The Mail’s stars pick their books of the year ... and every one’s a CRACKER! TMAS BOOKS

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN

DETECTIVE First Grade Dennis Malone runs the Manhattan North Special Task Force like Tony Soprano runs his mafia crew. The Force by Don Winslow (HarperCollins £18.99) is a compelling, profane, powerful saga of endemic police corruption and extreme violence which unfolds at breakneck speed.

Malone makes the rogue cops in Sidney Lumet movies, such as Serpico, look like Dixon of Dock Green. When they’re not rousting suspects or stealing guns, heroin and cash from drug gangs, they’re celebrating with high- end hookers in hundred- dollar- a-plate steakhouses.

Malone is a monster, a racist sociopath smothered in tattoos, but his methods are tolerated while he gets results. His inevitable fall from grace is biblical. I can’t wait for the movie. It’s got Scorsese written all over it.

CRAIG BROWN

KATHRYN Hughes has come up with a new and fascinating approach to biography in Victorians Undone (4th Estate

£ 20), zooming in on the physical peculiarities of five famous Victorians.

For instance, in one chapter she concentrates on Darwin’s beard, in another on George Eliot’s right hand, which was rumoured to be bigger than her left hand.

Anyone who loves the countryside will covet a book of photographs of North Devon places and people, The Recent Past by the late James Ravilious (Wilmington Square Books £16.99). I’m completely entranced by it, not just because the photos remind me of one summer spent with my grandmother on Dartmoor, but also because they are so honest, so beautiful and so generous.

SARAH VINE

AS MY daughter is fond of reminding me, the last thing any godchild wants for Christmas is an edifying book. Which is why all of mine will be getting A Poem For Every Day Of The Year, Allie Esiri (Macmillan £16.99).

Not only is it a thing of beauty, it also offers an accessible, informative, bitesize approach to poetry. Your godchildren may not thank you, but their parents will.

For grown-ups, the best choice edited by has to be Tim Shipman’s Fall Out

(HarperCollins £20). If you are at all curious as to how the Government almost managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at this year’s General Election, then this spirited account will give you the inside track.

QUENTIN LETTS

THEATRE producer Thelma Holt is a West End legend; imperious, disdainful, artistically ambitious and maybe just a touch dotty. For 20 years Sweetpea Slight worked as her assistant, and Sweetpea’s memoirs Get Me The Urgent Biscuits (W&N £14.99) catch beautifully (and without malice) London theatreland’s engaging resilience.

Sweetpea went to work for la Holt as a gauche teenager from the shires. Although paid a pittance and sometimes treated like a skivvy, she was, and remains, admirably loyal to the daft old dragon.

I loved this book for its selfless, slightly dazed sketch of the clattering chaos of theatre production. The humour is distinctly English.

JAN MOIR

THE Underground

Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Fleet

£ 8.99) won a Pulitzer, a U. S. National Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award and a book jacket recommendation from Barack Obama (‘Terrific’). Yet it still didn’t make it onto the Man Booker 2017 shortlist — a shame, verging on a sacrilege. For this is an extraordinary read.

The Underground Railroad is the name of the network of secret routes and safe houses that really did exist to help many escape bondage in the slave states of pre-abolition America.

The author turns the real-life metaphor into a literary reality, as we follow Cora’s bid for freedom from her Georgia plantation. History and a light dusting of allegory are meshed together in this heartstopping tale of human pursuit.

I now understand more about race relations in America than 100 history books could deliver.

ANDREW PIERCE

IT’S more than 15 years since I read the last in Philip Pullman’s compelling

His Dark Materials trilogy. Now he’s back with a new series The Book Of Dust, which is essentially for children. The first book, La Belle Sauvage (Random House

£20) is a prequel — set ten years or so before the first trilogy. The hero this time is Malcolm, aged 11, who works in his parents’ waterfront pub, the Trout, near Pullman’s hometown of Oxford.

With heroine Lyra, he is caught up in a terrifying adventure that takes him into a world of religious intolerance and control. I await volume two with bated breath.

MAC

UP UNTIL last week I had no idea that Frank Gardner, the BBC correspondent who was badly wounded after being shot by Islamist gunmen in 2004, was also a novelist — and WOW, what a novelist! I’ve just finished reading

Crisis (Bantam £7.99) and my heart is still in my mouth.

This is a fast-paced story about an ex-Special Boat Service Commando under contract to MI6 who is sent into the jungle of Colombia to investigate the murder of a British intelligence officer.

Well into the early hours of the morning, when all sensible car-

toonists should be asleep, I kept saying to myself ‘One more page, just one more page’. I was hooked on this tale about a ruthless drug cartel run by a fearsome, psychotic leader who tortures without compassion and masterminds a secret weapon against England.

SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE

TESSA HADLEY’S last novel The Past won the Hawthornden prize, and her new collection of short stories, Bad Dreams And Other Stories( Cape

£ 16.99) reinforces her undeniable talent.

Novelists don’t always make good short story writers (and vice versa), but she excels at both. She is brilliant at conveying emotion and has an uncanny ability to get under her characters’ skin, capturing their hopes and disappointments.

In the opening story, Jane, 15, surrenders her virginity to a drugaddled boy who she discovers in bed with another girl hours later. It is a magical, elegiac recreation of a Sixties summer’s day, and in a coda we learn the boy grows up with no memory of Jane, but the events of that carefree day reverberate for her for years to come.

These stories brim with life and intelligence and linger in the mind long after you close the book.

