With Christmas book-buying in full swing, Rosita Boland asks which books read this year will stand the test of time?
Dermot Ahern, Minister for Foreign Affairs
Tom Garvin's Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor For So Long? (Gill and Macmillan) is one of the most thought-provoking books of the year. Garvin asks why economic success came so long after independence. Essentially he puts it down to a "blocking coalition" of church, farmers and the Irish language lobby, all hostile to modernisation. The question of what unbound the Celtic Prometheus will annoy history students for years to come - I don't agree with everything in the book but it's one of the most interesting stabs at answering yet.
Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger (Penguin), was originally published in 1920, but a new translation was published this year. A coldly written, yet heartbreaking story of the scale, power and absolute terror of war through the eyes of a German adolescent on the Western Front during the first World War.
Phil Ball's book Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football (WSC Books) explores the political, social and historic past of Spain's great teams and regions: Franco's involvement with Real Madrid; Real Betis's working class roots; Basque pride; Catalan arrogance.
Christine Dwyer Hickey, Novelist
Ronan Bennett's Havoc in its Third Year, (Bloomsbury) is a walk through a desolate landscape. Set in 1630s England, it is a dark tale, beautifully told, of one man's struggle against political corruption.
Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (Jonathan Cape) also has a political backdrop. By narrowing the story down to one Jewish family, and then narrowing it yet again down to the viewpoint of its youngest member, Roth explores the secret, mad, and often downright dangerous world of children, while overhead the adults blunder on. A masterpiece.
Neil Jordan - Shade (Hodder Headline) - is a visual rather than a physical writer, relating the story from a distance and through the long lens. Nobody creates mood like he does. And that's what my three choices have in common: mood. It's what remains long after the plot, characters, title and even, God forbid, name of the author, have faded to grey.
Christine Dwyer Hickey's novel, Tatty, was published in March by New Island Books
Olivia O'Leary, Broadcaster
My book of the year is pretty, and plump as a pie with poems and pictures. It's Something Beginning with P: New Poems from Irish Poets (O'Brien Press), edited by Seamus Cashman, and illustrated by Corrina Askin and Alan Clarke. The poems are written for children, which suits all of us. Buy it for your favourite niece. Keep it for yourself.
Katie Hannon's The Naked Politician (Gill and Macmillan) got me beautifully through a rainy week off the coast of Brittany. She's a child of the cumann, and her chapters on selection conventions, election counts and by-elections are the real thing - not to be missed.
Full of wild and wonderful women, Nell McCafferty's autobiography Nell (Penguin Ireland) could as easily have been called Lily because Nell's mother comes marching through the pages like an Amazon. Lily's extraordinary letters and Nell's view of Derry from the other side of the barricades, are the highlights of this book.
Olivia O'Leary's Politicians and Other Animals was published in April by O'Brien Press
R.F. Foster, Historian
Tom Dunne's Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798 (Lilliput Press) is a profoundly original book: a subtle intellectual autobiography as well as a probing and provocative account of the 1798 Rising in Wexford and the long shadows it throws forward to our own day. The long final section on the Battle of Ross is an unforgettable tour de force of historical reconstruction, driving narrative and cinematic action-drama.
Jeremy Treglown's deeply absorbing V. S. Pritchett: A Working Life (Chatto & Windus) is another kind of biography, with an unexpected Irish dimension: new aspects revealed of this masterly short-story writer and literary critic include a nearly-forgotten first marriage to an Irishwoman, and Pritchett's incisive journalistic coverage of Ireland during the Civil War. Treglown also does full justice to Pritchett's decisive role as an arbiter of literary education, especially through the New Statesman.
Billy Colfer's The Hook Peninsula (Cork University Press) is written with scholarship, sensitivity and real historical insight. This is a beautifully produced, lavishly illustrated geographical history of a part of Ireland with a distinctive heritage of architecture, history and wildlife.
R.F. Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford University
Peter Singer, Philosopher
Now that the votes of American Evangelical Christians have given George W. Bush a second term of office, and a Dutch filmmaker has been murdered, apparently by Islamic militants who objected to his portrayal of their religion, what better book to recommend than Sam Harris's The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (Norton, New York). If only every religious person would read it, and abandon beliefs for which there is no evidence, the world might be a more peaceful place.
Timothy Garton Ash, in Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our Time (Allen Lane), sees the relationship between Europe and America as pivotal for the future of the world. Can this relationship become something positive, even with Bush as president for another four years? Ash shows how this has to happen, for America, for Europe, and for the world.
