Sam Mendes
Director

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (Fourth Estate) was head and shoulders above any other book this year: moving, funny, and unexpectedly beautiful. I missed it when it was over. Stephen Sondheim's Finishing the Hat (Virgin) was like its author: fascinating, precise, opinionated, brilliant. I loved Stewart Lee's How I Escaped My Certain Fate (Faber). Never has anyone made me feel so close to the terrifying and occasionally exhilarating insanity that is stand-up comedy.

Sebastian Faulks
Novelist

I enjoyed – if that can be the word – The Big Short by Michael Lewis (Allen Lane), an account of how a group of people contrived to bring the banking system to its knees, to take much of your money and many of your jobs, to condemn your children to a life of debt – and got away unpunished, with millions in their own back pockets. It's in the interest of bankers to pretend that their work is too technical for lay people to follow, but in an account such as Michael Lewis's, it's really not that difficult. It's quite clear what they did. Harder to understand is how they got away with it.

Rachel Johnson
Editor, the Lady

Hitch-22 (Atlantic) by Christopher Hitchens is like a tin of Pedigree Chum: solid, meaty nourishment. Hitchens is incapable of writing a boring sentence. When he asks himself what he'd like to be different if he had to be the Hitch all over again, he answers: "more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period". I cried several times during Deborah Devonshire's memoir Wait for Me! (John Murray), mainly at deaths: sister Nancy, brother Tom, and her three stillborn children. The calibre of events, cast and author could hardly be higher and Debo has gracefully potted an extraordinary life (though ordinary to her) with kindness and humour.

Tristram Hunt
Historian and politician

Putting his little local difficulty behind him, Orlando Figes showed in Crimea: The Last Crusade (Allen Lane) why he is such a stellar historian. As ever, it mixes strong narrative pace, a grand canvas and compelling ideas about current geopolitical tensions. In The Lost City of Stoke-on-Trent (Frances Lincoln), Matthew Rice, partner to top potter Emma Bridgewater, provides a clarion call to the "Five Towns" to stop knocking down the bottle kilns and pot banks and start preserving one of the civic gems of England. New Labour never had much time for history, but since the end of office, you can't stop them writing the stuff. Peter Mandelson's The Third Man (HarperPress) has the most authentic feel in a genuine account of his role in, out, in, out and in government.

Jeremy Hunt
Culture secretary

When I fought the last election I never imagined I would be in cabinet with Nick Clegg – and certainly never thought I would be recommending Tony Blair's A Journey (Hutchinson). But he has done politicians a favour by reinventing the art of the memoir in a way not achieved since Alan Clark's Diaries. Funny and self-deprecating, they are also deeply manipulative beneath the surface. His best advice to ministers? Don't make enemies deliberately as you'll make plenty accidentally.

Wendy Cope
Poet

I once tried to write a prose memoir but couldn't find the right tone of voice. Three authors who did published books this year. Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens (Atlantic), Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay (Picador), and My Father's Fortune: A Life by Michael Frayn (Faber) are all beautifully written. On my summer holiday I was surprised to find myself enjoying a fat book about the Soviet economy. Francis Spufford's Red Plenty (Faber) mixes fact and fiction, with the benefit of scrupulous notes to tell the reader which is which. Without the notes I would have found it frustrating. With them it's terrific.

Shami Chakrabarti
Civil rights campaigner

Gareth Peirce is such a private person that despite a momentous career (representing the Birmingham Six, Lockerbie families and Guantánamo detainees among others), Dispatches from the Dark Side (Verso) is her first book. It is a timely reminder of the darker side of lawlessness in freedom's name. The End of the Party by Andrew Rawnsley (Penguin) is an impartial journalistic examination of New Labour by one of Britain's finest political commentators.

Craig Raine
Poet and critic

Hampton on Hampton (Faber) is a series of interviews with the playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton that amounts to an artistic autobiography. Intellectually intimate, unpretentious, informative, entertaining, anecdotal, fearless, funny, serious. Simon Armitage, the best poet of his generation, has produced a book of prose-poems, Seeing Stars (Faber), full of compelling, quirky, inventive, surreal tales. In January, I read his incomparable translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This autumn, I was charmed by the comedy of these spellbinding dispatches.

Michael Palin
Broadcaster

I enjoyed Chef by Jaspreet Singh (Bloomsbury). Its themes of food and war and love and poetry form a series of intricate tightropes that the author treads skilfully, bringing us, in a short book, a lot of pleasures. I read Alain de Botton's A Week at the Airport (Profile) with smiles of recognition, nods of approval and sighs of admiration. Most people can't wait to get away from airports. I'm very glad he stayed.

Nick Hornby
Novelist

Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Chatto & Windus) pretty much delivers on the promise of the title, and certainly delivers everything you'd ask from a literary biography. Bakewell recognises that the life of a major writer extends way beyond his death: Montaigne is nearly 500 years old now and, given that he invented the personal essay, as influential as he's ever been. There must have been some doubt in the minds of the Booker judges as to whether Francis Spufford's Red Plenty (Faber) is a novel. I can think of no other explanation of why it wasn't even longlisted. It's a breathtakingly researched and brilliantly imagined picture of life in Khrushchev's USSR. Fictional farmers and economists rub shoulders with real politicians; Spufford cuts between them like Robert Altman might have done, if he'd ever been drawn to five year plans.

David Vann
Novelist

I was hesitant to read Lisa Moore's February (Chatto & Windus) because it didn't sound fun to read about decades of grief, the aftermath of a husband lost in the sinking of an oil rig off Newfoundland. But the world is so carefully observed it becomes something other than what it is. Rose Tremain's Trespass (Chatto & Windus) offers a similarly gorgeous evocation of the external world and interior life but coupled to grand themes: the fall of the old house, the broken inheritance, rivalry and betrayal. In non-fiction, Melanie Thernstrom's The Pain Chronicles (North Point Press) explores the history and meaning of pain.

