Clare Mulley

Redwood (Viking, £25), Ben Macintyre’s latest compelling caper with consequences, tops my list this year. Set in 1980s Tehran, a city of nightingales and scattered gunfire, it reminds us that the Cold War was not just an ideological battle between communism and capitalism. Enter a disaffected spook, a few hardline clerics, many bloodthirsty terrorists and much weaponry, and you have a recipe for high drama and the potential end of the world as we know it.

Natalie Livingstone’s almost equally lively and revelatory The Nuremberg Women (John Murray, £25) stresses that while the public face of the postwar military trials was resolutely male, as were the indictments (no mention of rape among the war crimes, for instance), women played significant roles not just as journalists and war artists but among the legal teams and witnesses.

Meanwhile, top of my ‘to read’ pile is Jane Rogoyska’s Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War (Allen Lane, £25).

Lionel Barber

WTF India: Are We Losing the Plot? by Suhel Seth (Juggernaut, £5.50). India can put a rover on the moon but its rivers are sewers, the air is rotten and red tape is rampant. Suhel Seth, a businessman and political commentator, has written a pithy polemic against the normalisation of civic failure. Rich in dark humour, with prescriptions to boot, WTF India is a wake-up call to a complacent political class.

The Nuremberg Women by Natalie Livingstone (John Murray, £25) is the story of eight women at or near the centre of the Nuremberg Nazi trials. The portraits are acute and the historical research meticulous. The journalist Erika Mann wanders around like an open knife; the French Resistance fighter and Auschwitz survivor Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier exudes moral authority; and there’s a secret love story involving Rebecca West, who writes like a dream but is not someone to share a cup of tea with. The abiding impression is German ambivalence over war guilt, despite the horrors of the Nazi era.

Duncan Fallowell

Lawrence Durrell’s The Avignon Quintet, published between 1974 and 1985, has had me hooked. Having purchased Sebastian on a whim, I then acquired the other four in unread first editions. After his muddled work following The Alexandria Quartet I too joined the sneerers and walked away. But Durrell recovered; and now here I am, on the current of his contrapuntal method, voyaging into a netherworld of intrigue, exile, romance and intellectual disquiet. For the first time I fully appreciate Durrell as a successor to Joseph Conrad and precursor of today’s global deracination. I also realise how starved I’ve been of high prose style in our present literary landscape. I’m reading the books out of order, so that this doesn’t become a task or a soap opera.

One never ceases to marvel at the Loeb Classical Library, the nearest thing we have to the lost library of Alexandria, and I’ve ordered its latest addition, Orphic Collection (Harvard University Press, £17.99). Heaven knows where that will take me.

Daniel Swift

This is slightly cheating as it is not published until next year, but the best book by far that I’ve read recently is James Shapiro’s Othello: An American Tragedy (Yale University Press, £20). Disturbing, provocative and stunningly researched, it tells the story of the American afterlife of Shakespeare’s fictional Othello. That sounds dry, but the book is not. Slave owners, including the genial founding father Benjamin Franklin, named their slaves Othello and there was also a slave ship called the Othello. The book is full of haunting details and, through patient archival digging and understated narrative confidence, it builds to a shattering portrait – of the submerged currents of history, of how rage passes between the generations and the violence inside the apparently classy gesture of alluding to Shakespeare.

Francis Wheen

A History of the Novel in Britain by Philip Hensher (Pelican, £25) is a tour de force and a gloriously provocative one. I love Hensher’s enthusiasm for the many fine but forgotten authors whom he rescues from neglect, and the boldness of his slingshots against giants: ‘Considering Tolkien was a linguist, it is surprising how absolutely frightful his manner of writing is.’ Jilly Cooper, by contrast, is praised as ‘the sort of excellent novelist that Q.D. Leavis taught the aspiring intelligentsia to despise’.

If you’ve ever wondered why, about a decade ago, senior politicians suddenly started claiming that women could have penises and men could grow cervixes, you’ll find the answer in Alice Sullivan’s Sex, Lies and Statistics (Polity, £20). It is the story of how gender madness seized control of institutions such as universities, police forces and even the Office for National Statistics, which initially tried to drop the male/female question from the 2021 census. This is a bracingly forthright history of an extra-ordinary delusion which to future generations will seem as incredible as phrenology or the South Sea Bubble.

