Judith Beveridge

There have been some wonderfully impressive collections of poetry published this year – M.T.C. Cronin’s The Flower, The Thing (UQP), Stephen Edgar’s Other Summers (Black Pepper), Les Murray’s The Biplane Houses (Black Inc.), Jennifer Harrison’s Folly and Grief (Black Pepper), Craig Sherborne’s Necessary Evil (Black Inc.) – but I am singling out Robert Adamson’s The Goldfinches of Baghdad (Flood Editions) for special mention. This is Adamson at his absolute best. In poem after poem, myth, image and lyricism are fused by a subtle clarity of mind. He brings us news like no other poet. The birds which have roosted for years in Adamson’s imagination are now out. These charmingly poetic, sometimes trickster presences sing of and reveal both the light and dark. This book is breathtaking in craft and execution. All these books reinforce the fact that this is a time of splendour in Australian poetry.

Neal Blewett

My reading this year has been dominated by the spate of books on the tragedy in Iraq. From a number of good volumes, I found Thomas E. Ricks’s Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (Allen Lane) the most rewarding and the most damning. It makes a powerful case that the war was misbegotten in conception, maladroit in execution, and likely to be malign in its consequences. It also paints a frightening picture of the dysfunctional nature of the Bush régime. I was impressed by the paperback version of The Third Reich in Power 1933–39 (Penguin), the second volume of Richard J. Evans’s proposed trilogy on Nazi Germany. It confirms the promise of the first that this will be the most authoritative account in English of Hitler’s Germany. As always, I enjoyed Inga Clendinnen: her Quarterly Essay, The History Question: Who Owns the Past? (Black Inc.) was sophisticated, elegant and, in so fraught a field, non-partisan.

Pamela Bone

In Be Near Me, by Andrew O’Hagan (Faber), an English priest’s ministry to a small parish in Scotland ends in scandal and retribution. This poignant and thought-provoking story of class hatred and lost idealism is the best book I have read this year. Next is Theft: A Love Story (Knopf), by Peter Carey. No one but Carey can swear with such wit and fluency. Very Australian, hugely enjoyable. My third choice is Moral Disorder (Bloomsbury), by Margaret Atwood. These linked short stories read like a novel: probably partly autobiographical, more realistic and domestic than much of Atwood’s work. Wise, acerbic and funny. Finally, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (Penguin), by Ian Buruma. Through events in his native Holland, Buruma explores the most urgent issue facing Europe: the coexistence of people of vastly different beliefs and values; a subject that confronts us all.

Paul Brunton

Frank Brennan’s Acting on Conscience: How Can We Responsibly Mix Law, Religion and Politics? (UQP) is a lucidly written and cogently argued tract for our times, especially in view of the current debate on the separation of church and state, and on the role of religion in politics. John Hirst’s Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (Black Inc.) brilliantly takes the historical received wisdom on topics such as the ‘tyranny of distance’, clinically dissects it in the light of the evidence, and produces re-evaluations of great persuasion. Australian history at its best. And after the Christmas pudding, pick up Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), edited by Richard Davenport-Hines. This is superlative letter-writing.

John Button

I enjoyed reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Man without a Country (Seven Stories Press), a collection of pieces on writing, art, politics and what he sees as the dark soul of contemporary America. Vonnegut is in his eighties, grumpy, entertaining and honest. Murder in Amsterdam, by Ian Buruma, deals with the reactions of Dutch Society (traditionally liberal, open and tolerant) to the murder of film producer Theo Van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic. The issues of race, religion and cultural difference, which lie at the heart of the contemporary democratic dilemma, are all there. Closer to home, I thought Carmen Lawrence’s Fear and Politics (Scribe) was a gutsy attempt to tackle the exploitation of fear as a political strategy. Instructions for American Servicemen in Australia 1942, recently republished by the Bodleian Library, is a small volume, suitable for covert reading in church, at motivational lectures and ALP branch meetings. It has fascinating insights into Australian customs and language in 1942, and might well have been the source document for the ANZUS Treaty. Que sera sera.

