A spiritual love story takes flight

The spy who came in from the shadow of the wall

This history of women's lives in Pharaonic Egypt may seem clear-cut (men ruled the world, women were subordinate and only the richest could afford tombs), but it nevertheless contains a few surprises – that landed property, for instance, passed through the female line, or that they enjoyed a certain amount of social freedom, walking about without their faces veiled.

In the hands of anyone else, this would have been a superlative crime novel, but Mina has raised her own bar so high that this latest featuring her female detective, DS Alex Morrow, falls a little short.

An artistic life that made ripples

Cockayne might have relished the grisly story of 17th-century Mary King's Close in Edinburgh, where neighbours of those suffering the plague were apparently bricked up alongside them and left to die.

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.

Enjoy a stormy, sensual – and deftly plotted – adventure with the Georgian seafarers of Essex

At the end of the 1960s, Frank and Lee Forrest move to Auckland from New York with their four children: Evelyn, Dot, Ruth and Michael.

Welcome back our peerless spymaster, with another novel that unmasks low deeds in high places

Immigration severs elite from masses – but does the panic about controlling it deepen that rift?

We first met the dysfunctional Walsh family in Keyes's zingy 1995 debut novel Watermelon.

Has there ever been a more grandiose title for a novel? In calling this book Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess seems to be suggesting that he has written a novel about everything. The extraordinary thing is that in these dense 648 pages, he has.

For his third autobiography, O'Grady revisits the Eighties, and the ascent of his alter ego Lily Savage – the brassy, backchatting "Blonde Bombsite" from Liverpool – from sawdust to stardust.

Unlike its sexed-up title (it was originally The Server) Parks's playful book is largely concerned with the energising power of self-denial.