Home Fire – Kamila Shamsie

 When Isma Pasha and Eamonn Lone meet in a Massachusetts coffee bar, they are both far from home but have plenty in common. They are both Asian British with homes in North London, but their circumstances differ.

Isma’s a marked woman. Just getting into the USA to do a PhD was problematic, as her father was a jihadi involved in worldwide campaigns before dying in captivity on his way to Guantanamo Bay. He prioritised the fight ahead of his family, leaving Isma with few memories, none good, of him but many of her long-suffering, now deceased, mother. Her younger siblings, twins Aneeka and Parvaiz, never knew their father.

Eamonn’s father, by contrast, is Karamat Lone, poster boy Home Secretary in the UK Government who has made a career of embracing his Britishness. Eamonn is in the US, his entry presumably unproblematic, to visit the family of his mother, a successful Irish-American businesswoman, and, as is his wont, to enjoy himself.

Isma and Eamonn get on but their differences prevent any intimacy, not least because Isma knows, but does not tell, that her brother Parvaiz has gone off to join Isis. Later, back in London, Eamonn tries his luck with the younger, more attractive, sister, Aneeka. After an initial rebuff, she comes on to him. He does not question her change of heart.

The story switches to Parvaiz to give an account of his radicalisation, flight to Isis, and life in Raqqa, where reality begins to bite. And reality starts to bite in London too, boding ill for Aneeka and Eamonn, and worse for Home Secretary, Karamat Lone. Difficult choices have to be made, with lives at risk, careers at stake, and love exerting its painful pull.

Tightly written at under three hundred pages, Isma, Eamonn, Parvaiz, Aneeka and Karamat sequentially narrate events and give voice to their conflicting loyalties. The different perspectives are well balanced and give insights that must resonate within the British Asian community.

The Subtle Knife – Philip Pullman

 This is the second volume of the His Dark Materials trilogy, re-read to tie in with the current BBC serialisation.

At the end of volume one, Lyra walked into the hole in the sky created by her father Lord Asriel. Here we learn it leads to another world and the city of Cittagazze. The city is outwardly idyllic, but it is deserted except for bands of children. Where have the adults gone?

Meanwhile in Oxford (that is the Oxford in our world, not the similar Oxford in Lyra’s world) a young boy, Will Parry, delivers his mentally fragile mother to a safe location before confronting some ominous men in suits searching his house. They are after letters sent home by Will’s long lost father while on an expedition to the Alaskan wilderness. Will foils the men, takes the letters, and looks for somewhere safe to hide. He stumbles over a strange ‘hole in the air’ and climbs through to find himself also in Cittagazze.

Will and Lyra meet, and adventures ensue, involving Lyra’s mystical alethiometer gadget and a subtle knife that opens windows into other worlds. After some flitting between worlds, Lyra decides to continue on Lord Asriel’s trail. Will would like to find his father, too and fortunately, according to the alethiometer, both searches are entwined so the intrepid pair can set forth together.

Meanwhile the witches, led by Serafina Pekkala, seek Lyra for their own purposes; aided by Texan airman Lee Scoresby, whose role it is to find the shaman Stanislaus Grumman, who knows something important. Pursuing them all is Mrs Coulter, Lyra’s wicked mother, in deadly alliance with those Oxford men in suits and the sinister forces that emptied adults from the streets of Cittagazze.

People get hurt, wounded, tortured, killed, so this is no fairy story. It moves quickly and, provided the fantasy is bought into, satisfyingly. But as the middle book of the trilogy, little is resolved. Instead the pieces are left nicely set up for the finale in book three.

You Are Awful (But I Like You) – Tim Moore

 Tim Moore decides to visit the worst places in Great Britain, or at least those with the worst reputation. Taking as his guide various surveys and his own preconceptions his itinerary takes in run down seaside resorts (Great Yarmouth, Skegness, Southport and Rhyl); fallen industrial giants (Hull, Middlesbrough, Merthyr); dead end towns (Barrow, Hartlepool); and many points in between.

To add to his sorry trip he stays at hotels and eats from establishments with the worst Trip Advisor ratings and visits ‘attractions’ with the most rubbish reviews. He buys an old Austin Maestro (the worst of a bad bunch of British Leyland models) to make the trip and compiles a playlist of the most mind numbing music to play en route.

If that doesn’t sound fun, in Moore’s capable hands it is, as he mercilessly lampoons the places and the people who live and work there. Some stops last barely an afternoon, so it is hardly an in depth or even fair assessment of some challenging environments. But it is funny, provided you don’t live there.

Despite the laughs, it paints a sorry picture. However the conclusion does acknowledge that at least these places have (or had) identity and character (be it bad, sad or dangerous) and it is with an element of regret that Moore records the demise of the distinctive and its replacement by the bland.

The Sleeping and the Dead – Ann Cleeves

 It has been a warm summer in Cranford, a small town in the north east of England, where DI Peter Porteous has transferred in the hope of a quieter life. But as the water level in the lake drops, a weighted body is discovered. It has been there a while, years, but the post-mortem and missing person records eventually identify the victim (for it is murder) as Michael Grey, a young man who disappeared shortly after completing his A levels in 1972.

But Michael Grey is a bit of a mystery. He arrived in Cranford only a couple of years before his demise and was fostered by a local elderly couple, now deceased. There are school records to be had, there is an old teacher who remembers him, and a few of the school cohort can be traced living locally. A little further afield, living in a coastal town, is his then girlfriend, Hannah Meek. She is recently separated, living with her teenage daughter, and works as a librarian at the local prison. That makes for a stressful life at home and work, so Porteous’s questioning just adds another level of aggravation.

The story unfolds as Porteous investigates in his quiet unfussy way, and Hannah gently unravels. Tension ramps up towards the end as disparate side stories cleverly coalesce to provide a satisfactory ending to a devious plot.

And the plot is the main thing; the characters never quite grip the imagination, which is possibly why Peter Porteous never made it to the serial book status of other Cleeves stalwarts like Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez. But it is still a diverting enough early (2001) work by one of the leading detective fiction writers around.

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

 Evangelical Baptist minister Nathan Price has a new mission, talking the word of Christ to the dark continent. What the Reverend Price decides, his family have to lump as God’s will, so wife, Orleanna, and four daughters have no option but to up sticks and leave their comfortable home in the southern United States for a primitive shack in the interior of the Belgian Congo.

But it is 1959, and white colonial rule enables the family to maintain a veneer of civilisation and relative wealth with a dollar stipend coming in and an established link with Leopoldville via a maverick South African airman.

It is still a culture shock, but more humorous than worrying, until the Belgians pull out and grant a chaotic independence to the natives. Most whites flee the country, but Nathan is determined to fulfil his (now unpaid) mission. The family remain and the consequences for Orleanna and the girls are profound.

