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BOOKS REVIEWS: FICTION


Some of my 2,000 books

All reviews in alphabetical order by title

Contents

“The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho

Coelho is a Brazilian writer whose work has been translated into 55 languages and who has sold almost 43 million books world-wide (including over 21 million copies of "The Alchemist"), but this is the first material of his that I have read. I was looking for a short novel that I could read in a day off work and this fitted the bill. It is a simple tale - mystical, spiritual, almost religous - about a young Andalusian shepherd called Santiago who seeks an unidentified treasure on a journey that takes him to a crystal shop in Tangiers and an oasis in the Saharan desert. Leavened with uplifting aphorisms, the central message of the work is that, if you have the courage to seek your treasure, along the way you will discover many things, not least about yourself, and may come to discover that the treasure is in fact much closer to home than you thought.

Link: author's web site click here

“The Almond” by Nedjma

"Nedjma", a pseudonym which means "star", is a Moroccan woman in her forties who is convinced that she has to remain anonymous, otherwise she would be stoned in the streets. This is because she has written an erotic novel about the sexual awakening of a Muslim woman that is apparently around 40% autobiographical and otherwise based on the experiences of dozens of Muslim women that she knows. It is a work that could not have been published in the Arab world and so it originally came out in France where it was a literary phenomenon. Rights have now been sold in 17 countries.

The title refers to a woman's sexual genitalia and this is a remarkably explicit and erotic work, but it is also one full of anger, as it tells the tale of Badra, a Moroccan girl from a small village who is forced into a marriage at the age of just 17 to a local notary of 40. Eventually fleeing to the city of Tangiers, she discovers passion and pain with a sophisticated doctor called Driss whom she describes as at once "my master and my torturer".

In the preface, the author writes: "Through these lines, in which sperm and prayer are joined ... my ambition is to give back to the women of my blood the power of speech confiscated by their fathers, brothers and husbands." Ultimately, therefore, this is a powerful political statement.

Link: feature on author and novel click here

“The Amber Spyglass” by Philip Pullman

First published in 2000, "The Amber Spyglass" is the third and final part of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy and, as the longest, it runs to almost 550 pages - making the trilogy as a whole a formidable 1,300 pages. This concluding volume is not simply the most extensive; it is the most complex, moving frequently between half a dozen different universes, several of them - notably the world of the dead - being new to the storyline. Lyra and Will are still central to the tale, many earlier characters return, and there are all kinds of new life forms, including the tiny Gallivespians and the wheeled mulefa. The alethiometer and the subtle knife are still very much in use, but now a third device - the eponymous spyglass - is deployed to see the strange phenomenon of dust which is defined as "only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself".

As well as being the lengthiest and most complicated, "The Amber Spyglass" is the most ambitous of the three novels with huge themes and the most direct references to religion. At the beginning, we are told that the Authority or God is not the creator but 'simply' the first of the angels whose regent is the angel Metatron. Towards the end of the work, following a titantic battle, both God and Metatron are dead, but so are Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter - Lyra's unlikely parents who abandoned her as a child but died for her as an adolescent - and many other Lyra allies.

At one level, "His Dark Materials" is a thrillingly inventive adventure story which concludes in an achingly sad love between two young people, Lyra and Will, who are compelled to retreat to their separate universes, to be reunited in spirit only once a year when they sit on the same bench in Oxford's Botanic Garden. At another level, the trilogy is a savage satire on organised religion and the church, presenting an altogether more humanistic interpretation of life.

In the words of the former nun turned scientist Mary Malone: "I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are." For Pullman, there is no heaven 'up there' , but only the heaven we ourselves create in each of our universes. This reflects my own philosophy entirely and it is wonderful to see it expostulated in such outstanding literary style.

Links:
Philip Pullman's site click here
fan site 1 click here
fan site 2 click here
fan site 3 click here

“The Anatomist” by Federico Andahazi

The subject matter of this Argentinian novel – translated from the original Spanish – is a most unusual one. Although it is fiction, it is said to be based on historic fact and concerns the ‘discovery’ of the “amor veneris” or clitoris by an Italian anatomist Matea Renaldo Colombo in 1558, about the same time that another Italian called Colombo was coming across America. One would think that a man possessed of such useful information – sadly neglected by so many men even today – would have a fulfilled life, but this is a tragic tale. The woman with whom he makes the discovery (the noble Ines de Torremolinos) is burned at the stake, the woman on whom he wants to visit his discovery (the famed prostitute Mona Sofia) dies of syphilis, and he himself in despair commits suicide. There is probably a lesson here, but I am not sure what it is.

“Angelica’s Grotto” by Russell Hoban

Hoban is an American who was born in 1925 and moved to London in 1969. He has written more than 50 books for children and some complex fiction and the cover of this work describes it as “a novel about Internet sex”. In fact, the ‘grotto’ of the title is an adult web site that serves to bring together 72 year old American art historian Harold Klein and the very much younger British researcher Melissa Bottomley. Certainly they have sex of a kind, but something more fundamental is going on here, something to do with identity and control. Hoban’s fables are noted for their allusions to classical mythology and, in this work, a recurring theme is the Ingres painting of “Angelica Saved By Ruggiero” [for picture click here] – the hero’s name is, of course, Italian for Roger and I am half-Italian!

“The Angry Gods” by Wendy Brandmark

In the Autumn of 2009, I attended a weekly two-hour session in short story writing at central London's City Lit and my tutor was Wendy Brandmark. So it seems strange for me to be critiquing my own tutor, but what's sauce for the goose ..

On our course, one of the things we discussed was the point of view (POV) of the narrative. Usually there is one POV but, in this short novel of 160 pages, WB has adopted two, each with its own timeframe, who alternate from chapter to chapter. There is Sonia, a Jewish woman of 31 teaching in New York City in 1955, who embarks on her first relationship - one opposed by her family because it is with Caleb, a black poet about 20 years her senior. Then there is Helen - Sonia's daughter with Seth - aged 14 in 1972, who discovers her mother's untold earlier relationship and is just experiencing her own sexual awakening. Both characters appear unhappy and unsympathetic - to quote a line from the book: ""all just ants in the universe".

As I would expect, the novel is well-written (although I found the poem inaccessible) but, as with so many modern novels, very little happens and and what does happen seems so prosaic and inconsequential. Give me a compelling story and some colourful characters.

“Archangel” by Robert Harris

Many years ago, I read a biography of British politician Neil Kinnock by Robert Harris, but these days the author is known as a very successful writer of political thrillers. So far his novels have adopted the same formula: a single word title and a carefully constructed plot centred on a hypothetical situation arising from an aspect of the Second World War and its aftermath. I thoroughly enjoyed “Fatherland” (1992) and “Enigma” (1995) and now comes “Archangel” (1998) which is arguably his best work to date.

Supposing the Soviet dictator Stalin had locked a notebook in his office safe; supposing his security chief Beria had managed to steal this while Stalin was dying from a stroke; supposing the book was found in modern-day Russia. What secret would it contain and what would be the implications for the Fatherland? Harris is a consummate storyteller and colours his work with fascinating historical detail. He reminds us that, as well as leading the USSR ill-prepared into a war that killed 30 million Soviet citizens, Stalin created a terror of three decades that purged another 66 million citizens; yet millions of Russians still rever his memory. It is this brilliant combination of compelling fiction and important history that makes Harris such a welcome novelist.

“Asylum” by Patrick McGrath

Written from the perspective of Dr Peter Cleave, a psychiatrist at a remote hospital for the criminally insane, this is a tale of what he calls in the first sentence of the novel a “catastrophic love affair characterized by sexual obsession” and describes towards the end of the narrative as “one of the most florid and and dramatic examples of morbid obsessional sexual compulsion I had encountered in many years of practice”. The destructive relationship in question is that which occurs between the beautiful Stella Stark, the wife of the deputy superintendent at the prison, and the artistic Edgar Stark, an inmate convicted of murdering and mutilating his wife.

If this sounds like heavy stuff, then I guess it is, but McGrath – a British writer whose father was a medical superintendent at Broadmoor Hospital – provides a wonderfully written and completely absorbing story that pulls the reader along all the way to the final revealing sentences.

“Atonement” by Ian McEwan

The only previous work that I have read by McEwan was "The Comfort Of Strangers", a novella of just 125 pages published in 1981, following its appearance as a film. "Atonement" is a much longer work (372 pages) and comes after the author has won the 1998 Booker Prize (indeed this particular novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2001). Very little happens in "Antonement", but what happens is momentous for the individuals concerned and the whole work is beautifully crafted and written with McEwan showing himself an absolute master of prose.

The structure of this ambitious work is an unequal triptych: the first section (almost half the novel at 187 pages) is set in an English country house on just two hot days in the summer of 1935; the second section (168 pages) jumps to May 1940 and the retreat from Dunkirk; while a short third section (just 20 pages) brings us to London in 1999. In the first part, 13 year old aspiring writer Briony Tallis observes her 23 year old sister Cecilia in two incidents with Robbie Turner, the Cambridge-educated son of the char lady - one a tussle over an expensive vase by the side of the garden fountain and the other a more intimate encounter in the house's library. Briony's misunderstanding or misinterpretation or misrepresentation of these events sets the scene for tragic circumstances for which she spends a lifetime of atonement in the only form a novelist knows how.

