Biographies of the year

Italian poet and writer Gabriele D'Annunzio, subject of Lucy Hughes-Hallett's prize-winning biography The Pike. Photograph: Mondadori/Mondadori via Getty Images

Three kinds of biographies make ideal Christmas presents – the political or theatrical legend; the literary restoration; and the maverick life. This year has turned out to be a bumper one in all three of these categories. Despite widespread predictions about the death of biography, lives are back with a vengeance.

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not For Turning (Vol 1)by Charles Moore Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book

As momentous as the passing of Lady Thatcher was Penguin's publication, through its Allen Lane imprint, of the first volume of Charles Moore's "authorised biography" (some 860 pages) within days of her death. Margaret Thatcher: Not for Turning takes her life story up to victory in the Falklands in 1982. Moore has made an exemplary job of providing a lucid, sometimes thrilling, political analysis of Thatcherism, an oddly British fudge of theory and pragmatism.

Thatcher's indifference to the unexamined life gave Moore extraordinary freedom, and he's made the most of it. Few authorised biographies are as searching and candid. If, like many of us, you are one of Thatcher's children, and think you know it all already, you would be wrong. This is a biography full of revelations, large and small.

Moore is especially good on the transition from Margaret Roberts to the wife of Denis Thatcher ("not a very attractive creature … " she wrote, "but quite rich"). His account of the disasters of Thatcher's first administration, up to the leadership crisis of 1981, is superb. And, of course, he can hardly fail with Thatcher's conduct in the Falklands war, the event that transformed her into the Iron Lady and symbol of Britishness. Moore is an entertaining writer. Not many prime ministerial biographers would pay tribute, as he does, to his hunter, Tommy, an animal who "jumps everything" and is "essential to my sanity".

In another year, Philip Ziegler's Olivier, (MacLehose), the life of another British giant, might have excited more interest. There is plenty of theatrical gossip, some useful accounts of the starry high points, but (compared to Moore) Ziegler has not really got under the skin of his subject. Ziegler, a distinguished royal biographer, is less at home with greasepaint and the footlights, and it shows.

More entertaining is William Cook's account of the intertwined lives of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, One Leg Too Few (Preface), which might provide that impossible relative's seasonal gift.

From the political biography of the year to the literary life that everyone's talking about – Penelope Fitzgerald by Hermione Lee (Chatto) – is a short step. "Mops" Fitzgerald (nee Knox) and Margaret Roberts were near contemporaries. But Fitzgerald's life was, until her 60s, a succession of failures, a haunting tale of blighted hope, personal tragedy and rare, late fulfilment. Together with a brilliant portrait of a complicated, elusive woman, Hermione Lee's biography also holds up a mirror to the 20th century, casting memorable light on the literary world in the age of ink and paper.

A more conventional literary life is Andrew Lycett's biography of Wilkie Collins (Hutchinson), author of The Moonstone, the friend and contemporary of Charles Dickens. Credited with pioneering the detective novel, Collins has attracted many biographers over the years, drawn to his extraordinary life and work in the hope of levering open a new understanding of the Victorian psyche. Lycett, who has written excellent lives of Ian Fleming and Conan Doyle, is well-equipped to do this, but his subject gets away from him. Wilkie Collins certainly lived "a life of sensation" (Lycett's claim), but he remains the Macavity of literary Victorians, a mystery cat.

Among the bizarre and sensational, it would be hard to beat Gabriele D'Annunzio. The Pike by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Fourth Estate), a life of the Italian poet and self-promoter, is the acclaimed winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson prize for nonfiction, and a biographical tour de force.

Even by Italian standards, D'Annunzio is stranger than fiction. Bestselling poet, aviator, showman, war hero, libertine and fantasist, he was the proto-fascist manifestation of that strand in Italian life that flourished under Mussolini (whom D'Annunzio despised). But he was also a European phenomenon. James Joyce compared him to Flaubert, Kipling and Tolstoy. Hughes-Hallett has previously written about heroes and supermen. D'Annunzio is the subject for which she has long been in rehearsal.

