Sarah Akhtar, Stoke-on-Trent

Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (4th Estate) follows two children, Marie-Laure in France and Werner in Germany, as the second world war approaches. I knew they were destined to meet, but not where or how. A story of war like no other I have read, it is gripping and moving and I spotted Ken Barlow reading it in Coronation Street.

Kate Anderson, Sheffield



I feel I know the inhabitants of Holt well by now, and sad I will not be visiting it again. Kent Haruf’s final novel, Our Souls at Night (Picador), is a triumph of gentle understatement. Addie and Louis break the conventions of the fictional small town of Holt and spend their nights together. It is wonderful to read a novel where the ageing main characters are not beset by dementia or care, but have the same desire as many of us: to know that they are significant to someone.

Justine Ayres, from the website

Sejal Badani’s Trail of Broken Wings (Lake Union) encapsulates the complexity of family life. It is the story of three sisters and their mother who are reconnected after their father develops a serious illness. A fascinating insight into the way families try to hide, bury, deny, suppress and control abuse and trauma.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Terry Pratchett at home near Salisbury in 2008. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/Rex

JP Bebbington, from the website

Terry Pratchett’s The Shepherd’s Crown (Doubleday Childrens) is glorious and heartbreaking, a grand finale and fitting swan song from one of the greatest writers of this – and the last – century. The book allows the reader to mourn Sir Terry, Granny Weatherwax and the Discworld together, and for that I am very grateful – and in awe of how, even in his last months of severe bad health, he was able to produce a book as witty and insightful as those that came before.

Tim Blackburn, London

In a strong year for collections of short stories, my pick has to be those of the late Lucia Berlin, republished as A Manual for Cleaning Women (Picador). Family life took Berlin around the US and Latin America. She married and divorced three times, had children, fought alcoholism and chronic back trouble, and took lots of different jobs. Her experiences are mined for individual stories of immediate raw appeal that intertwine to create near-autobiography. A miracle of empathy.

Charles Boardman, Nottingham

Perfection is rarely encountered, but this year it came in Kent Haruf’s slender Our Souls at Night. Not a great deal happens; two elderly neighbours enter into a life-changing companionship, and there is a gentle and sad ending. Robert Harris’s Dictator (Hutchinson), the end of his Cicero trilogy, is historical fiction at its best. I also enjoyed Tessa Hadley’s The Past (Jonathan Cape), in which a large family gathers together for a holiday in an old family house to discuss its possible sale.

Vidya Borooah, Belfast

The bold idea of Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (Oneworld), translated by John Cullen, is a further inquiry into the murder of an Arab in Albert Camus’s L’Etranger. Daoud’s account is narrated by Harun, the victim’s younger sibling, who hopes to rescue his dead brother, Musa, from anonymity. The parallels between the lives of the narrator and Meursault are subtly and skilfully drawn. This is no simplistic condemnation of French colonial rule. In modern-day Islamist Algeria, Musa finds himself alienated from the society in which he lives. He, too, is an outsider.

Phelim Brady, Guildford

Anne Toner’s Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission (Cambridge) is essential reading for any lover of the written word. To miss it would be a grave sin of ...

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kent Haruf, author of Our Souls at Night. Photograph: Sophie Bassouls/Corbis

Jerard Bretts, Milton Keynes

Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night explores the late-blooming relationship between a widow and widower in a way that challenges our views of what it means to grow old. I don’t think I will ever forget this spare and unsentimental masterpiece. Wallace Stevens scholars John N Serio and Christopher Beyers, in The Collected Poems: The Corrected Edition (Vintage), have gone back to original editions and manuscripts to produce this definitive volume. I hope it will introduce this dazzling modernist poet, too long overshadowed by TS Eliot, to a new generation of readers.

