Season's readings Hari Kunzru to Philip Pullman: writers and politicians pick the best books of 2008

Hari Kunzru: Joseph O'Neill's Netherland is a melancholy and controlled novel about cricket. There aren't many of those around. JG Ballard is also a cricket fan, and his volume of autobiography, Miracles of Life, provides a key to his strange, hallucinatory fiction. I'm living in New York, and the only thing that's made me feel homesick is a photography book called No Such Thing As Society: Photography in Britain 1967-1987 (Hayward Publishing). It shows a world I remember from growing up, a world that now feels very far away in time, as well as space.

Hanif Kureishi: I read Alex Ross's beautifully written The Rest Is Noise (Fourth Estate) with excitement and pleasure, as it links the numerous and diverse strands of 20th-century music in a compelling narrative. Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 (Virago) by Lisa Appignanesi is a thorough study of one of our age's preoccupations, the mind, its disturbances and those who might help cure it. Darian Leader's The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression (Hamish Hamilton) is a brilliant examination of a similar theme by one of our most important contemporary thinkers......