Fiction of the Year: Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent, picks her 21 fiction titles of the year.
Slow Man By JM Coetzee (Secker)
Yet again the great South African, now writing from Australia, shows his mastery of narrative tensions as well as his thinker's grasp of the ultimate truths and fears. A man loses his leg in an accident and finally finds himself, or more importantly, belatedly discovers a response to other people, if admittedly one shaped by his need. Remorselessly human, it is also funny and touching; Coetzee the artist remains the complete novelist.
Summer in Baden-Baden By Leonid Tsypkin (Hamish Hamilton)
Translated by Roger and Angela Keys, all that is miraculous about Russian literature is articulated in Tsypkin's incredible, Sebald-like lyric recreation of the frenzied splendour and squalor of the life and death of Dostoyevsky as recalled during the narrator's train journey spent reading a diary written by the great 19th-century novelist's widow.
The Darling By Russell Banks (Picador)
The most under-sung of the major US writers, Banks is a gifted storyteller with an angry, concerned conscience. Not the best of titles, but this powerful book, told from the viewpoint of an American woman, now in old age, who was once a young rebel in flight from herself, and ended up in Liberia, is vivid and convincing.
Out Stealing Horses By Per Petterson (Harvill Secker)
Imagine American master William Maxwell finding a soulmate in a Norwegian writer and Petterson is it. The narrator, an elderly widower, looks back on his life and remembers the moments that defined his destiny. A thoughtful, honest novel (translated by Anne Born), its triumph lies in its tone of pragmatic resignation and Petterson's seductive understatement.
Brecht's Lover By Jacques-Pierre Amette (Hesperus)
Amette's daring and intriguing psychological 2003 Prix Goncourt-winning drama (translated by Andrew Brown), about the different kinds of waiting takes the facts of Brecht's life to shape a cool, offbeat European novel that is to fiction what Hirschbiegel's wonderful Downfall, based on Hitler's final days, is to cinema.
Never Let Me Go By Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber)
Profound, peculiarly beautiful and cautionary, Ishiguro's masterwork looks with subtle artistry at innocence betrayed in a remarkable and important performance investigating philosophy and ethics at their most practical. Read this chillingly understated novel which defies its horrific subject.
Gilead By Marilynne Robinson (Virago)
Robinson's dignified, spiritual and intelligent book of truths was the human, moral story a divided America seeking answers needed - as do we all. Rev John Ames, facing death, speaks to the little son he will never know as a grown man. A conversational narrative voice shows a father comforting his son from the grave, while a novelist majestically demonstrates the subtle power of fiction.
The Secret Goldfish By David Means (Fourth Estate)
Established as an original on the publication of his first collection, Assorted Fire Events, Means has further consolidated this with these dark tales pulsing with his weird flair for the offbeat. Best of all is the terrific title story. Subversively imaginative; bow to a wayward genius.
Corpus Christi By Bret Anthony Johnston (Random House)
Think Richard Ford, think great short stories; then think Johnston, a Texan, who certainly writes with echoes of Ford's thoughtful, laconic, melancholic punch, but also has his own voice. The US short story is more than alive and well, it is triumphant.
The Girl from the Chartreuse By Pierre Péju (Harvill)
A little girl is hit by a van. From this everyday tragedy Péju's novel of the mind (translated by Ina Rilke) explores the themes of silence, language, flight and being alive. Beckett, Borges and Paul Auster haunt the narrative as the child's salvation rests in story, and what could have become melodrama instead achieves fatalistic grandeur.
Runaway By Alice Munro (Chatto)
The great Canadian made the study of everyday struggles and disasters her own. Shifts of love, betrayal, children changing and relationships dying, with loss, always loss, central - her short stories are among the few standing equal to those of William Trevor. The theme of farewell hangs over the collection which has more than its share of goodbyes.
Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather By Gao Xingjian (Flamingo)
Gentle and so beautiful, these stories by China's Nobel literature laureate, translated by Mabel Lee, flicker and shimmer like sunlight on water.
The Known World By Edward P Jones (Amistad)
First US winner of the IMPAC Prize (2005), Jones's brave, atmospheric period novel confronted the historical reality of freed black slaves who have become slave owners in his multi-layered blending of the biblical and vernacular. Moral while avoiding the moralistic and written in a rich, lyric prose, Jones's novel explores survival.
