From new voices like NoViolet Bulawayo to rediscovered old voices like James Salter, from Dave Eggers's satire to David Thomson's history of film, writers, Observer critics and others pick their favourite reads of 2013. And they tell us what they hope to find under the tree …
Curtis Sittenfeld
Novelist
My favourite books of 2013 are Drama High (Riverhead) by Michael Sokolove, Sea Creatures (Turnaround) by Susanna Daniel, and & Sons (Harper Collins) by David Gilbert. Drama High is incredibly smart, moving non-fiction about an American drama teacher who for four decades coaxed sophisticated and nuanced theatrical performances out of teenage students who weren't privileged or otherwise remarkable and in so doing, changed their conceptions of what they could do with their lives. Sea Creatures is a gripping, beautifully written novel about the mother of a selectively mute three-year-old boy; when she takes a job ferrying supplies to a hermit off the coast of Florida, her world is upended. & Sons is a fabulously clever, warm-hearted novel about fathers, sons, literature, art, lust, envy, fraudulence, and Manhattan.
As for a book I'd love to be given, Mohsin Hamid has recently been writing wonderful columns for the New York Times that make me curious about his novels. If Santa's reading this, I believe I'll start with How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (Hamish Hamilton).
Hilary Mantel
Novelist
Time to recall the more energising parts of the year's reading: Kate Atkinson's inexhaustibly ingenious novel, Life After Life (Doubleday). Or Ace, King, Knave (Faber), Maria McCann's exuberant revivification of grave robbers and gamblers, hucksters and whores in 18th-century London (which I read in advance of its publication next month): like Hogarth sprung to life. Time to remember summer, with The Authors XI: A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon (Bloomsbury). It's more a record of style than success as, inevitably, at least one writer takes his iPad with him when fielding. But the players (authors, agents, actor Dan Stevens) turn in polished, cheerful reports of their revival of a literary and sporting tradition.
As for the book I'd like to receive, it's never been written: Thomas Cromwell, The Missing Years.
Ali Smith
Novelist
Kate Atkinson's Life After Life (Doubleday) is an absolute beauty of a novel and of the novel form, one of the most original and subtle things I've read for years, a shining, kind and quietly uncompromising novel whose own afterlife, I suspect, already involves words such as instant and classic. One of the other texts to breathe new life into old classic forms this year was Kate Tempest's Brand New Ancients (Picador); a long poem about us and the gods that's all high-kicking verve and long-range understanding. I loved its vision, powerful and merciful.
And the book I'd most like someone to give me for Christmas is Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald (Chatto & Windus); in fact, no, in this case I don't think I can wait till Christmas.
Colm Toibin
Novelist
I have been sure for some time that I will come back as a jellyfish in the next life and thus have been much cheered up by Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean (University of Chicago Press) by Lisa-ann Gershwin. It seems we will take over, and no drop of water will be complete without us. In fiction I enjoyed Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers (Harvill Secker) for its style and its daring, and Philipp Meyer's The Son (Simon & Schuster) for its ambition and sense of character.
For Christmas I would like to get The Prints of Ellsworth Kelly: A Catalogue Raisonné (Hudson Hills Press).
Joe Dunthorne
Novelist
George Saunders's latest story collection, Tenth of December (Bloomsbury), is full of wonders. If you need convincing, read the book's brilliant, disturbing centrepiece, The Semplica-Girl Diaries, on the New Yorker website. In poetry, I loved Emily Berry's Dear Boy (Faber), Heather Phillipson's Instant-flex 718 (Bloodaxe) and the whole back catalogue of Ben Lerner; his debut collection, The Lichtenberg Figures, is a decade old now but ageing beautifully.
For Christmas, I'd like Nice Weather (Faber), the new book from Frederick Seidel, the most debonair psychopath in poetry.
Melvyn Bragg
Novelist and broadcaster
1) Dante: The Divine Comedy, translated by Clive James (Picador). A triumph of great poetry and accessibility. Wonderful.
2) Unfaithfully Yours by Nigel Williams (Corsair) is a passionate, outrageous, thoughtful and brilliantly constructed comic novel. Up there with the very best. Williams unleashed!
