From the flashback folio

What were the best books published this year? For our year-end survey, we decided to ask seven authors to send in their selections.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s account of America’s misadventure in Iraq, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and Mohsin Hamid’s novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, were the only books to receive multiple mentions, but from Ramachandra Guha to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Roberto Bolano to Don DeLillo, there are plenty of great picks here:

Amit Chaudhuri

Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis had been out of print in Britain for a long time. How fortunate, then, that it should not only be available again this year as a Penguin Modern Classic, but in such a marvellous translation by the poet Jamie McKendrick.

Faintly Gatsby-like in its delineation of the romance of luxury and graciousness as experienced by a besotted outsider, darkened by the imminence of 1939 (all the main characters are Jewish), it is, nevertheless, a paean to life in the way it circles round space and remembered objects. Space and time are at odds in this story; space unfolds, time is recovered even as it dwindles, and the complex, long sentences—which are translated into hypnotic English—enact the simultaneity of letting go and of hoarding.

In this context, I should mention that Jamie McKendrick is one of Britain’s best younger poets, and that his beautiful and passionately intelligent collection of poems, Crocodiles and Obelisks, published this year by Faber, is a reminder of this fact.

Two other books—by Pakistani writers in English, who remind us that South Asian Anglophone writing can be just as effectively informed by craft as by storytelling: Mohsin Hamid’s terrific The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and the unique Aamer Hussein’s wonderful collection of stories, Insomnia.

Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist

Philippe LeGrain’s Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them is an impassioned defence of immigration from the point of view of the host country, the source country, and most importantly, the migrants themselves. Philippe is a great reporter and an even better thinker.

Thanks to the success of Freakonomics and to a lesser extent my own The Undercover Economist, a glut of pop-econ books hit the market this year. The most likeable—and original—was Tyler Cowen’s Discover your Inner Economist. I lapped it up.

Finally, two psychology books: the brief, snappy Yes by Goldstein, Martin and Cialdini; and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, which is a book guaranteed to change the way you think when it comes out early next year. Predictably Irrational will go head-to-head with my own The Logic of Life, and with almost the opposite thesis. Ariely gives many fascinating examples of when we make mistakes.

Amitava Kumar, author of Home Products