Our books of the year 2011 reflect the wide range of literature being written today. While others might sniff and grumble about this year's Booker shortlist or the rise of the digital, we believe in celebrating good books for good books' sake. So, for what it's worth, here are the best books we've read all year.

Five classic books that started life in another language.

With the upcoming Independent Foreign Fiction Prize winner announcement next month, we thought it ample opportunity to draw your attention to other books in translation.
Here are five classic books that started life in another language, you may have read them or you may have not... but chances are you will have heard of them...

How do you define 'Holocaust literature'? The idea itself seems absurd, if not obscene; but the efforts of writers and philosophers to understand one of the most incomprehensible events in human history have produced mountains of books, some of them truly great, and it's an understandable instinct to lump them all together under a definable category. But categories are dangerous: some books are really about things they never explicitly mention, and some pretend to be about things that they're not; sometimes subsequent events give a book meanings it was never intended to have when it was written.

With that in mind, here are five books, some well-known and some less so (and not all of them obvious choices), that concern or reflect upon or bear some meaningful relation to the Holocaust. Not all of them would sit comfortably on a shelf marked 'Holocaust Literature', and this is by no means a 'best-of' list; instead, we hope these books might open up new perspectives or introduce you to writers you hadn't yet encountered.

Five books in translation that made it on to our screens.

With the upcoming Independent Foreign Fiction Prize winner announcement, we thought it ample opportunity to draw your attention to other books in translation.

So in the first of our themed booklists, here are five translated fiction novels that have been adapted for the screen.

Books into films... this month, we look at the source material for some classic movies

From models to musicians to movie stars... from reality shows to high society parties... from the depths of addiction and hubris to the heights of adoration and vanity... books exploring the myths behind celebrity give us glimpses into a world we live through vicariously, wish we had and probably know more than we should about... Here are our ten books on celebrity.

'Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.' Emily Dickinson

With the upcoming Independent Foreign Fiction Prize winner announcement, we thought it ample opportunity to draw your attention to other books in translation.

When we talk about 'State-of-the-nation' novels, we tend to mean books that are British or American, approximately the size of breezeblocks and terribly, terribly Serious – like Jonathan Franzen's Freedom or George Eliot's Middlemarch. What we tend to forget is that the Russians have been doing this for ever, and usually better - and far more entertainingly - than us Anglophones.

Here is the Booktrust's list of 5 great State-of-Russia novels

There's been a resurgence of late in short stories, with a rising number of literature nights, new online portals and apps for the form and celebration from other writers. So we thought we'd give you our short story collections of the year...

Chosen by our translated fiction reviewers, Nikesh Shukla, Catherine Mansfield and Pete Mitchell, here are our five translated books of the year...

Our choice of novels from mainland Europe.