Observer Food Monthly's 20 food books of the year

Christmas Cookbooks. Photograph: Katherine Rose for Observer Food Monthly

Proper Pub Food by Tom Kerridge
(Absolute Press, £20)

Crowned king of the Best Restaurant in the UK, with a hit BBC series and astonishing sales of this accompanying book: 2013 has been good for Tom Kerridge. Packed with delicious, do-able recipes from a man who clearly loves creating, cooking and eating food, this is a book to read, to savour, to be inspired by. Big flavours and a big idea from the big man: much loved British pub classics with a simple yet sophisticated twist. As he says: "Chillaxo relaxo, feel good about whatever you prepare." The OFM book of the year from the cook of the year. Proper lush!

Eat, The Little Book of Fast Food by Nigel Slater
(4th Estate, £26)

Beautiful, small, packed like an explorer's journal, Eat, like all Nigel Slater's books, is as much artefact as cookbook, though, of course, it comes with "over 600 ideas for dinner". With recipes written almost as extended tweets, this feels the most "modern" book on the list: the food is comforting, clever, though with a feel for what we are eating now. A perfect stocking filler.

Levant: Recipes and Memories from the Middle East by Anissa Helou
(HarperCollins, £20)

The photos intended for this book were stored on a laptop that was then stolen – and it is a measure of the evocative beauty of the writing that they're not really missed as Anissa Helou guides us through the food and family stories of her home region and childhood. Perfectly crafted recipes – with the instruction you follow them carefully – from a gifted cook.

Simon Hopkinson Cooks by Simon Hopkinson
(Ebury, £25)

A new collection from many peoples' most trusted recipe writer, tied to his recent TV series but with added menus and deliciousness. It is constructed as a collection of meals – A Sunday Lunch, A Continental Supper – with trademark attention to detail. This is after all a man who peels the chickpeas for his hummus. Worth buying for the tomato curry recipe alone.

Traditional Recipes of Laos by Phia Sing
(Prospect, £20)

Originally published in 1981 by Alan Davidson's Prospect Books (Davidson's last posting as a career diplomat was as British ambassador to Laos before becoming a food writer and author of the Oxford Companion to Food). It contains 124 recipes from the late master chef at the royal palace plus an account of Lao cookery and ingredients by Davidson and his daughter Jennifer. An exquisite insight into a largely undiscovered food.

The Paris Gourmet by Trish Deseine
(Flammarion, £22.50)

An essential guide to the food of her adopted home town by Irish food writer and "eat-girl" Trish Deseine. A product of many years of enthusiastic research, it is all here: the places to eat, to shop, to stay, with recipes and insider tips by a talented writer who wears her depth of knowledge as lightly as a Pierre Hermé macaron. The perfect companion to a Eurostar ticket.

DOM: Rediscovering Brazilian Ingredients by Alex Atala
(Phaidon, £35)

Part mantra, part meditation, part manifesto, and perhaps the most important food book of the year. Not because you will be able (or maybe even want) to make meals from ants, or the fermenting fruits, roots, fish and fauna of the Amazon, but because he introduces his reader to a cooking style and culture that is intensely foreign and yet familiar. Any book that has a "treatise on caipirinha" deserves respect. Atala has arrived.

A Work in Progress: Journal, Recipe and Snapshots by René Redzepi
(Phaidon, £39.95)

Something for everyone's attention span: part Instagram fest, part recipe porn, part intimate diary. For food lovers, it is in the journal where the real joy is found: pages saturated with an intense love of cooking and insight to maintaining creativity, plus an occasional "pressed leaf" of meadowsweet or shepherd's purse. An intimate glimpse into the interesting head – and heart – of the most influential chef on the planet. Inspirational.

Mange Tout by Bruno Loubet
(Ebury, £25)

A book to cook and cook again by perhaps Britain's finest French chef. Packed with bistro classics retooled for modern palates, with occasional nods to the rest of the world ("lime pickle and yoghurt aubergines"). Rooted in Bordeaux, remade in Brisbane, Loubet brings enthusiasm, curiosity and knowledge – he was schooled at La Tante Claire and Le Manoir – to his recipes and it shows.

One Good Dish: the Pleasures of a Simple Meal by David Tanis
(Artisan, £17.99)

A deceptively simple idea from the writer of A Platter of Figs. As you would expect from an alumnus of the Chez Panisse school of cooking who keeps a place in Paris, there are flavours of Europe and California, with north African and Asian influences, gathered together with an understanding of what makes for a good plate of food. A cookbook in the real sense, one that deserves to be well-thumbed and kitchen-stained.

