Old empires, new thinking

If you read one book this week

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (Doubleday) R280

It's mid-January and already this extraordinary and compelling tale of an obsessive London commuter, a lonely alcoholic who becomes embroiled in a murder mystery, has been hailed as the thriller of the year, the Gone Girl of 2015. With intersecting, overlapping, not-all-as-it-seems narratives, it offers a wildly unpredictable ride.

The issue

In a nutshell, here are some genre highlights for 2015. Out next month,SJ Watson's Second Life, about a devoted wife obsessed with a stranger, also takes on Gone Girl territory. Harry Hole creator Jo Nesbo's standalone, Blood On Snow, about a hitman hired to kill the woman he loves - the boss's wife - is here in April. In September, Robert Harris returns with Dictator, which, with Imperium and Lustrum, completes his Cicero trilogy.

Also in September, there's a new James Bond "co-written" by Anthony Horowitz with unseen material from 007 creator Ian Fleming's archives. And, just in time for Christmas, Prime Suspect author Lynda la Plante returns with Tennison, set in 1972 at the start of the career of her character Jane Tennison. She's fresh out of training and plunged into the deep end after the murder of a pregnant girl.

Crash course

Further to the Charlie Hebdo killings, it's been said the banlieues - the suburbs ringing the large French cities - are fertile breeding grounds for Islamic extremists because of the neglect of grim immigrant housing estates and the chronic sense of isolation due to high unemployment. But in his acclaimed The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and its Arabs (Granta), out in paperback this week, Andrew Hussey offers a simpler, more convincing explanation. "The rioters, wreckers, even the killers of the banlieues are not looking for reform or revolution. They are looking for revenge."

It is, in a nutshell, payback time for Algeria, a French colony until 1962, and a conflict that began with Napoleon's imperial adventures.

Tracing a line back from Paris to Marrakesh and Tangier, Hussey details the complex relationship between secular, republican France and Muslim north Africa to provide a compelling and unique take on French history. Hussey warns that anti-Semitism is now rife among young French Muslims. The claim they stake on France's future is, indeed, troubling.

The bottom line

"Once, elbow deep in bubbles at the children's bath time, I suddenly found myself praying in a kind of panic that nothing would ever change. 'It never has to get better than this,' I remember thinking. 'We can do this forever. Just like this.' But the mere fact of my thinking it was a kind of acknowledgement that this couldn't last, neither the equitable moment of our marriage nor the shaky American dream in which it had been conceived." - Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller (Harvill Secker)