Best of 2011: Books

Booker-winner Julian Barnes made the list, but came in behind Henning Mankell with his final installment of the Wallander series. Don DeLillo's career-spanning stories The Angel Esmerelda and Jamil Ahmad's debut collection The Wandering Falcon both set the bar for shorts, and it was good to see Beryl Bainbridge's posthumously published The Girl With the Polka Dot Dress make the final cut too. 

The Critometer Top 10 (Fiction)

1. Henning Mankell - The Troubled Man (98%)

2. Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment (96%)

3. Ali Smith - There But For The (94%)

4. John Burnside - A Summer of Drowning (93%)

5. Edna O'Brien - Saints and Sinners (90%)

6. Don DeLillo - The Angel Esmeralda (90%)

7. Jamil Ahmad - The Wandering Falcon (90%)

8. Julian Barnes - The Sense of An Ending (89%)

9. Beryl Bainbridge - The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (88%)

10. Susan Hill - A Kind Man (87%)

= Yan Lianke - Dream of Ding Village (87%)

Staff Picks

Julian Barnes - The Sense of An Ending (89%)

'Finally a worthy Booker winner.'

David Lodge - A Man of Parts (71%)

'A particularly illuminating account of H.G. Wells' sex life'.

Helen Oyeyemi - Mr Fox (86%)

'Both upsetting and witty - all you want from a short novel.'

Jeffrey Eugenides - The Marriage Plot (80%)

'Makes semiotics accessible to all'.

David Vann - Caribou Island (80%)

'There's more to Alaska than Sarah Palin.'

...and finally

We expected better...

Annie Proulx - Bird Cloud (40%)