There are three books of the year. The first is It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, by the Canadian artist Seth (Cape, £14.99/offer £13.49). A book so quiet that it stills the reader into an enchanted trance, it tells the story of Seth's obsessive search for Kalo, a New Yorker cartoonist from the 1940s, whose works have been lost.

Wrapped in nostalgia, exquisitely drawn in black and white washed over with blue-grey-green, impeccably narrated and full of wry wit, this book about disaffection and the salvation held out by art and the love of art is magical, insightful and, ultimately, transforming.

The second is Exit Wounds (Cape, £14.99/£13.49). Rutu Modan's clear-eyed look at one of the most difficult issues of our time, suicide bombing, is free of cant, outrage, hysteria, preaching and politics. In full-colour panels, it tells the story of a young woman who approaches a Tel-Aviv taxi driver to tell him that his father, who was her lover, has died in a suicide attack. A fractious and edgy friendship develops between Numi and Koby as they try to reconstruct what happened — both the public event of the man's death and the private story of his secret relationship with Numi — and the story moves towards its unexpected (and beautiful) ending. It is a moving and utterly convincing portrayal of what must be to live in modern Israel.

The third, Shortcomings (Faber, £12.99/£11.69), is the celebrated Adrian Tomine's first outing in Britain. It seems unlikely that a story about the relationship problems of an aggressive second-generation JapaneseAmerican, with a secret hunger for Caucasian women and contempt for women of his racial group, could be original, convincing and unputdownable.

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Background

• The Times Christmas choice: fiction

• The Times Christmas choice: crime

• The Times Christmas choice: history

• The Times Christmas choice: audiobooks

Background

• The Times Christmas choice: children aged 2-10

• The Times Christmas choice: gardening

• The Times Christmas choice: art

• The Times Christmas choice: memoirs and autobiographies

• The Times Christmas choice: graphic novels

But Tomine's latest book is all this and more. It is rendered with uncluttered beauty, the dialogue is so convincing that you can almost hear the characters speak, and it is alight with truth.

Those are the trailblazers of 2007, but the following are also outstanding. Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic, £12.99/£11.69) is a novel for young adults. It tells the story of a 12-year-old apprentice clockmaker living in poverty in the Gare du Montparnasse in 1929, whose boyhood gets tangled up with the early history of cinema, and is so lovingly drawn that it is hard to put down. It has written and drawn sections that are kept separate, almost in imitation of early silent films. You'll keep coming back to sneak astonished looks at these pages long after you have finished it.

Jason's I Killed Adolf Hitler (Fantagraphics, £8.99/£8.54) is about a professional assassin sent back to the 1930s in a time machine to take out Hitler. When the mission goes wrong, Hitler travels to the present. But the book, with Jason's characteristic animal-headed people, stripped-down narrative, and crisp, laser-sharp colour drawings, is really a wintry, melancholy story about ageing and what people do for love. A strangely uplifting desolation haunts the 48 pages that have more to say about affection and the ties that bind than many novels several times its length.

Paul Hornschemeier's The Three Paradoxes (Fantagraphics, £9.99/£9.49) is the baffling, delightfully inconclusive story of an illustrator struggling with artist's block, on a short visit to the town where he grew up. He is racked by childhood memories and anxiety about a first meeting with a girl after he leaves his father's home to return to Chicago. Mixing at least five different drawing styles, to signal various memories, paratexts and counterfactuals, it is an intelligent example of how much the graphic novel form can achieve with such economy: a picture is indeed worth a thousand words.

Nowhere is that more eloquently illustrated than in Posy Simmonds's Tamara Drewe (Cape, £16.99/£15.29). Its observations of the liberal middle-classes, the publishing world, and the boredom of the lives of working-class teenagers in a hole of a provincial English village are devastatingly spot-on. The drawings hold a wealth of details that no amount of words could express. Witty and gripping. Simmonds's prose is as beautiful and sharp-edged as her drawing.

Nevermore (SelfMadeHero, £12.99/£11.69) collects ten of Edgar Allan Poe's gothic horror tales (and a poem), adapted for the graphic format and illustrated by, ahem, new blood, showcasing a dazzling array of styles. They are all here, from The Fall of the House of Usher to The Raven, each drawn by a different artist, each distilling as much terror as putting images to Poe's uniquely macabre imagination will allow.

Bestsellers 2007

1 300, by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley
Dark Horse, £16.99
Made into the cult film in which Spartan heroes keep the world safe for democracy

2 Simpsons Comics: Beach Blanket Bongos
Titan, £8.99

3 Tintin in the Congo, by Hergé
Egmont, £9.99

4 Simpsons Comics: Big Beastly Book of Bart
Titan, £8.99

5 Civil War, by Mark Millar
Panini, £10.99

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