What were the best books and who were their authors? Belinda McKeon finds out from people who should know: novelists, poets, historians, academics, critics, politicians and others.
Michael Longley
Poet and critic
The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Irish Poems, which he edited, was published this year. He is currently working on his eighth collection of poems
In its writing, photography and design, C.E.B. Brett's Buildings of North County Down (Ulster Architectural Heritage Society, £26) is a masterpiece. This most civilised of guides communicates his deep sense of the beauty that can reside in the buildings of a place, in this case my native county.
An admirer of Dominic Hibberd's two previous books about Owen, I esteem even more his Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £25). His delicate exploration of that hitherto underestimated
topic, Owen's homosexuality, really does help to explain the great poems. Suffused with her unsurpassed background knowledge of Belfast and Ulster and her ardent devotion to the novels, Patricia Craig's Brian Moore:
A Biography (Bloomsbury, £20) is another indispensable account of a writer's life. Since I am involved in judging this year's T.S. Eliot Prize, I must avoid mentioning new poetry collections. But I relished Richard Murphy's The Kick (Granta Books, £20), a frank and evocative autobiography that
throws light on the impressive edifice of the Collected Poems, published last year by Gallery. And lastly, the propulsion and inventiveness of Ciaran Carson's The Inferno of Dante Alighieri (Granta Books, £14.99) surely makes his the Dante translation de nos jours.
Antony Beevor
Author and historian
His Berlin: The Downfall 1945 was published by Viking in April. His next book will be an edition of Vassili Grossman's wartime notebooks, diaries and letters
Selina Hastings, in her superb biography Rosamond Lehmann: A Life (Chatto & Windus, £25), shows that even though her subject led the sort of life many would envy – she was a brilliant, beautiful novelist who moved and loved in the highest bohemian circles – Lehmann's life was harrowing and tragic. Orlando Figes's Natasha's Dance – A Cultural History of Russia (Penguin Allen Lane, £25) is a magnificent account of Russia's astonishing artistic growth, largely due to the fundamental tension between old Russian values and the attempts to westernize the country. David Gilmour's The Long Recessional; The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling (Murray £22.50) is a highly original and beautifully written study of Rudyard
Kipling. And finally, in a year exceptionally rich in biographies, Claire Tomalin's Samuel Pepys, The Unequalled Self (Viking £20), brings to life the man behind the greatest diary in the English language.
Gerry Adams
President of Sinn Féin
Brandon published new editions of his The Street and Other Stories and Cage Eleven this year; Hope and History, a book about the peace process, is due from the same publisher in 2003
The River Cottage Cook Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (Harper Collins, £25) is my exit plan from politics; a very interesting cross between a cookbook and a story of escape from the rat race. This guy's decision to buy a cottage and start an organic farm enriched his life; dipping into his book enriched mine. Hooked: A Hurling Life by Justin McCarthy and Kieran Shannon (Gill & Macmillan, 114.99) is both a great biography
and, with all the drama, intrigue and politics of the GAA in there, an illustration of how sport is like – and about – life. Brendan Anderson's Joe Cahill: A Life in the IRA (O'Brien Press, 125), about a man who spent
a lifetime in the IRA, is necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand that particular lifestyle; it's very much a memoir, starting before Partition and bringing us up to the current situation. For my birthday I
received Flora Hibernica by Jon Pilcher and Valeria Hall (The Collins Press, 131.95); a fascinating account of how the landscape has evolved since we first became an island, and a contemporary view of what still exists and what needs help. Meanwhile, Edna O'Brien's In The Forest (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £16.99) is well-written and riveting, and I
have just read, in one sitting, Danny Morrison's All The Dead Voices (Mercier. EURO12.95), an intimate little memoir and reflection.