Allan Mallinson

Max Hastings’s Plunder (HarperCollins, £25) is a naught-for-your comfort account of the slow collapse of the Wehrmacht, the Third Reich indeed, in western Europe. When the end of war was in sight, it was not a safe place to be for civilians and soldiers alike. Hastings paints a vivid picture of the weeks after the Allied crossing of the Rhine and the aftermath of the surrender. I think it’s his best book yet.

Tim Spicer’s An Axe and Four Balloons (Barbreck, £25) is the biography of a man of whom few will have heard, yet to whom we all owe so much: Brian Franks DSO MC, ‘the Man Who Saved the SAS’, an Old Etonian hotelier who first put on uniform in 1939. You couldn’t make it up.

Lastly, Paul de Zulueta’s Last Night I Dreamt (Virago, £25), a history of many generations of the du Mauriers, of which he’s one, is astutely and charmingly written as well as elegantly and wittily illustrated.

Jenny Colgan

The Strangers by Naomi Alderman (Figtree, £15.99) is the oddest book – a science fiction story about the arrival of a new type of species, which is actually a bait and switch for a beautiful, heartfelt memoir about motherhood and infertility. It’s touching, extraordinary and a real achievement.

The Great Dictator by Matthew Sweet (Hodder, £19.99). From the moment you hear the title of this biography of Barbara Cartland you know you’re in for a rollicking good time. As a race through the crazed bright young people of the 1920s to the ridiculous excesses of the 1980s, involving drunks, shotguns, wars, politics, royalty and about a zillion of Cartland’s books sold (the manuscripts delivered by Rolls-Royce to Claridge’s), this is a vivid, wonderful story about Britain.

On the Calculation of Volume: IV by Solvej Balle (Faber, £12.99). This haunting, beautiful series about a woman who slips through a crack in time and gets stuck in one November day has many fans of which I am one; we are up to Volume IV, she is no longer alone and I am in it to the end.

I was also caught up in this year’s craze to read Moby-Dick and was delighted that I had. Nobody told me it was funny and that the chapters were so short. I adored it from start to finish.

Dennis Duncan

Transcription by Ben Lerner (Granta, £14.99). I think the reason I resisted reading Lerner for so long was because I expected him to be smart-alecky. That whole Brooklyn hipster thing. I only bought Transcription to prove myself right, the way you might click on a news story purely for the thrill of being triggered. Needless to say, I realise I’ve been an idiot all these years.

If you’ve heard anything about this novel, it probably concerns the opening scene in which an interviewer drops his iPhone in the toilet ahead of a rare, highly anticipated interview with an aged philosopher. It is a very funny set piece – a kind of Larry David study in slapstick and awkwardness – but it’s a credit to Lerner’s seriousness that it’s the least interesting thing about this wise, moving book. Take, for example, the interview itself (at least as it’s transcribed for us), which is a prose poem of insight and confusion: magical, devastating and brutally realistic.

After realising how badly I’d misjudged him, I hoovered up Lerner’s other novels. They’re all good, but there’s a clear trajectory, each one better – less showy, less embarrassed by emotion – than the last. I’m delighted that Transcription won the Orwell Prize but outraged that the Booker judges overlooked it. I await Lerner’s next with the eagerness and zeal of the converted.

Genevieve Gaunt

The best fiction reads like non-fiction and the best non-fiction reads like fiction. Two sucker-punch novels that encapsulate this are Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist (Fourth Estate, £10.99) and Farewell to Eden by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson Heinemann, £22), which I reviewed in these pages.

The Good Terrorist skewers a group of white, middle-class 30-year-olds living in a squat in London who rail against the bourgeoisie (from which they hail). My favourite line is: ‘People go on demos because they get a kick out of it. Like picnics.’ Lessing captures a moral narcissism that predates social media. This 1985 book is now reprinted with a blisteringly good introduction by Donal Ryan. Great literature distills the essence of things so well that when a book confronts us with a portrait of suffering, heartache, political machinations, vanity or tragedy we are dismayed yet strangely comforted to realise that over centuries everything has changed yet nothing has changed.

