Rocking reads for under the tree
From royal gossip to foul-mouthed spooks, the Mail’s star columnists pick their very best books of the year…
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN
London Rules by Mick Herron (John Murray £8.99, 352 pp) JACKsoN LAMB is a foulmouthed, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, corpulent, flatulent spook who leads a motley crew of misfits and screw-ups in an Mi5 backwater called slough house.
he is the grotesque creation of Mick herron, who introduced us to Lamb in the novel slow horses in 2010. London rules, published this year, is the latest instalment, by turns gripping and laugh-out-loud funny, with few concessions to the stifling modern cult of you-can’t-say-that.
it is set in the wake of the EU referendum. The protagonists include one of the country’s leading Brexiteer MPs and his wife, who writes a column for a tabloid newspaper. (Who could herron have in mind?)
SARAH VINE
Skymeadow by Charlie Hart (Constable, £16.99, 288 pp) The Quest For Queen Mary by James PopeHennessy and Hugo Vickers (Hodder & Stoughton £20, 336 pp) This was the year i finally caught the gardening bug. Although still a rank amateur, i find myself inexorably drawn to the slow, seasonal world of plants.
it’s such a welcome retreat from the daily insanity of life, a refuge from the noise and rage that seem to surround us. Charlie hart’s wonderful memoir skymeadow encapsulates perfectly the healing quality of horticulture.
Yes, it’s about how hart single-handedly transformed an unruly patch of England into an elegant garden — but it’s also about how working with soil and plants calms the mind and soothes the soul.
From the sublime to the outrageous, with The Quest For Queen Mary by James Popehennessy, who died in 1974, but not before he had published an acclaimed — and rather racy — biography of Queen Mary.
Nevertheless, it was not as candid as it might have been, as this collection — the raw interviews with courtiers and members of Queen Mary’s household that formed the background of the book — shows.
it’s not just the central character of Mary herself — described as ‘one of the most selfish human beings i have ever known’ — it’s the cast of supporting players and Pope-hennessy himself, the kind of man who could sit up all night carousing with dukes and still remember every word the following morning.
CRAIG BROWN
Broadsword Calling Danny Boy by Geoff Dyer (Penguin £7.99, 128 pp) GEoFF DYEr’s Broadsword Calling Danny Boy is an hilariously funny, freewheeling, rule-breaking, wholly original, scene-by-scene sprint through the crazy action film Where Eagles Dare.
i defy anyone not to laugh at Dyer’s description of Clint Eastwood’s talent for squinting or, when face-to-face with armed Nazis, ‘not just squinting, but squinting in German’.
JAN MOIR
The Flame by Leonard and Adam Cohen, (Canongate £20, 288 pp) MY hero Leonard Cohen died two years ago. The Flame is a collection of his last poems and writings, which he collated in his final months.
There are scraps from the notebooks he kept throughout his life, featuring lyrics, poems that turned into lyrics, prose and illustrations.
i didn’t know that Leonard spent a great deal of time alone in hotel rooms drawing gloomy self-portraits inscribed with You Can’t Emerge, or This is The End of it! Yet, somehow, i am not surprised.
The Flame is not without its darkly comic moments, but Cohen’s enduring, beautiful bleakness is the draw here. his gift for understated melancholia is on each blackening page.
Poems might start with a rose but, all too soon, fingernails are being pulled out as love goes awry in the frozen tundra of another doomed romance.
it’s fascinating to see the daily struggle and the creative process of a man whose lyrics from another time are still embedded in our hearts.
‘i came so far for beauty,’ he writes, ‘i left so much behind.’
PETER OBORNE
Moeen by Moeen Ali (Allen & Unwin £20, 304 pp) The Quest For Queen Mary by James PopeHennessy and Hugo Vickers (Hodder & Stoughton £20, 336 pp) i LovED Moeen Ali’s autobiography, well ghosted by Mihir Bose. Not only does Ali have the best cricket beard since W.G. Grace, he is also the most culturally significant English Test cricketer since Basil D’oliveira.
