I've fallen short of my book-a-week target for 2015 by about 10 books, but what's missing in quantity has been more than made up for in quality.
Picking five favourites has therefore been so difficult - particularly as four could be by the same author - that I've cheated a little. (Is quadrilogy an actual word?)
The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante
There's not a lot left unsaid about these books, not least by me, as I reviewed #1 My Brilliant Friend in January and #s 2 and 3, The Story of a New Name and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay in the summer.
These books had an emotional charge to them that is rarely matched as well as a fierce honesty in the story-telling that made them compelling and uncomfortable in turn. When you start dreaming about characters in the book you're reading, you know they have either deeply affected you or scared the life out of you. In this case it erred toward the former although Lila is more than capable of the latter.
Closing the book at the end of volume 4, The Story of the Lost Child, was the beginning of a grieving process. I've filled the gap these books left - to some extent anyway - with the Ferrante back catalogue. Amazingly, The Days of Abandonment, a story with incredibly strong echoes of the Lila and Lenú saga, managed to turn the emotional intensity up even higher.
These are books to be reckoned with, as memorable as anything I've ever read.
The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina
This novel, with its striking but fading green dust cover, was, at three years, the longest-standing resident of To Be Read stack. Something in the blurb made me keep it when so many other books were passed on, but there was always a reason for not reading it.
And that's a pity, because it's taken a lot longer than it should have done to discover the huge and relentless power of Denise Mina's story-telling and her exceptional characterization.
I followed up quickly by listening to the next book in the series featuring Glasgow detective novel - Gods and Beasts - through Audible. And there's something about Morrow that has got right inside me, leaving a deep impression that usually takes longer than two books.
On the face of it, these are conventional procedurals, but under the surface there's a psychological beat that makes them anything but. Mina lays Morrow, her colleagues and her adversaries bare, and in doing so creates a complex and edgy world.
The Death House by Sarah Pinborough
It's really a pity that teenagers spend so much time glued to their iDevices, because the quality of fiction written for the ungrateful swine is extraordinary.
This one has it all: romance, drama, pathos, philosophy and mystery, all fused together in an imagined and imaginable near-future world in which children with an unnamed defective condition are exiled to a sinister medical facility on a small UK island.
There they live half lives, turning their backs on the twin pains of emotion and hope, waiting until it is their time to die.
And then Clara turns up, with love in her heart and adventure in her soul and teaches the children to live.
It's a beautiful, clever, emotional book and I loved it.
The Fatal Flame by Lyndsay Faye
There may come a day when I forgive actor-turned-writer Lyndsay Faye (interview) for lowering the curtain on her boisterous New York detective series featuring 'Copper Star' Timothy Wilde. But not yet.
Faye has married fascinating historical detail in a journey through mid-19th Century New York City with a sharp series of mystery stories populated by an irresistible cast of heroes and grotesques. Here public duty and private business are conducted with scant regard for either morality or the law and only loin-hearted Tim stands between the poor and the huddled masses and the depravity of the gods of early Gotham. Brilliant stuff.
Faye's next book - really - is a re-imagining of Jane Eyre. As a serial killer. Awesome.
The Secret Place by Tana French
Celtic cities have been a rich source of crime fiction in recent years, and the Dublin Murder Squad series of Tana French rivals the very best of it.
The Secret Place is exceptional. First it captures quite brilliantly the dark side of the boarding school experience - claustrophobia, over-blown drama, intense personal rivalries - boiling them down to their sometimes poisonous essence. And then it puts them at the heart of a brilliantly told murder investigation tale in which two cops fight for their professional pride on a one-day deadline that also exposes the dark heart of the squad room.
Tana French gets people in the best possible way and uses their strengths and weaknesses, their vanities and fears to suffuse her stories with tension and sharp insight.