Link: "Observer" review click here

“The Believers” by Zoë Heller

Heller's third novel concerns the secular Jewish, politically radical Litvinoff family of New York City: husband Joel, a distinguished lawyer who, very early in the eight-month narrative, suffers a serious stroke that puts him in a coma; his English wife Audrey, outrageously out-spoken and lacking in maternal instinct; elder daughter Rosa who, having spent four years in revolutionary Cuba, is now increasingly attracted to orthodox Judaism; younger daughter Karla, locked in a marriage that is sexually fraught and dangerously loveless; and adopted son Lenny who repeatly lapses into drug abuse.

Each member of this dsyfunctional family has to find a way of living with herself and the rest of the family which involves - as it must - believing in something or somebody, but the choices are not easy or obvious. Most of the characters are women - representing very different approaches to life - but this is certainly not a feminist work.

Clearly Heller has here drawn from her own experiences of being brought up in a Left-wing, Jewish family in London and now living in NYC with her husband and two daughters and her writing is elegant and expressive with a wide vocabulary and acute observation.

“Birdsong” by Sebastian Faulks

This was recommended to me by CWU colleague Jeannie Drake and in turn I would recommend it to any one. It is a moving and very well-written account of the squalor and death of the trenches in First World War France, set around the love between 20 year old Englishman Stephen Wraysford and 29 year old French woman Isabelle Azaire and the enquiries two generations later of their grand-daughter 38 year old Elizabeth Benson. The erotism of the scenes of forbidden love and the harrowing recreation of life in the trenches make for a novel of rare power.

“The Book Thief” by Marcus Zusak

Zusak is the son of an Austrian father and a German mother but he was born and lives in Australia. He has said that writing this book was inspired by two real-life events related to him by his parents: the bombing of Munich and a teenage boy offering bread to an emaciated Jew being marched through the streets. Although American publisher Knopf has marketed the book set in Nazi Germany as a teenage novel, it was originally intended and published in Zusak's native Australia specifically for adults (in the UK, there are two editions). It is long (550 pages), but the large text, the frequent inset comments, the short chapters and the sheer narrative power of the work make it a real page-turner.

For me the title is almost oxymoronic: theft is bad but books are good, so how can taking books be wrong? In the case of the eponymous character Liesel Meeminger - nine years old when the novel opens in January 1939 - reading and writing are how she copes with the traumatic wartime events of the next four and a half years as she is fostered by Hans and Rosa Hubermann in the little town of Molching on the outskirts of the city of Munich. What gives the story a special edge is that the narrator is Death himself who has much work to do at this time and visits Liesel herself three times in the course of the novel. Ultimately this is a life-affirming tale to the extent that Death eventually admits "I am haunted by humans".

Link: web site for book click here

“Brace” by by 15 authors

This is the sixth anthology of short stories that I've read in this year (2009) when I myself have commenced writing short stories. All 15 stories are written by British authors who are not established names but the quality is high. "The Doll Factory" by Heather Richardson is particularly clever and engaging. Set in 2093, it tells the tale of a soldier drugged to cope with the brutality of combat nevertheless suffering from "spontaneous rehumanisation" but, instead of a straightforward narrative, the experience is revealed through a varied set of documents.

“Brideshead Revisited” by Evelyn Waugh

I confess that I read few classic novels but viewing the 2008 film "Brideshead Revisited" prompted me at last to tackle this novel which was first published in 1945 and represents "the sacred and profane memories of Captain Charles Ryder" - to quote the sub-title - from 1923 to 1943. This is widely regarded as Waugh's best novel and certainly it is his most famous, but I found it a cold and unengaging exercise, although written with some style.

The novel is centred on the Flyte family which is very upper class and (mostly) very Catholic. As some one with a background which was both working class and Catholic but who has left both class and religion well behind, I found myself deeply antipathetic to the six members of the Flyte family and indeed most of the other characters in the tale. Ryder seems both attracted to and repelled from the family, like a moth to a flame, and in turn forms deep attachments to Sebastian and Julia both of whom fail him.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) had a middle class upbringing and became a Catholic in 1930. If his work is a nostalgic tribute to a fading upper class world or a critique of the guilt-ridden nature of Catholicism, it is neither nostaglic enough about the one or critical enough of the other.

“Bridget Jones’s Diary” by Helen Fielding

As a diarist myself, I find anything in the form of a diary an easy, even compulsive, read. This novel captures the thirtysomething female angst revolving around work, men, dieting, smoking and something called “fuckwittage”. Most young women seem to find it resonant of much of their own experience and immensely funny, but for me it was merely amusing, very light and ultimately sad. Do liberated young women really want to be swept off their feet – literally – by a wet character called Mark Darcy? Apparently enough do to justify a film of the book anyway.

"Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” by Louis de Bernières

This novel was published in 1994, but it took me years to read it. I think that what put me off was the length – it is over 400 pages of close text. So I waited for a Christmas/New Year break and I found that, having at last started it, I didn’t want it to finish, even though it is difficult at first to come to terms with the changing vistas and styles. It is quite simply a marvellous work, full of tragedy, romance and humour, with beautifully crafted language and an amazing vocabulary which had me reaching regularly for my dictionary. Former soldier and teacher de Bernières has produced a triumph of literature

Essentially it is a story of love between the unlikely couple of Italian soldier and musician Antonio Corelli and Greek doctor’s daughter Pelagia Iannis, set on the island of Cephallonia, a backwater of the maelstrom that was the Second World War. However, there is much about the horror of war and the betrayal of politics and, while de Bernieres is gentle towards the Italian soldiers, the British military and the Greek villagers, he is savage in his portrayal of Mussolini and his blackshirts, the German army of occupation, and the brutal communism of the Greek communists in ELAS.

Recently de Bernières’ critique of the Greek resistance has come in for much criticism – and rightly so – but the book does make clear that ultimately war is about politics and politics, especially Greek politics, is complicated. Also, the key historical facts have been vindicated by new testimony. Some 9,500 men of the 11,500-strong Italian force on the island were killed by the Germans, many of them after surrendering.

”The Cellist Of Sarajevo” by Steven Galloway

This wonderfully-crafted novel by Canadian author Steven Galloway was inspired before he ever went to Sarajevo by an appalling incident on 27 May 1992 when 22 people were killed by mortar shells while queuing for bread in the Bosnian capital during the siege that eventually lasted almost four years and claimed approximately 10,000 lives. For the next 22 days, a renowned local cellist called Vedran Smajlovic played Albinoni's Adagio at the site of the outrage in honour of the dead. A decade after the siege, I visited Sarajevo and saw many of the locations mentioned in the novel, while Albinoni's Adagio was music used at my first wedding many years before we could conceive of ethnic cleansing in modern Europe.

In fact, Galloway hardly mentions the unnamed musician of his novel. Instead the narrative - mainly focused on a single day - revolves around the experiences of three Sarajevans who do not know each other but who are loosely connected to the cellist. Kenan, 39, risks his life every four days or so to collect water for his wife and three children and an ungrateful neighbour. Dragan is 64 with a wife and son away in Italy, he works at a bakery, and he is trying to get there for a meal of bread. Then there is Arrow - her code name - a 28 year old woman who became a crack rifle shot at university and now acts as a sniper for the defending forces.

Surprising, Galloway never mentions the ethnicity of the characters or the forces in his novel and instead constantly uses the phrase "the men on the hills" to describe the besieging Serbs. He describes graphically the deprivation, the fear and the bravery of the Sarajevans but also alludes to divisions in the defenders' ranks and the criminal profiteering of a shameful minority. Above all, though, this is a tale of redemption and hope as each of his three characters seeks to retain their humanity at a time of death, destruction and even betrayal: "He will behave now as he hopes everyone will someday behave. Because civilisation isn't a thing that you build and then there it is, you have it forever. It needs to be built constantly, recreated daily."

Link: the real cellist of Sarajevo click here

”Chocolat” by Joanne Harris

On a Shrove Tuesday in February, 25 year old single mother Vianne Rocher, together with her six year old daughter Anouk, arrive at the small French town of Lansquenet-sans-Tannes. They decide to stay and Vianne opens a chocolaterie called ‘La Céleste Praline’, directly opposite the church of Saint Jérome officiated over by the Curé Francis Reynaud. By Easter Monday seven weeks later, secrets will have been revealed, lives will have been changed, and a great feast and a chocolate festival will have been held. Out of such seemingly prosaic material, Harris weaves a wonderfully magical tale replete with mouth-watering descriptions of every conceivable kind of chocolate confection. She is sharply critical of the prejudices of small-town French life and of the hypocrisy of the Catholic priest, yet it is all done in an amusing, even affectionate, manner in a novel which is beautifully written and immensely readable.

“Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell

It is not surprising that this fascinating and enjoyable novel - Mitchell's third - was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize because it is a tour de force representing six stories in one artfully-constructed work, each written in a different format, each constituting a different genre, each set in a different time. Each tale is around 80 pages or so, making the whole novel a formidable 529 pages, but all except the sixth one are split in two in a neat symmetry that ends as it begins. Like an 11-armed candelabra, each branch sheds light on the other. Along the way, there are all kinds of cross references between the stories, the underlining suggestion being that we are all spirits that float in time as clouds around the sky: "Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies."

We begin with a journal by American notary Adam Ewing narrating a sea adventure set in the Pacific in 1849; we move forward in time to a set of letters from Robert Frobisher, the composer of a work called "Cloud Atlas Sextet", written from Belgium in 1931; next stop is a pulp fiction thriller set in California in 1975 and involving investigative journalist Luisa Rey; then we have a black comedy in modern day Britain when unfortunate publisher Timothy Cavendish finds himself incarcerated in an old folks' home; jumping forward to a not too distant future, there is a science fiction story in the form of a recorded interrogation of an "ascended fabricant" called Sonmi 4561 in a corporatist nightmare that used to be known as Korea; moving even further forward in time to a post-apocalyptic time after "The Fall", we have the folksy reminisences of a superstitious and barely literate survivor called Zackry Bailey; and then the pattern is repeated but in reverse.