Small, self-obsessed, with very bad teeth, D'Annunzio is not an appealing character. His treatment of those close to him was shocking. His ideas were ridiculous. Hughes-Hallett justifies her interest by claiming, perhaps correctly, that D'Annunzio's story illustrates how the glorious classical past can lead to the jackboot and the fascist manganello.

D'Annunzio was also obsessed with sex and with the smell, taste, texture, and sensation of his lovers' bodies. His letters are replete with detail which Hughes-Hallett, who revels in sensuality, has mined voraciously. The Pike, an off-putting title, is nevertheless a rich, voluptuous treat. She rightly says her subject is "half-beast, half-god". Confronted with an unreliable subject she has adopted a method more common to novels than biographies. The result is a triumph, the biography of the year.

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The Hunger Games: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

"If we burn you burn with us."

Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice. But she's still not safe. A revolution is unfolding, and everyone, it seems, has had a hand in the carefully laid plans - everyone except Katniss.

And yet she must play the most vital part in the final battle. Katniss must become their Mockingjay - the symbol of the rebellion - no matter what the personal cost.

I have loved and truly enjoyed every single book in the Hunger Games trilogy and I think it really develops as a story. The first time I read Mockingjay I found it very confusing and hard to understand... but reading it again I properly understood it and it made a great book; it was much better the second time round, I thought. There should be more books like the Hunger Games, it's a truly amazing trilogy! It's sad and depressing but at the same time a really enjoyable book. I think I could read them again. Not any time soon but I think they're the kind of books you can read over and over and over and they never get dull.

It's great fun to re-read them again and re-live all the moments of the Hunger Games. I can imagine it getting as big as Twilight, if it isn't already there. It's sad that it's only a trilogy and there aren't going to be any more. I was compelled the whole way through it, although there were moments I thought I was just going to stop reading it because I had already read it and I have so many other books; I then picked up the book and it was like I wasn't in my own living room anymore - I was wherever Katniss Everden was, I was Katniss Everdeen, The Girl On Fire.

You get so caught up in reading the Hunger Games it's like the real world doesn't exist anymore, the Hunger Games is the real world. And it's very rare to get a book that actually does that. It's very rare to get so lost in a book to the extent that you feel you are actually the one experiencing everything that you're reading. And that's what I love most about the Hunger Games.

I think anyone who hasn't already read them should definitely read them, and anyone who has read them and enjoyed them should definitely think about re-reading them because the experience is just as satisfying the second time round. I would rate the entire trilogy 5 stars!! Without a doubt.

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History books of the year – review

Simon Schama: 'learning, wisdom and humanity'. Photograph: Tim Kirby/ BBC/ Oxford Film and Television

Alfred Hitchcock defined drama as life with the boring bits left out. These days publishers are trying to produce history books with the boring bits left out. The public still wants to read history, goes the thinking, but no longer has the time or stamina to wade through doorstops – huge books on big subjects that take weeks to digest. But reduce it to serviceable chunks – single out a year, a moment, or an individual – and they'll go for it.

It's easy to be snobby about this: the American historian Douglas Brinkley has dismissed One Summer: America 1927 (Doubleday), Bill Bryson's bestselling romp through the year that Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Sacco and Vanzetti were finally executed as "remedial pseudo-history", composed of "stray anecdotes", "cliches and hokey summations", even while saying "America needs more accessible, easy-to-read history". I don't think Bryson and Messrs Doubleday will be missing sleep over that.

Actually, the publishers are right: the market has changed. The difficulty is that books produced to a formula aren't necessarily easier to write than other kinds; and they don't always work. In 100 Days to Victory: How the Great War Was Fought and Won (Hodder), Saul David reconfigured a familiar narrative into 100 beautifully sharp snapshots and made a huge subject accessible to a broad readership within a reasonable compass; but the exercise left an unsatisfied feeling – a taster menu, not a proper meal.