Finally, Bart Schultz's magisterial Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe (Cambridge University Press) will not make the bestseller list, but it does justice, at last, to the greatest exponent of utilitarian ethics, and one of the greatest moral philosophers of all time.
Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. His book, The President of Good and Evil: Taking George W. Bush Seriously, was published in April by Granta
Cecelia Ahern, Novelist
What's to say about Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code (Corgi) that hasn't already been said? It's an obvious choice but a sincere one. It is clever, fast-paced and a visual read but much more than that. I love how it explains the lack of acknowledgment of the important role of women over history and places them in their integral role.
A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly (Bloomsbury) is a beautifully written story. It's about how a young teen with a passion for words is torn between the responsibilities of the stifling life of a woman in the 1840s and her dreams of stepping out of that box. It's very cleverly spun around a real-life murder that occurred during that time.
Cecelia Ahern's latest novel is Where Rainbows End (HarperCollins)
Luke Gibbons, Academic
Sharon O'Brien's remarkable The Family Silver: A Memoir of Depression and Inheritance (University of Chicago Press) shows that more than the family silver is passed down in Irish-American families. Memoirs often mistake self for social importance, but rarely have the loose ends of family and cultural inheritance been so finely braided into the search for self.
Angela Bourke's Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker (Jonathan Cape) deals movingly with another writer caught in transatlantic emotional crossings, this time between redbrick Ranelagh and the neon loneliness of New York.
In Kevin Rockett's meticulous Irish Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography (Four Courts Press), the mentality that censored water washing up on the beach when Burt Lancaster embraced Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity has at last met its match.
Peggy O'Brien's wonderful poetry collection, Sudden Thaw (Lilliput Press), puts words on exactly the kind of emotions that censors fear most: subtle, elusive and tinged with erotic intensity.
Luke Gibbons's recent book, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime, is published by Cambridge University Press
Ivana Bacik, Barrister
In a year that was dominated by elections, I really loved Olivia O'Leary's Politicians and Other Animals (O'Brien Press), a great recovery read for political animals that helped put the European and citizenship referendum results in some sort of perspective for me.
Anna Funder's Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall (Granta) is essential reading for anyone going East. Funder, an Australian living and working in Germany, became obsessed with the silence surrounding the ongoing presence of so many undercover informers after unification, and wrote this fascinating, funny and very human account of her attempts to discover the truth behind the Stasi.
A book I read before the US election is unfortunately just as important now. In The President of Good and Evil: Taking George W. Bush Seriously (Granta), Peter Singer shows convincingly that Bush's policies offend even against his own rigid ethical code. We are in for a long four years.
Ivana Bacik's Kicking and Screaming: Dragging Ireland into the 21st Century was published by O'Brien Press in May
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Novelist
The Best American Non-Required Reading (Houghton Mifflin), edited by Dave Eggers, is a wonderfully eclectic mix of graphics and essays and stories which proves that there is much good writing being published in smaller American journals. I plan to read this annual collection in the years to come.
The blistering intelligence in Erasure, by Percival Everett (Faber & Faber), is obvious from the first page. Monk, a black professor, has a heightened awareness of the absurd in life. But it's his spoof of the "black novel" that I most enjoyed: a well-done satire about the American publishing industry's insistence on seeing "black" stories solely through the monolithic lens of the ghetto.
Snow, by Orhan Pamuk (Faber & Faber), has subtle melancholy. Ka returns to his Turkish town and encounters government officials, students, fundamentalists, and the woman he has never forgotten. Although the dialogue is sometimes too expository, I felt moved by Ka's ambiguous sympathies, all of them seemingly wrapped in the silence of snow.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published in March by Fourth Estate
Antoinette Quinn, Biographer/Editor
The Irish novel of the year for me was Colm Tóibín's The Master (Picador). I found its portrayal of Henry James's sexually repressed life almost unbearably moving at times.
Elaine Sisson's Pearse's Patriots: St Enda's and the Cult of Boyhood (Cork University Press) is a brave and sensitive exploration of a potentially tricky subject. Another very different book on education in Ireland is also a compelling read: A Danger to the Men? A History of Women in Trinity College Dublin 1904 -2004, edited by Susan Parkes (Lilliput Press).
It has been an exceptionally rich year for Irish poetry. Above all, I'm delighted that Anthony Cronin has at last brought out his Collected Poems (New Island Books). Landlubber though I am, I relished Theo Dorgan's Sailing for Home: A Voyage from Antigua to Kinsale (Penguin Ireland), because every line is alive.