Sue Brooks, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire

When I had finished Rob Cowen’s Common Ground (Hutchinson), I promised myself I would find a way of witnessing the emergence of mayflies next year and celebrate the return of Apus apus, the common swift, as I had never done before. Cowen’s year-long obsession with a small area of disregarded land near his home in Harrogate moved me deeply, to tears sometimes, and has been life-changing. Lucy Wood’s Weathering (Bloomsbury) is exciting, startling and engrossing – some passages I read again and again for the beauty of the imagery. Three women, one of them a ghost, endure a hard winter in an old house beside a river. Each has a unique voice, including the river, and their own unique transformation. Reading Iain Sinclair’s Black Apples of Gower (Little Toller) was like visiting a foreign country. I had to go there again and see it through his eyes – a great adventure.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by Adam Gale

Cornelius Browne, Dungloe, County Donegal

At the beginning of the year, Robert Crawford’s Young Eliot (Jonathan Cape) led me back to The Waste Land with fresh eyes. In the middle of the year, Colm Tóibín’s On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton) bolstered my love of such poems as “The Moose”, while stoking my interest in Thom Gunn, the painter Tony O’Malley and Tóibín’s own fiction. Towards the end of the year, Ali Smith’s Public Library and Other Stories (Hamish Hamilton) introduced me to the neglected Scottish poet Olive Fraser, a Christmas gift destined to outlast these dark evenings.

Fiona Caldwell, from the website

Holly Bourne’s Am I Normal Yet? (Usborne Childrens) is an accurate portrayal of mental health issues in young people without dramatising or romanticising, and without that being the main storyline. It raises awareness in a constructive way.

Michael Callanan, Birmingham

The year started with a punch to the gut in Ryan Gattis’s novel All Involved (Picador) and a punch to the heart in Stuart Evers’s Your Father Sends His Love (Picador). The year ended with a charge to the brain in Claudia Rankine’s poetry Citizen (Penguin) and Eula Biss’s non-fiction On Immunity: An Inoculation (Fitzcarraldo), which are inventive, creative and astoundingly written. Only two writers have made me want to race to read everything they have written, and now three: Tom Drury is a revelation; his Grouse County trilogy, which concludes with Pacific (Old Street), manages to be both poignant and hilarious.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Patti Smith performing in 2015. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

Linda Calvey, Northampton

I was already deep into Jonathan Bate’s Unauthorised Life of Ted Hughes (William Collins) when I read a review of Patti Smith’s new memoir, M Train (Bloomsbury). Her reverence for the poetry and life of Sylvia Plath sprang out at me, and thus I made my first acquaintance with Smith’s lyrical writing, unorthodox life and sheaves of photographs (images of Plath’s grave in all seasons and lights). In tandem with a previous biography of Hughes, by Elaine Feinstein, I sampled Patti’s earlier memoir, Just Kids. While at Coney Island with Robert Mapplethorpe, looking bohemian, she heard a woman urging her husband to take a snap of them, as possible celebrities. “Nah,” he replied. “They’re just kids.” Ted Hughes commented that he and Plath had been “only kids” at the most intense and divisive stage of their relationship. I was left to ponder the fatal maturing entwinements of creative couples; who must live and who die; how each lives on in myriad ways, still locked in restless embraces and rivalries – and who bows to the task of recording and parsing these lives and loves.

Morag Charlwood, Shoreham-by-Sea

Pascal Garnier’s Boxes (Gallic), a finely honed gothic tale translated by Melanie Florence, is a mordant exploration of the comédie humaine that enticingly scratches away at the fragility of love, loss and grief. Raymond Jean’s Reader for Hire (Peirene), translated by Adriana Hunter, personifies the lure of reading in its main character, the “Reader for Hire”, while making you, the reader, complicit in the act of transformation implicit in the act of reading. It’s clever, witty, ironic stuff, both touching and erotic. Jonathan Lee’s High Dive (Heinemann) is engaging, humane and devastating in its tragedies. Set around the small lives of fictional players in the bombing of Brighton’s Grand Hotel in 1984, it brings to life a major piece of recent history.

John Irving Clarke, Wakefield

The poems in Huddersfield-based Gareth Durasow’s Endless Running Games (Fruit Bruise), described in the blurb as poems for the console generation, burst off the page with fast-action animation. The reader will often feel compelled to pause, replay images and steel themselves for the visceral lurking among the magical and the mythical. But Durasow also does tender: read the love poems, the poems about children, take a cue from “Walt Whitman in My Pocket” – “look how much goes on in there” – and, yes, there is a vast amount revealed only by reading and rereading. A pleasurable prospect.

