TONY PARSONS
Best-selling British author of Man And Boy and Man And Wife
For war-obsessed, military-fixated males, I would recommend Richard Holmes' Redcoat - The British Soldier In The Age Of Horse And Musket. Holmes is the best popular historian around today, and Redcoat gets you under the skin and jerkin of the foot soldier at Waterloo and other battlefields.
If you want to get in touch with your feminine side, then Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It is superior chick-lit about a woman who juggles man, work, marriage, children and a sexy bit of trouser. Intelligent and funny, Pearson makes Bridget Jones look like a shagged-out old spinster who can't get a man.
You might feel as though you have overdosed on Iraq, but Jarhead - A Marine's Chronicle Of The Gulf War by Anthony Swofford is a gripping, page-turning memoir of the first Gulf war, in which Swofford was a marine. Not so much a story of men in action, Jarhead is more a book about how and why men get there - a tale of fathers and sons and prostitutes and watching too many war movies. It is a sign of the times that Swofford didn't even get to fire a shot in action, although he was very nearly wiped out by fellow Americans. So no change there, then.
One of my favourite novels of the year is Man-Made Fibre by Francine Stock. It's about the disintegration of a marriage in the England of the early 1960s, when a promising young scientist from the staid Home Counties gets posted to America to invent a new nylon. Stock is brilliant at evoking what she calls 'vintage futurism' - the past's view of a gilded tomorrow. She has a telling eye for corporate life, suburban mores and how all our dreams eventually turn to dust.
RAYMOND R WONG