Books of the year 2008

The New Statesman's round up of the best books of 2008 as suggested by critics and contributors including David Marquand, Tahmima Anam, Fatima Bhutto and Anthony Howard

Tim Adams

Julian Barnes's Nothing to Be Frightened of (Cape, £16.99) is a nice corrective to the one-note atheism of Dawkins and the rest. It is human, clever and full of doubt: "I don't believe in God, but I miss him . . ." Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke (Simon & Schuster, £20) makes you challenge all you thought you knew about Churchill, and about war. The book I have carried with me all year, though, is Mick Imlah's The Lost Leader (Faber & Faber, £9.99). Imlah's poetry is that rare combination of erudition and conversation: perfectly crafted lines from the heart. The collection dwells on the idea of Scotland, of how where we come from shapes where we end up; it contains memorable meditations on a nation's heroes, never forgetting that it is the local and particular which stays with us. Imlah's voice holds all the histories together, easy as a ballad, forever crackling with one-liners.

Fatema Ahmed

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard (Granta, £12) is not a self-help book for lazy book reviewers, but an entertaining essay on literature, anxiety and the canon, and the eighth instalment in the author's "Paradoxes" series. Bayard is the kind of French academic who is more interested in how we can change Proust than in how Proust can change us. He also knows who killed Agatha Christie's Roger Ackroyd and who was really killed in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Someone should translate and publish the whole series in time for next Christmas. Beautiful Image by Marcel Aymé (Pushkin Press, £12) is a novel about a man who finds one day that he has a different face. It is less unsettling than Kafka, but its combination of charm and creepiness is pleasantly disorientating. More