Colm Toibýn
Author

James Ryan’s South of the Border (Lilliput) is a novel filled with irony, drama and tender wisdom about what we cal led ‘The Emergency’ and the rest of the world knew as World War II. It is brilliant in its sense of period, but also in its vivid characterisation and good, clear writing. Dennis O’Driscoll’s interviews with Seamus Heaney, Stepping Stones (Faber & Faber) forms a uniquely interesting book because of the interviewer’s tact, his special knowledge of the work and his abiding belief in the importance of poetry in the world. Anne Enright’s Taking Pictures (Jonathan Cape) displays her wit and her mastery of the short story form. Deirdre Madden’s Molly Fox’s Birthday (Faber), written with skill, sympathy and flair, establishes her further as one of the most important Irish novelists.

Diarmaid Ferriter
Historian and author

I devoured Sonia: My Story by Sonia O’Sullivan with Tom Humphries (Penguin Ireland). There are two sides to this tale of the career of Ireland’s greatest ever athlete: the obsessive perfectionism that drove her to such glorious athletic heights, and her somewhat tortured personal life. This is a detailed and frank account of the endless running, scheduling and travel; the very public triumphs, as well as the disappointments brought on by over-training and a failure to separate her personal life from her running life. It is also a story of evolving emotional maturity, as love and motherhood brought a new perspective and balance to her life, while not interfering with her resilience and determination. Her lack of bitterness about the numerous gold medals she lost to athletes suspected to be drug cheats is also highly admirable.

Andrew Lynch
Sunday Business Post reviewer

Of the three Barack Obama biographies I read this year, David Mendell’s Obama: From Promise to Power (Harper Collins) was by far the best. Drawing mostly on first-hand reporting from the author’s time as a reporter on the Chicago Tribune, it’s a deft and revealing portrait of the human being behind the global phenomenon. While Mendell is fundamentally sympathetic to his subject, he does not shy away from detailing his faults: most notably, a healthy ego that occasionally jars with his saintly public image. Talking to him before the famous 2004 Democratic Convention speech that launched him onto a national stage, Mendell recalls Obama exclaiming: ‘‘I’m LeBron, baby [a reference to a gifted teenage basketball player]. I can play on this level. I got some game!” Soon enough, we’ll find out how true that is.

Dermot Bolger
Author and critic

Ways to Live Forever (Scholastic) is an incredibly brave debut children’s novel by Sally Nicholls that will become a crossover classic. Lead character Sam wants to know about aliens and UFOs and airships and what it feels like to kiss a girl, and he wants a hundred other questions answered quickly because, aged 11,Sam is running out of time. That this unflinching story of a boy dying of cancer is deeply uplifting is a tribute to the extraordinary balancing act performed by Nicholls in being unafraid to take on every aspect of dying and ask the unanswerable questions that confront us all. It is a dark book and yet awash with the zest for life which Sam has, as his family, while already grieving, find ways to make each wish come true. It deservedly won the Glen Dimplex Award for best debut this year.

Eamon Gilmore
Labour Party leader

Paul Krugman , the author of The Return of Depression Economics (Norton), is an economist of unusual gifts. Winner of the Nobel Prize for his contributions to economic theory, he has turned his hand to expounding economic ideas in terms the layman can understand. As in his New York Times column, The Conscience of a Liberal, this book has no diagrams or equations, and Krugman consciously avoids language that is ‘‘excessively dignified’’. The purpose is to convince people, so that they will then act. First published in 1999, it has been updated and re-published in light of recent events - a modest, but highly effective way of saying he told us so. Its central message is a call for an economic rescue operation to get credit flowing again and prop up spending. For Krugman, ‘‘the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men’’. US president-elect Barack Obama is listening. We should too.

