Homegrown writers shine among year's outstanding literary efforts

Books editor MARGIE THOMSON scans her bookshelves to bring us the year's best releases.

You could have read nothing this year but New Zealand books and you would have been busy and, mostly, happily preoccupied.

The flood of local literature began early with the run-up to the International Festival of the Arts in Wellington, with big-note writers such as Elizabeth Knox, Damian Wilkins and Lloyd Jones all launching new novels there.

And so it has continued, from the literary - Charlotte Randall, Kirsty Gunn, Gregory O'Brien, Graeme Lay, Elspeth Sandys, Fiona Kidman, Elizabeth Smither, Diane Brown and Owen Marshall - through the comic - Sarah Kate Lynch, William Brandt, Peter Hawes - through the memoirs - Kevin Ireland, Michael King, Matt McCarten, Colin Crump - through the poets - Emma Neale, Bob Orr, Albert Wendt, Chris Price, C.K. Stead - to some first-timers that our reviewers really liked, such as Paula Morris, Denis Baker, Ann Beaglehole, Bernard Steeds.

Too many to name here, and that's the great pity of lists such as this: by definition they are exclusionary, subjective and unfair.

But so is the book market. So many books are published in the last few weeks of the year that booksellers (and reviewers) are left scrambling to give adequate space to perfectly worthy titles, while being swamped by the giants.

Since late October, some huge, eagerly awaited titles have been released, including Zadie Smith's Autograph Man, Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, Umberto Eco's Baudelino, and Donna Tartt's The Little Friend, which has been so trumpeted it will probably come to define the publishing year.

For my money the better book was Jeffrey Eugenides' marvellous Middlesex - which came out a week earlier but was mown down by the Tartt juggernaut. Of these four "eagerly awaited" works, only Faber's has had an unequivocally enthusiastic reception.

All we can do now is remind you of the titles our reviewers liked especially over the past 12 months. We hope you enjoy them as much as we have. And of course, as you read this, the publishers are busily preparing their catalogues and review copies, ready for the coming year.

NEW ZEALAND FICTION

The Book of the Film of the Story of My Life by William Brandt (VUP $29.95)

A dazzling comedy that offers several hours of happy chortling, from a writer with a pitch-perfect ear for the rhythms of everyday language. Brandt is interested in blokes in the postfeminist world, so this is the story of Frederick, barely clinging on to the bottom rung of the ladder, while his wife, who has just left him, has become a Hollywood movie star.

Son of France by Geoff Cush (Vintage $26.95)

It's 1930 and the French tricolour flies over New Zealand. This extended "what if?" drives this terrific story, which is a mix of dark satire and a delightful comedy of manners.

Jake's Long Shadow by Alan Duff (Vintage $29.95)

The final of the trilogy that began with Once Were Warriors. While he sails dangerously close to losing his fictional voice in polemic, Duff's writing is powerful and important, and his story is compelling. There are moments of simple lyricism, and Jake has mellowed, transformed but there's still plenty of brutality as Duff relentlessly examines life on the seedy side.

The Hopeful Traveller by Fiona Farrell (Vintage $26.95)

This book in two halves contains two separate yet parallel stories set on an island at the end of the world, in 1851 and today. Involving, mythic, Farrell offers us startlingly sensual imagery and characters and worlds to believe in utterly.

Royce, Royce the People's Choice by Peter Hawes (Vintage $26.95)

A comic odyssey involving a 17-year-old hunk from Westport and the most beautiful fish in the world. A vivid, colourful, endlessly entertaining adventure.

The Shark Bell by Christine Johnson (Penguin $29.95)

It's Dunedin 1969, and this is largely told by a boy with an uncertain existence, drawn to the ocean, whose mystery and ever-changing moods provide him with much-needed solace. But below the surface lurk secrets which, like sharks, may rise from the depths. Poignant, wonderful.

The Shag Incident by Stephanie Johnson (Vintage $26.95)

Johnson demands that we set aside our received wisdoms of two decades ago and have a good laugh at the way we were. A New Zealand icon is attacked by a group of feminists, with far-reaching effects on the lives of many people. Sharply observed, clever and very, very witty.

Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance by Lloyd Jones (Penguin $34.95)

A love story that weaves through the decades and across continents, resonating into the present day. Filled with love, longing and sadness, pulsing with the uplifting, heartrending rhythms of the tango.

Queen of Beauty by Paula Morris (Penguin $26.95)

A mesmerising story that moves between Auckland and New Orleans, in which a young woman uncovers her family's stories of ownership, dispossession and loss.

Stonedogs by Craig Marriner (Vintage $26.95)

A group of friends hatch a plan that goes horribly wrong. A gritty urban tale about fringe-dwellers and disillusionment, gang behaviour, race relations, greed, rampant consumerism, lots of drugs. Blackly funny, very, very violent. It won the Deutz Medal for fiction at this year's Montana Awards.

INTERNATIONAL FICTION

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Bloomsbury $36.95)

A 20th century-sweeping saga of a Greek-American family, narrated by a hermaphrodite, in which themes of displacement and belonging, adolescence and the intricacies of gender are managed with indefatigable lightness and sympathy.

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (Canongate $39.95)

Teeming with the ghosts of literature past, this voluminous novel, the story of Sugar, a prostitute of "masculine intellect", is a confection of Victorian melodrama, satire, gothic horror and sentiment.

Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan (Picador $59.95)

The glorious, gruesome tale of William Buelow Gould who, in 1828, was sent as a convict to the worst hellhole in the Australian penal system and forced to paint for his life. A rather beautiful book illustrated with paintings of fish - "a fish is a truth," Gould says - this won the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Platform by Michel Houellebecq (Random House $45)

Offensive, controversial but never gratuitous, this book inspires strong opinions among its readers. Houellebecq casts his eye over religion, ethics and morality, East and West, in this story of two Parisians marketing sex tours to Eastern locations.