3) Poetry of Witness: the Tradition in English 1500-2001 by Carolyn Forché and Duncan Wu (WW Norton & Co) Poems by those "marked by history". An original and punchy take on the well trodden path of anthologies. The linking passages are particularly well done.
4) The book I'd like for Christmas has a very long title: The Making of the Middle Sea: a History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World by Cyprian Broodbank (Thames & Hudson).
Jackie Kay
Poet and novelist
Proof again that the Caine prize for African writers really knows how to pick a winner We Need New Names (Chatto & Windus) by NoViolet Bulawayo is a tour de force. Ten-year-old Darling is an unforgettable and completely necessary new voice: add her to the literary canon. Bernardine Evaristo's Mr Loverman (Hamish Hamilton) tells the complex story of the secret love affair between Barry and Morris, two elderly African-Caribbean men. Heartbreaking, yet witty, this is a story that also needed to be told.
I'd love to find Claire Vaye Watkins's Battleborn (Granta Books) in my Christmas stocking. It sounds right up my street, and what a year it has been for the short story.
William Dalrymple
Writer and historian
For a genre that has often been declared dead and buried, travel writing has had a remarkable year. Robert Macfarlane's Holloway (Faber) was a perfect miniature prose poem of a book, beautifully printed and published, and co-authored with his friend and travelling companion, Dan Richards. Macfarlane is one of our most physical writers, and the greatest pleasure of his precise and worked prose is his astonishing ability to capture the spirit of a place.
Charlotte Higgins produced another remarkable British travelogue, Under Another Sky (Cape), about Roman Britain that was at once thoughtful, learned, witty and superbly written. My favourite book this year was, however, the final, unfinished and posthumous volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor's walking trilogy, The Broken Road (John Murray). While the book is certainly uneven, and contains some jottings that are little more than raw data, overall it is every bit as masterly as Between the Woods and the Water (John Murray), while some passages – such as his marvellous account of a love affair in the old Bulgarian city of Plovdiv – are the match for some of the great passages of A Time of Gifts (John Murray). All the old enthusiasms are there: the love of language and languages, the long historical and literary digressions, the perfect recollection of a lost, Ruritanian prewar and mostly pre-industrial world. Here, too, is the same exquisite prose. A real treat, especially for those of us who despaired of ever seeing it in print. As for my Christmas present, I'd like a copy of Lucy Hughes-Hallett's Samuel Johnson prize-winning biography of D' Annuncio, The Pike (Fourth Estate), which I can't wait to read.
Mary Beard
Classicist
As a Samuel Johnson prize judge this year, I reckon that any one of the books on the shortlist – from The Pike (Fourth Estate), Lucy Hughes-Hallett's winner, to A Sting in the Tale (Cape), by Dave Goulson – is a worthy book of the year; and the whole range is a tribute to the state of non-fiction publishing in the UK. Appearing since the prize is a great set of architectural essays by Gavin Stamp, Anti-Ugly (Aurum Press). Reprinted from Apollo magazine, they are a wonderful celebration of the best in English design, and a stylish invective against the worst. A great Christmas gift.
Sebastian Faulks
Novelist
The People Smuggler by Robin de Crespigny (Penguin) is the extraordinary story of an anti-Saddam Hussein dissident who was tortured in Abu Ghraib, then set about trying to get his family to safety in Australia. The adventures make Les Misérables look like plain sailing. Unforgettable. Priscilla (Harvill Secker) by Nicholas Shakespeare is an account of the author's aunt's life in France under the Nazis. Her descent parallels that of France. Grim but fascinating.
I would like to be given Eminent Hipsters (Cape) by Donald Fagen and/or Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 (Harper Collins) by Max Hastings.
Philip French
Observer film critic
Three fine books from consecutive decades. Florian Illies's 1913 (Clerkenwell Press) is a riveting intellectual chronicle of a crucial year. Careless People (Virago), Sarah Churchwell's fascinating account of "the invention of The Great Gatsby", fumigated my mind after exposure to Baz Luhrmann's film. Thomas Doherty's well researched Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press) throws fascinating new light on America and the rise of Nazism.
If the paperback of Sheila Hale's Titian: His Life (Harper Collins) isn't waiting for me under the Christmas tree I'll have to go out and buy it.
