"Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone." The most meaningful book of my reading year was Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby, which began as a story about a bequest of apricots from her mother's tree and transformed into a chronicle of what Solnit – what we – do with our pain. How do we move forward after disaster? For Solnit, the answer was to write this book.
Other master storytellers turned outward, discovering chaos and tension and complexity – life, in short – outside their doors.
Lawrence Wright's Going Clear and George Packer's The Unwinding told wildly different, peculiarly American stories of excess and repentance, one in a paranoid religious group, the other in an economy gone sour.
Amid the narrative pyrotechnics, a reminder was necessary that the humble newspaper column could perform wonders, too.
The Library of America's American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith assembled the unadorned daily work of a sportswriter with an eye for the telling detail, and a humane bond with his readers.
In 2014, I look forward to reading Mark Harris' Five Came Back, about the wartime experiences of five legendary American filmmakers, and its impact on their postwar work.
Having seen the footage George Stevens shot of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in 1945, I have been haunted ever since by its mute, mundane horror. If Harris can match the vigor and erudition of his Pictures at a Revolution, it should be a book to cherish.
* Saul Austerlitz
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It was not a great year for current events non-fiction. I had high hopes for three, which claimed to answer some fascinating and important questions: What is Hillary Clinton really like? What happens inside the circular tower in Basel where the world's 18 most powerful bankers meet in private every other month? Why are the United States and Pakistan always misunderstanding each other?
Unfortunately, each book – respectively, The Secretary by Kim Ghattas, a veteran BBC correspondent at the US State Department; Tower of Basel by financial journalist Adam LeBor; and Magnificent Delusions by Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the US – answers its question only partially, leaving crucial topics untouched and filling the rest of its pages with repetition and irrelevance.
The Secretary, for instance, provides far more in-depth analysis of the logistics of multi-time-zone airplane meals than insight into the motivations of Clinton. Will she run for president in 2016? Don't look for any clues in this book.
Tower of Basel impressively investigates how the Bank for International Settlements collaborated with Hitler during the Second World War, but only briefly explores how it wields its power today.
Magnificent Delusions does the best job of fulfilling its mission, providing multifaceted explanations and numerous examples of how the two countries have blindly insisted on seeing only what they want to see, going back to the creation of Pakistan in 1947. This book's main flaw is its endless and boring quotes from primary documents. Curious readers might be best served by skimming these three books for key words.
* Fran Hawthorne
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I hadn't paid much attention to Everything but the Girl's Tracey Thorn prior to reviewing Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to be a Pop Star for this newspaper, but her candid, witty and insightful memoir taught me what a wise and unique human being she is, and when I went back to listen to Protection, her classic 1995 single with Massive Attack, I realised afresh that it's a monumental piece of work.
I also loved Burt Bacharach's autobiography Anyone Who Had A Heart, and reading about his pre-fame years working with Marlene Dietrich. I was amazed just how much air time Burt gave his ex-wives, all of whom clearly found him a challenge. Brilliant composer; difficult man; fascinating life.
In 2014, veteran music writer Mick Houghton's I've Always Kept a Unicorn: The Biography of Sandy Denny certainly looks promising. It's billed as a work that finally does justice to the ill-fated Fairport Convention singer's compelling story. Houghton was approached by Denny's estate to write the book, and in his day job as a PR man, he has worked with a number of Sandy's bandmates and contemporaries including Richard Thompson and Bert Janch.
I'm also intrigued by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Kinney's The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob. It's a factual book about Dylan obsessives, that curious breed who hang on Bob's every word despite his steadfast refusal to acknowledge their existence.