One link is a recurring birthmark shaped like a comet, suggesting that the same soul or spirit is involved, while another frequent reference is to boats of various kinds. A major link involves the formats used - so Adam Ewing's diary is read by Robert Frobisher whose letters are to a Rufus Sixsmith who features in the Luisa Rey story which is read by Timothy Cavendish and so on. The overall message is one of opposition to avarice and consumerism: "In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction."

“Come Together” by Josie Lloyd & Emlyn Rees

This is the story of a modern-day, but somewhat old-fashioned, romance between Jack Rossiter, a 27 year old artist, and Amy Crosbie, a 25 year old temp. Alternate chapters are written from the male and female point of view by authors Emlyn Rees and Josie Lloyd respectively in a clever marketing device which apparently has resulted in their coupling in real life. The sex is realistic and the style very easy, but it is all too predictable and superficial.

“The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time” by Mark Haddon

This is a marvellous novel, originally written for children but becoming a massive best-seller with adult readers. What makes the novel so remarkable is the perspective from which it is is written, that of Christopher, a 15 year-old boy living in Swindon with Asperger's Syndrome. He is fascinated by numbers and science and time, but does not like yellow or brown things or meeting new people or being in small spaces or even being touched.

One night he discovers that his neighbour's dog, a poodle called Wellington, has been speared with a garden fork and his determination to discover who killed the animal has profound implications for his life and our understanding of autism. The author has worked with children and adults with mental and physical disabilities and his knowledge and humanism shine through a work which is both funny and moving.

Link: profile of author click here

“The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown

This 600-page novel has been a publishing phenomenon - by the time I read it, it had sold 10 million copies worldwide and been translated into 40 languages. Does it deserve this success? Well, it is certainly not great fiction, reading much like a Jeffrey Archer novel with a rather plain and predictable style and poor characterisation. However, it is a compelling read with cliff-hanging chapter endings and playful deceptions of the reader that make it a real page-turner. Since the whole thing takes place over 24 hours, it is like a written version of the television series "24" with almost as many plot twists.

It is probably the subject matter that has made the work so popular. Brown cleverly weaves together 2,000 years of religous history and cultural symbolism with ingenious use of mathematical and linguistic codes to present an alternative view of the status of Christ, the position of the Catholic Church, and the role of the Knights Templar, as well as offering a take on the nature and location of the mythic Holy Grail. The opening is cracking; the subsequent pace unrelenting; but the conclusion lame and limp.

Link: author's web site click here

“Dream Story” by Arthur Schnitzler

Strange that a novella of less than 100 pages, first published in German in 1926, could inspire an English-language film of almost three hours in 1999. Yet this is the erotic and enigmatic story on which Stanley Kubrick based his controversial film “Eyes Wide Shut”. Like the author himself, the main character Fridolin is a doctor in Vienna in the early part of the century. He experiences a series of unconsummated female encounters as he attempts to come to terms with the revelations of his wife Albertine‘s sexual fantasies. At the end of it all, she insists that ”..neither the reality of a single night nor even of a person’s entire life can be equated with the full truth of his innermost being”, while he observes that “.. no dream is altogether a dream”.

“e” by Matt Beaumont

This is a British novel written in 2000 entirely in the form of e-mail communications. Set in an advertising agency called Miller Shanks, it depicts a frenetic two and a half weeks in which the agency bids for the prestigious Coca-Cola account. It is bitingly satirical about the industry, one message complaining about the “Sun” newspaper: “They’ve made us all look shallow, conniving and driven by lust – in short, like we work in advertising”. And the language is cruder than would be allowed in any organisation I know, the first sentence reading: “Take that fucking Walkman off, get your arse in here and show me how I do an all-staff e-mail”. But it’s a racy read and at times genuinely funny.

“Ella Minnow Pea" by Mark Dunn

The eponymous Ella is an 18 year old living on the fictional island nation of Nollop off the coast of the USA, named after the alleged creator of the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". The statue dedicated to Nollop features this sentence in a set of 35 tiles which, in the course of the novel, progressively drop from their pedestal. The problem is that the island authorities see these fallings as a sign that each letter in turn should be prohibited from use in spoken or written form and the same restriction is applied by Dunn in his increasingly conflated lexicon and bizarre text. The entire narrative takes the forms of letters - hence the sub-title of the novel "A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable".

Best read in a day, this short but original work is a clever and cautionary satire in the traditions of "Gulliver's Travels" or "Animal Farm" which makes plain the absurdity and injustice created by faith and fundamentalism and the need to recognise that liberty can be lost in seemingly innocuous increments. As Ella puts it: "Nollop is not God. Nollop is silent. We must respect that silence and make our decisions and judgements based upon science and fact and simple old-fashioned common sense".

Mark Dunn is an American playright who has here crafted an artful and original first novel but, talented though he is with language, he is politically naïve. Many of the aggrieved citizens of Nollop simply leave the island for the 'enlightened' United States - this is not an option for the persecuted of China or Iran. The island authorities are defeated by an intellectual exercise that contradicts Nollop's assumed supreme powers - if only creationists and conspiracy theorists could so easily be convinced by evidence.

“E-mail: A Love Story" by Stephanie D Fletcher

This is an American novel written in 1996 entirely in the form of bulletin board messages and e-mail communications which makes it compulsive reading for any PC user. It is an erotic but thoughtful examination of the delights and the dangers of cybersex as experienced particularly by Katherine Simmonds, a 44 year old married woman from North Carolina. She has relationships – can you be adulterous over the Internet? – with Buck Brazemore and John Kelly with interesting consequences for her marriage to Tom.

"Falling Angels" by Tracy Chevalier

Chevalier is an American who has lived in Britain since 1984. Her first novel, "Virgin Blue", won praise, but it was her second work, "Girl With A Pearl Earring" [reviewed on this page] that won her a mass readership and "Falling Angels" is now her third novel. There are some similarities with "Girl .." - it is an historical novel told from a woman's perspective but, whereas "Girl .." was about the process of creating art in 17th century Holland, "Falling Angels" is about the rituals surrounding death in early 20th century London. It is not morbid, but it is serious.

The novel opens and closes with the death of a monarch and with scenes in a cemetery inspired by Highgate Cemetery in north London (which I have visited). In the intervening a period of almost a decade, we share the fortunes of two families: Richard and Kitty Coleman and their daughter Maude and Albert and Gertrude Waterhouse and their daughters Lavinia and Ivy May. In an immensely readable format, the tale is told through very short chapters representing the 'voices' of the characters, usually the women.

The title can be taken two ways: an angel above one of the graves does indeed tumble over, but also more than one of the women falls morally. Yet ultimately this is a liberating story about personal and political self-discovery.

Link: web site for book click here

"The Five People You Meet In Heaven" by Mitch Albom

"There are five people you meet in heaven. Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For undertsanding your life on earth". So explains the first of the persons met by 83 year old Eddie, a maintenance man at a fairground, following his death when trying to safe the life of a young girl during an accident involving one of the rides. Each of the individuals gives Eddie an insight into his life that he never had and a lesson that he (and we) can learn. This short, but engaging, narrative does not require a literal belief in heaven (I have none) for one to take away a life-affirming message: we touch, and our touched by, so many in our life without always understanding or even knowing the consequences.

"Girl With A Pearl Earring" by Tracy Chevalier

This novel is named after a famous portrait by the Dutch 17th century painter Johannes Vermeer which is displayed in the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague. I have seen the original several times and my wife and I so admire the work that we have a framed copy hanging in our bedroom. But who is the girl in the painting? How did a young maid like this attract the attentions of such a distinguished artist? Why is she wearing those strange blue and yellow cloths on her head? And how could such a lowly individual be wearing a pearl earring? Of course, in truth, we will never know, but Chevalier - brought up in the United States but now resident in Britain - has done such a marvellous work of research of the period and crafted such a delightful tale that her imaginative account makes for a compelling read.

Link: web site for book click here

“The Glass Room” by Simon Mawer

Shortly before reading this novel, I read another work - "Guernica" by Dave Boling - which is a tale of love and war told through the prism of a place and featuring in cameo roles some actual historical characters. While "Guernica" was accomplished, however, "The Glass Room" - which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009 - is consummate. The writing is finer and the characterisation more skilled.

Most of the narrative is set in what was then Czechoslovakia before and during the Second World War, althought there are short sections dated 1968 and 1990, and this is a country whose history and language I know well (my wife is half Czech), making the work all the more resonant. Many relationships are explored, but the pivotal one is that between the owners of the modern house which gives the novel its name, the Jewish businessman Viktor Landauer and his gentile wife Liesel, who have two children before fleeing the Nazi occupation of their country to live in Switzerland, then Cuba and the finally the United States.

This is Mawer's eighth novel and it is a most impressive work, demonstrating considerable knowledge not just of Czechoslovakia but of subjects ranging from ballet to biology. The writing is beautiful, capturing the interplays between very different characters and constantly returning to the luminosity of Das Landauer Haus and the room itself and the events that take place there. There is much history and politics here but also plenty of sex and sexuality in a narrative which is quite compelling.

The book cries out to be made into a film where the room can be made truly visible.

Note: Although "The Glass Room" is a work of fiction, the house and the city are not fictional but not identified in the novel. The actual place is the Villa Tugendhat in the city of Brno.

