Escape in a book ... fiction can often create a sense of a place more powerfully than any travel guide. Photograph: Marco Cristofori/Zefa/Corbis

Top of my list is The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswamy (Harper Perennial). The book has been a best seller in its native Egypt and throughout the Arabic world since publication in 2002. Set in downtown Cairo at the time of the 1990 Gulf War, it reveals modern Egyptian life through the eyes of a diverse range of characters – an aristocratic playboy, a gay newspaper editor, a religious zealot, childhood sweethearts – all of whom live in the same apartment building. Cairo hasn't been so vividly - or sexily - evoked since Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk.

	Escape in a book ...

Barcelona broods in Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind (Phoenix). Ashen morning skies cloak the city "in a wreath of liquid copper". On the narrow streets night watchmen linger as "the brightness of dawn filtered down from the balconies and cornices in streaks of slanting light that dissolved before touching the ground". Part thriller, part Gothic melodrama, part coming-of-age romance, The Shadow of the Wind brings Barcelona to life in the years after the Spanish Civil War.

You won't find Mark Anthony Jarman's Canada in the travel brochures, and more's the pity. His 19 Knives (House of Anansi Press) includes not only the best story I've read in a year, but one of the best ever written. Rejecting post-modern cynicism, Jarman celebrates life's ecstatic mysteries alongside its trivialities. The result is hypnotic, crazy, seductive and darkly funny. Smoky bars. A freaky house fire. A cougar attack. A pointless argument in a parking lot. Sublime. Jarman joins the ranks of Canada's finest storytellers: Munro, Gallant, MacLeod and Atwood.

Berlin cast a spell over me long before my first visit, and Thomas Brussig's Heroes Like Us (Harvill) takes one laughing and weeping through the last decades of the Cold War. The central character is the teenage fantasist (and would-be Nobel laureate), born on the day Soviet tanks rumbled into Prague, responsible alone for breaching the Berlin Wall. Think Goodbye Lenin (with bonking) rather than The Lives of Others.
Ian Rankin's Rebus novels spawned a dozen crime tours in Edinburgh, as do Donna Leon's in Venice. Any day now the first long boats will rip along the klongs in search of John Burdett's Bangkok. His three compelling detective yarns unfold in the city's underbelly. In Bangkok 8 (Corgi), a visiting US marine sergeant is killed inside a locked Mercedes by a maddened python and a swarm of cobras. His other titles feature a Kalashnikov-toting monk, a pre-op transsexual and a troop of demonic hookers. This is surreal Thailand where a devout Buddhist cop, speaking slick Chandler-eze, avenges the death of his partner and soul brother. Bangkok, man? "Great city, lousy traffic."

Finally, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's outstanding Half a Yellow Sun (Harper Perennial). Through the lives and loves of her characters, Adichie tells the story of the catastrophic Nigerian-Biafra War of 1967-1970: starvation, colonialist arrogance, international realpolitik and ethnic division. Here are haunting, "real" stories from Lagos, Nsukka, bush villages and battlefields. "Olana jumped each time she heard the thunder. She imagined another air raid, bombs rolling out of the plane and exploding in the compound … sometimes she imagined the bunker itself collapsing, squashing them all into the mud." A haunting, compassionate, transformative novel that reveals a world that no tour bus will ever guide us to.