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From new voices like NoViolet Bulawayo to rediscovered old voices like James Salter, from Dave Eggers's satire to David Thomson's history of film, writers, Observer critics and others pick their favourite reads of 2013. And they tell us what they hope to find under the tree …

Curtis Sittenfeld

Novelist

My favourite books of 2013 are Drama High (Riverhead) by Michael Sokolove, Sea Creatures (Turnaround) by Susanna Daniel, and & Sons (Harper Collins) by David Gilbert. Drama High is incredibly smart, moving non-fiction about an American drama teacher who for four decades coaxed sophisticated and nuanced theatrical performances out of teenage students who weren't privileged or otherwise remarkable and in so doing, changed their conceptions of what they could do with their lives. Sea Creatures is a gripping, beautifully written novel about the mother of a selectively mute three-year-old boy; when she takes a job ferrying supplies to a hermit off the coast of Florida,...

• Hawks are not easy to domesticate. Some of them refuse to “break”. They would rather starve themselves to death before giving up their freedom. Julian Goldberger, the director of ‘The Hawk Is Dying’ isn’t ready to be domesticated either. Hopefully he will never be. He became one of the most acclaimed new young directors in 1998 with his feature film debut Trans, an almost experimental but unforgettable movie that opened at the Toronto Film Festival and quickly became a cult pic. The low-budget movie, about a teenager trying to find his place in the world, became a favorite of the festival circuit, traveling from Sundance to Berlin winning awards and hype for this author. Trans caught the eye of Ted Hope, one of the biggest names of the so called ‘independent circuit’, who offered to produce his next project. Almost eight years later, on the eve of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival,

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Paul Giamatti, Sarah Polley and Michael Pitt will head the cast of The Hawk Is Dying, which Julian Goldberger is directing for Antidote Films and This Is That. Hawk, based on the novel by Harry Crews, focuses on the character of George Gattling (Giamatti), who becomes involved with a young graduate student (Polley) who is searching for a red-tailed hawk. It will mark Goldberger's second feature, following 1998's Trans, which he shot while a student at the AFI.