Goodbye 2015, and goodbye to big beasts like Ed Balls, Vince Cable and the Alexanders (Douglas and Danny), all ushered off the political stage in an election that saw Scotland turn SNP yellow, Ukip reduced to a single MP and Ed Miliband replaced as Labour leader with lifelong backbencher Jeremy Corbyn.

The unexpected Tory majority gave writers plenty to chew over in their election postmortems. How did Labour, which claimed to have won the “ground war” on the eve of the election, get it so wrong? The BBC’s Iain Watson attempts to find out in Five Million Conversations (Luath), written in an accessible diary style. His conclusion is not a happy one: the party has serious political and organisational challenges to overcome if it wants to take power again (and it needs to capture seats it hasn’t held since Tony Blair’s landslide in 1997).

A large portion of Labour’s current misery is down to the nationalist landslide in Scotland. The background to that thumping defeat is spelled out in Joe Pike’s fast-paced, well-sourced Project Fear (Biteback), which covers Scottish politics from the start of the independence referendum campaign through to election night. It’s essential reading for anyone who follows Westminster politics but has a sketchier idea of the earthquake north of the border, not least because Corbyn’s continued leadership could rest on the outcome of next summer’s Holyrood election. Labour insiders fear another wipeout, which would prompt the question: wasn’t Corbyn supposed to win back Labour voters who swung to the SNP as “the only true anti-austerity party”?

The big disappointment for Ukip on 7 May was that, despite racking up more than four million votes, the party held just one of its two seats (Douglas Carswell’s Clacton constituency) and failed to gain any. Most humbling of all, party leader Nigel Farage was defeated in Thanet South. Farage resigned, then unresigned, and the Huffington Post’s Owen Bennett was there to see it all. There was fretting in Ukip circles when his book Following Farage (Biteback) came out, as many party staffers had gleefully slagged off their former leader after his resignation, only to discover 48 hours later that he was back in charge. They needn’t have worried. Bennett’s book is full of the utterly barmy stuff we’ve come to associate with Ukip footsoldiers (Godfrey Bloom of women are fridge-sluts fame makes a cameo), but most of their voters clearly don’t care.

Following the Conservative victory, this autumn marked David Cameron’s 10th year as party leader. The anniversary was commemorated with two flavours of biography. For serious types there is Cameron at 10 (William Collins) by former Wellington school headmaster Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon. This “inside story” starts in 2010, and the early chapters will prompt wonkish nostalgia. Remember the Big Society? The economic Plan A? Andy Coulson? The Tories would rather you didn’t.

For the more frivolous, there is Call Me Dave (Biteback), a book-length version of the tearful voicemail one might leave an ex-lover, implying that he’s nothing without you and, anyway, you’ve told all his friends he’s rubbish in bed. Michael Ashcroft and Cameron’s breakup was prompted by the former’s belief that his contributions to the Conservative party should have been rewarded with a seat in the cabinet. The PM declined to oblige. During the election, Ashcroft made his detailed polling available to the public, and followed up with this biography co-authored with the former Sunday Times political editor Isabel Oakeshott. It’s undeniably readable, thanks to several eye-catching claims that no one but a billionaire could have got past the libel lawyers.

This autumn we also got the second volume of Charles Moore’s epic, if occasionally exhausting, Margaret Thatcher biography (Allen Lane), tragically not called “Thatch 2: Thatch Harder”. Filed alongside it in the “Leftie Hate Figures” section of all good bookshops will be Niall Ferguson’s Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist (Allen Lane). Finally, 31 years after it was written, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (Bodley Head) got a UK release following the success of his endless biographies of Lyndon B Johnson. The story of New York’s unofficial emperor Robert Moses reveals how to get things done in local government (top tip: being a minor-league tyrant running a shadow government helps).

Looking at politics more broadly, several titles stand out. Juliet Jacques’s Trans (Verso) provides a lyrical exploration of her own gender journey against the background of increasing media interest in transgender issues. Thoughtful and intimate, it’s a fine successor to books such as Jan Morris’s Conundrum. Meanwhile, Katrine Marçal’s Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? (Portobello), translated by Saskia Vogel, asks hard questions about homo economicus, who is very definitely a man. Our economy depends on huge amounts of unpaid and often unacknowledged labour, the majority of it done by women. What if policymakers took that into account? But the year in feminism is not all depressing: Anita Anand’s Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary (Bloomsbury) unearths the extraordinary story of a forgotten British-Indian suffragette who went from Queen Victoria’s goddaughter to militant activist.

As Russia grandstands over Syria, understanding what Vladimir Putin wants is crucial. Peter Pomerantsev, a British journalist born to Russian parents, spent a decade working in Moscow immediately following the energy boom that created the oligarch class. The vignettes in his account of modern Russia, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (Faber), transport the reader to a world of glittering decadence and Kafkaesque corruption. For those interested in American politics, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s short, brutal meditation on the black body and masculinity, Between the World and Me (Text), and Claudia Rankine’s prose-poem Citizen (Penguin) are essential reading.

Finally, if you want to understand how things work – or, as is more often the case, how they don’t – there are two good options. Gillian Tett’s The Silo Effect (Little, Brown) asks why organisations fall into an institutional version of tunnel vision; while David Halpern’s Inside the Nudge Unit (WH Allen) explains how to change people’s behaviour in subtle but profound ways. Politicians of all parties, whether winners or losers this year, could learn from them.

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