The Year in Books

:00:02. > :00:06.people. Now it is time for a look at the

:00:06. > :00:15.books that have topped the bestseller list in 2012, with the

:00:15. > :00:21.year-end books. -- The Year In Books.

:00:21. > :00:24.2012, the year JK Rowling reinvented herself as an adult

:00:24. > :00:29.novelist, E L James Blunt the publishing world that have 50

:00:29. > :00:34.shades trilogy, which sold and sold it and just get on selling. Fifty

:00:34. > :00:40.Shades Of Grey started life as any book, and 2012 was the year of the

:00:40. > :00:44.Kindle and the iPad. Even sales virtually doubled -- ebooks sales

:00:44. > :00:50.now account for 10% of all books sold. Let's look back over The Year

:00:50. > :00:54.In Books with the aid of highlights from the news channels meet the

:00:54. > :00:57.author interviews. Let's begin with a remarkable double. Hilary Mantel

:00:57. > :01:01.one of the Booker Prize for Bring Up The Bodies, the second book in a

:01:01. > :01:09.planned trilogy about Henry VIII's great minister, Thomas Cromwell, a

:01:09. > :01:15.trilogy which began with Wolf Hall, which also won the Booker Prize.

:01:15. > :01:23.Well, I don't know. You wait 20 years for a Booker Prize... And two

:01:23. > :01:27.come along at once. When the book was first published, we went to

:01:27. > :01:34.Cadhay, an Elizabethan manor house near Hilary Mantel's Bevan home, to

:01:34. > :01:40.meet the author. I had tried to tease a way Cromwell's reputation

:01:40. > :01:46.from the man himself. It appears to me that bumbles of prejudice have

:01:46. > :01:50.been handed down the years from one historian to another. And they

:01:50. > :01:54.eventually flowed out into the popular perception of a man who,

:01:54. > :02:04.when he appears in fiction and drama, he is always a one-

:02:04. > :02:05.

:02:05. > :02:09.dimensional, black cloaked villain. And I wanted to lift that black

:02:09. > :02:15.cloak and see under there. spent much of your career being

:02:15. > :02:21.written about as a widely admired novelist, a little underrated,

:02:21. > :02:27.perhaps. Wolf Hall changed that. And you have now made that

:02:28. > :02:33.transition to a best-selling novelist. How has that changed you?

:02:33. > :02:39.It is sudden success. It seems strange to me. I sometimes feel

:02:39. > :02:47.like a cork bobbing on the ocean. But it has not affected my day-to-

:02:47. > :02:50.day practice as a writer. Every day, when you sit down at your desk, you

:02:50. > :02:57.are made new. And it does not matter what failures or successes

:02:57. > :03:03.you have had in the past. All you have to be is that day's work. That

:03:03. > :03:10.is all you can do it. That is where you should focus your imagination,

:03:10. > :03:17.and let the rest just happen. There were other fine winners among

:03:17. > :03:19.the year's crop of literary prizes. Wade Davis won of the Samuel

:03:19. > :03:22.Johnson Prize for non-fiction for Into The Silence, his extraordinary

:03:23. > :03:27.account of the failed British attempts to conquer Everest in the

:03:27. > :03:31.1920s. And Madeleine Miller won the last Orange Prize for Women's

:03:31. > :03:36.Fiction for The Song Of Achilles. Orange has pulled out after 17

:03:36. > :03:39.years as sponsor, and next year's prize will be supported by

:03:39. > :03:45.individual donors, including Joanna Trollope and Cherie Blair. At the

:03:45. > :03:49.start of the year, there was the Costa Prize, whose five category

:03:49. > :03:54.winners included two first-time authors with very different day

:03:54. > :04:00.jobs. Moray Young, whose Blood Red Road won the children's prize, and

:04:00. > :04:05.Christie Watson, whose tiny sunbirds far away won the First

:04:05. > :04:08.Novel Prize. I came to the UK to go to drama school. I then worked on

