Was there something in the water this year? Marlon James’s fearsomely energetic Seventies-set crime novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld, £8.99) – the first book by a Jamaican writer to win the Booker Prize – opened with a chapter narrated by a ghost.

A Brief History of Seven Killings author Marlon James: "I wanted to give my characters desires, dimension, contradiction"

The Blue Guitar (Viking, £14.99), by the reliably (sometimes notoriously) highbrow John Banville, laid its scene in a steampunk Ireland criss-crossed by roving airships, where time seemed to be running backwards.

Margaret Atwood’s savage comedy The Heart Goes Last (Bloomsbury, £18.99) imagined a post-crash America where families rotated monthly between suburban homes and experimental prisons; Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (Faber, £20) took place in a medieval Britain populated by pixies, dragons and knights in armour.

Margaret Atwood at the University of Toronto Credit: Angela Lewis

In Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (Jonathan Cape, £18.99), Salman Rushdie described a battle between Islamic jinn for a 21st-century Earth; in Slade House (Sceptre, £12.99), David Mitchell recounted a haunted-mansion story about a pair of soul-sucking vampires.

The old skirmishes between literary and genre fiction may still have been going on somewhere in the jungles of publishing, but out in the open, in 2015, the war was clearly over. Less well-known names also lit out for strange imaginative territory.

Patrick deWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor (Granta, £12.99) was slighter and more mannered than his Booker-nominated Western The Sisters Brothers (2011), but its dreamlike Euro-Gothic fantasy, with strong comic notes of Terry Gilliam’s 1988 film Adventures of Baron Munchausen, cast a powerful spell.

In The Field of the Cloth of Gold (Bloomsbury, £16.99), Magnus Mills produced another of his uniquely absurdist fictions, this one a Kafka-lite allegory of the history of Britain set in a large field whose inhabitants bicker ceaselessly over the intricacies of tent-pitching and land management.

Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney (John Murray, £14.99), a beautifully written debut with more than a tinge of the horrific about it, evoked a rain-sodden corner of Seventies Britain where radical Catholicism rubs up against nastily effective pagan magic.

And Max Porter’s short and startling Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (Faber, £10) imagined a bereaved Ted Hughes scholar whose home and life were invaded by Crow, the poet’s vicious, sweary spirit of misrule.

Max Porter's novella is inspired by Ted Hughes' symbol of the crow Credit: Alamy

Other novels, calm on the surface, concealed depths of quiet strangeness. Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border (Faber, £12.99) told the story of a zoologist who is recruited by an eccentric British peer to supervise the reintroduction of wolves to his estate in the north of England.

Halfway through Hall’s novel, though, Scotland declares independence, and the narrative zooms off into counterfactual history. A God in Ruins (Doubleday, £20), Kate Atkinson’s companion piece to Life After Life (2013), seemed at first to spurn the time-bending tricks of its predecessor, but its deeply moving, intensely observed story of a war veteran growing old in the second half of the 20th century hid some startling temporal and narrative tricks.

It didn’t stop there. Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (Jonathan Cape, £16.99) was a dissertation on technocapitalist confusion disguised as a novel, featuring a “corporate anthropologist” with an initial for a name, who lurks in the ill-ventilated basement of a vast company as he tries to compile a report no one will read on a project no one understands.

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

Ros Barber’s Devotion (Oneworld, £14.99), one of my particular favourites, told a moving story of marital struggle and inner healing in a near-future London where radical atheism and Christian fundamentalism are at war.

Patricia Duncker’s Sophie and the Sibyl (Bloomsbury, £12.99) concealed a mass of feminist theory and literary-critical inquiry beneath the petticoats of a historical novel, sparring with the work of George Eliot and John Fowles even as it paid tribute to the writers themselves.

And Richard Beard’s teasing, oddly profound Acts of the Assassins (Harvill Secker, £16.99) imagined a clapped-out Roman gumshoe taxed with shadowing the apostles and investigating the resurrection of Christ in what appears to be a modern-day Middle East.

