Unputdownable: The books you wish you had been given for Christmas

Country Life's reviewers name the books that have most absorbed them this year, with topics ranging from grey partridges to cricket, rock music, wolves and medieval history, plus the most diverting fiction.

Jamie Blackett

It has been a good year for botanical history books. The Tree Hunters by Thomas Pakenham chronicles the adventures of David Douglas and other explorers who discovered the trees that enrich our landscape. Where the Old Roses Grow by Janelle McCulloch sheds light on the passion of Vita Sackville-West and others who made our rose gardens what they are today. Also, Matthew Evans’s fascinating book Milk changes the way we think about every mammal’s chief superfood and it is great that Charles Blanning has returned to the fray with another pacey thriller about greyhound sports, Electric Rabbit.

Henrietta Bredin

Despite the odd typo (how did that happen in such a beautifully produced book?), Nigel Slater’s gentle ruminations on seaweed floating in broth, scorch marks on a chopping board and listening for the ‘low soft crackle’ of a perfectly cooked sponge cake add up to A Thousand Feasts of deeply pleasurable reading. I was surprised to find myself relishing a novel about American girl boxers: Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot slipped past my guard with its vivid descriptions of obsessive competition.

Michael Billington

I learned most this year from Hitler’s People by Richard J. Evans. Sub-titled The Faces of the Third Reich, it offers compelling pen portraits of 22 leaders of the Nazi movement. The author’s conclusion is that they were not psychopaths, but, by and large, members of the bourgeoisie traumatised by Germany’s humiliation in the First World War. For light relief, I turned to Rupert Everett’s witty collection of short-stories, The American No, which shows he is as magnetic a writer as an actor.

Mark Cocker

Jeff Ollerton’s Birds & Flowers is a deep-time dive into the weird, wonderful, but always important inter-relationships between these two organisms. The author distils a mountain of diverse materials into an engaging personal story. Hunt for the Shadow Wolf by Derek Gow is a tour de force by a genuine maverick of British Nature. He blends history, folklore or plain make-believe with the biological science and controversial environmental philosophy entailed in wolf reintroductions, yet it’s leavened by laugh-out-loud humour. The result is profound and fair minded.

Tiffany Daneff

Sue Prideaux’s biography of Paul Gauguin, Wild Thing, stays in the mind and is one of those books you keep recommending to friends, not because they are art enthusiasts, but because it is so engrossing. The author had access to rediscovered memoirs and reveals the falsehood in recent claims of misogyny and racism. Her portrait uncovers a man of huge intelligence and integrity whose obstinate pursuit of truth changed the way we see the world — and led to his untimely death.

Matthew Dennison

Anne Somerset’s masterly Queen Victoria and her Prime Ministers captures Victoria’s voice, measured and, as she once described Gladstone, ‘so very arrogant, tyrannical and obstinate’. Even Disraeli found her ‘very wilful and whimsical’. Harriet Baker’s subject in her absorbing Rural Hours is Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf and Rosamond Lehmann’s engagement with country life — impossible to ask for more. And Country Life readers will surely delight in Faber’s 70th-anniversary reissue of Lucy M. Boston’s atmospheric The Children of Green Knowe.

Mark Diacono

James Kaplan’s 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans & The Lost Empire of Cool is a brilliant biography of sorts, of three musical geniuses whose 1959 coming together created the seminal jazz album Kind Of Blue. Restaurant critic and broadcaster Jay Rayner’s first cookbook, Nights Out At Home, shares his interpretation of the restaurant dishes that have stolen his heart (and stomach) — opinionated, funny and serious. Hope I Get Old Before I Die: Why rock stars never retire by David Hepworth charts how, starting with Live Aid, music changed and we/society changed with it — unputdownable.

Roderick Easdale

There is a tendency among some historians to overlook sporting pastimes in their narratives. In Echoing Greens, a well-researched study of cricket’s representation in art and literature, Brendan Cooper unravels a fascinating social history by depicting how English culture has veered markedly in its attitude to cricket. Once looked down upon as a diversion for country bumpkins, cricket came to be venerated as symbolising England at its finest.

