The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet David Mitchell’s spectacularly accomplished and thrillingly suspenseful novel starts in 1799, when Jacob de Zoet, a pastor’s son from Amsterdam, disembarks at Dejima, a high-walled artificial island offshore from Nagasaki that the Japanese have made available as a trading post for the Dutch East Indies Company. From this pent-up huddle of warehouses and cramped quarters, Mitchell unfurls a narrative of panoramic span.
Within a community bristling with suspicion and shady goings-on, Jacob struggles to keep his bearings. Awkwardly honest, he makes enemies by the conscientiousness with which, as a junior clerk, he exposes fraud and embezzlement. Initially hoping to work in Dejima for just a year in order to make enough money to marry his fiancée in Amsterdam, he finds himself penalised for his integrity, and is condemned to remain far longer on the fringes of a nation that proudly terms itself the Land of a Thousand Autumns. A further complication is his growing attraction to Orito Aibagawa, a keen-minded young midwife with a burn-scarred face. Her story becomes central in the novel’s second part.
Mitchell fills his pages with a medley of accents, idioms and speech habits. Prodigiously researched, his book resurrects place and period with riveting immediacy. Imagining, with corresponding fullness, not just its characters’ present predicaments but their pasts and futures, it brims with rich, involving and affecting humanity. Peter Kemp
The Good Soldiers by Daniel Finkel In this powerful and moving book on one US infantry battalion’s deployment to Baghdad in 2007-8, David Finkel goes further than anyone I have read towards demonstrating why this war will mark the soldiers who were in it for life. This is an exceptional and unforgettable account of what conflict did to these 801 men and women. Finkel chronicles, down to the smallest personal detail, the soldiers’ horror and grief; he captures, also, the humour that always exists when men are in proximity to death.
John Swain
The Life of Irene Nemoirovsky by Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt Irène Némirovsky, the French author of Suite Française, who died in Auschwitz aged just 39, makes such a compelling subject that one can forgive the authors of this biography their rather plodding portentousness. Using previously unseen material, the book is excellent about her early life with her monstrous mother, her growth as a writer and the tragedy of her demise. Andrew Holgate
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The Ask by Sam Lipsyte Milo Burke, a development officer at “the Mediocre University at New York City” and the hero of Lipsyte’s incandescently written third novel, is the author’s best loser yet. Half-man half-howl, he lives in Queens with his wife and three-year-old son. Hanging on to his job by a fingernail, he gets one last chance to redeem himself when a big “ask” comes his way. You have to go back to Joseph Heller to find American comic writing this energised. With a terrific dyspeptic bounce, The Ask has a high old time bringing its hero low. Tom Shone
Ian Dury: The Definitive Biography by Will Birch A squat, scowling geezer with a withered arm and a leg in callipers (from childhood polio), Ian Dury couldn’t sing in tune to save his life. But he could write memorable songs and instantly conquer audiences with his charisma. Like many charmers, he was also a manipulator. He kept switching the line-ups of his backing bands, the High Roads and then the Blockheads, so that he was always in control. He was not a nice man, but an exceptionally interesting one, and this is an amiable, well-researched book. Lynn Barber
William's Progress by Matt Rudd “He’s a bloke, you see,” William Walker, journalist and hapless hero of Rudd’s second novel, tells a friend, explaining some particularly simple-minded activity by the friend’s lover. “He’s an idiot. We’re all idiots.” Certainly, William himself, while charting the 12 months following his son’s birth, reveals an impressive aptitude for blokeish idiocy. Whether flooding his house and driving his family into rural exile, or inadvertently manufacturing circumstances in which he becomes the prime suspect in a murder inquiry, he lurches from one cock-up to the next. William’s diary of failure is charming, slickly plotted and extremely funny. Nick Rennison