The best of the fiction year – review Justine Jordan rounds up our critics' recommendations - from The Guardian

Of course, Freedom is on this list. But here are a few other interesting tidbits, from this "best of" list. For example:

Surely the year's most pleasurable read and now a Costa contender, Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, charted teenage highs and lows at an Irish boarding school: Patrick Ness called it " a rare tragicomedy that's both genuinely tragic and genuinely comedic".

Jeffrey Burke from Bloomberg, had this to say about the book, last month:

For his second novel, Murray has gone from impressive to world-class. “Skippy Dies” concerns a few months in the life of a Catholic boys high school in Dublin called Seabrook College. There’s sex and drugs and high jinks, wimps, bullies, queen bees and brains, jaded teachers, a questionable coach and an administrator so perfectly full of himself that I was reminded of Stephen Dedalus’s bloviating Mr. Deasy in “Ulysses.” This is far from the musical TV series “Glee,” though. Characters that verge on cliche prove unpredictable. A teacher ripe for burnout finds inspiration in a World War I uniform. A femme fatale reveals the stony investment adviser within. The punk selling diet pills isn’t the worst pusher in school.

See that Bloomberg piece, here.

Christopher Tayler applauded Ian McEwan's "elegant and surprising" response to global warming in Solar (Jonathan Cape, £13.99): "instead of applying doom and gloom, he reaches for a lighter, more comic mode than usual".

In March, The New York Times reviewed the book:

Ian McEwan has long had a penchant for creating unsavory, disreputable characters: children who bury their mother in the basement (“The Cement Garden”), a Machiavellian sadist who preys on a pair of middle-class tourists (“The Comfort of Strangers”), a dead woman’s conniving former lovers (“Amsterdam”), an adolescent girl who makes false accusations against a man that will alter his life and the life of her entire family (“Atonement”). In his latest novel, “Solar,” Mr. McEwan’s protagonist — a fat, middle-aged Nobel Prize-winning physicist named Michael Beard — joins this gallery of distasteful antiheroes. In the course of the book he will not only cheat on five wives and innumerable girlfriends and send an innocent man to jail, but he will also steal another scientist’s plans for stopping global warming and try to turn them into a big, moneymaking machine. This self-deluding scientist will come to embody just about everything that has brought about the climate-change crisis in the first place: greed, heedlessness and a willful refusal to think about consequences or the future.

See the complete Guardian list here. Jordan breezes right by the titles, so it's a quick run-down.