Sticking to tradition is not my forte. Many a time I have preferred to opt for a different, unconventional approach. But as far as books are concerned I tend to enjoy the “tradition” of listing those titles that have impressed me most throughout the year, as the year’s end fast approaches.

Following in the footsteps of the compulsive bestseller Pompeii, Robert Harris, who has penned such best-selling titles as Enigma, Archangel, Fatherland and Selling Hitler, has now come up with the accounts of Tullius Tiro, a confidential secretary of Roman senator Cicero in Imperium.

Reading between the lines one cannot but help detecting a number of Blairite parallels. Apart from learning how his secretary was also “an author of no mean reputation” and “the inventor of the art of shorthand” we come to discover ancient Rome with all of its treachery and political double dealing while Tiro’s own life unfolds in an exciting, astonishing, arduous and “finally extremely dangerous” manner.

This exciting book derives its title from political power – the power of life and death, as vested by the state in an individual. Harris claims that “many hundreds of men have sought this power but Cicero was unique in the history of the republic, in that he pursued it with no resources to help him apart from his own talent”. Given the success of this book one can expect more Roman thrillers in the near future by this bestselling author.

Although I bought my copy of The rise of a hungry nation: China shakes the world by James Kynge from Heathrow Airport, when I was in Beijing last March I noticed that the book was also available in the English titles section of leading bookshops. Kynge first went to China as an undergraduate in 1982 when he studied Chinese in a university located between the Yellow River and the birthplace of Confucius. He spent some 19 years in all as a journalist in Asia, a decade of which was taken up reporting from China – latterly as China Bureau Chief of the Financial Times.

The book explains how the Chinese caught up not only in technology but also in such areas as design. I found particularly amusing the account of a Como corporate customer of Babei, the largest of Shengzhou’s 1,100 tie makers, who encountered difficulty in paying for the silk he had imported from China. The Chinese company’s president took his compensation in the form of the Italian company’s design shop and in so doing he bought access to the only segment of the industry in which by that time the Chinese were not yet dominant. Such anecdotes dot the whole book, often at the expense of sacrificing narrative flow. But it should nevertheless prove to be compulsive reading for those like me who continue to be fascinated by the ways in which Chinese minds work.

John Grisham’s latest thrillers had become somewhat formulaic, particularly as he tried to keep his story lines away from the confines of the law courts. Although it did not sell as much as his fiction titles, his recent first ever true story The innocent man: murder and injustice in a small town showed that the author has lost none of his finely honed writing skills.

The blurb of the book describes it as his most extraordinary legal thriller yet. In a way I tend to agree with this publicity slogan, particularly as the book will come as a shock to all those who believe that in America you are innocent until proven guilty. If you read the book, make it a point not to miss out on the author’s note as it provides compulsive reading.

Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Making globalisation work might not reach the same heights of his Globalisation and its discontents. However this remains a book not to be missed, particularly by those who believe that given the right amount of will power, the powers that be, can actually reform the process of globalisation. The main axis on which the whole book hinges is that among the central choices facing all societies is the role of government with economic success requiring getting the balance right between the government and the market.

Taking an optimistic perspective the author shows that while critics of globalisation are correct in saying it has been used to push a particular set of values, this need not be so. He adds that globalisation does not have to be bad for the environment, increase inequality, weaken cultural diversity and advance corporate interests at the expense of the well-being of ordinary citizens. Those who might dismiss such arguments as wishful thinking are in for some pleasant surprises if they choose to read on.

Lebanon has always fascinated me – even before I visited the country last June on a Council of Europe assignment. But if you want to discover many of the complexities of its political system I recommend that you read Nicholas Blanford’s The assassination of Rafiki Hariri and its impact on the Middle East: Killing Mr Lebanon.

In spite of the turmoil that the country went through and is still going through at present, when Hariri was killed Beirut was going through a quiet patch, so much so that the author describes it as “a city at peace”. Blanford is highly descriptive in his style of writing, using the tempo and pacing of a thriller writer. In fact the book begins with him working at home when the explosion that killed Rafik Hariri blasted through his quiet neighbourhood two kilometres from the St George Hotel, rattling windows and sending a few loose panes of glass smashing onto the street outside.

His first reaction was to telephone his United Nations peacekeeping contacts in south Lebanon, assuming that the thunderclap was produced by an Israeli Air Force jet flying a low-level supersonic run over Beirut – a muscle flexing gesture that often meant trouble along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel. Obviously the book has been overtaken by events – particularly by the Israeli-Lebanese war of last July as well as the recent rise of Hezbollah, but particularly for the uninitiated, Blanford’s book offers deep insight into the regional power play and proxy wars that have developed over the years, as well as the influence which not only Syria but also Saudi Arabia have on Lebanese relations.

Many people find it hard to distinguish between Shiites and Sunnis. Vali Nasr’s The Shia Revival has the right answers as it explains and elaborates how conflicts within Islam will shape the future. What I myself came to learn through this book was that in spite of their inherent conflicts, like many populations they have lived uneasily near each other for a long time and yet they have their stories of common struggles, communal harmony, friendship and intermarriage. A book of this sort would be incomplete without reference to Zarqawi, particularly as we read about Sunni political concerns in postwar Iraq, the legacy of Shia-Sunni rivalry over the centuries, the future of Islam and that of Sunnis in Iraq.

For many members of our younger generation the Cold War is something alien; almost an aberration, a period of time confined to history books. Having lived through most of the years of this era, I found John Lewis Gaddis’s The Cold War to offer the kind of gripping narrative which should make it interesting even for those who have not lived through those dramatic years. The claim that this is the first full major history of the whole conflict might be somewhat overstated, but it brings back memories of years long gone past when Kennedy and Khrushchev confronted each other over the Cuban Missile Crisis as well as the way and the reasons why Nixon and Mao sought their wary friendship. The book succeeds most in highlighting the underlying dynamics of the conflict in a crisp manner that is aided rather than bogged down by the author’s encyclopaedic historical knowledge.

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Leo Brincat is the Main Opposition Spokesperson on Foreign Affairs and IT.