James Bradley

Pulling three books out of the slew of remarkable work published in 2005 isn’t easy, but A.L. McCann’s exhilarating enema of a novel, Subtopia (Vulgar Press), would have to be one. Misanthropy and self-loathing never sounded so good, and McCann’s devastatingly accurate pastiche of Australian pastoral surrealism à la Patrick White or Peter Carey is as hilarious as it is savage. In The Secret River (Text), Kate Grenville has produced a book that transcends anything she has written before, and which I am sure is a classic in the making. My third choice would have to be the most-discussed, least-read book of the last twelve months, The Latham Diaries (MUP). Don’t believe the bile: its many contradictions aside, Latham’s book lays bare the vacuum at the heart of our democracy, the corrupted and corrupting nature of power, and the thoroughgoing cynicism and imaginative failure of our media and political class.

Peter Craven

Alice Munro’s Runaway (Vintage) was as startling and real, as crystalline and achieved a book of short stories as the world has seen in heaven knows how long. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Hamish Hamilton) was September 11 seen through the eye of a precocious primary schooler – clearly a portrait of the artist – and managed to triumph over the author’s impulses to be too smart for words. In this part of the world, there was Sonya Hartnett’s Surrender (Viking), a novel of deep and dazzling darkness, and J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man (Knopf): a remarkable performance, beautifully modulated and paced, by one of the world’s masters of narrative momentum. It is quiet and self-reflexive to the point of looking a bit postmodern (though it isn’t), but this is fiction so assured it creates the kind of hush normally reserved for great music. Very differently, but with a comparable excellence, Craig Sherborne’s Hoi Polloi (Black Inc.) was one of those memoirs so true to the barbarities of individual and collective experience that it fills the soul with hilarity and wonder. There was also a new book by my favourite mid-career poet: from Canada, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (Knopf), by the great Anne Carson.

Gillian Dooley

This was a year for intense, passionate books. Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Dead Europe (Vintage) is dark, offensive, poetic, violent and compelling, and suggests the repellent fact that racism is everywhere and the worse for being suppressed or denied. Eva Sallis’s The Marsh Birds (Allen & Unwin) also tackles racism, through the eyes of an Iraqi teenager who finds himself in Australia’s vile system for asylum seekers. The narrative is subjective and powerful, and very frightening. I found two works of investigative journalism especially good: Following Them Home: The Fate of Returned Asylum Seekers, by David Corlett (Black Inc.), treats the subject with intelligence and sympathy; while Ruth Balint’s Troubled Waters: Borders, Boundaries and Possession in the Timor Sea (Allen & Unwin) exposes another shameful example of people unfortunate enough not to be Australians, who are forced to deal with Australian officialdom.

Martin Duwell

As the last literate person on earth to discover the work of Anne Carson, it is a pleasure to recommend Economy of the Unlost (Princeton). I share with many a slight irritation with her ‘creative works’ – such as Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (Vintage) and Decreation – but this book, devoted to a comparison of perhaps the two most impossible-to-compare writers, Paul Celan and Simonides of Keos, is a small critical masterpiece. Among books of Australian poetry (my basic diet), I’d list Jaya Savige’s Latecomers (UQP), Philip Hammial’s Voodoo Realities (Island Press) and Bruce Beaver’s The Long Game and Other Poems (UQP) as highlights. The first is one of a group of fine débuts this year, the second a collection of Hammial’s intoxicating descents into his own kind of instinctive surreal, and the last a final farewell to a great Australian poet.

