My top ten books of the year

Newspapers are busy filling their pages with their top tens of the year. 2009 has been a vintage year for fiction so here are a few of my Christmas must-reads.  High-brow, low-brow, you name it, it’s an eclectic list. In no particular order (as they say on The X-Factor), my favourites include:

1: I’ve bought Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (Bloomsbury, £7.99) for almost everyone I know. An ambitious, epic novel, it follows the “complicated shared history” of two families from Second World War Japan to post 9/11 Afghanistan.

2: Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (Viking, £17.99) has been shortlisted for the 2009 Costa novel award and must stand a chance of winning. Eilis Lacey leaves 1950s Ireland to make a new life in America.

3: Screenwriter Sadie Jones took the literary world by storm last year with The Outcast, her debut novel. Her second, Small Wars (Chatto & Windus, £12.99), is equally assured and elegant.

4: David Nicholls’ One Day (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99) is unmissable. A funny “will they, won’t they?” romance, it traces the relationship between university friends Emma and Dexter on the same day each year for 20 years.

5: Sue Townsend’s latest Adrian Mole book is hilarious one moment, poignant the next. Adrian Mole: The Prostate Years (Michael Joseph, £18.99) sees the hapless Mole enter middle-age.

6: Detective Inspector Rebus is a hard act to follow – but Ian Rankin is on to a winner with his latest creation. The Complaints (Orion, £18.99) introduces us to Inspector Malcolm Fox, a cop who investigates other cops.

7: I’m a big fan of Marian Keyes and The Brightest Star in the Sky (Michael Joseph, £18.99) is her best book yet, Keyes deftly weaves the tangled stories of the inhabitants of a rambling Dublin townhouse.

8: For a pacy, unputdownable read, try Who Dares Wins (Century, £18.99). Chris Ryan tells how brothers Sam and Jacob Redman have watched each other’s backs right through their military careers. But then Jacob is kicked out of the SAS . Six years on, the brothers find themselves on opposing sides in a deadly war.

9: My top book for teenagers is Robert Muchamore’s Brigands M.C. (Hodder Children’s Books, £12.99). The eleventh in Muchamore’s hit CHERUB series has a cracking plot. Dante Scott is only eight when he sees four members of his family brutally murdered by a biker gang.

10: For children over nine or ten I recommend Geraldine McCaughrean’s The Death-Defying Pepper Roux (Oxford University Press, £12.99). When Pepper Roux is born, his Aunt Mireille predicts he’ll be dead by the age of 14. But when he hits 14 the resourceful Pepper decides he isn’t ready to die and instead sets sail on a string of adventures.