Kate Green

‘This is not a memoir of a troubled soul hoping to be fixed by the road,’ says Oliver Smith in his prologue to On This Holy Island — what a relief! This is an interesting, modern take on the pilgrimage, incorporating Lindisfarne and Wembley. Petroc Trelawny adopts a similarly non-self-indulgent approach in Trelawny’s Cornwall and the result is extremely moving. You feel every step of David Nicholls’s tenderly funny novel You Are Here and Andrew O’Hagan’s ‘state-of-the-nation’ door stopper Caledonian Road was equally satisfying, right to the very last line.

John Lewis-Stempel

Giving your true love a partridge in a pear tree might be tricky, but there are two acceptable book substitutes to place under the tree. The Return of the Grey Partridge by Roger Morgan-Grenville and Edward Norfolk recounts the fascinating and persuasive story of the rehabilitation of the gamebird on the latter’s ducal South Downs estate. The paradox of saving Perdix perdix? Peppering is a game shoot, where, crucially, apex predators who feast on the bird are controlled. And Tarquin Millington-Drake’s gloriously glossy photo album, Living with Greys, is as captivating as the beloved bird itself.

The Return of the Grey Partridge by Roger Morgan-Grenville and Edward Norfolk has been very popular with our reviewers this year. Credit: Getty

Allan Mallinson

The super-heavyweight military-history book of the year is Jonathan Dimbleby’s Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won The War. The writer never loses control of the massive narrative, as well as spotlighting detail that brings home the utter brutality—peerless reportage in the highest Dimbleby family tradition. In Time and Tide: The Long, Long Life of Landscape, Prof Fiona Stafford leaves her ‘dreaming spires’ (again) to get down among the weeds, shorelines, fens and forests on the theme of transformation (and continuity), taking with her some of the prose and poetry she teaches — a book of delights. Andrew Ziminski’s Church Going: A Stonemason’s Guide to the Churches of the British Isles would be in Larkin’s pocket were the poet still alive, which is recommendation enough.

Mary Miers

Paul Gough’s Gilbert Spencer: The Life and Work of a Very English Artist stands out among the biographies for its fresh material about a well-covered period in British art, beautifully written and illustrated and revelatory about a painter who has too long been overshadowed. It is excellent on the complex relationship between the Spencer brothers and how Gilbert emerged from the shadow of the more famous Stanley to become a highly regarded observer of rural life.

Timothy Mowl

The standouts were David Matless’s sharply critical England’s Green, about environmental change, Michael Gilson’s Behind the Privet Hedge, an analysis of the suburban garden in our national psyche, Adrian Tinniswood’s sardonically witty The Power and the Glory and its country-house eccentrics and Alison Weir’s Mary I: Queen of Sorrows, which offered a more nuanced view of Bloody Mary and her relationship with Elizabeth I. I was absorbed in the gently evolving love story of two singletons walking in David Nicholls’s You Are Here and got my crime hit in the confused identities of Peter James’s One Of Us Is Dead.

Carla Passino

On May 29, 1453, the Ottoman army, led by Sultan Mehmed II, breached the walls of Constantinople and swarmed into the city. Ever since, Europeans have painted the ‘Turks’ as infidels, crumbling and morally corrupt. Diana Darke vigorously challenges this perception (and other historical myths) in The Ottomans: A Cultural Legacy, newly published in paperback. She highlights the often forgotten architectural, artistic and scientific successes achieved by the Ottomans and considers how they were rooted in a social structure that was, in certain respects, groundbreaking for the time.

Gavin Plumley

It was wonderful to return to an old chum with Armistead Maupin’s Mona of the Manor — an echo of former glories, perhaps, but given a rural spin. Separation of city and country also informed Miranda Pountney’s wow of a debut novel How To Be Somebody Else. Homecoming was likewise a crucial vein in Trelawny’s Cornwall, by one of the BBC’s finest voices. Petroc Trelawny applied his sense of place to a poignant prose poem about the land he loves.

