Politics
John Horgan, lecturer and biographer of Sean Lemass
Variously rumoured to be either the Svengali or the Darth Vader of the Labour Party, Fergus Finlay has written a fascinating and often funny account of his sojourn in the corridors of power in Snakes and Ladders (New Island Books, £9.99pb/£20hb). It's a good follow-up to Sean Duignan's One More Spin on the Merry-Go-Round and with luck, in time it will spawn other accounts.
Some people may hope Memoirs: My Life and Themes (Poolbeg, £20) by Conor Cruise O'Brien, is the last shot in the Cruiser's locker, but don't count on it. A spirited defence of one of the most controversial figures in Irish life, it is written with effortless elegance and biting wit. And finally, if all politics are local, the grammar of politics is universal.
Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson's Life and Times 1961-73 (Oxford University Press, £30 in UK) by Robert Dallek, is an account of one of the most undervalued of contemporary US presidents and a fine study of the arts of negotiation, compromise and arm-twisting which are common to presidents and county councillors alike. Affectionate, insightful and, above all, fair.
Popular fiction
Marian Keyes, novelist
Tara Road (Orion, £14.99) by Maeve Binchy is a warm, witty, gossippy, un-put-downable read. A lovely, feel-good book.
Rosie Meadows Regrets . . . (Headline, £9.99 in UK) by Catherine Alliot, is the fourth and best so far from this former copy-writer. It is charming, clever, well-written, laugh-out-loud funny with a great plot.
Revenge of the Cootie Girls (Penguin, $5.99 in the US to order) by Sparkle Hayter, is the third in the Robin Hudson series and is a sassy, funky, comic mystery based in a TV station in Manhattan.
Biography
Margaret Ward, biographer of Maud Gonne and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington
For those wondering whether women had any role at all in the events of 1798, The Women of 1798 (Four Courts Press, £9.95) edited by Daire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong is an excellent place to start. Nancy Curtin puts it well, in discussing Matilde Tone, that while a "gendered division of sacrifice" appeared to characterise the female contribution, it was also a time, because of their quiet determination, that public space for women began to open up. Maybe Tomorrow (Penguin Books, Australia; not available here) by Boori (Monty) Pryor (with Meme McDonald) is by an aboriginal Australian who has suffered the pain of the deaths of four of his family, victims of a racist society. Boori had been a success in the "white man's world" before resolving to continue the work of his dead brother in recovering aboriginal culture and bringing it to the attention of the world.
I have great admiration for Margaret Forster's ability to fashion absorbing tales of family life from the most ordinary people in Precious Lives (Chatto, £16.99 in UK). Her insistence on validating the domestic, combined with her meticulous eye and painstaking research, creates a past which reveals modest lives with all their awkwardnesses and painful secrets.
Literary fiction
John Banville, novelist and Irish Times literary editor
Among the fiction highlights of the year is Cities of the Plain (Picador, £16.99 in UK) by Cormac McCarthy. It is the final volume of McCarthy's trilogy and while it is not as strong as the earlier volumes, All The Pretty Horses and The Crossing, it is still inimitable. Toward the End of Time (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99 in UK) by John Updike, has Updike, as always, fizzling with energy and ideas. Along with Richard Ford he is the greatest chronicler of contemporary American life. Brokeback Mountain (4th Estate, £3.99 in UK) by E. Annie Proulx is an extraordinary, long short story. It is indescribable - buy it, read it.
Science fiction
Tom Moriarty, Irish Times science-fiction reviewer
The most intriguing science fiction book I came across this year was Saint Leibowitz and Wild Horse Woman (Orbit, £6.99 in UK) by Walter M. Miller, his belated follow-up (after 40 years) to A Canticle for Leibowitz. It's a weird and wonderful story of cardinals, popes and primitive nomadic tribes in a new dark age with a charming anti-hero named Brother Blacktooth Saint George.
In (slightly) less bizarre sci-fi, Otherland (Little Brown, £16.99 in UK) by Tad Williams, and the huge The Rise of Endymion (Headline £6.99, in UK) by Dan Simmons, had the best mix of technology, adventure and relevance to our earthbound selves.
Crime fiction
Vincent Banville, novelist and Irish Times crime fiction critic
Not a vintage year for crime fiction but the three I enjoyed most were Blood Work (Orion, £5.99 in UK) by Michael Connelly, in which heart-transplant patient and FBI operative Terry McCaleb sets out to discover the murderer of the donor of his new heart; Sunset Limited (Orion, £16.99 in UK) by James Lee Burke, which features Detective Dave Richeaux in another tale of conspiracy and deceit located in the swamps and bayous of New Iberia; and, closer to home, The Smoke King (Secher and Warburg, £9.99 in UK) by Maurice Leitch, set in 1942 and with embittered, alcoholic Lawlor, a sergeant in the RUC, endeavouring to prove the innocence of a young, black GI accused of murder.
Travel
Rosita Boland, journalist and travel writer
The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters (Harper Collins, £19.99 in UK) is by William Dalrymple, a brilliant, multi-award winning travel writer with a historian's gene, who has spent 10 years in the Indian subcontinent. These extended essays on the darker aspects of Indian, Sri Lankan and Pakistani culture are enthralling. Whether writing about drug lords in Pakistan's remote north-west frontier; or life in Sri Lanka's Jaffa, the heartland of the Tamil Tigers, Dalrymple manages the rare coup of being both informative and entertaining.
The Sea (Granta, £7.99 in UK) edited by Ian Jack is one of the very best of Granta's always excellent themed anthologies and includes wide-ranging accounts of lives defined by the sea. Among other contributions, Justin Webster writes a mesmerising 23-day diary of his time as an observer on board on a Spanish fishing trawler, Los Piratas.
It's expensive, but it's a seam of treasure. The Illustrated Royal Geographic Society: A Unique Record of Exploration and Photographs (Workman Publishing, £45 in UK) by Diana Craig contains more than 100 years of photographs taken on Royal Geographic-funded expeditions. It includes extraordinary pictures of Shackelton's ice-bound ship, of the broken monastaries of an occupied Tibet, of the arcane red sandstone city of Petra, of yak summer pastures in central Mongolia. This is superlative time travel over the decades.