Non-fiction
Presidents I’ve Known and Two Near Presidents, by Charles Willis Thompson (2007)
The Bloody Sunday Report, Vol. VII (2010)
Katherine Swynford: The History of a Medieval Mistress, by Jeannette Lucraft (2013)
The Prisoner, by Dave Rogers (2015)
Empire of Mud, by J.D. Dickey (2016)
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary Trump (2020)
Non-genre
The Spring of the Ram, by Dorothy Dunnett (2012)
Spend Game, by Jonathan Gash (2013)
Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie (2013)
Crash, by J.G. Ballard (2014)
Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters (2018)
SF
The Mark of Ran, by Paul Kearney (2006)
Coyote Dreams, by C.E. Murphy (2007)
The Guardians, by John Christopher (2007)
Kiss of the Butterfly, by James Lyon (2013)
Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins (2013)
Killdozer!, by Theodore Sturgeon (2022)
Stray Pilot, by Douglas Thompson (2023)
Doctor Who
Coldheart, by Trevor Baxendale (2012) [Eighth Doctor, spinoff novel]
Plague of the Cybermen, by Justin Richards (2013) [Eleventh Doctor, spinoff novel]
The Ripple Effect, by Malorie Blackman (2013) [Seventh Doctor, spinoff novel]
Doctor Who: Cybermen Monster File (2014) [Cybermen, spinoff multimedia]
Choose Your Future: Night of the Kraken, by Jonathan Green (2019) [Twelfth Doctor, game book]
Choose Your Future: Terror Moon, by Trevor Baxendale (2019) [Twelfth Doctor, game book]
Times Squared, by Rick Cross (2020) [Lethbridge-Stewart, spinoff novel]
The best
I was really blown away by Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, a great novel of repressed Victorian London, and also Surrey. (Review; get it here)
Honorable mentions
The Spring of the Ram, by Dorothy Dunnett, is the second of her superb Niccolò sequence, taking him from Flanders to distant Trebizond, in the shadow of the fall of Constantinople and the imminent threat of a repeat. I loved all of these, but this was one of my favourites. (Review; get it here)
Empire of Mud is a great micro-history of the city Washington and the District of Columbia. Did you know that before the Pentagon, there was the Octagon? Which is still standing, and actually has only six sides. (Review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of
Presidents I’ve Known and Two Near Presidents, by Charles Willis Thompson, is by the Washington correspondent of the New York Times and the New York World, and wrote this book in 1929, about the presidents of the previous thirty years – McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding and Coolidge and Mark Hanna, the power behind the throne of McKinley’s presidency, and three-times Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan. A brilliant personal insight into a rather neglected part of US history. (Review; get it here)
The one to avoid
The Prisoner, by Dave Rogers, is one of these annual-style books, published in 1989, about the 1960s series, which adds very little to its recapitulation of the plots of the 17 episodes. (Review; get it here)