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.

The Girl on the Train – Paula Hawkins

The girl is Rachel, divorced, dissatisfied and drinking to excess; the train is a commuter bone shaker – the 8:04 into London or the 17:56 back. During a regular but unscheduled stop at signals Rachel habitually gazes out of the carriage window at the lives of those whose houses back onto the line just there.

Two houses hold particular interest for her. At one she is enthralled by a couple (she christens them Jason & Jess) living the idyll – morning coffee on the terrace, sharing a glass of wine in the evening, always touching each other, and to all appearances clearly in love. At another house, a few doors down, she used to live but it is now the home of her ex-husband with his new wife and baby.

Rachel begins the narrative in an almost diary fashion, musing on the events of her day, how she feels and reflecting (bitterly) how she got into her current state; though in all aspects she is hampered by alcohol induced memory gaps. But what becomes clear is that something is happening with ‘Jess’ – Rachel sees her kissing another man, then she disappears from view.

Not just from Rachel’s view either – a missing persons case is reported in the local paper. The search is on for Megan Hipswell, who is clearly ‘Jess’ in real life.

Now Megan’s voice is heard, but her narration, in similar diary format, begins a year earlier. It alternates with Rachel’s, but while Rachel’s moves forward day by day Megan’s skips weeks and months progressively catching up to what became a fateful day.

Rachel can’t help getting involved, her voyeurism somehow entitling her to befriend Megan’s husband Scott (the real ‘Jason’), which in turn brings her back into the ambit of ex-husband Tom and his wife Anna. This brings a third narrator, Anna, into the mix, and the story bounces between the three women, revealing some tangled history while bringing out some clever nuances in perspective.

The action, plot and reveal is good enough for any thriller, but the unusual construction and the forensic unpicking of the protagonists’ lives (the real ones behind the outward impressions) lift the book well above the norm.

Highly recommended.

Running For Their Lives – Mark Whitaker

In this dual biography Mark Whitaker relates the lives of Arthur Newton and Peter Gavuzzi; names not as well-known as maybe they deserve to be given their incredible achievements as long distance runners.

Arthur Newton was born in Britain but settled in Natal, trying to make his fortune farming, but having invested time and money improving the land he fell foul of the South African government’s plans to separate farmland into racial divides. His land was in the wrong place, became worthless and the compensation offered derisory. He hit upon a novel idea to publicise his grievance – become famous; the means to fame would be as a runner and the competition he targeted was the 54 mile Comrades (double) Marathon from Durban to Maritzburg.

He worked out his own training regime and running strategy, and despite starting the race as a thirty-nine year old unknown, won it by a clear half hour. This and other successes did little to move forward the farm dispute, and even taking his campaign back to Britain to set a new world record for 50 miles, was to no avail. Back in Natal he gave up the battle and, penniless, walked to Rhodesia. There he got back on the road and broke the 100 mile record, beating a relay team of four athletes.

His farm gone and his days as a top class runner numbered (he was by now 45) he had little choice but to make a move from amateur to professional and entered a bizarre race set up by American impresario CC Pyle. The course across the USA from Los Angeles to New York had athletes running an average 40 miles a day for eighty-four days. Amazingly there were 199 entrants for the ‘Transcontinental’.

Among them was Peter Gavuzzi, until then a steward on a Cunard liner who maintained his fitness by running laps of the deck. Lured by the prize money he, along with the others set off over mountains, through deserts, as much part of a travelling circus as a race. Running together, hours ahead of most, they formed an unlikely friendship – Newton older, middle class, articulate, Gavuzzi young, working class and deferential – sharing a love of running and the necessary embracement of solitude that few others understood.

Professional running, particularly road running, was not a commercial success, depending on novelty as much as performance – Newton & Gavuzzi raced in six day snowshoe marathons and against horses – so when both eventually retired it could have been to obscurity. Yet both men’s later lives contained incident of note.

Gavuzzi was caught on the wrong side of the English Channel when Nazi Germany invaded France, and spent years as a prisoner of war. Newton’s war was a longer and personal one against the athletics establishment. He was convinced his unconventional training theories would benefit British runners but he was barred from engaging with them (officially at least) due to his ‘professional status’.

