Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (Chatto) is a revelation, brilliantly demonstrating the undemure existence of this widely admired novelist: a louche Irish husband, debt, a poverty-stricken life on sinking barges and council flats lie behind a facade of mild English eccentricity and powerfully original (often very un-English) work. It reads like a Fitzgerald novel.
I was dazzled by Javier Marias's The Infatuations (Hamish Hamilton): nobody else writes so hypnotically of obsession, suspicion and the murky areas of love and crime.
Similar themes characterise Edna O'Brien's short stories in The Love Object (Faber), each one a masterclass in her quintessential qualities of delicacy and toughness.
Lucy Riall's Under the Volcano: Revolution in a Sicilian Town (Oxford) tells the story of an 1860 peasant revolt on an English-owned Sicilian property: a classic of microhistory, raising large issues of landlordism, violent history and mutual incomprehension, with distinct Irish echoes.
The poems that meant most to me in 2013 were Seamus Heaney's, read with a revived intensity after his loss. But of new publications, I was deeply impressed by Martin Dyar's Maiden Names (Arlen House): funny, astute, marvellously judged, and a genuinely new voice.
Next: Mary O'Donoghue's books of the year
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