Helen Dunmore
Novelist
Penelope Lively's Ammonites & Leaping Fish: A Life in Time (Penguin) is a superb study of memory and of her own voyage into the ninth decade of life. Her clear, limber prose bears up the cargo of the past lightly. Whether she's writing about her second world war childhood in Egypt, the Suez crisis, Yalta in the early 1980s or the ammonites of the title, curled into "a sea-smoothed flat pebble of blue lias", Lively is a compelling, vitally interested witness to time past.
St Ives, The Story of the Porthmeor Studios (Halstar) by Marion Whybrow celebrates the recent restoration of these studios and fishermen's net lofts in St Ives. Artists such as Julius Olsson, Terry Frost, Sandra Blow, Patrick Heron and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham once worked here, while generations of St Ives fishermen mended nets and stored gear in the lofts. The book is packed with rare photographs of Porthmeor past and present, and fascinating interviews with the fishermen and artists who work in the buildings today.
For Christmas I would like The Letters of Paul Cézanne (Thames & Hudson), edited by Alex Danchev.
Julian Baggini
Philosopher and author
In Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain (WW Norton), the philosopher Patricia Churchland defies her neuro-fundamentalist reputation to present a supremely measured, sensible and readable account of the brain's role in making us who we are. I also enjoyed the rare combination of breadth and detail in Geoff Mulgan's The Locust and the Bee (Princeton University Press), an essential guide to how to deal with the "predators and creators in capitalism's future" of the subtitle.
Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (Granta Books) would be a great addition to my impressive pile of great novels I never find time to read.
Justin Cartwright
Novelist
The book I most admired was Jim Crace's Harvest (Picador). I was lucky enough to be sent an advance copy of & Sons (Harper Collins) by David Gilbert, a story about the sons of a famous New York writer to be published here in January. Wonderfully energetic and perceptive, exceptionally vivid and a tour de force. Look out for it. I doubt there will be much that is better in the coming year.
The book I would most like for Christmas is a first edition of Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory (Harper Perennial).
Craig Taylor
Journalist, playwright and author
Does Joe Sacco's intricate first world war panorama, The Great War (Cape), count as a book of the year? It's certainly my meticulously illustrated panorama of the year. If not, I'll choose another. Nitpickers might say both Françoise Héritier's The Sweetness of Life (Penguin) and Joe Brainard's I Remember are little more than lists, but I didn't read anything more compassionate. (Notting Hill Editions did a terrific job with the Brainard reissue). I loved the three bonkers novelitas in the Cesar Aira box set (Penguin).
For Christmas, someone could give me USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series (Turnaround) – a good way to offset all the goodwill and frivolity.
Tim Adams
Observer critic
Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree (Chatto & Windus) travels deep into the terra incognita of parental love. The tales Solomon returns with, of profound disability and extreme differences overcome, make it a bible of empathy and inclusion. Lucy Hughes-Hallett's The Pike (Fourth Estate), her life of Italian poet and proto-fascist Gabriele D'Annunzio, stayed with me for very different reasons – it's not only an inspired telling of a life that becomes more repellent with each page, it illuminates early 20th-century Europe in brilliant, unexpected ways.
The book I'd most like for Christmas is Spitalfields Life (Saltyard Books) by the anonymous Gentle Author. I've been an avid fan of the blog, but ink and paper is where it belongs.
Sam Jordison
Critic and author
You might think that you've heard a lot in recent years about the dreadful final days in Hitler's bunker and Magda Goebbels's murder of her own children. I know I did when I started Meike Ziervogel's novel Magda (Salt) – but I soon realised that it still had the power to shock and surprise. This is an intelligent, acute and horrifically intense book. It didn't so much take my breath away as make me gasp for air.
I worry about nominating Exodus (Melville House), the third book in Lars Iyer's increasingly renowned trilogy. I chose the second, Dogma, in this same paper last year and cringe slightly at my lack of originality. I'd cringe more, however, if I neglected to mention Iyer's magnificent barbed eloquence. It's curiously profound, strangely touching and, best of all, deeply insulting.