Master it, How to Cook Today by Rory O'Connell
(4th Estate, £25)

A series of private cookery lessons from Ballymaloe's pre-eminent teacher, the next best thing to a residential course. Unjustly overshadowed by his sister Darina Allen, O'Connell offers an elegant template to an understanding of good food. A grounding in everything you need to know, effortlessly explained. The man is revered by Claudia Roden – need we say more?

Restaurant Babylon by Imogen Edwards-Jones and Anonymous
(Bantam, £14.99)

How did it take the author of the gossipy Hotel, Fashion and Pop Babylon so long to get around to the restaurant business? Apparently, "only the names and some of the circumstances have been changed to protect the guilty". The OFM verdict? Very thoroughly researched.

A Greedy Man in a Hungry World by Jay Rayner
(William Collins, £12.99)

This is OFM's own Jay Rayner in iconoclastic mood – chapter headings include Supermarkets are not evil, Is small always beautiful? – challenging sacred tenets of ethical eating not for the sake of it, but to highlight the complexities of feeding a planet whose population will soon reach 9 billion.

Cooked by Michael Pollan
(Allen Lane, £20)

Pollan heads back to first principles, the processes – use of fire, water, the exposure to air that aids fermentation – all of them fundamental to the act of cooking itself. It's a serious read, quoting Nietzsche, exploring the food industry's relationship with feminism and spending quite a long time on the pro and cons of chopping onions. But ultimately it's a book about transformation: how turning base ingredients into food shapes the way we live.

The Green Kitchen by David Frenkiel and Luise Vindahl
(Hardie Grant, £25)

Inspired vegetarian dishes, developed from the authors' cult blog Green Kitchen Stories: the Decadent Beetroot and Chocolate Cake and the Beet Bourguignon are already classics. Beautifully designed and photographed (Frenkiel's day job is as an art director), this is vegetable-led eating as a pleasure, never, ever a chore.

No Time to Cook by Donna Hay
(Hardie Grant, £18.99)

Having children prompted Hay – an institution in Australia – to work out how to juggle deliciousness with being time-poor and retaining proper family meal times. No Time to Cook is the result, full of invention and variety, with recipes such as nori-wrapped wasabi salmon with mushy peas, Chinese chicken hotpot, and crispy fish with avocado-lemon salsa.

The Ethicurean Cookbook
(Ebury, £25)

Seasonality is key at Somerset's Ethicurean, whose trump card is its 100-year-old walled garden. Winner of an OFM award for Best Ethical Restaurant, the team's beautifully packaged first cookbook doubles as celebration of their surroundings, although you don't need to live in the Mendip Hills to cook a beautiful roasted tomato and liquorice basil soup, or salsify and Ogleshield gratin.

Tapas Revolution by Omar Allibhoy
(Ebury, £20)

Allibhoy has two restaurants of the same name – one in the Shepherd's Bush branch of Westfield, the other in Bluewater – both good enough to visit even if you're not on a shopping trip. The revolution he's talking about is actually more like fervent enthusiasm for simple, beautiful Spanish dishes: peas with serrano ham and eggs, cod with piquillo peppers, and tarta de Santiago.

Pitt Cue Co: The Cookbook by Tom Adams et al
(Mitchell Beazley, £20)

For the meat lover in your life. The team behind Pitt Cue are obsessed, rearing their own herd of fatty rare-breed pigs in Cornwall, crucial to the beautiful pulled pork that helped establish them as one of the best barbecue restaurants in the country. You'll find the recipe here, alongside clever fruit ketchups, great slaws, pickling and cocktails.

Under a Mackerel Sky by Rick Stein
(Ebury, £20)

Dealing with his father's suicide by heading for the outback, catching a freighter from New Zealand to New York, running a nightclub: Stein has plenty to talk about before he gets to fish restaurants in Padstow and becoming a fixture of food TV. His fine autobiography never shies away from that defining tragedy and how it rippled through his life, even revealing his sudden need, last summer, to swim to the Cornish cliffs where his dad died.

To order any of these books for a special price, go to guardianbookshop.co.uk/ofmcookbooks

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Fiction books of the year – review

Lionel Shriver: ‘exciting, infuriating and very funny’. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

One of the most exciting and infuriating books I have read this year is Big Brother by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins), a very funny, ultra-original tour de force about a woman's relationship with her obese older brother. Loosely based on Shriver's own "big brother" (he died in his 50s), it plays on the "what if?" themes Shriver covers so perfectly. What if you had a sibling in that condition? Is it wrong to intervene? Or wrong not to? It has an extraordinary narrative twist that had me throwing the book across the room in disbelief and reluctant admiration.

Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld (Doubleday), the "novel about psychic twins which is not really about psychic twins", is a must-read: it's the best dissection of a life spent among small children I've ever read. Equally original and daring is Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs (Virago), an extraordinarily brilliant book, fizzing with anger and wit, which reminded me of the energy of Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal (even though the ending made me very cross).

For an elegant meditation on war and its impact on family life, Elizabeth Day's lyrical Home Fires (Bloomsbury) comes highly recommended. Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings (Chatto & Windus) is a complex, cleverly interwoven analysis of the moment when the lives of six friends begin to unravel. Mark Lawson's The Deaths (Picador) is a must for anyone who hates their own obsession with Waitrose, a satire on Middle England where "every home is almost a village of its own".

Unexploded by Alison Macleod (Hamish Hamilton) is a quietly poetic deconstruction of a marriage imploding in Brighton during the second world war. Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright (Bloomsbury) is a madcap revision of Richard Coeur de Lion: think The Da Vinci Code for intellectuals. Blood & Beauty by Sarah Dunant (Virago) is a wonderful reimagining of the lives of the Borgias.

And, if you must have another doorstop in the year of the doorstop (after Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries won the Booker), then go for Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch (Little, Brown): a literary page-turner about love, betrayal and the art world. My own 500-pager of choice? Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things (Bloomsbury). Don't read anything about it (spoilers are too easy with this novel), just read it. In some ways 19th-century botanist Alma Whittaker sees all life has to offer. In other ways she gets trapped in a binding closet. Hugely enjoyable.

From the Costa shortlist, Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell (Headline) is a reliably great read, like all her books. This is the saga of an Irish family in London set in 1976. O'Farrell has a wonderful ear for dialogue and an eye for the irritating quirks of domestic life. Far less cheering but just as much of a page-turner is All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld (Jonathan Cape), a weird and wonderful novel about isolation, memory and a dog called Dog. It tells the story of a young woman trying to run away from a complicated past. She ends up on an unnamed island off the coast of Britain, tending sheep which keep mysteriously disappearing.

Of all the novels on the prize shortlists, I most loved two books which have been around for a while and are now in paperback. Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple (Phoenix House, shortlisted: Baileys prize), is a dazzling comic novel about a misunderstood architect. It's an eccentric and brilliantly accomplished story with a real screenplay quality to it. Just as funny (and just as American) is May We Be Forgiven by AM Homes (Granta, winner: Baileys prize), a hilariously clever analysis of two brothers. Of the two, AM Homes has more serious aims and her work just gets better. Great stocking fillers. Or get AM Homes's whole back catalogue for a more substantial gift.

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Psychology books of the year – review

Malcolm Gladwell examined how setbacks can aid the underdog in David & Goliath. Photograph: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./ Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBIS

Ever since its origins in the late 19th century, psychology has been a double discipline. There are the laboratory experimentalists who look "objectively" – from the outside – at behaviour, emotions, perception, or thought. Imaging technologies have turned them into neuroscientists who can now follow the routes of all this in the brain. Then there are the psychologists with a more literary or philosophical bent. They probe experience, listen to the inner human story, and may, like Freud, think that this, too, is scientific, even therapeutic – arguably more so than any fashionable diagnostic classifications. This year the most interesting books have come from the latter camp.

Darian Leader's Strictly Bipolar (Penguin) is a passionate attack on the rise of bipolarity as a diagnostic category. Big Pharma's mood-stabilisers have meant that diagnoses have gone up by 4,000%, while pop-cultural evocations have bred unconscious imitation. What is taking place, he argues, is a shoehorning of a complexity of experience into a sloppy paradigm defined only by highs and lows.

Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz's The Examined Life (Chatto & Windus) is a finely honed rendition in some 30 vignettes of what passes in his consulting room. There's 21-year-old Matt, reckless in his behaviour, who can't seem to feel his own emotions; Amanda, who imagines terrorists in her flat; Graham, who bores for England. The always surprising "whys" of all this, teased out in the analytic hour, may be individual but they implicate us all.

Doubling as a literary academic and a psychoanalyst, Josh Cohen is well poised to engage in acts of interpretation – of texts, patients, the culture as well as himself. In The Private Life (Granta), he examines some of the tensions in our current snooping- and celebrity-obsessed world, where privacy is in danger of becoming a dirty word. At the same time he journeys into that cloudy terrain of the unconscious to probe the uncanny stranger within, that ultimate guarantor of privacy.

