Simon Baker
My favourite novel of 2007, which was omitted from an oddly undistinguished Booker longlist, was The Pesthouse by Jim Crace (Picador, £12.99), a dystopian image of a future, plague-ridden America which has regressed following an unspecified catastrophe. In the novel a young man and woman try to make their way out of a dying country in which all history, art and science have been lost. It is written beautifully, with conviction and feeling, and is the author's best work for several years. My non-fiction choice is God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens (Atlantic, £17.99), a book which, along with Richard Dawkins's 2006 The God Delusion (and, best of all, Bertrand Russell's 1927 masterpiece Why I am Not a Christian), stands as a clear-sighted, ele- gant and witty unravelling of a superstition adhered to long after Darwin put God out of a job. (Although if the rumours are true about God's 2008 riposte Now You're For It, You Blasted Atheists, I obviously retract my recommendation entirely.)
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