For Christmas: Copendium by Julian Cope (Faber). In spite of the occasional brilliance of Morrissey's new book, Julian Cope's Head-On remains the best rock star autobiography ever written. Anyone who's also read his glorious ramblings in The Modern Antiquarian and Japrocksampler will know that Cope can enthuse like no other. Yes, this is a book about hundreds of bands I've never heard of, and probably couldn't stand to listen to, but I still expect that this latest instalment in the arch-drude's magnificent oeuvre will be nothing short of righteous.
Simon Singh
Science and mathematics writer
It's been a good year for nerdy books. Tim Harford's The Undercover Ecomomist Strikes Back (Little Brown) was an excellent primer for me, a non-economist who wants to understand the financial crisis. I am currently enjoying Undiluted Hocus-Pocus (Princeton University Press), the autobiography of Martin Gardner, whose passion for puzzles was said to have turned many children into mathematicians and many mathematicians into children. I sense that today's teenagers are not familiar with Gardner, so hopefully this book help connect them with his great legacy.
I know my Christmas stocking will contain Spectrums (Bloomsbury) by David Blatner, which looks at everything from infinitesimals to infinity across a range of physical properties in only 192 pages.
Lara Feigel
Lecturer and author
This has been a year of unusually enjoyable narrative poems. I loved Hannah Sullivan's You, Very Young in New York, a pellucid slow-motion account of the half-pleasurable agonies of youth, in Craig Raine's very fine Areté anthology. I also enormously enjoyed Christopher Reid's Six Bad Poets (Faber), which swipes warmheartedly at London literary life past and present.
Over Christmas I am planning to turn to history, reading Richard Overy's fascinating-looking The Bombing War (Allen Lane).
Rachel Cooke
Observer critic and author
The best novel I read, by a mile, was Tessa Hadley's Clever Girl (Cape), which tells the story of one woman's life from hardscrabble start in a Bristol bedsit to more affluent middle age. It's so finely worked, like emotional needlepoint, though she handles time masterfully, too. Stella, its heroine, seems always to be moving towards the light, and I read the last 20 pages with tears pouring down my cheeks. The best non-fiction I read was I Know You're Going to Be Happy (Short Books), Rupert Christiansen's piercing memoir about his bolter father, and the effect his disappearance had on the author's mother, trapped in 50s suburbia. A masterpiece of precision and quiet bewilderment, it is restrained, elegant and telling, what it doesn't say being as important as what it does.
For Christmas, I'd like a full set of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles (Pan) in their delightful new livery, please.
John Kampfner
Journalist, author and broadcaster
Three biographies-cum-histories, three very different figures, each as compelling as the other: Jung Chang's Empress Dowager Cixi (Cape) reminds us how China's past influences the present. In Story of a Death Foretold (Bloomsbury), Oscar Guardiola-Rivera vividly demonstrates the extent of US complicity in the coup that brought Pinochet to power, and from a very different political perspective, Charles Moore's Thatcher epic, Margaret Thatcher (Allen Lane), is by far the most authoritative account of the woman who changed Britain.
As for Christmas, two years late and still not got round to reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (Fourth Estate).
Rachel Joyce
Novelist and playwright
The two books that stayed with me this year were both short ones – and both dealt a blow that left me reeling. Levels of Life (Cape) by Julian Barnes combines ballooning, photography, love and bereavement, and if you can't think how, you need to read it. The Spinning Heart (Transworld) by Donal Ryan is told from the points of view of 21 people struggling to get by in rural Ireland.
My Christmas books have to be One Summer (Doubleday) by Bill Bryson along with Penelope Fitzgerald (Chatto & Windus) by Hermione Lee. Two big books to go alongside two short ones.
Colin Thubron
Novelist and travel writer
A uniquely meditative and poetic study of Germany, Roads to Berlin: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Germany (Quercus) comes from the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, who was an eye witness of the wall's collapse. And Simon Garfield's On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way It Does (Profile) is a witty, imaginative study of how we have made maps, and how they have made us.
For Christmas I hope for Harvest (Picador), the last novel of that fine and unsparing writer Jim Crace.
John Banville
Novelist and screenwriter
Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica, by TJ Clark (Princeton), is the best thing in a long time on this still contentious painter. Whether or not you agree with Clark's take on Picasso, you will not look at his paintings in quite the same way ever again.
