(by Sarah Waters)

Once you start reading this, you won’t be able to stop. Frances Wray, 26, and her mother live in a large, decaying house in a genteel part of London. It’s 1922, they have lost all the male members of their once-posh family (Frances’ two brothers, both killed in WWI, and her financially inept father) and they are flat broke.

So, they take the drastic action of converting the upper floor into accomodation for “paying guests”, a rather common young “clerical class” couple, Len and Lilian Barber. And it’s all downhill from there. Waters’ descriptive writing and characterisation are marvellous, and she ramps up an almost unbearable level of psychological tension which is sustained till the very end. She is also, slyly, very funny.

(by Dylan Horrocks)

Enchanting, complex graphic novel centred around cartoonist Sam Zabel who has lost all inspiration and is joylessly churning out drivel to earn money. But then Sam comes across some old comics and literally enters wonderful new worlds which scare the bejesus out of him, at first.

Horrocks has created a powerful narrative, full of twists as quivering Sam starts to gain confidence, especially when he encounters the “magic pen”. Horrocks also confronts sexism in the comic book world by empowering his female heroines and articulating a debate about the moral boundaries of fantasy. Fabulous. It is Horrocks who has the magic pen.

(by Joel Dicker)

Prodigal Swiss writer Dicker was the year’s sensation with the release of this much-translated thriller. It centres around Marcus Goldman, a smug young New York writer who won stardom with his first novel but is now, on deadline, completely blocked. He seeks solace at the home of his old mentor, Harry Quebert, himself once a famous novelist for just one book, but that fails.

Shortly afterwards, Harry is charged with the murder, from 33 years ago, of a 15-year-old girl found buried in his garden. Marcus moves into Harry’s New Hampshire house and sets about digging up the past, sniffing for clues, aerating secrets. It starts to seem that everyone has one.

(by Anthony Horowitz)

What a ripper! Horowitz’s second herlock Holmes novel, after The House Of Silk, is a perfect construct, set just days after the plunge of Holmes and Moriarty into the Reichenbach Falls. New York Pinkerton agent Frederick Chase and DI Athelney Jones meet at the scene, inspect Moriarty’s corpse, find a clue and set off for London to try and thwart a very nasty American villain who is setting up shop in the capital’s underworld. Horowitz’s plotting and characterisation are sublime, and the ending will leave you gasping, both in shock and admiration.

(by James Ellroy)

LA, December 6, 1941. A Japanese family of four are found dead in their LA home. Ritual suicide seems the cause, but as Ellroy’s first book in five years unfolds, nothing, as always with Ellroy, is what it seems. Loosely the first part of a prequel to Ellroy’s terrific LA Quartet series from the late 80s-early 90s, this is a blood-thirsty new epic of racism, political corruption, Chinatown, Bette Davis and way too much driving around a war-fevered LA.

Those who are familiar with Ellroy’s oeuvre may feel a sense of deja-vu, but there is no doubting the sheer magnum force of his staccato prose and techicolour storytelling.

(by Ben Lerner)

The hero of Ben Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, has had a busy year. He’s enjoyed considerable literary success, been diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness, and been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a baby. The action takes place in New York City between super-storms, beginning with Hurricane Irene and ending with Hurricane Sandy. As with Lerner’s highly original first novel, Leaving The Atocha Station, not much happens and yet a lot happens.

The story is somewhat autobiographical and also metafictional, in that it’s about a novelist, who is also a poet, writing his second novel. It’s an elegantly expressed, contemporary meditation on art and life that could almost be described as a long poem.

(by Ian McEwan)

In this absorbing, meticulously researched novel, Ian McEwan explores the impact of religion on ordinary people who struggle to conform to its narrow and, in some cases, life-denying precepts. Fiona Maye, a well regarded High Court judge in the British Family Division, is asked for an emergency court order to save Adam, a Jehovah’s Witness teenager, who is refusing a blood transfusion. Adam and his parents are steadfast, even though their decision will condemn him to a ghastly death. While she’s considering Adam’s case, Fiona’s husband reveals he is having an affair.

She must put aside her own emotional pain in order to decide Adam’s case in accordance with the law, which requires that she act on the principle that “the welfare of the child is paramount”.