The narrative is delivered in real time by the four girls, passing the baton chapter by chapter. This gives a pleasing variety of styles in line with their diverse personalities. Eldest Rachel (15) is the frustrated prom queen who bemoans most the lack of hair products, her language peppered with delightful malapropisms. Leah and Adah (14) are twins, but only in the sense of sharing their birthday. Leah is strong willed and confident, willing to follow her father into the good fight and well able to cope with jungle life. Adah, damaged in the womb, limps along in her wake, selectively mute but articulate in her dark atheistic thoughts. Ruth May is barely more than a toddler but adds her child’s eye view of events. Orleanna’s contribution is a retrospective introduction to each section of the book, bitter with hindsight and outrage.

The book delivers on so many levels – strangers in a strange land; familial relationships that are authentically complex; the impact of local and global politics at the individual level – with prose that uses words to great effect, witty, wise, angry and moving.

Read as part of the African leg of the book-packing journey, the book wears its six hundred pages lightly, each of them a gem to read.

Fludd – Hilary Mantel

Published in 1989, this is an early novel by the ‘Wolf Hall’ author, and is refreshingly compact at under two hundred pages.

Set contemporaneously in and around a Roman Catholic church at Fetherhoughton, a small fictitious town in the north of England, it tells of events that start when the Bishop visits the incumbent, Father Angwin.

Father Angwin is, let’s say, traditional in his approach to faith. He knows his parishioners and how they like their religion – unchanging and uncomplicated. The Bishop thinks some modernisation would not go amiss, starting with the removal of the numerous statues that litter the church and represent long gone ideas of idolatry. He also promises to send a curate to help out in the ministry – someone young, keen and moving with the times.

Later that month, on a wet autumn evening, Fludd arrives at the presbytery. Father Angwin fears the worst, but Fludd’s influence on proceedings, and on the female coterie of the church and adjacent convent, is not so much threatening as unsettling. Events unwind, spiral even, and by the end (after the Fludd?) the community at Fetherhoughton is much changed.

The grim up north atmosphere is well done, and the characters are artfully drawn. The gentle humour is balanced by an underlying feeling of impending, wrath of God, doom. In the struggle of light against dark, which side is the Almighty on? And which side is Fludd on?

The Word is Murder – Anthony Horowitz

 Anthony Horowitz is not only the author of this novel; he is also a character in it –narrating the tale.

When consulting detective, Daniel Hawthorne, wants someone to write a book about his latest case, he contacts renowned novelist, Anthony Horowitz, with whom he has worked previously, advising on scripts for a TV series. Horowitz is unsure; he is busy with scripts for Foyle’s War and a Tin Tin film but is unable to resist the lure of writing about ‘true crime’ and its detection.

And the crime is tantalising enough. A woman walks into a funeral parlour and arranges her own funeral, supposedly well in advance, but within hours she has been murdered. Hawthorne is called in to assist and Horowitz accompanies him, taking notes on the investigation while trying to get inside the head of his main ‘character’ and understand his methods.

It is not a harmonious partnership. Horowitz makes unwelcome attempts to involve himself in solving the crime; and Hawthorne’s suggested improvements to Horowitz’s drafts are received with similar ill grace. With red herrings and blind alleys, the plot twists and turns, taking in old scores and newly formed enmities. It moves at a fast pace, and whenever Horowitz tries to find respite in his day job, he is interrupted and summoned to a new interview.

It works well enough with Horowitz a literate Watson to Hawthorne’s infuriating Holmes. The name-dropping insight into Horowitz’s work provides added interest and at least seems authentic.

Enjoyable as an off-key whodunnit with a clever ending.

Sweet Sorrow – David Nicholls

 As Charlie Lewis and his fiancée, Niamh, plan their wedding and review the guest list, Niamh asks why none of Charlie’s old school friends have been invited, “particularly that Shakespeare girl”.

That sends Charlie’s mind back to 1997 and his last week at school and the summer that followed it. He was at a low ebb at home (parents splitting up), at school (exams bombed out), and with his friends (blanked since an unfortunate incident with a pool ball). Off on a solitary bike ride he comes across a girl from the other side (the posh side) of the tracks. He is instantly attracted to Frances Fisher, and to improve his chances with her he reluctantly gets involved in a holiday scheme production of Romeo and Juliet.

Few authors do adolescent love, angst, and humour as well as David Nicholls. The opening chapter alone – the leavers’ disco on the final afternoon of school – is funny enough to warrant a ‘do not read in public’ warning. But it is not laughter all the way, there are serious issues involved. There is also sufficient attention given to the play to provide some interesting insights into the text.

Charlie and Fran’s romance blossoms, but must end, he’s marrying Niamh after all. However, twenty years on, a reunion of the Full Fathom Five theatre cooperative has been arranged…

The Prime Minister – Anthony Trollope

Sometime in the mid nineteenth century, duty calls for the Duke of Omnium, formerly Plantagenet Palliser MP, ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer. Parliament is balanced and no-one can muster enough support in The Commons to form a government. But government must go on, and the inoffensive Duke of Omnium, now in The Lords, is persuaded to lead a coalition, manned (and they are all men) by those prepared to put the national interest first, while of course landing plum jobs.

The Duke may be uneasy in his new role, but his wife, Lady Glencora, is in her element. They are a fabulously rich couple, and Lady Glen is determined that their time in the spotlight will be memorable, for lavish hospitality if nothing else. That creates marital tension with the Duke who likes a quiet life and sees his elevation as purely temporary.

Speaking of marital tension, disconnected from the high life, Emily Wharton, daughter of a well-off solicitor, rejects her long-time suitor and falls for a handsome chancer, Ferdinand Lopez. Her father objects, the name alone hits alarm bells. Despite Lopez being English, of good manners, reputably well connected, and comfortably off, Mr Wharton objects. He maintains Lopez cannot be considered an English Gentleman (unlike his rejected rival) and labels him in terms that now would be considered racist. However, the daughter gets her way, marries in haste, and inevitably repents at leisure.

The link between the two storylines is tenuous  - Lopez and his old rival for Emily both stand for the parliamentary seat at Silverbridge, in the Duke of Omnium’s domain, and Lady glen gets her interfering fingers involved – but each strand makes for a good novel of human relations, told by a master of that art.

It is a long and leisurely read, good for a chapter a night in bed before lights out; and at that rate it took the best part of three months to complete.

The Wych Elm – Tana French

 Toby Hennessy always considered himself lucky, growing up in affluent Dublin, in a stable middle class family, attending a good school, graduating university, and landing a decent first job as media manager for a small but cool gallery. He has a girlfriend he loves and mates who are always up for a pint.

Though he is an only child, his father is one of four brothers, and two of them also have a single child, so Toby has two cousins of like age and circumstance. The three cousins, more like siblings, spent many childhood summers together at their paternal grandparents’ home, the old and rambling Ivy House. This is nowadays occupied solely by the fourth, unmarried, brother, Hugo. And in the grounds of the Ivy House stands and old wych elm.