Peter Craven

David Malouf’s Every Move You Make (Chatto & Windus) is a superb collection of stories – easy, expert and full of authentic feeling. Robert Hughes’s Things I Didn’t Know (Knopf) is a marvellous account of a life with its full share of blessings and curses, told with all the red-blooded eloquence of the greatest non-fiction writer we have. I liked Philip Roth’s Everyman (Jonathan Cape) and John Updike’s Terrorist (Hamish Hamilton); and Richard Ford’s Lay of the Land (Bloomsbury) is enchanting. Martin Amis’s House of Meetings (Jonathan Cape) has a kind of black, mesmerising quality I was unprepared for. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (Picador) will make you weep aloud. The best novel I read this year by an Australian was Anson Cameron’s Lies I Told about a Girl (Picador) – a kind of alternate history of a prince at Timbertop – which everybody ignored and which certainly has its flaws, but which is a more sparkling performance, with more sap and laughter, more poignancy and credible dialogue than most books. I liked Inga Clendinnen’s Agamemnon’s Kiss: Selected Essays (Text), Craig Sherborne’s Necessary Evil and – stretching back into the past – some of those minimalist jeux d’esprit by the great Muriel Spark, who died this year.

Ian Donaldson

The outstanding book from the past year’s crop has been, for me, Richard Wollheim’s Germs: A Memoir of Childhood (Black Swan). Amusing and melancholic by turns, it re-creates through the eyes of a precociously thoughtful child an unusual English household of the 1920s and 1930s, presided over, distantly, by the father – a German Jewish émigré from Breslau turned theatrical impresario – and, nearer to hand, by the mother, a former London showgirl, now devoting her total energies to the eradication of household dust. This is a classic work, to rank with Gorky’s Childhood and Gosse’s Father and Son. The most absorbingly argumentative book of the year has been English: Meaning and Culture (OUP), by the Australian-Polish linguist Anna Wierzbicka. Highly readable – though preferably not on long-haul flights, when the author’s analysis of linguistic misunderstandings occurring between airline pilots and air traffic controllers can induce nervousness.

Morag Fraser

I read Peter Hessler’s River Town, Two Years on the Yangtze (John Murray) in China, hoping to learn more about the country’s beguiling and frustrating cultural codes. Peter Hessler at least had the language, so his experience – painstakingly recorded – of two years teaching in an old river town provided a vicarious initiation, often richly comic, other times near tragic. What I hadn’t expected was how revealing the book would be about the United States, and about the balance of integrity and obsession in an individual American. Hessler is a long-distance runner – in every sense. From China to India, courtesy of Inga Clendinnen, whose recommendation sent me to J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (NYRB  Classics). Clendinnen, critical of historical novels in general (as Kate Grenville will know), makes an enthusiastic exception for Farrell. One can see why: it’s richly ironic, wise about colonialism and wonderful to read. As is Roger McDonald’s The Ballad of Desmond Kale (Knopf). I like fine wool and handcrafted language. McDonald’s nineteenth-century Australian epic has both.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (Fourth Estate) is frankly personal and partisan, which both makes for gripping reading and saves the reader the trouble of trying to guess what his agenda might be. Fisk’s encyclopedic knowledge of events in the Middle East over the last thirty years fills the 1300-plus pages of this monumental tome, full of incident and insight, and is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand contemporary global politics. Closer to home, Andrew McGahan’s futuristic dystopia Underground (Allen & Unwin) is equally partisan, a funny, angry, energetic novel about Australia and where it might be heading. Finally, there are two Scottish crime novels by writers I was very happy to discover: Mo Hayder, whose Pig Island (Bantam) is full of extremely well-done gore and turns on a beautiful, unforeseeable plot twist; and Kate Atkinson, whose One Good Turn (Doubleday) is a sequel to her brilliant Case Histories (Black Swan).

Lisa Gorton

The Melbourne poet Tina Giannoukos recommended Aliki Barnstone’s brilliant new translation of the Greek poet, Cavafy, The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy: A New Translation (W.W. Norton & Company). In this translation, Cavafy’s poems are spare but never formal: perfected conversations that also work like songs. I also enjoyed the new version in English of E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World (Yale University Press), with its extraordinary imagery and perfect sentences. I found Simon Leys’s The Wreck of the Batavia and Prosper (Black Inc.) all the more disturbing for the uninflected clarity of his prose style.

Bridget Griffen-Foley

A few pages into Whose ABC? (Black Inc.), the follow-up volume to his earlier history, This Is the ABC (Black Inc.), K.S. Inglis recounts the production of, and reaction to, Four Corners’ audacious 1983 report ‘The Big League’. In doing so, Inglis introduces us to a then ‘burly 34-year-old’, Chris Masters, and to his ‘aura of angry honesty’. Whose ABC? is a work of great maturity, displaying subtlety, insight and a lightness of touch as Inglis tells an often dark tale of dealings between governments, commissions, managements and staff. If it had not been in press at the time of ABC Books’ dumping of Chris Masters’s eagerly anticipated biography of Alan Jones, Inglis’s book would have had a sensational coda. Finally published by Allen & Unwin, Jonestown is a tough and impassioned study of the use and misuse of power, not just in Sydney, but in the universe created by Alan Belford Jones.

