The It’s Good To Have You Back Guys Award

Thomas Pynchon and James Ellroy both did stirling work in shaking off the cobwebs with Inherent Vice and Blood’s A Rover respectively, but the award must go to Iain Pears for Stone’s Fall. Ten years after his fantastic An Instance Of The Fingerpost (probably the book I have given as a present more than any other) Pears revisited his favourite time-shifting, viewpoint changing structure to tell an epic story of the life and death of a turn of the century industrial baron. It builds brilliantly to a devastating climax.

The Mummy I’m Scared, Do I Have To? Award

I bow to few in my love of The Baroque Cycle, a 1,200 page epic about codebreaking, piracy and the rise of money across 17th century Europe. I was therefore excited about Neal Stephenson’s new one. That it turned out to be a seemingly longer book about a future society controlled by secular monks means I am now the proud owner of £25 door stop. My fault for being a wimp for sure, but life really is too short for 928 – that’s nine hundred and twenty eight – pages worth of secular monks isn’t it? Isn’t it?

The Answer, My Friend, Is Blowing In The Mind Award

Well of course this could have been Richard Dawkins’ latest meisterwerk The Greatest Show On Earth, but is instead  a much smaller book – at least in size. Lewis Wolpert’s Why We Live And How We Die is an incredible journey through the structure of cells and is a story that is at once hugely complex and beautifully simple. Slip one in the stocking of someone who still thinks there is such a thing as chi.

The Actually It Was Like This Award

Mark Thompson’s The White War was the incredible story of a long forgotten front in the First World War. Voodoo Histories nailed the idiocy of widely held conspiracy theories that perpetually plague and corrode current political debate. But the award goes to Peter Preston’s We Saw Spain Die, an account of the lives and experiences of reporters and novelists during The Spanish Civil War.

2009 was the 70th anniversary of the fall of the Republic and still its story resonates in our murky blurred world as a story of easily identifiable political good vs evil. Certainly liberals of many stripes still fantasise over whether they would have had the moral cojones to join the International Brigade or file copy from a bombed out hotel in Madrid. This is an incredible story of the people who really did.

The Who Would’ve Thunk It Award

Who could’ve predicted that young adult horror fans would have titles as good as The Forest Of Hands And Teeth and The Enemy to get their zombified teeth into? But my biggest surprise was Luke Haines’ Bad Vibes, a scabrous account of a never quite made it pop groop doing battle during the Brit Pop Wars of the early 1990s. Haines is a clever, self-absorbed bloke but is also very aware of the chips he carries on both shoulders and how despite himself, he is in love with the thing he most despises. The results will be chastening for anyone wanting a career as a minor pop star but hilarious for everyone else.

The Old Reliables Award

Alan Furst’s The Spies Of Warsaw was another beautiful variation of the same faberge egg he has been polishing for twenty years. The same yet different to all his others, it is a wonderfully atmospheric pre War story of wrestling conscience. Robert Wilson wrapped up his terrific series about Sevillano detective Javier Falcon in dramatic fashion in The Ignorance of Blood and Jo Nesbo cruised to the top of the Scandi Crime League with The Redeemer.

But once more it is Boris Akunin who takes the biscuit. Not this time with either of his two excellent Erast Fandorin books, The Coronation or She Lover of Death, but with the last part of his frankly weird Sister Pelagia trilogy. This is because Pelagia and the Red Rooster is marvellously strange and quite the oddest and most unsettling crime book I have read all year. Akunin really is quite unlike any other author at work today.

Book Of The Year: The Day Of The Locust by Nathanael West

Yes I know the year in question is 1940 but West’s tragi satire, set among a motley crew of lost souls just about clinging on to their own Hollywood dream, gets right to the essence of our times more than any contemporary book I can think of. It nails our morbid obsession with empty celebrity as driven by boredom, self-loathing and a desparate need for sensation in a way that is equal parts horrific and hilarious. If that’s not enough, The Day Of The Locust gave the world a lead character called Homer Simpson. Much as I love The Simpsons I’ll take this one as saying something profoundly funny about 2009.

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