Andrew O'Hagan
Novelist and critic
Currently International Creative Writing Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin, in 2002 he was made a United Nations Special Representative for Literature. His new novel, Personality, will be published by Faber in April
Late in the story of Emma Bovary, we come to feel that Flaubert is mourning his heroine as he might mourn the end of his own writing labours. She lies there in the bed, "her eyes as black as full stops". But Emma was
not the end of Flaubert's labour, nor was she the end of heroines, or even of Flaubertian ones, as you discover when you read the best novel published in the last year, Anne Enright's The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (Jonathan Cape, £12.99). You can always tell when a novelist is original, because people
immediately start to speak of other writers brought to mind by the work. In Enright's case, people have grasped for Garcia Marquez, or Angela Carter: for my money, Enright's originality might be compared to that of Djuna Barnes. Eliza Lynch's great journey upriver – pregnant, hot, infamous,
Irish – is just a wonderful thing to read. Also very good this year were
Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club (Flamingo, £8.99), a
biography of ideas centring on a group of men in the American
Civil War period, and Slow Air (Picador, £7.99) a very distilled,
replenishing, second book of poems from the Scottish
poet Robin Robertson.
Ed Moloney
Journalist and
author
Penguin published his
A Secret History of The IRA in September
This year I read The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (Picador, £30). Babel was a Jewish Bolshevik who fought with Red partisans in Poland against anti-Communists in 1920, and The Red Cavalry Stories, his account of that
campaign, is the centrepiece of this marvellous book. Inevitably, Babel fell foul of Stalin and in 1939 he was forced to confess to espionage and was shot. He was the Soviet Union's Kafka, his great talent suppressed by
tyranny. Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson – Master of the Senate (Jonathan Cape, £30) is a 20-year long epic journey into the life and career of one of America's most compelling politicians and the second of three volumes. It is not only required reading for anyone wanting to learn about how America ticks; as a lesson in political biography, it has no equal. James Bamford's Body of Secrets (Arrow, £10) is a fascinating and superbly written exposé of the National Security – the people who break codes and tap phones on behalf of the US government.
Ian Sansom
Author, critic and father
Granta published his The Truth AboutBabies in June
Living on a small island one is, of course, fascinated by stories written by people living on small islands, and I was therefore delighted to come across Tony Porter's The Great White Palace (Doubleday, £12.99), the
true story of how Porter and his wife bought a tiny island off the south Devon coast and restored its derelict Art Deco hotel. It's all jolly hockey sticks, but I rather liked it. Allen Kurzweil's novel The Grand Complication (Heinemann, £9.99), meanwhile, is set in the New York Public Library, which rather guarantees its interest. The whole thing's a rigmarole but suffice to say there's a stolen watch, an apartment
stuffed to overflowing with curios and objéts, and quite a lot of stuff about strip joints and black Spandex catsuits. Kurzweil's enthusiasms are many, and his research comprehensive.
And finally, well, what can one say about Paul Muldoon? I don't know. Maybe if you buy Moy Sand and Gravel (Faber, £14.99) you might be able to think of something.
Declan Kiberd
Author, critic and academic
Richard Murphy's The Kick (Granta Books, £20) is an amusing and haunting memoir and a fitting backdrop to last year's Collected Poems (Gallery Press). The pen-pictures of figures like the young John McGahern or Sylvia Plath were spellbinding, but the book also gave a superb insight into the social transformation of post-imperial England and post-colonial Ireland in the middle of the last century.
Orlando Figes's Natasha's Dance (Allen Lane, £25) offered a marvellous overview of Russian culture through the centuries. Written by a historian who has the gift of knowing how to connect politics and the world of bohemia, it took some undeserved flak from academic specialists.
This was a year, it seems, in which confident syntheses of historical movements seemed to come into their own – Brian Feeney's Sinn Féin: A Hundred Turbulent Years (O'Brien Press, 117.95), was a masterpiece of pacy narrative and analytic rigour, with lots of interesting comparisons
between the past and present.
Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea (Secker and Warburg, £10) offers a luminous account of the effects of the Great Famine on an awesome range of characters bound for New York in Black '47 – a novel in which
imaginative audacity is tempered only by a scholar's scruple.
