Other people's lives have remained my abiding literary interest in 2007. While I have read with huge enjoyment some worthy and inspiring life stories - that of novelist Edith Wharton as recounted by biographer Hermione Lee (Chatto & Windus, £25) comes at once to mind - it is those of a pair of 'bad hats' that have given me the greatest, guilty pleasure.

In both cases the story is in the title - one a title of exceptional length, You Cannot Live As I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This (Ebury Publishing, £12.99). 'This' means dead, so it has fallen to the novelist and Independent columnist Terence Blacker to present the astonishing career of Willie Donaldson, crack addict, author of the Henry Root Letters and lover of Sarah Miles and Carly Simon, among much else. Journalist Tom Sykes survived many a bender in London and New York to tell his story in What Did I Do Last Night? (Ebury, £10.99).

Chris Gray

Mosquito (£14.99, HarperPress) by Roma Tearne, recently short-listed for the Costa prize, is about the Sri Lankan civil war through the prism of an unconventional romance. I loved the story and the writing - influenced by Roma's career as a painter.

Redemption (£7.99, Transita), by Kay Langdale, about the linked lives of six women, is a welcome antidote to the downbeat nature of so many novels. It makes the humdrum of marriage appealing and compromise something to celebrate.

Finally, Waves by Sharon Dogar (£9.99, Chicken House) is a haunting, beautifully-written tale of a girl in a coma and her brother's attempts to find out what put her there. It has one of the saddest and yet most uplifting endings I've ever read.

Mary Zacaroli

Tim Jeal wrote his ground-breaking biography of Livingstone, published to critical acclaim and missionary outrage some 30 years ago, and so it was worth waiting for his latest book on fellow-explorer Stanley (Faber, £25). Again it moved away from the commonplace of ruthless quests in pursuit of glory. This was a Victorian whose expeditions brought light to darkest Africa and I caught Jeal's passion as he probed this vain, tough and uncompromising character. The history of the Muslim world and Christendom is topical, and the Battle of Lepanto was a medieval crucible in the conflict. Victory of the West (Macmillan, £20), by Niccolo Capponi, paints this as one of the greatest sea battles of all time, the last fought with oared galleys and with deep consequences for the safety of Europe. Intrigue and drama dominate the narrative.

Some 55,000 airmen perished in the strategic bombing offensive yet no special campaign medal was struck for survivors. While the grim result in such cities as Dresden, Cologne and Hamburg continues to produce debate, Patrick Bishop, in Bomber Boys (Harper Press, £20), pays tribute to the courageous pilots and gunners who pursued the war in the skies. Ace reading as a companion to his book on the fighter pilots.

Colin Gardiner

Christopher Skidmore kicked 2007 off with Edward VI: The Lost King of England (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £20), a convincing reappraisal of the short life and reign of Edward VI, king for just six years in the mid-16th century. His reign has largely been considered a footnote of Tudor history, but here emerges as a pivotal moment in the story of England.

Royalty had a part to play, too, in James Morton's life of 19th-century dancer, actress, courtesan, and one-time lover of Ludwig I of Bavaria Lola Montez (Portrait, £20). Poor Ludwig must have rued the day he met Lola, falling under her spell so completely that this once popular King fell from public grace and had to abdicate.

Lighter reading was delivered courtesy of Joe Moran's Queuing for Beginners (Profile, £14.99). Structured around a typical day in the life of a 21st-century office worker, this quirky and entertaining examination of the mundane rituals of daily life turned out to be surprisingly interesting.

David Bowes

Without question Silent Fields, by Roger Lovegrove (Oxford University Press, £25), is top of my list. After years of patient research through church and parish records of the vermin trapped, hunted and killed over the generations, he has come up with a picture of the history of the nation's wildlife from the middle ages to the present day. The plight of everything from badgers, bears and beavers to wolves, kingfishers, the golden eagle and the humble house sparrow is included, making it a book with enormous relevance today.

Adelina, by Oxford poet Biljana Scott (Birsay £8), is a moving collection of poems written with a scholarly hand in memory of her gifted daughter Adelina, who died after falling into a swollen river while on holiday in Zermatt. My words can never do justice to the sensitive way Biljana has wrapped the memory of her daughter in poems that say all that has to be said without syrupy sentimentality.

For those who take vicarious delight in reading about delicious meals that others have eaten and enjoyed, I'd suggest Where Shall We Go For Dinner?, (Orion £16.99) a romance by Tamasin Day-Lewis, one of Britain's finest food-writers.

Helen Peacocke

Picture books are a great way of encouraging young children to read and I think Walker Books produce illustrated stories better than any other publisher.