Catherine Davies, from the website

Kamel Daoud describes The Meursault Investigation as a dialogue with Albert Camus’s L’Etranger. The opening line is a riposte to Meursault’s uncertainty over when his mother died, “today or perhaps yesterday”: the mother of Musa and Harun (Camus’s unnamed Arab and his brother) is alive and well. The story told by Harun, a quasi-oral account with the intonations of Algeria, contrasts with Camus’s tersely written novel from the metropole. Pre-Bataclan this was a thought-provoking insight into the Algerian legacy of France. After Bataclan it raises uncomfortable questions about the postcolonial relationship of Islam and Christianity. It measures absurdity with some glimmers of hope. After all, this time, mother is still alive.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kate Atkinson, author of A God in Ruins Photograph: Euan Myles/PR

Alison Doig, Etchingham, East Sussex

I loved Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins (Doubleday), a fine exploration of chance and contingency; also Tessa Hadley’s forensic detailing of sibling relationships in The Past. Tim Clare’s brilliant, mad interwar thriller, The Honours (Canongate), starts out as one kind of book, then turns into quite another. Clare is a poet and his language sparkles. If you are one of those people who would never pick up a young adult book, put aside your prejudice and read Philip Reeve’s Railhead (Oxford). Set in the far future where giant sentient trains travel between the stars, Reeve’s hallucinatory landscapes and unforgettable characters challenge our ideas of what it is to be human.

Angus Doulton, Yelverton, Devon

In Cuckoo (Bloomsbury), Nick Davies distils the findings from more than 30 years’ study of the relationship between cuckoos and the species that play host to their eggs and young. He shows clearly that there is a steadily escalating “arms race” in which each side evolves new strategies of defence and attack. He describes evolution taking place not over millennia, but within one naturalist’s lifetime. So much modern nature writing tends to be rather self-regarding, but this wonderfully curious book is the antithesis to all that.

Paul Eastwood, Stamford

Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Joan Didion, The Last Love Song (St Martin’s), will do little for your faith in humanity. Conspiracy theories abound in Didion’s writing, and Daugherty penetrates beneath the surface to reveal how her uncompromising moral intelligence created such a meticulous interpretation of our recent past.

Peter Elliston, Taunton, Somerset

Sunjeev Sahota’s Booker-shortlisted The Year of the Runaways (Picador) deals with what it means to be forced to leave your country hoping for a better future, only to find that moving halfway across the world brings equally difficult struggles. I became immersed in the lives of the young woman and three young men as they battled with their beliefs, rip-off merchants and family loyalties. Sahota’s refusal to explain all of the non-English expressions or modes of address adds to his story’s authenticity.

Brian Fearon, Barnstaple, Devon

Simon Spillett’s The Long Shadow of the Little Giant (Equinox) is the story of Tubby Hayes, one of the most gifted jazz musicians this country has produced, who died at the age of 38. Spillett, a talented jazz musician himself, admired Hayes greatly, yet this is no hagiography. It is a detailed portrait of Hayes’s life and music, warts and all, as well as telling the story of the development of modern British jazz in the postwar period – the ups and downs, and the effect of rock’n’roll and the Beatles on its popularity. The selected discography will have fans of British jazz searching for the recordings they do not own.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

Joanne Finney, from the website

Quite simply, no book has ever sunk so deep into me as Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (Picador). The main character, Jude, lived so vividly in my mind that I woke up one night crying about something I dreamed had happened to him. It’s flawed in places, but so vividly written, so heartfelt, it deserves every praise.

Rose Fletcher, from the website

I was gripped by something (I can’t quite explain what) in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, an update of the post-college New York novel. Hyped – yes. Too long – yes. Too much – at points, yes. But the characters are vivid and real (with the exception of the token-ish Malcolm) and the ending, although predictable, was one of those rip-the-bottom-out-of-your-stomach ones.

David Fothergill, Pocklington, Yorkshire

The Winter’s Tale has always been a tricky play to classify, so it’s no surprise that Jeanette Winterson’s interpretation, The Gap of Time (Hogarth), spins through an exhilarating array of genres. The sensational opening chapter enmeshes the reader in a rollercoaster ride of tragedy, comedy, thriller, fantasy, chicklit, plus a few pages of raunchy sex. Hang on to your seats, because Winterson, like Shakespeare, is an expert at teasing, pleasing and torturing our emotions. I also recommend Adam Sisman’s John le Carré: The Biography (Bloomsbury). If 600 pages is too long for you, just enjoy the first half, full of the amazing escapades of the author’s father, Ronnie, who must go down (and he several times did) as one of the 20th century’s greatest confidence tricksters.