Links:
author's web site click here
official Villa Tugendhat site click here
Wikipedia page on the building click here

“Guernica” by Dave Boling

Everyone has heard of Guernica, the Basque town that was savagely bombed by the Luftwaffe on 26 April 1937, and most are aware of the famous painting by Picasso which, since the fall of fascism, has been on display in Madrid. Conveying the horror of that incident is not easy and this novel does it through the lives of two families related by marriage: the Ansotegui family - headed by the hard-working farmer Justo, married to Mariangeles, and father to the dancer Miren - and the Navarro family - centred on brothers Dodo, a fisherman, and Miguel, a carpenter. Miren and Miguel marry and have a beautiful daughter Catalina and befriend a blind soapmaker Alaia. In this story, some will live, some will die and some will be maimed both physically and psychologically. There are 'guest' appearances by some actual historic personages.

In many respects, this is an impressive work. For American journalist Dave Bowling, this is a formidable first novel - wonderfully researched, carefully structured, and immensely readable. His narrative of 370 pages starts in 1893 and ends in 1940 with the actual bombing - a very moving account - occuring almost exactly half way through. However, the publishers promote the novel as comparable to "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" and, while both deal with love and war, "Guernica" is simply not in the same class as Louis de Bernières' work. Here all the leading characters are one-dimensional (noble and/or heroic), the dialogue is stilted and undifferentiated between the characters, and the portrayal of the Basque cause is overly simplistic (in a Author's Note at the end, Boling states: "I tried not to tax the reader with elaborations on the complex and volatile politics at work at the time" - something that Bernières was willing to do).

Links:
author's web site click here
Wikipedia page on the bombing of guernica click here
Guernica Peace Museum click here

“The Guy Next Door” by Meggin Cabot

I only read this because it is written entirely in the form of e-mails and I wanted something light for a flight. It isn't even the first novel in this format - see "E-mail" [click here] and "e" [click here] - and there's light and then there's totally fluffy. Cabot normally writes for children (a series called "The Princess Diaries") and she should stay with this genre because her novel for older readers is simply an up-date of the fairy tale of Cindrella and Prince Charming. In this case, Cinders is 27 year old, red-headed columnist Melissa Fuller, while her Prince is 35 year old John Trent who is heir to $20M - but, of course, any such prince originally appears in 'disguise'...

“Havana Bay” by Martin Cruz Smith

Arkady Renko is a Moscow investigator who was first introduced to us in 1981 in the best-selling "Gorky Park" (which I enjoyed at the time). Since then, Renko has become a recurrent character of Cruz's novels and this is the fourth outing for the intrepid and inquisitive Russian.

The novel is set entirely in Cuba's capital of Havana, shortly after the Russians have abandoned their erstwhile Communist allies following the collapse of the Soviet Union - extremely difficult years known as "the special period". I read the book during a holiday in Cuba, starting and finishing in Havana, and I have to say that the author has captured very effectively so many features of the city and of aspects of life under Castro.

The story starts with the discovery of a body - presumed to be that of a Russian friend of Arkady - but, as the plot develops and quickens, there are a range of Cuban, Russian and American characters, much intrigue, some sex, more deaths and and a good political joke: “What are the three achievements of the Revolution? Health, education and sports. What are the three failures? Breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

Link: author's web site click here

“The Hours” by Michael Cunningham

This compelling novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, but I only read it after I had seen the film in early 2003. It is not essential to have read previously Virginia Woolf's work "Mrs Dalloway" [for review, click here], but I think that it helps, because Cunningham borrows both the essential structure of the 1925 work and makes so many allusions to it. "Mrs Dalloway" is an account of one day in the life of a woman preparing for a social gathering and "The Hours" tells the interlinking stories of three women in different ages all going through one day centred on a social event and all connected to the earlier novel: Virginia Woolf is writing the book in 1923, Laura Brown is reading it in 1949, and Clarissa Vaughan is a modern day woman who is affectionately nicknamed Mrs Dalloway. In fact, "The Hours" was a working title for the Woolf novel and the phrase is used by one of Cunningham's characters.

All three days - four, if we include the original Woolf novel - encompass similar events: flowers are bought, food is prepared, women kiss each other, suicide is contemplated (and, in some cases, realised).

Above all, however, all the women experience the same essential feelings of waste and want. Virginia is convinced that "She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric" and "She thinks of Vanessa, of the children, of Vita and Ethel: so many. They have all failed, haven't they?"; Laura "is humiliated by herself" and has "the nowhere feeling", believes that "The world is already, subtly, beginning to leave her behind" and concludes that "She has failed"; Clarissa thinks "She is superficial" and "I am trivial, endlessly trivial", feels that "there is this sense of missed opportunity", and asserts that "I'm far less than I could have been". Almost the last words of the narrative are: "we hope, more than anything, for more".

Cunningham has produced a beautifully written and artfully crafted work that is impressive in being a male insight into the female condition.

Link: author's web site click here

"How To Be Good" by Nick Hornby

I resisted the Hornby phenomenon for a long time, so I didn't read "Fever Pitch", ""High Fidelity" or "About A Boy" - all of which have been made into films - but the captivating title and number one best-seller status of "How To Be Good" was too much to resist. The story is told from the perspective of north Londoner Katie Carr, married with two children and a doctor - self-evidently a good person, but someone who wants more from her marriage and her life. The very first sentence grabs the reader: "I am in a car park in Leeds when I tell my husband I don't want to be married to him anymore". What follows is sharp and insightful writing full of lines like: "Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every word you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play". Much faith healing and do-gooding later, there are no answers or solutions, but Katie concludes "I can do this. I can live this life". She should get out more.

Link: web site for author click here

“In Search Of An Impotent Man” by Gaby Hauptmann

This was originally written in German, but it has now been translated into English and become an international best-seller. It tells the entertaining story of Carmen Legg, a 35 year old, red-haired professional woman who seeks a man who is not ruled by his penis. She thinks that this means means finding an impotent man and that architect David Franck is such a man, but she discovers that she is mistaken on both counts. This is a feminist tract in the form of a light, amusing novel, but – for this male reader anyway – it begs the question of whether modern women really know what they want from a man.

“Intimacy” by Hanif Kureishi

Recommended to me by my Communication Workers Union colleague Beth Lamont, this novel taught me a new word: lucubration which means nocturnal meditation. It is only a short work of 153 pages and can be reading in one sitting, but the subject matter is hardly light. Essentially it is a lucubration – now you know what the word means – by a middle-aged writer about to abandon his partner of six years and sons of 5 and 3. It is sexually explicit and emotionally searing and particularly resonant for me since my first wife left me and and our son when he was five.

“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini

Recommended to me by my Postwatch colleague Sheila Button, this was a wonderful discovery that I savoured from first page to last. The narrator is Amir, aged 12 when we first meet him in Kabul and 38 when he is a long term resident of San Francisco who receives that call that will take him back to a very different Afghanistan. His childhood friend is Hassan, the runner of the title, someone who never denied Amir anything. But they come from different worlds: the former Pashtun, Sunni and wealthy; the latter Hazara, Shia and poor. Yet what they have in common - and one particular traumatic incident - defines this rivetting narrative which frequently aches with pathos but is ultimately a tale of redemption.

The work is a triumph for first time author Hosseini who was born in Afghanistan and whose family received political asylum in the USA in 1980. In the course of its 300+ pages, we learn much about the history, politics and culture of a country in and over which so much blood has been spilt. The novel spent over two years on the "New York Times" bestseller list and has now been published in 42 languages and made into a film.

Link: author's web site click here

“Larry’s Party” by Carol Shields

I originally bought this book as a birthday present for my very good friend Larry Cohen of the USA, but then decided to read it myself. It is two decades (aged 26-46) in the life of Canadian Larry Weller who has the unusual, and symbolic, occupation of mazemaker. At the end (the titular party), he is reunited with his first ex-wife wife Dorrie. It is wonderfully written, but – like so many modern novels – seemingly so inconsequential. If I knew what post-modern meant, I would probably so describe it.

“Life & Times Of Michael K” by J.M. Coetzee

This novel was published in 1983 and won the Booker Prize for that year. Since then, Coetzee has won the Booker Prize a second time and in 2003 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But it was not until a visit to his native South Africa - including the Karoo area which features so much in the work - two decades after this novel was written that I read it and it is the first novel that I have tackled by this author.

The title reminds me - deliberately I am sure - of "The Castle" by Franz Kafka where the lead character is known simply as Joseph K, but the tone of the work recalled more "The Stranger" by Albert Camus because the person at the centre of the tale - a hare-lipped, somewhat dull-minded, black gardener in apartheid South Africa - is so alienated from everyone and everything and only achieves a kind of control and a sort of peace by starving himself almost to death. This is a shortish work of less than 200 pages, but most of it consists of one long chapter, and the writing style is quite sparse, but powerful and compelling.

“Life Of Pi” by Yann Martel

The strange title might suggest that this is some kind of mathematical treatise, but it is in fact a novel about survival at sea for seven months. The title is not a reference to the arithmetic constant, but to a young Indian boy of 16 called Piscine Molitor Patel, named after the favourite swimming baths of a friend of his father, the father being a zookeeper in the French-occupied town of Pondicherry.

When the ship carrying Pi's family and the zoo's contents sinks in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the only company for the boy is a 450lb Royal Bengal tiger called Richard Parker, a female orang-utan called Orange Juice, a zebra with a broken leg, and a hyena. What would it take to survive in such circumstances and what account could one possibly give of it afterwards?

This is the third work by Yan Martel who was born in Spain but now lives in Canada and it won him the Man Booker Prize for 2002. Structured in a neat 100 chapters, this is a compelling and seductive piece of storytelling. It is now being turned into a film but I have no idea how such a work can be translated to the screen.