Octavia Pollock

Roger Morgan-Grenville and Edward Norfolk’s The Return of the Grey Partridge gives hope to anyone worried about wildlife and farming: the rare gamebird is flourishing on a viable farm in harmony with countless other species that are struggling elsewhere. The questions of predator control and shooting are sensitively addressed in a book that should be on every desk at Defra. Summer at Tangents, hopefully the first of many P. G. Wodehouse-esque tales of golf and village life from Roderick Easdale, is effervescently amusing and, for gripping drama based on startling truth, you can’t beat Robert Harris’s latest, Precipice.

Alan Powers

A saying from the Book of Proverbs was inscribed on an ivory plaque at the jeweller Wartski’s: ‘It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer. But when he has gone his way, he boasteth.’ Dealing in all kinds of art is influenced by the solid things scholars talk about, but, without the rogues and their boasting, it would miss all the excitement. In Rogues and Scholars: Boom and Bust in the London Art Market 1945–2000, James Stourton, former chairman of Sotheby’s UK, has written a riot of a book that carries its detailed knowledge along in a tide of information with irresistible asides about personalities stranger than fiction.

David Profumo

I greatly enjoyed two detective novels — not a genre I often read. From the witty, perceptive Kate Atkinson came Death at the Sign of the Rook, the sixth to feature her beguiling sleuth Jackson Brodie, in a country-house saga. The quite dissimilar Irish policeman St John Strafford is the versatile Irish writer John Banville’s protagonist in The Drowned, a darkly compelling procedural that is unnervingly astute about human foibles. Julian Pullan has self-published a serious, well-researched and lively volume about salmon fishing: Right Place, Right Time would be ideal for any angler’s stocking policy.

Michael Prodger

Roger Crowley’s Spice is a compelling and fact-rich narrative of how cloves, nutmeg, pepper and the rest drove global trade and exploration. The Roads to Rome by Catherine Fletcher is also about journeys, those of the travellers on the 100,000km network of metalled roads that fanned out from ancient Rome and which rang to the tramp of legionaries and pilgrims, Grand Tourists and poets.

Charles Quest-Ritson

Two excellent new books. For gentlemanly gardeners, Thomas Pakenham’s The Tree Hunters chronicles 300 years of plant hunters and their aristocratic patrons who loved making arboreta. For general readers of a curious temperament, Patrick Joyce’s Remembering Peasants is a fascinating analysis of how the pre-industrial peasant classes lived or survived, worked or died, with an emphasis on Poland, Italy and poor, oppressed Ireland.

David Robinson

It’s been a bumper year for the medievalist. James Barnaby’s Religious Conflict at Canterbury Cathedral in the Late Twelfth Century and Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made Medieval France set high standards. Alice Roberts offers more forensic insight in her Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond. Addictive page-turners, written by two superb historians with a gift for storytelling, came with a new biography of Henry V by Dan Jones and Helen Castor’s The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV. I was mightily impressed with The Monastic World: A 1,200-Year History, by Andrew Jotischky, but for light relief you cannot beat a Felix Francis racing novel: Syndicate is a crackerjack.

Agnes Stamp

What I Ate in One Year by Stanley Tucci is a funny, often poignant reflection on life, death and grief through the medium of food. Simon Schama meets ‘Horrible Histories’ in David Mitchell’s paperback romp through England’s monarchs in his hilarious Unruly: A History of England’s Kings and Queens. A treat for equestrians is my colleague Kate Green’s Badminton Horse Trials at 75. Superbly illustrated (mostly by the brilliant Kit Houghton), it celebrates the champions (two-legged and four) that have tackled eventing’s ultimate test. Finally, Gavin Stamp’s Interwar, my late father’s swansong, edited posthumously by his widow, Dr Rosemary Hill, is the definitive history of British architecture between the First World War and the Blitz.

Jack Watkins

Bill Bowes — balding, bespectacled, ungainly — was an unlikely fast bowler; Dudley Carew thought he ambled to the crease ‘like a cart horse indignant at being prodded out of its normal stride’. Yet, the Yorkshireman played 15 times for England, including on the infamous Bodyline tour of 1932–33, and became a respected journalist. Jeremy Lonsdale’s nicely judged An Unusual Celebrity: The Many Cricketing Lives of Bill Bowes is a window on a time when Test and county cricket, so despised by today’s administrators, was supreme.