What happens over the next five hundred pages cannot be satisfactorily summarised without multiple spoilers, as the plot slowly warms, thickens, boils over, subsides and has the mess wiped off the cooker, but not without leaving stubborn traces that cannot be erased. Suffice to say, Toby’s good luck seems to be running out.

In addition to the satisfyingly rich plot, the dynamics of Toby’s relationships with his cousins, mates and girlfriend are picked apart, mainly by Toby who is the narrator throughout. Though not a reliable one, due to an early bump on the head that leads him (and the reader) to often doubt his memories. Other perspectives are provided as his cousins relate their versions of the past; but how reliable are those?

There is a violent robbery, and later a body turns up, so the police intrude too. Their questions only prompt Toby to ask harder ones of himself, and his cousins, about events of a decade previously, at the Ivy House, in the shadow of the wych elm.

It is a gloriously intensive novel that keeps on giving, in a style reminiscent of the novels of Donna Tartt.

This Sporting Life – David Storey

 Set and written in 1960, the sport is Rugby League and the life (or a couple of years of it) is that of second row forward, Arthur Machin.

The novel opens on Christmas Eve in the middle of a match, just as Arthur takes a shoulder to the jaw and comes to with a couple of teeth missing. That is more inconvenient than anything as there is a party due that night at Chairman’s fancy mansion. But strings are pulled, and a dentist found; after all Arthur Machin is one of the stars of the team.

Events on the field then take a back seat for the rest of the book, which concentrates on Arthur’s back story – his recruitment to the club  - and his relationships with his teammates, his landlady, and the club owners and committee men. Arthur narrates throughout in his northern no-nonsense working class style.

The book provides an interesting snapshot of its time and place, though its relevance to the modern world is limited. It does deliver an insight into the dawn of the age of celebrity as Arthur, a big fish in a small pond, is tolerated, feted, and provided with favours; so long as he performs on the pitch.

Death Deserved – Jorn Lier Horst & Thomas Enger

 Norway’s number one female distance runner, Sonja Nordstrom, has gone missing on the day her explosive autobiography is published. Is it a stunt or a meltdown? Emma Ramm, young on-line blogger on celebrity antics, goes to doorstep her. There is no answer, but the door is unlocked; inside it is empty but there are signs of a struggle. She does the right thing and calls the police. 

Alexander Blix arrives to take charge of the case. Emma and Blix converse. To him she is a witness in a potential abduction; to her he is a police source in the story she will file. But it is more than that for Blix, they have a shared history that she is oblivious to, but he knows all too well.

That is why he keeps her in the loop, enabling her to post exclusives to her editor’s delight and Blix’s boss’s dismay. It is not all one way. Emma’s celebrity knowledge and contacts prove useful, as another high-profile disappearance is uncovered, and new ones occur. Then bodies start to turn up.

It is soon clear there is a full-on serial killer on the loose, and both Blix and Emma are on the trail. A side story, Blix’s daughter on a reality TV show, gives Blix more to think about; could the contestants, or the winner, become potential targets?

The pace is fast and the balance between police/journalistic investigation and Blix/Emma personal issues is about right. The joint authorship – Horst is ex-police and Enger is ex-journalist – is no doubt reflected in the Blix/Emma dual lead, but it is seamless. And a word for the translator, as the English text is flawless.

It is a suitably dark Scandi-noir thriller, with a late reveal and a resounding climax.

Ingenious Pain – Andrew Miller

 The book opens in Devon in 1772 with the brutal and clumsy autopsy of a man, the participating doctors curious to find the secret of his unique ‘talent’. From then, the chronology is sliced and diced, but essentially the novel narrates the short life and interesting times of the man on the slab, James Dyer.

His conception, on a frozen pond in 1739, is brief and ungentle, with his mother compliant, but ignorant of the identity of the father. She is already married, and James’ strangeness, a cuckoo in the nest, is apparent early on. He does not cry, and neither does he speak. Only when he falls out of a tree and breaks his leg, does someone cotton on that he feels no pain.

That opens career opportunities that take in fairground quackery, a pampered curio in a gentleman’s collection, naval enlistment and, finally, medicine. James Dyer turns out to be very good at medieval surgery, for it is so much easier to concentrate and keep a steady hand with no empathy to the un-anesthetised patients’ pain.

But there is a downside. If you cannot feel pain, what is your experience of pleasure? And if something changes, what would it be like to feel, as an adult, pain for the first time? And would all those old wounds, many voluntarily accepted for show, now demand their agonies be felt?

There is an authentic period feel to the prose that richly describes landscapes, characters, and events in the story. It is an interesting romp through eighteenth century life that would make a good read even without Dyer’s unusual physiology. The reader is drawn in, feels the pain that James Dyer doesn’t; then feels it double when he does.

Big Sky – Kate Atkinson

 Jackson Brodie has washed up on the North Yorkshire coast where his business, Brodie Investigations, is turning over a living pursuing the missing and the adulterous, around Scarborough, Whitby and Bridlington. His actress ex-wife, Julia, is filming locally, so Jackson has the occasional help or hindrance of teenage son, Nathan, and Labrador dog, Dido.

There is no attempt here to summarise the story; the plotting and delivery are excellent, but secondary to the characterisation. It is quite a cast, starting with three golfing buddies: Tommy Holroyd, alpha male, successful haulier, into his luxury lifestyle with trophy wife, Crystal (of whom more later); Andy Bragg, more beta, second fiddle to his wife in their hotel business, but with a lucrative side line in arranging travel and job placements for young foreign females who want to work in the ‘hospitality’ industry; and Vincent Ives, definitely gamma, recently separated from wife, Wendy, subsequently moved out of the marital bungalow into a seedy bedsit, and to cap it all, now made redundant.

Tommy’s wife, Crystal, has a past to put behind her and she will put up with Tommy for the comfort and security he provides. Her emotional capital is invested in baby daughter, Candice, and teenage stepson, Harry. Harry’s interests are not trucks and golf, but books and theatre. He works part time at the vampire attraction and volunteers backstage at the pier theatre, helping the resident acts – washed up comic, Barclay Jack and rising drag queen, Bunny Hopps. Add to this two young female detective constables, Ronnie and Reggie, on a low key trawl for information on a historic abuse case.

It is a heady mix and Kate Atkinson lights the blue touch paper and fireworks ensue. Plots develop, twist, interweave; murky pasts emerge and uncertain futures beckon.

And through it all, Jackson Brodie plods like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern through Hamlet, a bit part player, never quite up to speed, but in at the death. Despite working on the periphery of events, his pithy commentary on life, punctuated by imagined dialogue with Julia, is central and, more often than not, funny.

The Prisoner of Heaven – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

 In this, the third volume of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, centre stage is taken by young Daniel Sempere, son of the proprietor of Sempere & Sons bookshop in Barcelona, and his older friend, Fermin Romero de Torres, who helps out there.