Barry Jones

David Reynolds, Professor of International History at Cambridge, is my first choice, with In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (Penguin). Reynolds has produced a masterly account of how Winston Churchill’s six-volume The Second World War (1948–54) was written and who wrote it. Fascinating revelations include the role of Whitehall mandarins in recasting the narrative when Churchill was still leader of the opposition, the extraordinary tax deal which may have been worth up to $US50 million, and disputes between working parties about what should be included and what deleted. Churchill, to his credit, preserved the paper trail and all of Reynolds’s judgments are amply documented. Michael Howard, doyen of military historians, calls it ‘the book of the decade’. Carmen Callil, in Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland (Jonathan Cape), writes investigative history that reads like a Gothic horror novel or comédie noire film script. She tells how a girl from Melbourne became involved in the life stories of Louis Darquier, a ghastly spiv who became Vichy’s Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, sending thousands of Jews to their deaths, and of his appalling wife Myrtle Jones, born in Launceston, Tasmania. Inga Clendinnen’s essay The History Question: Who Owns the Past? is entirely worthy of her: luminous, penetrating, generous and timely.

Gail Jones

Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (Giramondo), a copious, dazzling 519-page challenge to Xavier Herbert’s novel of the same name (1938), reminds us that no place is inexhaustible and that every new perspective is a celebration. Centred on ‘the blackfella mob living with quiet breathing in higgily piggerly, rubbish dump shacks …’ near the town of ‘Desperance’, it is a marvel of odd characters, slippery registers and humanely generous vision. Eric L. Santner’s On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (University of Chicago Press) is an idiosyncratic meditation on the boundaries of the human and the outcast, the self and the neighbour, figured as a creaturely assault on ego. Tendentious, stimulating, both metaphysical and ‘post-metaphysical’, it argues that the ‘creaturely’ is a biopolitical aspect of all forms of power and offers genuinely new readings of the three authors at its centre.

Nicholas Jose

My big fiction read for the year was Carpentaria, by Alexis Wright. I have been waiting for this book – the author’s second novel – for quite a while and I’m happy to report that it exceeded all my expectations. Wright brings into being a cast of larger-than-life characters, mostly Aborigines. She gives us their personal dramas, their mythic adventures and the mostly destructive politics of their mighty environment. Her voice crackles in a warm whisper one minute, then bursts into full-throated eloquence the next, as she tells us story after story. Extraordinary invention combines with deep understanding, sharp and delicate detail and flashes of cheeky humour. Like the river tides of the Gulf, the book’s larger rhythms carry us towards a powerful vision of resilience and survival on a grand scale. Carpentaria is a brilliant act of creative imagination. My poetic treat this year was the uncollected poems, drafts and fragments of Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn, and published as Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Should an author’s carefully managed published oeuvre be altered by posterity’s rummaging through unpublished papers? Bishop was famously a perfectionist, and these unpublished poems add almost as much again to her collected works. Some of the love poems were perhaps too intimate to publish when she was alive. It’s great to have so many more of Bishop’s sassy Brazilian poems, and worth it alone for ‘It is marvellous to wake up together’, reproduced in facsimile typescript. I was also pleased to see the monograph Guan Wei (Craftsman House), by Dinah Dysart, Natalie King and Hou Hanru. Guan Wei is a fabulous fabulist artist who is having a big year playing with claims that the Chinese discovered Australia six centuries ago.

James Ley

With the notable exception of David Malouf’s wonderful short stories in Every Move You Make, it was a good year for horror and violence. In The Resurrectionist (Picador), James Bradley turns a gruesome series of early nineteenth-century murders into a brooding metaphysical meditation; while Cormac McCarthy’s latest, The Road, is as powerful and atmospheric a work as you could wish for, even if it doesn’t quite rise to the level of hypnotic savagery he achieved in his best book, Blood Meridian (Picador). The adventurous might also want to track down William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central (Alma Books), which won the National Book Award in the United States this year. Vollmann is not exactly a household name, but he is one of the most interesting writers in America, and Europe Central is so vastly ambitious that it makes almost every other writer in the world look lazy.

