CRITIC'S CHOICE: Current writers, especially Irish ones, put in a strong showing this year, but faced some heavyweight competition from the past. Eileen Battersby selects her top fiction of 2002
1. The Complete Works of Isaac Babel translated by Peter Constantine (Picador). Murdered by a Stalinist firing squad, Babel is a towering figure, the tragedy of his life matched by the genius of his fiction, particularly The Red Cavalry Stories and his reportage. Anything worth knowing about the art of writing is contained in this invaluable, glorious and unforgettable 1,000 pages. In a good year for fiction, many contemporary writers are entitled to take a bow, but I have to admit that several of my year's selection are classics in translation, as here.
2. The Radetzky March Joseph Roth trans Michael Hofmann (Granta). The final days of an ageing empire evoked with style, wit and intelligence by a truly great writer. If you have yet to experience Roth, begin here, and then read everything.
3. Embers Sándor Márai, trans Carol Brown Janeway (Viking). Passion and betrayal between friends simmer for almost 50 years, culminating in a dignified if choreographed confrontation in a Carpathian castle. This taut, limpid Hungarian classic lingers through its austere if bitter grace.
4. Doctor Glas Hjalmar Soderberg, trans Paul Britten Austin (Harvill). As the tormented narrator, the good doctor, admits, he has read his Dostoyevsky and his Balzac, as had Soderberg. It is a hilariously black tale. A beautiful young wife confesses her misery to her susceptible GP, who decides to kill the repulsive clergyman husband. First published in Sweden in 1905 and translated into English in 1963, here is a welcome republication of an edgy, frenetic, utterly believable masterpiece.
5. Luck By Gert Hofmann, trans Michael Hofmann (Harvill). A young boy recalls the final day of his parents' unhappy marriage. There is no analysis, merely incidents. Ironic and urgent, the story's genius lies in the characterisation; father is eccentric, mother is desperate for a life. Hofmann evokes the intimate magic of The Film Explainer (1995).
6. A Life's Music Andrei Makine, trans Geoffrey Strachan (Sceptre). The gifted Siberian, who writes in French, creates a mood, and within it the story of a chance conversation that recalls a young life destroyed by war.
7. Love and Sleep Sean O'Reilly (Faber). Harsh, brutal and disturbingly honest, here is a relentlessly European-Irish novel that grabs the reader by the throat. Nothing is easy, and the anti-hero is at war with everything, mainly himself.
8. The Story of Lucy Gault William Trevor (Viking). Understated, graceful and very sad, Trevor's elegiac, innovative variation on the Great House theme shows how a life can turn on a chance detail. It also depicts the passing of a culture and the decline of a family.
9. This is Not A Novel Jennifer Johnston (Review). Another Irish writer who understands milieu, this is a characteristically sharp, intelligent narrative by the elegantly canny Johnston, who remains fascinated by memory, loss and the small, inevitably brutal injustices of family secrets.
10. That They May Face the Rising Sun John McGahern (Faber). Widely praised by others for the beauty of its prose, this novel struck me more for McGahern's shrewd reading of the Irish as portrayed by a small lakeside community and the truths seldom expressed in speech but invariably evident in the unspoken - a novel of weighty evasion.
11. Shroud John Banville (Picador). Yet another articulate, confessional Banville narrator mesmerised by his own awfulness. Axel Vander wriggles at the mercy of ego, fear, duplicity and awareness of the comic horror of his self-created mess. As always, the linguistic virtuosity seduces and there are the horribly funny setpieces.
12. Family Matters Rohinton Mistry (Faber). Mistry's gracious, rather formal prose creates humane, compelling narratives and marvellous characters. Bombay comes to life in this charming, textured family saga in which an old man haunted by his emotional cowardice stumbles towards death, unwittingly tearing his family apart in the process.
13. Crow Lake Mary Lawson (Chatto). The best of Canadian family narratives is represented in this powerful début about two troubled clans. Set in northern Ontario, it is tragic, real, never melodramatic, and possesses authentic moral force.
14. Unless Carol Shields (Fourth Estate). An inspired Shields sees the ridiculous lurking in the ordinary and the pain that threatens complacency in this angry, honest and deeply subversive performance about control and the losing of it.
15. Clara Janice Galloway (Cape). The Scottish Galloway is a terrific writer. Her beautiful, atmospheric novel based on the life and disappointments of stoic pianist/ composer Clara Schumann is heartbreakingly superb, not only for the brilliant characterisations of Clara and her complex husband, Robert, but for its evocation of 19th-century German life.
16. The Complete Short Stories J.G. Ballard (Flamingo). Surreal, magnificent and as strange as is to be expected from the futuristic maverick visionary, world fiction's most awesome imagination. More than 1,000 pages offering zany nightmares, some of which hold the seeds of the novels. Brilliant, a volume to hoard greedily beside the Bible and the Brothers Grimm.
17. The Next Big Thing Anita Brookner (Viking). A convincing study in self-knowledge, this is the always perceptive Brookner at her best. Herz is a likeable character, who at 73 has retired and is aware that the next big thing is most probably his end; nevertheless, he remains something of a romantic and a dreamer. Sure-footed, funny and dauntingly astute.
18. Tuck Everlasting Natalie Babbitt (Bloomsbury). About as fresh, original and profound as fiction can be, Babbitt's story of an ordinary US family doomed to bewildering immortality is perfection.
19. Life of Pi Yann Martel (Canongate). I enjoyed this quasi-philosophical adventure fable, the achievement of which is the narrative voice. Hope and horror walk hand in hand throughout in this year's Booker winner, although the deserving Booker dark horses, Trevor or Mistry, should have won.
20. The Other Side of Silence Andre Brink (Secker). Always important, at times heavy- handed, at his finest - such as in Rumours of Rain (1978) - South African Brink is excellent, but he seeps macho bluster and is best approached warily. This new novel is a genuine surprise. Often unbearably brutal, it is a touching, gentle portrait of a woman who suffers but survives.
21. Assorted Fire Events David Means (Fourth Estate). The great US short story tradition enters strange and different territory courtesy of a laconic new voice possessing a shrewd understanding of tone - one to look to.
Addendum . . .
(Top Five non-fiction titles)
1. After Nature W.G Sebald, trans Michael Hamburger (Hamish Hamilton). My Book of the Year: within this gorgeous verse triptych from 1988 lies the genesis of Sebald's fabulous, profound world view and the later masterworks it shaped.
2. Stud - Adventures in Breeding Kevin Conley (Bloomsbury). A relaxed, witty exploration into a strange, secretive world where nature, science and human cunning fuse to create a genetically perfect work of art - the majestic and all too vulnerable thoroughbred.
3. Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 Seamus Heaney (Faber). A lyric sensibility undercut by robust common sense and an effortless feel for the right word elevate many of these pieces, illustrating why some readers, myself included, consider Heaney an even finer prose writer than he is a poet - look to his Brodsky appreciation.
4. "Our Treasure of Antiquities" Peter Harbison (Wordwell and National Library of Ireland). Yet again Harbison displays his scholarship and style in recreating a working visit to Connaught undertaken by two 18th-century artists intent on recording Ireland's heritage.
5. Mercator - The Man Who Mapped The World Nicholas Crane (Weidenfeld). Within an exciting recreation of the chaotic Europe of 500 years ago, Crane tells the story of the cobbler's son who began his intellectual life as a philosopher, then turned to maths and became the father of modern map-making - a wonderful, humbling book.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times