“The Love Letter” by Cathleen Schine

“How do you fall in love?” asks a mysterious letter that happens to fall out of a book. We find out one answer to this eternal question in this slight but romantic tale of unconventional, yet irresistible, love between 42 year old bookstore owner Helen MacFarquhar and 20 year old student helper John Howell. The story is framed by the letter, eventually revealed to be from a novel by the lover of a relative of one of the principal characters. As with so many modern stories on relationships, little actually happens, but it is an enjoyable read and well-written by American author Schine. Indeed the ‘love across the generations’ novel has now been turned into a film.

“Loving Roger” by Tim Parks

I can’t resist reading novel with my name in the title (see also “Roger’s Version”) and this one was first published in 1986. The story is told by Anna, a 20 year old typist, in an almost childishly simple yet appealing style. Her lover is Roger, an intelligent and “terribly, terribly earnest” office worker who wants to be a writer. He is not willing to return her love and, pregnant with his second child, she stabs him to death. Like several modern novels that I have read, it is not about events but about relationships, not ending in a conclusion but in a stage, not hopeful but fatalistic.

"Lyra's Oxford" by Philip Pullman

First, there was "Northern Lights" in 1995; next there was "The Subtle Knife" in 1997; and then there was "The Amber Spyglass" in 2000 - together making up the hugely successful "His Dark Materials" trilogy by Philip Pullman. However, in 2003, Pullman wrote "Lyra's Oxford", a short story of less than 50 pages titled "Lyra And The Birds" plus a map of the city and various other emphera. The tale may be brief, but the subject matter - an attempt on Lyra's life two years after Lord Asriel's war and the parting with Will - is dramatic and tantalisingly brief. Pullman has written on his web site: "This is a sort of stepping-stone between the trilogy and the book that's coming next". I can't wait for "The Book Of Dust".

Links:
Philip Pullman's site click here
fan site 1 click here
fan site 2 click here
fan site 3 click here

“A Married Man” by Catherine Alliott

Catherine Alliott is a best-selling British author of six novels who has just been introduced into the American market, but this is the first work of hers that I've read. Most of my reading is quite serious and at Easter I fancied something light; in fact the book is so insubstantial it kept threatening to float away. Over a readable but unchallenging 567 pages, widowed mother of two 31 year old Lucy Fellowes endeavours to find a new love. The title of the novel suggests that a passionate affair is on the cards, but Alliott is obviously a conservatively moral character because the central relationship has its share of humourous encounters but is little more sexual than the average teenage party. There are some plot twists at the end but, like "Bridget Jones' Diary", the final coupling is very predictable.

“Midnight's Children” by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie's second novel was published in 1981. It won the Booker Prize and in 1993 it was adjudged the 'Booker of Bookers' (the best novel to have won the Booker prize in its first 25 years). However, it was not until a holiday to India in 2003 that I felt sufficiently motivated to read it. I was put off by its length - 463 pages of densely-packed text. Also I was aware that Rushdie's style is difficult - he breaks many of the conventions of punctuation, person and tense and uses a dream-like form known as "magic realism". But the work is most certainly worth the effort and, once one has grown used to the unusual style, one is carried along by Rushdie's consummate story telling.

In one sense, this is the account of a life - that of the narrator Saleem Sinai as he pours out his soul to his wife Padma. But, in another sense, this is the history of a nation, as 63 years of 20th century India is witnessed through the prism of one Kashmiri family. The children of the title are the 1,001 babies born in the first 24 hours of the independence of India on 15 August 1947, each with miraculous powers, the nearer the birth to midnight the greater the power - and therefore none more so that Saleem himself who arrived on the dot of midnight and has the ability to enter people's minds and connect up all the midnight children.

This is an immensely rich work, replete with historical and cultural allusions - many of which I am sure I missed - and full of connections (or, as the narrator puts it, "correspondences"). Nothing is what it seems - Saleem himself was switched at birth with a child of a different class and religion and his fantastical powers ultimately prove illusory. There is considerable scope for debate about what the novel is telling us, but I interpret it as a long lament by Rushdie for the dashed hopes of a new nation as the wonderful talents of its half a billion citizens are reduced to little more than the farce of a Bollywood movie.

Footnote: A couple of weeks after finishing the book, I went to see a Royal Shakespeare Company stage version at the Barbican Theatre in London. The dramatisation by Salman Rushdie, Simon Reade and Tim Supple does a remarkable job of compressing into just over three hours all the essential events of the lengthy novel, faithfully reflects some of its dialogue and captures much of its wry humour, but inevitably it cannot do justice to the richness of the text and the complexity of the structure of the original work.

“Montana 1948” by Larry Watson

I confess that this is a novel - actually almost a novella (175 short pages) - of which I had never heard (it was published in 1993) until my friend Howard Webber, a fan of American literature, gave it to me as a 60th birthday present (I was born in 1948). Well-written and traditionally structured, it is set in 1988 and narrated by 12 year old David Hayden. whose father Wes is the sheriff of the fictional small town of Bentrock, whose uncle Frank is a war hero and local doctor, and whose housekeeper Marie Little Soldier is a Hunkpapa Sioux. What happens between these adults in a matter of just a few days will act as a child's hard lesson in the relationship between loyalty and justice and serve as metaphor for America's taming of the West.

“Mrs Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf

I was moved to read this novel by seeing the film "The Hours" which is based on a modern book which in turn was inspired by this 1925 novel. I have never previously read a word by Virginia Woolf and now I know why. The work - an account of one June 1923 day in the life of an upper middle class woman in London preparing for an evening party - is meandering and mournful. Clarissa Dalloway may be "the perfect hostess", but "half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this and that". She thinks of herself as "nothing at all" and a man she almost married believes that "there was always something cold in Clarissa". One of the characters in the novel jumps out of a window and I was almost tempted to follow him.

“Northern Lights” by Philip Pullman

First published in 1995, "Northern Lights" (or "The Golden Compass" as it is called in the USA) is the first part of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy and runs to almost 400 pages. This opening volume is "set in a universe like ours, but different in many ways". It is a well-written, cleverly plotted and utterly compelling narrative which is enormously inventive in both characters and themes. The story may have been written for childen, but the multi-layered nature of the work makes it fascinating for adults too.

From the opening four words ("Lyra and her dæmon .."), we know that this is a very different novel. Lyra Belacqua is the 12 year old heroine at the heart of the story, a curious and spirited youngster with some special powers. Like all humans in this universe, she has a dæmon (hers is called Pantalaimon), an animal that is never parted from her and can change shape constantly until she reaches puberty when it will assume its permanent form.

The work is populated with many other fascinating characters: gyptians like John Faa, witches like Serafina Pekkala, armoured bears like Iorek Brynison, and Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter who have close, but changing relationships, with Lyra. Besides the idea of dæmons (a mixture of mortal soul, animalised personality and guardian angel), there is the alethiometer, which can answer any question in the hands of a skilled enquirer (like Lyra), and dust, the full meaning of which awaits the further novels in the triology ...

Links:
Philip Pullman's site click here
fan site 1 click here
fan site 2 click here
fan site 3 click here

“On Beauty” by Zadie Smith

I really enjoyed Smith's first novel "White Teeth", although I decided not to bother with her second offering "The Autograph Man". This third novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, but I've clearly missed the plot because it failed to move me. In fact, the problem is that there really is no plot; like so many contemporary novels, so little actually happens.

It is very well written and displays some erudition (especially on the art of Rembrandt) Smith has an acute sense of observation and a fine ear for dialogue and dialect. But I simply failed to see the point of the work.

For Smith, "On Beauty" is an homage to E M Forster's "Howard's End" - a work I have not read (although I have seen the film). The story is up-dated to the present day, reset to the USA, and features a largely black cast, especially the members of two families led by distinguished academics: the Kippses who are right-wing Christians and the Belseys who are secular liberals. After 443 pages of exposition, I wouldn't particularly want to meet any of them, although the two mothers are decent folk.

“On Chesil Beach” by Ian McEwan

This is McEwan's 10th novel - actually it is more a novella with little over than 150 pages of text - and the fourth that I have read. All the action - although the word is something of a misnomer here - takes place in a single night, except for extensive scene-setting over the previous year and some final pages that flash through 40 years. It is the honeymoon night of Edward and Florence in July 1962, both new graduates, both 22, both virgins, he anxious about climaxing too soon, her facing the whole ordeal with "a visceral dread".

McEwan is a fine, expressive writer who captures the misunderstandings between the young couple and expresses the nervousness of the new husband and the repression of his new bride in aching terms. As he puts it so sparsely Between Edward and Florence, nothing happened quickly", concluding the simple but tragic story with the observation that "This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing".

“One Day” by David Nicholls

This is a humorous tale of modern romance and, since the genre is so plentiful, sometimes authors attempt a structural device to introduce some originality. In the case of “Come Together" by Josie Lloyd & Emlyn Rees, alternate chapters are written from the male and female point of view by the respective authors. In the case of "One Day", David Nicholls has chosen to devote successive chapters to the same day of the year (15 July) for a period of 20 years (1988- 2007). The weakness of the device for a novel is that it makes the narrative inescapably episodic, but the great strength is that it enables the story to cover a lot of ground and evoke a sense of different periods.

