Francis King
In a year when at least half-a-dozen well- known novelists fell far below their usual form (nonetheless one of them, amazingly, managed to enter the Booker short-list), for me the best fiction of the year came from an unknown writer, Brian O'Doherty, and a writer still too little known, Matthew Kneale. O'Doherty's The Deposition of Father McGreevy (Arcadia, £11.99) is a remarkable little tour de force, eerie and eventually shocking, which makes one won- der why, now in his seventies, this writer, so much in command of his medium, should have produced only one other novel. Kneale's historical novel, English Passen- gers (Hamish Hamilton £15.99), set in Tas- mania in which the recent settlers are cruelly intent on 'civilising' the aborigines, is a thrilling exercise in narrative complexi- ty on a Dickensian scale. My non-fiction choice is Jeffrey Myers's succinct, taut, highly perceptive Orwell (Norton, £19.95), the best biography on the subject to date.
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