A.L. Kennedy
Author and critic
Indelible Acts, her book of short stories, was published by Jonathan Cape in October
I would recommend The Element of Water by Stevie Davies (Women's Press, £6.99) – a real piece of writing, beautifully crafted and
dealing delicately with issues of post-second World War responsibility and guilt in a way that higher-profile books claimed to, but really didn't. All delivered with lyricism and dry humour. The Melancholy of Resistance
by Laszlo Krasznahorkai (New Directions, US$25.95) is also a winner – a masterpiece of point of view writing and pelting along – courtesy of the most insane sentence structures I've ever come across. It's funny, tragic, disturbing and deeply joyful – often simultaneously and its translator (the
wonderful George Szirtes) should get a medal of some kind. Elizabeth McCracken's Niagra Falls All Over Again (Jonathan Cape, £10.99)
is also full of pleasant insanity and humour. If you have any interest in double acts, comedy, old-time vaudeville, or true friendship, this is for you – a faultlessly created narrator and a book full of wonderful observation and good nature. And you could do worse than Ann Patchett's Bel Canto (Fourth Estate, £6.99) – a charming exploration of music, love, human
potential and frailty.
Colum McCann
Novelist
Awarded the Princess Grace Memorial Award in Monaco in October. Orion will publish his new novel Dancer in January
I'm currently judging an American award that involves reading 70 first-time novels. It's pure masochism, really. So, outside of these books I haven't read for pure pleasure as much as I normally would, but there were five or six rays of real brightness. William Kennedy's Roscoe (Scribner,
£15.99) is a wonderful continuation of the Albany cycle – like his character, Kennedy is a bootlegger of the soul. Molly McCloskey showed everyone why she's one of the most inventive writers around with The Beautiful
Changes (Lilliput, 118.99), a novella and stories that dare greatly. I was really happy when Jennifer Johnston's novel, This is not a Novel (Review, £14.99), landed on my desk. Jennifer is an extraordinary writer – she
continues to show us the pulse of the wound. And I have to say that Alexsandr Hemon's novel Nowhere Man, to be published by Picador next June, confirms and cements everything that Question of Bruno (Picador,
£6.99) suggested. The book is befuddling a lot of the critics in the US right now – that's because Hemon's the real deal. The last chapter in particular is one of the great feats of contemporary literature.
And watch out for Hugo Hamilton's memoir The Speckled People, due in
February from Fourth Estate; it takes great mastery to appear to tell a life story with such ease.
Alain de Botton
Author
Hamish Hamilton published his book The Art of Travel in May. In spring 2004, Hamish Hamilton will publish Status Anxiety, which will coincide with a Channel 4 TV series
This year, I finally got around to reading Michel Houellebecq's last two novels, Atomised (Vintage, £6.99) and Platform (Heinemann, £12.99) and was surprised by how much I enjoyed them – they were dark and pessimistic and funny in the best, melancholic way. I also enjoyed Virginia
Nicholson's Among the Bohemians (Viking, £20), a survey of the English counter-culture from 1900 to 1939 and Isabel Colegate's A Pelican in the Wilderness (HarperCollins, £16.99), a survey of how hermits and
outsiders have lived for the last two millennia. David Blayney Brown's
Romanticism (Phaidon, £14.95) is a beautifully illustrated and thoughtful tour through the art, politics and literature of the Romantic Movement.
Terry Eagleton
Author, critic and academic
Allen Lane published his memoir The Gatekeeper in January. His most recent book Sweet Violence: The Way of the Tragic was published by Blackwell in September
I greatly enjoyed Hjalmar Soderberg's classic Swedish novel Doctor Glas (Harvill £10), which centres on a Stockholm doctor who kills one of his patients, the husband of a woman he loves. It caused scandal when it
was first published in 1905, because it was thought to promote euthanasia; now it is reprinted for the first time in English.