The focus is resolutely on the two principles so that that the reader comes to know them like friends: Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, aged 22 and 23 respectively when we first meet them the day after graduation in Edinburgh when they have just enjoyed their first sex. The self-deprecating, working-class Northerner with her First in English & History and the brash, middle-class Southerner who only manages a 2:2 in Anthropology are very different but very attracted to each other on the eve of lives that will go in very different directions but with regular contact of variegated nature. The work is immensely readable so that the 435 pages flash by and, in the last 50 pages, the structure and tone alter in a manner which leaves the reader genuinely moved.

Nicolls trained as an actor and writes for television and film as well as being a novelist. "One Day" would make a wonderful film where the episodic structure would work brilliantly.

Link: web site for book click here

“One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was arrested in an East Prussian village in early 1945 and charged with making derogatory remarks about Stalin. For the next eight years, he was in labour camps, at first in 'general' labour camps along with common criminals in the Arctic and later in Beria's 'special' camps for long term prisoners. In this novel, first pubished in in 1962, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov - prisoner S 854 in the 104th work team - was sentenced to high treason in 1943 and has now served eight years in 'general' and 'special' camps. It does not get more autobiographical than this.

Solzhenitsyn - who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 - wrote a short novel (only 143 pages in my translation by Ralph Parker) without any chapters or divisions (like his sentence) describing a single January day in 1951 when the temperature is 'officially' minus 27.5C, all the way from the freezing reveille at 5 am through to work at a bleak building site to sleep around 10 pm. It is a compelling read that chills the soul as well as the body. Yet Shukhov regards it as "almost a happy day" and the last paragraph notes that it was just one of his 3,653 such days.

Link: Wikipedia page click here

“Ox-Tales: Air” by 9 authors

This is one of four original collections of short stories by British- and Irish-based authors, each of which is very losely based around one element highlighting a key area of Oxfam's work. Here air represents Oxfam's action on climate change. The nine stories are by Alexander McCall Smith ("The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series), Helen Simpson, DBC Pierre ("Vernon God Little"), AL Kennedy, Kamila Shamsie, Beryl Bainbridge, Louise Welsh, Diran Adebayo and Helen Fielding ("Bridget Jones's Diary"). The one I enjoyed most was "Goodnight Childen, Everywhere" by Bainbridge, a tale which manages to turn an ancient radio into a thing of mystery.

“Ox-Tales: Earth” by 9 authors

This is one of four original collections of short stories by British- and Irish-based authors, each of which is very losely based around one element highlighting a key area of Oxfam's work. Here earth represents Oxfam's action on agricultural development. The nine stories are by Rose Tremain, Jonathan Coe, Marti Leimbach, Kate Atkinson ("Behind The Scenes At The Museum"), Ian Rankin (the Rebus novels), Marina Lewycka ("A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian"), Hanif Kureishi, Jonathan Buckley and Nicholas Shakespeare. Especially impressive is a longer than average work by Shakespeare which cleverly tells the tale of two female assassins: one at the time of the French revolution and the other hailing from contemporary Africa.

“Ox-Tales: Fire” by 10 authors

This is one of four original collections of short stories by British- and Irish-based authors, each of which is very losely based around one element highlighting a key area of Oxfam's work. Here fire represents Oxfam's aid for conflict areas. The ten stories are by Mark Haddon ("The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time"), Geoff Dyer, Victoria Hislop, Sebastian Faulks ("Birdsong"), John le Carré ("The Spy Who Came In From The Cold"), Xiaolu Guo, William Sutcliffe, Ali Smith, Lionel Shriver and Jeanette Winterson. "The Island" by Haddon is particularly imaginative and moving.

“Ox-Tales: Water” by 9 authors

This is one of four original collections of short stories by British- and Irish-based authors, each of which is very losely based around one element highlighting a key area of Oxfam's work. Here water represents Oxfam's action on water projects. The nine stories are by Esther Freud, David Park, Hari Kunzru, Zoë Heller ("Notes On A Scandel"), William Boyd, Michel Faber, Joanna Trollope ("Other People's Children"), Giles Foden ("The Last King Of Scotland") and Michael Morpurgo. "Crossing The River" by Park is a haunting tale narrated by the boatman who meets the dead.

“The Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver

First published in 1998, this is a novel of which I had never heard and which I would probably have never read had it not been for an American woman blogger whom I have never met (we are simply e-mail buddies) who both recommended the book and sent me a copy (many thanks to Dana Huff). I am a slow and deliberate reader and this is a work of 546 pages but, at the end, I didn't want it to finish.

The story begins in 1959 when a family of six leave Georgia, USA to travel to the village of Kilanga in the Belgian colony of the Congo. The head of the family Nathan Price is a southern Baptist missionary with firm and fixed views on what Christianity and the Bible can give to the natives, but the tale is told through five separate female voices: Nathan's wife Oleanna who 'speaks' rarely and in retrospect; Rachel (15), the most reluctant to be there and a mangler of words; the 'strong' twin Leah (14), originally devoted to her father and his mission; the other twin Adah who suffers from hemiplegia (paralysis of half of the body) and has a fascination for words, especially palindromes; and Ruth May (5), young and wilful.

Kingsolver uses these different voices to present a variety of reactions to the encounter with the social, religious and political dimensions of post-colonial Africa. Each is changed and damaged by the experience, one becoming paralysed by it, one trying to disconnect from it, one becoming energised and politicised by it, and the others being destroyed by it. The British - and indeed other western European nations - have long experience of practising and reflecting on the motives and the outcomes of their colonial history, but Americans do not think of themselves as colonisers and appreciate little of their country's secretive political interference in Africa (and many other places), so "The Poisonwood Bible" will open some eyes and (hopefully) minds.

The first 400 pages of this illuminating story cover 17 months in Kilanga during which the Congo acquires its independence under Patrice Lumumba, while the remaining 140 pages move more quickly through the next 35 years, bringing us to the mid 1990s. Along the way, there is much hardship (both physical and mental), several marriages, several births, and many deaths (two of them in the Price family) in "this cradle of rewarded evils and murdered goodness" where "everything you thought you knew means something different in Africa".

Kingsolver's writing is of the highest order, she is a wordsmith of great skill, and the narrative is quite simply compelling, so that this is a novel destined to become a literary classic. The author spent a brief portion of her childhood (1963) in a small village in central Congo, but the rest of the rich texture of this work draws on a massive amount of research and empathy. In the United States, "The Poisonwood Bible" was finalist for the Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner awards and was an Oprah's Book Club selection, while in South Africa it won the National Book Prize.

Links:
Barbara Kingsolver's site click here
author's answers to questions on the book click here
Dana Huff's review of the novel click here

“Pompeii” by Robert Harris

This is the author's fourth best-selling novel and I have read and enjoyed them all. The earlier ones were “Fatherland” (1992), “Enigma” (1995) and “Archangel” (1998). Like all the others, "Pompeii" has a single-word title and uses actual historical events in a well-researched and carefully-characterised plot. However, whereas the first three novels took events from the 20th century, this time Harris has gone right back to AD 79 when the volcano Vesuvius exploded with unprecedented and deadly force. In fact, we are 300 pages into a 400-page narrative before the volcano rips, so most of the novel is setting up the four main characters: the honest and talented 27 year old aquarius Attilius, the elderly soldier, philosopher and scientist Pliny, the unscrupulous former slave Ampliatus, and his spirited 18 year old daughter Corelia. Sadly the whole thing is rather formulaic so that who lives and who dies is no surprise, although it is portrayed with some style.

“Prague” by Arthur Phillips

My dear American friend Suzan Cole sent me this novel because she knows how much I love the Czech capital and, in the United States, this has been a national bestseller. It looks promising: after all, it is titled "Prague" and the cover is a picture of the Charles Bridge. I knew, from the promotional text, that much of the material would be about the experience of five young Americans in post-Communist Budapest, but I never expected that the 'action' would only shift to Prague in the final paragraph of 367 pages of small text. In an interview at the end of the book, Phillips states; "The novel is named not for a city, but for an emotional disorder". So, now I know...

"Prague" is set overwhemingly in Budapest, largely in the twelve months beginning in May 1990. In fact, I spent a week in the city in August 1991, so the locations and colour of the work were of some personal interest to me and I particularly enjoyed the 75-page historical 'diversion' that makes up the second of the four sections of the novel. However, none of the five American characters is appealing and, given that Phillips says he was "hopelessly in love" with Budapest, the whole tone is melancholic, even depressing. But "Prague" is brilliantly written and Phillips displays - in his first novel - an electic range of knowledge and a virtuoso style of writing.

Link: web site for book click here

“Ralph’s Party” by Lisa Jewell

Since my brother is called Ralph and I live in London, I was inevitably attracted by a novel called “Ralph’s Party” set in the capital. All the six main characters – like the author – are 30ish but, whereas Jewell lives in north London, her cast abide in Battersea in the same three-storey Edwardian house. In the course of 350+ pages, each resident has a relationship with at least one other and it’s all resolved – in a fashion – at a party to launch Ralph’s paintings. This first novel is not Booker Prize literature but, if you’re suffering from a heavy cold over a grey weekend (as I was), it’s an easy and entertaining read.

“The Reader” by Bernhard Schlink

When I saw the film of "The Reader", I admired the brilliant acting by Kate Winslet but was disturbed by the moral confusion of the story by German law professor Berhard Schlink. I decided ro read the best-selling book to see if the moral issue became any clearer. This is a Holocaust work that attempts to explore the hugely sensitive issue of the guilt of the following German generation. It is a quick read since it is not a long work and the chapters are all unusually short - but does it make the moral question any clearer?

The first two-fifths of the story - located in 1958 - is about the relationship between 36 year old tram conductor Hanna Schmitz and 15 year old schoolboy Michael Berg; the second two-fifths - set seven years later - revolves around the trial of Hanna witnessed by Michael; and the final fifth or so concerns the time of Hanna's 18 year prison sentence.

