W. B. Belcher - Lay Down Your Weary Tune

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A decent novel, but somewhat flawed

Overall, I enjoyed this book.  It's not quite what I expected and it has its flaws, but it kept me reading and has some good moments.

The book is narrated in the first person by Jack Wyeth, a musician and writer who isn't very successful at either and is lost and adrift in life.  Out of the blue comes an invitation to ghost-write the autobiography of Eli Page, a Dylan-like hero figure to Jack, whose songs were hugely popular decades ago but who is now a damaged virtual recluse in a small New England town.  His time with Eli forces John to acknowledge and confront his own past and his own failings, he meets a woman, makes an enemy of the local cop, has to confront small-town small-mindedness, becomes embroiled in a series of crimes which point to Eli...and so on.  It's better than it sounds, but there is a rather familiar feel to a lot of the plot, and the climax verges on the criminally cliché-ed.

Nonetheless, W.B Belcher writes well and creates quite convincing characters and a sense of place, so it did draw me in and keep me reading.  Surprisingly, though, I didn't think he really conveyed that sense of the power of songs which shape our youth and our growing up and which seem woven into our very bones, nor of the almost mythical status their creators can achieve in our minds.  I was hoping for a sense of what it might be like to meet one of those who did that for me - Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen or Paul Simon, for example - but I found these aspects of the book a bit disappointing.  This is John's story of his finding some maturity rather than a story of music and its creators; it's not bad, but it's not particularly great or particularly original.

I enjoyed this enough to round 3.5 stars up to 4, but I thought it could have been a good deal better, especially about the music, given that a musician was at its heart.  Recommended with some reservations.

Mary Horlock - The Book Of Lies

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Thoughtful and involving

I thought this was a very good book: well written, gripping and with interesting and important things to say.

Set on Guernsey, the main narrator is Catherine, a teenage girl who, on the first page, tells us that she has killed a schoolmate. What follows is her story leading up to that point and beyond, very skilfully interwoven with accounts written by her father and others of events during the Nazi Occupation of the island. The book, as you might expect, is mainly concerned with lies in both these times and with the parallels between the two. It speaks of how people lie sometimes deliberately to cover up shameful acts, sometimes to try to do good, sometimes to seek attention and sometimes because it just seems to happen and they can't help themselves. It also looks at the effects of lying and how it can rapidly get out of control, producing all kinds of unwanted and sometimes terrible consequences, and of the mistrust and damage they can engender.

I found all this fascinating and gripping because of the quality of the storytelling. The narrator's voice seemed very convincing to me, with that slightly flippant teenage tone even when describing grave and terrible events, and the two stories sat very interestingly together. My only reservations were that Catherine's story itself was in two timeframes which weren't always clear to me, and although I liked the ambiguity of the ending, its tone didn't quite ring true - hence four stars instead of five. Nevertheless, I would warmly recommend this as an enjoyable, literate and thoughtful read.

John Connolly - Hell's Bells

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very enjoyable read

I enjoyed this book. It is a very good, well-written adventure story, which is very amusing in places and with a good deal of thoughtful and erudite stuff, too.

This book has a distinct voice of its own, but there are echoes of Terry Pratchett, Radio 4's Old Harry's Game, Tolkien and even Philip Pullman in places. The story, of a young teenage boy with his dog and a motley assortment of friends lost in Hell and trying to prevent its demons invading Earth, got off to a rather slow start and I found some of the humour at the beginning a bit laboured, too. I certainly kept reading, though, and once it got going the book was excellent - very exciting, full of remarkable imagination, genuinely laugh-out-loud funny in places and with some important things to say about good, evil and what it is to be a decent human being.

I thought that the most enduring passages were some Dante-esque encounters which Samuel (our hero) has with people in Hell being punished for their sins by being forced to live them out for all eternity. I found his encounter with the Void very powerful and the episode with The Blacksmith genuinely moving. To include all this in such a gripping and amusing story is quite something, and I think this book will appeal to older children and adults alike. Warmly recommended.