Two recent books on the Holocaust were also written to a formula. The detective story approach worked well in Thomas Harding's Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz (Heinemann) but in Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Chatto) the needs of narrative forced Wendy Lower to tell an important story hastily and through a few individuals. It would have worked better at greater length.

These things are subjective, of course. As a general reader I'm quite happy to let others guide me through the labyrinth. And good writers develop their own formulae. Graham Robb's preferred method of travel is the bicycle and 15,000 miles in the saddle lie behind The Ancient Paths: Discovering the Lost Map of Celtic Europe (Picador), an extraordinary book that uses digital mapping and modern software to revive the old thesis about ley lines and straight tracks in pre-Roman Gaul and Britain – Asterix as road engineer. The sources on the period are so limited that it is hard to know whether Robb's speculations about the druids are revolutionary or crackpot. The Romans, by contrast, left a heavier footprint, even in benighted Britannia, and in Under a Different Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain (Cape) Charlotte Higgins set out in a camper van to explore and reflect on the remains – an elegant addition to a long antiquarian tradition.

In Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia's History (Allen Lane) Catherine Merridale approached a huge subject via a single building, the Kremlin, that gloomy tyrants' lair in the centre of Moscow. Conspiracy and claustrophobia under the onion domes is not normally my thing – I loathe Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible – but here the sharp intelligence and atmospheric prose kept me absorbed.

The truth is, though, that our best historians, being touched with madness, transcend publishers' formulas and assume that readers will happily spend weeks sharing their obsessions. This year several of the big beasts of the jungle were strutting their stuff.

Max Hastings easily saw off his rivals in the battle for the first world war centenary market, which took place a year ahead of schedule. His Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 (HarperCollins) was old-fashioned military history, shamefully readable and spiced up with jibes at the defence policy of Blair and Brown. There were more insights into current debacles in William Dalrymple's Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (Bloomsbury), another book unafraid to retell an old story with enormous gusto, but greatly enhanced by Dalrymple's mastery of Afghan sources and his passion for the subject.

I haven't always been Simon Schama's greatest fan: he can be glib and self-satisfied. But The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000BCE-1492CE (Bodley Head) found him at his best. Perhaps because he was on home territory, the mannerisms were under control and the extraordinary breadth of Schama's learning, wisdom and humanity was allowed to shine through.

Rana Mitter's China's War With Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival (Allen Lane), a book that has long cried out to be written, provides Anglo-Saxon readers with an authoritative account of one of the cornerstones of the second world war. But why should we welcome Richard Overy's The Bombing War: Europe 1939-45 (Allen Lane), a veritable doorstop of a book, when there is already a vast library on the subject? Because this topic has reached the point where it needs to be pulled together and Overy, by combining Herculean archival work with lucid writing, has done just that. If not the last word on the subject, the last for while. David Caute's Isaac & Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (Yale) used a minor spat between two refugee Jewish intellectuals, Isaac Deutscher and Isaiah Berlin, as the pretext for a fascinating tour of the cultural battleground of the cold war.

Not many laughs here. So, for my lighter nominations I'll go for O My America! Second Acts in a New World (Jonathan Cape), Sara Wheeler's entertaining account of women who left these shores for the United States in the 19th century, and The Author's XI: A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon (Bloomsbury), a delightful homage to the days when the likes of PG Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle and JM Barrie put willow on leather. It'll make the perfect antidote to grim news from Australia.

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Fatima Bhutto: 'Pakistan produces women with extraordinary spirit'

Fatima Bhutto, photographed in London by Sophia Evans for the Observer.

The author Fatima Bhutto has had a lifetime of being asked about her surname. She comes from the "cursed" political dynasty in Pakistan: her grandfather, the former president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed in 1979, three years before Fatima was born; her father, the radical politician Murtaza Bhutto, was shot dead by police in 1996; and her aunt, the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, was killed in a bombing in 2007.

Not surprisingly, Fatima has no desire to enter the political arena. "No," she says, "I always wanted to be a writer. I was very lucky to have a father who was a feminist and as a child I was always told I could do what I wanted to do and I loved to write. I'm doing my dream job! There's no way I'd surrender it."

