Spectator Books of the Year: A T.S. Eliot collection to stand the test of time

Best novel: no question, Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen (Atlantic Books, £13.50). A Florida comcrime (I just made that word up) which makes you feel better about the US in a year when that’s been tricky. You can be sexually saucy and inoffensive — a lesson Donald has never learned.

It’s been a crowning year for our best living literary critic, Sir Christopher Ricks. His long campaign for Bob Dylan to be taken seriously in a literary way has triumphed. His edition of The Poems of T. S. Eliot with his co-editor Jim McCue, (Faber, two volumes, £26 each) is (literally) monumental and will last for as long as poetry is read.

Peter Parker’s Housman Country: Into the Heart of England (Little Brown, £19.99). Parker — one of the few biographers, I suspect, who has actually shorn a lamb — penetrates to the Englishness at the heart of A.E. Housman. The book is appropriate for a year which may see the end, or rebirth, of the country.

The most poignant memoir of 2016 was Beyond the High Blue Air(Atlantic Books, £14.99), Lu Spinney’s account of her son’s vegetative condition after a snowboarding accident and the cruellest decisions a mother can be confronted with. Exquisitely written.

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