Richard Davenport-Hines

Amidst the din, slogans and panic of modern publishing, my cherished books are tender, calm and achieve a surpassing eloquence by dint of tightly controlled reticence.
Anthony Thwaite’s Late Poems (Enitharmon, £10) are written by a man of 80. Each of them is word-perfect: some recall dead parents; others foreshadow Thwaite’s death; and throughout there is the clear, crisp wisdom, pensive sadness and absence of confessional self-pity that show a mastery of language and feeling.
Amos Oz’s Scenes from Village Life (Chatto, £12.99) is set in an Israeli pioneer village which is being chi-chied with boutique wineries as jackals circle in the surrounding countryside. The landscape and routines of Tel Ilan are sumptuously evoked. Oz’s characters might be drawn from Chekhov: their lives seem an irresoluble muddle of sorrow, baffled hopes and missed chances; his compassion for them makes the reader care deeply about them, too. This is a wise, beautiful and enduring book.

Cressida Connolly

Nicola Shulman’s study of Sir Thomas Wyatt and his times, Graven With Diamonds (Short Books, £20), is both sparkling and scholarly. Nothing I’ve ever read about the court of Henry VIII has made it so vivid. For the first time one could really grasp Anne Boleyn’s wit and intelligence, both of which she must have needed, to keep the king off for seven years — seven years! — until they could marry. The book is marvellous about Wyatt’s poetry: indeed, about the point of poetry in general. A gem.
I loved the young German writer Judith Herman’s short story collection, Alice (Clerkenwell Press, £8.99).The stories are beautifully written, very precise in their detail, yet enigmatic.
Finally, a novel, New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani (Dedalus, £9.99). Don’t be put off by the unwelcoming title: this is an extraordinary book, as good as Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and with a similar mystery at its heart.

Andro Linklater

It seems to be an unwritten axiom of the Christmas books selection that it should serve two purposes: to praise the books and, perhaps more importantly, to preen the selector’s discernment and esoteric taste. At the top of my list, then, comes Cao Xueqin’s novel The Dream of the Red Chamber, a magical realist, political fable written in China’s Qianlong era, and superbly translated in the 1970s by David Hawkes as The Story of the Stone (Penguin, £15.99). Not only is it an intoxicating read — as though Gabriel Garcia Marquez had written The Pallisers — but its account of the downfall of a Manchu bureaucratic family sheds more light on the modern clash between Beijing and provincial powerbrokers than a library of Sinophile commentaries.
I highly recommend To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 (Allen Lane, £25), T. M. Devine’s lucid and meticulously researched dissection of Scotland’s exiled community because it offers an eye-opening view of the link between the country’s imperial past and its possibly nationalist future.
Finally, I enjoyed Richard Dawkins’s latest promotion of science as religion, The Magic of Reality (Bantam, £10). Although coming from the opposite direction, he has begun to bear an unmistakable resemblance to Mary Baker Eddy.

Allan Massie

Graham Swift is probably still best known for Waterland, published almost 30 years ago. I rather think he is now out of fashion. Certainly Wish You Were Here (Picador, £18.99) received less attention that it deserved. Swift has the admirable ability to write literary novels about characters who would never read such books. He presents us with a complete world, one which his inarticulate characters struggle to understand. William Empsom wrote that ‘the central function of imaginative literature is to make you realise that other people act on moral convictions different from your own’. Graham Swift does just that.
The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung (Doubleday, £12.99) is a novel that everybody interested in contemporary China should read. Written in a flat journalistic style (in translation at least) it presents a vivid, intelligent and disturbing picture of the world’s emerging super-power, a society where economic freedom co-exists with continuing political repression, a place where vast change has been accepted in order that there should be no essential change.
I greatly enjoyed Andrew Nicoll’s second novel, The Love and Death of Catarina (Quercus, £12.99). Set in an unnamed Latin American country, it is written with a pervasive irony, while having also a compelling plot. It might be described as homage to Graham Greene. Certainly his influence is apparent, without being oppressive. A very good novel indeed.
On the crime front, Robert Harris’s thriller The Fear Index (Hutchinson, £18.99) combined a gripping narrative with intelligence and wild imagination. Reading it, I was almost persuaded that I understood

 the activities of hedge funds.

Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James (Faber, £18.99) is a tribute to Jane Austen and a sheer delight. A book to banish Boxing Day blues.
Finally, among many good non-fiction books, I would recommend Amin Maalouf’s Disordered World (Bloomsbury, £20), a civilised, sceptical, yet optimistic (if only just) examination of the state of things today. The middle section on the Arab World (‘Lost Legitimacy’) should be prescribed reading in the Foreign Office and on the foreign desk of newspapers and the BBC.
Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson (Knopf, $30), not yet published here, offers much more than the title suggests. It is the best and most sympathetic study of Hemingway I have read in a long time.

There are a lot more at The Spectator.