D. J. Taylor
Jane Stevenson's Edward Bun-a: TwentiethCentury Eye (Cape, £30) was one of the best biographies I have read in years. Not only does Stevenson get to grips with the complexities of Burra's life, personality and social circle — none of them readily decipherable — she also raises a host of questions about the nature of art and artists which books about painters sometimes forget to consider. The book is a triumph, and just the sort of study which Burra's reputation needed.
I also liked Paul Willetts's immensely well-researched evocation of late 1940s London gangland, North Soho 999 (Dewi Lewis Publishing, £9.99). My novel of the year, inexplicably — well, no, all too explicably — absent from the Man Booker lists was Adam Thorpe's Between Each Breath (Cape, £12.99), a tense, billowing account of an avant-garde composer whose life starts to disintegrate in the wake of a fling with an Estonian violinist, and, with its deftly written prose, offering welcome reminders of Thorpe's alternative career as a poet.
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