:04:09. > :04:15.the alternative comedy circuit in the early '80s to get my Equity

:04:15. > :04:21.card. I then became a tap dancing chorus girl in the West End in

:04:21. > :04:25.high-society. After that, I retrained as an opera singer, and I

:04:25. > :04:29.worked on tour with a medium-sized touring company in the UK and

:04:29. > :04:36.France for six to seven years. I also did some solo work and a bit

:04:37. > :04:42.of singing teaching. I started writing in 2003. Why? I because I

:04:42. > :04:50.broke my wrists. I fell off a bus and smashed my head into a wall and

:04:50. > :04:55.broke both my wrists. It was one of those existential wake-up calls.

:04:55. > :05:00.Christine Watson is a nurse. People have been very interested in me

:05:00. > :05:04.being a nurse. But actually, nursing and writing are very

:05:04. > :05:07.similar creatures. The thing that made me nurse and the thing that

:05:07. > :05:12.made me write are the same. It has an interest in humanity and what

:05:12. > :05:17.makes us human beings in life and death and grief and loss. These are

:05:17. > :05:22.what I focus on in both jobs. Nursing crosses over into my

:05:22. > :05:28.writing, and writing probably crosses over into my nursing.

:05:28. > :05:32.Costa book of the Year award went to novelist Andrew Millar the Pure.

:05:32. > :05:36.It is a prize, which is lovely. I don't think prizes entirely changed

:05:36. > :05:41.people's lives. I shall go back to Somerset tomorrow and carry on with

:05:42. > :05:46.the work I was doing. His book is an account based on fact of the

:05:46. > :05:51.emptying of a medieval cemetery in Paris immediately before the French

:05:51. > :06:00.Revolution. I obviously don't just want to trade in symbols when I am

:06:00. > :06:10.writing. It is not some kind of allegory of France before the

:06:10. > :06:15.revolution. And yet, of course, it is not just that there was this

:06:15. > :06:19.cemetery which was excavated, which is interesting, but it is also

:06:19. > :06:25.about when it happened. The clearance was in some way inspired

:06:25. > :06:31.by new ideas, no thinking -- new thinking, the stubborn fantasy that

:06:31. > :06:35.we can start again. It was a good year generally for

:06:35. > :06:38.historical novels. The veteran Thomas Keneally published The

:06:38. > :06:42.Daughters of Mars, about two Australian Sisters who served as

:06:43. > :06:48.military nurses in the First World War and much of it is based on fact,

:06:48. > :06:50.including the sinking of the Dardanelles a hospital ship full of

:06:50. > :06:56.New Zealand nurses. But Thomas Keneally is quite clear that he is

:06:56. > :07:01.not writing straightforward history. This is about the horror of

:07:01. > :07:06.Gallipoli. It is about the Western Front. It is also about some

:07:06. > :07:13.specific historical events were due likely disguise. For instance, in

:07:13. > :07:18.the idiom of Gallipoli, your nurses are sunk in a hospital ship. There

:07:18. > :07:26.was such a ship. How accurate is your account of the sinking of this

:07:26. > :07:34.ship? Or well, of course, nothing in fiction... Fiction is lies piled

:07:34. > :07:43.end on end. But the recounting of the sinking of the Archimedes,

:07:43. > :07:47.would I stole in typical Australian fashion from the New Zealanders, is,

:07:47. > :07:57.to a considerable part, based on what at the Young Women wrote about

:07:57. > :08:01.

:08:01. > :08:10.their survival. And yet I feel licensed to go beyond that and give

:08:10. > :08:15.them reactions, give them subtleties of feeling that are not

:08:15. > :08:19.recorded in the journals. We spoke to contemporary novelists, too,

:08:19. > :08:23.like Ian Rankin, whose latest book sees the return of Inspector Rebus,

:08:23. > :08:29.now retired, sent by his author on a road trip to the north of

:08:29. > :08:33.Scotland, a maverick as ever. almost like a private eye within

:08:33. > :08:36.the police force. He is never happy to be part of a police inquiry. He

:08:36. > :08:41.is not happy being a small cog in a big machine. He wants to be off on

:08:41. > :08:44.a tangent, killing his own thing, running his own investigation

:08:44. > :08:48.within the police investigation. That makes him more like a private

:08:48. > :08:53.eye. The fun thing about not being a cop is that he can break the

:08:53. > :08:56.rules a bit more than would be allowed as a police officer.