It is 1957, Christmas time, when business should be booming, but Daniel is on his own in the shop when a grim old man, cloaked and disfigured, enters. He makes an expensive purchase but instead of taking it away, he leaves it for Fermin Romero de Torres inscribed with a cryptic message.

The message is a link to the past, to 1939 and the aftermath of the civil war, when the young Fermin is detained in horrific conditions at the Montjuic fortress. Also imprisoned there is famous (or notorious) author Daniel Martin, the main character from the previous volume – The Angel’s Game - who is now somewhat crazed. Fermin befriends Martin and learns of the hold that the prison governor has over the writer, which concerns a threat to a his (Martin’s) young friend, Isabella Sempere, and her young son, Daniel.

The dark story of Fermin’s past imprisonment and attempted escape from Montjuic is alternated with the more light-hearted present. Even there, there are difficulties. Daniel is unsure of his wife’s fidelity and Fermin’s plan to marry his own sweetheart has obstacles connected to his past.

Fermin’s breezy tone permeates the narrative and makes for mainly easy reading, with the plot less labyrinthine than in previous volumes. The characters of Daniel, and particularly Fermin, shine through and while Fermin gets some closure, Daniel has unfinished business by the end.

Presumably, that is dealt with in the fourth and final volume of the series, thankfully, completed by Zafon in 2016, well before his death earlier this year.

Into the Water – Paula Hawkins

 Nel Abbott has been fascinated by the drowning pool at Beckford ever since she holidayed in the Northumberland village as a child. In medieval times women branded as witches met their death there, and in modern times women labelled as suicides joined them. One as recently as 2015, a schoolgirl named Katie Whittaker, Nel’s daughter’s best friend.

And now, later that year, Nel too has died in the water. The first question, as always, is did she jump or was she pushed. The second question, whatever the answer to the first, is why.

Nel’s estranged sister, Julia (or Jules as she now styles herself) is called to Beckford to identify the body and look after her niece, Lena, who has now lost her best friend and her mother to the water. As an outsider, Jules, has no idea of the secrets, lies, loyalties and enmities held close by the community. Even the DI on the case lives locally, his wife is Lena and Katie’s head teacher. Fortunately, his DS, Erin Morgan, is an outsider as well.

Told from multiple viewpoints, insiders and outsiders, first person and third person, the events of the fateful evening are unravelled. Links emerge to Katie’s death, and one even earlier. And Jules must face revelations about that childhood holiday in Beckford that sowed the seeds of her and Nel’s falling out.

There is a lot of plot involved and it hangs together well. The multiple perspectives serve to flesh out the characters and move the narrative along at a ferocious pace. It is tense with twists all the way to the end.

As a thriller it is up there with Hawkins’ previous hit, Girl on the Train, which is recommendation enough.

The Bickford Fuse – Andrey Kurkov

We are in the USSR, sometime around the end of the Second World War; or rather sometimes, as the timeline shifts with deliberate ambiguity.

A self-propelled barge carrying explosives runs aground in the Sea of Japan. When the captain fails to return from seeking help, the only other crew member, Vasily Kharitonov, decides he, too, must look for assistance. But what about the explosives? His solution is to unravel a fuse (a Bickford fuse) behind him so that if instructed he can destroy the stockpile rather than let it fall into enemy hands.

He walks westwards, for years, unravelling what is now clearly a metaphorical (or metaphysical) fuse behind him. He encounters a range of typical Soviet nonsense – a ‘mulag’ imprisoning dissident musicians, a runway where no planes ever land but around which factions fight, a town whose inhabitants nearly all work in a factory producing straightjackets, and so on.

In parallel, there are a couple more wandering souls. A searchlight truck with a driver, Gorych, and a passenger sets off into the night. The night and their journey are unending, with the truck rolling on long after the fuel runs out; things happen occasionally. Elsewhere the one-legged Captain Koretsky is on a mission that requires him to deliver radio speakers to remote communities. In one such, he recruits an assistant, and they head eastwards.

Over it all, a powerless black airship floats at the mercy of the wind. On board, the father of the nation looks down on Kharatonov, Gorych and Koretsky, unable to intervene.

It is surely all very symbolic and it may be cuttingly satirical if you are Russian; and in that language the prose may have been less clunky than the translation. Otherwise, it can be enjoyed as a kind of Russian magic realism where the impossibilities and strangeness are the acceptable price of immersion in atmospheric settings and unusual characters.

The Other Half of Augusta Hope – Joanna Glen

What, or who, is her other half? It could be her twin with a different birthday. The Hope sisters are born either side of midnight on 31 July, which is reflected in their names - Julia and Augusta.

The twins are as alike as chalk and cheese, Julia pretty and content, Augusta plain and questioning. Julia is into dolls, clothes and pets; Augusta’s passions are books and words. She has her favourites words, like Burundi, the country’s name rolling off the tongue evocatively. It piques her interest, and she researches the country’s history.

Unknown to her, half a world away, a boy named Parfait Nduwimana is growing up in Burundi, living with the legacy of that history and experiencing a present not much better. But his outlook is positive, and after talking to his friend, the local Spanish priest, he develops a plan to walk north to Morocco and from there go by boat to Spain. He will take his younger brother with him.

Back in England, Augusta also has the wanderlust. A family holiday and her study of Spanish literature feeds a dream of life in the sun there; she visits regularly and eventually she makes the move and gets a job in the south of Spain. Parfait makes it there too, against the odds. But for each, happiness is tainted by family tragedies.

Their paths cross once or twice early on, near misses only, but it would be rubbish if they did not meet up eventually. Could it turn out that the other half of Augusta is a soul mate in the form of boy from Burundi?

The twin narratives of Augusta and Parfait move their respective stories on rapidly. Augusta’s relationship with her twin and parents is particularly well-observed, and Parfait’s optimistic response to the hand life has dealt him is uplifting. While their destiny may seem clear, their journeys have enough twists and turns to keep the reader unsure to the end.

The Uninvited Guests – Sadie Jones

In late Victorian England, the Torrington family’s stately home of Sterne is under threat from the creditors. Edward Swift, who has married the widow Charlotte, is off to Manchester for the weekend to secure a new loan, leaving behind Charlotte and three stepchildren – Clovis, Emerald and young Imogen. It is unfortunate timing; he will miss Emerald’s eighteenth birthday dinner.

Only a couple of guests are invited, Emerald’s childhood friend, Patience Sutton and her mother. But circumstances intervene and Patience’s brother, Earnest, turns up instead of the mother; and when nouveau riche neighbour John Buchanan calls with a present, he gets added to the guest list too. Dealing with the revised catering falls to housekeeper Florence Trieves, aided by one maid.

When Clovis goes to collect the Suttons from the station, he returns with startling news. There has been a dreadful accident on the branch line and passengers are in need of somewhere to shelter until the railway can make arrangements for their journey to continue. They have been directed to Sterne.

