Ballard and Bosch sound like some dystopian upmarket commodity. They are, but deep in with the low life. They are Michael Connolly’s new duo of detectives, one in semi-disgrace, one retired. Throw in Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer, and you’ve got one of the most fascinating and satisfying series of crime novels out there. Throughout the 33 that Connelly has published since 1992, familiar characters turn up regularly.

Paul Essinger has quit life as a professional tennis player and retired to his native Texas where, over the course of seven days, he and his extended family are due to spend Christmas at his parents’ family home.

In 1930, a couple of romantically involved Chinese expats in Berlin – both revolutionaries in their own way – went on a farewell date. One of them, Deng Yan-da, was due to return home to continue his clandestine political work. The pair saw Marlene Dietrich smoulder through The Blue Angel. Two decades later, Deng’s former partner, Soong Ching-ling, asked a German friend to send a disc of Marlene singing “Falling in Love Again” to her in China. She had not forgotten her Berlin affair.

Movement, flight, searching, the quest for a destination: as its title might suggest, Sarah Hall’s latest story collection Sudden Traveller is preoccupied with journeys of one kind or another. From the Cumbrian moors to a city in the near East, a time-bound version of Cambridge to a Turkish forest and the anonymous urban sprawl, the territory of these tales spans a wide, varied geography.

My Mother Laughs was first published in Chantal Ackerman’s native French in 2013. This year it has been translated into English for the first time, twice. Silver Press’ elegant version is framed by a foreword by the poet, Eileen Myles (who also has a poem on the back flyleaf) and an afterword by the academic, Frances Morgan. These women’s voices are sympathetic, and naturally turn the book as a whole into a kind of conversation.

That John le Carré! It turns out the agent isn’t so much running in the field as playing badminton. The master of the spy novel, of the foibles fantasies and sadnesses of our imperfect world – with the occasional excursion to excoriate Big Pharma and the like – has produced a magnificent slow burner.

A Month in Siena is a sweet, short mediation on art, grief, and life. Ostensibly describing the time and space of its title, Matar touches on vanishings and lacunae in his past. Early on, he links the disappearance of his father in Cairo in 1990 to his interest in art: “He was imprisoned and gradually, like salt dissolving in water, was made to vanish.

For visitors to New York, it’s all about Manhattan, its 23 square miles of skyscraper-encrusted granite instantly familiar, its many landmarks – enshrined in movies and music – must-sees on the itinerary of first-time tourists. The other four New York City boroughs? Well, the journey to and from the airport takes you through at least one of them, which is as far as many people get to visiting them.

Every now and then a book comes out that can change lives. If a survey like this had appeared when I was a student at the Slade, the struggle to make headway as a female artist would have seemed less daunting. We’d have had role models and names with which to counter the assertion that there had never been any significant women artists. And the recent explosion of female talent celebrated in this book might have happened a generation earlier.

She has more armed guards than she has luggage. She has a sense of purpose even Magsalin admires. She rides along the coast toward a historic place and, by simply stepping on its soil, she will accomplish her duty. An homage to the dead, but not only for her benefit. Films, after all, have a sociality not even the most narcissistic can subvert. They require the possibility of observers. Thus consumers are significant to her story. For an inland, riverine town, this coastal road is invigorating. So much of this journey seems to be a start.