The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru (Hamish Hamilton $34.95)

A delight from start to finish, this novel takes a tone of comic irony in its exploration, via the half-caste central character, of the enduring racial tensions that are the legacy of the imperialist era in India.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel (Canongate $35)

An ingenious, gently philosophical tale about an Indian boy, Pi, adrift on a lifeboat with a menagerie of animals. Highly readable, pleasingly troublesome Booker Prize winner.

Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry (Faber $34.95)

There is much sadness and conflict in this novel, set in Bombay's Parsi community, the story of an elderly professor and the daughter who must take care of him, although she scarcely has the means to do so. But it's the grace and humanity of the story that stay with you, as heady as incense.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (Fourth Estate $21.95)

A hostage drama in which the starring characters are an opera diva and a Japanese businessman. Yes, there's conflict and division but, more memorably, there is love, music and the triumph of shared humanity. A fabulous read, this won the Orange Prize.

That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx (Fourth Estate $49.95)

Proulx has excelled herself with her sometimes dark, sometimes wryly comic examination of the demise of small family farms and communities in the Oklahoma and Texan panhandles as the corporations - in particular, stinking hog farm conglomerates - move in. Bob Dollar is the hero of this tale and, while he's no salesman, he knows just how to get the locals talking.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (Little, Brown $37.95)

A strange, lovely fable narrated by a 14-year-old murder victim who watches from heaven as her family struggles in the aftermath of her disappearance. The novel travels through tough reality, armed with a sense of the miraculous.

Unless by Carol Shields (Fourth Estate $31.95)

The last novel from a writer who sees the world within small pools of domesticity. Reta's peaceful, successful life is torn apart when her daughter chooses a new life, sitting on a street in silence with a sign around her neck proclaiming "goodness". Loss, then, is the theme, and this book feels like a weighing-up of life, of choices made, of achievements and what they mean.

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor (Viking $54.95)

Elegant, lyrical, Trevor's writing is stamped with truth. A child loses her parents; parents lose a child - and yet tragedy yields "a gentle fruit". A marvellous novel.

I Don't Know How She Does It by Alison Pearson (Chatto and Windus $34.95).

Kate Reddy's a high-flying investment banker with young children and a husband. A social comedy for our time, this is lots of fun - Bridget Jones for working mums.

NON-FICTION

Koba the Dread by Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape $54.95)

Amis investigates Stalin's murder of 20 million of his citizens and seeks to understand why it has been given less weight than Hitler's holocaust. His conclusion that the story of Russia between 1917 and 1953 is "a black farce like Titus Andronicus" is naturally controversial.

Berlin by Antony Beevor (Viking $54.95)

Harrowing, learned account of Germany's fall to the Soviets in 1945, when civilians suffered the full fury and horror of war.

The Book of Iris: A Life of Robin Hyde by Derek Challis (AUP $69.95)

An evocative, exhaustive account of the life of the poet, novelist and journalist Iris Wilkinson, by her son. Wilkinson's life has loomed larger than her work for the past few decades: she flouted social conventions and lived as if she were not afraid, although she killed herself at just 33. A prolific writer, who was published under the pseudonym of Robin Hyde, she was among the first generation of writers who felt and wrote like New Zealanders.

Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner (Weidenfeld and Nicolson $39.95)

This memoir, written in 1939 shortly after Haffner exiled himself from Germany appalled at what was happening there, was discovered only in 1999 after his death. It's a personal memoir which encapsulates the history of his country in the early 20th century, and thinks deeply about people's options in the face of brutality. Stimulating and beautiful.

Seeds of Distrust by Nicky Hager (Craig Potton $24.95)

A small book that went off like a bomb inside the election campaign. Hager reveals the undemocratic nature of Government decision-making in his examination of what happened to a shipment of GE-contaminated sweetcorn seed.

An Inward Sun: The World of Janet Frame by Michael King (Penguin $39.95)

For sheer charm it would be hard to beat this pictorial, companion volume to Wrestling With The Angel, King's biography of Frame. The many photos documenting Frame's life and family give a sense of the writer that the biography could not.

Twelve Minutes Past Midnight in Bhopal by Dominique LaPierre (Simon and Schuster $37.95)

This narrative account of one of the worst industrial disasters ever seen - the gas leak at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal in 1984 - is a tour de force, a great humanitarian effort.

On Longing by Vincent O'Sullivan; On Kissing by Kate Camp; When Famous People Come to Town by Damian Wilkins (Four Winds Press $14.95)

Lloyd Jones' publishing venture produced these three lovely, small-format books as an attempt to encourage and develop the essay genre.

The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker (Penguin $39.95)

Evolutionary psychologist Pinker's main tenet, that the innate nature of humanity is a product of our evolutionary history, has come under fire from his peers on both sides of the nature/nurture divide. The blank slate of the human mind, the immaterial soul, the noble savage - he leaves no sacred cow ungoaded.

Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Saks (Picador $27.95)

Saks' account of his childhood in wartime England is delightful, and maps the development of a great yet sensitive mind and his burgeoning understanding of the wonders of science.

A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields by Philip Temple (AUP $69.95)

If any group of relatives has earned the right to be regarded as New Zealand's First Family, it is the Wakefields. Fame and infamy accompany them in equal portions, which makes, of course, a great story. Temple's achievement here is impressive and adds greatly to our understanding of early Pakeha New Zealand.

The Victorians by A.N. Wilson (Hutchinson $85)

Full of anecdotes that include the great and the downtrodden of the era, Wilson's passion and magpie knowledge and his judgment that "the Victorians are still with us" make this a lively book.