Colette Fitzpatrick
News anchor

I was asked to read Terry Prone’s book, What Every Working Woman Should Know . . . and Do (Currach Press), as part of my research for TV3’s Midday programme. Newspaper reviews describing Prone’s attitude in the book hadn’t been promising - according to Prone’s vision: ‘‘Women were lazy, gossipy and bore people about their weight and their lover,” the papers said. We wondered on the show how a working woman like Prone could have betrayed us that way. Well, I asked her, and she didn’t. Prone’s book pointed out that some women did these things, but only some women - not everyone. The rest of the book offers practical, sound advice on interviews, reviews, promotions and pensions to help you succeed in the workplace. A must-read for working women everywhere.

Ben Schott
Writer

People’s preference for Wilkie Collins or Charles Dickens was the Rolling Stones or Beatles discussion of Victorian times. It rears its ugly head again in the Suspicions of Mr Whicher (Bloomsbury), as Kate Summer scale manages to weave both the operatic access of the former and the punchy economy of the latter into a magnificent, real-life who dunnit. As a fan of significa over trivia, it’s a real pleasure to watch her build significant fact upon fact to recreate an old-fashioned Victorian thriller. And the bonus is - it’s all true! Do yourself a favour on Christmas night. Turn off the telly, send anyone who is in your armchair to bed, pour yourself a big glass of port and settle down to read The Suspicions of MrWhicher. You won’t be disappointed.

Trevor White
Author and publisher

The Irish have yet to recognise the real cost of fast food. Even the experts are blissfully unaware of its dangers. One restaurant critic this year spoke of his love for McDonald’s. Why, he wrote, do ‘food snobs’ whinge about the Golden Arches, when it’s really so nice and fluffy? A better question: why are we witnessing a massive rise in the number of people who have strokes, heart disease and diabetes? If you want to know why it is so important to eat unprocessed food, read In Defence of Food (Allen Lane) by Michael Pollan. This remarkable book is an eloquent manifesto for thoughtful food choices, and there’s nothing remotely snobby about it. Essential reading for anyone who truly cares about the way we eat.

John Boyne
Author

My favourite book of 2008 was The Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate) by Philip Hensher. It’s an extraordinary novel that charts the lives of two families in Sheffield, spread over 30 years from the 1980s until today. It manages to be frequently funny and often quite moving, while never losing its sense of intrigue or mystery. Dissecting the lives of four parents and five children who live on opposite sides of a street, Hensher uncovers a world of surface tedium underscored by affairs that go wrong, obsessions that linger across the decades, criminality, illness and bullying. Our expectations are frequently challenged as characters who initially appear to be the most loathsome turn out to be capable of acts of uncommon generosity, while those who appear sympathetic in the opening sections become duplicitous and malevolent. It’s to Hensher’s credit that such a long novel - almost 800 pages - can leave the reader breathless for more.

Deirdre Purcell
Author

The Imposter (Atlantic), by South African writer Damon Galgut, is one of those novels that works on almost all levels - it is a psychologically insightful, page-turning, literary thriller, underpinned by the author’s powerful sense of place. The story, set largely in the remote veldt, concerns a youngish man, Adam, who has failed in business and is now housebound in an effort to become a writer. His nemesis, Canning, is a mysterious entrepreneur who represents himself as what he is not, with violent consequences. I read this compulsively over one day and evening, marvelling at the author’s handling of conflicting scenarios: claustrophobia versus open spaces, the desire for creative expression versus lust for wealth - and the inherent clashes that surround sexual power and control. Galgut’s pacing skill is extraordinary: even the lyrically descriptive passages thrum with imminent menace. My heart thumped throughout and the overused phrase ‘unputdownable’ is appropriate.

