To get the bad news out of the way first: the scariest paperback of the year was Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction (Bloomsbury). It considers the vast damage being done to the biosphere by human beings, summed up by one scientist thus: “Look around you. Kill half of what you see. Or if you’re feeling generous, just kill about a quarter of what you see.”

For life-affirming relief from this, touching on subjects of deep importance – women’s identities and roles, from youth to middle age; cancer; fitting into society; and much more – it has to be Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys by Viv Albertine, pictured (Faber). Albertine was the guitarist in the groundbreaking and even-better-than-you-remember-them feminist punk band the Slits, who I suspect inoculated many young men against sexism at the end of the 1970s: and this memoir is hilarious, moving and thought-provoking. It’s probably my favourite book of the year, and its popularity one of those phenomena that make you think that not all hope is lost.

Will Hodgkinson’s memoir The House Is Full of Yogis (Harper Collins) describes his father’s sudden conversion, following near-death from salmonella, to the Indian religious cult of the Brahma Kumaris (tenets: vegetarianism, asceticism, white pyjama suits). It’s both hugely engaging and mind-boggling, especially when Hodgkinson’s tabloid journalist mother writes a bestseller called Sex Is Not Compulsory just, so it would seem, to wind people up, and with no consideration for her mortified children. She’s a splendid creation of egotism whom imagination alone would be hard-pressed to conjure.

You may have aged relatives to consider. Nostalgic agitproppers with an interest in the capital’s history will love David Rosenberg’s Rebel Footprints (Pluto), which arranges London’s radical past into easy but fascinating and inspiring historical walks. Those who did national service, or managed to avoid it, will particularly appreciate National Service (Penguin) by Richard Vinen, a long book that never becomes wearisome, and has at least one fascinating item on every page. My favourites include the story about John Peel’s brother-in-law insisting Peel address him as “sir”, and the squaddie in church who was shouted at by a corporal: “Oi! You take your hat off in the house of the Lord, cunt!” Of course, you don’t have to be old to love this book. More genteel is Stefan Zweig’s monograph, Montaigne (Pushkin), a beautiful, perhaps even the best, reflection on the great French essayist.

There has been some great fiction this year, too. Reprints: Victor Serge’s Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics), which tells you, sometimes with deadpan, horrified humour, always with intelligence and honesty, what it was really like to live in Stalin’s USSR, either as a citizen or a guest of the gulag; and Danilo Kiš’s Encyclopedia of the Dead (Penguin Modern Classics), one of those story collections that brings to mind Jorge Luis Borges but seems somehow more full of circulating blood, pumped by a heart as well as a brain: thought experiments that can move almost to tears.

New(er) fiction: Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames (Pushkin) is a seemingly bizarre attempt to update PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels to contemporary America – but an extremely successful one, too, true in spirit not only to the original but to the concerns of modern fiction. It’s a Necker Cube of a book in that it can be either extremely funny or extremely sad, depending on the face that presents itself to you as you read (it is of course both, and everyone who bought this book on my recommendation has told me they loved it). Do also read, whether you are new to his long-running character Frank Bascombe or not, Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank With You (Bloomsbury), in which Ford’s genial, wise, droll narrator muses on the vagaries of life as it shuffles through its autumn. It’s delivered in prose that is effortlessly stylish, exact and always trembling on the edge of great humour.

Off to the States? … Stephen Fry as Jeeves and Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster in Jeeves and Wooster. Photograph: ITV / Rex Features

Back on this side of the Atlantic, Guy Ware’s The Fat of Fed Beasts (Salt) is Samuel Beckett by way of Quentin Tarantino, with a good shake of Franz Kafka: featuring guns, bank robbery, metaphysics and the question of good and evil.

There can be only one contender for sports book of the year: Giles Smith’s Roy of the Rovers: the Official Autobiography (Arrow). The man, the myth, the legend, the suspiciously large number of kidnappings – it’s all here.

If you can’t make your mind up about any of these, just buy a huge stack, if not the entire list, of Penguin Little Black Classics’ celebration of 80 years of being in business. There are 80 60-or-so-page extracts from 80 works covering millennia: 80p each or £49.99 for the lot, which you can keep in a box by the bed and dip into, as you would a box of chocolates. And if 50 quid seems a lot for a bookish present, reflect that it is considerably cheaper than a degree in the humanities, and probably, these days, at least as useful.

• Save at least 30% Browse all the critics’ choices at bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. From now until Christmas, 20p from each title you order will go to the Guardian and Observer charity appeal 2015

Best books of 2015