Anna Sheehan - A Long, Long Sleep

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Well written, thoughtful and gripping

I enjoyed this book far more than I expected to. I am most definitely not in its target audience, being male, a very long way past my teens and not much of a reader of science fiction. However, I found it well written, thoughtful and gripping, and I am glad that I tried it.

The premise of the book is that, a couple of centuries into the future, a sixteen-year-old girl called Rose wakes from stasis to find she has been asleep for over sixty years and that the world she knew is greatly changed. This gives rise to some insightful stuff about alienation, friendship, falsehood and reality, the nature of freedom and so on, as well as an interesting and ultimately very exciting story. There is some slightly clunky green-is-good and corporate-is-bad stuff which jarred a bit on me even though I am in considerable sympathy with the basic ideas, but in the main I found it an engaging and intelligent read.

The writing is excellent, with elegant, readable and unflashy prose, and a fairly small cast of believable characters whose relationships ring very true. The story is also very well crafted: the truth of Rose's past emerges at a perfect pace and the narrative itself is involving, gripping and sometimes very moving.

In short, this is a good story, well told. It will certainly appeal to young adults, but also has a lot in it for not-at-all-young adults like me and I recommend it warmly.

Alexander Maksik - You Deserve Nothing

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Brilliantly insightful

I thought this was a fantastic book. I wouldn't normally have bothered with it because I didn't like the sound of it at all - it has an off-putting title, it is set among wealthy teenagers in an American International School and has a plot synopsis which sounds like Dead Poets Society written by a French existentialist - but I am lucky that a friend whose judgement I trust recommended it to me. It turned out to be one of the best-written, most thoughtful and most intellectually and emotionally engaging books I have read for a long time, and I found myself as gripped by it as by a really good thriller.

The story is of an inspirational teacher and his relationships with his students. Alexander Maksik manages to make this both fresh and enthralling. He tells the story through three first-person narratives, the teacher himself and two of his students, one male and one female. All three voices are brilliantly done: distinctive, convincing and with real insight into their characters, and every character in the book is wholly believable. I thought he showed exceptional insight into the sheer thrill of being an inspiring teacher and into being a thoughtful 17-year-old with that nagging sense that other people have the answers but you don't. What really makes the book stand out, though, is the way the characters wrestle with ideas, idealism, the tension between what you want to be and what you find you can be, and the difference between our public faces and private interiors. I found this utterly riveting and extremely moving in places.

The prose is excellent. It is readable, unfussy and unpretentious, and sometimes very affecting. It would be too much of a spoiler to say exactly why, but in context I physically winced at the sentence "Then I heard the toilet flush, the deep groaning of liquid being sucked down into the bowels of the building." The book is peppered with unobtrusive gems of wit or insight, and Maksik also paints a subtle portrait of an institution which, very recognisably, professes to care deeply for its students but regards weekly sessions with a stranger who has recently done a brief counselling course as far more valuable than genuine human companionship and warmth.

Even if you can't bear the idea of reading about wealthy American teenagers in Paris, are allergic to French existentialists and shudder at the thought of a school-set book, I would urge you to give this book a try. I have a lot of sympathy with all those views but I thought it was absolutely outstanding. Very warmly recommended.

Alex Marwood - The Darkest Secret

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A gripping, rewarding read

I thought this was a good, involving book.  It is billed as a thriller and there is certainly a building atmosphere of tension and a need to find out what happened, but it is also a very good novel of character and social observation.  The premise is pretty well-worn: in 2004 Coco, a three-year-old girl goes missing from a house where several wealthy families have gathered to celebrate the birthday of Sean Jackson, a wealthy property developer and father of the girl.  It becomes clear early on that she is never found, and when Sean dies in the present day (2016) people gather and we learn what has become of those involved.  It is very well done, though, and I found it very gripping.