:08:56. > :08:59.there was that case in Swindon not long ago with a murderer who led

:08:59. > :09:03.the police officers to the graves of his victims, and yet they could

:09:03. > :09:06.not convict him on that evidence because it had been improperly

:09:06. > :09:11.gathered. That has brought out an interesting debate. There was a lot

:09:11. > :09:15.of support for that police officer. A lot of the time when the police

:09:15. > :09:19.officer does not follow the rules, we disapprove. But this time, he

:09:19. > :09:23.got a result. It was not like he was roughing this guy up or

:09:23. > :09:28.anything you would see in Life On Mars. It was none of that, it was

:09:28. > :09:32.just driving the guy about, talking to him, making sure he was

:09:32. > :09:38.comfortable and unappealing the layers of the onion until he felt

:09:38. > :09:43.the need to confess. That Cobb did the right thing.

:09:43. > :09:49.Political memoirs do not often make great literature, but the best can

:09:49. > :09:52.be both inspiring and engrossing. Mary Robinson was Ireland's first

:09:52. > :10:02.female President and later a controversial UN High Commissioner

:10:02. > :10:06.

:10:06. > :10:14.The island I will be representing is a new Ireland - open, tolerant,

:10:14. > :10:21.inclusive. The job is little more than symbolic. Did you find that

:10:21. > :10:26.frustrating? I found it intriguing. It was much more tangible before,

:10:26. > :10:32.but Hira was now having made a solemn promise that I would make it

:10:32. > :10:37.a more relevant role, and I had to do it. It was a lonely period.

:10:37. > :10:44.lot of it seemed to have been about should you shake hands with Gerry

:10:44. > :10:51.Adams, the Dalai Lama, General Pinochet? Why you're a natural

:10:51. > :10:54.diplomat? Does that kind of thing come easily to you? I think I am a

:10:55. > :10:57.mixture of a diplomat and a passionate human rights person and

:10:57. > :11:03.quite a steely character. Those three are combined in different

:11:03. > :11:07.ways. It was difficult to go to republican west Belfast, but I

:11:07. > :11:14.wasn't going to shake the hand of Gerry Adams. But he was going to be

:11:14. > :11:17.there. He was, and they couldn't have a relationship with those

:11:17. > :11:22.communities unless I respected where they were coming from and

:11:22. > :11:26.their leader. And so I did shake his hand, off the camera, but that

:11:26. > :11:30.is what the press were interested in. And I was heavily criticised.

:11:30. > :11:35.But I knew I had done the right thing. There are some moments in

:11:35. > :11:41.your life, very rare and very special, the sheer joy and sense of

:11:41. > :11:44.freedom, since a recognition, it was unbelievable. Something had

:11:44. > :11:54.changed in that hall in Belfast for those communities, and they would

:11:54. > :12:00.never go back. They belonged in a way that was very special.

:12:00. > :12:04.surge in sales of eBooks was driven as much as anything by it EL

:12:04. > :12:11.James's 50 shades Trilogy, a mix of Mills & Boon with added sex and

:12:11. > :12:20.bondage. Between them, the three books have sold almost 10,000 --

:12:20. > :12:24.10.5 million copies alone. The books' worldwide success seems to

:12:24. > :12:29.have left the author dumbfounded, judging by this interview with Will

:12:29. > :12:32.Gompertz. It all seems to have happened to somebody else. I still

:12:32. > :12:40.put washing in the washing machine, make sure the children are fed,

:12:40. > :12:44.that sort of thing. And that is the reality. The phenomenon even for a

