I haven’t bothered doing my round-up-of-the-year’s-cultural-highlights thing for the past few years because it feels a bit pretentious and who’s interested anyway? But I guess if I write about my favourite books of 2018 now it might give a few people ideas for Christmas presents while there’s still time to get to the bookshops before stocking-stuffing time.

These are books I read in 2018, which doesn’t necessarily mean they were published in 2018. They should all be available from all UK bookshops, but you may need to order them (most high street bookshops can get most books within a couple of days).

I bought The Sealwoman’s Gift by Sally Magnusson because I wanted a book set in Iceland to read while we were on holiday there this summer, and this was the only one I could find that wasn’t a Scandi-noir policier about Dreadful Crimes. But actually it is about a real-life dreadful crime – the abduction of a load of Icelanders from the Westerman Islands by Barbary Corsairs – and it isn’t all about Iceland, since it deals mainly with the captives subsequent lives as slaves in North Africa. It’s moving, romantic, historicallyt fascinating, and very good indeed (but never has a beautiful cover been so ruined by a badly-placed advert for Zoe Ball’s book club – it looks like a sticker, but it’s part of the design!)

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter is a novel I picked up completely at random from the library. In 1962 an actress escaping from the troubled Liz Taylor/Richard Burton production of Cleopatra in Rome arrives at a tiny hotel on the Italian coast. In the present day, the hotelier travels to Hollywood to try to find out what became of her. Around these two events Jess Walter spins a whole web of stories, taking in the movie business, the writing business, the fate of the Donner Party, love, death, and the boost given to modern celebrity culture by Burton and Taylor’s love affair. It’s tremendous fun, and beneath the surface brilliance it has considerable depth. I went on to read two other Jess Walter books – The Financial Lives of the Poets and We Live In Water, each very different and both very good, but this is my favourite.

There’s a slight echo of Beautiful Ruins’s plot in A Simple Scale by David Llewellyn: in the 1930s a Soviet composer falls foul of the party and his work is suppressed; in 1970s Hollywood an American composer borrows a piece of his music for the theme to a Battlestar Galactica-type TV show, and in 2001 the Russian’s son and the American’s assistant try to work out what connected the two men. It’s beautifully told and beautifully written. I also read another of David’s novels, Ibrahim and Reenie, which is equally fine.

I’ve been seeing Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London books all over the place for a while, and I didn’t think they’d be my thing at all. Police procedurals about an imaginary branch of the Met which deals with ghosts, rogue wizards and London’s troublesome local deities, the books veer between crime and horror, my two least favourite genres. But in between there’s a lot of very charming fantasy, the police stuff feels very convincing, and the London backdrop is drawn in such detail, with such a nerdy eye for architectural oddities and odd scraps of history, that they manage to be completely addictive. (I think they get better as they go on, too.)

The Winnowing Flame trilogy by Jen Williams is another series that shouldn’t be my cup of tea – part high fantasy, part very horrid horror – but so much of Jen’s humour creeps in that I was completely won over. The story takes place in what seems like a fairly bog-standard fantasy world until you realise that it’s threatened not by marauding dragons or evil wizards but by periodic alien invasions which the locals call ‘Rains’; the series is basically a disguised science fiction saga in which none of the protagonists can interpret what’s happening as anything but magic. There are two volumes so far – The Ninth Rain and The Bitter Twins, and the third is coming next year.

Embers of War by Gareth L Powell – a big, proper, old fashioned space opera (I wrote about it in detail here). The second in the series, Fleet of Knives, will be out next year.

I haven’t read nearly enough children’s books this year, but I enjoyed The Train to Impossible Places by P.G.Bell – a sort of fantasy version of the same wormhole-railway idea I used in Railhead (though there’s no connection, we must have been writing simultaneously). It reminded me of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and the more whimsical bits of Doctor Who.

Artwork from the Bunny vs Monkey series, by Jamie Smart

There are some great children’s comics around at the moment: Jamie Smart’s Bunny vs Monkey saga continues, and there’s now a collection of his Looshkin, the Maddest Cat in the World stories – both are works of comedy genius. Bog-Eyed Books are republishing some slightly older comics, including Gary Northfield’s Derek the Sheep (a big favourite in this house when my son was small) and Sarah McIntyre’s lovely Vern and Lettuce.

Vern and Lettuce also appear in Sarah’s beautifully drawn and coloured The New Neighbours, which is my picture book of the year – it’s funny, perfectly structured, timely, and kind: if the small people in your life don’t have a copy you should get them one, and if there aren’t any small people in your life you should get one for yourself. (Here’s a review from Page 45, who stock all the above-mentioned comics, and ship internationally.)

Artwork from The New Neighbours, by Sarah McIntyre

Oh, finally, if anyone is interested, my fave TV shows of the year are The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, Brooklyn 99, and Halt And Catch Fire, my top album is Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer, and the best film is inevitably Mortal Engines.