Published in the year following Orr’s death at the age of 57, Motherwell is an analysis of the author’s childhood in Motherwell, on the outskirts of Glasgow, and her first steps into adulthood. However, while this book is ostensibly about Deborah Orr the child, it is as much about her parents, John and Win, and about Deborah Orr the adult. Everything seeps into everything else, just as Win seeped into Orr’s life, claiming her daughter’s whole being as her own.

Supernatural and Gothic stories have always haunted the misty borderlands between high and popular culture. The finest manage to hover between page-turning genre tales and what counts as respectable or “literary” fiction. This place in a perpetual limbo can offer the authors of yarns about borderline beings and in-between states an exhilarating kind of freedom. Their readers will know and recognise the usual weird or uncanny signposts, but writers can then point them towards almost any destination, thematic or emotional, that they desire. 

Nathalie Léger’s superbly original Exposition is a biographical novel meditating on the nature of biography itself. Its plot – if indeed its 150 pages of intense reflection bordering continuously on stream of consciousness can be called a plot – is an account of the life of Virginia Oldoïni, better known as the Countess of Castiglione.

This is not a drill. Lock down, evacuation. An active school shooter is on the loose, actually more than one: two or three men in balaclavas with automatic shotguns. But this isn’t a high school or college in the USA – it’s in Somerset, England. A progressive co-ed school, founded in the 1920s, known for its liberal values, its lack of religious affiliation and its privileged pupils. A haven of political correctness. Who would want to attack it?

In a year that saw some notable highs (Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic) and some stonking lows (Jacob Rees-Mogg's much-derided The Victorians) our reviewers share their top picks – some of which we covered, others which we didn't.

During a single day of bloated idleness last week, I managed to watch three televised ghost stories, adapted from the works of Charles Dickens and a brace of Jameses: MR and Henry. Christmas, moreover, will have proved again to millions that Harry Potter and his wizard companions have lost none of their potency as divinities in the 21st-century household. The creatures dismissed by a sceptical thinker in 1709 as “ghosts, hobgoblins, witches and spectres” now enjoy a second life across swathes of British popular and literary culture.

Nalini Singh's debut thriller thrusts us into Golden Cove, a small coastal town in New Zealand at "the edge of nowhere” that isn't everything it seems. What on the surface is a sun-bleached paradise made recently popular with back-packers is revealed to be much more sinister.

Animal intelligence has come to the fore as an essential and fashionable subject for study. Dolphins, elephants, bees, prairie dogs, gannets, whales, baboons, wolves, parrots, bats – not mention lance-tailed manakins and grey mouse lemurs – are just a few of our fellow creatures whose social behaviour is the subject of this pithy, elegant book.

In March 1937, the government of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk instigated what it called a “disciplinary campaign” against the Zaza-speaking Alevi Kurds in the Dersim region of eastern Turkey. What followed was a bloody, coordinated assault that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and forcible deportations. The episode has “weighed on Turkey’s official history ever since” and supplies the context to Sema Kaygusuz’s Every Fire You Tend, translated into English by Nicholas Glastonbury.

Elizabeth Strout is fond of plain titles. Much as her stories are interested in subtlety – the quiet complications and contradictions of ordinary life – her books advertise themselves by means of telling understatements. Olive, Again follows ten years on the heels of her Pulitzer Prize-winning “novel in stories” Olive Kitteridge, which painted a resonant, emotionally complex portrait of a community in fictional Crosby, a small coastal town in Strout’s native Maine.