Patrick McCaughey

Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française (Chatto & Windus) leads the field in new fiction and joins that small shelf of important World War II novels. Writing at the time of the fall of France, Némirovsky was both its chronicler and its victim. The editorial pages at the end of the novel detailing Némirovsky’s husband’s search for her after her arrest by the Germans make for sombre reading. She was already dead. Peter Steele’s second volume of ‘art into poetry’, The Whispering Gallery (Macmillan Art Publishing), concentrates solely on works from the National Gallery of Victoria and is sumptuously produced. The poems generally hew closer to the image than in the earlier volume, Plenty (Macmillan Art Publishing), and reveal simultaneously the breadth and quality of the gallery’s collections and Steele’s own increasingly assured voice as the poet of painting. Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s book-length poem, The Universe Looks Down (Brandl & Schlesinger), is odd, difficult and astonishingly lively on the page. I think it’s a sort of ‘ship of fools’ theme. The biggest bust of the season is Robert Hughes’s memoirs, Things I Didn’t Know. Shoulda, coulda been a better book, although the opening chapter on his near fatal accident in Western Australia is riveting and brave.

David McCooey

Three books that stand out for me unite intensity with intelligence. Jacob Rosenberg’s Holocaust memoir, East of Time (Brandl & Schlesinger), makes the unbelievable horribly imaginable by emphasising day-to-day experience in the Lodz ghetto. The work is full of incomprehensibility, pain and tragedy, but it also portrays the liveliness of the ghetto community in the face of endless deprivation and crime. East of Time will surely become a classic work, as will my other two ‘best books’: Robert Adamson’s The Goldfinches of Baghdad and Jennifer Maiden’s Friendly Fire (Giramondo), both career highs for their authors. Adamson’s high lyrical intensity produces extraordinary poems that are equally attuned to the resonance of myth and the reality of politics. Maiden’s Friendly Fire engages an utterly unique style that is essayistic and brilliantly associative. In the process, Maiden anatomises the political realities of the post-9/11 world with great urgency and wit.

Brian Matthews

Mary Ellen Jordan, in Balanda: My Year in Arnhem Land (Allen & Unwin), tells a tough, topical story with potent restraint. This is a courageous, personal and unillusioned experience of our continuing indigenous crisis. Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador), by Carrie Tiffany, is a beautifully written, deceptive novel. An initially guileless narrative gradually reveals moving and acutely disturbing depths. Tiffany’s love story effortlessly blends the researched past with an irresistible and profoundly tragic imaginative world. Nick Hornby, in A Long Way Down (Penguin), demonstrates again his mordant wit and canny plotting. A stunning array of incisively evoked voices brilliantly captures and evaluates the dilemmas of our times. In Javier Falcón, Robert Wilson has given the sophisticated thriller a brooding, introspective sleuth who eclipses fictional rivals such as Brunetti and Hieronymus Bosch. The Hidden Assassins (HarperCollins) is Wilson territory: tense, political, sensuous, in a prose that meets all the challenges.

Brenda Niall

Written more than sixty years ago, my best book of 2006 was very nearly lost forever. The two novellas that make up Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky, were discovered in an old notebook, published in Paris to great acclaim in 2004, and are now available in translation. Némirovsky, who died in Auschwitz in 1942, had planned a five-part epic of war and peace. Set in France during the first chaotic year of the German occupation, it shows a set of individuals and families caught up in the tensions and terrors of the time. Its psychological insight and narrative skill make the inevitable comparisons with Tolstoy perfectly appropriate. David Malouf’s stories in Every Move You Make are subtle, graceful, yet strong. The varied moods make this collection one to revisit. And I would happily reread Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn. An entertainment, set in Edinburgh at festival time, in which the author plays ingenious games with the crime genre, it is funny, inventive and astute.

Peter Porter

Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934–1971 (Jonathan Cape), by Stephen Walsh, the second and concluding volume of Walsh’s commanding biography of the greatest musical mind of the twentieth century, is easily the most important book I read this year. Yet Peter Conrad reviewed it contemptibly in the London Observer. So far has celebrity and anecdote replaced seriousness in the press! Walsh’s book is not just for the musically adept: it is a whole social history wrapped in the story of a great artist. We have seen a fine crop of poetry books this year, and the following three are fascinating and important. In The Whispering Gallery, Peter Steele returns to examining the way art may infiltrate its way into poetry. The connections between some admirable and off-centre graphic works and the verse they evoke are marvellously woven. ‘Ekphrasis’ it’s called, but in the end it’s an excuse for more good poetry. In John Tranter’s Urban Myths (UQP), the revolutionary leader pitches his tent on Parnassus. This really can be described as ‘the best of Tranter’. It’s surprising how what once seemed hard quickly becomes classic. Folly and Grief, by Jennifer Harrison, contains poems that manage the mysticism of everyday life. Harrison’s writing, rich and singular, is handled with extreme dexterity.