Soderberg's protagonist is an early runner of the existentialist hero, locked in a complicated and intriguing triangle. Henri Lefebvre was an extraordinary
figure, associated with surrealism, dadaism and the extreme fringes of the French avant garde who became one of the leading theoreticians of the communist movement; the second volume of his Critique of Everyday Life, published in translation this year (Verso, £22), is a sociological classic which rescues, indeed invents, the concept of everyday life as an academic and sociological topic. What he did – theorising how people experience the world in a daily way – was new and vastly influential in 1962 and remains fascinating.
And Eric Hobsbawm's Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (Allen Lane, £20) is beautifully written and ironic, a story that is told not just in the annoying, self-focused manner of autobiography but wisely, looking
at the life historically in the way that a historian would. And Hobsbawm, now 85, is one of the greatest living Marxist historians writing in English. He sees the way his own life is bound up with its times.
Pat Rabbitte
Leader of the Labour Party
No novel that I have read for a long time rivals John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun (Faber, £16.99), a story that moves through the different seasons in language of striking lyrical beauty. I recall
someone describing his first book for almost a decade as a symphony. For sheer pleasure it is an exceptional experience. Churchill by Roy Jenkins (Macmillan, £30) is a stylish evocation of the great old imperialist bulldog
who was destined to lead his country through the dark days of the second World War. How Churchill won the war and lost Britain in the 1945 General Election is told with humour and fascination. LBJ – a life by Irwin Unger and Debi Unger (John Wiley & Sons, US$30) is recommended to anyone interested in the life and extraordinary career of the driven, tormented, dynamic and complex man who would probably have become one of the greatest US presidents ever were it not for Vietnam. His legislative record on the great issues of the day, civil rights and the war on
poverty, was far more impressive than JFK from under whose shadow Johnson could never quite extricate himself.
Anne Enright
Novelist
The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, published by Cape in September, is shortlisted for the Sunday Independent/Hughes and Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award
Janice Galloway's novel Clara (Jonathan Cape, £10.99), which tells the story of pianist and composer Clara Schumann, is a book to spend time with and get lost in. Full of historical and psychological subtleties, the accumulation of daily detail becomes unbearable as Clara's life narrows and her talent is dissipated in the service of the men she loves. Flight (Gallery, EURO10), the latest collection of poetry by the Irish poet Vona Groarke, is worth it for one poem alone, a discourse on food during the Easter Rising –
down to the crackers in Jacobs' and the exploding flour sacks in Bolands' Mills.
Other readers will find different treasures among the pages of this third collection in which Groarke asserts her mature, and lovely, voice. Set in Newfoundland during the slow genocide of the native Boethuk people, River Thieves (Canongate, £10.99), the first novel by the Canadian poet Michael Crummey might be too "authentic" for some tastes, too melodramatic for others, but there is no doubting the fact that the guy can really write: atmospheric, lucid, sophisticated storytelling, with real heart.
Caroline Walsh
Irish Times Literary Editor
Arrows In Flight, a collection of new short stories by Irish writers which she edited was published in October by Scribner/Townhouse
Taking on the terrifying terrain of love, the fragility of happiness and the complexity of blood ties in The Beautiful Changes, a novella and four short stories (Lilliput, 18.99), Molly McCloskey showed how completely she was mistress of them, as well as a born practitioner of the short story form.
"Snow" and "Dust", about a seemingly perfect American family unravelling during their Christmas reunion on McCloskey's familiar territory of Oregon as the snow falls outside with "exciting ominousness", are stories that momentarily stop the heart. The delight of Sweet Violence: The Way of the Tragic by Terry Eagleton (Blackwell, £14.99) is the way it overturns received images and ideas at every turn. A tour de force trip through the theory of tragedy from the Greeks to Thom Gunn, it's a great way to revisit an entire canon in a very challenging way. Given that it was at times Nightmare on D'Olier Street at The Irish Times over the last 12 months, the perfect antidote came along in The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton
(Hamish Hamilton, £14), a beautifully written reminder that journeys are the midwives of thought and that, if you have the imagination, you can traverse the world without ever leaving home.
