Books of the year vary, of course, depending on where you reside.

This can be seen in Stephen Romei’s summary for the Australian. Highlighted are Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower (Text), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate), Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Random House), Richard Ford’s Canada (Bloomsbury) and Chris Ware’s Building Stories (Pantheon).

In the Australian’s Books of the Year wrap up Peter Craven liked Gillian Mears’s Foal’s Bread (Allen & Unwin), Geordie Williamson liked Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (Viking) and Peter Pierce thought best Australian novel of the year was Toni Jordan’s Nine Days (Penguin).

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Susan Wyndham also chose Bring up the Bodies along with others including The Lighthouse by Alison Moore (Canongate), Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth (Jonathan Cape), Alice Munro’s  Dear Life (Chatto & Windus), Cate Kennedy’s Like a House on Fire (Scribe) and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (Allen & Unwin).

The New Statesman’s round-up of favourites from regular contributors and friends found a couple of titles were chosen by several of the participants: What Money Can’t Buy (Allen Lane), the political philosopher Michael Sandel’s assault on the logic of market fundamentalism and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay collection Pulphead (Vintage).

A S Byatt chose Jenny Uglow’s The Pinecone (Faber & Faber), Adam Gopnik picked Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: a History of Violence and Humanity (Allen Lane) and Geoff Dyer went for Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press).

The Guardian, opting instead for Not-new books of the year, had Irvine Welsh recommending Iceberg Slim’s Pimp: The Story of My Life (Canongate), Lionel Shriver going for W Somerset Maugham’s The Collected Short Stories (Vintage Classics), AL Kennedy for Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Penguin Classics) and Geoff Dyer this time opting for Arda Collins’ It is Daylight (Yale).

In addition to Mantel and Ware, the New York Times included among its Ten Best Books of 2012 Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt (Liveright Publishing/W. W. Norton & Company), Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon (Scribner) and A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers (McSweeney’s Books).

Two fiction books in the Washington Post’s list but not in everyone else’s were Arcadia by Lauren Groff (Voice) and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (Ecco).

Gaby Wood in London’s Telegraph also mentioned Mantel, Zadie Smith’s NW (Hamish Hamilton), Martin Amis’ Lionel Asbo (Cape), Ware, and two graphic works: Joff Winterhart’s Days of the Bagnold Summer (Jonathan Cape) and Mary and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of her Father’s Eyes (Jonathan Cape).

Wood concludes, “Books, it seems, have become a cause – something to be championed, like literacy itself. If we don’t do that now, in ten years’ time we’ll all be discussing the same three books we paid nothing for ten years ago.

“The moment is full of potential: stories are thriving, invention is at its height, anything is possible. So, while the digital evolution is still in its early stages, it’s worth asking: What are books worth to you?”