Allan Massie's books of the year

Graham Swift is probably still best known for Waterland, published almost 30 years ago. I rather think he is now out of fashion. Certainly Wish You Were Here received less attention that it

deserved. Swift has the admirable ability to write literary novels about characters who would never read such books. He presents us with a complete world, one which his inarticulate characters

struggle to understand. William Empsom wrote that ‘the central function of imaginative literature is to make you realise that other people act on moral convictions different from your

own’. Graham Swift does just that.

The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung is a novel that

everybody interested in contemporary China should read. Written in a flat journalistic style (in translation at least) it presents a vivid, intelligent and disturbing picture of the world’s

emerging super-power, a society where economic freedom co-exists with continuing political repression, a place where vast change has been accepted in order that there should be no essential change.

I greatly enjoyed Andrew Nicoll’s second novel, The Love and Death of Catarina. Set in an unnamed

Latin American country, it is written with a pervasive irony, while having also a compelling plot. It might be described as homage to Graham Greene. Certainly his influence is apparent, without

being oppressive. A very good novel indeed.

On the crime front, Robert Harris’s thriller The Fear

Index combined a gripping narrative with intelligence and wild imagination. Reading it, I was almost persuaded that I understood the activities of hedge funds.

Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D.

James is a tribute to Jane Austen and a sheer delight. A book to banish Boxing Day blues.

Finally, among many good non-fiction books, I would recommend Amin Maalouf’s Disordered World, a civilised,

sceptical, yet optimistic (if only just) examination of the state of things today. The middle section on the Arab World (‘Lost Legitimacy’) should be prescribed reading in the Foreign

Office and on the foreign desk of newspapers and the BBC.

Hemingway’s Boat by Paul

Hendrickson, not yet published here, offers much more than the title suggests. It is the best and most sympathetic study of Hemingway I have read in a long time.

deserved. Swift has the admirable ability to write literary novels about characters who would never read such books. He presents us with a complete world, one which his inarticulate characters

struggle to understand. William Empsom wrote that ‘the central function of imaginative literature is to make you realise that other people act on moral convictions different from your