John Banville
Novelist and critic
For his latest novel Shroud, published by Picador in September, he is shortlisted for the Sunday Independent Irish Novel of the Year Award
For pleasure, simple and otherwise, this reader's year has produced nothing better than Nobody's Perfect: Writings From the New Yorker (Picador, £15.99), a selection from a decade of New Yorker writings by that magazine's film critic, Anthony Lane. Direct heir of Cyril Connolly and Kenneth Tynan, Lane is one of the most elegant, witty and passionate writers at work in the language. Ann Saddlemyer's Becoming George: The
Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats (Oxford University Press, £25), had one searching for less clichéd ways of saying "definitive", "magisterial", "exhaustive" . . . Mrs W.B., as she was known in her viduity, was one of literature's heroines waiting to be sung, and what a song Ann Saddlemyer sings. Rüdiger Zafranski's Nietzsche, translated by Shelley Frisch (Granta Books, £25), is a wonderfully clear-headed study, blessedly free of the kind of tittle-tattle that too often passes for biographical investigation of this pivotal, tragic and still controversial philosopher.
Colm Tóibín
Author and critic
In March, his Lady Gregory's Toothbrush was published by Lilliput, while Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almódovar was published by Picador. Picador will publish The Master, a novel about Henry James, next autumn
Jeffrey Eugenides's novel Middlesex (Bloomsbury, £16.99) is an ambitious and ingenious novel about 20th century America. He establishes and holds a brave and virtuoso comic tone, managing to ensnare both private dilemmas and public events in the same perfectly modulated fictional trap. Anne Enright's The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (Cape, £10.99) is written with some of the same comic skills, but the tone is riskier, the sentences more outrageous, both sharp and stunning, and the connection between the body and the body politic so sad that you want to burst with laughter. Sebastian Barry's Annie Dunne (Faber, £10.99) is a masterpiece
of ventriloquism, quiet, carefully written, each detail shaped with enormous care, until slowly, without the reader becoming aware, the novel takes on a compelling emotional depth and holds you in its grip. Ed Moloney's
A Secret History of the IRA (Allen Lane, £20) is a masterful and definitive version of the struggle within the Republican movement over the last 30 years. It makes the figure of Gerry Adams more intriguing, both sinister
and admirable; it also makes its author the most authoritative historian of recent history in Northern Ireland.
Roy Foster
Historian and author
Paul Muldoon's Moy Sand and Gravel (Faber, £14.99) moves with eerie assurance and a rollicking deftness of touch between Ireland and America, scattering references and playing word-games, but always with a
seriousness beneath. Who else can write love poems which echo Cavafy and Bob Dylan with equal authority? Linda Colley's Captives (Jonathan Cape, £20) puts the early British Empire through a new spin, breaking
up categories and advancing marginal figures to the forefront of a tangled tale: there are interesting Irish echoes here too. Rudyard Kipling's opinions about Ireland were pretty sulphurous, but David Gilmour's subtle reading of the supposed urimperialist in The Long Recessional: the Imperial Life of
Rudyard Kipling (John Murray, £22.50) is penetrating, unexpected and beautifully written. Finally, if like me you have never managed to finish one of Rosamond Lehmann's books, Selina Hastings's Rosamond Lehmann: A Life (Chatto & Windus, £25) will dazzlingly explain why.
Astringent and witty, it patterns life and work together to create a consummate psychological portrait of a sacred monster.