* James McNair
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It was a splendid year for history, with Richard Overy, among others, publishing important books. But the most galvanising historical work I read this year was Eric Schlosser's Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident and the Illusion of Safety. In this stunning, deeply researched work of investigative history from the author of Fast Food Nation, Schlosser combines a minutely detailed account of a 1980 accident at a nuclear missile silo outside Damascus, Arkansas, with a frightening history of the mishaps and safety issues that have dogged nuclear weaponry since the 1940s. Nuclear arsenals are inherently unstable, Schlosser argues, vulnerable to human error, technical malfunctions and other contingencies. Schlosser recounts numerous crashes of US air force planes laden with nuclear bombs – it is flat-out dumb luck that we have avoided the accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon. You will be kept awake at night – I was – pondering the implications of Schlosser's findings.
Two other histories also dazzled. A title by William Dalrymple is always an event, and Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan was no exception. A riveting account of the first Anglo-Afghan war, Dalrymple details the disastrous 1839 British invasion of Afghanistan. A book with resonance for our own times. Scott Anderson's thrilling Lawrence in Arabia joins the crowded canon of titles on this enigmatic 20th-century figure whose legendary exploits during the Arab Revolt still provoke debate. As for 2014 – the year we will look back at the outbreak of the First World War – I am very excited about Adam Tooze's The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931.
* Matthew Price
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Of the many excellent works of non-fiction published over the past year, two volumes in particular stand out. Sarah Churchwell's Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Making of The Great Gatsby is a wonderfully entertaining exercise in cultural and literary history: innovative, informative, compellingly written and wonderfully evocative of dark glamour of New York in 1922. Similarly suffused with a sense of place is Andrew Lycett's supremely readable Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation. Lycett's reconstruction of the world in which Collins moved is wonderfully vivid, will interest any reader who enjoys the literature and history of Victorian England, and now stands as the most entertaining and authoritative biography of this most bibulous of writers. I recommend enjoying the book over a tipple in your club, though this is by no means obligatory.
The non-fiction lists for 2014 are set to be dominated by titles marking the centenary of the onset of the Great War. Those looking for alternative reading matter ought to look out for Picador's republication of Clive James' first collection of essays (long out of print), The Metropolitan Critic. James is a fabulous essayist: amusing, allusive, wide-ranging, memorable. You leave each of his collections with a new list of writers and topics to investigate, and a store of new anecdotes to recount – this volume will be no exception.
Also worth looking out for is the publication next summer of Jonathan Meades' memoir, An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Meades is well known for the brilliance of his programmes for television, but he is also a phenomenal writer. If his other works are anything to go by, his memoir will be arresting, dark, shocking, meticulously and freshly observed, and grimly, bleakly funny. Perfect for a holiday.
* Matthew Adams
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This was a very strong year for histories and biographies in the English-language publishing world: Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia, a highly detailed and refreshingly multi-faceted re-examination of the Arab Revolt during the First World War, brings to light the quirky personalities and offstage heroics of several key players in addition to the famous Lawrence of Arabia. Graven with Diamonds, Nicola Shulman's spirited and completely engaging biography of the English poet Thomas Wyatt, stresses that the man's groundbreaking verse-making was just one small part of a full and hectic Tudor life and uses a good deal of fascinating inference to uncover the true nature of his relations not only with King Henry VIII but with Anne Boleyn.
Dennis Showalter's Armor and Blood, which combines in-depth documentary analysis (including many former Soviet-controlled caches of records that are still not often consulted in detail by western historians) with excellent insight into human nature in order to paint a new and comprehensive picture of the great tide-turning Second World War battle of Kursk, in which, far from the more celebrated western conflicts, the full might of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union met along a vast front.
Nathaniel Philbrick's Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution looked at the American Revolution battle with lots of fresh enthusiasm, showing the enormous risks taken by Great Britain's rebellious colonials when they first showed their willingness not just to obstruct but also to conduct a full-scale military resistance to their king.
And although the new year will no doubt contain many pleasant surprises, two titles I'm highly anticipating are: the US publication of Tom Holland's new translation of Herodotus, which was greatly praised in the United Kingdom, and The Last Kind Words Saloon, Larry McMurtry's first novel in five years.
* Steve Donoghue
A year in reviews
While some of 2013’s non-fiction titles left much to be desired, The National’s writers found others gleaned valuable insights from both the recent and distant past
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