(by Martin Amis)

Martin Amis’ expedition into the horrors of Nazi Germany is almost too grim to finish, but for fans, it’s worth persevering, if only to witness what Britain’s most consistently interesting novelist has dared to get up to this time. Amis’ prose is as dynamic as ever, and there’s a queasy fascination in the dreadful scenario, as the hero, Golo Thomsen, a nephew of Martin Bormann, conducts a love affair with the wife of Paul Doll, the commandant of a concentration camp.

Told from three narrative points of view, that of Thomsen, Doll and Szmul, who is head of the Sonderkommando (prisoners whose task it was to dispose of bodies), The Zone Of Interest is a powerful blend: angry, poignant, comic, disgusted, and finally, in its Afterword, typically grandiose: Amis informing us about the World.

(by Jose Saramago)

In 1953, Jose Saramago submitted his novel, Skylight, to a publisher. When he received no response he didn’t write anything for a long time. In 1989, after he’d successfully produced three novels, the publisher wrote to say they’d rediscovered the Skylight manuscript and wanted to buy it. Saramago refused, insisting that the book not be published in his lifetime. Now, after his death, the novel has been published by his wife and, more recently, translated into English.

Set in an apartment house in Lisbon in 1950, Skylight tells the story of 15 residents of six flats. With humour and sharp attention to detail, Saramago has created an intimate portrait of a diverse group of characters. A compassionate novel, full of insight and wit.

(by Richard Flanagan)

Richard Flanagan’s novel about the Burma railway won this year’s Man Booker Prize. Flanagan’s father was a prisoner of war on the “narrow road”, built by the Japanese using forced labour during World War II. His fictional hero is Dorrigo Evans, an Australian doctor who becomes famous after the warfor his courage in dealing with his captors. Although he’s a national hero, Evans remains haunted by the trauma of enslavement.

Flanagan’s vivid narrative makes it clear that the captors were, in a sense, prisoners too. Over-written in parts, and justly nominated for this year’s Bad Sex Award, it’s worth reading for the fascinating and grim subject.

(by Laline Paull)

My book of the year. Watership Down with bees: except it’s better. Laline Paull manages one of the great impossible feats of science fiction, presenting us with an alien whose values and thinking and sensory experience really are alien... and making her comprehensible and sympathetic, to the point where her world becomes visceral and exciting.

The story has an elegant shape, yet isn’t predictable. The writing is clear and evocative, framing inhuman experience in human terms without ever quite letting us forget we’re inhabiting the mind of an insect.

(by Claire North)

Do you ever imagine being thrown back into your younger self’s body, knowing everything you know now? It’s a scenario that’s been used well a number of times in novels — Ken Grimwood’s Replay, Catriona McCloud’s Growing Up Again — but never with the sophistication and excitement North achieves here.

This is the story of a man living and reliving the 20th century: in itself, rich material for fiction. It’s also an involving study of idealism at war with pragmatism, and a propulsive thriller about the end of the world.

(by Ann Leckie)

Not just a great sequel to a great novel, though it is that, thank God. Ancillary Justice was so good, and so unexpected — at once a first-rate space opera and the best science fictional exploration of gender since The Left Hand Of Darkness — that it was hard to believe Leckie could have a worthy sequel ready a year later.

But this doesn’t just continue the story of Breq, the sentient spaceship now trapped in a human body, and her role in the ongoing collapse of the Radchaai Empire. It also manages to sidestep all the expectations arising from the previous novel, and head somewhere quite new.

(by William Gibson)

Arctic levels of cool. William Gibson imagines a detailed 50-years-out future for the first time since Neuromancer, and sculpts it in spare, elegant prose. So very spare, in fact, that feeling out the exact nature and dimensions of his plot takes careful reading.

It’s an effort you’ll enjoy making: every sentence has its own precisely judged weight, and the cumulative effect is exhilarating. This is one of the year’s best thrillers, and also a chillingly plausible picture of where this planet might be heading.

(by Ned Beauman)

The title is the name of a mysterious new designer drug, which turns up on the streets of London and draws the attention of two likeable young stoners, who soon find themselves up to their necks in all sorts of trouble.

But “glow” is also a fair description of the reading state this book induces: the prose is polished and hyper-intelligent, and the well-meaning young heroes are so curiously lovable. The story widens out into mysteries both criminal and biological — why are London’s foxes seeming so clever all of a sudden? — and every page offers you new reasons to keep reading.