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Best Book of 2000: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
Anne Meadows
‘It is the novel I have read which best expresses the honest and sad truth of art: that it is often produced in precarity and performed in near silence, but that it can also redeem a life.’
Best Book of 2000: The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent
Will Boast
Will Boast on why Lionel Trilling’s The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent is the best book of 2000.
Best Book of 2008: Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
Mika Taylor
‘Rivka Galchen’s debut novel is one of my favourites from the last few years.’
Best Book of 2008: To the End of the Land, by David Grossman
Lily Dunn
‘David Grossman is a writer who speaks to the heart, and this is his masterpiece.’
Best Book of 2010: Mr Chartwell, by Rebecca Hunt
Emma Jane Unsworth
‘Hunt writes with brio, the visceral often blooming into the mystical.’
Best Book of 2013: When the World Became White by Dalia Betolin-Sherman
Mira Rashty
‘New poetic expressions can still emerge and evolve in Hebrew – an ancient and almost prehistoric language, with its grumbling sound’
Best Book of 2015: Thus Were Their Faces by Silvina Ocampo
Valerie Miles
‘Time is a rubber band, and in a single sentence, ghosts and alternative worlds superimpose’
Best Book of 2016: Joanne Kyger’s On Time
Hoa Nguyen
Hoa Nguyen on why Joanne Kyger’s On Time is the best book of 2016.
Best Story of 1992: ‘Mlle. Dias de Corta’
Mary O’Donoghue
Mary O’Donoghue on why Mavis Gallant‘s ‘Mlle. Dias de Corta’ is the best story of 1992.
Black Country
Anthony Cartwright
‘There’s a sense, I think, that what that X in the box translates as is seventeen and a half million voices that say, we’re still here.’
Blue Hills and Chalk Bones
Sinéad Gleeson
‘One day, something changes; a corporeal blip. For me, it happened in the months after turning thirteen: the synovial fluid in my left hip began to evaporate like rain.’
Blue Sky Days
Tomas van Houtryve & Eliza Griswold
‘For those caught beneath its thrum, there’s no comfort that the drone, and whoever is at its helm in America, is only targeting the bad guys.’ Eliza Griswold introduces Tomas van Houtryve's unsettling photo-essay taken by drones coming close to civilian life in the manner of the drones currently deployed in Afghanistan.