Michael Shmith

My cookery year was energised by Bill Buford’s Heat (Vintage): a brilliant account of his odyssey into professional cooking via the hellish kitchens of restaurateur Mario Batali, where cuts, abrasions and burns are obligatory rites of passage, and where you learn that one-millimetre square diced carrots means that and not a millimetre more or less. A brave, wonderful book, especially for those who think they can, but never will, be proper chefs. My musical year was enlightened with the second and concluding volume of Stephen Walsh’s masterly Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934–1971, which balances scholarship and musicianship with history and personality. Never easy, Stravinsky, especially with his creepy amanuensis, Robert Craft, hovering in the shadows. My local year was beguilingly informed by Kristin Otto’s engrossing Yarra: A Diverting History of Melbourne’s Murky River (Text), an irresistible, serendipitous journey along the life and banks of every Melburnian’s brown friend.

Maria Takolander

M.J. Hyland’s Carry Me Down (Text) deserved J.M. Coetzee’s commendation and a Booker Prize nomination. Narrated from the perspective of a painfully lonely and sensitive boy, the story of his ‘madness’ is told with an extraordinarily authentic and powerful voice. I was forced to inhabit his character from the novel’s opening, in which the boy and his parents themselves inhabit books. The boy narrates: ‘It is a good mood, as though we are one person reading one book – not three people apart and alone.’ While the reading experience Hyland offers isn’t exactly an amiable one, Robert Adamson’s latest volume of poetry, The Goldfinches of Baghdad, is a blessing – an incantatory intermingling of world, body, politics, love, word and myth, where ‘A wing’s streak of white / is all that separates us from the dead’. In short fiction, Barry Oakley’s edited anthology, Encounters: Modern Australian Stories (Five Mile Press), provides some fine snapshots of the Australian quotidian.

Angus Trumble

Patrick McCaughey’s fine Voyage and Landfall: The Art of Jan Senbergs is an ideal conjuction of author and subject, beautifully written, sumptuously and carefully produced – a credit to Miegunyah Press. I found Luca Turin’s The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell (Faber) engrossing, although the science is in hot dispute. It seems that most roses grown in Bulgaria end up in ‘Joy’ by Jean Patou, tons and tons per fluid ounce, which helps explain the scandalous cost. An unexpected highlight of the year’s crop of exhibition catalogues was the exquisite Style and Splendour: The Wardrobe of Queen Maud of Norway, 1896–1938, by Anne Kjellberg and Susan North (V&A Publications). Stop laughing! Queen Maud’s ski and tobogganing outfits are sensational, and the black-and-white ‘Arlesienne’ evening dress by Worth from the winter season of 1912−13 is a masterpiece, and in many ways epitomises both Edwardian opulence and unequivocally anti-Victorian style.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Sometimes we want novels to be jagged and surprising, but it is hard not to admire something approaching formal perfection: I found a quality like this in Zadie Smith’s comic novel, On Beauty (Hamish Hamilton), elegant swervings away from Howards End. We can easily forgive Smith for its being an ‘academic novel’, she so activates those barren leaves. The book of poetry which attracted me most vividly was How to Make a Million (Wellington University Press), by the Dunedin poet and novelist Emma Neale. Neale is a poet who seems to take note of everything around her, which is no small thing. At the opposite extreme, the book I have kept returning to during the year has been Gerald Murnane’s Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (Giramondo): the impeccable Murnane is surely the artist’s artist of writers, so good you could almost call him infuriating.

Geordie Williamson

I opened Michael Taussig’s new essay collection, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (University of Chicago Press), for its title piece, but ended up devouring the whole book. Professor of Anthropology at Columbia, Taussig is a witty and learned man who brings clarity to obscure subjects in a way that trusts the layman’s intelligence. If you have ever wondered what on earth Georges Bataille was on about, Taussig’s essay ‘Transgression’ is the best exposition I have read. M.J. Hyland’s Carry Me Down is this year’s novel. The story of a young giant’s troubled entry into adolescence is so continually unexpected in its progression, so delicately precise in registering the violence at its centre, that it resists easy assimilation. Hyland writes as though she has several skins too few, operating on the border of a madness to which her protagonist actually succumbs. But she does so with such discipline and stylistic scrupulousness that this rawness becomes an artistic strength.