Best Books of 2010

Non-fiction, Part 1

We’ve asked this year’s Granta contributors to tell us what their favourite books were in 2010. Memoirs, especially political memoirs, dominated our writers’ non-fiction choices. Other non-fiction choices and poetry will be published tomorrow, and fiction on Wednesday.

Hector Abad’s elegiac Oblivion: A Memoir, is the tender and heartbreaking account of his father’s life and murder in Colombia. Abad writes passionately about the hauntingly cyclical violence in Colombian politics and his father and namesake’s struggle against the corruption and injustice of his country. But it’s not all politics; Oblivion is the moving story of a family, touched but not destroyed by violence. I wish we had more of Abad in English. – Fatima Bhutto

Buy the Pakistan issue now to read Fatima Bhutto’s reportage, ‘Mango Pir’

I’m still thinking about Jessica Stern’s Denial: A Memoir of Terror, which I read almost straight through shortly after it came out this summer. I’m interested in how women face the consequences of violence, and I’d long been aware of Stern as a prominent expert on terrorism. In Denial, her investigation of her own rape is stunning – but it is her surprising and sometimes brutally lyrical description of the crime’s long emotional aftermath that has stayed with me. As she turns that exacting eye on her own diminishing interior life, I watch her feel less and less – and somehow, as she lets me inside her moments of dissociation, I feel more and more.
– V.V. Ganeshananthan

V.V. Ganeshananthan’s short story, ‘Hippocrates’, was published in Granta 109: Work and is free to read online

Gideon Rose’s How Wars End, a superb historical analysis of America’s wars over the past century. Gideon Rose’s meticulously researched book shows that America forgets the political aspects of war, its leaders focus on military victories and neglect the creation of a stable postwar order, most recently in Iraq. Rose, who earned his doctorate in Political Science under Samuel Huntington at Harvard, taught at Princeton and now edits Foreign Affairs, tells the riveting story of American wars and politics from Woodrow Wilson’s decision to join the World War I through Roosevelt’s involvement in World War II, through Truman’s Korean war, to the failures of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in Vietnam without any exit plans. How Wars End is a superb recreation of the choices American presidents and their advisers made during these crucial moments in the US history, choices that affected millions of lives and shaped our world. This is a must-read.
– Basharat Peer

Basharat Peer’s report, ‘Kashmir’s Forever War’, was published in Granta 112: Pakistan and is free to read here

The English-speaking world has had to wait four years to read Hector Abad’s brilliant memoir Oblivion. Dr Hector Abad Senr was an outspoken liberal brave enough to denounce abuses by the Medellín paramilitaries and police. A day in August 1987 he was handed a paramilitary hit list, containing his own name. He declared himself proud to be in such fine company. Days later he was gunned down in the street outside his house. A best-seller in Abad’s native Colombia, Oblivion is a son’s tribute to his father and a chronicle of the troubled history of Medellín and Colombia.
– Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna’s ‘The Last Vet’, where she follows Sierra Leone’s last qualified private vet, was published in Granta 109: Work and is available to read online

David Remnick’s portrayal of Barack Obama in The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama captures the enigma and aura of the man with lambent eyes who has set himself the unenviable task of serving as a bridge between the fractious groups that make up the USA today. It’s a thorough and nuanced study with an occasional ‘slam-dunk’ cool reminiscent of the president himself. Remnick forensically scrutinizes Obama’s own writing, and drawing on enormous research skewers the bigots for whom Obama is a latter-day John Proctor in the crucible of Washington. The Bridge is a welcome corrective to the right-wing vitriol of Fox News, and an elegant triumph of reason over cynicism. – Colin Grant

Buy the Going Back issue now to read Colin Grant’s ‘Lino’, an extract from his memoir Bageye at the Wheel

Check in tomorrow to see non-fiction choices from Jennifer Egan, Peter Stothard and others, as well as recommended poetry books.