Catherine of Bergenza, Portugese Catholic princess, is sent to England to be the wife of Charles the Second, newly restored to the throne. Bringing an indomitable sense of right and wrong to a muddled and compromised court, where Charles feels obliged to pardon the wrongdoings of men who supported him or his father, even when those wrongdoings are directed against or harm him, enabling the rise of powerful lords who feel, and effectively are, untouchable by law, and who all turn against the king with savagery and ruthlessness. Charles himself wounds Catherine with his mistresses, but she remains not only faithful but manages to avoid succumbing to jealousy and bitterness, learning how to cope with the ebb ad flow of her husband's favour to best defend the interests of her beloved homeland and her fellow religionsists. It's a world of intrigue and plot and conspiracy, and it culminates in the extraordinary welter of political and religious ugliness that was the Popish Plot, during which only Catherine's good name and demeanour seem to keep the country from another Civil War.

Well written and well told, with touches of wit and great passion under the cool, precise voice, filled with extraordinary characters, as many good as evil, and many divided, such as her husband, a man of charm and grace, yet who constantly shifts and compromises weakly, and who is s casually and unquestioningly misogynistic as most other men of his age. A terrific, absorbing and fascinating read.

I love a good puzzle book, books where often not only the answer has to be deduced from the text, but so has the question. Books like The Quincunx, House Of Leaves and...um... I wish I knew more of them. Anyway, this is one, three linked novellas set on twin colony worlds where identity is fungible and we can't be sure whether the humans are aliens, the aliens are human or if the aliens really exist at all. What does it mean to be alien? What does it mean to be human? Are you a son or a brother or a twin or a clone? Has someone else replaced you or are you the replacement? Is the truth a tool of dystopian oppression? Does slavery set you free? One can have one's head wrecked by a book, be utterly chilled and yet emerged cleansed and confused. Being alive is a puzzle, after all, and we don't want to jump to the ultimate answer too soon.

Westlake's big blockbuster commercial international thriller: a heist with aspects much too dark and horrible for Dortmunder but an adventure too exuberant and freewheeling for Parker; instead we get one of those unique Westlake creations full of sly humour and with but with horror and violence lurking not far into the shadows. Mercenaries and corrupt operators and ousted Asian businessmen conspire to rob Idi Amin of a train full of coffee. It's a big, complex operation full of many moving parts with plenty of opportunities for betrayal and setbacks and a nasty price to pay when things do go wrong. Fantastic characters, intricate plotting, hair-raising situtations and unusually, for Westlake, graphic sex, all combine in a pot-boiler executed with rare craft and competency.

Patricia Finney's second Elizabethan espionage thriller is even better than the first (and the third is even better still, but we'll get to that.) Narrated by the Madonna herself, the Virgin Mary, who moves from scene to scene with grace and compassion, the muti-stranded narratvie concerns an old scandal from childhood of Queen Elizabeth, and the Book of the Unicorn, which contains the secret, and the factions searching furiously and ruthlessly for said book which promises to either destroy or grant absolute control over the Queen.

A Catholic priest hiding from the pursuivants hears an old woman's confession, and hatches a scheme. Protestant priest-hunters and courtiers, pressing for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots have a chance to put Elizabeth herself in her place. A man wakes in the Tower with no memory of who he is, Simon Ames comes back from the dead to rescue an old friend, and the Queen's Fool sets out to save her mistress.

A brilliant thriller that lays out life in the Westminister Court of the Virgin Queen, from the morning routines of the Queen and her women to the cut-throat world of the courtiers and counsellers, to the lowest cellar where the night-soil is collected and stored, the plots and counter-plots, the politics and the unforgiving religious hatreds are all brought to sinister, dangerous life.

Superbly written, full of detail and living, breathing characters and sly commentaries on religious extremism and misogyny, this is a top-notch novel of historical intrigue.

I have ambitions this year to tackle some more challenging literary works, but right now I'm sicker than a thing that is very sick indeed and fancy a bit of this post-collapse cyberpunk horror sci-fi western. The last published in the Dark Future series, it's also a prequel, as Elder Seth leads his Josephite flock through the vast, nearly abandoned US desert, to Salt Lake City. It's a bloody trail, and that's how Seth likes it, all part of the ritual to bring forth the dark Lovevraftian gods he serves. It's nasty and satirical and violent and somehow sets the right mood for this dog-day New Year.

Set in a world where the Roman Empire persevered through to the modern day and now owns most of the world, built through military conquest and an (increasingly unsustainable) slave economy. Marcus, the nominated heir to the Empire goes on the run after the deaths of his parents, his only hope of safety a hidden refuge for runaway slaves. Two unusually gifted slaves, brother and sister, escape from London and flee to the European mainland. Thrown together with the fugitive heir, they flee to the refuge, but the Empire is close behind.

So what should be an adventurous tale of danger and intrigue and struggling on in the face of impossible odds in a distorted reality turns out to be something meatier and more substantial due to the author's total commitment to her characters. Everyone in Romanitas is damaged, whether it's Marcus by loss and betrayal, or Una by her enslavement, Sulien by injustice or any of the other characters wrestling with their hurts and their angers and their insecurities. They represent an emotional and psychological palimpsest of the Empire itself, a repressive, highly controlled military oligarchy full of splendours built on human suffering. More demanding than you might expect from a slipstream political thriller, but well worth it.

Sometimes rereading a book is like reading it for the first time. I first read this when it originally came out in 1999 - the year I got married! Yay! - but I have no real memory of what happened in it. I was pretty sure there were pigs involved somewhere.

This was the last book in Disch's Supernatural Minnesota series, and it mines familiar Dischian themes of fundamentalist religion and the banality of evil. It's a masterful, assured, wonderfully written tale of ghosts and witchcraft and shamanism, all grounded in mundane and familiar human passions and foibles and failings. Disch had a keen satirist's eye, and though he saved the worst of his ire for Christian intolerance, wiccans and atheists and Indian skinwalkers prove no less evil and destructive.

Diana Turney is a substitute teacher out of work after a scandal shuts down her school. While her sister is in prison for shooting her husband, she goes to live with the husband to care for their daughter Kelly. She recovers memories of her father abusing her as a child and encounters his malevolent ghost in the smokehouse of the family home, and suddenly she has the power to turn people into animals. A large cast of characters is drawn into the web of evil she weaves with her new-found abilities, corrupting innocence and unearthing horrible secrets.

Disch carries off a complex plot full of the unexpected with ease and skill and invents a range of flawed and interesting characters depicted with unflinching accuracy. Not as dazzling and epic as The MD, perhaps, but then The MD may be one of the best books ever, but still a brilliant horror novel of rare literary merit, moral complexity and real power.

Joshua Kampa travels back in time, first in his dreams, then in a kind of reality, where his dreaming visions allow him to access a kind of perfect simulacra of the past, all the way back in Pleistocene Africa, where he befriends a small group of Homo habilis, studying them in an unprecedented exercise in field palaeoanthropology, learning their ways, finding a home for himself after a lifetime of not belonging, finding unexpected love, hardship, bliss and heartbreak, and something else he never could have imagined.

Beautifully imagined and magically evoked with Joshua's voice of repressed poetry and self-taught knowledge alternating with chapters about how his life lead him to this unlikely place, No Enemy But Time is a novel of dreams and reality, science and myth, family and belonging.