the space-time continuum. It’s the characters that shine through, flawed, occasionally unpleasant but always realistic, despite the conceit.
48. The King is Dead – Jim Lewis (2003)
The first forgotten novel of the 2000s on this list, The King is Dead is a powerful and beautifully written tale of love and fate, of families and their misfortunes. It is also a quiet masterpiece that brings Memphis liltingly to life. There is a moment of supreme power at the start of section 2 that I remember making me draw breath. It’s a scandal this book isn’t more well known.
47. Timoleon Vita Come Home – Dan Rhodes (2003)
Dan Rhodes first novel is a shaggy dog story with all kinds of unhappy endings. It’s also, as you’d imagine from Rhodes, strange and incredibly funny.
46. The Horned Man – James Lasdun (2002)
The Horned Man is a slim, taut volume suffused with dread and unease. A man is being framed – seemingly – for a series of brutal crimes. But what is the truth? And will we ever know it. Lasdun marries sentences you could fall into and swim around in for days with a tight plot and a series of increasingly flawed and surprising characters. Superb.
45. After the Fire, A Still Small Voice – Evie Wyld (2009)
One of only three novels to survive from 2009, Evie Wyld’s debut is quiet, atmospheric and utterly beguiling. The depth and clarity of both the characterisation, the settings and the social and political context – not to mention the generational sweep – of this novel marks it out as something quite, quite special. I suspect Wyld will be one of the key voices of the next decade.
44. The People’s Act of Love – James Meek (2005)
I read this freezing novel of pre-revolutionary Russia in a baking apartment in Kefalonia. It was like air conditioning all of its own. Violent, bloody and entertaining, but entirely serious and intelligent, this is the kind of book you shiver just thinking about.
43. Netherland – Joseph O’Neil (2008)
I expected to go crazy for this novel, considering the hype and the fact it was about cricket, but good though it was – and some of it is truly astonishing – it didn’t quite live up to its amazing reputation. Despite this, it’s still a powerful and subtle look at the nature of home and of ambition.
42. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami (2005)
The least successful of all Murakami’s long novels, Kafka on the Shore is still streets ahead of most writers' output. While I loved it when I read it, it didn’t settle with me in the same way that, say, Sputnik Sweetheart or Hardboiled Wonderland did. But it's still a brilliant, edifying read.
41. Murder on the Leviathan – Boris Akunin (2005)
I’d just started an ill-fated tenure at Virgin books and was feeling unwell. The doctor recommended some rest, so I went into a bookshop and asked for something light for me to enjoy; a crime novel perhaps. A bookseller recommended Leviathan (as it was then known) and I devoured it in one sitting. Daft, clever, funny and meticulously plotted, with a bunch of characters not easily forgotten, Leviathan is the perfect introduction to Akunin’s unique world.
50. Callisto – Torsten Krol (2007)
A snortingly funny and clever book, the kind of thing that Vernon God Little would have loved to have been. Similar in many ways to Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole, this is a satire on contemporary culture which is wise and witty enough to work.
49. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffeneger (2003)
I cried in the office at the end of this confusing yet winning tale of love across the space-time continuum. It’s the characters that shine through, flawed, occasionally unpleasant but always realistic, despite the conceit.
48. The King is Dead – Jim Lewis (2003)
The first forgotten novel of the 2000s on this list, The King is Dead is a powerful and beautifully written tale of love and fate, of families and their misfortunes. It is also a quiet masterpiece that brings Memphis liltingly to life. There is a moment of supreme power at the start of section 2 that I remember making me draw breath. It’s a scandal this book isn’t more well known.
47. Timoleon Vita Come Home – Dan Rhodes (2003)
Dan Rhodes first novel is a shaggy dog story with all kinds of unhappy endings. It’s also, as you’d imagine from Rhodes, strange and incredibly funny.
46. The Horned Man – James Lasdun (2002)
The Horned Man is a slim, taut volume suffused with dread and unease. A man is being framed – seemingly – for a series of brutal crimes. But what is the truth? And will we ever know it. Lasdun marries sentences you could fall into and swim around in for days with a tight plot and a series of increasingly flawed and surprising characters. Superb.
45. After the Fire, A Still Small Voice – Evie Wyld (2009)
One of only three novels to survive from 2009, Evie Wyld’s debut is quiet, atmospheric and utterly beguiling. The depth and clarity of both the characterisation, the settings and the social and political context – not to mention the generational sweep – of this novel marks it out as something quite, quite special. I suspect Wyld will be one of the key voices of the next decade.
44. The People’s Act of Love – James Meek (2005)
I read this freezing novel of pre-revolutionary Russia in a baking apartment in Kefalonia. It was like air conditioning all of its own. Violent, bloody and entertaining, but entirely serious and intelligent, this is the kind of book you shiver just thinking about.
43. Netherland – Joseph O’Neil (2008)
I expected to go crazy for this novel, considering the hype and the fact it was about cricket, but good though it was – and some of it is truly astonishing – it didn’t quite live up to its amazing reputation. Despite this, it’s still a powerful and subtle look at the nature of home and of ambition.
42. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami (2005)
The least successful of all Murakami’s long novels, Kafka on the Shore is still streets ahead of most writers' output. While I loved it when I read it, it didn’t settle with me in the same way that, say, Sputnik Sweetheart or Hardboiled Wonderland did. But it's still a brilliant, edifying read.
41. Murder on the Leviathan – Boris Akunin (2005)
I’d just started an ill-fated tenure at Virgin books and was feeling unwell. The doctor recommended some rest, so I went into a bookshop and asked for something light for me to enjoy; a crime novel perhaps. A bookseller recommended Leviathan (as it was then known) and I devoured it in one sitting. Daft, clever, funny and meticulously plotted, with a bunch of characters not easily forgotten, Leviathan is the perfect introduction to Akunin’s unique world.
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