Justine Jordan wraps up the year's novels, short stories and graphic fiction
As with Wolf Hall three years ago, Christmas novel-wrapping will be dominated by Hilary Mantel's latest feat of historical imagination. Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate) won its author a second Booker, and continues to build a Tudor world that feels solid enough to touch, bringing Thomas Cromwell's life into the precarious present tense and the reader to the heart of Henry VIII's court. This volume focuses on the downfall of Anne Boleyn, the darkening mood of Henry's reign, and the chilling practicalities of interrogation and torture.
This year's Booker also gave a welcome boost to some left-field books from small publishers, shortlisting Alison Moore's immersive tale of a man unable to escape his own family history, The Lighthouse (Salt), and Deborah Levy's sly melodrama Swimming Home (And Other Stories). Also on the shortlist was Will Self with Umbrella (Bloomsbury), his deepest and most rewarding novel to date. Madness, war, mechanisation; class, feminism and modernity – all these and more are interrogated in a dense slab of prose that spans the 20th century and jumps from one consciousness to another in the high old modernist style. One for the hard-to-buy-for James Joyce fan in your life.
Though you wouldn't have known it from the Booker lists, all the big names were out this year. Martin Amis railed against the debasement of English culture in Lionel Asbo (Jonathan Cape), while Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth (Jonathan Cape) was simultaneously a tongue-in-cheek riff on his own early stories, a typically assured spy novel with a sting in the tail, and a meditation on the relationship between reader and writer. Sequels and prequels were everywhere, with Rose Tremain returning to the hero of Restoration in Merivel (Chatto & Windus), Irvine Welsh revisiting Trainspotting territory for Skagboys (Jonathan Cape), and Alan Garner – a mere 50 years on – concluding his classic sequence of children's novels with the adult volume Boneland (Fourth Estate). Lawrence Norfolk gave a fascinating crash course in 17th-century cookery with John Saturnall's Feast (Bloomsbury). There were new novels from Peter Carey, Pat Barker and John Banville; a slim volume from Toni Morrison, Home (Chatto), a big, rollicking one from John Irving, In One Person (Doubleday), and a huge, very loud one, MOSTLY IN CAPITALS, from Tom Wolfe, Back to Blood (Jonathan Cape). The big seller, of course – if one discounts the tsunami of erotica flowing from the pens of EL James and imitators – was JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy (Little, Brown), a wizard-free saga about high passions and low deeds in a parish council election that reads like a mash-up between Jonathan Coe and Joanna Trollope.
Richard Ford's seventh novel was almost universally acclaimed: Canada (Bloomsbury) is a beautifully written exploration of family tragedy, cosmic uncertainty and the north American landscape, with a killer opening. "First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later." In mid-century Montana, a teenager is violently uprooted; he flees across the border into Canada, and a difficult new life.
NW (Hamish Hamilton), Zadie Smith's first novel in seven years, zeroed in on a small patch of London to explore everyday life in the capital: geographical proximity and social distance, the bounds of place and the desire to escape. Some critics complained about its fragmentary nature and wobbly overall plot, but sentence by sentence, no one comes close for combining formal playfulness with syllable-perfect dialogue and fresh perceptions; certainly nothing else has given me greater reading pleasure this year.
Staying in north London, Keith Ridgway's Hawthorn & Child (Granta) was one of 2012's oddest, most remarkable books: a detective novel in which everyday life is harder to puzzle out than any crime. The policemen of the title try, like the reader, to make sense of things: there's an unnerving gangster, a sadistic editor, perhaps a secret band of wolves. "Knowing things completes them. Kills them," the book insists. "Not knowing sustains us." Ridgway has written a curiously satisfying peaen to incompleteness. There was another brilliant curio from Gwendoline Riley, Opposed Positions (Jonathan Cape). Riley writes cool, faintly autobiographical novellas about enigmatic young women who drift, think and write; she wears her influences (Woolf, Fitzgerald, Camus) with impressive insouciance, and this is one of her best.
It was a great year for short stories, with stand-out collections from Jon McGregor, Nathan Englander and Kevin Barry, but one essential – and very handsome – purchase must be Alasdair Gray's lavishly illustrated Every Short Story 1951-2012 (Canongate). The author of Lanark threatens to spill out of any covers that try to contain him; here he is, over 900 pages, in all his rackety glory. We were fortunate too to have a new collection from the incomparable Alice Munro, now in her 80s. Dear Life (Chatto) addresses her own mortality, as it moves into autobiography with pieces that are "the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life". And Junot Díaz's This Is How You Lose Her (Faber) is an absolute treat – slangily inventive, infectiously exuberant stories about love and infidelity among the Dominican-American community in New Jersey.
It's certainly not brimming with seasonal cheer, but Chris Ware's latest graphic extravaganza is an object of bleak, intricate beauty. Several objects, in fact: Building Stories (Jonathan Cape) is a foot-high box containing 14 exquisitely produced books and pamphlets about the inhabitants of one Chicago apartment block – a lonely old lady, a woman stuck in a terrible relationship and a frustrated would-be artist. Oh, and a bee called Branford, who hovers outside the building and has his own tragicomic yearnings to deal with. Ware's graphic restraint has impressive emotional force; this is a work to pore over, from an artist like no other.
For a more cheerful take on domestic life, Posy Simmonds's Mrs Weber's Omnibus (Jonathan Cape) collects her Guardian strips of the 70s and 80s about a scruffy, well-meaning Guardian-reading family and their friends. It's salutary to discover that both her cosy in-jokes about middle-class silliness and her sharp political fury over sexual inequality and the divide between rich and poor remain remarkably undated. Here, as well as jokes about hummus and childcare, you'll find shrinking universities, attacks on the welfare state, youth unemployment – and, of course, Christmas, rolling around each year in a blizzard of grumbling and enchantment.
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