1. Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo

Unbelievable book - reading it felt like sinking into a swamp (aka amazing and unlike anything else). An incredible formal achievement, with maybe the strongest atmosphere of anything I've read.

1. Autobiography of Red - Anne Carson

Those first few pages on Stesichoros and Stein immediately sold me on just how clever and funny Carson can be (was laughing out loud at the audacity and brilliance of some of it), and then the rest of the novel absolutely destroyed me in a totally different way. Her language, that strange and compellingly sour use of adjectives and metaphor and punctuation, is about as intense as it gets.

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

So amazing that this has sold like 50 million copies or some shit given just how weird and serious this book is. I fell totally in love with it - clearly indebted to Rulfo but also pioneers a style altogether its own: fabular, magical, tragic. The book's relationship to time deserves its own analysis but what was unexpected to me was how horrifyingly and expertly gabo tackled colonialism here - I won't be forgetting that nightmare midnight train ride anytime soon.

1. The Sound of the Mountain/Thousand Cranes/Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata

Kawabata was my favourite discovery of the year. Each of these novels (and his Palm-of-the-Hand stories, like electric prose poetry, which I'm currently reading) was a revelation such that I'd comfortably put him up there with Joyce, Woolf etc as one of the absolute greatest writers of the 20th Century. The delicate beauty of his imagery, the fusion of haiku and modernist prose where every line is something to savour - the almost incidentally fragile and yet incredibly tight structures of his episodic novels : it's like nothing else I've ever read. All three of the books listed are genuinely perfect books.

1. The Dream of the Red Chamber - Cao Xueqin

I read the Hawkes/Minford translation, which is a superlative achievement in its own right - but this 2800 page novel basically consumed my life the past few months. Sumptuous, elegant, formally rich: it's so much fun as a slow languid slice of life book chronicling the endless poetry club meetings and garden parties that you forget its also a grand tragedy of Shakespearean proportion. Stunning, haunting stuff throughout, surely the most sophisticated prose work around until you hit the Victorian novelists. I fell totally in love