At 31, Bhutto has just published her first novel. The Shadow of the Crescent Moon is set over the course of one morning in a small town in Pakistan's tribal regions, close to the border with Afghanistan. It follows the story of three brothers who are forced to make difficult choices against a backdrop of continuous war. But the heart of the novel, for Bhutto, lies in the female characters.

"In my mind, it was this story of three brothers and then these women took over, just like Pakistani women do," she laughs. "There is such a singular view of Pakistani women and it's such a shallow and very unfair view. There's an impression of how differently we do things, how downtrodden we are. Millions of women suffer but they [also] struggle, they resist and fight. It's a harsh country, an unfair country, but it also produces women with extraordinary spirit."

In fact, it produces women such as Bhutto herself, who lost her father when she was 14. She was convinced that her aunt, who had fallen out with Murtaza and was prime minister at the time, was responsible. Bhutto wrote about Pakistani state-sanctioned violence in her memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword, which was published in 2010 and became a bestseller in her home country.

When I ask how she feels about her aunt's legacy now, she politely declines to expand. "The nice thing about doing fiction is that I don't feel I have to answer all these heavy political questions."

Could Benazir have done more to empower ordinary women when she was in power? "The only safety that women have in this country is with each other," Bhutto replies. "They've never had it from power."

At one point in her novel, Bhutto writes of a character feeling trapped by "the ghosts of history". Does she feel the same? "I don't think it's just me," she says. "This is a very young country – only 67 years old. With any country negotiating the future against a very turbulent past, you can't escape your heritage. Those ghosts of history are everywhere."

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Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher - review

Welcome to the mind of Hannah Baker. No… wait, she's dead. What happened? She took her life. Maybe not the cheery beginning you were hoping for.

Moving on, Hannah is dead but she is still alive in 13 different tapes. 13 different tapes with 13 different people on, and not for the best of reasons. These treasured tapes have the 13 people that caused her to take her life. Then, of course, they are passed along the line of people injecting guilt into each and every one of them.

Then, here comes number 9. Clay Jenson, the secret admirer of Hannah Baker. But what did he do?

I adored this book. The author seems to be able to observe normal people to inject into his characters, because everything else I've seen has not managed to do so. They seem to have made what would have been simple a maze of the character's thoughts. It's not the plot that I loved so much, although it's original in its own right; it's the complex thoughts and emotions that the character expresses.

It's not the action itself but what follows after it which is what I think this novel is all about. The little things add up to big things which, in this book, went out of control and spun into death.

However, there is one fault. I did not like the ending. Yes it made you feel hopeful for Clay Jenson but it came to an abrupt stop; not a tantalizing cliff hanger, just a stop. It left your mind to wander not settle on an ending, whether happy or sad.

Finally, let's not let that drag down a great book done by a great author.

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Architecture books of the year – review

Heaven up here: life in an abandoned Caracas office block is explored in Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities. Photograph: Iwan Baan/ Urban-Think Tank

I don't know why, in these end times for communications made with dead trees and days of general impoverishment, but the market for sumptuous, fat, beautifully illustrated books of architecture and design seems as strong as ever. This year saw a Taschen tome on the great Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, by Philip Jodidio, which is over-bright for its subject but still welcome, and an impressive volume on the Italian master Carlo Scarpa from Phaidon and Robert McCarter. Also from Phaidon is a delightful work, with text by Deyan Sudjic, on Shiro Kuramata, a furniture designer simultaneously fanatical, esoteric, postmodern and minimalist. Zeuler Lima's book on Lina Bo Bardi (Yale), the once overlooked, now hugely resurgent genius of mid-20th-century Brazil, is exceptionally fine.

Scarpa, Siza, Kuramata and Bo Bardi are all well known in the worlds of architecture and design, less so outside, and each book is a good way (at a price) of getting to know them. Also educational, and engagingly so, is the second volume of Makers of Modern Architecture (NYRB), in which the American critic Martin Filler deftly summarises the likes of Le Corbusier, Eero Saarinen and Rem Koolhaas.

