Gee our critics' choice

The books we love best are not necessarily those at the top of the bestseller lists. There, books such as Jeanette Cook and Ian Baker's New Zealand Food, Wine and Art, Bradley Trevor Greive's The Blue Day Book and Joanne Harris' Chocolat have, for weeks, gone out the bookshop door faster than anything else.

But for a more subjective appraisal we've asked some of our regular reviewers (Penny Bieder, John Connor, David Hill, John McCrystal, Dennis McEldowney, Elspeth Sandys) to tell us about their favourites from the past year:

* Ellie and the Shadowman by Maurice Gee (Penguin, $34.95). New Zealand's best novelist doing what he does best. Alone of the following titles, this book was chosen by three reviewers.

* The Honey Suckers by Victoria McHalick (HarperCollins, $24.95). Fifteen short stories by a first-time writer who has achieved polished perfection, and who impresses with both her wisdom and her powers of observation.

* Life of Len Lye by Roger Horrocks (AUP, $49.95). Lye's enormously interesting and varied life is told with stunning clarity and pace.

* The Bells of St Babel's by Allen Curnow (AUP, $19.95). Published when the recently deceased poet was 90, he nevertheless demonstrates his extraordinary ability. A source of great pleasure.

* The Bag Lady's Picnic by Frankie McMillan (Shoal Bay Press, $24.95). We were prepared for this to be just another collection of stories by a talented young New Zealand female writer, but this has enough power and charisma to rise even above that standard. Clearly a talented psychologist.

* Counterpart by Mike Johnson (Voyager, $19.95). Literary science fiction.

* Jolt by Bernard Beckett (Longacre, $16.95). Pushes the boundaries of young adult fiction in a marvellous mixing of the interior and the exterior.

* Shackleton's Forgotten Men (Thunder's Mouth Press, $45) by Lennard Bickel. A standout among the many good books about South Polar exploration, this is a great story which flips the well-known story and focuses instead on the people who supported the famous man.

* The Chivalry of Crime (Vintage, $26.95) by Desmond Barry. The Jesse James story, told from the point of view of the man who shot him. Terrific action adventure set around the horrors of the American Civil War.

* Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley (Penguin, $29.95). Wonderful characters, and although the book is huge it doesn't matter, as long as you like being in the company of horses. It's a rambling, relaxing read.

* Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver (Faber and Faber, $29.95). Three very lightly interwoven relationships, peppered with environmental debate.

* The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (Fourth Estate, $34.95). Franzen made hay when he refused to go on Oprah Winfrey's show. His literary family saga contains a flawed cast that we may all relate to.

* My Century by Gunter Grass (Faber and Faber, $24.95). A Nobel Prize- winner at the peak of his powers, celebrating and lamenting, from a German perspective, the century just ended.

* The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert (William Heinemann, $45). A book of moral courage which asks: how responsible are we for crimes committed in the name of our country? This first novel by a German Australian was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

* Ravelstein by Saul Bellow (Penguin, $24.95). A gorgeous masterpiece about two crotchety old men by a writer who is now in his mid-80s.

* Dreamcatcher: A Memoir by Margaret A. Salinger (Washington Square Press, $49.95). Tragic and controversial, the daughter of iconic J.D. Salinger airs her family in public. Self-indulgent but always gripping.

* Paradise Salvage (Scribner, $34.95) by John Fusco. As well as having a strong plot and being very funny, this is a nice study of the Italian-American ethnic community.

* Border Crossing by Pat Barker (Vintage, $34.95). An engrossing, quite profound story about a psychologist who becomes haunted by a man for whom he gave evidence at a murder trial many years before.

* News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Penguin, $17.95). A non-fiction account of a series of kidnappings in Colombia of prominent people, mostly journalists, by drugs gangster Pablo Escobar to force the Government to stop extraditing drug criminals to the United States for trial. Translated from the Spanish, even so it is a lean and supple story that reads like a thriller, by a South American master craftsman.

2001 – The year in review