I very much enjoy picking my favourite books of the year – here is my choice for The Spectator.

“I devoured Lily King’s new novel in one sitting – she’s one of my favourite contemporary writers. Heart the Lover is a beautiful evocation of love, friendship and loss, told with great tenderness and verve. I also loved Made- leine Thien’s glorious The Book of Records. The novel brings together the unlikely constellation of the 8th-century Chinese poet Du Fu, the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the 20th- century German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Ahrendt. It’s clever, quirky and magnetic. My two favourite non-fiction books this year are Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? and Richard Holmes’s masterful Tennyson biography, The Boundless Deep. I think Macfarlane is England’s best nature writer, and once again his prose sings, its rhythm mirroring the subject matter. It’s liquid (or riverine) – surging, eddying and magnificently alive. The Boundless Deep reveals a new and compelling Tennyson, very different from the bearded Victorian we knew; and few can illuminate and interpret poetry with the insight, delight and skill that Holmes brings.”