Richard Gilyead, Saffron Walden, Essex

It feels like being cheated when you discover a brilliant author who has recently died. Not that you expect to be in touch, but knowing there is no more to come. Kent Haruf, whose Our Souls at Night was published posthumously this year, was the master of concise storytelling. This short novel is a coda to his wonderful Plainsong trilogy and, taken together, the series comprises a great American novel of ordinary life. In his final book, an ageing widow invites an old neighbour into her bed for conversation and companionship, scandalising the town and provoking an emotional ultimatum from her family. A simple story, simply told, but utterly compelling.

Sarah Goldson, from the website

Holly Bourne’s Am I Normal Yet? tells the story of Evelyn and her battle to get off Prozac without relapsing into an OCD nightmare. Bourne makes every detail realistic, so don’t expect a sickly sweet happy ending. What I especially love about her writing is the way she teaches her readers useful life lessons while never sounding preachy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See. Photograph: Shauna Doerr/AP

Nicola Gooch, York

Matthew Thomas’s We Are Not Ourselves (4th Estate) charts the life of Eileen Leary, a New Yorker of Irish immigrant parents. Central to her life is Ed, the talented scientist she marries. I didn’t anticipate correctly the “loss” to which the blurb refers, a loss that threatens to overwhelm Eileen. Poignant, but full of hope. Can I recommend a novel I’m only halfway through? Yes, if it’s Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See. I can’t say how this pacy novel ends, only that I don’t want it to.

Catriona Graham, Edinburgh

The final part of Amitav Ghosh’s opium wars trilogy, Flood of Fire (John Murray), is a rollicking wordfest that sprawls across land, sea, social class and ethnicities, sweeping us along in its narrative drive. By contrast, Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation is more meditative. The narrator relates the tale of family tragedy to a French tourist/journalist he meets in a pub. I doubt his is a reliable narrative. In Acts of the Assassins (Harvill Secker), a police procedural in which past and present collide, Richard Beard creates a Roman world with Toyotas where all flights go through Schiphol, St Paul is a body-guarded convention speaker and nothing is quite as it seems.

Leda Beth Gray, from the website

The Invention of Nature (John Murray) is a lively biography of Alexander von Humboldt and the naturalists, scientists, philosophers and writers he influenced. Andrea Wulf does a great job of capturing his enthusiasm for nature and his out-of-the-box thinking. He deserves more credit for inventing concepts that people are rediscovering today – well over a century later.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marlon James, winner of the Man Booker prize 2015. Photograph: One-world Publications

Guy Hearn, from the website

Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld) shines a light on a time and a place in history (Jamaican gun law and politics in the 1970s) that has previously hardly been noted in literature – in music yes, in literature no. It also shows how blowback is not a concept limited to the Middle East. CIA interference in Jamaica directly leads to the Yardie drug posses in major American cities a decade later. It’s brilliantly researched; most of the main threads of the story are true or believed to be true. As James himself says, if it no go so, it go nearly so.

Kate Johnson, Mirfield, Yorkshire

Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life put mine on hold until I had finished it and beyond. That an ageing female reader should care so much about the friendships of a group of gifted but damaged American college students is testament to the novel’s power. Yes, the background of Jude is dark, very dark, and deeply malign, but the extent and manner of the darkness is so carefully revealed over the course of the novel that it is neither prurient nor sensationalist. In contrast, although a very bad thing happens to Amory Clay, her life unfolds with readerly pleasure in William Boyd’s Sweet Caress (Bloomsbury).

Darren Johnston, from the website

In The Headscarf Revolutionaries (Barbican), Brian Lavery has written not only an inspiring account of the women who campaigned for better safety in the fishing industry after the Hull trawler disaster in 1968, but also a social history of a world that has largely ceased to exist. Whether describing how the ventilation cowls on trawlers had to be coated with grease as weather protection, or the exact process of cod skinning, Lavery transports us to an unforgiving place of hard labour and macho conservatism. The scenes at sea are as vivid as anything in Hemingway or Melville, and winter conditions in Icelandic fishing waters make life at Alistair MacLean’s Ice Station Zebra seem tame.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Symbol of sin and temptation … a Red Admiral butterfly. Photograph: Derek Harris / Alamy/Alamy

Martin Jones, New Barnet, Hertfordshire

In the 14th century, young men would tie a fine thread to the body of a butterfly, attach it to their hats and wander around the countryside with the butterflies fluttering around them “like tiny living kites”. The Red Admiral has been represented in art since at least the 1330s, mainly as a symbol of sin and temptation, but also, after the assassination of the Russian tsar Alexander II, as a messenger of death. Peter Marren’s Rainbow Dust (Square Peg), a captivating cultural life of British butterflies, is crammed with such fascinating stories. The real reason for those bright colours? One scientist chewed on this for years – literally.