When they turn up, they are a raggle-taggle bunch from the third class carriage, plus one gentleman from first who goes by the name Charlie Traversham-Beecham. While the rabble are herded into the morning room to be plied with cups of tea, the gentleman (and a very forward one too) is invited to the perpetually disrupted birthday dinner.

The evening gradually descends into confusion, chaos and madness. The rabble seem to multiply, Traversham-Beecham exerts a malevolent control over proceedings, a storm breaks, past truths emerge, and suppressed opinions are aired. Will relationships and guests, invited and otherwise, survive the stormy night?

The narrative and characters draw the reader in and forward quickly; the slide from normality through strangeness into the supernatural is gradual and well handled, so by the end, the events of the weekend, as explained to the returning Edward Swift, seem perfectly natural.

Conviction – Denise Mina

It is a conventional start to a thriller. Anna is up to enjoy an hour of peace and quiet, listening to a podcast in the kitchen, before Hamish and the girls come down. The marriage is off the boil and, frankly, Anna lacks the will to put it right. However, Hamish’s solution is more nuclear; he is leaving this morning with Anna’s best friend, Estelle, and he is taking the girls with him. That leaves Anna stunned and in no mood to welcome the subsequent arrival of Estelle’s now ex, Fin. He is a bit of a celebrity and somewhat needy.

Anna’s turbulence is exacerbated as the podcast she was listening to concerns a true crime and miscarriage of justice involving the death of an old acquaintance, Leon Parker. Unable to cope mentally with her own family break-up, she re-immerses herself in the podcast and determines to find out the truth behind the facts. The facts are that Leon Parker and his two children (by different ex-wives) died at sea, poisoned while alone on board the luxury yacht, Dana, which was then scuttled.

Fin goes along for the ride, using their quest to fuel his sagging social media presence. What he does not know yet is that Anna has another connection to the case, via Parker’s new wife, Gretchen Teigler. Fin’s exposure of them on social media could, and does, unleash forces too unpleasant to contemplate.

Cue a helter-skelter dash across Europe as Anna and Fin seek answers to the Dana killings and flee pursuing would-be assassins.

It all feels very modern with podcasts and the power social media to the fore. Some suspension of credibility is needed in the David and Goliath struggle of Anna and Fin versus the all-seeing and all-powerful Gretchen Teigler.

No spoilers in saying the outcome is as conventional as the start; but what is sandwiched in between is anything but.

Born to Run – Christopher McDougall

The book starts off as a bit of a travelogue with the author delving into the Copper Canyons (Barrancas del Cobre) of Mexico’s Sierra Madre, where few strangers go and even fewer come back. Two reason for that – getting lost and dying of thirst, and getting found and dying of a drug baron’s bullet.

McDougall risks it in search of the Tarahumara, an indigenous group renowned for their long distance running prowess, first glimpsed in the 1990’s when someone persuaded a small group to travel to the States to compete in an ultra-marathon – the Leadville 100 mile run through mountains at altitude.

But McDougall’s motive is more personal. He has suffered running injuries for years and wants to find out how the Tarahumara can run vast distances, in sandals, in severe conditions, well into their fifties and sixties, without damage.

When he finally makes contact, it is through an American gone native who goes by the name of Caballo Blanco (the white horse). He is as enthusiastic about the Tarahumara as McDougall and shares his dream of putting on a race in the Barrancas between the Tarahumara and the best of the current US ultrarunners.

Interspersed with the narrative are pen portraits of some of those ultrarunners and their incredible feats of running endurance and the crazy events at which they compete. Then there is an investigative theme on the issue of running shoes that concludes, convincingly, they promote rather than prevent injury. The message is barefoot, or as close to it as possible, is best. In addition, history, anthropology, and physiology is delved into to theorise that man’s unique ability to run vast distances without stopping to rest, enabling pursuit hunting, was an evolutionary advantage that proved significant. Man was indeed born to run.

The narrative climaxes with the great race in the barrancas, and it does not disappoint. Fitting, for a book that gets more interesting and satisfying, page by page, as the themes develop and combine in a winning formula.

Shuttlecock – Graham Swift

The narrator, Prentis, works in a small civilian unit of the police where records on redundant incomplete investigations are held pending resolution or indeed forever as the case may be. His relationship with his boss, Quinn, is strained; he suspects Quinn is setting him impossible tasks, to find links and connections that don’t exist - to test him or to break him. Bear in mind this is the 1980’s so this work involves paper records and requires clerical and mental dexterity.

Relationships at home are no better. He is a bully to his wife and two sons. He imposes his will and gets sullen obedience in return. One bone of contention is his refusal to take them out on Sundays; instead, he visits his institutionalised father who has suddenly become mute after a breakdown.

That is another complicated relationship. His father was always a distant figure and much of what Prentis knows of him he has gleaned from an autobiographical account of his WWII exploits as an agent and then a prisoner in occupied France.

Things build to a head as the older son flexes his adolescent independence. Prentis finds himself between a father who won’t speak and a son who won’t listen. However, his boss eventually opens up and takes Prentis into his confidence about the work he has been set. Prentis will have to face up to some stark choices.

The portrayal of the decidedly odd character of Prentiss is well done. His self-centred view of the world is made to make sense no matter how distasteful his actions. The father-son dynamics are explored with perceptiveness. And though Prentis’s life is short on action and adventure, there is plenty of that in the extensive extracts from his father’s wartime account.

It is concise at just over two hundred pages, and though published in 1981 it does not seem dated in style. In summary, a curious period piece.

Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood creates this novel around the real life story of Grace Marks who was convicted in Canada in 1843, along with fellow servant James McDermott, of the murder of their employer Thomas Kinnear and housekeeper Nancy Montgomery. Grace was only sixteen years old at the time (McDermott was older) and some clemency was applied sparing her the gallows for life imprisonment.

By 1859, Grace has been in and out of an asylum and holds a trustee position in the penitentiary, regularly allowed to serve in the Governor’s household. There is a body of opinion that maintains her innocence, claiming she was an innocent and unwilling accomplice to McDermott, involved against her will. Others see her as the evil and manipulative driver of the crime. 

Enter Dr Simon Jordan, a young physician specialising in the diseases of the mind, full of modern ideas from Europe and ambitions to set up his own, forward-thinking institution. It his through his interviews with Grace that her full story unfolds. Or at least her version of it; can Dr Jordan, and the reader through him, believe all she says? 

Meanwhile Dr Jordan has his own issues to deal with as a genteel but impoverished young professional susceptible to feminine charms, be they from Grace, the governor’s daughters or his distressed landlady.

Grace gives him the story of her childhood emigration from Ireland, her separation from her family, and her early employment as a servant girl. In that first job she makes and loses a friend in traumatic circumstance that could be significant in her subsequent actions. Those actions, too, are eventually related in their full horror. Dr Jordan’s exploits between sessions with Grace add colour and light relief while also heightening the tension. 