At 2,500 pages, Giacomo Leopardi's Zibaldone (Penguin) is surely the biggest book of the year, as well as one of the most exciting. This hodge-podge of meditations on art and culture and pretty well everything else under the sun, brought to English by a team of seven translators, shows Leopardi to have been not only a superb poet but also one of the very greatest European thinkers of the modern era. Building: Letters 1960-1975, by Isaiah Berlin, edited by the devoted and indefatigable Henry Hardy (Chatto & Windus), is even more engrossing and entertaining than the two previous volumes of Berlin's correspondence. Pure joy.
And, dear Santa, please may I have in my stocking The Letters of Paul Cézanne, edited by Alex Danchev (Thames & Hudson)? It looks wonderful.
Louise Doughty
Journalist and novelist
Damian Barr's wonderful memoir Maggie & Me (Bloomsbury) was the coming-of-age story of this year. A new discovery for me was Canadian poet George Elliott Clarke's, Illicit Sonnets, published over here by the tiny Eyewear Press – a good present if you wish to remind your other half that middle-aged or elderly people still have sex.
Beneath the tree, I would like to find The Goldfinch (Little, Brown) by Donna Tartt on the basis that it will be a good one to snuggle down with when the inevitable new year virus hits.
Lucy Lethbridge
Author
I was enthralled by Stephen Grosz's profound and moving The Examined Life (Chatto & Windus), which packed large ideas into a slim volume, while Robert Brownell's huge tome, Marriage of Inconvenience (Pallas Athene), weighed in with an enjoyably obsessive re-examination of the marriage of Effie and John Ruskin and the pubic hair question. When it came to novels, AM Homes's May We Be Forgiven (Granta Books) was exhausting but exhilarating.
For Christmas I hope someone gives me a copy of Charles Palliser's new novel, Rustication: for fans of The Quincunx it's been a long, 15-year wait.
Eben Upton
Raspberry Pi CEO
I enjoyed Danubia (Picador), by Simon Winder, a "personal history" of the Habsburgs, a family so complicated that in other circumstances you'd call them byzantine. Funny and yet also fantastically informative. The Wool trilogy (Arrow) by Hugh Howey was another high point. Good old-fashioned, twisty hard science fiction. I picked the series up after the publication of Wool and Shift, and found myself counting the days until Dust came out in October.
For Christmas, I'm rather hoping for a copy of The Quarry (Little, Brown) by Iain Banks. One of the saddest pieces of news for me this year was his death in June of cancer at the age of 59.
Julie Myerson
Novelist and critic
Mark Lawson's The Deaths (Picador) and Lionel Shriver's Big Brother (HarperCollins), though unalike in theme, are perfect in identical ways: ambitious, relevant, brave and full of humour and heart. Bonnie Nadzam's astonishing debut Lamb (Windmill), published in paperback during the summer, uses breathtaking prose to shed light on a chilling theme. And then along comes James Salter's All That Is (Picador). Effortlessly beautiful, funny, sexy and wise – the kind of novel that makes you want to delete your own meagre work-in-progress and start over. Is there a How to Write Like Salter Handbook? If so, that's what I want for Christmas, please
Alex Preston
Novelist and critic
2013 was my year of Shirley Hazzard. The novelist David Miller pressed The Transit of Venus (Virago) on me and I devoured it and subsequently everything else she's written. I also immersed myself in the novels of Iain Banks, who died this year. The Quarry was not his best, but I greatly enjoyed acquainting myself with his earlier work. I also found, in Evie Wyld's second novel, All the Birds, Singing (Jonathan Cape), a voice indebted to Banks and every bit as strange and compelling.
For Christmas I'd like to settle down, slightly drunk after my turkey and port, with Sebastian Faulks's Jeeves and the Wedding Bells (Hutchinson).
Teju Cole
Writer, photographer, art historian
The book I thought most about this year was Sonali Deraniyagala's Wave (Virago), her account of the 2004 tsunami. It is one of the most difficult things I've ever read, and one of the most consoling. In the past few months, I often went to Opened Ground (Faber), Seamus Heaney's selected poems; each line was a reminder of what the world lost when he died in August. And January sees the release of The Poetry of Derek Walcott, from FSG. All the best of Walcott's poetry, as indispensable to contemporary literature as Heaney's, will at last be available in a good single volume.