Cyril Kavanagh, Kingston-upon-Thames

Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Bodley Head), originally published in 1974 but released in the UK for the first time this year, is ostensibly about urban planning, but becomes a stunning study of naked power. Over a period of 40 years, Moses dominated planning in New York and defied mayors, governors and presidents. Through sheer force of personality and ruthlessness, he created modern New York to his own design, which entailed his own version of ethnic cleansing, class prejudice and social engineering. O Sing Unto the Lord: A History of English Church Music (Profile) may sound dry, but Andrew Gant’s gem of a book is hilarious as well as informative, a joyful gallop through English social history with a superb cast of characters.

Sue Keable, Cambridge

Elizabeth Day’s Paradise City (Bloomsbury) is a clever, multilayered tale of four very different characters (from very different backgrounds) whose lives come to mingle in a witty, almost Dickensian way. The reader is drawn to the initially unlikable multimillionaire Howard, the only man among the four protagonists. The women are compellingly strong, each in her own way, and it is little short of a marvel how Day forges the seemingly impossible links between such a cross-section of society.

Anne Kirkman, Cambridge

Val McDermid’s Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime (Profile), brought to my attention by a retired government forensic scientist, scores on all counts. While packed with information, it is by no means a mere textbook, although it could certainly be used as such by an aspiring crime writer. The prose style is excellent and readable, as one would expect from McDermid, and I found its factual presentation more to my taste than the many fictional accounts of forensic crime research available. I think even readers who don’t like detective stories or violence would find it worth a look.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Simon Armitage on the South West Coast Path.

Kate Latham, Cornwall

This year I have done a long cycle ride and a long solo walk, so two books had particular resonance for me. Simon Armitage’s Walking Away (Faber) describes the highs and lows – geographical and emotional – of walking the South West Coast Path from Minehead to Land’s End. En route there are poems read and poems written, and some difficulties with the sea, which is always on the right and a bit “samey”, even to a poet. In comparison, Jon Day’s Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier (Notting Hill) is part academic treatise, part love song to cycling and all things bike-ish. No lycra is required to enjoy this book, just the ability to pedal and stay upright. What both books do is examine the ambivalences the solo traveller has towards offers of companionship, which I thought was probably just me being weird. Phew!

Colette Lawlor, Silverdale, North Lancashire

In Melissa Harrison’s At Hawthorn Time (Bloomsbury), a road forms the thread in a narrative encompassing springtime’s species and human interaction with nature, and itself. Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney (John Murray), set in Morecambe Bay, has an eerie atmosphere that is tangible if you visit this flat and foggy northwest coast – especially at low tide on a drizzly, winter’s day.

Terry Lempriere, Warrington

At the start of the year, Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop (Abacus) left me spellbound with its mixture of romance and adventure, depicting lost and found love in middle age; it remained lodged in my memory through many other books, so much so that I reread it recently and felt even deeper enjoyment of its entertaining account of books, canals and French characters. Julian Barnes’s Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (Jonathan Cape) is a typically elegant and absorbing book by one of the great contemporary English writers, and with strong Gallic undertones – a wonderful set of essays about artists, many of them French, covering the period from Romanticism through to modernism. A very satisfying and perceptive read from a master craftsman.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest James Rebanks on his farm in Cumbria. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Les Maden, Harleston, Norfolk

The gift of A Shepherd’s Life (Allen Lane) took me to the Eskdale Show to meet the author, James Rebanks. His book describes the beauty and harshness of fell life in the context of family kinship and lakeland traditions. Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks (Hamish Hamilton) explores the language of landscape and regrets the loss of regional vocabulary – that which defines and enriches our abused natural environment. However, my book of the year is Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (Faber). Adventures in the dystopian world of new Russia make bling look dowdy, the Tory party magnanimous and China Miéville unimaginative. Disturbing and unforgettable.