It is all beautifully written, leaving much for the reader to ponder, filter the ambiguities and come to their own conclusion on Grace’s guilt or otherwise. One clear verdict is that it is a very good read.

Different Class – Joanne Harris

It is September 2005, a new term at St Oswald’s Grammar School, and veteran Latin teacher Roy Straitley is bracing himself for changes. The events of the previous academic year (covered in a previous book) has led to the installation of a new head teacher and his ‘turnaround’ team, full of buzz words, policies and strategies that are anathema to an old stick like Roy. He’s been at St Oswald’s, pupil and master, thirty-four years and has seen it all before.

 The new head is also an old boy, and that brings back memories to Roy of the events of 1981 when the new head was briefly a pupil. It was another problematic year for the school when a charismatic colleague of Roy’s was hounded out of his job after three boys caused him trouble. And now that old colleague has died and, to Roy’s dismay, is refused a memorial in the school chapel for fear of resurrecting the scandal.

 One of the boys recorded the events of 1981 in a diary and snippets of it are revealed throughout the book though, as nicknames are used, identities remain uncertain.

The 1981 diary, Roy’s memories of that year, and the trials of teaching under current ‘turnaround’ conditions progress to their respective climaxes. It is no surprise, or spoiler, to find that they are all connected; but the who’s and how’s remain pleasingly obscured to the end.

It is atmospherically, almost claustrophobically, written with events all taking place in or around the school premises, past and present. This is a different side to Joanne Harris; no summery rural French idyll here, it is autumnal, suburban and stifled Englishness.

 This is the third (though the first I have read) book in the St Oswald’s series and despite several references back it stands alone well enough. Enjoyable without sending me scurrying to read the earlier two.

Life and Times of Michael K – J M Coetze

Michael K, at thirty-one years old, has survived a difficult childhood (institutionalised with a hare lip and a slow mind) and early adulthood to eventually hold down a job in the parks and gardens department in Cape Town, South Africa.

But now the government of the city and the whole country is collapsing under civil war and, to make matters worse for Michael, his sick mother needs him to look after her. With unrest on the streets and squalid urban living conditions, Mrs K wants to leave town and travel up-country to her childhood homestead of which she has fond, if rose-tinted, memories. That is a big ask for Michael what with travel restrictions, roads filled with soldiers, militia and guerrillas, and a woman who cannot walk more than a few steps. But he is resourceful and fixes up a sort of barrow and wheels his mother off.

His survival skills are tested by the military and civil authorities and he endures hospitalisation, incarceration, isolation and interrogation; not to mention cold, thirst and hunger.

Most of the narrative is from Michael’s point of view, with a brief contribution by a doctor who becomes interested to the point of obsession with K’s case and his outlook on life and death. It provides a useful, articulate, counterpoint to Michael’s less analytic outlook.

It is a spare and haunting read that leaves the reader despairing for Michael’s well being and sharing the doctor’s bemusement at Michael K’s self-appointed role as a long-suffering but perennial survivor.

The Wall – John Lanchester

The world has changed. Now, after The Change, people in areas worst affected are even more desperate to get to those places less so – like Britain. Britain’s answer is The Wall that stretches the whole coastline and the Defenders who man (and woman) it with searchlights and rifles.

Defenders are conscripted. Everyone has to do their two years on the Wall; their tour of duty increased for any lapse of attention or breach of discipline. Twelve hour shifts, two weeks on two weeks off, one of which is for training and the other leave. But where to go for your leave? Back to your parents who have caused the mess, the Change, and put you on the Wall?

We join Kavanagh on his first day, experience the cold, the tedium, the fear of action that would break the tedium, looking out for those trying to get in over the Wall. As for those Others trying to get in, they are getting increasingly desperate and well organised. There are rumours of inside help, traitors at work.

And another thing, for every Other who breaches the wall and gets away, a responsible Defender is sent the other way, ‘put to sea’ and abandoned to their fate.

The book is refreshingly compact and is convincing in its dystopian outlook. The mind numbing routine and the interludes of frantic action are nicely balanced. No spoilers, but there are also tastes of life either side of the Wall.

The Martian – Andy Weir

When Mark Watney gets left, presumed dead, on Mars when the rest of the crew abandon their mission in the face of an overwhelming sandstorm, things don’t look good. Okay, so he is alive through a fluke of circumstance, and the base (“the HAB”) is intact with all life supporting systems operational, but the comms dish has blown away and there is no way of letting anyone on Earth or the receding spaceship know that he needs rescuing.

The next scheduled mission to Mars will not arrive for four years and will land over three thousand kilometres away. His food supply he can stretch to last a year. No, things don’t look good. But he is resourceful and mentally tough and a botanist with a good grasp of basic science and engineering, so he gets to, tackling one job at a time, staying alive, thinking things through, counting his assets.

He has got a couple of Mars rover buggies, some emergency pop-up tents, five spare space suits, and half a dozen potatoes meant for Thanksgiving supper. He survives, buys time, waits, makes plans.

Then back on Earth, someone monitoring satellite images notices things at the Mars base have changed position. Who is moving them? It can only be an alive Mark Watney. All resources are diverted to come up with a rescue plan that seems impossible to execute before he starves to death.

The narrative now toggles between the fight for survival on Mars and the efforts to launch a rescue mission from Earth. Watney is tested to the limit as every crisis overcome is followed by a new problem to solve. On earth the best brains on the planet scheme and model options, none guaranteed to succeed.

It makes for compulsive reading. Watney’s log has enough science to convince and its breezy tone gets the reader on board, urging him on to a testing climax.

The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing – Mary Paulson-Ellis

Solomon Farthing is an aging, down at heel heir hunter in Edinburgh. He owes money he has not got, but a local DI owes him a favour and gives him a tip off that could save his bacon. Thomas Methven has just died in a care home; he has no known next of kin and no real estate, but he does have a fifty thousand pounds sewn into his burial, or rather cremation, suit. If Solomon can find an heir and agree commission before the funeral, he will be off the financial hook with cash to spare.

Interspersed with the 2016 heir hunt, a flashback to November 1918 unfolds involving Solomon’s grandfather, Captain Godfrey Farthing and his small band of WW1 soldiers holed up in a deserted farmhouse close to the front line, days before the armistice. One of his men is Archibald Methven.

As the two stories move forward in parallel, links between them emerge and resonate down the years, not only the characters and their families but also in the form of seemingly inconsequential objects. Valueless in themselves these items – including a pawn ticket, a reel of pink cotton, a walnut shell, a silver cap badge - become charged with significance as they are gambled for and traded by the soldiers, then passed down the generations. Solomon Farthing’s own past is revealed as his investigations brush up uncomfortably close to his long repressed memories.