The Collected Poems of Patrick Kavanagh, edited by Antoinette Quinn, was published by Allen Lane/Penguin in September
Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh, Broadcaster
Bill Clinton radiated a very definite charisma from the start and all is contained in his own life story, Bill Clinton, My Life (Hutchinson). It rambles a little from the footpath at times but so did the real Bill now and then. I would equate him with a sportsman who regularly invites yellow and red cards from referees but who remains as the big crowd puller to the end of the season. He came to Dublin a few months ago to promote the book and I recently spotted his name in the visitors' book in The Royal Dublin Golf Club.
Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh's From Dún Síon to Croke Park: The Autobiography was published in October by Penguin Ireland
Mark Little, Broadcaster
The common denominator among the books that mattered to me this year was unconventional wisdom. If it was predictable then it ended up half-read on the bedside table. I loved Francis Wheen's tirade against the "tyranny of twaddle", How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World (Harper Collins).
Amidst the dark rhetoric about Islam and the West, the most rational perspective came from French scholar Gilles Kepel in The War for Muslim Minds (Belknap/Harvard). In this American election year, Michael Moore and Bill Clinton got star billing, but their books delivered precious little fresh insight.
For my money, if you are still mystified by what's just happened in the United States, the right book is The Right Nation (Penguin) by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. It is not the most comforting read of the year, but it is cool, clear and even, and they are rare qualities in that towering pile of books about Bush's America.
Mark Little's Zulu Time: When Ireland Went to War was published by New Island in April
John Banville, Novelist
Those who know Georges Simenon only as the creator of Inspector Maigret have missed some of the most extraordinary fiction of the 20th century. Among Simenon's romans durs, that is, "hard novels" as distinguished from thrillers, Dirty Snow (New York Review Books) is a masterpiece. Set in an unnamed Belgian town during the Nazi Occupation, it recounts the crimes and violent redemption of 19-year-old Frank Friedmaier, the ultimate existential protagonist; deeper than Camus, subtler than Sartre.
John Gray's Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (Granta), a collection of the philosopher's New Statesman columns, is profound, pithy - "Belief in progress is the Prozac of the thinking classes" - and salutary in these fundamentalist times; Gray is one of the best of contemporary thinkers, an Isaiah Berlin de nos jours.
And two art books: Anonymous: Enigmatic Images from Unknown Photographers, by Robert Flynn Johnson (Thames & Hudson), is a ravishing and mysteriously moving portfolio. Sienese Painting: The Art of a City Republic, by Timothy Hyman (Thames & Hudson), is a persuasive championing of Siena's Renaissance artists over their more muscular Florentine and Roman fratelli.
John Banville's next novel, The Sea, will be published by Picador in June
Keith Duggan, Sports journalist
Although books on soccer are best avoided as a rule, White Angels: Beckham, Real Madrid and the New Football, by John Carlin (Bloomsbury), is a heavy hitter. Carlin, who contributes frequently to the superb Observer Sports Monthly magazine is a hairy culture-vulture type who just happens to be football mad. He also managed to get rare access to Beckham, Figo and the men in suits at Real Madrid. A fascinating insider's account and also an indictment of the mad state that big-time soccer has reached.
You can never go wrong with the Best American Sportswriting series (Houghton Mifflin). The 2004 edition is edited by Richard Ben Cramer and is drawn from typically diverse sources to provide insights into everything from
Michael Jordan's last days as a ball player to the world taxidermy championships.
The novel I most wanted to read this year was The Town That Forgot How to Breathe (Secker and Warburg), by Kenneth J. Harvey, mainly because of the great title and the recommendations that came with it. It is a would-be spooky tale set in a Nova Scotia fishing town. But like a lot of the flashy and trumpeted books of the year, it was ultimately a let down.
Keith Duggan's book about the GAA, The Lifelong Season, was published this autumn by Townhouse. An Irish Times journalist, Duggan was voted Sports Journalist of the Year in the recent ESB National Media Awards
Caroline Walsh, Irish Times Literary Editor
It took decades for eminent US philosopher and writer Peter Singer to turn to the story closest to him: the cultural richness of his grandfather, David Oppenheim's life among Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler and others in pre-second World War Vienna. Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna (Granta) is an unforgettable book.