Newton and Gavuzzi (happily returned from France) got belated recognition in the post-war years as interest in athletics increased in the publicity spotlight of a burgeoning Olympic movement and the race for the four minute mile. But that same Olympic movement, by capping their distance races at a mere 26 miles also rendered Newton’s records at 50 and 100 miles obsolete, and the likes of him and Gavuzzi to relative obscurity.

So the book does a great service in retelling the story. Its tangential departures into early South African politics, American sporting showmanship, Second World War internment, and the amateur versus professional Olympic controversy adds context and depth to the world these two, otherwise unexceptional, men found themselves living through.

The Revenant – Michael Punke

After losing both his career and his fiancée (the back story revealed early) Hugh Glass finds himself in St Louis with no clear idea of his next move. He joins an expedition up the Missouri River in the employ of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.

It is the 1820’s and west of the Mississippi is hotchpotch of dangers. The native American Indians are subdued but unreliable, some keen to trade, others keen to kill; the winter in the Rockies is severe; and the grizzly bears roam wild and free.

While out scouting Glass comes across a she bear with cubs. She goes for him and though he puts a shot in her chest it doesn’t halt the charging beast and Glass has his arm and back clawed and his leg badly bitten before the bullet takes effect and reduces the bear to a lifeless mass on top of him.

Found by the main group and inexpertly patched together Glass hangs on to life but he slows down progress, dangerous with the hostile Arikara tribe in the vicinity. Two volunteers agree to stay put, the expectation being to bury him when he finally expires; young Jim Bridger out of gratitude for Glass’s past kindnesses, the mercenary John Fitzgerald out of greed for the promised extra pay and with an eye to inheriting Glass’s rather fine rifle.

When Glass inconveniently fails to die he is abandoned, left with only his clothes and blanket; Fitzgerald making off with his rifle, powder and flint, and Bridger with his hunting knife. Glass still refuses to give up the ghost and instead begins to crawl.

What follows is a story of survival over the stacked odds of climate, starvation, wild beasts, and wilder Indians; and of revenge on the two miscreants not so much for the abandonment but for the theft of his only means of self-support. Hugh Glass will survive (the included map gives that away) so the real tension is in the pursuit of Bridger and Fitzgerald.

It is a well written yarn, based on elements of truth, which make it authentic in its setting and detail - a western with a difference and a pretty good read.

The Road to Reckoning – Robert Lautner

New York 1837, and twelve year old Thomas Walker’s father’s business, supplying spectacles, is not going well as the US economy sags. However John Walker gets wind of a new invention by one Samuel Colt – a factory produced (so cheap) hand gun with a revolving chamber that gives “five pistols in each hand” – and decides to take the job selling them.

But the market for such weaponry is in the wilder west – Illinois & Indiana – so equipped with an order book, a dozen samples, and a working wooden replica, father and son set off by wagon as travelling salesmen dealing in death and destruction.

At an early stop at a frontier town called Milton, the sales pitch to a storekeeper is interrupted by a drifter emerging from the bar, who ridicules the claims made (and the wooden toy) and forces father and son into a humiliating exit from the store and the town.

But there is no escape; as they camp that night their tormentor, and three henchmen, arrive to continue the discussion. John Walker again attempts to walk away but pays the price of a bullet in the back (no spoiler here – it is only page 30).

The men take the money and guns but leave Thomas with the wagon, horse, wooden gun and order book, which he gathers up and leaving his father’s corpse under a blanket returns to Milton.

His one aim is to get back home and to that end he latches on to ex-ranger Henry Stands who is heading that way. Reluctantly at first, Stands takes charge of him, and just as well as the murderous gang realise Thomas’s testimony could get them hanged, and so are in pursuit.

Adventures ensue with young Thomas also at danger from religious do-gooders and a reclusive mountain man who is rather too welcoming.

Related by the now mature Thomas looking back, the prose reflects a mid-western slow drawl that adds authenticity at some cost to fluency. But at just a couple of hundred pages that is no drawback to a very readable western.

A Burnable Book – Bruce Holsinger

London 1385, and at Moorfields outside the walls of the medieval city a young woman of quality is pursued, caught and brutalised, the attacker demanding “doovray leebro” after each beating. The book he seeks is not given up; the woman dies without revealing what she knows but not before calling out a cryptic couplet.

