Best Books of the Year

Granta asked some of its authors to tell us what the essential titles of 2009 were. Helen Simpson has clearly had a year for short stories, while Blake Morrison has been to New York and back…

Helen Simpson: ‘I loved Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro’s latest collection of short stories. The way she handles time is remarkable. She has already played ducks and drakes with the decades in her most recent books, but here she does it with whole lifespans too. Other short story collections I enjoyed this year were Jay McInerney’s The Last Bachelor, Petina Gappah’s An Elegy for Easterly, a reissue of John Updike’s Here Come the Maples, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, and Muriel Spark’s The Go-Away Bird. It was Martin Stannard’s engrossing new biography Muriel Spark that sent me back to her stories.’

And Blake Morrison recommends Colm Toibin's Brooklyn - ‘a restrained and beautifully constructed story of emigration, work, family and divided loyalties’; for non-fiction, Eating Pomegranates by Sarah Gabriel, ‘a memoir of mothers, daughters and genes - there have been other tales of breast cancer in recent years but none so well written as this.’ Finally, he was absorbed in the poems of Christopher Reid, enjoying his two collections A Scattering and The Song of Lunch. The first is ‘a moving sequence of elegies for his wife, the second a comic tribute to the lost Bohemian traditions of Soho.’