Karl Marx by Jonathan Sperber meticulously plots Marx's life, showing how the political philosopher, activist and family man lived and worked through the tumultuous revolutionary struggles of the mid-19th century.

It's fascinating reading how the biographer pursues his admitted aim to present Marx as "a backward-looking figure" immersed in the daily struggles of his own time but largely irrelevant to our day.

Yet it's an irony of history, which Marx recognised only too well, that sees this work of many years' preparatory research finally being published at the height of a crippling crisis in capitalism, reinforcing the truth of Marx's analysis of the nature and development of the system.

For those bewildered by the relative placidity with which the public appear to accept this government's frontal attack on all aspects of our welfare system, Patrick Joyce's The State Of Freedom explains the underlying reason - a fundamental and, Joyce maintains, peculiarly British lack of historical understanding of the nature of the state. "History in Britain does not touch the quick of the present as it does elsewhere," he writes. There are lessons for the left, which traditionally has spent its energies in modernising rather than changing the system, in that statement.

In preparation for reviewing the upcoming RSC dramatisation of Hilary Mantel's prizewinning Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, I have been working through these first two parts of her planned historical trilogy charting the life of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's wheeler and dealer.

Historical fiction, if it is to be anything more than costumed storytelling, must not only capture the colour and spirit of an age but engage with universal truths relevant to the world of the reader. Mantel's novels haven't the sweep and significance of Tolstoy's or, even more, Vasily Grossman's Life And Fate. But they do engagingly bring home how little political power play has changed over 500 years.

Gordon Parsons

My Book of the year is Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial, £7.99) in which she again uses the novel form to tackle large social and environmental issues.

This time, her theme is the effects of climate change and rapacious logging on the migration patterns of Monarch butterflies which appear to be shifting from their traditional winter refuge in Mexico to a forest area in the US Appalachians. It's an area of great poverty and social deprivation, where nothing much happens and the big event of the month is the church jumble sale.

All of a sudden, the discovery of the over-wintering butterflies brings scientists, researchers and the press to their backwoods home and turns their tranquil, if rather boring, lives upside down.

One young mother becomes so fascinated with the phenomenon of the butterflies that she slowly becomes involved in the campaign to study and save them from destruction.

In her involvement with the scientists who come to study their behaviour and her increasing knowledge and new interest in the natural world, her life becomes transformed.

Kingsolver's prose relates this fictitious but credible event as excitingly as a detective story. The families who live in the Appalachian valleys, cut off from the US mainstream, live like a lost and forgotten tribe until the outside world suddenly intrudes.

She brings her characters alive with a deep-felt empathy and understanding of what poverty and deprivation really mean. But she also shows how individuals, given the opportunity, can find inspiration and transcend their conditions.

John Green

One of the most incisive books of 2013 has to be Andrew McGettigan's The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets And The Future of Higher Education (Pluto Press, £16.99), which provides an excellent primer on the nuts and bolts of the current neoliberal assault on higher education in England.

McGettigan gives an admirably clear and accessible account of the gradual commercialisation and privatisation of universities introduced by Mandelson and new Labour and now accelerated -without primary legislation and with only limited parliamentary scrutiny - by Willetts and the Con-Dem coalition.

Like Gove's attack on schools and Lansley's attack on the NHS, Willetts's plans for higher education are - at best - an ideologically driven attempt at "creative destruction."

By providing a clear and detailed account of the basic facts, figures and policies, McGettigan has provided an invaluable tool for those resisting that neoliberal onslaught.

Those in search of a festive tonic could try Michael Parenti's Waiting For Yesterday: Pages From A Street Kid's Life (Bordighera Press, £9.99).

In this beautiful little book Parenti, who turned 80 this year, presents us with a memoir giving snapshots of his life as a working-class kid from New York growing up in Italian East Harlem. Parenti is not only politically astute but also a very skilful writer and in this book he manages to seamlessly weave together the intensely personal with the political.

The result is a delight to read and combines his wry sense of humour, deeply poignant reflections on the passing of time and insightful commentary on class and ethnicity in 20th century and the contemporary US.

For crime fiction with a political slant, check out Liam McIlvanney's second novel Where The Dead Men Go (Faber, £12.99), a gritty Glasgow story set against the backdrop of the upcoming referendum on Scottish independence.

Alex Miller

My choice of novels this year apart inevitably from Scandinavian detective stories has leaned towards rereading of the classics and two I greatly enjoyed focus on women's rights and status. George Eliot's Middlemarch, the realistic story of a provincial town in the 1830s, truly reflects the society of its time and makes most contemporary British novels pallid if not vacuous in comparison.

Issues the novel raises include parliamentary reform, medical science and the railway line which is about to be built.

Against this background the idealistic Dorothea, the central character, enters a disastrous marriage, wrongly believing her pedantic husband to be a great scholar. She is but one of the memorably portrayed characters drawn from the widest social background by Eliot and in the process she provides telling insights into love, marriage, property, inheritance - and much else.

Tolstoy also holds the mirror up to the age in Anna Karenina, set in the social circles of the Russian aristocracy.

Anna, the beautiful trophy wife of an aloof government officer, wants for nothing except affection. She feels romantic love for the dashing, wealthy cavalryman with whom she elopes but the downside is that her husband takes possession of their child.

She is shunned by fashionable society while her lover comes through the storms unscathed. He is increasingly detached from her desolation and the end is tragedy.

There are no cardboard characters in these two absorbing novels and no facile conclusions can be drawn, but the issues raised are explored in masterful prose.

John Moore