The gestation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been told many times before, but in The Story of Alice (Harvill Secker), Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has produced a biblio-biography that is crammed with lovely new things. He gets us far closer than we have ever been to the act of alchemy by which a shy and slightly creepy Oxford don turned a pert little girl into an enduring heroine of children’s literature. Parti cularly delicate is the way Douglas-Fairhurst deals clear-sightedly with the vexed business of Lewis Carroll’s sexuality without spoiling the lingering enchantment of getting lost in Wonderland.

Oxford also looms large in John Aubrey: My Own Life (Chatto & Windus), Ruth Scurr’s inventive account of the 17th-century antiquarian who, as the author of Brief Lives, has a good claim to be the first great biographer in the English language. Having been forced to abandon his alma mater during the civil war, Aubrey spent the rest of his life jotting down the kind of gossipy, scandalous biographical fragments that only circulate around high table after much port has been taken. In an act of daring ventriloquism, Scurr here tells Aubrey’s life story in his own words, stitched together from his scattered manuscripts. The result is a triumph of historical imagination, as vivid and endearing as its subject’s own.

In Threads (Jonathan Cape), Julia Blackburn sets out to write the life of John Craske, a Norfolk fisherman who painted, and then embroidered, scenes of the sea that enchanted the chattering classes of the interwar period, who liked nothing more than discovering genius in a cottage. In this meandering – in the best sense – quest narrative, Blackburn goes in search of the hard facts of the fisherman-artist’s life. She doesn’t exactly find them, but then it might have been disappointing if she had. Outsider art requires outsider biography, and Blackburn, an expert in finding new forms to fit odd lives, has managed her task magnificently.

Another outsider who has attracted a supremely skilled biography this year is Francis Barber, the Jamaican slave who became valet to Samuel Johnson. Michael Bundock’s rigorously researched and judiciously told The Fortunes of Francis Barber (Yale) is a model of how to use one apparently insignificant life to break open a historical moment that could otherwise be approached only through official documents. Barber’s extraordinary and varied career – he was, by turns, a British schoolboy, an able seaman, a bookseller and a schoolmaster, as well as Johnson’s majordomo – allows Bundock to explore what life felt like for a black man in Georgian England. Barber attracted prejudice, but also a fair degree of kindness, not least from Johnson himself.

Shakespeare might hardly seem to need another biography, but James Shapiro’s 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (Faber) is so much more than that. Using the same methodology that he brought to 1599, his masterpiece of 10 years ago, Shapiro digs deep into the social and political context that gave rise to Shakespeare’s greatest late work. There is terror on the streets, thanks to the failed gunpowder plot and to an outbreak of plague, while at the Jacobean court politics is, as ever, rotten to the core. In masterly detail Shapiro shows how this simmering paranoia fed into every line of King Lear.

Meanwhile, for an equally fine-grained account of living with Shakespeare, try Antony Sher’s Year of the Fat Knight (Nick Hern). Like Shapiro, Sher has returned to a format that did well for him before. But whereas Year of the King (1985) dealt with his transformation into the “bottled spider” that is Richard III, here Sher offers an account of playing Falstaff in the RSC’s recent production of Henry IV Parts I and II. In his earlier book, the thirtysomething actor wrestled with becoming evil, here the older Sher takes us through the process of becoming fat and ridiculous. His text, organised as a diary, is supplemented by his own paintings and sketches.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary (Canongate) is almost unbearable to read, which is why it’s so important that we do. Slahi, who has never been charged with any crime, has been unlawfully held in Guantánamo for the past dozen years. Teaching himself English by listening to his interrogators on the sly, he has written a shattering account of what it’s like to spend more than a decade in hell. Chronic deprivation is punctuated by sessions of physical and psychological torture to the point where you wonder how Slahi could bear to stay alive. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that, little by little, he also witnesses acts of humanity. Guards become friends with inmates while interrogators let slip their own doubts about what they are doing. It is in these moments that you begin to think there may be hope for Slahi and the remaining Guantánamo internees, although it will surely require a sharp shove from the outside world.

The personal essays in Etgar Keret’s The Seven Good Years (Granta) may seem slight – many of them are only a few pages long – but they are packed with good things. Brisk, funny, sad and sharp, Keret’s bulletins from middle-class life in Tel Aviv mix rocket attacks with babygrows, nightmares about the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a particularly irritating telemarketer. The “seven years” of the title is not just a biblical reference, but covers the time during which Keret became a father to a son while also dealing with the decline and death of his own parent, a Holocaust survivor. This is tragi-comedy done with an elegant touch.

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (Greywolf) takes the whole debate around transgender people and makes it into searing art. In telling the story of her marriage to the fluidly gendered film-maker Harry Dodge, Nelson meditates on the point, or pointlessness, of chopping up the world into male and female. While Dodge is receiving testosterone injections and a double mastectomy, Nelson is undergoing IVF and getting pregnant. As their two bodies swell and soften, harden and contract, Nelson interrogates the borders of language, law and custom that have been set up to keep them in their place. This makes the Argonauts sound heavy going, but it is also scabrous, tender and – perhaps an odd word to use – essential.

Finally, if you want a more sequined version of gender at play, you could do worse than Paul O’Grady’s Open the Cage, Murphy (Bantam). In this, the fourth instalment of his memoirs, O’Grady takes his alter ego Lily Savage from Butlins in Skegness to partying alongside (not exactly with) Madonna. There’s a degree of candour and artistry to O’Grady’s writing that lifts it far above the usual slack demands of showbiz memoir.

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