Eoin McNamee
Novelist. His novel The Blue Tango was published by Faber this year.
Boston Teran's God Is A Bullet (Pan, £5.99 in UK) rates an incandescent X for sex, language, narco-occult slaying in Cal-Mex badlands. Paul Muldoon's Poems 1968-1998 (Faber & Faber, £12.99 in UK) illustrates how his work is an alchemical riposte to dreary steeple analysts. Essential.
James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand (Century, £16.99 in UK) takes up stylistically where White Jazz left off. Inimitable chopped syntax posits the mob/political assassination of JFK. The theory is well-known, but Ellroy's retro flair and scat-style execution factor in the class.
Robert Fisk
Author and Middle East correspondent with the London Independent
In the year of hysteria, three books to explain the madness. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game (Macmillan, £7.99 in UK) is the only sane work on the Afghan tragedy and Osama bin Laden, coldly reminding us that the Taliban and bin Laden himself were - courtesy of Britain's new ally, Pakistan, old ally Saudi Arabia, a clutch of oil conglomerates and the CIA - very much our creation.
Noam Chomsky's book (written with Edward S. Herman), Manufacturing Consent (Vintage, £8.99 in UK), is an essential antidote to the ever more dangerous and more gutless satellite television coverage of our ruthless wars. If journalists are sheep, they move in flocks.
Victor Klemperer's 1933-1945 diaries of the Nazi years - I Shall Bear Witness (Phoenix, £8.99 in UK) - remind us how truly awesome was the second World War, how truly pathetic our own puny struggles today. Klemperer, a German Jew who fought in the 1914-1918 war but was fired from his job at the Dresden Technical University in 1935, clings to sanity through literature as the Nazis, week by week, strip him of money, tobacco, food rations, home, household cat, typewriter, pleasure trips on the Elbe, seats on trams, freedom. He and his wife were among the few beneficiaries of the 1945 Dresden fire storm, escaping the anti-Jewish laws as blitz victims who have lost their papers. Essential reading for anyone who thinks 2001 was the worst of years.
Marian Keyes
Novelist. Her latest book, Under the Duvet, a collection of non-fiction, has just been published by Michael Joseph.
Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible (Faber & Faber, £12.70 in UK) is an ambitious, powerful novel. A US preacher moves his wife and four daughters to the Congo to "convert the natives". Spread over 30 years, the story is told by each of the five women, and we follow their personal fortunes as well as that of the Congo; no sooner does it achieve independence than its fledgling democracy is scuppered by US intervention, leading to the assassination of the elected leader and installation of a kleptocracy. It's an angry book - and a very timely one.
Slab Rat (Abacus, £7.99 in UK) is by Ted Heller, Joseph Heller's son. Poor Ted, he's always going to be compared to his dad, but his first novel is actually a very fine comic debut. Set in the cut-throat world of New York magazine publishing, it has shades of Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis, but Heller is that rare creature - a writer whose work is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny.
My third choice is Three Blind Mice (Abacus, £9.99 in UK) by Caron Freeborn. Forget Jake Arnott, this is the real thing. East-end noir from a woman who lived the life (and spectacularly broke with tradition by going on to become a Cambridge MA). Tautly written in the vernacular, this is a dark, erotic read that examines class, status, love and family.
Dennis O'Driscoll
Poet and critic. His collection of literary essays, Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams, has just been published by Gallery Press.
Seamus Heaney's renewable energy transforms the light of other days into a perpetual light in his dazzling new collection, Electric Light. Another Nobel laureate with a light touch, Wislawa Szymborska, is crisply translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak in Miracle Fair (Norton, £14.99 in UK), a selection of her wry, wise, wicked poems. Michael Hartnett, too, is a miracle worker in his intensely lyrical and richly rhythmical Collected Poems - not least when intoning his 'Secular Prayers'.
Liz McManus
Writer and Labour Party TD for Co Wicklow
I have been having the tome of my life with From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (HarperCollins, £25 in UK) by Jacques Barzun. Almost 900 pages long, this book is a rich, rewarding narrative of the triumphs and failures of Western cultural life over the last 500 years written by a distinguished historian.
I also read John Montague's recently reissued collection of short stories Death of a Chieftan (Wolfhound, £6,99) because one of the characters in it is based on my father. I was hooked by the vitality of writing, which withstood the test of time magnificently, and which led me naturally into reading the first part of his autobiography, Company: a Chosen Life ( Duckworth, £14.99 in UK). The Visitor's Book (Brandon, £10.15) by Mary Rose Callaghan is a funny, bitter-sweet novel about the understanding - and lack thereof - that characterises relations between us and our US cousins. In the context of the events of September 11th, this book has particular resonance, a point reinforced by the poignant cover picture.
Paul Carson
Doctor and novelist. His third medical thriller, Final Duty, is now out in paperback.
I blame Frank McCourt. Since Angela and her miserable Ashes, bookshelves have groaned with books by tortured souls desperate to tell their tales of grief. If I hear of one more tortured infancy at the hands of drunken fathers, depraved priests, Christian Brothers or Taliban militiamen, I will reach for the nearest bucket. When I read, I want to be entertained, to feel good when I turn the last page. Not reach for a rope and start checking the attic beams.
So three cheers for Pete McCarthy. His McCarthy's Bar (Hodder & Stoughton, £6.99 in UK) is a big hearty belly laugh from cover to cover. A travel book about Ireland, it should be handed out gratis by Bord Fβilte. More humour, too, from Shooting Sean (Harper Collins, £6.99 in UK) by Colin Bateman, the seventh novel featuring his heavy drinking, cheating and misfit hero Dan Starkey. Bateman is a seriously funny writer. Pick any novel and read it on a packed DART and watch your neighbours become more and more irritated with your smirks and chuckles. Marooned in Cape Cod this summer, I broke my own rule and ploughed through The Human Stain (Vintage, £6.99 in UK) by Philip Roth. Not exactly a bundle of fun, but brilliantly written; it's a novel of anger, sadness and dark secrets with extraordinary insights into the American psyche. Highly recommended, but no belly laughs guaranteed.
Next week: from politics to poetry - a category-by-category guide to the big books of the past 12 months