Season's readings: writers and politicians pick the best reads of 2008 By Ginny Hooker on Culture

Monica Ali: I loved Sebastian Faulks's Engleby (Vintage), which contains the best and funniest description of a dinner party I have ever read. Joseph O'Neill's Netherland (Fourth Estate) is so beautifully written I immediately bought a couple more copies to give to friends. Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader (Profile) would make a perfect stocking filler for just about anyone. Any fans of The Wire suffering withdrawal symptoms should load up on Richard Price (one of the show's writers), starting with Clockers and including his recent offering, Lush Life (Bloomsbury).

Tariq Ali: I was much impressed by two debut novels by south Asian writers who, unlike many local counterparts, write about things that matter. Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Cape) is a surreal thriller dealing with the assassination of a Pakistani military dictator. At times incredibly funny, it also, like a Buñuel film, captures the sinister side of life. Tahmima Anam's The Golden Age (John Murray) explores the painful birth-pangs of Bangladesh through the eyes of a family wrecked by the war.

Ronald Fraser's magisterial history Napoleon's Accursed War (Verso) is a brilliant view from below of the popular Spanish resistance to French invasion, in what the insular Brits still call the Peninsular war, when the term "guerrilla" came into common currency. One of the great epics of the 19th century, properly recovered for the first time by Fraser in all its ambiguities and tragedies, along with its popular heroism, it's continuously moving, without a trace of sentimentality....