This year I have read a number of books equivalent to the Answer to the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, which is fewer than last year (62) or the year before (54). I was going to offer excuses for this (writing another book; an episode of depression that blew a hole out of much of the Spring and Summer) but my records show that this was more than 2020 (41) and a lot more than 2019 (18), so perhaps it’s, you know, about normal. By way of compensation, some of these books have been excellent and there are so many contenders for this year’s Top Ten that I’ve had to leave out some really good ones, and deciding the winner has been difficult. So here they are, in no particular order, as they say on the game shows:

Robin Dennell: From Arabia To The Pacific: How Our Species Colonised Asia Our species began as a hunter of open savannah in Africa. When it left Africa into Asia, it had to contend with environments as harsh and as different as arctic tundra and tropical rainforest – which it conquered as no other species has done. In this engaging book, archaeologist Robin Dennell explains how and why our species became so uniquely invasive. DISCLAIMER: I was sent a copy by the author.

David Mitchell: The Bone Clocks The only other novel of Mitchell’s I’ve read is Cloud Atlas, and, like that, The Bone Clocks consists of six novellas loosely tied together, though in conventional sequence rather than nested like layers of an onion. Each novella eavesdrops on a decade in the life of Holly Sykes, a seemingly very ordinary English woman, from teenage runaway to dying septuagenarian. The Bone Clocks is never less than ambitious but it is held up from collapse by the sheer quality of writing.

A. M. Homes: Days of Awe If  James Thurber had been born in the late twentieth century rather than the late nineteenth, and had been female (also Jewish) he might have turned out something like A. M. Homes, whose dissections of modern American life in this warm collection of short stories have the same satirical, surreal, occasionally fantastical and always affectionate tone, but which are always as sharp as a tack.

Robert Graves: Goodbye To All That  is an autobiography, written in the eminent classicist’s early thirties after he had fled to Majorca, swearing to leave England for good (hence the title). And it’s no wonder he wanted to get away from it all. Born in 1895, Graves was sent to a series of dismal preparatory schools before being thrown at Charterhouse and thence the Western Front, which he seems to have preferred to his schooldays. Given the often depressing nature of Graves’ experiences you’d think that reading this book might be a chore, but far from it. The tone is breezy and bright, and full of (often very dark) humour.

V. E. Schwab: The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue Adeline La Rue is an illiterate peasant girl born in the French countryside towards the end of the seventeenth century. Fearing a short, brutal life of drudgery and, at best, boredom, she makes a deal with the Devil to be free. But desperate souls never read the small print (the Devil being, of course, in the details) and Addie is destined to go through life instantly forgotten by everyone she meets. Until, that is, three hundred years later, when she meets Henry, manager of a bookstore in New York — who remembers her. The writing is astonishingly good. The characters, both prosaic and demonic, leap off the page.

William Boyd: Any Human Heart consists of extracts from the diaries of Logan Gonzago Mountstuart (1906-1991), a literary figure so insignificant that he is entirely fictional. For me it has echoes of Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess and The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham in its evocation of creative talent just trying to burst through the conventions of their times, not always successfully. It’s a testament to Boyd’s skill that you can’t help but like Mountstuart, despite the fact that he is an adulterous, philandering, voyeuristic drunk.

Ben Elton: Time and Time Again Very far from his 1980s stand-up heyday Elton has proved himself as a novelist of some skill, tackling ever more serious subjects. The one starts with a hypothetical discovery by Newton that were you to stand in a space the size of a closet in the basement of a building in Istanbul at a certain time in 2025, you’d be transported back to 1914. He leaves his calculations to posterity, and time travel is the fate of adventurer Hugh Stanton, who goes back to 1914 to prevent Archduke Franz Ferdinand from being assassinated — thus preventing the Great War.  But Stanton finds that just his very existence in the time stream into which he has so rudely dropped changes the course of events: and he is not the only person who’s had the idea of rebooting history.

Dara Horn: People Love Dead Jews Time and time again, the world slaughters Jews, only later on to say how sorry it is about it. In a disturbing, depressing (but endlessly interesting) book that takes in Jewish history from Renaissance Europe to 1920s China, Dara Horn shows that the world is only interested in Jews when they are dead. This is illustrated perfectly by the story of a real, live Jewish member of staff at Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam being told not to wear his kippah in public… for fear of giving offence.  Plus ca change.

Simon Sebag-Montefiore: The World: A Family History is a rather gruesome 4,000-year litany of murder, incest, deceit, massacres, religious mania, war, genocide, and some rather lavish banquets (which often end up in massacre, rape, war &c. &c.)  after which one feels that the sooner that Hom. sap. becomes extinct, the better. At more than 1,200 pages, it’s a terrific achievement. Having read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire last year (which is more than twice as long) I was surprised at my initial reluctance to read this, but once you pluck up the courage to dive in, the water’s blood-soaked lovely.

And this year’s winner is …

Gaia Vince: Nomad Century Because of climate change, the biggest migrations in human history are happening now, and will continue through the present century, as billions flee the global south. Vince sets out the scale of climate-change-caused disruption the world currently faces in stark, even terrifying terms before setting out a detailed manifesto on how the world might be saved or even made better by welcoming migrants into countries suffering depopulation, rather than putting obstacles before them. An important and indeed visionary book.