Finola Kennedy
Economist

The rediscovered Irish novel by Jules Verne, Petit-Bonhomme, republished by the Royal Irish Academy as The Extraordinary Adventures of Foundling Mick, is an unsentimental tale of charm and insight. Despite the worst possible start in life as an orphan in a Poor School in the north-west, who is exploited by a travelling showman and temporarily adopted by a selfish actress, Mick finds refuge with a farming family, the Kirwans. When they are evicted, Mick starts trading, eventually moving to Dublin where, with acumen and honesty, he makes his fortune. Mick uses his wealth to give employment and help to others, including the Kirwans. In recessionary times, the story of Mick, which takes him all around Ireland, encountering every sort of character, raises spirits as a tale of triumph over adversity. If Nicolas Sarkozy is looking for a gift for Brian Cowen, he need look no further.

Martin Mackin
Director of Q4 Public Relations

For me there was no new book of 2008, but there was a new writer - that’s to say if you can apply the word ‘new’ to a writer who was born in 1925 and published his first novel in 1956. I read James Salter’s Light Years (Vintage) in the early part of this year. Ostensibly a novel about the unravelling of a marriage, it is beautifully composed, sensual, clear-eyed, and has a wintry heart. I followed this up with Salter’s memoir Burning the Days (Vintage) which moves from his young adulthood as a fighter pilot to adventures of a different kind, in the screen trade, in Rome, Paris and beyond. All of this is set out in prose that is romantic and luminous. Richard Yates has been subject to such a degree of rediscovery that we will inevitably see the publication of his long-lost grocery lists. James Salter deserves similar treatment - seek him out.

John Kelly
Broadcaster and writer

Places like Mossbawn and Broagh have become as vivid to Seamus Heaney‘s readership as the landmarks of their own childhoods. So, too, the people in south Co Derry who surrounded the young poet before he flitted toWicklow via Belfast and onwards to a Nobel Prize. That journey - both as poet and public figure - is recounted in Stepping Stones (Faber&Faber) by Heaney himself in response to prodding from interviewer Dennis O’Driscoll. Avoiding the academic swamp which can make the lives of poets such hard going, O’Driscoll’s approach is to facilitate and, as a result, we get more than we might have expected. Guarded and gracious, certainly, but there’s a firmness here that will make you gulp. Hard to put down.

Patricia Casey
Consultant psychiatrist at the Mater Hospital, Dublin

In The Semantics of Murder (Serpent’s Tail) by Aifric Campbell , lead character Jay Hamilton is a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst who uses his patients’ case histories as fodder for his fiction writing. For Hamilton, the complexity of their life stories takes precedence over their need for healing, as he mercilessly casts aside those who are surplus to his literary requirements. Interwoven into the dubious professional practice of this man, is the mission by an investigative biographer to discover the identity of Jay’s late brother’s murderer. As the story progresses, the sibling rivalry between Jay and his deceased brother, a mathematical genius, becomes apparent. Campbell weaves a story of loneliness, dark secrets and bitterness. Written beautifully, and moving painlessly between the present and the past, the reader is kept in suspense. Campbell has created characters that are simultaneously vibrant and chilling, and the reader can anticipate a conclusion that is laden with suspense. This is no simple who dunnit thriller but a sophisticated masterpiece that has been thoroughly researched and is suffused with the coldness of modern life. It is to be hoped that the author (herself Irish) will continue to work within this genre.

John Shaw
President of the Law Society

At a time when politics and politicians are at a low ebb, it did give me some encouragement to read a couple of books during the year which reflected well on those in the public service. Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland (Bodley Head) by Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, was a fascinating account from a different perspective of the tortuous negotiations that led to the Northern Irish peace process. The other book was written by possibly the most famous lawyer in the world right now: The Audacity of Hope, written by Barack Obama and published by Crown, is thought-provoking and insightful and it is a cause of great optimism that there is some substance behind the style. I also loved The Book of Weather Eye (Gill & Macmillan) for the erudition and wit of its author, Brendan McWilliams.