Maria McCarthy, Teynham, Kent

Poets write the best stories, and those in Kate Clanchy’s The Not-Dead and the Saved (Picador) are exquisite desserts to be savoured singly: little bombs of flavour that linger. Patience Agbabi reincarnates Chaucer’s frank and bawdy pilgrims for the 21st century in Telling Tales (Canongate). A chance meeting with Katharine Norbury led me to her extraordinary memoir The Fish Ladder (Bloomsbury). Often unbearably rich in its depiction of grief, physicality and a search for family, the book is framed by actual, mythical and metaphorical journeys to the source of water.

Janette McKenna, Liverpool

In The Killing Lessons (Orion), Saul Black introduces you to two killers on page one and makes you feel the fear of their victims. Valerie Hart is the officer in charge of an investigation going back three years and is determined to stop the brutal killings. Valerie has her own problems, coping with her alcoholism and being in love with her ex. Black doesn’t hold back with his descriptive writing of rape and mutilation. The story takes us back to the troubled childhood of one of the killers, disturbing but relevant.

Hamilton McMillan, London

Nick Lane’s The Vital Question (Profile) seeks to resolve that emblematic puzzle: why is life the way it is? The book is brimming with large ideas cast in a form intelligible to the layman, a combination of originality and accessibility redolent of Darwin. Quite different is John Parrington’s The Deeper Genome (Oxford), an excellent synthesis of what is currently understood about the human genome. It corrects claims of omniscience and shows just how wrong informed predictions turned out to be.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A gentleman without large familymeans … John Aubrey. Photograph: Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy

Anne Mills, Tonbridge, Kent

In John Aubrey: My Own Life (Chatto & Windus), Ruth Scurr beautifully recreates from notes, fragments, drawings and contemporary reports the diary of a gentleman without large family means, between the English civil war and the reign of William and Mary – a time of scientific and archaeological discovery, and historical revolution. In This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC (Guardian Faber), Charlotte Higgins is friendly, occasionally surprised and exhaustive as she analyses the history of UK broadcasting and the many crises over technology, content, money, personal agenda and politics. The hero of the beginning is Hilda Matheson, who coined the phrase “this new noise” and died young. As to its future ... ?

Hayden Murphy, Edinburgh

In Why Torture Doesn’t Work (Harvard), Shane O’Mara, director of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin, offers a passionate and informative riposte to those who feel a “war on terror” justifies barbarism. Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Irish-language masterpiece Cré na Cille was written in 1949 and published in English (translated by Alan Titley) for the first time this year as The Dirty Dust (Yale). Written mainly while Ó Cadhain was interned for his Republican beliefs during Ireland’s “Emergency” (elsewhere known as the second world war), it tells of the dead talking to themselves in a graveyard in the west of Ireland. On a simple level, the poems in John F Deane’s Semibreve (Carcanet) are elegies for the past and specifically for a lost brother. More profoundly, they teach us how bereavement, touched by a poet’s tongue, can become a shared gift: “wonders of the flesh and spirit, a road-map for a shattered faith”. In The Irish Times (Bloomsbury), Terence Brown, respected biographer of Yeats, turns his academic eye on the 150-year history of a paper where for half a century, as reader and correspondent, I discovered the ephemeral nature of history and bylines. It provides light on the dark times, shadow on those who would be famous, and is gloriously disrespectful of reputation.

Arthur Musgrave, Bristol

The books I enjoy most are often by writers who stray beyond the boundaries of a single discipline. In Swimming with Sharks (Guardian Faber), anthropologist turned journalist Joris Luyendijk uses the voices of City workers to explain the banking crisis. With Flood of Fire, anthropologist turned novelist Amitav Ghosh completes his trilogy about the opium wars, an eccentric but carefully researched multicultural history encompassing plot absurdities that wouldn’t be out of place in a Bond film.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Landscapes of Communism … the Palace of Culture in Warsaw. Photograph: STF/EPA

Declan O’Driscoll, from the website

It is Owen Hatherley’s lack of cynicism that makes Landscapes of Communism (Allen Lane) both appealing and unusual. Where many would seek to mock all of the buildings constructed in eastern Europe during the communist era, he seeks to understand the intentions of those who designed the buildings. He illuminates the pre-cast rigidity of the most doctrinaire decisionmakers, as well as the exemplary aspects of those exceptional buildings which combined modernist aesthetics with a genuine consideration for the social benefits of the structures.