Anyone wondering why California went to the Democrats in the recent US election should read Where I Was From: A Memoir, by Joan Didion (Flamingo). Long living in New York, Didion - the great contemporary American thinker - decided to explore her ancestors' passage from the East Coast to the West, down the centuries, to Sacramento where she was born. She explains the audacious spirit of California - afrontier spirit derived from the necessity of getting "through the Sierra before the snows fell" - and along the way, explains much of contemporary America besides.
Novel of the year: The Master by Colm Tóibín (Picador). The world of Brahmin New England and the lagoon landscape of Venice in near darkness will never seem the same after their masterful evocations here.
Colm Tóibín, Novelist
Anthony Cronin's Collected Poems (New Island Books) contains more than half a century's work. The tone and range, from the lyrical to the comic, from the complex and hard to the strangely reverential, are genuinely astonishing and make this an essential book for all those who care about Irish poetry and all those who don't.
Patrick Kavanagh's Collected Poems (Allen Lane/Penguin), edited by Antoinette Quinn, is an extremely handsome book and at long last a definitive version of the old genius's poems.
Diarmaid Ferriter's The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 (Profile) is a huge undertaking, mixing high politics and low economics, much insight and space for argument. Finally, Anne Enright's Making Babies (Cape) gave me a terrible dose of womb-envy and made me laugh a lot.
Colm Tóibín's The Master (Picador) was on the shortlist for this year's Man Booker Prize
Selina Guinness, Academic
In The Plot Against America (Jonathan Cape), Philip Roth has written a brilliant counter-factual history of the rise of right-wing politics in the United States, and a clear and deliberate parable for contemporary times. As violations against civil liberties make life increasingly difficult for his Jewish family, the narrator, little Philip Roth, tries to go on being a kid, bringing to this epic novel some of the funniest scenes I've ever read.
Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Teheran: A Memoir in Books (Fourth Estate) is an unsentimental account of Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution. After she is banned from teaching English literature at Teheran University, Nafisi invites some of her female students to attend a secret book-club at her flat. In Austen, James and Nabokov, the girls find parallels that challenge their experiences under the new regime. Sharply observant of the tensions among her students, and her own uncertainties about the project, this memoir provides a timely affirmation of how radical a Humanities education can be.
Finally, Jaan Kaplinski has steady and beautiful meditations on poetry, old houses, and planting trees in Evening Brings Everything Back (Bloodaxe).
Selina Guinness is the editor of The New Irish Poets, published in September by Bloodaxe
Conor O'Callaghan, Poet
I've been relishing Paul Durcan's The Art of Living (Harvill). Durcan is an authentic original and his new collection is smaller and lonelier than anything he has done for some time, and is distinguished by a lovely glittering miniaturism. The Full Indian Rope Trick (Picador), confirms Colette Bryce as one of the most gifted poets of this generation. Gerard Fanning's Water & Power (Dedalus) has just appeared and is also well worth a look.
San Francisco's August Kleinzahler is another original. The Strange Hours Travellers Keep (Faber and Faber) blends a heady cocktail of post-Beat street smarts, aesthetic affectation, ageing, dogs, Irish monks and Liberace. Peter Fallon's The Georgics of Virgil (Gallery Books) is wise and satisfying. I expect it to compare very favourably to another identically-titled translation by the fine American poet David Ferry.
Conor O'Callaghan's Red Mist: Roy Keane and the Football Civil War - a Fan's Story was published this year by Bloomsbury
Diarmaid Ferriter, Historian
Colm Tóibín's journey inside the mind and life of Henry James in The Master (Picador) results in a book that is deep, rich, absorbing and beautifully crafted. The sounds of Henry's solitude and memory as he comes to terms with his insecurities are skilfully portrayed. This is fiction writing at its best, encapsulating the professional and personal highs and lows of the artist.
Olivia O'Leary's Politicians and Other Animals (RTÉ/O'Brien Press) is perfect bedside reading for the political junkie; her collection of short essays, first broadcast on Five-Seven Live, pose the fundamental question - why do they do it and why are we so interested in them? It is acerbic, witty, moving, angry, and irreverent. O'Leary should be running the country.
Tom Garvin's Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor For So Long? (Gill and Macmillan) is provocative and engaging; scholarly yet accessible. He probes the reasons for the political and economic failures of the 1940s and 1950s, and writes with vigour and passion. A stimulating read, even if you disagree with his conclusions.