The Sea By John Banville (Picador)
Winning this year's Booker Prize from a strong shortlist, this most assured of literary artists brilliantly creates here a study of one man's engagement with life, love, memory and regret.
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian By Marina Lewycka (Viking)
The legacy of war and the displacement it causes receives original treatment in this fast, funny debut about Ukrainian immigrants settled in England but still tied to the old country.
The Brooklyn Follies By Paul Auster (Faber)
From the master of Dickensian coincidence and connections, this blunt, down to earth narrative, told by an ageing survivor the reader simply has to believe, could well be Auster's best novel.
Rape: A Love Story By Joyce Carol Oates (Atlantic Books)
So prolific it appears to take at least four publishers to deal with her output, Oates is a passionate writer who, at her urgent best, as here, uses language with relentless exactness. Few approach the unsettling honesty of her explorations of sexual humiliations and emotional power shifts.
Arthur and George By Julian Barnes (Cape)
Difficult as it is to believe, here I am selecting a book by Barnes whom I haven't enjoyed reading since Flaubert's Parrot in 1984. Well, this big-hearted, human period piece set in Edwardian England, and based on the life of Arthur Conan Doyle and his interest in a real-life miscarriage of justice, engages throughout.
Willenbrock By Christoph Hein (Picador US)
Shortlisted for the Impac Prize, this sharp, punchy and bizarrely slow-moving narrative based on the misadventures of its eponymous anti-hero, a second-hand car dealer, offers a grim and at times funny insight into what Günter Grass had long foreseen as the misery of unified Germany. Translated by Philip Boehm, the story, like the society and Willenbrock's life, shudders to a halt near the end, but that could be the point.
Old Filth By Jane Gardam (Chatto)
One of those deceptively quiet novels that creep up for just about every prize going, including this year's Orange Prize, which it should have won. Graceful and poised, Gardam tells the quietly sad story of an elderly lawyer whose life was not as easy as his peers suspect.
Bad Dirt By Annie Proulx (Fourth Estate)
No, not the best of Proulx, but sufficient flashes of vicious genius fester and hum to justify edging Bret Easton Ellis's daring Lunar Park (Picador) out of this selection.
Tigers in Red Weather. By Ruth Padel, (Little Brown)
An elegy for dead love, a travelogue, a personal and practical quest and a lament for the tiger and for nature itself - Padel, the poet and descendant of Darwin, describes, experiences, reports and assesses in a captivating, edgy, provocative narrative that stalks the tiger across the globe and celebrates its threatened majesty as well as the opulence of nature and humanity's chronic mishandling of it.
George Stubbs and the Wide Creation. By Robin Blake (Chatto)
Fascinating, cohesive, old-style account of the life of an artist who approached the painting of horses with the eye of a scientist and the grace of a poet, all set in a vivid social history of Stubbs's Georgian England. Blake shows the heights to which responsible, insightful biography may aspire.
The Byerley Turk. By Jeremy James, (Merlin Unwin)
Foaled in Serbia in 1678, the stallion who became known as the Byerley Turk was a professional soldier, and fought in the Sultan's army. Later, having been captured, ridden across Europe and brought to England, he was sold to Captain Robert Byerley, and served in King William's forces at the Battle of the Boyne and later at Aughrim. Retired to stud, he became the foundation sire of the thoroughbred line, and died at 25 in 1703. In a colourful, romantic adventure, meticulously researched and told with passion, James proves real life is stranger than fiction.
A Poet's Journal and Other Writings. By Padraic Fallon (Lilliput)
Exciting, insightful literary criticism, edited by Brian Fallon, from an Irish poet who looked to Yeats without being intimidated by him.
Memoir. By John McGahern (Faber)
Intense love for his mother and palpable rage against his father shape this atmospheric recollection which, in keeping with McGahern's fiction, is valuable Irish social history as observed by a careful, astute intelligence honed with savage humour.
No Country for Old Men. By Cormac McCarthy (Picador)
If ever a novelist needed a sense of humour - and quick - it's Cormac McCarthy. However tedious Salman Rushdie's ramshackle, here-we-go-again Shalimar the Clown (Cape) is, at least he threw in a few gags.