Holiday time is reading time. Here's Jason Steger's selection of great reads from the past year.

Catching the right words to conjure up the nature and force of the sea is possibly more difficult than catching that perfect wave.

The characters in Plane Tree Drive remain largely mysterious to one another, each with his or her own story or crisis.

This unsettling novel takes the form of a monologue by a character who cannot stop thinking about her husband's first wife.

In her 25th novel, the ever-popular Di Morrissey offers a strong, well-crafted plot and a dramatic physical setting.

There are two kinds of war novels. One kind is about the war, and the other, infinitely better kind such as The Kites is about the people in the war.

The tectonic plates of power are shifting in the Pacific, bringing us closer to China and pulling us away from America,

The wonder is that Jelena Dokic achieved as much as she did given the physical and mental abuse she was subjected to by her father.

This collection of oral histories is less about girlhood per se, and more about the formative experience of childhood.

Central to the appeal of An Activist's Life is the way Christine Milne has structured her story around ordinary objects in her life that have personal significance

Kristen Roupenian's New Yorker short story Cat Person prompted a massive response, but most of the discussion seems to think that it's a confessional essay.

The friendship in Claire Messud's novel falls into three clear parts: their closeness, its undoing, and finally the impending disaster.

It is Louise Erdrich's Native American lens on her imagined apocalyptic world that gives Future Home of the Living God its soul.

The question at the heart of Chris Ryan's eccentric but brilliant new book is: how much is a great sports photo perspiration, inspiration or plain luck?

What is the enduring appeal of the wartime classic starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman?

You can be certain of one thing in the year ahead, plenty of books will be published. Here's a sample of what you can expect.

Scientists have come up with a theory to explain the strange, extended seasons in Game of Thrones.

Illustrated Christmas letters written by J.R.R Tolkien feature Santa Claus and his helper Polar Bear.

As comic book writers go, Akira Yoshida boasts an impressive resume. There's just one issue - he's not real.

Konrad Marshall's Yellow & Black is a writerly tale of victory made the richer by the closely observed experience of defeat.

Despite its modest number of speakers, Hungarian remains the one possession enduringly unique to Hungarians.

Helen Dale has turned her hand to speculative fiction, with the first in a two-part novel that imagines the trial of Jesus in a Roman Empire that's undergone an Industrial Revolution.

In William Sutcliffe's dystopian novel We See Everything London is burning and two 16-year-old boys are playing different roles in a shattered city as civil war of some kind breaks out.

Melanie Raabe's follow up to The Trap is classic domestic noir.