I've seen a lot of customers come in and out of our bookshop last year, and as a small Indy store, we staff love to chew the fat and shoot the breeze about what they've really liked or disliked.

Here's the word on the street from hundreds of fantasy & scifi-reading customers about what they've considered to be the best novels of 2010.

The comments are my own, though. I love checking out our customers’ suggestions: you get to discover books that you might never have read - and it's a heck of a lot more accurate in picking winners than the so called AI that large online book stores use to compile their soulless recommendations.

1.  Kraken by China Mieville

A fishy tale of occultists and a missing squid stolen from a museum by evil doers. China brings his trademark over-writing to the work, but the pace and style of his brilliant work sweeps you along. One of the more literary picks on this list, mixing pulp sensibilities with highbrow writing. A must-read from last year’s genre selection.

2. The Kingdom Beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt

An incredibly well imagined fantasy novel. Set in the distant future, the people of Earth are scrabbling along at a near-Victorian level of society, but there are ancient secrets hidden in the world’s jungles from an earlier age. A u-boat pirate and a college tutor go in search of some of them, with bad results. File under un-put-downable high-adventure. When’s the movie coming out?

3. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Think Bladerunner set in a resource-depleted future Asia, with heroine Emiko as a windup (replicant) trying to negotiate her way through a dark, hungry Thailand. One of the best dystopian novels I have read for a long, long time, and lots of the store’s readers agree with me! Deserves all its awards.

4. Humans by Robert J. Sawyer

You have to a love a science fiction novel set in a parallel reality Earth where Homo sapiens went extinct, and Neanderthals rule. It’s basically a Planet of the Apes homage, with a Homo Sapien drawn into this strange world from our own, and the plot muscles provided by a looming natural disaster which might just sent the Neanderthals the way of the dinosaurs. Clever material, written with one eye on a possible TV series deal. Canadian Robert J. Sawyer is quickly becoming this century's Michael Crichton.

 5. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin

A baroque, beautifully written fantasy novel with echoes of J.R.R. Tolkien, Gene Wolfe and David Eddings. It starts as a bit of a cliché, with barbarian Yeine Darr entering the fabulous City of Sky to discover she is the chosen one and heir to the kingdom (one day, all this will be yours). It soon moves out of cartoon fantasy land, though, becoming a complex and engaging tale of royal politics and what you have to do to seek and keep power. It is just great to see someone still doing high fantasy this well!