Any list of the psychological best has to include a new volume from Adam Phillips. One Way and Another (Hamish Hamilton), with a brilliant introduction from John Banville, brings new essays together with some selected old ones, to reflect on narcissism, obstacles, compromise, tickling, being bored and more. It doesn't really matter what Phillips puts his mind and prose to. To use Virginia Woolf's words on the essay, he can always "sting us awake and fix us in a trance, which is not sleep but rather an intensification of life".

Naoki Higashida's The Reason I Jump (Sceptre) is an extraordinary account of how autism feels from the inside, written by a 13-year-old boy. The book, in one way, underlines the theme of Malcolm Gladwell's David & Goliath (Allen Lane), an energetic, counterintuitive exploration of why (and how) underdogs succeed, and how disabilities, traumatic childhoods, and other seeming lacks can sometimes trump power.

The year also brought us the excellent Life Lessons series (Pan Macmillan). These popularising pocket volumes highlight quotations from the great thinkers of the past and interweave them with interpretation that brings them closer to our own times. Brett Kahr's Freud is both elegant and useful in this respect, as is John Armstrong's Nietzsche.

Finally, neuroscientist Giovanni Frazzetto's How We Feel (Doubleday) perhaps signals a trend towards a less imperialist neuroscience. He takes us on a journey through anger, guilt, anxiety, grief, joy, love – and underlines just how far science can now go in its explanations before we have to call in those other kinds of explorers of the inner life, the poets and the philosophers.

Lisa Appignanesi's King's College debate series can be seen at thebrainandthemind.co.uk. Her next book, Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness, is published next April by Virago

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Kill Your Darlings – review | Mark Kermode

Kill Your DarlingsProduction year: 2013Country: USACert (UK): 15Runtime: 104 minsDirectors: John KrokidasCast: Ben Foster, Dane DeHaan, Daniel Radcliffe, Elizabeth Olsen, Jack Huston, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michael C HallMore on this filmLink to video: Kill Your Darlings stars Daniel Radcliffe and Dane DeHaan

"We're sending millions to fight fascists in Europe, but they're here – metre and rhyme!" Hmm. The fact that battles fought in the library of Columbia University appear unavoidably peripheral when the second world war is raging elsewhere is just one of the problems facing this earnest, enthusiastic, but oddly irksome take on the birth of the Beat poets, a group already overserved by swooning cinematic tribute. Daniel Radcliffe makes a surprisingly strong fist of his central role as a young Allen Ginsberg, the nebbishy son of a poet who arrives at university with a head full of uptight anxieties, which are promptly undone by his infatuation with Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan, looking more like a young Leonardo than DiCaprio himself) and his first heady whiff of drink and drugs. Carr is a boisterous irritant who introduces Ginsberg to the equally youthful Kerouac and Burroughs (the latter first seen grimly inhaling nitrous oxide in a bathtub) while heading inexorably towards a grisly appointment with love and death. But before that, he must leap on to desks, tear up books, and shriek drunkenly about the "new vision" in the manner of one who needs a good slap, but instead finds adoration and indulgence wherever he looks. Despite all the talk about radical new forms of art, director John Krokidas falls back frequently on the traditional cliches – the tearaway artists frantically typing to jazz, or scribbling through cigarette smoke in cafes and clubs, the evidence of their emergent genius remaining all but impossible to dramatise. There's an admirable candour to the film's investigation of its subjects' sexuality, and a clear love of the material which seeps through the screen even as the characters alienate and annoy – one another, and us. Ultimately, it's oddly conservative fare; well played, handsomely mounted, but as inert as the books that its protagonists blithely hurl from the shelves.

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Young Bond series by Charlie Higson - review

I love all of Charlie Higson's other books like The Dead and The Enemy, which my dad introduced me to as he spoke to him on Twitter and got me a signed photo, so straight away I knew I would like this series of books. And I must say I did. They were packed to the brim with action, violence, strategy and gruesome deaths - all of which I love and really enjoy reading and writing.

James Bond is the main character in all the stories. There are five in the series starting with Silverfin, which is packed with secrets and strange eels, he also meets his soon to be life long friend, Red Kelly.

Then there is Double or Die where there is a cryptic message sent to Eton and James' friend crashes his car.

Next there is Blood Fever, which by the way if you don't like mosquitos you better not read this book. From fake gold to a mysterious girl going missing.

After that there is Hurricane Gold where kidnap and stealing is flowing out of the book along with a human rat run.

And finally there is By Royal Command, full of Russians, Germans, the Hitler Youth and mad scientists. What more could you want?

There around 350 pages long each. I recommend these to 11 or 12+ as there is quite a lot of violence and gore, and also some swearing. However they are some of the best books I have ever read. And I have read a lot. Charlie Higson has also written The Enemy series, which I recommend not to you but to you older siblings or your dad.