Morag Fraser

Essay collections are the books I’ve most enthusiastically dog-eared by repeated reading. Martin Krygier’s political reflections traverse the latter decades of the twentieth century in Australia and Europe, and in the process make nonsense of conventional – and now useless categories – left/right, conservative/progressive. Krygier is a meaty delight to read: self-aware, ironic, knowledgeable and passionate about the civility that must inform all public life if we want to live decently, and fully. Scots poet Kathleen Jamie I found in a bookshop in St Andrews. Six months on, I am still rereading Findings (Sort of Books) and enjoying Jamie’s precise and profound observations. She has a poet’s capacity for registering particulars – the northern dark, the habits of peregrine falcons, the stone of a neolithic tomb – and turning them into what feels like necessary knowledge. Gail Jones’s splendid heroine, Lucy Strange, has a related knack with epiphanies, which makes her novel Sixty Lights (Harvill) an intense pleasure to read, and reread.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

In 2005 I’ve seen three very different and distinguished Australian books that all broke their respective moulds. Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore (Text) is a literary novel masquerading as conventional crime fiction, a chilling, evocative murder mystery that’s also very funny in its sharp portraiture of Australian masculinity. Delia Falconer’s The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers (Picador) compresses complex ideas about history, politics, subjectivity and storytelling into a vision at once intensely poetic and sharply focused. Gay Bilson’s gorgeously designed Plenty: Digressions on Food (Viking) likewise addresses both politics and aesthetics in an intellectually far-ranging way, as she meditates on matters gastronomical and on a life spent practising the culinary arts.

Lisa Gorton

First, Gerald Murnane’s collection of essays works as a whole, as a study of memory and forgetting. Every writer’s style amounts to a vision; but every phrase in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (Giramondo) is so true to Murnane’s peculiar vision that his style amounts to a philosophy. If consistency of style makes Murnane’s essays remarkable, Jennifer Maiden’s fourteenth collection of poetry is remarkable for its brilliant incongruities. Friendly Fire (Giramondo) ranges from political satire to intimate lyric, from the war in Iraq to conversations with her daughter; juxtaposing realms of experience to equal how we live now. Paddy O’Reilly’s The Factory (Thompson Walker) is a finely crafted thriller; Craig Sherborne’s memoir of childhood, Hoi Polloi, is a brilliant demotic Australian Gorky.

Bridget Griffen-Foley

The Australian Dictionary of Biography Supplement (MUP): bearing one of the most mundane titles, this is one of the most important titles of the year. The Supplement adds more than 500 biographies to the estimable ADB, ranging from Dirk Hartog, born in 1580, to 1980. With the cover adorned by a drawing by Mickey of Ulladulla, this ‘missing persons’ volume, not surprisingly, includes a large number of Aborigines and women, and says much about the changing priorities of Australian historiography since the ADB’s origins in the 1960s. The subjects are variously familiar and unfamiliar, distinguished and infamous. Today, my favourite is Jessie Grover, who established a silk factory and specified that only women could be on the board, and had a Melbourne Cup runner named after her. While waiting for The Latham Diaries (MUP) to be remaindered, my political interests have had to be sated by Tom Frame’s measured The Life and Death of Harold Holt (Allen & Unwin).

Michelle Griffin

Of the many books I read this year for business and pleasure, Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (Harvill) remains most vivid, chiefly because one chapter made me dry retch. I had happier encounters with the grudging sympathy of Cynthia Ozick’s tragicomic novel The Bear Boy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) and the mysteries both mundane and enormous that shaped Michael Chabon’s Sherlock novel The Final Solution (Fourth Estate). History of the year was Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World (Jonathan Cape): of course, it’s full of guesswork, but also the grace notes of a well-informed imagination. I was devastated when Will died. Locally, I loved Julienne van Loon’s Road Story (Allen & Unwin), which wipes away the usual rural pantomime affectations with prose that burns like kerosene and an admirable lack of exposition. Finally, the Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs of the methodical Gerald Murnane, a collection of essays both deft and daft.

