This year, we rounded up more than 2,000 of the newspapers' books of the year recommendations to find out which titles were most popular.
The exercise – branded as 'heroic' by Tom Gatti in the Times – has revealed the strong appeal of well-written literary fiction with a contemporary theme as well as thoroughly researched non-fiction.
The book chosen more often than any other was Joseph O'Neill's Netherland (Fourth Estate), a novel about cricket and post-9/11 New York. Other popular fiction included Zoe Heller's The Believers (Fig Tree) – New York again – Aravind Adiga's Man Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger (Atlantic), Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture (Faber), John le Carré's A Most Wanted Man (Hodder & Stoughton) and Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil (Faber).
Mick Imlah's The Lost Leader (Faber) took the crown for this year's most-chosen collection of poetry.
The most popular non-fiction titles were Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder (Harper Press), a study of late-eighteenth-century scientists; Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise (Fourth Estate), a history of twentieth-century music; and autobiographies by Ferdinand Mount (Cold Cream published by Bloomsbury) and JG Ballard (Miracles of Life; Fourth Estate).
Here at Booktrust, we loved Mary Borden's The Forbidden Zone, the reminiscences of a First World War nurse beautifully republished by Hesperus Press; Angus Cargill's alternative book of music lists, Hang the DJ (Faber); A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury); the winner of this year's Booktrust Teenage Prize, The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (Walker); and Sloane Crosley's hilarious collection of essays I Was Told There'd be Cake (Portobello).
Despite Fourth Estate's successes Netherland, Me Cheeta and Miracles of Life, the most-chosen publisher was Faber.
For more information about the list, please contact James Smith at Booktrust james.smith@booktrust.org.uk
