Francis Wheen

Clare Mulley Redwood (Viking, £25), Ben Macintyre’s latest compelling caper with consequences, tops my list this year. Set in 1980s Tehran, a city of nightingales and scattered gunfire, it reminds us that the Cold War was not just an ideological battle between communism and capitalism. Enter a disaffected spook, a few hardline clerics, many bloodthirsty terrorists and much weaponry, and you have a recipe for high drama and the potential end of the world as we know it.

Philip Hensher I have a theory that Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels are an ingenious variation on Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays. If, in a future episode, River Cartwright ascends to his kingdom renouncing Jackson Lamb, and if Catherine tells us of Jackson/Falstaff’s death offstage, don’t be surprised. In any case, Clown Town (Baskerville, £22) is a magisterially accomplished novel and Herron a master of vivid voice, showing himself in a plot of shining, machine-like efficiency. The other novel I adored was Tash Aw’s The South (4th Estate, £16.99) – a ravishingly written account of a brief, obsessive passion between two teenagers during a boiling hot Malaysian summer.