Richard Johnstone

Dutch by birth, Australian by upbringing, Scottish by choice, Michel Faber brings an edgy cosmopolitanism to the stories collected in The Fahrenheit Twins (Canongate). In these clever tales of broken families and failed relationships, the cool, distinctive style provides for traces of optimism amongst the gloom. Family is also the focus of Barbara Caine’s Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (OUP), an absorbing account of the dynamics of a large and talented group of people, and the complex web of influences that worked its way amongst them, for better or for worse. And it’s family again in Bradley K. Martin’s Under the Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (Thomas Dunne). While nothing about this book – style, structure, length, subject – makes for particularly easy reading, it is riveting all the same. Tyranny meets postmodernism, in a régime so thoroughly nasty that its effects will be felt long after the Kims have gone the way of all dynasties.

Barry Jones

Degenerates and Perverts: The 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art describes the public, institutional, critical and aesthetic reaction to an important touring exhibition promoted by Sir Keith Murdoch in 1939. The title quotes the outraged reaction of Melbourne’s National Gallery director to works by van Gogh, Matisse, Léger and Picasso. The illustrations, text and production are splendid. The collection remained in Australia throughout World War II; major works could have been snapped up at bargain basement prices, but were not, due to a failure of nerve. Ian McEwan’s Saturday (Jonathan Cape) is a series of brilliant set pieces about a single day in a surgeon’s life, rather than a novel. Reviewers were generally fulsome (in the literal sense), but John Banville called it ‘a dismayingly bad book’. I found it both compelling and implausible. Untold Stories (Faber), running to 656 pages, is Alan Bennett’s first collection of prose since Writing Home (1994). Writing with incomparable grace and self-knowledge, Bennett explores his inner life, art, music, festivals, honours and a bout with cancer.

Nicholas Jose

I have a soft spot for Knitting: A Novel by Anne Bartlett (Penguin), a story of the convergence of two very different women, in which a very special knitted dress changes hands and grace moves in unlikely ways. The imagining is fresh, strong and spirited as the author follows currents of grief and waves of high humour, all coloured in with lovingly located detail. I also liked The Idea of Home by John Hughes (Giramondo), a portrait of the artist as a wayward PhD student. This memoir takes the form of a set of dazzling, divergent essays that glance off place, family and the obscure ways of self-formation, with a special feeling for those moments when things suddenly become clear. The most memorable line of poetry I read this year came in ‘The Anti-Travel Travel Poem’ in Adam Aitken’s new chapbook Impermanence.com (Vagabond Press): ‘where we know belonging, we know how.’

James Ley

Honourable mentions to Sonya Hartnett’s Surrender and Brian Castro’s The Garden Book (Giramondo), but they were pipped by Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation (Picador), which is a truly appalling story in the hands of an incisive writer. I couldn’t put it down – which is a cliché, but absolutely true. Iain Sinclair’s Edge of the Orison (Hamish Hamilton) has one of my favourite authors on the trail of the Romantic poet John Clare. Sinclair is one of the most distinctive prose writers currently working in the English language. Generic distinctions run screaming from his books. He is brilliant in the way that only someone who is a little bit bonkers can be. One more? How about Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume 1 (Simon & Schuster). Chronicles is magnificent: fabulously written and unexpectedly hilarious.

David McCooey

This year was notable for three illustrations of life writing’s importance. The first is a novel, J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man, which opens with an extraordinary meditation on care and suffering. With the sudden appearance of the fictive novelist, Elizabeth Costello, the work becomes teasingly concerned with the intersections between living and writing. As Hermione Lee notes, in Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing (Chatto & Windus), Coetzee ‘has always been impossible to predict’. Lee says much in this marvellous collection about many writers, and in the process she considers how biographers piece ‘parts and bits’ together to ‘make a solid figure … out of what has gone’. Craig Sherborne’s Hoi Polloi shows just how seamless, startling and profound such piecing together can be. His memoir of childhood is darkly hilarious and often painful in its anatomy of children and their parents. It is destined to be a classic of Australian life writing.