Susan Hill

I read little new fiction this year but reread the tried and tested, including Joseph Roth’s masterpiece The Radetzky March, which I urge upon you.

Non-fiction is headed by Hermione Lee’s Anita Brookner: Art and Life (Chatto, £28). Wanting to leave no trace, the writer destroyed everything. What a task for Lee, then – and she has done Brookner proud, making light of the difficulties. Reading this biography should lead you to the still underrated novels.

Philip Hensher’s A History of the Novel in Britain (Pelican, £25) illuminates and educates in the best unacademic way while being academically sound.

Andrea Wulf

First things first. I have picked a book by someone I know personally. I don’t normally do this because it feels wrong somehow; but I really loved David Keenan’s strange, wonderful Boyhood (White Rabbit, £23). It’s like a magical psychedelic ride – unashamed, bold and utterly different (in the best possible way). There are multiple strands to the story, including a poet-soldier in the second world war, speaking horses and the tender relationship between the protagonist and his father, who has dementia.

Another book I loved was Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis (Boiler House Press, £12.99), originally published in the 1930s. It tells the story of Henry Preston Standish, a wealthy New York stockbroker, who tumbles into the Pacific somewhere between Hawaii and Panama. Being a gentleman, he’s deeply embarrassed by the accident and tries to keep his dignity as the ship disappears over the horizon. It is hilarious and unexpectedly moving at the same time.

Mark Mason

Paul Fischer’s The Last Kings of Hollywood (Faber, £22) told me stuff about Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg that I didn’t know – and I know a lot about that trio. For instance, I knew that Spielberg realised the full power of the ‘head pops out of the boat’ scene in Jaws when it caused someone at a preview to be physically ill. But I didn’t know that he’d shot the close-up of the head with $3,000 of his own money, because the studio refused to pay. He got the prop out of storage, built a replica of the boat in a friend’s swimming pool and poured milk into the water to make it cloudy.

The Last Best Place on the Internet (Granta, £18.99), Richard Cooke’s study of Wikipedia, asks fascinating questions about why we value knowledge, and what it’s for. In 2019, Christina Koch edited the article on spacewalks, and added the one she’d just done. She was logged on from the International Space Station.

Michela Wrong

I enjoyed Simukai Chigudu’s Chasing Freedom (The Bodley Head, £20) far more than expected, given its painful subject matter: the alienation that is the legacy of Britain’s decolonisation process, inherited from a Zimbabwean father and Ugandan mother. The writer’s lack of self-pity prevents this memoir ever becoming a whine.

‘It’s all about the minerals’ is the lazy trope spouted whenever the war in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo comes up. As with all tropes, there’s a lot of truth to it, and Nicolas Niarchos spent more than ten years probing the mineral rush of our era, getting himself arrested in the process. His Elements of Power (William Collins, £25) is the impressive, authoritative result.

When you spend time writing about corruption in the developing world, it’s important to be reminded that Britain itself is not exactly sleaze-free. Robert Barrington, the author of Corrupted Kingdom (Profile, £22), is a recognised authority on the subject. While pulling no punches, the book also offers positive, practical steps to address the scourge. It’s not too late.

This year seemed an appropriate moment to read my friend Majid Parsa’s firsthand account of what it was like growing up carefully closeted in Iran. The Ayatollah’s Gaze (Wilton Square, 16.99) exposes a gay underworld of boozy parties, clandestine assignations and febrile relationships conducted under the noses of devout Muslim parents blithely arranging their sons’ betrothals. In its way, Majid’s is the ultimate act of revolt.