Sebastian Barry
Author and playwright
Hinterland was staged at the Abbey in February, and a one-act play, Fred and Jane, at Bewley's in September. His novel Annie Dunne was published by Faber in June. The Abbey will produce his translation of Lorca's The House of Bernada Alba next April
From Behind a Closed Door, by Brian Barton, (Blackstaff Press, £14.99), gathers the secret court martial records of the 1916 Rising, and also offers a fine narration of these dark events, out of which glimmers the
truly exceptional spirit of the executed men, without exception, their strange lightness and their mysterious grandeur of mind in the bleak face of death. The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up In Ireland (Allen
Lane, £20, now also out in paperback) by Roy Foster, to my mind the best prose stylist of his generation, even among the novelists, is the Tacitus of our age, and this book, turning and turning with insight, empathy and a sort of enchanting ruthlessness, is a wonderful seed-catalogue of his gifts. And
this year I enjoyed a new edition of Da by Hugh Leonard (Methuen £7.99), published for the Abbey revival. A play as valuable to read as to see, a really high achievement. There is a courage, an intimacy and an incomparable craft that makes this one of the finest plays of the 20th century.
Paul Muldoon
Poet and critic
His most recent book Moy Sand and Gravel, published by Faber in October, has been shortlisted for the 2002 T.S. Eliot Prize
Books by Irish authors which I found particularly engaging this year were William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault (Viking, £16.99), a big house novel that enriches a genre one might have been forgiven for thinking bankrupt; Seamus Heaney's wonderfully robust and revelatory Finders
Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (Faber, £20); and Ciaran Carson's The Inferno of Dante Alighieri (Granta, £14.99), quite simply the best version of Dante there is, the only one with a more than passable stab at
terza rima.
Garret FitzGerald
Former taoiseach
His Reflections on the Irish State has just been published by the Irish Academic Press
Michael Hopkinson's The Irish War Of Indepdendence (Gill & Macmillan, 130) fills a curious gap in the Irish historical record – for although there are many accounts of 1916, and several, (including one by this author) on the Civil War, there has been no satisfactory general account of the War of Independence. This is an objective and well-researched
account of the events that led to the establishment of our State. The Field Marshal Alanbrooke's War Diaries 1939-1945 (Phoenix Press £9.99), edited by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman, offers a unique perspective on the second World War – one that challenges the traditional view of Winston Churchill as war leader. But, infuriating as Alanbrooke as Chief of the
Imperial General Staff found his Prime Minister's persistent attempts to divert the war into a series of side-shows, he nevertheless recognises how much was owed to the inspiration of his leadership. The Northern Ireland Prime Minister Lord Brookeborough occasionally appears as the Field Marshal's young nephew Basil!
And Joanne Harris's novel, Five Quarters of the Orange, (Black Swan, £6.99) skilfully evokes war-time France with its problems of collaboration with the German occupiers. Beautifully written, it holds one's attention to
the end.
Angela Bourke
Author and academic
Edited the Oral Traditions section of the new Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vols 4 & 5: Irish Women's Writing and Traditions, published in October by Cork University Press. Her book about the Dublin-born New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan will be published next year.
My book of the year was John McGahern's That They May Face the
Rising Sun (Faber, £16.99, now in paperback), which I'll read again and
again for the way he uses language to paint people and places. I also loved
Rory and Ita (Jonathan Cape, £16.99), Roddy Doyle's memoir of his parents' lives. Making the spoken word readable is not easy, and this is a rich social history that's wonderfully funny and alive. I'm delighted to have
Seán Ó Coileáin's new edition of An tOileánach by Tomás Ó
Criomhthain (Cló Talbóid, 135 hardback, 14.95 paperback): it's a classic,
presented now as its author wrote it, and also a beautifully produced book.
Gearóid Mac Lochlainn's fine book and CD, Sruth Teangacha (Cló
Iar-Chonnachta, EURO15), is performance poetry in Irish for the 21st century, from the streets of Belfast. I seem to have read a lot of novels about music, but the one that stays in the mind as pure pleasure is Ann Patchett's Bel Canto (Fourth Estate, £6.99). The plot is a version of the conventional disaster movie, with wildly disparate characters confined together, but the quality of the writing, and the meditations on music and translation, lift it to
another level.