The most compelling books of the year offer contrasting perspectives of cities. In The View from the Train (Verso), we are offered perceptive, educated, un-obvious musings on place and inhabitation by the film-maker Patrick Keiller. The Italian Townscape (Artifice) is a reprint of a 1963 book by Ivor de Wolfe, the pseudonym of the publisher of the Architectural Review Hubert de Cronin Hastings. It is rich in black-and-white photographs, made haunting by the passage of time, that show not only crumbling marble, but also advertising signs, road markings, the shine of a smart car. It is animated by de Wolfe/Hastings's text – pithy, witty, passionate, sometimes florid, sometimes eccentric.

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Bradley L Garrett has academic credentials (Oxford, University of Californiacorrect) in geography and archaeology, with a parallel life as an urban explorer. This means that he and his associates break into places usually off-limits – tube tunnels, abandoned mental hospitals, the tops of skyscrapers – and photograph their experiences. Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City (Verso) documents their adventures, combining erudite references (Montesquieu, Walter Benjamin) with compelling photographs of men in hoodies in strange places.

If its appeal is its celebration of the unofficial, Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities (Lars Müller) goes much further. With photographs by the great Iwan Baan, it documents a skyscraper in Caracas, left as an incomplete concrete frame and then colonised by squatters, who improvised a multistorey city, complete with churches and brothels. The book, my book of the year, is a breathtaking document of human society and human ingenuity.

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Caroline Criado-Perez: 'I don't know if I had a kind of breakdown'

Caroline Criado-Perez photographed at her home in north London: she thinks the attacks were provoked by 'a combination of misogyny and fear'. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer

Caroline Criado-Perez never expected it to be that big a deal. It was just that when the Bank of England announced in April that the social reformer Elizabeth Fry was to be dropped from the £5 note in favour of Winston Churchill, she realised our banknotes would have an all-white, all-male line-up and "it pissed me off".

She didn't have a big game plan, she says, talking in the kitchen of her north London flat with a small, excitable dog on her lap. "I just thought: This is bollocks."

Criado-Perez, an Oxford English literature graduate who is studying for a master's in gender theory at the London School of Economics, set up a petition and threatened to sue the bank under the 2010 Equality Act. Within days, it had attracted 35,000 signatures.

Her campaign worked. When Mark Carney became governor of the Bank of England in July, he swiftly announced that Jane Austen would be the new face of the tenner. Carney, she says, was "very smooth".

And that might well have been that. But overnight, the 29-year-old found herself a target for a violent outpouring of misogynist bile on Twitter. She received a stream of rape and murder threats. It lasted for days.

"The immediate impact was that I couldn't eat or sleep," she says. "I lost half a stone in two days. I was just on an emotional edge all the time. I cried a lot. I screamed a lot. I don't know if I had a kind of breakdown. I was unable to function, unable to have normal interactions."

She thinks the attacks were provoked by "a combination of misogyny and fear" from men "who have been brought up to think the world is theirs to inherit… They see a dissonance when they see a woman who is making herself heard."

The police were "a bit flummoxed". Eventually they took her seriously enough to investigate, but she remains "frustrated" that they don't seem to be looking into online rape threats received by other women.

"Our society always tells the victim how to behave, not the perpetrator," she says. "It's easy for me to change my behaviour. It's much harder to make them stop attacking me."

Yet, in spite of what she has been through, she insists that it has been a good year for feminism. Projects such as everydaysexism.com (a website that allows women to share details of sexist incidents) are "making sexism visible [and] opening people's eyes to the fact that we're not equal yet", she says.

These days, she is "a lot better, more able to cope". Her boyfriend, Matthew, has proposed. She is thinking of writing a book. And then there's that Jane Austen £10 note. What, I wonder, is her favourite Austen novel? "Persuasion," she says. It's hard to think of a more suitable reply.

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