Banned on publication in Syria, Khalifa's third novel - longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013 - is set not in present-day Aleppo but in the decade following 1970 when the Muslim Brotherhood became locked in battle with the state's Baathist party.

This slick Dutch bestseller, translated by Sam Garrett, takes place over a single dinner in a high-end restaurant, during which the psychological interplay between couples rises to sinister levels.

The first paperback of Charles M Schultz's 'Peanuts' appeared in 1952, though the comic strip had been nationally syndicated a couple of years before that. I started reading 'Peanuts' at six or seven, a contemporary of its characters, and followed it for the next 50 years.

An entertaining novel whose brooding romantic hero has Asperger's Syndrome

A collection of essays from a masterful humorist that are perfectly judged and nuanced

A suspenseful coming-of-age novel about 'other' realms buried in the known world

The story of George Mallory, the dashing mountaineer and Bloomsbury-set member who disappeared attempting the summit of Mount Everest in 1924, would seem to write itself.

In Nemesis we left Falco, Lindsey Davis's Roman sleuth, on a sombre note, suffering the loss of a father and a child. Perhaps life had become too dark for him to take centre-stage in another novel.

At its peak in 1950, the city of Detroit housed nearly two million people; today, fewer than 750,000 live there.

"That's Henry Cecil… he should have retired years ago." The words of a young trainer drifting across the Heath at Newmarket must have stung, but during Cecil's dog days in the Noughties it was not an isolated view.

Possibly overshadowed by Kevin Powers's equally excellent The Yellow Birds, which also came out last year, this novel by Texan-born Greg Baxter, who has lived in Dublin and now resides in Berlin, also has at its centre a US veteran of the Iraq war who is coming to terms with his experiences as he settles himself uneasily in an unnamed European city.

These may well turn out to be the brightest writers of their generation, but while some work truly shines, the list fails to satisfy as a collection

One child good, two ... a nightmare

Inspired by a beautiful and painterly scene that she witnessed on a lonely moonlit beach one summer night, of a young couple taking a self-portrait on a mobile phone, the French photographer Catherine Balet set out to capture the specific spectral quality of the light that she sees emitted by our computer screens and electronic devices: "The chiaroscuro of the 21st century".