Playing in Test matches during ramadan, he neither eats nor drinks throughout blazing hot days. he claims it makes him a better cricketer. surprisingly, his best friend in the team is the far from abstemious Ben stokes.
Meanwhile, hugo vickers and James Pope-hennessy’s The Quest For Queen Mary ends up being a glorious study of European royal families in the mid 20th century. A masterpiece.
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (Profile £20, 304 pp) BBC1’s thrilling series McMafia, starring James Norton as a banker sucked into a web of corruption, made me eager to understand more about the global grip exerted by organised crime.
Moneyland by oliver Bullough explains in terrifying detail how, for today’s super-rich, the world has no borders . . . it’s just ‘Moneyland’. oligarchs and crimelords send their illicit funds flowing electronically from one tax haven to the next, through a bewildering series of shell companies that nestle like russian dolls.
one of the Moneyland hotspots is London, where millions of these businesses are registered — yet pay no tax in Britain. Many of the most devious dodges were dreamed up by UK banks, too.
if you’ve ever wondered how international aid gets siphoned off and how Third World dictators hide billions, this frightening, but very readable, book tells all.
QUENTIN LETTS
Jeeves And The King Of Clubs by Ben Schott (Hutchinson £16.99, 320 pp) Breathe by Dominick Donald (Hodder & Stoughton £17.99, 528 pp) As A P. G. Wodehouse enthusiast, i am wary of spin-offs and adaptations of his comic novels, but Ben schott’s Jeeves And The King of Clubs — a Jeeves and Wooster homage approved by the Wodehouse estate — is remarkably good. schott’s one
mistake is to make the book a little long but, in its similes, pace and general zing, this yarn is eerily Wodehousian.
Dominick Donald’s police murder-mystery Breathe is set in the great pea-souper London smog of 1952.
The hero is that neglected species, a beat copper. I got a little lost once or twice, but that must have been the fog.
BAZ BAMIGBOYE
Giant by Don Graham (St Martin’s Press £22, 336 pp) ELIzaBETh TayLor had wanted out of the Lassie movies because she was done playing second fiddle to a dog. horses were a better fit for her: National Velvet had made her a child star. Couldn’t she be in a film with horses?
yes, she could. The director George Stevens was working on an adaptation of Edna Ferber’s novel Giant, about cowgirls and cowboys mixing with oil wildcatters on million-acre ranches in 20th-century Texas.
Don Graham’s gripping book on the making of the 1956 classic movie details how La Taylor had to get in line behind audrey hepburn and Grace Kelly.
It’s hard now to imagine hepburn and Kelly in the role instead of Taylor, just as it’s impossible to fathom that producers wanted alan Ladd in the part that was eventually played by the iconic James Dean, who was killed in a crash days after shooting ended.
Graham also explores the stars’ giant-sized egos and sexual appetites, and how rock hudson, who played Taylor’s husband in the picture, was told to ditch his boyfriends and ordered to take ‘girlfriends’ to popular restaurants.
The TV show ray Donovan, which stars Liev Schreiber as a hollywood fixer who cleans up all manner of messes, proves not a lot has changed.
MAC
Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber £14.99, 288 pp) IT’S a long time since I’ve been so engrossed by a book as this one. a friend recommended it to me, so I popped down to my local bookshop and bought a copy.
That evening, I thought I’d read a couple of pages to see what it was all about. Three hours later, I turned the last page and sat back, stunned by the freshness and vitality of the writing.
The author is only 27, for heaven’s sake, yet writes with such maturity, confidence and lovely flowing prose about a couple of young students in smoky Dublin: Marianne, a skinny, anxious girl and Connell, the working-class star of a football team.
It’s a story of what it’s like to be young and in love — passion, awkwardness and uncertainty (I remember it well).
The author has a remarkable ability to expose the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. We are part of it and are totally immersed in it.
There are vividly described passages of intimate sex, some nasty villains and an abundance of witty dialogue. What more could a reader want?
Sally rooney’s first book, Conversations With Friends, which will definitely be my next read, was a huge success and given much acclaim by the critics, but Normal People must surely be hailed as a classic.