Brian McFarlane

First, J.M. Coetzee’s Adelaide-set novel, Slow Man. If it didn’t seem a contradiction in terms, I’d say it is both minimalist and baroque: it both pares life away to its essentials and engages in the most audacious flights of formal fancy. Nick Hornby, so invisibly skilful that one hardly expects to see him on such lists, belongs here for his tour de force, A Long Way Down (Viking), in which four disparate types, with a common urge to commit suicide on New Year’s Eve, take charge of the novel’s voices in alternating chapters. In the homely Maureen, he creates a figure whose quietly growing moral stature is beautiful to watch. Theatrical/film biography usually displays plenty of gush and grime, but not John Coldstream’s magisterial chronicling of that great actor and elusive man, Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Meticulously researched, it never gets enmired in its footnotes, and Bogarde emerges in free-standing complexity.

Brenda Niall

Two of my favourite novels of 2005 plunder the literary past, making their transatlantic getaways in bizarre or tragicomic style. Cynthia Ozick’s The Bear Boy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is a risky venture in which Jane Austen’s Fanny Price meets Christopher Robin and the first Mrs Rochester, all of them in the Bronx, in the 1930s. Zadie Smith’s reworking of Howards End as an East Coast campus novel, On Beauty (Hamish Hamilton), is less complicated, and it too succeeds brilliantly. Some artistic baggage is carried south in an accomplished piece of Australian cultural history, by Eileen Chanin and Steven Miller with Judith Pugh. Degenerates and Perverts: The 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art is an engrossing read and a sumptuous production.

Peter Porter

Already crossing one finishing line ahead of the field, and coming down the straight for a second victory, Craig Sherborne has to top my Christmas recommendations. Hoi Polloi is a memoir of childhood like no other. Scabrous, brutal but plaintive to the point of tears, Sherborne’s account of infancy in rural New Zealand and adolescence among the racing fraternity of Sydney is an instant classic. No one who reads Hoi Polloi will be able to subscribe to parental governance again. As a verse sequel to Hoi Polloi’s prose parade, next year Black Inc. will issue Sherborne’s book of poems, Necessary Evil, as remarkable in every way as its predecessor. Sherborne is pioneering a virtuoso way of linking poetry to the stark surface of life in modern suburbia. The novel I admired most in 2005 is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (Faber), a dystopian fantasy of human cloning for organ transplants which radiates genuine feeling and not just fashionable foreboding. For originality of narrative, and insight into the traditions of Kashmir life, I recommend pages 45 to 133 of Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (Jonathan Cape), the ‘Boonyi’ section: they almost give magic realism a good name. The rest of the novel is a different matter.

Angus Trumble

I loved Flora Fraser’s Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III (John Murray), a wonderfully hair-raising group portrait. Of the fifteen mostly overweight royal siblings, only Princess Sophia managed to get knocked up by one of her father’s equerries, and had to tolerate appalling rumours that brother Ernest, the Tourette-style serial-groping Duke of Cumberland, was actually responsible. Despite its bracing title, Eileen Chanin and Steven Miller’s Degenerates and Perverts: The 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art delights by presenting and contextualising an uninterrupted sequence of modern masterpieces, almost none of which found their way into Australian public collections. I also liked Ivan the Terrible (Yale University Press), by Isabel de Madariaga, especially the set pieces of flirtatious diplomacy between Queen Elizabeth and the Tsar. It is best read in conjunction with the truly shocking Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (Steidl/Fuel), which proves that, with Russia, plus ça change …

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

To my mind the best fiction of the year was that of Ian McEwan’s Saturday. That busy old form the novel is expected to offer compulsion, traction and information; and Saturday, deep in cerebral microsurgery, provided all three in abundance. The quirkiest book was Gerald Murnane’s Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, which may be essays or might be stories but is brimful of Murnane’s inimitable, impudent persona. In poetry, I responded to the quiet questioning of David McCooey’s Blister Pack (Salt); more than any Australian poet since R.A. Simpson, he has laid his hands gently on everydayness.