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith: A City On Mars Just when I was finishing the draft of my next book, in which I was wondering idly about possible futures for people in space, I came across this entertaining and very refreshing corrective. Cheekily subtitled Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? the Weinersmiths puncture the starry-eyed optimism of space cadets such myself that the High Frontier will soon be ripe for human settlement. Yes, there may be some exciting technology, driven by the ambition of tech billionaires such as Messrs Musk and Bezos, but there is really far too much we don’t know about the capabilities of humans to survive in space that we need, realistically, to research, before we make that leap. To take just one thing (notwithstanding inasmuch as which that it’s an absolutely crucial … er … thing): although some 400 astronauts have ventured into orbit, and even then for only very short periods, the only humans who have ever been above the Earth’s magnetosphere were the Apollo astronauts, all of whom were men. To date, no woman has ever flown above the natural geodynamic shield that protects fragile flesh from the harsh environment of radiation in space. This means that there are no data on the effects that radiation has on the female reproductive system, still less on whether it is possible to bring foetuses to term in space, and that they should grow up healthy.

Oh, and another if rather different thing that the Weinersmith’s cover in depth: the questions raised by legal title and ownership of any part of space (this section of the book is much more interesting than it sounds). Can you just fly off to Mars and set up your own private empire there? Apparently not — the United Nations’ Outer Space Treaty (OST) forbids it. But the OST was created before anyone had landed on the Moon, and might need updating. Efforts to sequester pieces of space before such issues are hammered out to the general satisfaction might lead to conflict here on Earth.

Third, for perfectly good reasons of biology, as well as societal functioning, psychology and economics, successful colonies in space will need to be large, and house many thousands of people, if not millions, with the necessary spread of occupations that would allow a society to function. A few people cooped up in a tin can hundreds of miles from Earth won’t cut it. What if one of the colonists needs root-canal work and none of the other colonists is a dentist? And so on. Finally, space is dreadful. I mean, really dreadful. Yes, the views are nice, but the immediate environment is simultaneously extremely dull and absolutely lethal. There seems to be no rational reason why anyone would want to go into space. That doesn’t rule out any irrational ones. And when have human beings ever behaved rationally? All of which brings us to …

Simon Sebag-Montefiore: The World: A Family History This absolute unit of a tome was given to me last Christmas — yes, Christmas 2022 — but I had been put off by its forbidding hugeness (it weighs in at more than 1200 pages) and until the holidays I was only reading a few pages at a time, when to get the best out of it you really need to put in the hours. (This was the book I mentioned last time). Conceived as a modest little lockdown project by the eminent historian, it covers 4,000 years of human history, from the perspective of families — dynasts such as the Habsburgs, the Julio-Claudians, the Sauds, the Hohenzollerns, the Assads, the Gandhis, the Bonapartes, the Trumps, the Paleologoi and so on, and many more you’ll never have heard of. Taken together it’s a rather gruesome litany of murder, incest, deceit, massacres, war, sexual perversion, more war, genocide, mutilation, slavery, antisemitism, misogyny, rape, more war and some rather lavish banquets (which often end up in massacre, rape, war &c. &c.)  after which one feels that the sooner that Hom. sap. becomes extinct, the better.

In a book thus enormous there are bound to be mistakes. Isaac Newton went to Cambridge, not Oxford. Las Vegas is in Nevada, not Utah. And where he talks about ‘palm olive’ he really means ‘palm oil’. There are omissions, too (wherefore Idi Amin?) though not many (the comprehensive treatment is nothing short of staggering.) But no matter. Selecting the material, editing and proofreading a book this large will always be a challenge. There were quite a few clever words I had to look up: funambulist, bazzoon, contumacious, camarilla, chappal, malversation, rebarbative, to name but three six seven, but it’s hardly the author’s fault that such words are rarely encountered here in Cromer. He does trip up, though: former President Jimmy Carter can hardly be described as ‘toothsome’, though I know what he means.

On the positive side, the things that this book offers are, first, a sense of comparison. By looking at all of history — everything, all at once — you get a good idea of the simultaneity of events in widely different places. The book goes into far more detail about places such as South America, pre-conquest North America, China, India, central and south-east Asia and especially Africa than any book I’ve seen so far. I had no idea, for example, that the English Civil War took place at the same time that Shah Jahan was putting up the Taj Mahal.

This allows the history of individual places to be viewed in their proper proportions. For example, almost nothing is said about England until it started to become a European and then a global player. In the context of everything that was going on in the world during what we like to call the ‘Dark Ages’, all that stuff I enjoy reading about so much about, such as the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle of Hastings and so on, was of marginal interest globally, given the titanic events happening elsewhere at the same time, such as the Justinian plague, the spread of Islam, and so on.

And by driving the narrative forward on a truly global scale, one gets a good appreciation of the progress of such things as the Black Death, and the First World War. There are some surprising insights. For example, in this book, the Second World War started not with the German invasion of Poland, but the Japanese invasion of China some years earlier, for that’s when the dominoes started to fall.

But what this book offers most of all is a richer context of current events, usually studied in a very detailed, granular way. Here the author shines, as he has interviewed many of the key players, from Margaret Thatcher onwards. Here is Sebag-Montefiore on political correctness and the Culture Wars concerning which there is much current debate:

The open world had never been richer or more secure, yet America — emulated by the other comfort democracies — started to consume itself in vicious, self-mutilating schisms about history and nation, virtue and identity, every bit as demented as the christological controversies of Medieval Constantinople.

It’s a terrific achievement. Having read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire last year (which is more than twice as long) I was surprised at my initial reluctance to read this, but once you pluck up the courage to dive in, the water’s blood-soaked lovely.