In order of preference, Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent, picks her top 21 fiction titles of 2006 - and some non-fiction and poetry that impressed
1 The Lay of the Land
By Richard Ford (Bloomsbury)
Older, wiser and now bearing all the scars of approaching mortality, good old Frank Bascombe saunters back in this
majestically funny masterclass in storytelling, part memoir, part commentary. At the heart of Frank's scaldingly rhythmic, oh-so-Southern exasperation, side by side with his multiple woes - his cancer, his two wives, his living children, his long-dead son Ralph, and those neurotic neighbours - is his shell-shocked country, the union under siege. A thousand times more terrifying
than Cormac McCarthy's The Road (Picador) and twice as profound, encounter the novel of the year - and of most other years as well.
2 House of Meetings
By Martin Amis (Cape)
Finally this most gifted of writers, and the author of terrific swashbuckling performances such as Money and The Information, has produced an eloquent, dark book based on the Russian gulag horrors and told by a heartsick, self-hating narrator whose gruff, compelling voice is worthy of the Amis talent, intelligence, anger and underrated candour.
3 Beyond Sleep
By WF Hermans (Harvill Secker)
The narrator, an aspiring geologist, reckons his academic future will be assured if he finds a meteorite. There is also the issue of the early death of his father, not to mention his own musical ambitions. Alfred tells his story in the present tense and is given to a blunt candour that establishes his personality. When he arrives in Oslo to join an expedition, his daydreams soon become nightmares. First published in the Netherlands in 1966, this is a landmark post-war European novel worth celebrating.
4 Liquidation
By Imre Kertész (Harvill Secker)
The 2002 Nobel laureate, this Hungarian original is the author of Fatelessness. His singular imagination and daunting literary skills dazzle throughout a layered narrative in which a depressed editor describes going in search of a lost novel of a famous writer-colleague who had survived Auschwitz only to later kill himself. Ultimately a play within a novel, with nods to Beckett and Ionesco - it's wonderful.
5 Winter's Bone
By Daniel Woodrell (Little Brown)
Ree, a life-hardened 16-year-old, goes in search of her no-good father in this unforgettable thud of a narrative. Set in the harsh Ozark winter landscape, this violent quest unfolds through an impressive controlled reporter-like detachment (only the characters themselves yell and rant). Without faltering into either the theatrical or the apocalyptic, Woodrell's visceral story is so convincing that you can smell the fear and share the menace.
6 Last Night
By James Salter (Picador)
Truths and betrayals dance through this cool, unsettling and interestingly European-in-tone second volume of stories from a US master. Bitter if never wholly cynical, Salter's lyricism is almost conversational. He explores without judging and invariably identifies the chaotic ambivalence of desire, need and life itself.
7 Terrorist
By John Updike (Hamish Hamilton)
Updike the urbane master stylist, preoccupied with human behaviour, God and sex, unexpectedly turns his attention to the post-9/11 age of fear in this brave, concerned thriller of sorts, which identifies belief as the perverted inspiration behind terrorism.
8 Kingdom Come
By JG Ballard (Fourth Estate)
The shopping mall as the modern manifestation of Dante's Inferno? That sounds about right. Ballard the maverick seer has again dispatched a surreally deadpan appraisal in a deeply moral and often grotesque tale about the corrupt times in which we live. Lewis Carroll meets William Burroughs - I loved it.
9 The Speed of Light
By Javier Cercas (Bloomsbury)
Spaniard Cercas, author of Soldiers of Salamis, has achieved the near impossible by following that outstanding debut with another comparably fascinating performance. Again his theme is the legacy of war, and again he makes clever use of his quasi-autobiographical approach. His narrator, a would-be novelist, sets off to an American university and establishes a strange friendship with a Vietnam veteran suspended in a weirdly subtle torment.
10 Creatures of the Earth
By John McGahern (Faber)
Death came this year, too early and too cruel for a writer who has been deservedly mourned by the nation. His legacy remains, however, and included in this revised edition of the 1992 Collected Stories is his masterpiece, The Country Funeral (about which I am so grateful to have said back then to McGahern, "This is the one you'll have to beat"). It's also the one every aspiring fiction writer should read. Two new stories are also included in this edition.
11 Gallatin Canyon
By Thomas McGuane (Harvill Secker)
Here is a welcome reminder of exactly how good McGuane, one of the more low-key US masters, is when he decides to publish. Most of these diverse and surprising 10 stories are excellent and a couple, such as Cowboy, are superb. The humour is sly, the prose moves between the formal and the vernacular, and McGuane has a flair for making the telling of a story appear as simple as breathing - all of which adds up to saying: read this book.
12 An Altered Light
By Jens Christian Grondahl (Harcourt)
The revelation of this year's International Impac Dublin Literary Award, Danish writer Grondahl's third novel, translated by Anne Born, is an intense, unnervingly convincing study of one woman's life as it begins to unravel - and from that unravelling, multiple truths emerge.
13 Everyman
By Philip Roth (Cape)
Old age, illness and death dominate this oddly beautiful, sympathetic and sombre little novel from Roth, who, having abandoned his autobiographical obsession with the great Jewish writer - himself - and turned his attention to chronicling his country, here considers one man's death and the journey that led him to it.
14 The Other Side of the Bridge
By Mary Lawson (Chatto)
A quietly thoughtful and impressive successor to her 2002 debut, Crow Lake, this complex study of the lives of two brothers may remind readers more of the early Richard Ford than of Lawson's fellow Canadian, Alice Munro. It is a sombre, oddly serene book and, if slow to assert itself, it certainly does so in a performance of almost Shakespearean power.
