Too many books out there to choose from? Thrown by the 3 for 2s? Fear not.

Every June and December, Booktrust collates the national newspapers' summer reading and books of the year supplements for you.

Here's what the critics thought were the best books of 2006.

Our round-up of the newspapers’ books of the year in 2006 revealed that history held sway over critics’ reading choices, whether they were recommending fiction or non-fiction.

And the fact that the year’s most popular book – Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Francaise (Chatto & Windus) – is an account of life in Nazi-occupied France goes some way towards disproving the myth that publishers are dumbing-down to pander to an air-headed audience.

Colin Thubron got dusty in the Shadow of the Silk Road (Chatto & Windus) and Simon Barnes condensed decades of experience as a sports journalist to explain The Meaning of Sport (Yellow Jersey).

For many modern novelists, the past continues to be a rich source of inspiration: Robert Harris set Imperium (Hutchinson) in ancient Rome; House of Meetings by Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape) is about rivalry and romance in the slave camps of Stalinist USSR; and Sarah Waters looked back to London during the Blitz for The Night Watch (Virago). William Boyd’s spy story Restless (Bloomsbury) is also set during the Second World War.

CJ Sansom’s Sovereign (Macmillan) is a tale of intrigue and murder in Tudor England; Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock (Chatto & Windus) was inspired by her Scottish ancestors. David Peace stepped back only a few decades to relive Brian Clough’s tumultuous tenure at Leeds in The Damned Utd (Faber), as did MJ Hyland for her portrayal of one boy’s sad childhood in Seventies Ireland in her Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Carry Me Home (Canongate).

Among the non-fiction choices, studies of the twentieth century stood out. Tony Judt’s Postwar (William Heinemann) vied with Michael Burleigh’s Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al-Qaeda (HarperPress) and Carmen Callil’s Bad Blood (Jonathan Cape) – a biography of Nazi sympathiser Louis Darquier – for most popular history title. Andrew Roberts took on the mantle of Winston Churchill with A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) and Peter Hennessy’s Having It So Good (Allen Lane) proved a popular study of Fifties Britain.

The lives of those from previous generations continued to intrigue. Jenny Uglow’s biography of Thomas Bewick, Nature’s Engraver (Faber) was the most popular non-fiction choice of the year, closely followed by Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (Viking).

Other popular twentieth-century lives were Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf (Simon & Schuster); Zachary Leader’s hefty Life of Kingsley Amis (Jonathan Cape); and an edited collection of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Letters from Oxford to Bernard Berenson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Antonia Fraser looked further back for her study of Love and Louis XIV (also Weidenfeld).

Not all writers were obsessed with the past. Richard Ford delivered The Lay of the Land (Bloomsbury), his third and final novel about sportswriter turned estate agent Frank Bascombe; Andrew O’Hagan managed to pack class hatred, religious intolerance and forbidden love into Be Near Me (Faber); Howard Jacobson pulled off the feat of the year with Kalooki Nights (Jonathan Cape), a funny, angry book about the Holocaust (among other things). And Everyman, Philip Roth’s twenty-seventh novel, expressed in fewer than 200 savage pages what it means to be human.

Erica Wagner at the Times was the only person wise enough to remind her readers about the brilliance of Peter Hobbs’s I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train (Faber).

It’s been five years since the attack on the World Trade Center, which has given journalist Lawrence Wright time and enough perspective to write The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda’s Road to 9/11 (Allen Lane). Claire Messud set her novel The Emperor’s Children (Picador) in New York on that fateful day. Not surprisingly, other popular current affairs titles unpicked the situation in Iraq: State of Denial by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster); Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (Allen Lane); and Rory Stewart’s Occupational Hazards (Picador).

Poetry continues to impress many critics; in 2006 collections by Paul Muldoon (Horse Latitudes), Don Paterson (Orpheus), Simon Armitage (Tyrannosaurus Rex versus the Corduroy Kid) and, of course, Seamus Heaney (District and Circle) were all published by Faber to great acclaim, as was Elizabeth Bishop’s Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box (Carcanet) and the Collected Poems of CK Williams (Bloodaxe) and Michael Longley (Jonathan Cape). Maggie Fergusson’s life of George Mackay Brown (John Murray) also received good notices.

Short stories didn’t get much of a look in, despite the publication of a number of strong collections in 2006, but Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder (Bloomsbury) and Colm Tóibín’s Mothers and Sons (Picador) were notable exceptions. Erica Wagner at the Times was the only person wise enough to remind her readers about the brilliance of Peter Hobbs’s I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train (Faber).

The best of this year’s modern lives were sifted from the slew of celebrity biographies, among them Rupert Everett’s witty and popular Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins (Little, Brown), Ronnie Corbett’s And It’s Goondnight from Him (Michael Joseph), and John Cornwell’s autobiographical Seminary Boy (Fourth Estate). Alison Bechdel has, like Marjane Satrapi and others, used the graphic novel form to tell her story in the gothic Fun Home (Jonathan Cape). And Bruce Bernard published photographs of Lucien Freud at Work (also Cape).

Jamie Oliver and Giorgio Locatelli won the battle of the celebrity chef books with Cook with Jamie (Michael Joseph) and Made in Italy (Fourth Estate) respectively. Richard Dawkins raised hackles, ruffled feathers and made his readers scratch their heads with The God Delusion (Bantam Press); Michael Frayn was similarly thought-provoking in The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe (Faber). Penelope Hobhouse went In Search of Paradise (Frances Lincoln); Colin Thubron got dusty in the Shadow of the Silk Road (Chatto & Windus); Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves pondered why jokes are funny in The Naked Jape (Michael Joseph); and Simon Barnes condensed decades of experience as a sports journalist to explain The Meaning of Sport (Yellow Jersey).

Peter Carey amazed with Theft: A Love Story (Faber) and Canongate reissued Lewis Hyde’s inspirational – and unclassifiable – The Gift. Bravura new translations of Virgil's Aeneid by Robert Fagles, and Dumas's The Three Musketeers by Richard Pevear (both Penguin) and the first two volumes of Javier Marias’s Your Face Tomorrow trilogy (Vintage) were also celebrated.

Finally, the longest title of the year? Sue Clifford and Angela King’s England in Particular: A Celebration of the Commonplace, the Local, the Vernacular and the Distinctive (Hodder & Stoughton) must be in the running.

Publishers

So which publisher can claim to have had their books chosen the most? Thanks to Jenny Uglow, Andrew O’Hagan, a number of strong poetry titles, and several titles from their music list, the determinedly-independent Faber beat the competition by some way.

Following behind came Random House imprint Jonathan Cape, Bloomsbury, Chatto & Windus (also Random House), HarperCollins and Macmillan imprint Picador. Impressively close behind these big hitters came Penguin’s non-fiction imprint Allen Lane and Oxford University Press.