The Best a Man Can Get – John O’Farrell

Michael Adams loves his bachelor lifestyle sharing a South London flat with three other ‘lads’ that also serves as a studio for his work producing music for advertising jingles. He also loves his wife and two kids at his home north of the river, which he frequents as often as his ‘work’ (or laddish distractions) allows. Neither household is aware of the other – yet.

But burning the candle at both ends is difficult to sustain and Michael’s best of both worlds is in danger of turning into his worst nightmare.

Rich comedic veins are mined with skill and a commendable avoidance of cliché. But it’s not all played for laughs. As Michael’s troubles grow he has to re-examine his core values and reconsider exactly what is meant by the best a man can get.

Good for a laugh and good for a relaxing read.

The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell

This book is best described as a linked series of six novellas, spaced about a decade apart, with a new first person narrator each time.

1984: Troubled teenager Holly Sykes (treated as a child for hearing ‘radio voices’ in her head) runs away from home in Gravesend and encounters a mix of folk: some normal like Ed Brubeck, a boy from school who gives her practical help and advice; some weird like Esther Little, who seems to know her already and imparts an enigmatic message; and some positively paranormal, though that encounter is immediately redacted from her conscious memory. Her week of rebellion ends when a domestic crisis, little brother Jacko going missing, calls her home.

1991: Hugo lamb, Cambridge undergraduate, clever and he knows it, is in with the posh set, whose members he sees as fair game for his exploitative schemes. While skiing with his rich chums in Switzerland he learns that a scam back home has had unforeseen consequences that make a return unwise, but his companions abroad are also in trouble locally so he seeks refuge with a barmaid he has been targeting with limited success – one Holly Sykes. Sparks fly as estuary girl with attitude meets posh boy with class and charm, snowed-in together in her bedsit. But posh boy has also met some strange characters with a bizarre but tempting future to sell. Which way to go?

2004: It is Sharon Sykes wedding bash in Brighton. Sharon is Holly’s younger sister but the narrator is Ed Brubeck, now Holly’s partner and father to her daughter Aoife. Ed’s a war correspondent in the Middle East and while he recounts the events of the wedding he also reflects on his recent traumatic posting. Then a home based trauma occurs – Aoife goes missing (an echo of Jacko’s disappearance) and it needs one of Holly’s unconscious psychic utterances (a radio voice) to direct the search, during which reference is made to something called The Script.

2015: Our next narrator, for a five year span, is Crispin Hershey, author, living a literary globe-trotting existence on the back of his first novel, well received but not matched since. He’s bitter, cynical and not above taking revenge on a critic he blames for his decline. At conventions around the world he repeatedly bumps into Holly Sykes, now a successful author herself with a book about her ‘radio voices’ experiences. Crispin is at first dismissive of her credentials, but after experiencing one of her psychic episodes first hand comes to respect, indeed love her in his own curmudgeonly fashion. He also has brushes with someone trying to warn him about his part in The Script; when he brushes them off it doesn’t end well.

2025: At last someone who knows what The Script is – Marinus is an ‘atemporalist’ and through his narrative all the weird stuff becomes clearer. It is all part of the centuries old conflict between the good and the evil of their kind, which seems to be building to a cataclysmic clash. Holly Sykes, visiting New York, is an unknowing pawn in the end-game, which game will end with few survivors.

2043: Holly survived, but to what end? Eighteen years later it is a world much changed and in a ‘post-darkening’ decline, sans oil, sans internet, and running low on food and essential medicines. Back at the ancestral smallholding in rural Ireland she ekes out an existence, caring as best she can for her two grandchildren – Aoife’s daughter Lorelei and Rafiq an adopted refugee boy – for whom the future looks bleak. Is this really the end that The Script demanded?

The book is a tour de force. Six hundred pages, six novellas, intriguingly linked, covering six decades with six very different narrators (even the one repeated individual is a different person sixty years on). Around the gripping storylines is perceptive detail of past and present times and speculative ideas on where current trends may lead, chillingly, in the future.

As well as links between the novellas the author reintroduces characters from earlier books: Hugo Lamb is Jason Taylor’s big boy cousin in Black Swan Green; and Marinus has a bit part in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

The paranormal element intrudes only slightly into five of the six episodes, barely affecting the mainstream stories (while subtly laying down a breadcrumb trail towards the future); the other episode is full-on fantasy but easily manageable even for someone generally unfamiliar with that genre.

Another typically genre-defying David Mitchell novel of great worth delivered with trademark fluency and style.

White Teeth – Zadie Smith

White Teeth provides a lively insight into inter-generational multicultural working class life in London between the late seventies and early nineties through the lives of three families connected by marriage, friendship and shared experience. At the kernel is the unlikely friendship of Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal forged, as we soon learn, at the end of World War II.

But the book starts on New Year’s Day 1975 when Archie’s suicide attempt fails and turns instead into an engagement and subsequent marriage to Clara Bowden, many years his junior and the daughter of an immigrant West Indian Jehovah’s Witness.

Samad also marries a considerably younger woman, Alsana, and the two ex–comrades spend many an evening discussing life at O’Connell’s snooker club, its Irish heritage maintained by definitely un-Irish host Abdul-Mickey. Their parallel lives continue to echo with both producing offspring. The Jones union is blessed with daughter Irie; the Iqbal’s produce twin boys, but Magid’s and Millat’ differing personalities belie their physical similarity.

As the younger generation gains adolescence an altercation at school brings Josh Chalfen into their ambit; and with him his super-parents Joyce and Marcus. The Chalfens are high achievers (she a horticulturalist, he a geneticist) with an unshakeable belief in their approach to parenting, which they freely exercise on Irie, Magid and Millat.

The interference is not universally appreciated, and when Marcus’s latest research project becomes controversial, it produces a catalyst for conflict. Battle lines are drawn and forces converge towards a potentially life changing climax.

The book sprawls deliciously over 500 pages, giving each character time and space to develop and interact (dipping back into prior generations to give even more context). There is comedy in the detail and pathos in the larger themes as cultures clash, generations battle and ideologies strive for supremacy, sometimes within the same character.

It was an acclaimed debut novel when published in 2000 and still reads fresh and relevant today.