Ian Thomson
Author and critic
In her lyrical, savvy study of six alcoholic American writers, The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink (Canongate), Olivia Laing cast a humane eye on the accidents, social impairment and other damage caused by the demon booze. Gabriel Weston's scalpel-sharp novel Dirty Work (Jonathan Cape) explored the medical and religious ethics of abortion. And the film-maker Nicolas Roeg gave us a work of rare poetic insight in his memoir The World is Ever Changing (Faber).
My Christmas present? Kathleen Jamie's essay collection Sightlines (Sort of Books).
Peter Conrad
Academic, author and Observer critic
In Moments That Made the Movies (Thames & Hudson), David Thomson, with his all-seeing eyes, analyses details in favourite films that the rest of us, no matter how well we know them, have overlooked. Richard Havers' and Herbie Hancock's Verve: The Sound of America (Thames & Hudson) turns the story of a record label into a gloriously lively history of jazz; the book's design almost makes you hear the music as you read. Julie Maxwell's novel These Are Our Children (Quercus) is an obstetric tragicomedy, both harrowing and hilarious, about the traumas we experience and the pain we cause as we struggle to get into the world.
Catherine O'Flynn
Novelist
Ben Lerner's brilliant Leaving the Atocha Station (Granta) stood out from everything else I read this year. It just seemed to speak directly to me despite the fact that I am not a lying, self-medicating American poet drifting around Madrid. Closer to my own experiences was Sathnam Sanghera's Marriage Material (William Heinemann), which was funny and melancholy in equal measure.
For Christmas I'm hoping for Nina Stibbe's Love, Nina (Viking) and Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop (Faber) by Bob Stanley.
Talitha Stevenson
Journalist and novelist
The most incendiary book I've read this year is Who Owns the Future? (Allen Lane) by the computer scientist and visionary Jaron Lanier. A principled and contemplative figure in an industry prone to mania, Lanier argues that companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook have conned us into thinking we're being given something for free. Combine this with Dave Eggers's ingenious thriller The Circle (Hamish Hamilton) for a vision of a world that has not paid attention to Jaron Lanier.
For Christmas I'd like Carl Jung's The Red Book.
Ali Shaw
Novelist
George Monbiot's Feral (Allen Lane) made me dream of seeing lynx and beavers (and maybe even elephants) roaming the countryside. Gene Luen Yang's twin-volume comic Boxers and Saints told both sides of the story of China's Boxer Rebellion with equal empathy, warning of just how easily we human beings succumb to violence.
As for my stocking this year, if Father Christmas could slip in a copy of George Saunders's Tenth of December (Bloomsbury), I would be most jolly.
Michael Palin
Author and presenter
Helium (Bloomsbury) by Jaspreet Singh gave me a compelling insight into the cruel and complex world of India's recent internecine struggles. He examines a difficult period of history through a series of intense personal relationships that draw the reader in to a world that seems ecstatic and doomed at the same time. A wonderfully well-woven tale that shines a light on fascinating and appalling events.
The Signature of All Things (Bloomsbury) by Elizabeth Gilbert is dazzling in its scope and ambition. To say its themes are love and botany is not really to do justice to the daringly confident sweep of the story, which is held together by Alma Whittaker, one of the most appealing, convincing and utterly original heroines in modern literature.
Philip Pullman
Novelist
Inside the Rainbow (Redstone Press), edited by Julian Rothenstein and Olga Budashevskaya, contains hundreds of astonishing illustrations from Russian children's books from 1920-1935. A magnificent collection: brilliant colours, terrible shadows. Vic Gatrell's The First Bohemians (Allen Lane) is an irresistible history, fizzing with life, of the rakes, whores, scoundrels, artists, poets, thieves who inhabited 18th-century Covent Garden. Sarah Ruden's superb translation of Apuleius's The Golden Ass (Yale University Press) illuminates this wonderful story with a brilliant modern wit.
A book I'd like: I admire David Thomson very much, and his Moments That Made the Movies (Thames & Hudson) looks like just the job for the stocking.