Justin Quinn
Poet and editor of Metre Gallery published his third book of poems, Fuselage, in October. In March UCD Press published Gathered Beneath the Storm, his study of Wallace Stevens. A book on 20th-century American poetry and work on translations of the young Czech poet, Petr Borkovec, are planned for 2003
This year has been a particularly good one for poetry, both at home and abroad. Vona Groarke's collection, Flight (Gallery, EURO10), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, contains her best work to date – the poems have a dense, sweet lyricism that's crosshatched with precision and wit. As well as being a poet, Robert Minhinnick is an environmentalist and director of Sustainable Wales, but there is not a hint of eco-propaganda in After the Hurricane (Carcanet, £6.95) – it's an outstanding collection for many reasons, not least of which is the dazzling beauty he has found in
the detritus of globalism. For me, Glyn Maxwell is the best English poet of his generation. Most of the poems of The Nerve (Picador, £7.99) are set in the US where he now lives, and there is pleasure and surprise on almost every page. And finally, Geoffrey Hill has brought out the latest instalment in a series of book-length poems, The Orchards of Syon (Penguin, £9.99); it's demanding, visionary poetry, but richly rewards repeated readings.
Barry McGovern
Actor
He played this year in A Delicate Balance at the Focus, Island Theatre Company's touring production of Faith Healer and Ariel at the Abbey. He is currently playing Scrooge in A Christmas Carol at the Gate, and will appear there as Vladimir in January's 50th anniversary production of Waiting for Godot
Gerry Dukes's Samuel Beckett (Penguin, £9.99) is a perfect introduction to the great writer; an easy to read, accessible biography, full of photographs and illustrations. Dukes's understanding of, and love for, the work is evident. In Ranji: Maharajah of Connemara (Wolfhound, EURO12.99) Anne Chambers gives us the fascinating story of how one of the
world's greatest cricketers, an Indian prince who played for England, fell in love with and bought a castle in Connemara. Spiked: Church-State Intrigue and The Rose Tattoo (New Island, EURO14.99), written by Gerard
Whelan with Carolyn Swift, is the astonishing story of how a tiny Dublin
theatre, the Pike, and its management were arrested on the grounds of indecency for putting on a play by Tennessee Williams in
1957. This book is a great tribute to the late Carolyn Swift, whose wonderful work for theatre and dance in Ireland will never be
forgotten. Lastly, having read Dermot Rattigan's fascinating comparisons of radio productions of King Lear in Theatre of Sound: Radio and
the Dramatic Imagination (Carysfort Press, EURO19), I will never listen to a radio play in the same way.
Niall MacMonagle
Broadcaster, critic and teacher.
Off the Wall, an anthology of poems which he edited, has just been published by Marino. His Leaving Certificate poetry textbook, Poetry Now 2005, will be published next April
The 2002 imprint was rich, varied, numerous and a very good year for poems, poets and poetry: Neil Astley's Staying Alive (Bloodaxe
£10.95) gathers together 500 poems, each one on the side of life, each one making its own music; new poems burn with energy, familiar ones glow anew. In Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (Faber, £20)
generous, companionable and level-headed Seamus Heaney is a "verifying presence".
Ruth Padel's 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (Chatto & Windus, £12.99) offers rigorous, challenging, enlightening analyses and John Brown's In the Chair (Salmon, EURO20), contains 22 in-depth interviews with Northern Irish
poets. Louisa Young's The Book of the Heart (Flamingo, £16.99) is a fascinating, engaging, illustrated study of that vital organ and its depiction in religion, art and literature. Arrows in Flight, edited by Caroline Walsh,
(Scribner/TownHouse, £12.99) is a landmark short-story anthology reflecting the troubled, edgy, uncertainty of now. John Banville's Shroud (Picador, £15.99) renders the questing, solipsistic consciousness brilliantly but my outstanding book of 2002 is, without doubt, John McGahern's masterpiece That They May Face the Rising Sun (Faber, £16.99) for its
rhythmic, honest and wise portrait of place and people.