What a great writer. a new star is most definitely born: it seems that, like her namesake Wayne, she just can’t stop scoring goals.
JONATHAN PUGH
Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds (Jonathan Cape £16.99, 96 pp) My BooK of the year by several furlongs was Cassandra Darke by cartoonist Posy Simmonds — a page-turning graphic novel about a curmudgeonly and gloriously selfish art dealer residing in a £7million London townhouse who gets tangled up in a dark and gritty world outside of her Chelsea and Knightsbridge bubble.
It’s sharp, witty, deliciously observant and so exquisitely drawn it took my breath away. The perfect book for Christmas.
Galloping up not too far behind was William Boyd’s latest, Love Is Blind. he’s yet to write a novel I haven’t enjoyed.
PETER McKAY
Fear: Trump In The White House by Bob Woodward (Simon & Shuster £20, 488 pp) BoB WooDWarD of The Washington Post gets politicians and their bag-carriers to talk candidly (on a non-attributable basis) about the U.S. presidency.
This is his 19th volume, the first being 1974’s all The President’s Men about President Nixon and the Watergate scandal.
how does President Donald Trump emerge in Fear? ‘The sheer weight of anecdotes depicts a man with no sympathy and a pathological capacity for lying,’ said the Financial Times.
as special counsel robert Mueller’s probe into the murky 2016 election that brought Trump to power moves towards a likely-to-be-sensational finale, Fear will help you discuss the inevitable crisis intelligibly.
ANDREW PIERCE
Heads You Win by Jeffrey Archer (Macmillan £20, 480 pp) I’VE been hooked on Jeffrey archer’s novels since his first bestseller, Kane and abel, in 1979. his latest is his best since then.
There are similarities: Kane and abel told the contrasting stories of two men born worlds apart, while this latest has two men fleeing from the KGB in Leningrad in 1968 at the height of the Cold War. at the docks, as they prepare to stow away, they must each choose between a container ship bound for the U.S. or for Britain.
The fast-moving plot takes us to a Cambridge college, then to Parliament, which has just seen its first woman PM, Margaret Thatcher, and across the atlantic to the heart of the Kennedy political dynasty.
It’s a classic archer page-turner with a memorable final twist that made me shout out loud.
SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
The Quest For Queen Mary by James PopeHennessy and Hugo Vickers (Hodder & Stoughton £20, 336 pp) ThE year’s most unexpected pleasure was The Quest For Queen Mary by James Pope– hennessy, entertainingly edited by hugo Vickers.
These are the hitherto unseen notes of private conversations with royals and courtiers that Pope-hennessy wrote up in preparation for his official biography of Queen Mary, published in 1959.
They are beautifully crafted vignettes of royal life.
Pope-hennessy is a first-rate writer with a novelist’s eye for detail and vivid turn of phrase. he observes the royal Family like an ornithologist, capturing cadences of speech with exquisite precision.
The book is gossipy (he stipulated his notes should not be published for 50 years), irreverent and enthralling, culminating in a memorable series of encounters with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in Paris.
The Duchess, he notes, is ‘flat and angular, and could have been designed for a medieval playing card’.
BEL MOONEY
The Choice by Edith Eger (Rider £8.99, 384 pp) The Dangerous Book by Jay Ramsay and Martin Palmer (Fitzrovia Press £19.99, 560pp) haVING discovered the writings of Viktor Frankl this year, I was led to a memoir written by his friend and fellow holocaust survivor, Edith Eger.
The Choice tells how 16-yearold Edith was sent to the unimaginable hell of auschwitz, where she was forced to dance for the infamous Dr Mengele and was barely alive when the camp was liberated. This story of courage and hope leaves you speechless.
My award for the bravest, most unusual and exhilarating volume goes to Jay ramsay. I’d read ramsay’s poetry before — but nothing like this. he’s been bold enough to take the holy Bible and re-imagine it afresh in poetry, prose and drama.
Muscular, exciting, controversial and beautiful, this takes the Bible out of church and offers it back to everybody.