1. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (Hamish Hamilton)
Overwhelmingly my Book of the Year. One of the finest literary minds at work anywhere, Sebald, a German academic based in East Anglia, has made high art of his melancholic, photomontage-like fictions, which are extraordinary intellectual quests pursuing memory, the past and change. A haunted and haunting central character attempts through a meticulous, elegiac investigation to rediscover the identity he lost and shares the experience with the familiar Sebald narrator. Simply wonderful.
2. Atonement by Ian McEwan (Cape)
Though having the bad luck to come up against a fellow former Booker winner at the top of his form in Peter Carey, McEwan nevertheless has not only written his finest book, but he also has both revisited and reinvigorated the traditional English novel in an elegant and surprisingly moving story of innocence betrayed and betraying. The portrait of the young Briony as a 13-year-old moving from childhood imaginings to adult realities is extraordinary.
3. True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (Faber)
The great Australian foundation myth of Ned Kelly comes to life in Carey's lively Booker-winning rendition of the outlaw's story as told in his own words and most impressively "adjectival" voice.
4. The Hero's Walk by Anita Rae Baudami (Bloomsbury)
Hilarious and tragic family saga by yet another gifted Indian writer. A sour ageing man living with a wife and son he barely knows, but with whom he shares the vindictive fallout of his mother's paranoia, has to deal with the loss of his estranged daughter and the responsibility of loving the orphaned Canadian grandchild he has never met. Deserved a Booker shortlisting but was unfortunately overlooked.
5. A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford (Harvill)
As expected, another superlative collection from one of the world's finest observers of life and the cruel things people do to themselves and others through the need for and fear of love.
6. Provinces of Night by William Gay (Faber)
Just in case anyone may have thought dazzling Southern gothic fiction was a thing of the past, this is one of the year's most rewarding sleeper novels that is as funny as it is dark, and twice as good as Jonathan Franzen's hugely over-hyped The Corrections.
7. Half A Life by V.S. Naipaul (Picador)
In his finest novel since The Enigma of Arrival, this year's Nobel Laureate parades his elegant prose in a convincing exploration of one man's struggle to learn to live and love.
8. Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian (Flamingo)
Part travelogue, part tract, part confession, this profound, urgent and oddly romantic narrative belongs to the strange intellectual quest genre dominated by the great Sebald. Though not as miraculously poised or cohesive as the German's art, this is a rich, chaotic, involving, almost physical performance.
9. Collected Stories by Saul Bellow (Viking)
In a single volume the complete short fiction of a master whose energy, voice and sheer abundance continue to thrill.
10. Island - Collected Stories by Alistair MacLeod (Cape)
One of the great short story writers, Scots Canadian MacLeod possesses a slow moving, lyric vision in which tragic lives and family dramas evolve with the relentlessness of history.
11. The Name of the World by Denis Johnson (Methuen)
A stark prose poem of a novel chronicling one man's crack-up and slide into a state of suspended animation. Quite brilliant, from a US writer with a good deal in common with the great Russell Banks.
12. They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell (Harvill)
Though first published in 1937, this characteristically gentle story about a family tragedy lingers long in the memory as does all this master's work.
13. The Blue Tango by Eoin McNamee (Faber)
Stylish, sophisticated reconstruction of the dark motives behind a true-life murder of a young woman. Victim or doomed, self-destructive siren, Patricia Curran's presence wafts through the year's most assured Irish novel.
14. Back When We Were Grown Ups by Anne Tyler (Chatto), Empire Falls by Richard Russo (Chatto) and Licks of Love by John Updike (Hamish Hamilton)
Tyler and Russo demonstrate exactly why US writers are so good at re-creating life as lived by ordinary people in ordinary places, while Updike's sequel to Rabbit Remembered, some 10 years after the passing of poor old Harry, recaptures all the humanity, chaos and sheer life of the Rabbit quartet.
15. Night of Stone - Death and Memory in Russia by Catherine Merridale (Granta)
An awesome oral history that must be read and certainly stands equal as a magnificent companion volume to Antony Beevor's hauntingly profound Stalingrad.
16. The War Against ClichΘ - Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis (Cape)
Can anyone be this clever, write this well - all the time? Amis the stylist can and does. His literary journalism is first class, as are his random pieces. England's answer to Updike in the journalism stakes acquits himself so well here it hurts.
17. Flora Hibernica - the wild flowers, plants and trees of Ireland by Jonathan Pilcher & Valerie Hall (Collins): Irish Botanical Illustrators & Flower Painters by Patricia Butler. (Antiques Collector's Club)
Two beautiful and informed books with Cork-based Collins showing Irish publishing design at its best.
18. In the Company of Light by John Hay (Beacon Press, Boston)
Visionary, gentle and atmospheric musings on nature, landscape and time as witnessed in Maine and Cape Cod by a gracious, old-style US essayist besotted by, and concerned for the natural heritage.
19. High Island - An Irish Monastery in the Atlantic by Jenny White Marshall and Grellan D. Rourke (Town House)
Ardoilean is a strange, beautiful, elusive island off the coast of Connemara. One wonders at the tenacious monks who braved the seas in the 6th and 7th centuries to establish a monastery. This dignified volume is far from a mere coffee-table book. The authors have assessed the site based on archaeological fact while also capturing the sheer magic of a place seabirds now claim as their own.
20. My Days - A Memoir by R.K. Narayan (Picador)
Inspired first British publication weeks after Narayan's death aged 94, this gorgeously vivid short memoir, written in 1974, evokes the Chekhovian splendour and humanity of a truly Homeric chronicler of post-colonial India and its nation of great talkers.
Eileen Battersby has recently won the National Media Arts Journalist of the Year award for the third time