A.N. Wilson

Napoleon and his Marshals by Andrew Roberts (Allen Lane, £40). The author has written a fine biography of Napoleon and many other books and articles around that grandest of themes; but this is the chef d’oeuvre. I read it with absolute rapture and I know it will become one of my favourite books. The extraordinary variety of the marshals gives you a vision of why and how Napoleon united so huge a swath of the French behind him – from Ney, the son of a German barrel-cooper, to Bernadotte, eventually King of Sweden; from Berthier, the military genius, to Murat, the ‘spoiled priest’ son of an innkeeper. To see the Napoleonic story through the rivalries and multitudinous talents of the marshals makes for an unputdownable read. This is a major classic of history.

Sara Wheeler

‘Language is a dialect with an army and a navy.’ Laura Spinney’s Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (William Collins, £10.99) sheds more light on this famous dictum than anything I’ve read. We started speaking 300,000 years ago but invented writing relatively recently.

I also enjoyed Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi’s Ghost of the Mountains (Granta, £20), which unravels the secrets of the snow leopard through close study of the thrills and pitfalls of conservation biology.

In fiction, Colin Thubron’s Passage (Chatto, £14.99) deploys the mysteries of Ancient Egypt in brilliant counterpoint to the workings of the human consciousness. ‘Memories,’ the protagonist realises, ‘if repeatedly recalled, become unreliable.’ Indeed.

Mark Amory

I always imagined that these recommendations were meant to help people with their Christmas presents and was annoyed by contributors who had only read old books. But now I have become one of them. On my way through Philip Hensher’s impressive A History of the Novel in Britain (Pelican, £25) I noted some of the many novels I had not read. Charlotte Brontë’s Villette concerns a poor, shy English woman who finds herself in Belgium. Hensher describes it as about ‘a passion that makes no sense and is quite impossible’. Just so. It is indeed powerful, but harder work than Jane Eyre.

The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett is easier to like. The very different lives of two sisters born in a provincial English town are traced in persuasive detail. Hensher finds the end the ‘closest approach to the Russian novel at its greatest – perhaps even to Tolstoy’. I wouldn’t know as I have not quite got there yet. As you can see, I have turned my back on modern British fiction. Relaxing between classics, however, I find that obscure early P.G. Wodehouse is more readable than obscure early Agatha Christie.

Maggie Fergusson

Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo XIV (Ebury Vine, £11.99). Has a papal encyclical ever been chosen as a Spectator book of the year? Has Alastair Campbell ever before read an encyclical, let alone given it a ringing endorsement for a commercial publisher: ‘Beautifully written, hugely significant, speaks truth to power.’ ‘The first contribution we can make towards a more humane civilisation is to be mindful of our words,’ writes the Pope, and the encyclical’s 40,000 words surely represent the most profound contribution so far to the debate on AI. Leo is never overbearing – he does not lay down the law but invites readers to ‘engage in dialogue’ – and he’s no Luddite: AI can serve human good if truly human ends are sought. He simply wishes for each of us ‘to grow towards fullness’. Recently, I met Rowan Williams, who was reviewing Magnifica Humanitas for the Telegraph. What did he make of it? ‘Pitch-perfect.’

Sudhir Hazareesingh

My book of the year is Andrea Wulf’s The Traveller (Allen Lane, £30), a compelling biography of George Forster, an extraordinary Enlightenment figure who, as a teenage prodigy, accompanied his father on Captain Cook’s epic three-year voyage to Antarctica and the Pacific islands. Forster went on to become one of the leading naturalists and travel writers of his time, and one of its most creative thinkers. His political views were nourished by an uncompromising democratic spirit. He condemned European colonialism and slavery, championed racial and gender equality and embraced the American and French Revolutions.

I was also absorbed by Imaobong Umoren’s Empire Without End (Fern Press, £25), a magnificent new history of Britain’s relationship with the Caribbean. Written with zest and humanity, and full of memorable examples and captivating figures, it powerfully draws out the interconnections and ongoing legacies on both sides, notably on questions of race, slavery and colonialism.

In this context I warmly salute the online publication by the Ancestry platform, in association with UCL’s Centre for the Studies of the Legacies of British Slavery, of the enslavement registers from 20 former British colonies between 1813 and 1840. This rich collection of more than 300,000 digitised pages provides new insights into the lives of enslaved people in the early 19th century, as well as being an invaluable tool for contemporaries looking to trace the histories of their ancestors.