As 2009 draws to a close, we’ve been given the formidable task of culling the finest literature from the year. As always, it was tough picking out the best from a bevy of books published in the last 12 months. But who won? In the fiction category, it was Daniyal Mueenuddin’s collection of short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. As for nonfiction, the always reliable Dave Eggers topped the list with his Hurricane Katrina-centric book, Zeitoun.

Fifty years ago, Bernard Malamud won the National Book Award for his story collection The Magic Barrel. There are echoes of that book's casual mastery and patience in Mueenuddin's debut collection, which was a finalist for the same award this year. Only Mueenuddin's debut doesn't unfold in the Jewish enclaves of Brooklyn, but rather the mud-clapped floors of servant quarters in rural Pakistan. His characters, like Malamud's, are often stuck in an old order, even as the world tilts on and Pakistan's feudal society begins to crumble.

This book was a finalist for the National Book Awards and is starting to turn up in many "Best of the Year" lists, for good reason. It's a mesmerizing read about a way of life that is now almost extinct. Set mostly in rural Punjab and the city of Lahore, these interwoven stories, which take place over several decades, explore the lives of both rich and poor under Pakistan's rigid, almost feudal class structure. All the characters are related to, or dependent on, a wealthy landowner who is only vaguely aware of what happens to them as they live out their lives in the "other rooms" on his land and in his homes. Every room has its secret story, every character a vibrant, sometimes tragic life.

Alexander McCall Smith chooses SEVEN DAYS IN THE ART WORLD. William Dalrymple chooses IN OTHER ROOMS, OTHER WONDERS. Christopher Brookmyre chooses THE ABYSSINIAN PROOF. Janice Galloway chooses MURIEL SPARK: THE BIOGRAPHY.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Bloomsbury, £14.99) is an astonishing collection of short stories by the new star of the South Asian fiction, Daniyal Mueenuddin. The author's humane and humourous appreciation of rural life, seen from the point of view of the landlord, depicts a world familiar from "Sketches from a Huntsman's Album," but with the action transposed from the Russia steppe to the Pakistani Punjab. Like Turgenev, Mueenuddin creates a world peopled by rural folk, generously sketched with a wonderful freshness and lightness.

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s collection of linked stories, “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders” (Norton), set in contemporary Pakistan. These are beautifully limpid and luminous, reminiscent of early Naipaul, and range across society with enviable ease.

A remarkable debut by a Punjabi writer who has gained plaudits from Mohsin Hamid and Salman Rushdie. A small book that reveals, in every detail, the extent to which life in Pakistan is dictated as much by whom you know as what you do.

The son of a Pakistani civil servant and an American writer, Daniyal Mueenuddin grew up in Lahore and Wisconsin, trained as a lawyer in the U.S. and then returned to rural Pakistan to run his family's farm. He writes — in an unadorned, mesmerizing style — with both a deep understanding of Pakistani culture and an appreciation for what Western audiences know, or don't know, about life in a country that features far more prominently in the news than on the fiction shelf. The eight stories that make up his debut collection are marked by conflict and corruption — he's especially attuned to the subtle power struggles that can infect a household — but in this bleak environment, it's the little victories that keep his characters hopeful.

Contemporary Pakistan is a place where one man may bed down in a wooden crate and another in a mansion, where women of all classes must seek the protection of men, where there’s stealing and then there’s stealing. The eight stories in this impressive debut collection capture it all with remarkably clear-eyed compassion.

The best novel I read this year was Rawi Hage's COCKROACH (Hamish Hamilton), which tells the story of an ungrateful immigrant, filled with angst and attitude, in a Montreal which could be Kafka's Prague. It is a dark book, narrated with verve and brilliance. It made me jump for joy. Any writer who borrows a piece of a Capote book title is asking for it, but Daniyal Mueenuddin's IN OTHER ROOMS, OTHER WONDERS, set in worlds of rich and poor, east and west, has such razor sharpness and lyric tenderness that it gets away with it. Anyone writing "you only had to see her disjoint a chicken to know the depths and heights of her carnality" gets my vote.

The list includes Daniyal Mueenuddin, Linda Gordon, and Morris Dickstein,