Another memoir from Auster, this time of his childhood and adolescence, as usual with Auster it's evocative, self-aware, and an almost universal story. Also, as usual with Auster, the book is digressive, eccentric, and wholly original. The first part is a true childhood memoir, and for me is the strongest part of the book; honest, moving, funny and real. Then, as he so often does, he move to film studies - long descriptions of two films which formed his life-long love of movies.

Roger Deakin sadly died in 2006, just after completing this lovely book, a celebration of trees and wood. It's quite an eccentric collection of pieces about his own travels in Britain and Europe, his own house and its unusual construction, meetings with artists, a description of how Jaguar dashboards are made, a search for the original apple and other diversions. It's full of fascinating and extraordinary facts, lore, mythology and character, beautifully written. A great book.

It's difficult to say too much about this brilliant memoir without giving away too much, but this is a very powerful and honest story about Jones's family, and his journey to understand his parents and grandparents. It's tender, unsettling, brutally honest and compelling. He also writes about childhood in Wellington very evocatively. An excellent memoir.

Chris Pavone published his first novel in 2012 called The Expats, which came with high recommendations, and did pretty well for a first novel in the espionage genre. I never quite got around to reading it, but if it's as good as his new novel, The Accident, it will be worth a look. The Accident is about a manuscript, submitted to a literary agent, written anonymously, but which, if published, would be hugely damaging to the world's most powerful media empire, as well as the CIA, and the American president.

The murder of Scott Guy in July 2010, the subsequent investigation, eventual arrest, trial and acquittal of his brother-in-law, work mate and former friend Ewen Macdonald received enormous media coverage in New Zealand. It polarised opinions; many people remain convinced that Macdonald is guilty, and that the jury got it all wrong, others are convinced that it had to be someone else, and that the police botched their investigation and overlooked evidence pointing to any perpetrator other than Macdonald.

This book is a history of how mountains and the human need to climb them have evolved over centuries in the human imagination. Macfarlane explores how geology developed in the 17th Century, how the experiences of fear, and of the sublime, led to exploration in the 18th and 19th Centuries, especially in the Alps, and how the Great Game tensions in and around Tibet between the British and the Russians culminated in attempts to 'conquer' Everest in the 1920s.