JONATHAN PUGH

AT LAST I got round to reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (Abacus

£9.99) which, for four years, has been eyeballing me from my bookshelf, but at nearly 800 pages long I’d been putting it off.

I’ve been a fool as it’s spellbinding. It’s full of love, grief, beauty, art, obsession and loss. No surprise it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014.

Talking of big themes, Lionel Shriver’s novel The Mandibles

(Borough Press £8.99) was an unexpected delight. It’s 2029, the dollar’s in meltdown and the American dream has turned into a nightmare for the Mandible family, where everything they’ve taken for granted crumbles into dust.

BAZ BAMIGBOYE

THE second I reached the last page of John le Carre’s A Legacy Of Spies

(Viking £20), I went back to the beginning and read it again. All 264 pages.

I’d been so gripped by le Carre’s intricate tale of the British Secret Service delving into the past — and giving us a glimpse of master spy George Smiley for the first time in 25 years — that I hadn’t wanted it to end.

He expertly weaves together the past and present as he touches on ground partly covered by The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, bringing back Smiley’s old disciple Peter Guillam to revisit sins committed long ago. Is it a sin to read A Legacy Of Spies a third time?

HENRY DEEDES

DAVINA LANGDALE’S debut novel, The Brittle Star (Sceptre £8.99) tells of John Evert, a Californian farm boy whose world is turned upside down when his mother is taken by Pawnee Indians.

He enlists the help of Bill, a rugged bounty hunter with whom he forges a father/son bond. Their adventures take them all the way to the front line of the American civil war, a brutal experience which forces the boy to reassess many of the values and assumptions on which he’s been raised.

Along the way, John experiences friendship, love, death, alcoholism and, finally, redemption.

Fans of Annie Proulx, or Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy will love her eloquent descriptions of California’s rural terrain.

DOMINIC LAWSON

TO UNDERSTAND the Brexit negotiations, you have to realise nothing will budge until Germany wills it. I have read no more brilliant an account of Germany’s diplomatic domination of the EU than Berlin Rules, by Britain’s former ambassador to that nation, Sir Paul Lever (IB Tauris £17.99).

Such power-play is often compared to chess — and in the Soviet Union that game itself was a diplomatic and political weapon. Genna Sosonko, a Grandmaster who defected to the West in 1972, writes about this with unsurpassed insight. The Rise And Fall Of David Bronstein (Elk and

Ruby £21.41) is a deeply personal, and possibly most tragic, account of one of the Russian-Jewish geniuses caught up in this struggle.

JACI STEPHEN

WHEN Kathryn Sermak was hired as Bette Davis’s personal assistant in 1979, she was a 22-year- old ingenue who had no idea who the great movie star was. For the next ten years she would help the woman she regarded as her mentor and, subsequently, friend, through her twilight years that brought illness and a devastating betrayal by her daughter, B.D. Hyman, in a brutal memoir about her mother.

Davis’s heartbreak is also keenly felt by Sermak in her deeply personal Miss D And Me (Hachette

£20.99). The woman behind often horrific movie characters emerges as a loyal, kind and vulnerable person, emotionally maimed by a child she adored.

PETER MCKAY

WHILE the late Sir David Frost was commuting twice a week to New York to present a TV show, he was asked if he was ever frightened of flying. He replied: ‘No, it’s crashing I’m afraid of.’

For most nervous fliers, landing is what makes them tense — especially when there’s turbulence. Sometimes planes appear to drop like stones for short periods. We also wonder about the groans produced when the shape of the wings is being altered to reduce speed prior to touchdown.

How does a fully-laden 300-tonne jumbo jet touch down safely while travelling at 160 miles an hour? Let Boeing 747 captain Mark Vanhoenacker of BA put your fears to rest. His 58-page book, How To Land A Plane ( Quercus £ 9.99), explains simply and clearly the abiding mysteries of flight.

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

LOVERS of a good anecdote will relish Chutzpah & Chutzpah, by former Saatchi ad execs Richard Myers, Simon Goode and Nick Darke (Michael

O’Mara £20). It’s full of outrageous stories of champagne-fuelled Eighties deals and bloated salaries…

Many tales reveal the manic rivalry between brothers Charles and Maurice Saatchi, who fought constantly. This was the era of the quotable slogan, such as Castlemaine XXXX lager and, ‘Australians wouldn’t give a 4X for anything else’. We remember the ad... but whatever happened to the drink?

BEL MOONEY

I LOVE any novel by Rachel Joyce, whose The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was a huge success. Now she has created another Pied Piper of the heart in Frank, the proprietor of The Music Shop (Doubleday £14.99).

Frank’s individually chosen records can heal the soul — and this bewitching love story sings out the unique beauty of every human being, leaving you uplifted.

Totally different is Daniel Silva’s work. I discovered his latest, House Of Spies (HarperCollins £20) and also devoured the previous 16 in the Gabriel Allon series.

Allon is a brilliant Israeli art restorer, spy and assassin who takes on all who threaten the stability of his state — and of the world. Prescient novels designed to chill and to warn.

PETER OBORNE

DAILY Mail columnist, Quentin Letts, has written an important social text which lays bare the power structures and rules of discourse in the 21st century.

It’s beautifully written — but do not be fooled by its humorous tone. Patronising Bastards (Constable £16.99) makes some serious political points.

Meanwhile Isambard Wilkinson’s first travel book, Travels In A Dervish Cloak (Eland £19.95), is a masterpiece. Most books about Pakistan are by sniffy academics who hate the country. Here, at last, we have a writer who loves it.