The literary world of 2003 has so far been dominated by highly publicised prizes and various other mainstream marketing stunts and media obsequies, which to my mind are usually centred around uninteresting, uninspiring, and highly overrated pieces of work. However, this year's been unique in that some of the overexposed and over-praised books have, actually, been good. Take the 2002 Man Booker Prize winner; past and bitter experience has taught me that previous winners, with few exceptions, have been merely competent and consistently undeserving of the hype, with little to say to anyone outside of a smugly cosy intellectual coterie; but this year, having a soft spot for sailor's yarns and also tigers, I picked up Yann Martel's Life of Pi to take sunbathing up to a lake with me. If it's like all the others, I thought, I can just bin it and jump in the lake, but I only stopped reading when the pain of sunburn was becoming unbearable, as was the heat, and I needed to cool off. It's an amazing, vibrant book; completely unsentimental but powerfully moving – it gets in your skin, it gets in your blood. Richard Parker is one of the most convincingly-realised characters in fiction, ever. It's full of wonder; it celebrates being alive and human with a bright energy which doesn't in any way shadow its dark, dark heart. I'm still not sure about the carnivorous island, however. And it made me look like a boiled beetroot for a week or so afterwards.

Another book that I couldn't get away from if I tried was Vernon God Little by D. B. C. Pierre. I tried to ignore it and wish it would go away but an unsolicited copy came through the post from a contact at Faber. It sat on my desk for weeks as by that time I'd read several media-darling books and been unmoved by them all. It's the wasted time that bothers me; I mean, it took me say twelve hours to get through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggars. And for what? I'll deeply regret wasting those twelve hours when I'm old and ill. I'll want them back. I'll weep because they're gone (I already do, in fact...). So why I was prompted into reading Vernon God Little, I don't know but I was glad I did, from the first page onwards. I couldn't stop laughing. It's hilarious. But like all great comedies it has a tragic heart so black that it's dizzying to regard and dauntingly shocking to contemplate but the humour offers you a new way of seeing. As does the language; this is a book in which moths are 'felty splinters torn from night-time'. That's incredible. And it's just a throw-away line.

In fact, there's been an impressive wavelet of American/Canadian imports into the UK this summer; two spring instantly to mind – Well by Matthew McIntosh and Dead Girls by Nancy Lee. Both are collections of inter-connected short stories and both are absolutely absorbing. The yearning of the human heart is given expression so original and strong that I was rocked back on my heels (or, rather, my arse; I was sitting down when I read them). I doubt very much that they'll get the recognition they deserve in the UK; generally speaking, we like it safe here. We don't want to know that life has been robbed so much of substance that it can sometimes seem little more than a dream; we don't want to acknowledge that multiculturalism hurts. The same can be said for Damien Wilkins's Chemistry, from New Zealand; it's a superb, heartbreaking book. But it caused little more than a ripple over here, in this stagnant, mantled pond. A great pity. But sadly not surprising.

There has been some domestically-produced stuff of worth; Jim Kelman's collected essays, And the Judges Said..., are masterpieces of controlled political rage, and a first novel, The Tower, by Tristan Hughes, stands out. It's set on Ynys Mon, or Anglesey in English, which is an utterly unique island off the north-west coast of Wales. Driving to it, you pass through the vast mad mountains of Snowdonia for an age and then reach the coast where abruptly the land becomes a colossal pancake, a huge flat expanse dotted with standing stones and cromlechs and caves. It always seems washed in an eerie yellow light. It's a deeply peculiar, strange place, and Hughes captures the atmosphere of it perfectly. The main criticism is that his book's too short; it left me craving for more. Which isn't a bad thing, of course, but it sometimes feels that way.

Non-fiction? Jon Steele's War Junkie; Thomas Friedman's Longitudes and Attitudes; Exploring the World Before and After September 11th, which talks a lot of sense, despite certain simplistic right-wing whisperings, and quotes from many fascinating Muslim sources; and Violence and the Sacred by Rene Girard, which can't be encapsulated in a couple of sentences, except to say that it's so good that it leaves me less perplexed. There's also The Rough Guide to Unexplained Phenomena on my desk and, as research into a forthcoming novel, works on visitations and apparitions of a sacred/ecstatic sort, such as Cornwell's Powers of Darkness, Powers of Light. I'm also due to visit Greenland in October, so I'm reading anything I can get my hands on about that country; William T. Vollmann is indispensable here. But then he always is. He's one of those writers, like Denis Johnson, who I return to time and time over. How does he manage to travel so much and find time to write so much? He must have the energy of a swallow.

I always have a collection of poetry close-to-hand, too; at the moment it's the selected poems of Charles Madge, a shamefully neglected 1930s poet, called Of Love, Time, & Places, published by Anvil Press. It's expensive, and difficult to track down, but the rewards are worth it.

So, yes, there's some tremendous, inspiring work around, even, by God, on the bestseller lists. Amongst British writers there's a higher proportion of the negligible than the noteworthy, but that's only true in the Sunday supplements; dig, and you'll find gems. Hasn't that always been the case?

Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool and now lives in Wales. His first novel 'Grits' was made into a film for television and his other novels include Kelly & Victor, Sheepshagger and Stump.