Jim Power
Chief economist, Friends First

The sub-prime crisis has spawned a lot of books already, and before this crisis runs its course, many more will be published. Bear Trap and the Economic Panic of 2008 by Bill Bamber and Andrew Spencer tells the story of how Bear Stearns, which was always regarded as a maverick on Wall Street, collapsed. Published by Brick Tower Press, the book is told from an insider’s perspective, which makes it particularly interesting. Bamber was a senior managing director at Bear Stearns, with responsibility for a derivatives group within the bank. The opening line in the introduction claims ‘‘You just can’t make this shit up’’. This pretty much sums up the story of the demise of Bear Stearns, but also adequately describes a lot of what we have all experienced over the past year. This book is a great read which tells an exciting story well, but also gives an insight into the greed and irresponsible behaviour that has us all struggling for breath. In a past life, I visited this bank on many occasions and found it populated by an incredibly arrogant bunch of people who believed they were the ‘masters of the universe’. We now know they were anything but.

Fiona Ness
Agenda editor

When you edit copy all day for a living, there’s nothing like a bit of overwriting to get you overwrought when you’re reading for pleasure. Perhaps that’s why Irish writer Gerard Donovan’s understated short story collection, Country of the Grand (Faber) had such a lasting effect. The stories cast an eye over ‘New Ireland’ - an Ireland of prosperity and emptiness, loss of history and lack of anything worth replacing it with. They tell of a new breed of walking wounded in a country where, for many people, more has very definitely meant less. ‘‘People talk about the Celtic tiger, but what’s been around is the Celtic herd. People acting for money. It’s now that the tigers are coming,” Donovan said presciently on its publication in July. To Ireland, I, meanwhile, was a mad dash (but worth it) through history, literature and politics with poet Paul Muldoon as he finally caught the prose bug. His abecedary of Irish literature was re-published this year as part of Faber’s excellent poetry series. I wolfed them down

Josh Ritter
Singer-songwriter

Caught as we are in our own surreal and difficult moment in history, it’s easy to forget the birthing pains of other eras. So it’s illuminating and exciting to have read Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day (Harper Collins). A maelstrom of a book, it takes the reader on a tumultuous trip through ten months just after the close of World War I, when Boston’s police force took the fateful first steps toward unionisation, race relations entered a bloody new modern age, and Babe Ruth played for the Red Sox. The Given Day sits well next to Barbara Tuchmann’s The Proud Tower as a vivid history of an exuberant and chaotic period.

Alison Curtis
Today FM presenter

Canadian writer Miriam Toews’ novel, A Complicated Kindness (Vintage), is set in a small Mennonite town in Winnipeg. It was published first in 2004, but after picking it up this year I can safely say it is my favourite book since To Kill a Mockingbird. With autobiographical undertones, Toews tells the story of Nomi Nickle, a teenager who feels trapped by the rules of the society she lives in, and who is dealing with her recent abandonment by her mother and sister. The story focuses on Nomi’s need to rebel while trying to make things as normal as possible at home with her father. Lonely, funny and compassionate.

Joe O’Shea
Writer and broadcaster

I’m a history junkie and, while I have read some excellent fiction over the past 12months,my book of the year has to be Micheal O' Siochrú's brilliant account of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland. God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (Faber & Faber) is a masterful example of history writing that is authoritative and accessible. O'Siochrú sets the scene, the fractured world of mid-17th century Britain and Ireland, and shows us how political turmoil and religious strife created men like Cromwell. O'Siochrú's Cromwell, who only spent nine months of his life in Ireland, is not the satanic monster that I learnt about from the Christian Brothers. But the man and his changed but there are still plenty of Cromwells around: this great book helps us to identify and understand them.