Robert Macfarlane
Travel writer
Iain McCalman's The Reef: A Passionate History (Viking Australia), like its subject, builds slowly into beauty, offering an account of the Great Barrier Reef as it exists in culture, language and dream, as well as in marine biology. A convergence of recommendations led me to the long-awaited English translation of Yves Bonnefoy's remarkable The Arriere-pays (University of Chicago Press, trans Stephen Romer), whose mix of prose-poetic meditation with black-and-white photos predates WG Sebald's similar formal experiments.
I have not yet read, but would love to be given, Nick Groom's The Seasons: An Elegy for the Passing of the Year (Atlantic), which – written by an accomplished critic, cultural historian and countryman – will surely be richly evocative.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Novelist
I most enjoyed Barbara Pym's A Glass of Blessings (Virago), which I've only just discovered. Pym is funny and witty, brilliant at portraying the middle-class English of the 1950s, and in particular the psychology of femaleness.
I'd love to be given, as a present, a signed copy of Politics: Observations and Arguments, 1966-2004 (Penguin) by Hendrik Hertzberg, whose work I admire very much.
Kate Kellaway
Observer critic
Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree (Chatto & Windus) is a prodigious, illuminating book about the challenge of being a parent – especially when children are out of the ordinary. He considers deaf, schizophrenic and autistic children. He writes about dwarves, criminals, prodigies and children born as a result of rape. With calm – never fudging the difference between families – he thinks about what unites the parental enterprise. Kiss Me First by Lottie Moggach (Picador) is an outstanding first novel about a defective young woman who, with the internet as her ally, steers another woman towards suicide.
And I am longing to read Nicola Shulman's book about Sir Thomas Wyatt: Graven with Diamonds (Short Books).
Sara Wheeler
Travel writer and biographer
I don't know why Nikolai Leskov is not better known: he's one of the best: at his best, he is one of the best. My book of the year is the newly translated short story collection The Enchanted Wanderer (Vintage Classics). You don't just feel the falling snowflakes and smell the hay – you glimpse where God might be.
For Christmas give me Christian Wolmar's history of the Trans-Siberian railway, To the Edge of the World (Atlantic), as I am about to board.
Salley Vickers
Novelist
John Drury's Music at Midnight: the Life and Poetry of George Herbert (Allen Lane) is a beautifully judged appraisal of my favourite poet. I also admired the careful, delicate prose and subtle insights of Javier Marías's The Infatuations (Hamish Hamilton). And Terry Eagleton's ironical and trenchant take on America, Across the Pond (WW Norton & Co), made me laugh with glee and feel a rare pride in our native culture.
For Christmas I'd like The Letters of Paul Cézanne (Thames & Hudson) by Alex Danchev – it looks sumptuous and he's a favourite artist of mine.
Owen Jones
Columnist and author
He went from Britain's most dangerous man to a national sweetheart, and it troubles him. Tony Benn's last ever diaries, A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine (Hutchinson), movingly reveals one of the postwar political giants coming to terms with death, though still bursting with passion and idealism. Global austerity has a rarely discussed death toll, and David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu's The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills (Allen Lane) breaks the silence. Finally, I'll be packing Iain Banks's book The Quarry (Little, Brown) to visit my folks over Christmas, appropriately in his beloved Scotland.
Robert McCrum
Observer writer
My novel of the year is The Infatuations by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa(Hamish Hamilton), a murder mystery that's also a brilliant meditation on life, love and death. In contrast, Come to the Edge (Quercus) by Joanna Kavenna is a rustic romp, a sharp and entertaining satire on the myths of country life in the spirit of Cold Comfort Farm. Finally, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (Chatto) by Hermione Lee is the biography of the year, an extraordinary portrait of an English literary life.
Stephanie Merritt
Novelist and Observer critic
I was gripped by Sarah Dunant's Blood & Beauty (Virago), her fictional biography of the Borgias. It's a rich, ambitious novel, steeped in her passion for the Italian renaissance, with all the drama of a high-end soap. I also loved Maggie & Me (Bloomsbury) by Damian Barr, his memoir of growing up gay in working-class Glasgow. Written with beautiful clarity and no self-pity – I look forward to seeing what he does next.
On my Christmas list is Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch (Little, Brown).
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/24/writers-books-of-year-2013-observer
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