1
The Angel on the Roof, by Russell Banks (Secker). The author of Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter is one of the best and probably the most unsung of major US writers. This is a wonderful collection of stories spanning some 30 years. Anyone interested in the US, the American short story, the art of realist fiction and the bluntly subtle art of Banks himself, must read these stories.
2
No Great Mischief, by Alistair MacLeod (Cape). Ah, yes, the novel that should have won this year's Booker Prize but wasn't even shortlisted - but enough of that. This rich Scot's Canadian oral history follows a family through various layers of loss and chance in a landscape of ice and sea, and is both strange and extraordinary.
3
Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow (Viking). Though Bellow fans are still reeling from James Atlas's recent biography, it must be said this is a powerful, physical performance from a tough, gutsy writer shaped by a complex Jewish legacy. Ravelstein, rewarded too late for his originality, proves an engaging eccentric, while Chick the narrator brings a thoughtful, almost tender tone to a vivid narrative.
4
A New World, by Amit Chaudhuri (Picador). One of the best of the remarkable Indian writers who bring sophistication and elegance, often humour, to contemporary fiction. Chaudhuri's subtle study of a divorced writer returning home to Calcutta from the US with his small son achieves near perfection. Family and cultural tensions as well as personal unease are convincingly explored with telling understatement.
5
Anil's Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje (Bloomsbury). This is a passionate, important book about the outrages perpetrated in his native Sri Lanka in which Ondaatje abandons his lyric style for a terser, more felt prose. Fine characterisation, honest storytelling, anger and bewilderment mark it as a thoughtful, important novel.
6
Gertrude and Claudius, by John Updike (Hamish Hamilton). Just when you thought you knew everything there was to know about Shakespeare's Hamlet, along comes this tactile, inventive and curiously beautiful variation from a writer with more surprises up his sleeve than most magicians have rabbits. And it came only months after More Matter, his latest volume of journalism. Does this man ever sleep?
7
The Far Side of a Kiss, by Anne Haverty (Chatto). Based on William Hazlitt's obsessive love for a serving girl and his Liber Amoris which destroyed her and made him a figure of scandal, Haverty's graceful, beautifully voiced account is Sarah's story: it is about as intense an exploration of the excitement and humiliations of love - "I was the possessor of his heart . . . But I did not want it" - as you're likely to read.
8
Eclipse, by John Banville (Picador). Divided by loss, the aptly named Alexander Cleave, failed actor and husband, seeks refuge at his shabby small-town family home. This flamboyant, dream-like confession is blackly funny, sharply observed and intensely personal, depicting imagination and memory in an atmosphere of pain and panic.
9
The Man Who Ate The 747, by Ben Sherwood (Picador). Feelgood novel or not, I loved this offbeat small-town America yarn about a guy who is so in love with an unobtainable girl, he sets out to eat an entire aircraft just to impress her.
10
The Hill Bachelors, by William Trevor (Viking). An expectedly diverse collection from one of the world's finest writers. Trevor's feel for nuance remains unsurpassed.
11
Too Far Afield, by Gunter Grass. Even if everyone else hated this hefty post-unification saga about two 70-year-old men wandering about Berlin, I have to say I enjoyed the characters, the dialogue, the wry asides, the history, the general confusion and above all, Grass's lightness of touch.
12
The Married Man, by Edmund White (Chatto). Neck and neck with Philip Roth's The Human Stain (Cape), still White's conversational ease draws the reader into a heartbreaking, graphically candid story which reiterates the unfairness of life. As ever, White emerges as sympathetic, humane narrator.
13
The Weather in Japan, by Michael Longley (Cape). Hawthornden Prize-winning collection which demonstrates Longley's characteristic lyric grace, elegiac wisdom, subtle technique and thematic diversity. With its haunting quality of personal reflection, this collection continues the wonderful sequence begun in Gorse Fires and The Ghost Orchid.
14
John James Audubon in the West - the Last Expedition. Mammals of North America (Abrams). Audubon, artist and pioneer, salesman and egomaniac, was immortalised by his majestic Birds of America. This magnificent book tells the story of an expedition up the Missouri River undertaken in 1843. The plates are wonderful and the fine essays help explain Audubon's working methods, the contribution of his two sons, the relationship between art and natural science, the patriotism Audubon's genius inspired - and also provide shrewd insights into the great man's peculiar personality.
15
Bach, by Christoph Wolff (Oxford). Little is known about the personal life of the great composer who here emerges as a practical, hardworking, professional musician and church organist who loved his God as well as life itself. It is a superb, atmospheric book and Wolff has a musician's feel for the music. One of the best biographies I've ever read.
Bach: he loved his God as well as life itself.
16
Fanny Burney, by Claire Harman (Harper Collins). Burney is a clever satirist, but her life did not really get going until she married at the age of 41. From there on it raced along until her death at 88. Harman is a natural biographer and this is a vivid portrait of a lively woman and writer - it is also superb social history.
17
Goethe - The Poet and the Age Volume 11, by Nicholas Boyle (Oxford). Nine years after Volume One, Boyle's magnificent second instalment brings the story up to Goethe's 53rd year. Just another 30 to go . . .
Dense and scholarly, very strong on the complex politics and history of Goethe's Germany, it is also a sympathetic and unsentimental portrait of a life lived in order amidst chaos. It is often entertaining, with the great romantic poet striking one as an impossible but fascinating genius of as many moods as interests. Hopefully Volume Three is on the way.
18
Experience, by Martin Amis (Cape). Son of Kingsley and a prodigal talent who has often paid the price of living and working in the family business. No longer young and pouting, Amis is still short, has impressive new teeth, another beautiful wife and continues writing unforgivably well. As setting-the-record-straight memoirs, this is funny, honest, very human and as adroitly written as would be expected from a natural stylist.
19
The Medieval Castles of Ireland, by David Sweetman (Collins Press). Drawing on 30 years of studying Irish castles, Sweetman assesses the varied and complex range of medieval defended or fortified buildings which populate Ireland's landscape and towns. Particularly impressive on the 13th-century Anglo-Norman fortress and also the tower houses, this is practical scholarship laced with imagination. Best enjoyed when consulted at the specific sites.
20
And my Book of the Year. Piano Roles Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano, by James Parakilas and others (Yale). Even if only my fifth favourite instrument after cello, violin, organ and oboe, the piano is a magnificent and versatile music machine, as happy in the parlour as it is in concert hall or recording studio. This is a suitably glorious, informative, anecdotal and wide-ranging 300th birthday tour de force which celebrates the history, technical evolution and sheer genius of the piano as well as the many contrasting performers who have made it sing in its many voices.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times