Nicholas Hytner
Producer and director

In Finishing the Hat (Virgin) Stephen Sondheim collects the lyrics from the first half of his career, with a fierce running commentary on them that is as eloquent an insight into the creative process as I've ever read. He writes utterly fair and sometimes unsparing appreciations of the work of his peers and predecessors; and his reports from the Broadway front are irresistible. The theatre book of the decade.

Joan Bakewell
Broadcaster and novelist

In 2005, after 50 years of married life, poet Dannie Abse's wife, Joan, was killed in a car crash. His grief was torrential. He turned to what he knew – words, and how to shape them into poetry. His 2008 book, The Presence, was a prose account of his loss. This year's Two for Joy: Scenes from Married Life (Hutchinson) charts in some 50 poems the progress and evolution of their love and their married life together. I love their delicacy, their exquisite taste, and the sense of their sustained happiness together. This year I discovered Geoff Dyer with his essay collection Working the Room (Canongate). Once I caught his style, casually borne erudition, gentle self-disparagement, and ideas about most things on earth, I was hooked. Keynes on the Wireless (Palgrave Macmillan) shows that the economist's views on finance, state planning, the bank rate, debt, tariffs are by no means out of date. But what gives me most pleasure is his prose – lucid, exact and well-mannered.

Andrew Rawnsley
Observer political commentator

New Labour's personalities have been accused of producing memoirs that are self-serving. That's slightly unfair if only because, whether they meant to or not, they come out of them so badly. This year's crop have been execrably written (Tony Blair being the worst offender) and utterly unreliable as history (the preening and dissimulating Peter Mandelson being the worst culprit). For a memoir that is unflinchingly candid about both the personal and the political, intensely moving about his tribulations and triumphs, awesomely lacking in vanity and suffused with insight, I recommend Nelson Mandela's Conversations with Myself (Macmillan). This is not so much a book as a scrapbook: a collection of extracts from diaries, letters to family and friends, notes and transcripts. That adds authenticity to a book that breaks the heart and then makes it sing.

Nigel Slater
Food writer

The books I value most are those I return to again and again. Such has been the case with The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit (Bloomsbury). It has intrigued, inspired, amused and occasionally infuriated me all year, and will for years to come.

Julie Myerson
Novelist

Two novels filled me with writer's envy, and neither got the accolades it deserved. Joshua Ferris's The Unnamed (Viking) explores a mysterious, undiagnosable illness with the pace and daring of a thriller. But ultimately it's a compassionate meditation on the frailty of human minds and bodies. Subtly similar in theme is David Flusfeder's A Film by Spencer Ludwig (Fourth Estate). A clapped-out film-maker and his garrulous, elderly father leave a hospital appointment in New York City and decide on a whim to keep on driving. It's a road movie, it's a tender dialogue between parents and children, it's wonderfully embarrassing about how artists think about their art, but it also has the mark of great fiction: it feels like it has existed forever.

William Dalrymple
Travel writer

This year has seen three remarkable debuts by Indian non-fiction writers. Curfewed Night (HarperPress) is Basharat Peer's memoir of growing up in Kashmir under the shadow of the uprising. His revelations, especially about the indiscriminate use of electric shock torture on the genitals of a whole generation of Kashmiri youths, needs to be read by anyone who wishes to understand why the valley remains so restless. Sonia Faleiro's Beautiful Thing (Penguin India) is a sassy, sensitive and moving account of one bar girl's journey spiralling down through the circles of hell that are Bombay's sex industry. Mimlu Sen's The Honey Gatherers (Rider), about her travels with the Bauls, the wandering troubadours of Bengal, is a mixture of love story, travelogue, book of devotion and work of ethnography and theology.

Rachel Cooke
Observer journalist

I loved Letters to Monica, a collection of letters from Philip Larkin to his girlfriend, Monica Jones (Faber). Not only are they funny, sad and true; they are also charmingly replete with 1950s detail, evoking a world of curry-powder concoctions, rasping gas fires, and long but civilised train journeys. Nothing to Envy (Granta Books), Barbara Demick's book about real lives in famine-stricken North Korea, shows what good journalism can still do when it tries. Two novels were unfairly overlooked: Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett (Tuskar Rock), a gripping and beautifully written tale of what happens when greedy corporate America collides with a stubborn old woman; and The Last Weekend by Blake Morrison (Chatto & Windus), which is about curdled male friendship. It's a page-turner: creepy, and uncomfortably close to home.

Peter Serafinowicz
Comedian

The iPad has revolutionised my habits. I must have read 30 novels on it this year; usually I read two or three. I've loved Lee Child's Jack Reacher series for thrills, including his most recent, Worth Dying For (Bantam), but my book of the year is A Book Of Jean's Own! by Jean Teasdale (Griffin). Jean is the Onion's resident humour columnist: a childless, overweight, but psychotically optimistic fortysomething who lives with her boozy husband and spends what little money she has on collectable dolls and costumes for her cats, who both hate her. It's a comic masterpiece.

Chris Patten
Chancellor of Oxford University

The Rule of Law by the late Tom Bingham (Allen Lane) is the book of the year that I am likely to read again and again. In his beautifully written book the former senior law lord gives a succinct definition, demolishing, for example, the alleged legal case for the Iraq war in a few devastating pages. Every MP who can read should be given it for Christmas. The most gob-smacking book was Obama's Wars by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster). Why on earth does administration after administration allow Woodward to tell the inside story of the often gruesome process of decision-making in the White House?