The Sunday Times picture book of the year

China: Portrait of a Country by Liu Heung Shing
Taschen £29.99
In the late 1990s, Liu Heung Shing, a photojournalist born in China but educated in America, toured his native country, listening to the stories of photographers who had lived through Chinese communism, and persuading them to hand over images they'd hidden away rather than risk accusations of straying from the party line. His remarkable portrait of Chinese life from the 1949 revolution to the present day includes extraordinary pictures of young women workers jostling to light Mao Tse-tung's cigarette, disgraced intellectuals branded ‘ox-demons' and consigned to an ‘ox-shed' for re-education, and a youth waving a bottle of Coke in the Forbidden City, in 1981. Even more startling, however, are two shots from 2005, showing boat-pullers on the Yangtze working naked to protect the few clothes they possess. Welcome to modern China.

TIME by ANDY GOLDSWORTHY
Thames & Hudson £24.95
“When I began working 25 years ago...I was interested only in the making and moment of individual works,” says the sculptor Goldsworthy. Today, he is interested in how his works embody the past and anticipate the future; he's interested in the connections between pieces he makes at different times in different places. This fascinating book finds him creating art from the landscape around Santa Fe, New Mexico, at Cornell University in New York state, in Nova Scotia, France, Holland and at home in southwest Scotland, and keeping a daily diary. Whether being drawn into his thought processes (complete with grumbles) increases your pleasure in his works or robs them of some of their magic is debatable.

HELMAND by ROBERT WILSON
Cape £30
As the 52nd Infantry Brigade was nearing the end of its tour of duty in Helmand province earlier this year, its commanding officer invited Wilson, an award-winning commercial photographer, to join the unit as a war artist. In this magnificent book, he captures the region's dusty beauty and evokes camp life via details such as an unfinished jigsaw. What really sets the book apart, however, is a series of stunning portraits of the troops. Captured dead beat after days on patrol, sand ingrained in their features, these faces speak of war's harshness as tellingly as a Wilfred Owen poem.

THE MONUMENTAL INDIA BOOK by AMIT PASRICHA
Constable £100
“To do justice to the scale...of India's monuments, I needed to get more into the frame than the eye can see,” says Pasricha. The result is a luscious series of digitally “stitched” panoramas that include not just the great Mogul landmarks such as Akbar's tomb and Jaipur's pink palace, but also Hindu and Buddhist holy places, 12,000-year-old rock paintings near Bhopal and the rather zany legislative assembly that Le Corbusier designed for the Punjabi capital, Chandigarh. “Everywhere, India's monuments are crumbling,” notes William Dalrymple sadly in his foreword. The fact that Pasricha's pictures may outlive their subjects adds to the book's value and poignancy.

EDWARD STEICHEN: In High Fashion: The Condé Nast Years 1923-1937 by WILLIAM A EWING and TODD BRANDOW
Thames & Hudson £42
Edward Steichen had already won acclaim for his portraits and dreamy Romantic studies when, as chief photographer at Vanity Fair and Vogue, he set sail on a new course, introducing modernism to fashion photography and a sly wit to the society portrait, taking both to new heights of glamour. Marlene Dietrich - post The Blue Angel - looks ravishing in a black feathered hat, offset by white carnations, but, as often as not, it is the men - a nervy Eugene O'Neill, sexy old Frank Lloyd Wright and Walt Disney (flanked by Mickey) - who grab your attention.

WIRTSCHAFTSWUNDER: Germany after the War 1952-1967 by JOSEF HEINRICH DARCHINGER
Taschen £24.99
Having served in the Wehrmacht during the second world war, “Jupp” Darchinger reinvented himself in peacetime as a freelance photojournalist and set out to capture the era that was soon to be labelled das Wirtschaftswunder - the German economic miracle. In the space of a few years, images of children playing in city ruins and women knocking up meals in emergency shelters give way to teenagers astride smart mopeds, sporting James Dean haircuts, and family picnics in the country beside posh new cars. As the Berlin Wall went up, as Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt jostled for position and John F Kennedy paid a visit just months before his death in 1963, Darchinger was there to capture the moment.

AFRICAN AIR by GEORGE STEINMETZ
Abrams £19.99
As a 21-year-old in the 1970s, hitchhiking across the Sahara desert to escape life as a Beverly Hills rich kid, George Steinmetz dreamt of photographing Africa from the air. But it wasn't until he discovered powered paragliding 20 years later that his dream became a reality. After learning the ropes in California, he was off, gliding over Chad and Niger, capturing camel trains and discovering pre-Islamic burial sites below. This aerial survey - commissioned by National Geographic - mixes those shots with others taken from conventional light aircraft: from busy urban centres to migrating herds of elephant and zebra, the images are both beautiful and intriguing.

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