What I found was that the movie is a faithful adaptation of the novel. Schlink's relatively sparse but moving writing is perhaps more revealing of Michael's thoughts about Hanna (frequent references to him feeling "nothing" and his "numbness") but no less illuminating about Hanna's motivations and feelings (twice she cries "What would you have done?" and seems to exhibit emotional autism).

The reader of the title is, at different times, Michael, Hanna and we ourselves. For me, the key sentence of the book is Michael's dilemma: "I wanted to pose myself both tasks - understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both." Arguably most Holocaust literature has been more about condemnation than understanding, but Schlink runs the risk of showing more understanding than condemnation. Surely one has to do both, however difficult, and it is immensely difficult.

“The Reluctant Fundamentalist” by Mohsin Hamid

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2007, this is an easy read in the sense that it is short, well-written and compelling; but it is less comfortable in that it enters the mind of a man who wishes evil on America and it has an ambiguous ending. The author has acknowledged in an interview that the narrator of this monologue Changez has some things in common with him: "I have done much of what Changez has done: I have worked in New York and in Lahore, and I have spent time in Chile and in the Philippines. His story is not my story, but I certainly have inhabited the geography of his world." However, Hamid - who now lives in London - presumably does not share his character's pleasure at the attack on the Twin Towers, but does attempt to show how a Pakistani - even an educated and Americanised one - can be drawn into despising the Western style of life.

Changez states of the US reaction to 9/11: "It seemed to me then - and to be honest, sir, it seems to me still - that America was engaged only in posturing. As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away. Such an America had to be stopped in the interests not only of the rest of humanity, but also in your own."

Links:
author's web site click here
web site for book click here

“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy

"They went on." This is the recurring word triplet in a narrative that has no chapters but breaks every few paragraphs about a journey by foot that has no real beginning and no real end and no obvious purpose. It is an ordeal undergone by a nameless man and his nameless son in an anonymous land in a world suffering from an unexplained holocaust that has already destroyed most of the biosphere and threatens to do the same to the few remaining scavengers that represent humankind.

If this sounds bleak, it is - by turns haunted, harrowing, horrible. And yet it manages to be humanistic in its moving portrayal of the man's protection of his son and their joint belief that they are "the good guys" who are "carrying the fire". This remarkable novel by American author McCarthy is dedicated to his son and won the the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It has now been made into a film.

“Roger’s Version” by John Updike

This novel was originally published in 1986 and written by an author well-known for his clever writing. At one level, it is a narrative about three relationships: the marriage between 52 year old Divinty professor Roger and his younger second wife Esther (like me, they have a son called Richard), Esther’s sexually active affair with a student called Dale, and Roger’s one-off act of intercourse with his half-niece Verna. On another level, it is a debate about God versus science. Updike gives frequent exhibitions of astonishing knowledge of religious history, physics, biology, mathematics, computing, and even Latin and his style is both erudite and exotic – often excessively so – with long, complex, clever sentences. Neither level seems to have any genuine conclusion or even discernible purpose, but then this is the case with so many contemporary novels.

“Saturday” by Ian McEwan

McEwan is now regarded by many as the finest British writer of his generation, such is the consistent brilliance of his work. This is his tenth novel and, having previously read "The Comfort Of Stangers" and "Atonement", the third that I have savoured. Once again, he displays his acute powers of observation and forensic analysis of the seemingly mundane routines of an individual's life but, this time, he demonstrates an astonishly detailed knowledge of neuroscience and explores the fear of and reaction to the threat of terror in the post 9/11 world.

Set in a location I know intimately (my home city of London) on a day I remember well (Saturday, 15 February 2003 when huge numbers of marchers protested against the proposed invasion of Iraq), this is a tale of one man - successful neurosurgeon Henry Perowne - looking forward to a family reunion over a dinner that he himself will cook. It explores both the fragility and the complexity of our lives. Fragile in that a momentary and minor scraping of two cars can result in such trauma for both the Perowne family and the other motorist. Complex in that all our lives are threatened in new ways by terrorism and yet the forthcoming overthrow of Saddam Hussein is so uncertain in its morality and its consequences.

As Perowne contemplates the meaning of his life as a surgeon, he thinks that "There has to be more to life than merely saving lives". On the wider issue of the terrorist threat, he feels that "It isn't rationalism that will overcome the religious zealots, but ordinary shopping and all that it entails". And yet he does save a life and he does it with remarkable rationality.

“A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian” by Marina Lewycka

This novel has been a publishing phenomenon. It was rejected 36 times before Lewycka found a publisher at the age of 58. Since then, it has sold some 800,000 copies in the UK alone and been translated into 29 languages. The wonderful title certainly attracts attention to a first novel; yet it would not have become such a bestseller on the strength of the title alone.

Its success and popularity comes from its gently comic style and strong sense of narrative, as Lewycka - who was born of Ukrainian parents - tells the tale of 84 year old Nikolai, a one-time draughtsman in a Ukrainian tractor factory. a British resident since the end of the war, and a widower for the last two years. Three women are struggling over his welfare and wealth: 36 year old blonde, busty Ukrainian Valentina who wants to marry him and his daughters Naezhda and Vera who want to protect him.

Most of the time amusing and always very readable, regularly the novel gives a stark reminder of the tribulations of those caught between rival historical forces in the complex 20th century history of Ukraine. There are suggestions of a dark secret to be revealed, but there is no twist in the conclusion which is somewhat lame and unsatisfactory.

“Slumdog Millionaire" by Vikas Swarup

Originally published as "Q&A" in 2005, this novel was reissued as "Slumdog Millionaire" in 2009 following the worldwide success of the film adaptation which used the revised title. Already published in 25 languages, the book is set to appear in more with the boost given it by the movie which I saw before actually reading the novel. Not bad at all for the début work of a member of the Indian Foreign Service.

But then this is a thoroughly enjoyable read. It tells the story of the appearance on an Indian television programme "Who Will Win A Billion?" - modelled on the real-life "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" - of an 18 year old orphan, waiter and Mumbai slum dweller called Ram Mohammad Thomas. This is narrated in the form of 12 engaging stories - each a flashback to a part of Ram's life and each the background to a question in the quiz show.

If the film was criticised (unfairly) as being too improbable and romantic and presenting too harsh a view of India's poverty, then the novel is even more fantastical but less romantic and it is unsparing in its depiction of the privations of the poor with an even darker look at Indian life involving suicide, murder and other deaths in almost every episode. Yet the whole tale is told with a certain levity and even humour and the ending is both neat and up-lifting.

Link: author's web site click here

“The Sorrow Of War" by Bao Ninh

The Vietnam war has given rise to many novels, usually inspired by an American point of view. This is different: originally published in Vietnam in 1991, the author was a member of the North Vietnamese Army, serving in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade whose 500 members went to war in 1969 only to see only ten survive. The novel is the story of the scout Kien who is 18 at the start of the war in 1965 and 28 at the fall of Saigon in 1975. Before the war, he falls in love with his childhood sweetheart Phuong. After the war, he is responsible for retrieving and burying the bodies of his dead comrades lost in the Jungle of Souls, scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

Constantly shifting to before, during and after the war, one is presented with a series of stories and images which are by turns shocking, moving, cynical and sorrowful. He writes: "The sorrow of war inside a soldier's head was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk".

I read the book on a holiday in Indochina [click here].

“Sophie’s World" by Jostein Gaarder

This is an original and impressive book recommended to me and bought for me by my son Richard. It is written by a Norwegian teacher of philosophy and is a fascinating and lucid history of Western philosophy in the form of an unusual novel. The story is told to 15 year old Sophie by a strange character called Alberto Knox. Only after more than 200 pages do we learn that Sophie and Alberto are ‘only’ characters in a book written for 15 year old Hilde by her absent father Albert and some 400 pages into the novel, Sophie and Alberto actually manage to ‘jump’ into the ‘real’ world of Hilde and Albert. It is a long work (427 pages) that can only be read so much at a time and the ending is limp, but the concept is clever and it is a painless – even entertaining – way to review the main philosophical ideas from Socrates to Sartre.

"A Spanish Lover"by Joanna Trollope

I first read this novel in 1994 on a holiday to Barcelona and the references to the Moorish architecture of Seville and Granada made me want to go there. Eight years later, I did manage to visit these wonderful cities [for account click here] and this encouraged me to reread the book. In truth, there is not so much about Andalucía in the novel which is in fact a story about two very English women, twins Lizzie and Francis (37 when we first meet them at the start of the two-year narrative). This relationship has its own fascination for me because I am married to one of a pair of female twins and know how powerful and personal is this bond.

At the start of the story, Lizzie is the traditional and stable one, married with children and living in a splendid home in the country, while Francis is the London-based, free-spirited one who has had a number of unsatisfactory relationships with men and no interest in starting a family (guess which one I married?). But the Spanish lover of the title arrives at a time of change and himself promotes great change and - like life itself - the conclusion is not a particularly neat one. Joanna Trollope - a relative of the famous Anthony Trollope - writes in an incredibly easy style that makes one want to just keep reading, but her references to sex are so amazingly brief and so remarkably demure that the title is almost a come-on.

"A Spot Of Bother" by Mark Haddon

Haddon had huge success with “The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time” and his second novel is enjoying similar success. It is a long work - just over 500 pages - but it is an immensely easy read, partly because it is split into no less than 144 chapters , partly because the style is so seemingly simple - essentially chronological narrative with no diversions or ruminations. However, underneath this apparent simplicity is a perceptive and moving story centred on 57 year old George Hall who has recently retired and the relationships between George and his wife Jean, their daughter Katie and her husband-to-be Ray, and their gay son Jamie and his on/off partner Tony.