:12:44. > :12:47.time eclipsed JK Rowling's Harry Potter, but she came back strongly

:12:47. > :12:54.with the publication of The Casual Vacancy, her long awaited much-

:12:54. > :12:58.hyped debut as an adult novelist. Critics weren't entirely convinced

:12:58. > :13:01.by the book, set in a dysfunctional English country town, but as the

:13:01. > :13:06.author told Will Gompertz, she was always clear in her own mind what

:13:06. > :13:10.she was doing. This is the thing I wanted to write next. I had the

:13:11. > :13:17.idea for it, I knew I would love to write it. So that is where it all

:13:17. > :13:21.started. Why was it the thing you wanted to write next? It plays into

:13:21. > :13:27.certain themes in my life, it is quite a personal book, these things

:13:27. > :13:30.are think about a lot. It is personal in a sense that it deals

:13:30. > :13:39.with broad themes that have affected my life in a very real

:13:39. > :13:46.sense. Other children's authors, no matter how successful, have always

:13:46. > :13:51.envied JK Rowling's sales. Eoin Colfer published Artemis Fowl many

:13:51. > :13:56.years ago, and this year he published his last book about his

:13:57. > :14:03.criminal mastermind. We got the new Harry Potter, and we

:14:03. > :14:07.came along and did the interview. Ever since, you have been declared

:14:07. > :14:12.to JK Rowling, and your protagonist compared to Harry Potter. Did that

:14:12. > :14:22.annoy you? After a while I realised that it has done me nothing but

:14:22. > :14:28.good. Yes, I will have to bear the comparison. I once said that if JK

:14:28. > :14:33.Rowling is the Beatles, then I am the Rolling Stones. I also said

:14:33. > :14:41.that if JK Rowling is Madonna, then I am the Spice girls. I am Emerald

:14:41. > :14:44.Spice. We spoke to several fine children's writers. Michael

:14:44. > :14:48.Morpurgo took Matthew Stadlen to Devon to see the lush countryside

:14:48. > :14:55.that inspired his bestseller the War Horse. Since adapted for stage

:14:55. > :15:02.and screen. My teacher used to point at me and say, use your

:15:02. > :15:07.imagination, Michael! I was hopeless at using my imagination

:15:07. > :15:12.until I discovered that all stories that any good come from the real-

:15:12. > :15:16.life stories around us. And it is from real life, whether my own life

:15:16. > :15:22.or the lives of other people or stories that I hear on the bus, it

:15:22. > :15:28.is from real life that my imagination makes the play and then

:15:28. > :15:32.makes a stories. Effective you what I'd do is, I dream when I am awake,

:15:32. > :15:37.so the stories begin to each other weaving to reach other, and become

:15:37. > :15:41.a story of my own. It is what you're always told not to do at

:15:41. > :15:45.school. Don't look out of the window and dream, wrong. It is a

:15:45. > :15:49.really good thing to do. Michael Rosen, a former children's laureate,

:15:49. > :15:53.has written a book for children about one of the greatest

:15:53. > :15:56.children's writers of the last century, Roald Dahl. In all his

:15:56. > :16:00.books, he knew that in order to engage the sympathy of the child,

:16:00. > :16:05.in order for the child actually care about what happens, you have

:16:05. > :16:09.to see the world from the child's pointed view, and a lot of my work

:16:09. > :16:14.is about looking at myself the way I walls and looking at the world

:16:14. > :16:18.through those eyes. It is like putting on a pair of glasses from

:16:18. > :16:23.my childhood. And Philip Pullman reworked Grimm's Fairy Tales from

:16:23. > :16:27.modern readership. What I have done in my telling us to put it into my

:16:27. > :16:35.voice. This is the way I would tell it if I were telling it orally, a

:16:35. > :16:45.think. But also, I felt able, licence, allowing to add a little

:16:45. > :16:46.

:16:46. > :16:52.bit here, cut a little bit there, paper over a join. I felt I could

:16:52. > :16:56.tinker with them in a way that I would do again if I were telling it.

