I'm not sure if it's a strictly history book, but I particularly enjoyed Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking.

Command and Control by Eric Schlosser has to be one of the most unexpectedly well-done books I've read in the past six years, at least. It's a history of the US nuclear weapons program, and the reason it's unexpected is because he's journalist, noted for Fast Food Nation. It seemed like it would be just another anti-nuclear polemic, with very skimpy research, wild rhetoric. But it is really well-sourced, and quite neutral in tone. And the essential narrative is fascinating, with decades of engineers , striving to design and add more safety, contending with a military wanting to have ready access and reliable detonation.

My (current) top five of the year, although not all of them were published this year - I usually have to read on the way into work and that means the to-read-list has now spiralled well beyond my control:

David Crouch, The English Aristocracy, 1070-1272: A Social Transformation, (New Haven and London, 2011).

I've read this in sections before, and probably the entirety in that process but as a gift to myself I picked up my own copy and (re-)read cover-to-cover. English Aristocracy is a challenge, building on his arguments in two previous studies - Image of Aristocracy in Britain (London, 1992) or his The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France, 900-1300, (Harlow, 2005) - which all attempt to reassess some core ideas about social structure and élite culture in the High Middle Ages. Crouch's theses regarding the origins of chivalric and aristocratic culture are starting to become much more widely accepted since he was able to root them in the sociological schema of Pierre Bordieu's habitus but his discourse on the social structure of rural society remains incredibly controversial among specialists (but then what isn't when the discourse is under the label of 'feudalism'). I think this is book best read either after or in conjunction with Birth of Nobility as the arguments (and the theoretical outlines) are so intertwined, Image, written before Crouch implemented his adaption of Bordieu is less essential but still worth reading.

David Green, The Hundred Years War: A People's History, (New Haven and London, 2014).

This book came as a recommendation of /u/Valkine, I enjoyed it immensely and it has reinvigorated my passion for the HYW and the later Middle Ages more broadly. While Green pitches his book not as a narrative history he still offers a very useful potted summary of key incidences which make it wholly accessible to non-specialists while his thematic structure demonstrates that there is still scope even in what was once a highly saturated topic for new insights and innovation. That said, this remains a largely syncretic work, not only of Green's own research but a wealth of new literature in the field. However, its recent publication means that it missed some truly revelatory bodies of research but c'est la vie in academia - I would have loved to have had discussions of Ambühl (below) or Craig Taylor's, Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood During the Hundred Years War, (Cambridge, 2013) incorporated.

Remy Ambühl, Prisoners of War During the Hundred Years War: Ransom Culture in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2013).

Likewise, it would have been fantastic had Ambühl been able to engage more directly with Taylor's theses and vice versa. Both are highly dependent on Maurice Keen and use his research as a leaping off point. They come at Keen from two related but different angles. While Ambühl takes The Laws of War in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1965) as the keystone of his research Taylor is instead driving onwards from Chivalry, (New Haven and London, 1984). The two books are highly intertwined but I have a sense that Taylor is more acutely sensitive to Keen's Laws than Ambühl is to Keen's Chivalry, taking instead a more John Gillingham-rooted approach to the topic. This is still a very important book with appeal beyond specialists in the HYW. The exploration of ransoming processes offers abstracted but well-rooted case-studies which are often lacking in monographs and the attention to detail is superb. This will be my go-to for questions about ransom practice for the forseeable future, but I will likely tailor the 'culture' section with some Taylor. Finally, even considering Ambühl is writing in his second language this book reads better than most scholarly monographs.

Kevin Madigan, Medieval Christianity: A New History, (Oxford, 2015).

I have written up a review of Madigan on the Reading and Resources List, so I will merely quote that here:

'This is a book for beginners' claims Madigan at the beginning of his extensive endnotes. While producing a book for beginners might have been his intention, Madigan's command of a vast wealth of scholarship spanning the pre-history and entirety of the Middle Ages makes a beginner even of the seasoned professional. The scope and greatest strength of this magnificent new addition to the study of medieval Christianity is the thorough contextualisation of lines of development in medieval Christianity from the beginnings of the early churches right to the inception of the Reformation. Madigan achieves this without falling into the trap of ever painting these developments as inevitable - chiefly through taking a series of asides exploring alternative, later unorthodox, branches and expressions of spiritual Christianity. Like any survey, the author occasionally glides lightly over particularly contentious pressure points in modern historiography and sometimes the pressure of a subject stretching from ca. 150 to 1500 is noticeable. Still, Madigan is able to expound not only on the relevant clerical or religio-cultural context but set these within a wider social, political, and economic framework. A must read for anyone interested in medieval history. A small criticism is perhaps in an occasionally overly obtuse language which can occasionally spoil the rhetorical flow of the work - but your mileage (and vocabulary) may vary.

Adrian Bell, Anne Curry, Andy King, and David Simpkin, The Soldier in Later Medieval England, (Oxford, 2013).

This is a culmination of a AHRC funded project which has digitised and catalogued much of the evidence it discusses. As it represents the culmination of a number of notable military historians' work it is difficult to synthesise into one pithy review. All of these individuals have published widely on the topic and this book allows a wonderful prospographical insight into the soldiery (from highest peerage to lowest archer) in the HYW. While it may not be to all tastes it is a wonderful reference text and the utility of this and the online database to students and hobbyists will be immense.

Potential contenders, (ie. unfinished -although time is running out!):

John Sabapathy, Officers and Accountability, (Oxford, 2015).

Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe, 400-1000, (London, 2009).

Charles West, Reframing the Feudal Revolution: Political and Social Transformation between Marne and Moselle, c.800-c.1100, (Cambridge, 2013).

Underground by Haruki Murakami. It's a series of interviews with people who were affected by the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995. These people just talk matter of factly about being gassed by a deadly nerve agent while riding the subway. People taking a different train because of a training seminar for work, or staying at their girlfriends house the night before, or some other mundane reason. Having been to Tokyo on a handful of occasions and living in Seoul with one of the largest subway systems in the world, it was a rough read. If anyone is interested in domestic terrorism and doomsday cults and well written narrative, I highly recommend it.