Unawarded but prized

4 MUST-READS

Many of the year's literary prizes have been handed out, but there's still plenty of room for debate.

As newspapers and book clubs hold obligatory year-end polls and celebrities announce their picks, we look at some of the titles that haven't won any major awards "" yet "" but have made it to most top-10 lists. By top-10, we mean critical acclaim, though all these titles have sold very well too.

SNOW (Orhan Pamuk)

Turkey's best-known writer internationally won acclaim last year for the widely translated My Name is Red.

His latest novel, Snow, might well top even that, going by the enthusiatic endorsements by such major novelist-critics as John Updike and Margaret Atwood.

The story, which is as concerned with the enigma of artistic creativity as with the conflicts within the Islamic world, has a middle-aged poet visiting the remote city of Kars during a blizzard and finding himself caught up in a political revolution. Stark, thoughtful but surprisingly funny as well, in an absurdist vein.

CHRONICLES VOL 1 (Bob Dylan)

No one knew what to expect from the first volume of Dylan's much-anticipated memoirs. What we got was a book that is every bit as frustrating and unclassifiable as the man himself, unchronological and written in a delightful small-town Americana style that is part Mark Twain, part Jack Kerouac and all Dylan.

Full of awkward, ungrammatical sentences, colloquialisms, odd twists of phrase, it doesn't cater to popular perceptions; instead, Dylan seems hellbent on deconstructing his own myth.

The reverence in his voice when he speaks of his idols (Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Roy Orbison, even Harry Belafonte) is an eye-opener for anyone who can't reconcile the image of the great wordsmith with the wide-eyed, unsure boy who came to Greenwich Village in 1961.

THE MASTER (Colm Tóibín)

This year's Booker Prize race was seen as a tussle between David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (which eventually took the award).

But the dark horse in the shortlist was Irish writer Colm Tóibín's imaginative biography of Henry James. This is that rarity, a great book about a great writer; the "master" refers, of course, to James, but by the time you've finished this, you'll be willing to bestow the title on Tóibín.

PERSEPOLIS 2 (marjane satrapi)

In her acclaimed graphic novel Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi told the story of her childhood in an Iran that was under the shadow of the 1979 revolution.

This sequel chronicles her life as a student in Vienna, her subsequent return to her own country and the problems she had fitting in. Much like Pamuk's Snow, Satrapi's new book casts an interesting light on a world trapped between modernity and tradition.

Sceptics might suggest that much of Western critics' praise for these books stems from their providing an easy primer to the Islamic revolution as seen through the eyes of a modern young woman; but that would be doing a disservice to Satrapi's gentle, perceptive observations on living through difficult times.