My boys were intrigued by the magnificent book Walker compiled on the Titanic disaster, featuring stunning paper engineering by David Hawcock (Walker, £16.99).

They were also entertained by Previously by Allan Ahlberg and Bruce Ingman, Baby Brains and Robomum by Simon James (Walker, £10.99), and Marcia Williams' comic-strip versions of Dickens and Chaucer favourites. She also wrote Archie's War, a colourful diary of a young boy's experiences during the First World War.

Meanwhile, I rediscovered John Mortimer's amusing Rumpole yarns - The Penge Bungalow Murders was a highlight - and John le Carré's thought-provoking spy stories, including The Mission Song and A Perfect Spy.

Andrew Ffrench

Oxford author Brian Thompson had an appalling childhood, so I was expecting a misery memoir, but Keeping Mum: A Wartime Childhood (Atlantic, £7.99) is quite the opposite. His wry sense of humour pervades every word, and although his family was particularly bizarre, he conjures an unforgettable picture of 1940s Britain. The sequel, Clever Girl: A Sentimental Education (Atlantic, £14.99), lacks the heart-tugging intensity of the first volume, but tells the story of his adolescence with the same panache.

Matthew Kneale's When We Were Romans (Picador, £16.99) is told from the point of view of nine-year-old Lawrence, taken to Italy by his mother, who believes she is being stalked by her ex-husband. Lawrence, obsessed with astronomy and Roman soldiers, is an unforgettable character who stays in the mind long after you have closed the book.

Maggie Hartford

The London Eye Mystery (Fickling £8.99) is a clever thriller for teenagers, told in deadpan style by Ted, a young autistic boy obsessed with meteorology. When his visiting cousin fails to emerge from the Eye with the other passengers Ted solves the mystery of his disappearance - a warm, funny and disturbing read by Siobhan Down.

If you're planning a holiday to a tropical island pack Babette Cole's hilarious picture book A Dose of Dr. Dog (Cape, £10), where Professor Dash Hund, the long-lost herbal scientist, will help our canine consultant's "pesky family, the Gomboyles" to cure every ailment from bites to boils.

Valerie Martin, who won the Orange Prize, comes up trumps again with Trespass (Weidenfeld £16.99).

Just as Bush is planning an attack on Iraq, the Dales, a comfortable, safe American family, come unstuck when their peaceful territory is invaded by a foreign poacher. Then their beloved son falls for a designing Croatian, a refugee from the horrors of war, leaving their fragile world shattered forever.

Jan Lee

For sheer originality, Colin Cotterill's The Coroner's Lunch (Quercus, £12.99) wins hands down. It's a detective story set in Laos, with a coroner as the detective'. The cast of characters is most unusual: the coroner's two assistants, a string of unusual dead bodies, spirits and soldiers. Cotterill writes in a wonderfully wry, witty way that leaves me laughing out loud and wanting more.

Simon Sebag Montefiore's 101 World Heroes (Quercus, £19.99) gives a fascinating, informative and downright interesting look at 101 historical characters from Ramases the Great to the unknown hero of Tiananmen Square. Snippety snapshots, plus a short section on the times in which each character lived, give a whirlwind tour of world history.

Call me a pedant, but I applaud Lynne Truss in taking her campaign of the correct use of punctuation to children. The Girl's Like Spaghetti (Profile Books, £8.99) is a humorous take on the havoc that the misuse of the apostrophe can wreak. Bonnie Timmons' amusing illustrations show us the world of difference between, for example, Ladies' lounge' and Ladies lounge'.

Philippa Logan

Alison Light provided a thorough, penetrating study of Bloomsbury and the women who looked after it in Mrs Woolf and the Servants (Five Leaves, £20). It is easy to forget that the majority of British women were servants from the age of 12 until they married (if they ever did, since they had very little free time and employers did not like them to have 'followers'). Middle-class people assumed they could not do without them - housework was a full-time job - and novelists ignored or made fun of them. Virginia Woolf was kind to her servants, but couldn't quite believe that they were her equals.

Dominic Hibberd and John Onions's The Winter of the World (Constable, £25) is an anthology of poems inspired by the First World War in chronological order, from 1914 to 1930. Great poets are here, so are small ones, and emotions range from loud-mouthed patriotism to Owen's sense of "the pity of war". Impeccably edited and a basic text.

The war left 1.75 million Englishwomen without men to marry, and, in most cases, without sex. But they were not all tragic figures; many had useful lives or were high achievers. So far as I know, Virginia Nicholson's Singled Out (Viking £20) is the first book to tell their story.

Merryn Williams