:16:57. > :16:59.Because in Cinderella, you have added the detailed that she goes to

:17:00. > :17:06.the ball on three consecutive nights, each night wearing a

:17:06. > :17:10.different dress. Yes, for the British version called Mossycoat, a

:17:10. > :17:20.marvellous version. I borrowed that detail, because I thought that

:17:20. > :17:20.

:17:20. > :17:25.The year's crop of authors included plenty of eccentrics, and we met a

:17:25. > :17:28.few on the news channel. There was the poet Simon Armitage, whose

:17:28. > :17:34.walking home chronicled his attempt to walk the length of the Pennine

:17:34. > :17:38.Way, giving nightly poetry readings as he went to earn his living.

:17:38. > :17:41.You set out without any money except a one-way ticket to Scotland,

:17:42. > :17:48.and you end literally to sink your supper by giving poetry readings

:17:48. > :17:54.every evening. That was quite a brave thing to do. I suppose I was

:17:54. > :17:57.testing my reputation as a poet amongst the small villages and

:17:57. > :18:02.communities up in the north Pennines. And also may be testing

:18:02. > :18:07.poetry's reputation in general, whether people would turn out on a

:18:07. > :18:13.wet Wednesday to hear me read, and to see if I could make a living as

:18:13. > :18:17.an old fashioned troubadour. did they come? They came, yes.

:18:17. > :18:21.did you make a living? I thought it was a decent living, but it was

:18:21. > :18:28.just slightly less than the minimum wage when I added it up, so it is

:18:28. > :18:32.not a career path. Is a new Simon Armitage poet emerging from this?

:18:32. > :18:37.That might be the case. Increasingly, I spend time in

:18:37. > :18:41.places like this. I grew up on the periphery of the moors, but tended

:18:41. > :18:47.to spend time in towns and cities. I gravitate towards these places

:18:47. > :18:53.now, and it might be that my poetry goes in the same direction. Because

:18:53. > :18:59.your poems do appear in the hills. You have written another -- and

:18:59. > :19:04.number of poems that have been inscribed on stones up here. He yes,

:19:04. > :19:09.of what they call Stanza Stones, and they are dotted around. They

:19:09. > :19:13.are there forever, or at least long after me. Another eccentric was the

:19:13. > :19:19.art critic Brian Sewell, the second volume of whose memoirs contain a

:19:19. > :19:25.revelation of interest to students of espionage. It concerned his old

:19:25. > :19:30.teacher and close friend, Anthony Blunt, unmasked in 1979 as a Soviet

:19:30. > :19:37.spy. Brown's your claims he had been told of Blunt's secret life

:19:37. > :19:47.some years before. He came to Cambridge to talk to an old friend

:19:47. > :19:48.

:19:48. > :19:55.and mentor called Andrew Garos. And I went. And Andrew Garos began his

:19:55. > :20:01.tail by saying, Anthony wishes you to know... And then told me what

:20:01. > :20:09.everybody now knows about the links with Burgess and Maclean and Philby

:20:09. > :20:15.and whatnot. So did he say in terms, Anthony has in the past fed secrets

:20:15. > :20:20.to Russia? No, certainly not. But if you were given that information,

:20:20. > :20:30.that was the only conclusion you can draw. But he left the

:20:30. > :20:31.

:20:31. > :20:37.conclusion-drawing to me. And you believe that Andrew Garos was

:20:37. > :20:41.blunt's mentor and may have recruited him? I do. I see no

:20:41. > :20:45.reason why that should not be the case. That would make him a very

:20:45. > :20:50.successful spymaster, because he was never unmasked. Do you really

:20:50. > :20:59.believe that every spymaster in the country is unmasked? It is much

:20:59. > :21:04.more likely that there are a dozen of them who have not been unmasked.