Few of these feats of the imagination made it to the Booker list, which inevitably drew attention, at least initially, for the writers it left off.

Franzenphiles were furious to see their man’s rambling, melodramatic Purity (Fourth Estate, £20) bilked of a nomination, while anyone who shelled out in advance for Go Set a Watchman (William Heinemann, £18.99), the much-vaunted Second Coming of Harper Lee, would have been disappointed when it turned out to be more of a curiosity than a contender.

Harper Lee in her father's law office while visiting her home town Credit: DONALD UHRBROCK/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

However, the Booker selection had other merits. It brought well-deserved attention to Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways (Picador, £14.99), which told the stories of a houseful of Indian migrants in Sheffield and made a fascinating counterpoint to a summer of heated immigration headlines.

A Spool of Blue Thread (Vintage, £7.99) reminded us that Anne Tyler, a writer often dismissed as cosy, can write a barbed family saga that puts younger imitators to shame – although after reading Tessa Hadley’s The Past (Jonathan Cape, £16.99), a brilliant British take on two generations of family inhabiting the same house, I was vaguely surprised not to have seen that on the Booker list as well.

I wasn’t one of the readers who mourned the panel’s decision not to award the prize to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (Picador, £16.99), a long and wrenching New York novel about the ineradicable harm of childhood abuse, although it was hard to deny its baleful, dispiriting power.

For me, Marlon James’s thronged-to-bursting tale of turf wars and assassinations in Seventies Jamaica, a book as linguistically imaginative as it was narratively thrilling, was a splendidly worthwhile winner.

Readers of short fiction were well served this year by a clutch of fascinating work. Two debuts – Jessie Greengrass’s elegant, learned and melancholic An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw it (JM Originals, £10.99) and Claire-Louise Bennett’s artful collection of shut-in soliloquies, Pond (Fitzcarraldo, £10.99) – made highly striking use of the form, while in Three Moments of an Explosion (Macmillan, £18.99) the intensely clever science-fiction writer China Miéville produced a collection of imagined pasts and futures that sparkled with political and narrative insight.

New American Stories (Granta, £14.99), an anthology edited by Ben Marcus, was an electrifyingly odd piece of curation, corralling 32 stories from the post-9/11 age according to its editor’s esoteric whims and admirations; on the other side of the Atlantic, Philip Hensher’s handsome two-volume Penguin Book of the British Short Story (Penguin, £25 each) charted a very personal view of the form’s development from the early 18th century to the present day.

Fiction in translation, too, threw up a few unignorable gems this year. Whatever you make of Michel Houellebecq, it was hard to deny the provocative force of Submission (William Heinemann, £18.99), a queasy satire about France falling to an Islamic theocracy that was released by appalling coincidence on the day of the Charlie Hebdo murders.

The Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical novel reached its fourth instalment in English, Dancing in the Dark (Vintage, £8.99), and offered a typically unsparing portrait of the author as a sulky, hard-drinking adolescent virgin: it’s hard to recommend to beginners, but no one who has followed the series from the outset would want to be without it.

Elena Ferrante’s terrifying Neapolitan quartet of novels reached its conclusion in The Story of the Lost Child (Europa, £11.99), after tracking its pair of childhood frenemies through 50 fraught years of Italian politics, crime, academia and affairs of the heart; like its predecessors, this one had a grip of iron.

And Seiobo There Below (Tuskar Rock, £16.99), by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, was my favourite book of the year, although I’m not sure that this linked set of fictional pieces on the nature and function of art really counts as a novel at all.

Heavily influenced by Krasznahorkai’s time in Japan, it’s a book of fleeting episodes and luminous moments – a frustrated tourist visits the Acropolis; a Japanese master prepares to restore a medieval Buddha; some monks build a temple; the Florentine painter Filippo Lippi paints a wedding chest – but its exhaustive, patient sentences swell to contain whole worlds, and its emotional and intellectual reach becomes almost overwhelming.

Krasznahorkai was awarded the International Man Booker Prize this year. I doubt that the Nobel will be very far behind.

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