Marcus Sullivan Okore, from the website

Louise Beech’s How to Be Brave (Orenda) is a beautiful ode to storytelling, weaving together a contemporary story of a mother struggling to keep her diabetic child alive with a true story from the past (the author’s grandfather’s story of bravery in the second world war). A startling debut that celebrates the power of words and the redemptive energy of a mother’s love.

Katharine Robbins, Leeds

I was keen to read something different this year and the satirical novel Look Who’s Back (MacLehose), by the German writer Timur Vermes and translated by Jamie Bulloch, proved to be just that. Adolf Hitler wakes up in 2011 Berlin and, through the power of modern celebrity becomes an impersonator of himself. Emily St John Mandel is not the first author to write about postapocalyptic North America, but Station Eleven (Picador) contains some wonderful characters and reminds us of what we have. It is also a little too plausible for comfort.

Amy Rushton, Stoke-on-Trent

Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman (Corsair) follows a few days, and the many memories, in the life of Aaliya, who at 72 is embarking on her annual project of translating a favourite novel into Arabic. If only “the three witches” upstairs would leave her alone. Bitingly funny, deeply felt and exquisitely written. I was flabbergasted by the lukewarm critical reception for Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies (William Heinemann), an exploration of marriage that turns expectations upside down, all told through the snarkiest omniscient narrator since Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Both novels are love letters to fiction and a joy to read.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Poet Blake Morrison seen before speaking at the Edinburgh international book festival 2015. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Hugh Searle, Ely

Blake Morrison’s Shingle Street (Chatto & Windus), a small collection of poems largely inspired by the more remote parts of the Suffolk coast, was my bedside companion throughout 2015. It explores the frailties and hopes of those who live amid the isolation of a coastal landscape fast disappearing under the relentless battering of the sea. By contrast, Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal (Profile) eloquently explores the implications of mortality for the care and management of the sick – about “what it’s like to be creatures who age and die”. A mind shaker.

John Shields, Winslow, Buckinghamshire

Anna Hope’s Wake (Black Swan) is a tremendous first novel. The action covers five days in 1920, leading up to Armistice Day, and features three women trying to repair their lives after the war, alongside the evacuation in France and removal to Westminster Abbey of the body of an unknown soldier. The writing reaches a particularly high level of intensity in the masterly section in which Rowan Hind describes life in the trenches to Evelyn. There is just enough optimism at the end for us all to think it is worth carrying on.

Kimberly Shields, from the website

The characters in Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread (Chatto & Windus) are so fully formed I felt I was reading a family album. There is poetry in the way Tyler writes about mundane family life. When the book ended, I felt alone.

Michael Solan, Nettlesworth, County Durham

Tom Adams’s Looking Through You (Omnibus) contains iconic images from the ultimate fanzine, The Beatles Book Monthly, published from 1963 to 1969. Each issue, I can testify, was as eagerly awaited as each of their records. Photographs so fresh and vibrant testify to the impact and enduring popularity of the Fab Four. In any history of pop music, Tthe Beatles would be on the cover – this book could illustrate it. An ideal accompaniment to their music. If you were not there, these images could take you to a magical period – if you were, just wallow in the nostalgia.

Alison Starling, Sevenoaks, Kent

The best novel I’ve read this year is All My Puny Sorrows (Faber) by Canadian writer Miriam Toews. The tale of two sisters, one of whom is determined to kill herself, and how the family copes with the challenge of trying to keep her alive, manages to be heartbreaking and very funny.

Helen Steuart, Edinburgh

For my money, Lila (Virago) is the best so far of all Marilynne Robinson’s fine novels. The story of a neglected and abused child who is rescued by an illiterate woman in circumstances little better than her own, it is about the redemptive power of love. The reader is never entirely sure that Lila has overcome her past, but the book ends on a note of hope.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cyclogeography by Jon Day chronicles the unforgiving nature of the bike messenger’s existence. Photograph: Caro/Alamy

Martin Stott, Oxford

Two books have taken different approaches to the weather and the outdoors. In Cyclogeography, Jon Day chronicles the unforgiving nature of the bike messenger’s existence on the fringes of society, while examining the physical dimensions of the journey itself; gradients, road surfaces, wind, rain and the way the bike wants to flow downhill following the ancient ley lines of the city’s subterranean rivers. Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland (Thames & Hudson) is an ambitious literary and cultural history, the story of the stories that people have told each other about the weather across the millennia from Anglo-Saxon scribes to Zadie Smith.