Nadine O’Regan
Sunday Business Post arts correspondent

The winner of this year’s Frank O’Connor International Short Story award, Unaccustomed Earth (Bloomsbury) by Jhumpa Lahiri is an absorbing, well-written and beautifully distilled collection of tales investigating immigration and transplantation, primarily for Bengalis settling in America. Lahiri has a knack for vividly and earthily conjuring up situations and characters and giving them universal appeal. In novel-writing this year, some superb work emerged from Rebecca Miller (The Private Lives of Pippa Lee),Damon Galgut (The Impostor) and Marian Keyes (This Charming Man), but my favourite novel came from Wally Lamb with his The Hour I First Believed (HarperCollins), a gargantuan, multi-pronged story taking the 1999 Columbine school shootings as its starting point and moving outwards from there to explore post-traumatic stress disorder, marital breakdown and our continuing capacity for hope. Athoughtful, intelligent and captivating read.

Deirdre de Burca
Green Party senator

Professor Ivor Browne’s Music and Madness (Atrium) is compel ling reading for those who are fascinated by the human condition, and the often painful struggle of individuals with their own mental health. In a searingly honest account of his early development, Browne also introduces us to two of his life’s great passions - music and madness. While his ambition to become a professional jazz musician remained unrealised, he did emerge as a towering and influential figure in Irish psychiatry over several decades. Iconoclastic and unorthodox, Browne challenged the direction of conventional psychiatry and its treatment of mental illness. As chief psychiatrist of the Eastern Health Board, he was responsible for implementing the policy that saw a hugely significant shift in the care of mental patients away from large institutions and into the community. Browne’s narrative is engaging, refreshingly honest and at times bordering on the visionary.

Emmanuel Kehoe
Sunday Business Post reviewer

There are many reasons for contemplating divorce; partners reading a single copy of the same book at the same time is one. It’s something that often happens in our house, and having been told that John le Carré's A Most Wanted Man (Hodder & Stoughton) had been left in the hairdressers (it hadn’t) and then to discover a couple of days later that it had been taken on a business trip, I’m resolved to nip it in the bud. No more simultaneous reading, especially of le Carré, who calls for more concentration than most. Now in his 70s, the master of the literate cold war spy novel has migrated his anger over the last two decades to raw encounters with the world of multinational corporations and the blunt instruments of post-September 11 paranoia. At the centre of le Carrés latest novel is Issa, a half-Russian, half-Chechen boy who has been tortured to the brink of madness, surrounded by an assortment of more familiar characters, some humane in that vulnerable world-weary way that almost ensures decency will have a tough time. Le Carré remains a master of inventive characterisation and profoundly effective observation, and the prose is, of course, crafted to seamlessness. How does it end? I don’t know. It hasn’t come back yet.

Billy Roche
Playwright

Built on the premise that he will give up smoking, The Smoking Diaries and The Last Cigarette by Simon Gray (Granta Books) take us to the heart of what it means to be flesh-and-blood. It’s all chronicled here in diaries-cum-memoirs by this lovable, irritable, shambolic man: his love for his second wife Victoria, the loss of his younger brother Piers, his friendship with Harold Pinter, the hilarious back stories to his plays. It is to his credit that we affectionately worry and fret for him at every turn. Wry, funny, insightful and sad, in another age these diaries would have been called something else. Philosophical ramblings? Intellectual journals? What makes it all the more endearing is the fact that we know that Gray will not achieve his goal. His death on August 6, 2008, makes this his final, fitting, smoke-filled testament.

Ana Leddy
Head of RTE Radio 1

Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor (Secker) is a tremendous story and a gripping historical chronicle with adventure at the turn of every page. I loved it. The drama unfolds on a coffin ship sailing from Ireland to the US on which hundreds of steerage passengers perish from deprivation, despite the stewardship of a benevolent captain whose log guides us. Famine is the backdrop, but the central characters are fleeing many demons. Only one first-class passenger, Lord Kingscourt, dies on the voyage, and he has been murdered. It is he who is the link between the childless widow, servant Mary Duane, and the cast of characters threatened by the ominous presence of miscreant Pius Mulvey. This book could do for today’s history students what the much maligned Peig never had a hope of achieving with my generation. It left me wanting more. The sequel, Redemption Falls (Secker), is top of my Christmas list.