The 2016 story has black humour and elements of farce as Solomon keeps one step ahead of his pursuers; as well as the debt collectors there is a rival heir hunter and a (not quite) relative whose car Solomon has purloined. As counterpoint, the 1918 story is necessarily dark with the men mentally stretched to the limit having endured much and got within days of relief - provided no order comes to advance once more before the cease fire.

Each element leads to a fine climax after five hundred pages of pleasing complexity and intrigue.

The Whisper Man – Alex North

A young boy goes missing; police efforts to find him are fruitless until the body turns up weeks later close to where he disappeared. Worrying for the local community, particularly as it echoes serial cases twenty years earlier when the ‘whisper man’ was at large.

But he is still behind bars, and still keeping schtum about where his final victim lies. DI Pete Willis, who put him away, still visits prison periodically to get him to tell, and now must visit again due to the copycat ‘whispering man’ element of the recent crime.

Into the area moves single dad Tom Kennedy and his son Jake, the latter sensitive and still affected by the death of his mother. Their new house has an unfortunate connection to the whisper man case and when Jake hears whispering in the night…

It gets spooky; and complicated as Tom’s own childhood trauma gets stirred up. Throw in an attractive single mum at the school gate and a hardnosed female DI on the case and the story moves on apace, the narrative switching all the time among Tom Kennedy, Jake, the two police officers, and the unknown new whisper man.

The mix of crime, family relations, and the potentially paranormal works surprisingly well to give a good, mildly scary, read.

The Memory Chamber – Holly Cave

Isobel is a heaven architect, one of the best. Her job, in a time not far off, is to craft virtual heavens that will combine the memories of (usually) dying clients with key brain cells extracted after their death to enable a consciousness to continue in an eternally pleasurable state – heaven indeed.

She falls for a client and creates memories that will last beyond his too soon demise. But when he is suspected of committing a violent crime hours before his death, there is only one way to prove his innocence: for Isobel to enter his heaven and look for unwanted memories that may lurk there. And it is vital that he is cleared, as criminals are not allowed a heaven; sentencing goes beyond life here.

Murky waters are stirred. The ethics of the infant heaven architecture industry are lagging behind the technology; the law is even further behind, but its enforcers are very interested. The future setting is credible with driverless transport, eye-lens videos, and subcutaneous chip communications. And there are plot twists not to be spoilt here.

It is all narrated in the first person by Isobel, so we know only what she knows and share her doubts and fears about people and events around her. That makes for an intense reading experience, for her character is complex and interesting. After the intriguing first third, the middle third flags slightly but is worth pushing through to the exciting and frantic final section.

Five Quarters of the Orange – Joanne Harris

The widow Francois Simon runs a small creperie in Les Laveuses, a sleepy village on the River Loire. The story she needs to get off her chest provides two narratives, one covering events in her youth that trouble her, and the other covering why it must and how it can be told.

What links the two strands is that no-one in Les Laveuses knows that the widow Simon, who bought the old derelict Dartigen farm a few years since, is the same Framboise Dartigen who left there as a twelve year old girl in the aftermath of the German occupation in the Second World War. She keeps her identity secret for good reason. People died in the occupation; other people got blamed; and residents of Les Laveuses have long memories and revile the name of Dartigen.

All would have remained well enough had not the renown of her culinary creations (based on her mother’s recipes encoded in an album left to Framboise) come to the notice of her nephew’ wife. She is a Paris food journalist; she wants the recipes and is not above dirty tricks, including threat of exposure to the locals, to get them.

The two narratives unfold in parallel. The child Framboise runs wild on the banks of the Loire: battling her mother, manipulating her older siblings, and getting too close to an enigmatic young German soldier. The widow Framboise finds her creperie subject to fierce and unfair competition. The two wars showcase Framboise’s character, but there are rarely winners and losers in war, just survivors.

The descriptive prose is well flavoured with culinary references that enhance rather than intrude on the narrative. The relationships are complex, motivations unsure, and outcomes uncertain until the twin climaxes arrive.

A riveting, deliciously written book.

The Postmistress – Sarah Blake

In 1940 two stories unfold, one on each side of the Atlantic Ocean. In London, bombs start to fall as the Blitz begins and cub reporter, Frankie Bard, takes cover between shifts broadcasting news back to the States. In Franklyn on the tip of Cape Cod, the locals listen to the voice of the ‘radio gal’ but events in Europe have little effect on still-neutral USA, and town life goes on as normal.

The doctor’s new wife, Emma Fitch, arrives to take up residence; postmaster, Iris James, sorts the mail; and Harry Vane runs his garage business unaware that Iris James has her sights set on him.

Dr Fitch loses a patient and, more moved than most by Frankie Bard’s broadcasts, he decides to go off to London to help minister to the dying and wounded. There is a chance encounter with Frankie that leaves the radio gal with a message to deliver back home. But before then she lands the work assignment she has been craving, recording the stories of the countless, stateless, refugees fleeing the Reich and heading west across Europe for a boat, they hope, to the USA.

It is dangerous and emotionally draining work, especially as no-one back home (including the residents of Franklyn) seem to care what is going on. Back there the news is Mrs Fitch’s pregnancy and Iris James finally snaring Harry Vale. Frankie returns to the US and heads up to Cape Cod to deliver the messages first-hand – on the war in Europe and about Dr Fitch. How well will they be received?

The contrast between the daily life in London and Cape Cod is well documented and using Frankie’s broadcasts to link the two is effective. But both narratives are fragmentary; back stories are hinted at but not developed; futures are left dangling. This, presumably, is deliberate and echoes Frankie’s increasing introspection about the nature of her reportage – her subjects are real when in her sights but may as well not exist before or after.

Neither a difficult nor particularly satisfying read.

The Museum of You – Carys Bray

Clover Quinn lives with her dad, Darren, in a three bedroom house in a small town on the Lancashire coast. The long summer holidays are here and now she has turned twelve she can be left at home to look after herself while Darren is on shift driving his bus. There is a watchful eye and friendly face next door though in the shape of Mrs Mackeral. She has known Clover since she was born; literally, as she delivered Clover from her surprised mother on the kitchen floor.

That is one of the few things Clover knows about her mother, Becky Brookfield; other titbits have been gleaned from her grandad, her uncle Jim, and her dad’s best friend Colin. Dad Darren, however, is reticent. He is more than reticent; he is almost in denial. One of the three bedrooms is stacked high with Becky Brookfield’s stuff that he cannot face dealing with.

Now Clover, inspired by a school trip to a museum and a conversation with the curator, decides to use her time home alone to secretly set up an exhibition in the third bedroom to interpret the remnants of the mother she never knew.

Told alternately from Clover and Darren’s perspectives, a picture of normal chaotic family life emerges, with flashbacks and tangential forays into the lives of minor but well-drawn characters.

As the summer heat builds so does the tension. As the exhibition nears completion, Clover moves from childhood into adolescence and Darren notices the first shoots of feelings for another woman. But the big question is how he will react to the ‘Museum of You’.