15 The Match
By Romesh Gunesekera (Bloomsbury)
This is a beautiful, surprisingly underrated return to form by the author of The Sandglass (1998). Sunny, an everyman character, is living a life defined by the early death of his remote mother, a woman who taught other children piano. He then becomes dependent on his father, Lester, with whom he at least has cricket in common. With its shades of VS Naipaul minus the ego and the cynicism, The
Match moves from Sri Lanka to England and looks at characters caught between both cultures.
16 A Life Elsewhere
By Segun Afolabi (Cape)
Displacement, and the desperate need to make other places become some form of home, is the theme of the sombre, often beautiful and always moving stories in this debut collection by a Nigerian writer
whose voice is sympathetic and whose approach to characterisation is unusually intuitive.
17 Carry Me Down
By MJ Hyland (Canongate)
Deservedly shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, Hyland's disturbing second novel, with its honourable echoes of Mark Haddon and Pat McCabe, triumphs through its sustained narrative tone, one of lucid bewilderment, as expressed by a young boy, John Egan, an aspiring lie detector who may be going mad as he witnesses life as it is mangled by his unhappy parents. Small-town Wexford and, later, the flats of Ballymun acquire a life of their own.
18 Surveillance
By Jonathan Raban (Picador)
British writer Raban, now settled in Seattle, has long been possessed of the flair to write well about anything. Even if he is more of a fluently assured commentator than a novelist, Raban's narrative about the terror of living in the paranoia of post-9/11 America is still engagingly human and all too convincing.
19 The Emperor's Children
By Claire Messud (Picador)
It could have developed like an episode of Friends, but instead Messud - finally writing about her native US, and demonstrating a new-found lightness of touch - has written a cautionary comedy of manners based on the theme of personal quests in pre-9/11 New York. It all takes place on a vivid, lively canvas, with self-obsessed characters worthy of a 19th-century social historian given to writing novels.
20 The Secret River
By Kate Grenville (Canongate)
A strong narrative with a claim to winning this year's Booker (though it didn't), this looks to the foundation of modern
Australia and the vicious death knell it sounded for the native population. Grenville's traditional narrative balances
its polemic with a story centring upon
one man's ambivalent odyssey from
humane survivor to increasingly ruthless settler.
21 Constitutional
By Helen Simpson (Cape)
Simpson's fourth collection of short stories is about fading memory, illness, regret, death and, most especially, the fear of death. There are no tricks, no sentimentality, no cheap laughs; only truth, humour and a grasp of how lives are lived - and ended. So good it edges Twilight of the Superheroes, by Deborah Eisenberg (Picador) - stories tinged by the shadow of 9/11 and themes of disconnection and the need to escape ourselves - just out of the frame.
Poets on form: best collections
1 District and Circle
By Seamus Heaney (Faber)
What more can be said? For all the beauty, lyric ease and weight of memory, here is an instinctive poet who is also engaging with the horror of the now in one of his finest collections.
2 Selected Poems
By Adam Zagajewski (Faber)
Thank you, Poetry Now festival, for introducing me to the work of Polish poet Zagajewski (pictured), a laconic observer with a grasp of the unknowable, a capacity for wonder and a love of music that shapes his observations of the world and the people in it. Few scrum-halves have moved faster than I did to the bookstall outside in pursuit of this volume.
3 The Sea Cabinet
By Caitríona O'Reilly (Bloodaxe)
Excitingly sophisticated second collection, possessed of metaphysical eloquence and quietly meditative intelligence, from this most European of Irish poets.
Memoir, maps, metaphysics: the non-fiction top five
1 In My Brother's Shadow
By Uwe Timm (Bloomsbury)
Having read this good German writer's novels, I thought I knew what to expect, but this graceful miracle of a book is not only a superlative, beautiful memoir about a boy's lasting image of his big brother's brief visit home from the front during the second World War, it is also the story of a family's despair and of a country's guilt as told by a mature artist.
2 John Donne: The Reformed Soul
By John Stubbs (Penguin)
All the opulent squalor of the Elizabethan age of discovery, its intrigue, daring, imagination and religious savagery, is brilliantly evoked in this witty, atmospheric biography of a metaphysical visionary, adventurer, sinner and great-great-grandson of Sir Thomas More the martyr. Donne became the dean of St Paul's, his marble tomb survived the Great Fire. His life personifies the complexities of his time, his poetry and sermons continue to speak.
3 Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick
By Jenny Uglow (Faber)
Great biography often results in vivid social history and it certainly does here in this characteristically detailed study by Uglow, biographer of Elizabeth Gaskell and Hogarth. Northumbrian Bewick's beautiful engravings tell their own stories and also that of a changing 18th-century English rural way of life.
4 Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c1530-1750
By William J Smyth (Cork University Press/Field Day)
Scholarship, imagination, the multi-disciplinary overview of the historical geographer, an understanding of the power of conflicting cultures and more than 100 of the author's maps (as well as period maps) imbue this magnificent Simon Schama-like undertaking - to contextualise the evolving Irish landscape.
5 Industrial Ireland 1750-1930 - An Archaeology
By Colin Rynne (The Collins Press)
Archaeology does extend beyond 1700, it is all around us, and this major social history charts the story of the rise and fall of Ireland's fledgling industries, while exploring the wealth of stories and lives lived in the shadow of a lone stone bridge or a derelict or abandoned railway line.