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Weekend picks for book lovers

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Spend your weekend reading about a biography of Norman Rockwell.

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What should you read this weekend? USA TODAY's picks for book lovers include a new biography of American painter Norman Rockwell, and essays about reading by Britain's Nick Hornby.

American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 441 pp.; non-fiction

Why is it that so many great artists were so screwed up? Even Norman Rockwell. Norman Rockwell, for pete's sake!

He is the cornball king, the artist as fantasy storyteller, the artist of Americana. But was he a "real" artist? Art-world types argue about it to this day. Even Rockwell (especially Rockwell) dithered, dismissing himself as a mere illustrator while secretly longing to be taken seriously as an ARTIST, all caps.

As his new biographer, Deborah Solomon, makes clear, Rockwell was more than an illustrator. He painted arresting images that move us, inspire us, amuse us, that tell us something about ourselves and our times.

But his full story is often surprising.

If you thought you knew what Rockwell was all about, well, Solomon suggests maybe not. Did you know that he spent years in therapy with a leading psychiatrist — Erik Erikson — decades before seeing a shrink was routine?

USA TODAY says ***½ out of four. "Highly readable, illuminating."

Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books; by Nick Hornby, McSweeney's, 464 pp.; non-fiction

Collects Hornby's "Stuff I've Been Reading" columns from Believer magazine.

USA TODAY says ***1/2. "Ten Years in the Tub is something to soak in and savor."

Stella Bain; by Anita Shreve, Little, Brown, 261 pp.; fiction

In Marne, France, in 1916, a woman drifts into consciousness on a battlefield hospital cot and realizes "that she does not know her own name."

USA TODAY says ***. "An intriguing character study that delivers compelling mystery without melodrama."

Double Down: Game Change 2012 by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann; Penguin Press, 482 pp.; non-fiction

The authors' sequel to the best seller Game Change looks back at the last presidential election.

USA TODAY says *** ½ out of four. "Heilemann and Halperin's ability to get behind the scenes and into Obama's head makes Double Down nearly as riveting as their first work about the 2008 election."

Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith; Simon & Schuster, 304 pp.; fiction

Investigator Arkady Renko is on the case after an investigative journalist named Tatiana Petrovna – inspired by the real-life Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya – dies after falling from the balcony of her abandoned apartment building.

USA TODAY says *** ½ out of four. "Smith's writing conveys irony, social commentary and wry humor in whippet-sleek phrasing."

Contributing reviewers: Maria Puente, Korina Lopez, Jocelyn McClurg, Aamer Madhani, Patty Rhule

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The essential Nelson Mandela reading list

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Remember Nelson Mandela with these six books.

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Nelson Mandela is remembered as an iconic activist, an empathetic leader and the public face of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Learn more about the former South African president, who died Dec. 5 at 95, with these books by and about him, written for readers of all ages:

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela
By Nelson Mandela
"No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion," Mandela writes in this comprehensive autobiography, published in 1994. Beginning with his early life, the memoir recounts Mandela's rise to leadership and his thoughts during his 27-year imprisonment, building up to his election as president of South Africa in 1994. The basis for the current movie, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.

Conversations with Myself
By Nelson Mandela (paperback edition has a foreword by Barack Obama)
Mandela opened his personal archive for this collection of letters, prison diaries, calendars and transcripts from more than 50 hours of recordings, which gives readers a raw, unfiltered glimpse into his mind-set. The book, published in 2010, also contains unfinished passages Mandela wrote in the process of putting together Long Walk to Freedom.

Nelson Mandela: A Life in Photographs
By David Elliot Cohen, text by John D. Battersby
Nelson Mandela was a man of words, but photos of his struggle are often just as moving. This 2009 coffee-table book mixes rarely seen images and more iconic photos that encapsulate Mandela's career – from activist, to prisoner, to Nobel Peace Prize-winning symbol of compassion – and pairs them with text by South African journalist Battersby.

Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation
By John Carlin
"Sports has the power to change the world," Mandela once said. Carlin's book, which was adapted into the 2009 movie Invictus (directed by Clint Eastwood, starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon), tells the story of how the leader used the finals of the 1995 rugby World Cup to help mend a racially divided South Africa.

Long Walk to Freedom (for children)
Abridged by Chris van Wyk, illustrated by Paddy Bouma
Paired with vibrant illustrations, van Wyk adapts Mandela's best-selling autobiography for the younger set, covering his childhood, education and the forces that led him into the public sphere as a political activist.

Nelson Mandela (for children)
By Kadir Nelson
Award-winning artist and author Kadir Nelson brings his powerful, evocative style in this illustrated picture-book biography of the global icon.

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