Michael Sumsion, London

Wry, lyrical truths and a common humanity were demonstrated by Amit Chaudhuri’s droll, quietly perceptive slice of quotidian London immigrant experience in the 1980s, Odysseus Abroad (Oneworld); Max Porter’s poignant meditation on psychic healing and renewal, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Faber); Rabih Alameddine’s exquisite tale of resilience, An Unnecessary Woman; and Rob Magnuson Smith’s cranky, opaque novel about ancestry and artistic legacy, Scorper (Granta). Meanwhile, the late American author Lucia Berlin’s collection of dreamlike vignettes, A Manual For Cleaning Women, and Shena Mackay’s Dancing on the Outskirts (Virago) delineated inner lives with acuity and economy.

Matt Symmonds, from the website

John Harris’s The Trial of Maximo Bonga (Summersdale) is an original, funny, insightful travel tale of a young Englishman on holiday in the Philippines. He stumbles upon an old guest house run by an eccentric second world war veteran who makes Basil Fawlty seem normal. Their relationship develops and both end up helping each other. Heartwarming.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Felix Dennis, subject of Fergus Byrne’s More Lives Than One. Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex

Dave Taylor, Purbrook, Hampshire

Fergus Byrne’s More Lives Than One (Ebury) is a fascinating authorised biography of the remarkable Felix Dennis, who died last year. He was co-editor of the underground magazine O2, a publishing tycoon, poet and creator of a 2,500-acre broadleaf forest in Warwickshire.

Genevieve Terry, Exeter

Sara Taylor’s The Shore (William Heinemann) is a box set of a novel, each episode linked to the others in intriguing ways. Set in West Virginia, it covers 200 years of a family’s history, and travels a north American literary journey from southern gothic through Eudora Welty and John Steinbeck to Margaret Atwood. Turning the final page, you want to start again at the beginning. As you do with Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels (Europa). From the opening scene of My Brilliant Friend to the enigmatic conclusion of The Story of the Lost Child, this is compelling, compulsive, addictive fiction, set within the violent political and social changes of the time and conveying the experience of femaleness from childhood to middle age.

Graham Vingoe, from the website

A Brief History of Seven Killings is hideously violent at times, and the sex scenes are a little strong for my taste, but dammit, Marlon James knows how to make these characters come alive. They’re flawed and selfish and entrenched in a world that I’ll never know, or want to know, but when James writes about it, I have no hesitation in visiting it for a few hours.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest .

Max Porter, author of Grief Is the Thing With Feathers Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

Michael Walling, Enfield

Anne Enright’s The Green Road (Jonathan Cape) plays with the novel form to reflect the fragmented nature of family life today – she creates totally distinct narratives for four siblings, brought together with their mother for a rare Christmas reunion. Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing With Feathers (Faber) has found its way on to the poetry shelves, but is also a novella, and could even make rather a fantastic piece of theatre. It’s hilarious and devastating in equal measure. In NeuroTribes (Allen & Unwin), Steve Silberman explores the history of autism with his eye on a more diverse, tolerant future. The passages about Hans Asperger’s work with autistic children in Vienna, against the background of the Nazi eugenics programme, are essential, harrowing reading.

Cavan Wood, Lindfield, West Sussex

In Federer and Me (Yellow Jersey), William Skidelsky has produced a thoughtful and fascinating book about how his obsession with Roger Federer has shaped his life. Like that other sports obsessive, Nick Hornby, he knows that the roots of his interest might seem strange to others. Yet tennis becomes a window into his personality. He has a commendable honesty about his years of depression, his feelings of not being good enough and, through the love of his wife and tennis, finding himself. Although sceptical about finding a great purpose in life, Skidelsky has found one: there is beauty, perfection, challenge and inspiration in the Swiss tennis genius’s game. As someone who knows little and normally cares less about sport, I found this book compelling.

• Save up to 25% on the readers’ books of the year at the Guardian Bookshop. Visit bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.