This is a very domestic (and often amusing) drama, but the real skill of the work is Haddon's ability (as in his first novel) to capture and communicate what it is like to suffer from a mental disability. George experiences acute anxiety and panic attacks - something so much more common than we recognise and so much more incapacitating than we appreciate. He may try to dismiss it as merely "a spot of bother", but it causes him terrible physical and mental anguish and threatens both the future of his marriage and his attendance at his daughter's wedding. "Starting Over" by Tony Parsons

You're a policeman with a gun to your nose. What do you do? George Baily, aged 47, promptly has a massive heart attack, followed almost immediately by the transplant of a new heart from a 19 year old donor. This proves to be a life-changing experience for George, but not necessarily in the way one might expect, and for his family in ways which he certainly does not expect. This is the sixth novel by British writer Tony Parsons and the first that I've read. While an enjoyable enough piece of writing, it has nothing very special to say.

“3001: The Final Odyssey” by Arthur C Clarke

Over the past three decades, I have read all four novels in this series, the others being “2001”, “2010” and “2061”. Once again we are back to the four monoliths with their 1:4:9 dimensions: TMA Zero on Earth, TMA One on the moon, Big Brother at Jupiter, and the Great Wall on Jupiter’s moon Europa. This time astronaut Frank Poole – revived after a thousand years in space – manages to ‘contact’ Halman – a symbiosis of fellow astronaut Dave Bowman and computer HAL 9000 – on Europa, learns that the powers are about to weed out mankind, and manages to destroy the monoliths with computer viruses (cf. the movie “Independence Day”). An imaginative and well-written work.

“The Subtle Knife” by Philip Pullman

First published in 1997, "The Subtle Knife" is the second part of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy and runs to some 340 pages. This middle volume "moves between three universes: the universe of 'Northern Lights' [the first novel], which is like ours, but different in many ways; the universe we know; and a third universe, which differs from ours in many ways again". It is story-telling of the very highest order with effective characterisation, amazing people, exciting action, and above all a simply wonderful narrative.

Moving on from the the first novel, we are introduced to a new leading character, a new special instrument and a new universe. Joining 12 year old Lyra from the world of "Northern Lights", we meet Will from our own world; he is the same age and, like her, has been parted from his father and must travel across universes to find him. Where Lyra has found and mastered the truth-telling alethiometer, Will comes across and conquers the subtle knife which can cut anything, including an entrance from one universe to another. The new universe is called Cittàgazze which is largely inhabited by children since Spectres have consumed the spirit of most of the adults.

The narrative leads inexorably to the setting for the final novel in the trilogy: "Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have, has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit. And now those two powers are lining up for battle."

Links:
Philip Pullman's site click here
fan site 1 click here
fan site 2 click here
fan site 3 click here

"A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini

No sooner had I finished Hosseini's first novel "The Kite Runner" than I had to read this his second. It is every bit as impressive and marks Hosseini as a master storyteller. Whereas his first work was about the friendship between two Afghani boys, this is about the relationship between two Afghani women: the illegimate and ill-educated Mariam from Herat and the much younger, prettier and more cultured Laila from Kabul. What they suffer separately and together tells us a good deal about the plight of women in backward, war-torn and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan over a timeframe of almost three decades.

There are many similarities in both style and plotting between the two novels - each imbued with the traditions, language, religion and political history of the country, each providing intimate characterisation over long periods of time, each containing a shock towards the end of the narrative. This new work, however, is set exclusively in Afghanistan and is ultimately more hopeful and up-lifting.

Link: author's web site click here

"To Kill A Mockingbird" by Harper Lee

Lee was born in an Alabamba village in 1926 and her novel is set in an Alabamba town in 1935 seen through the eyes of an eight old girl, so clearly the atmospheric detail is at least partially autobiographical. The girl is called Jean Louise, but she is known to the family as Scout, and she has a protective brother Jem who is four years older. Their father is Atticus Finch, a single parent, local lawyer and elected politician who brings an immense sense of tolerance and decency to his family and his town, even when he is required to defend a black man falsely accused of the rape of a white women, so putting his own life in danger.

This was Lee's first novel (it was published in 1960) and won her the Pulitzer Prize. She tells a compelling story - reeking with hypocrisy and simmering with prejudice - in a deceptively calm, almost childlike, manner that extolls a philosophy as noble as it is simple. Atticus declares: " .. before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience". As Scout puts it: "Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks".

"Unless" by Carol Shields

This was Carol Shields' tenth and last novel, written during her time in Britain in the short period between her apparently successful treatment for breast cancer and the return of the disease which killed her in July 2003. It tells of a Canadian woman writer Reta Winters whose quiet domesticity is shattered by her 19 year old daughter inexplicably dropping out of her studies and sitting on a Toronto sidewalk holding a sign with the single word "Goodness". In a sense, this is similar territory to Nick Hornby's novel "How To Be Good" [for review, click here] and certainly Shields explores different concepts of 'goodness'; but she does more than that. As she herself put it in an interview: "I wanted the book to be about four things: men and women; writers and readers; goodness; mothers and children".

The 39 chapters of "Unless" are all titled with adverbs or prepositions ("little chips of grammar"), such as "So" or "Yet" or the title word itself ("Unless is the worry word of the English language"). Shields' characters are like these words - seemingly small and inconsequential, but in truth as valid and interconnected as any others. Shields' love of language is evident from her extensive vocabulary and marvellous fluidity, while her perceptive insights and wry humour make her a joy to read.

”A Woman In Jerusalem” by A.B. Yehoshua

At the end of a visit to Israel which included time in Jerusalem, I bought this novel - translated from Hebrew and shortlisted for the Man Booker Internatioal Prize 2005 - at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport. The woman of the title is dead before the story begins - killed by a suicide bomber in a Jerusalem market - but we earn that Yulia Ragayev was a migrant worker, a mechanical egineer who finished up as a cleaner at a bakery in the city. In discovering her story, we also learn that of the bakery's human resources manager - never named - who explores why the bomb victim lay unclaimed in a morgue and proposes a way in which his company can atone for this apparent oversight. The writing is elegant, the narrative engaging, and the conclusion unexpected.

”White Teeth” by Zadie Smith

How could a woman of just 24 write such an ambitious and assured first novel? Although Smith studied English Literature at Cambridge University, she never attended a creative writing class and she has insisted “none of my family appear in White Teeth in any obvious way”. She has explained that: "The novel began as a short story which expanded". In fact, it runs to some 540 pages and covers the experiences of three families over three generations, focusing particularly on the Joneses (English/Jamaican) and the Iqbals (Bangladeshi) between 1975 and 1999.

Along the way, Smith manages to place her novel in locations as varied as a British tank in Romania at the end of the Second World War and a multi-cultural playground in north London in 1992 and weave in references to such eclectic topics as the Indian mutiny of 1857, the Jamaican earthquake of 1907, horticulture, genetic engineering and much else besides. She has said: “I wasn’t trying to write about race”, but problems of ethnicity and assimilation run in and out of this multi-layered work with its colourful – in several senses of the word – cast of characters and cultures.

Yet the whole thing is written in an immensely lively and humorous style that makes the novel a compelling read. It is set in the London Borough of Brent, where I have lived for the last decade and a half, and the author is only one year older than my son, so I can identify with many of the themes and loved Smith’s ability to capture and mimic different ethnic accents. But this is a work than can be savoured by anyone interested in the contribution of diversity to contemporary society.

Link: interview with author click here

”A Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel

I don't read historical fiction, but this work won the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and I needed a long novel (this is 650 pages) for a trip to China.

The narrative covers nine years (1527-1535) that changed the course of English history as Henry VIII tired of his first wife Katherine of Aragon, who could not give him a male heir, and sought to take Anne Bolyn as his new wife, even if that meant breaking his nation away from the Church of Rome. There is an extensive cast of characters, with almost 100 helpfully listed before the text, and so many of the men are called Thomas and the women Mary. The central character though is Thomas Cromwell, a man of lowly upbringing who increasingly becomes an influential adviser to the monarch and we see events through his eyes which is an unconventional approach that offers a very much more sympathic perspective on Crmwell than most historical accounts and new insights on personages such as Thomas More who is presented as cruel and stubborn.

In order to make Cromwell's perspective sharp to the reader, Mantel adopts two stylistic devices. First she uses the present tense throughout which is no problem. Additionally she very rarely uses Cromwell's name as the subject of a sentence but instead simply adopts the pronoun 'he' which is frequently quite confusing. Nevertheless this is a very readable and accomplished work, full of period detail, including gruesome reminders of how precarious life was with plague suddenly taking lives and how so-called heretics - such as those who read the 'wrong' Bible - were tortured before being hanged and dismebowelled or simply burnt alive.

”A World Of Difference” by 15 authors

This is the fifth anthology of short stories that I've read in this year (2009) when I myself have commenced writing short stories. All 15 stories are by different authors (drawn from all five continents), but they have in common that they were written in English in the last 50 years and that they deal with cultural encounters. I read the book on holiday in Iran and one of the authors, Rohinton Misty, was born in India in a community of Persian descent - his story is entitled simply "Squatter". A particularly enjoyable story - and the longest in the collection - is "One Out Of Many" by Nobel Laureate V S Naipaul who narrates the tale of a Bombay servant who finds himself living and working in the utterly different Washington DC.

All reviews by ROGER DARLINGTON

Last modified on 21 July 2010

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