:21:04. > :21:08.That is the point of espionage! The point of espionage is not at the

:21:08. > :21:17.end of everything to some may create a scandal in the Sunday is

:21:17. > :21:23.to remain what you will already The year also saw the 30th

:21:23. > :21:28.anniversary of the Falklands war, recalled by Tony Banks in storming

:21:28. > :21:31.the Falklands. He fought in the Parachute Regiment, and after the

:21:31. > :21:35.war left the army to set up a successful care home business in

:21:35. > :21:41.Scotland. These days he campaigns on behalf of the many veterans

:21:41. > :21:45.suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I was I naive

:21:45. > :21:50.young man when I went to the Falklands. I was a fighting fit

:21:50. > :21:56.soldier, enjoying my life in the army. I was somebody who thought he

:21:56. > :22:02.had trained for a job he would never do. I was a fun-loving young

:22:02. > :22:08.buck, basically. And when you find yourself doing that job, and it was

:22:08. > :22:13.a pretty tough job, wasn't it? It was an old-fashioned war, infantry

:22:13. > :22:18.battles, close-quarter fighting, and you saw some terrible things?

:22:18. > :22:23.Absolutely. We used fixed bayonets. Nobody had had those since the

:22:23. > :22:28.Second World War. We were an elite regiment, a brand in our own right.

:22:28. > :22:35.And I always believed we would, it successfully in anything we did.

:22:35. > :22:38.However, I was unprepared for the brutality of war, of losing

:22:38. > :22:42.comrades or seeing death and destruction and despair. They get

:22:42. > :22:49.the impression that the most terrible things you saw were at

:22:49. > :22:52.Bluff Cove and Fitzroy, when the Sir Galahad was bombed by Argentina.

:22:53. > :23:00.We had always prepared for things like bullet wounds and blast

:23:00. > :23:04.injuries. But what we weren't prepared for was horrific burns.

:23:04. > :23:10.That was something that will stay with me for the rest of my days.

:23:10. > :23:14.You came back from the Falklands, and you were affected. A lot of

:23:14. > :23:19.guys went completely off the rails, cracked up totally. You, on the

:23:19. > :23:22.other hand, didn't. He went on to be very successful and build a

:23:22. > :23:26.large successful business. Why didn't you go the way of some

:23:27. > :23:32.others? I could lock it away and forget it, where some individuals

:23:32. > :23:36.cannot do that. It then becomes a downward spiral, where it is

:23:36. > :23:41.constantly on their mind, and then it manifests itself in alcoholism,

:23:41. > :23:45.criminality, drugs. The highlight of the summer, of

:23:45. > :23:49.course, was the London 2012 Olympics, and just before the start

:23:49. > :23:55.of the Games, I spoke to Chris Cleave, whose latest novel, Gold,

:23:55. > :24:00.looks at what it takes to become a champion Olympic cyclist. I think

:24:00. > :24:05.there are two kinds of athlete. There are the kind to consider the

:24:05. > :24:09.job at least temporarily done when they cross the finish line, and

:24:10. > :24:14.will limit the scope of their competitiveness to the competition

:24:14. > :24:21.itself, and then I think there is another kind an athlete who never

:24:21. > :24:25.goes off duty, who never stops fighting a psychological battle

:24:25. > :24:30.against rivals, now and in the future. And a thing as a

:24:30. > :24:36.storyteller, we are always fascinated by the people we are not.

:24:36. > :24:41.I wake up every day in thin, who can I imagine myself being today?

:24:41. > :24:45.And these characters, who just have this visceral need to win, began to

:24:45. > :24:50.really intrigued me. I started to wonder, what are they feel like

:24:50. > :24:54.when they do win? Isn't that enough? They stand on a podium,

:24:54. > :24:58.what are they thinking? Are they thinking, this is my moment, I am

:24:58. > :25:02.happy now, or rather a projecting strength while on the podium,

:25:02. > :25:07.working out who to be next. So that was 2012, and next year

:25:07. > :25:12.promises more treats. New novels from Tracy Chevalier and Kate

:25:12. > :25:18.Atkinson, Jeffrey Archer and James Patterson. Two biographies of