Nearby, hidden and paralysed with fear, another woman of lower rank (it is hard to get lower) listens to the words, intended she feels for her, as she clutches to her chest a cloth-wrapped parcel thrust at her by the fleeing gentlewoman moments earlier.

Though the book disappears into London’s seedier quarter its rumoured existence, loss and contents preoccupy the rich and powerful in King Richard II’s court – nobles, lawyers and the clergy all want to get their hands on it. Why? – It is a book of prophecies that foretell the death of thirteen kings of England starting with William the Conqueror. Twelve are already deceased (in the mode foretold) leaving Richard as the thirteenth, alive for now but not for long according to the book.

So is it a prophecy or a plot; and if a plot would not such forewarning foil it? However in the paranoid world of fourteenth century politics there is what the nineteenth century would term a catch 22: to admit to knowledge of the plot is proof of involvement and so treasonable. So although everyone but the king knows of the book no-one dare tell him.

It falls to John Gower, poet, dealer in confidential information, and general fixer to track down and recover the toxic volume, helped or hindered by his friend (and better poet) the renowned Geoffrey Chaucer. But the Moorfields murderer is also on the trail and as the book passes from hand to hand mayhem and violence follow.

Holsinger populates his novel with a mixture of historic and fictional characters and furnishes it with authentic-seeming details of medieval city life – from high court politics to the sex trade in the stews. His use of (possibly fictitious) vernacular, liberally in the latter context, cleverly obviates the need to use the more familiar (and offensive to some) nouns and verbs.

The novel rattles along for 450 pages alternating between Gower’s first person narrative and third person accounts covering the other characters’ movements. In addition to history and murder a subtler theme of deception is woven into the work giving it a flavour of a John le Carre thriller. The ending has a twist or two and ties up all loose ends satisfactorily.

It is a good enough book not to burn, particularly if historical fiction is your thing.

The Big Short – Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis worked briefly, incompetently (in his view), yet successfully, trading stocks and bonds for a Wall Street broker in the early 1980’s. He left and wrote an exposure of the folly he found there in his book “Liar’s Poker”, fully expecting the unsustainable industry he had been a part of to crash sooner rather than later.

Unfortunately for us all it took a full two decades of even more ballooning business in “financial derivatives” before the bubble burst. In The Big Short he describes that crash of 2008 from the viewpoint of those few traders who not only foresaw the collapse but decided that money, big money, could be made from it.

The how is complicated, but Lewis builds up the reader’s knowledge logically, explaining the nature of “sub-prime” home loans (those not 100% backed by the property value but predicated on the lender’s ability to pay at least the interest or to repay the loan from the later sale of the house on an assumed rising market). The industry then went on to package those dubious base products into mortgage bonds and sold them on to largely unsuspecting investors who relied on “triple A” ratings awarded by agencies such as Standard & Poor’s or Moody’s who either did not know or did not care about the inherent fragility of the underlying loans. In another spiral of self-deception those mortgage bonds were subsequently lumped together into vast “collateralised debt obligations” (CDOs) and sold on yet again.

That this became a sort of pyramid selling (or in US terminology - a Ponzi scheme) became apparent to a few perceptive but maverick dealers who decided they could profit from “shorting” the market. Shorting involves finding a way to profit from the fall in value of a stock or any financial product (the reverse of the normal investment process of picking stocks whose value will rise). In the case of financial derivatives such as the CDOs, the method was a “credit default swap”, effectively insuring against the fall in value of the product. For a relatively small annual premium there was the potential for huge gains, particularly as the US economy stalled, home owners lost jobs and property prices fell.

And a key element of this was that you could insure products you didn’t even own - it was betting pure and simple.

Lewis, in his attractive breezy style, concentrates as much on the personalities of those maverick dealers involved in this “Big Short” as the technicalities, which makes it an entertaining as well as informative read. Their stories, as outsiders betting against the received wisdom (or foolishness) of a seemingly rich and all-powerful business, has a David and Goliath quality. They emerge not as villains who caused the crash, but clear-sighted individuals whose initial warnings were ignored and who decided if the financial world was going to hell in a handcart they would at least make a bob or two out of the wreckage.