Gearóid Mac Lochlainn
Poet
His Sruth Teangacha was published in May by Cló Iar-Chonnachta. In September, he won the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award, and in October, the Butler Literary Award
When the writer Brian O'Maoileoin was travelling in Africa, he met Peter Karanga, a young man who had written a book combining his family's history with pictures and diagrams, and, recognising a valuable anthropological and literary manuscript, set to work on Nathena Nbari Ya Mumbi: Oidhe Clainne Mumbi (Coiscéim, EURO17), a translation of Peter's text. It's a rich insight into oral culture, tradition and colonialism, into what has happened to tribes. Everything remains in the African man's words, but Brian writes in Donegal Irish dialect, giving it the feel of Irish storytelling.
I haven't read Dante since university, but Ciaran Carson's wonderful The Inferno of Dante Alighieri (Granta Books, £14.99) captures the vernacular of his home place, just like the Italian did. It reads like a Belfast writer's dialect, with the language, the rhythm of that city, the Belfast edge. Everyone should read Why Do People Hate America? (Icon Books, £7.99) by Ziaudin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies. It is an attempt to answer that question, asked by a woman who stumbled towards a camera in the chaos of 9/11. The authors look at American cultural myths and foreign policy,
going so far as to say that American scholars have covered up the possibility the American Constitution is based on Native American ideas.
Marian Keyes
Novelist
For her latest novel, Angels, published by Michael Joseph in October, she is shortlisted for the Sunday Independent Novel of the Year Award. A new novel, Venus Rising, set in the world of publishing, is in progress
Suzanne Power's Lost Souls' Reunion (Picador, £9.99) is just an incredible first book. Power, called a future Booker winner by her editor at Picador, Graham Swift, is a serious, very powerful writer, one to watch,
and this book, about three generations of Irish women and the different lives they lived, is bleak and gritty, but not a saga; it has a huge degree of magic. I Don't Know How She Does It by Alison Pearson (Chatto & Windus,
£12.99) is very different. It's a book about a woman who puts her career first, about how tough it is for women, how they are bullied at work by men. It is basically a call to arms, a battle cry, but having said that it is a comedy,
and extremely funny. I had just read a biography of Peggy Guggenheim before I came to Laurie Graham's The Unfortunates (Fourth Estate,
£10), and I couldn't help thinking that Graham had based her protagonist on
Guggenheim: a woman who is as old as the century and has had the good luck to turn up at every important event, who has loved art and married many men. Again, it sounds like a saga, but feels like a much more important
book than that: witty, acerbic and wry, and tracing the history of the 20th century.
Richard Murphy
Poet
His memoir, The Kick, was published by Granta in April
For the first time in my life I read Madame Bovary this year, followed
by That They May Face the Rising Sun (Faber, £16.99). After
Flaubert's masterpiece, John McGahern's novel held its ground with the spare intensity of a prose poem, not a word out of place. McGahern makes the funny and sad ordinariness of life in the country of his
imagination a joy to read. The poet and critic, Denis O'Driscoll, is the best judge I have ever known of a good poem and of what makes a
poem good. So his knowledgeable, entertaining and well-written collection
of essays, Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams (Gallery, EURO17.50) delighted me. Beginning with a memoir of his origins, angled with ironical and self-effacing lucidity, the book will appeal to anyone interested in poets or
poetry in English or English translation, from San Francisco to Prague to Krakow. I am greatly looking forward to reading O'Driscoll's latest
collection of poems, Exemplary Damages (Anvil, £7.95).
Quite often while eating alone, I have relished poems, familiar and strange, from the rich cornucopia that Neil Astley provides in his Bloodaxe anthology, Staying Alive: Real Poems from Unreal Times (Bloodaxe, £10.95). The poems are served thematically and garnished with colourful notes.