It is well done and sensitively written with the relationship between Clover and Darren particularly touching. And if sometimes Darren gets a bit maudlin over his loss of Becky, it is balanced by the humour of Mrs Mackeral’s verbal mix-ups.

My Name is Leon – Kit de Waal

When we first meet Leon he is in hospital, but he is fine; he is there as his mother has just given birth to his half-brother, Jake. Leon is a sturdy nine-year-old, self-reliant, as he needs to be, as neither his nor Jake’s father is around, and his mum Carole is a liability.

She cannot cope and eventually Leon and Jake end up in care with foster-lady Maureen. All goes well for six months or so, then a permanent placement is found for Jake – he is a baby and, unlike Leon, white, which makes him easier to rehome. The separation from his baby brother devastates Leon and he hatches a plan to reunite the family.

That will not be easy with Jake elsewhere in London and Carol institutionalised in Bristol, so Leon starts accumulating the things he will need – a map, baby stuff, and money filched from unguarded handbags – in an increasingly heavy rucksack.

After another enforced change in fostering, Leon discovers a local allotment and befriends a couple of plot holders, at last male role models of a sort, though neither are ideal. Their potting sheds provide another source for Leon’s pilfering.

Leon chooses a bad moment to make his move. There is trouble on the streets with protests over the death of a black man at police hands. It is scary out there for a ten-year-old, even if he has got a gun in his rucksack!

It is all told from Leon’s viewpoint, which maintains a tight focus, possibly at the expense of variety in voice and tone.

Middle England – Jonathan Coe

The book opens with Benjamin Trotter returning to his home in the Midlands after his mother’s funeral. He has his father with him, and, as the evening progresses, they are joined by a succession of close friends and relatives who turn up uninvited, concerned at his quiet departure from the wake. That is in 2010, and the cast assembled form the core of characters that will take the reader through the events of the ensuing decade with all its challenges.

They are a diverse bunch, though a couple were at grammar school with Benjamin - an owner of a garden centre who gives a businessman’s perspective and a newspaper columnist who provides an insight into the political machine. From the family is Benjamin’s sister, Lois who is a university librarian, and her daughter, Sophie.

Sophie brings the younger generation into the picture. Her best friend, Sohan, is gay and of immigrant stock. Sophie, herself, in a reaction against her previous relationships with liberal metropolitan academic types, starts one with a working guy in Birmingham. His mother is far to the right and employs a Polish cleaner. Throwing in a couple more friends from Benjamin’s schooldays, Charlie Chappell, the children’s entertainer, and Jennifer Hawkins, Ben’s first failed attempt at coupling, provides additional scope for comedy.

The interplay between this panoply of characters and the significant events of the decade – the London Olympics, the US presidential election, the EU referendum, three general elections, and Brexit - paints a broad but vivid picture of Middle England in the 2010s. Each viewpoint is given respect, placed in real life context, with mouthpieces that articulate the debates of the day: immigration v racism; political correctness v equality of opportunity; and taking back control v cultural isolation. The destructive nature of the arguments takes its toll, but is there some hope for reconciliation at a personal level?

Difficult as the task is, the book successfully and entertainingly achieves its aims of reflecting life in middle England in a turbulent decade.

The Birthday Boys – Beryl Bainbridge

In June 1910 Captain Scott’s latest expedition sets off from Cardiff on the Terra Nova.

Its destination is Antarctica, its purpose to be the first to reach the South Pole. The book consists five sequential narratives, one each from the five men destined to make the final push for the pole.

First off is petty Officer ‘Taff’ Evans with his account of a wild send-off at Cardiff. A month later in July 1911 ‘Uncle Bill’ Wilson tells of a hazardous expedition en route, undertaken to collect specimens from the remote South Trinidad Island. A gap of nine months ensues before Scott himself, ‘the owner’, takes up the story of the error-strewn landfall on Antarctica (by now March 1911) and establishing bases. A fourth voice, that of Lieutenant ‘Birdie’ Bowers, describes a risky midwinter sortie in July 1911 to collect penguin eggs. Finally, ominously dated March 1912, ‘Titus’ Oates relates the final, fateful, journey alongside the four previous narrators whom by now we know well.

In fabricating these voices and linking them together, Beryl Bainbridge presents a most human account of their endeavour. The conflicts, disagreements and resentments are presented alongside the respect, camaraderie, loyalty and love. Heroic failure is made understandable if not sensible.

Is it bravery, patriotism or thirst for adventure or knowledge that drives their quest, or some compulsion to test themselves to the limit, inexplicable to most people? Whatever, it makes for gripping reading as each episode raises the stakes and shortens the odds on survival. Even the celebrations in Cardiff put Taff Evans at risk, of his job if not his life.

A clever idea very well executed.

The Hunting Party – Lucy Foley

This is a classic murder mystery with an added twist as not only is the identity of the murderer kept from the reader until the end, but also that of the victim.

The set-up is a group of nine young, well-heeled members of the metropolitan elite who book a remote highland hunting lodge to see in the new year in splendid, champagne fuelled isolation. They are not completely alone, there is a few staff and another party of two elsewhere on the estate.

Now to the form and plot, which complement each other cleverly. There are four female narrators (three guests and the manager) and another point of view over the shoulder of the male gamekeeper. They pass the baton to and fro to tell the story, but in two timelines. One starts on the discovery of the body on the second day of the new year, the other flashes back three days earlier to the day before New Year’s Eve when the party arrived.

Both strands move steadily forward, alternating to build up to twin climaxes of revealing the crime and unmasking the perpetrator.

It all works very well. The split timeline is effective, and the sliced narration provides a varied perspective on current events and private insights into long simmering hidden passions, resentments and most importantly, motives (of both guests and hosts).

And, of course, it snows to increase the isolation, ramp up the tension and provide a stark backdrop to the unfolding drama.

Manhattan Beach – Jennifer Egan

In pre-World War II New York young Anna Kerrigan accompanies her father, Eddie, to a rendezvous on Manhattan Beach with Dexter Styles. It is around these three characters that the novel unfolds over a decade or so.

It is mainly Anna who takes centre stage later, during the war years, by which time Eddie Kerrigan is long gone and she finds herself moving in circles that bring her back into anonymous contact with the Dexter Styles. He, she now realises, is heavily involved in racketeering, which throws new light on her father’s disappearance.

But meanwhile there is a war to be won and Anna, bored by the clerical work assigned her in the naval dockyard, wants to join the trainee divers she sees from her office window. Her battle for acceptance in such an exclusively male role, her ambiguous relationship with Dexter Styles, and the mystery of her father’s absence are weaved together in a context rich with period detail.

The plotline and modern historical setting both engage and there are sufficient twists, turns and peril to maintain interest to the end. The heroine is vulnerable but determined and her outcome matters; the fates of the two men are harder to care about.