Mitchell’s “small” book "Heidegger Among the Sculptors" is like an Aleph, or a Monad, that within its few pages manages to open out onto the work of Heidegger in most original and unsuspecting ways. Mitchell’s book not only opens up Heidegger’s work, in as much as he illustrates how we can and should read him backwards, from the post-Turn work towards the early work, but opens up Heidegger’s work on worldhood, spatiality, embodiment and temporality.

In his provocative book "Refounding Environmental Ethics: Pragmatism, Principle, and Practice", Ben Minteer challenges this dominant perspective in the field of environmental ethics with its emphasis on nonanthropocentrism and the intrinsic value of nature. He argues that the near-exclusive focus on these issues has left the field isolated and largely irrelevant at a time when environmental problems are crying for ethical guidance.

This book should be read by every human geographer, indeed it should be read by anyone who cares at all about the reach of the colonial state, the cultivation of inhumanity or just about dedicated and painstaking scholarship.

Catherine constructs a story of social policy’s silence in this regard, partly through reflecting on her own researching career, one marked by substantial policy reports and multiple other contributions in this field. Depicting the multi-disciplinary fields of homelessness research as largely positivist and empirical endeavours (with notable exceptions), the key call here is for an epistemological rewriting of homelessness as felt.

Hasana Sharp’s "Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization" is one the most invigorating books published in philosophy this year. Where Deleuzian and post-Althusserian accounts of Spinoza occasionally take all the affect out of one of the tradition’s most effective writers, Sharp’s book is eminently readable and clear about the stakes of rethinking Spinoza after the linguistic and discursive turns of the last half of the twentieth century.

"Flammable" tells the story of Villa Inflamable (translated and referred to in the text as ‘Flammable’), a shantytown on the edge of Buenos Aires, hemmed in by a petrochemical complex and the festering waters of the Río de la Plata, and which was named for a ship explosion just offshore. It is, as Auyero and Swistun tell it, a story of urban relegation and environmental suffering, of people whose lives are shaped in profound and permanent ways by the toxic environment in which they live, and by the confusion, longing, and resignation produced by indifferent state bureaucracy, duplicitous corporations, and prying journalists (and, it must be said, researchers).

"Timepass" is an extraordinary book in which Craig Jeffrey makes a layered argument about the ways in which lower middle-class Jat (middle-caste) men from provincial India negotiate their experiences of ‘surplus time’ as unemployed youth.

This book is an in-depth analysis of the engagements of young women (school girls) with the expectations of prescribed multiculturalism and in this case, riotous behaviours. For these young women, much of their girlhood appears to be spent in observation of highly masculinised behaviours. We are, however, treated to a far more complex story.

Simon Reid-Henry’s "The Cuban Cure: Reason and Resistance in Global Science" offers an important counter-history of biotechnology in Cuba which points to the field’s multiplicity and heterogeneity. Drawing on a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Reid-Henry provides an empirically detailed analysis of Cuban biotechnology from the 1980s through the mid-2000s.

This was a difficult book to read, but not because it was badly written. It is a difficult book to write about, but not because there is nothing to say. It is a beautifully wrought, painfully acute, moving, thoughtful and challenging book.