Diarmaid Ferriter's The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 was published in October by Profile Books
Claire Byrne, Broadcaster
Feel: Robbie Williams, the biography by Chris Heath (Ebury Press), has provided a good insight into what it is like to grow up in the spotlight of the British tabloid press. The author spent almost two years with his subject and that resulted in what seems to be a close friendship between the two. It could be said that there is some bias in favour of Robbie Williams because of this friendship - but it is still a great read.
I have interviewed Carol Drinkwater twice on Ireland AM and I am a great fan of her work. The Olive Harvest (Orion Books) is her third book on her life in the south of France. She is searingly honest in her books about the pitfalls of life in another country, her financial struggles there and the heartbreak of losing her longed-for baby. This book tells how both Carol and her husband, Michel, recovered following a serious car accident.
Claire Byrne, broadcaster with TV3, is the 2004 TV Personality of the Year
Gabriel Rosenstock, Poet
Seal i Neipeal, by Cathal Ó Searcaigh (Cló Iar-Chonnachta) is about a mountainy man going to Nepal. Being saved from the jaws of a rabid dog required a friend to smack the dog smartly on the head with a stick - not something a Buddhist likes to do every day. Left me thirsty for more.
Harry Potter agus an Órchloch, by J.K. Rowling, translated by Máire Nic Mhaoláin (Bloomsbury) - how often is there a 10,000 print run of a book in Irish? Could this mean 30,000 readers or more? But will they understand it or has the standard of Irish plummeted to a new low? "Níl mé ag rá dada," arsa Hagrid go lom.
If your local bookshop has little or nothing in Irish, nil desperandum: go to www.litriocht.com/shop, which claims to have every Irish-language title in print.
Gabriel Rosenstock's latest book of poems is Krishnamurphy Ambaist (Coiscéim)
Tom Garvin, Historian
Godfrey Hodgson's More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century (Princeton University Press) is a disturbing survey of American politics and society since Nixon. The continuing rise of the Republican Party and of a new conservatism have not, Hodgson argues, spread affluence and equality in the United States; on the contrary, the dismantling of the Roosevelt minimalist welfare system has made the US increasingly resemble the class-stratified societies of 19th-century Europe.
In the course of In Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our Time (Allen Lane), Timothy Garton Ash, using his range of contacts with senior administrators and political leaders, argues that Washington cannot rule the world unilaterally and that it doesn't really want to. The unilateralism of Bush and company must fail, and this offers Europe an opportunity to offer America a renewed version of the Atlantic alliance.
On a more local note, Terence Brown has republished his classic Ireland: A Cultural History (Harper Perennial), originally published in 1981, with a new section bringing the story up to 2002; almost incidentally, the book documents in passing the death of the culture wars that so obsessed Irish writers and artists in the emergent decades of independent Ireland.
Tom Garvin's Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor For So Long? was published this summer by Gill and Macmillan
Siobhán Creaton, Journalist
So you want to get ahead in your job? You want to learn how to excel at the black art of office politics? It's simple really. You just have to be a rat. Joep Schrijvers' The Way of the Rat: A Survival Guide to Office Politics (Cyan Books) brings you to the depths of the sewer where jealousy, cruelty, anger, hate and revenge are to be exploited to further your career. This often hilarious book comes complete with a "verminicity" test to determine whether you are a stupid, clever or filthy rat. Schrijvers also gives pointers on how to spot other rats.
James Surowiecki's Wisdom Of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (Little Brown) examines decision-making processes in everyday life as well as those with far reaching consequences for the world. The idea is not that a group will always give you the right answer but that on average it will consistently come up with a better answer than any individual could provide.
Katie Hannon's The Naked Politician (Gill & Macmillan) is informative and entertaining. She lifts the lid on a political world in which the participants have long since accepted that only the deeply cynical can hope to survive and prosper.
Siobhán Creaton's Ryanair: How A Small Irish Airline Conquered Europe was published in May by Aurum Press. She is an Irish Times journalist
Ian Sansom, Author
As far as my choice of reading is concerned I tend to be limited somewhat to whatever donations have been given to our local Oxfam shop, and the Save the Children Fund, and the Cancer Research Foundation.
Among the best books published this year, however, and either purchased by me at full cost price or borrowed from generous friends in the full knowledge that they might never see them again, I would recommend Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness (Jonathan Cape), Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said (Bloomsbury), and the new edition of Ivor Gurney's Collected Poems (Carcanet). All excellent. None remaindered.
Ian Sansom's The Truth About Babies: From A to Z is published by Granta