The story is intercut between the time of Coco's disappearance and the present day.  The 2004 story is in the third person, from various characters' points of view and the present day narrative is first person by Mila, Sean's daughter who was a stroppy teenager at the time of Coco's disappearance.  This took me a little while to get used to, but became very effective.  Alex Marwood writes well and creates very believable characters, I thought.  Be warned - it is hard to find anyone to like here, but they are all very well drawn and there are a few redemptive aspects to the present day story.  I found the narrative drew me in very well and I became thoroughly gripped by it.

A great strength of this book is Marwood's insight into her characters and into wider social developments.  It is difficult to give much detail without giving away more than I would have wanted to know before starting, but as a small example, writing of a redeveloped Queen Anne house, she says, "It's as old as the trees around it, this house, but Sean has stripped it of its antiquity and made it horribly, painfully perfect…  Everything gleams, the way it does in Disneyland."  There are lots of small but penetrating observations like this throughout the book which really add to our understanding both of the characters and of the world they live in. 

A friend read this before I did and absolutely hated it, so I came to it expecting to dislike it, too.  Against my expectations, I thought it was a rewarding, gripping novel.  Don't expect a comfortable read – it's mainly horrible people behaving appallingly – but it's a very rewarding one.  Recommended.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Shuichi Yoshida - Villain

Rating: 3/5

Review
Rather disappointing

I had high hopes of this book - it sounded insightful and engrossing, with a fine evocation of some important aspects of Japanese society and other very thoughtful reviewers think highly of it. In the end, though, for me it didn't quite manage to be any of these things.

The book is slow in pace, which I often like and which can be very effective, but here just seemed to drag for long periods. For example, endless descriptions of the intricacies of various local roads or listing exactly how many yen each course of a meal cost just seemed to me like tedious and pointless detail rather than building up a convincing backdrop. I found the characters (and there are many of them) rather thinly drawn and lacking real emotional depth, and although the story emerges gradually and rather skilfully, I found that the chopping between third person narrative and various first person internal monologues distracted rather than added to it.

I think part of the problem for me was the translation, which wasn't so much poor as inappropriate, in that it is very specifically American. I have no objection to this in principle, but it really got in the way of the evocation of provincial Japan. People go to the restroom and the barbershop, for example, which kept transporting me to the USA rather than Japan, and the young women sound like Californian airheads when they speak to each other. After being given a sinister description of the behaviour of the murderer, the narrative voice says, "That, indeed, was the kind of guy he was." This is a repressed, threatening, violent man and he calls him a "guy"? Things like this continually threw me out of the story, and although nothing is actually described as "totally awesome" I sometimes had the dreadful feeling that it might be.

So, I'm afraid I can't really recommend this book but do read the other reviews here before being put off by mine because there are plenty of others who liked it very much.

Will Carver - Girl 4

Rating: 3/5

Review:Well written, but...

The quality of the writing and the fresh approach to the story's structure meant that I enjoyed the first two-thirds of this book in spite of myself. It is the story of a detective in pursuit of a serial killer, narrated in short chapters cutting between the voices of the detective, the killer and the victims (who are dead by the time they are speaking to us). Against my expectations, I liked this and found the character sketches of the victims in particular very convincing.

However, at bottom the story is yet another in the sea of books, films and TV shows about killers performing monstrous acts of vicious brutality on women for his (and our) gratification and doesn't add anything to a now hackneyed and implausible genre. There is a serial killer preying on women in inventively sadistic ways, making a show of the bodies and sending notes with clues to the police. The killer plays psychological games and targets the detective himself. There is a detective to whom vital clues appear in dreams and who has a complex psychological back-story. He is insomniac and drinks excessively. Reality and fantasy become blurred. The emotional delirium becomes ever more intense...and so on and so on. Eventually, in spite of a couple of twists which I didn't see coming, this all got so tiresome and familiar that I got extremely fed up with it and the final revelation of the killer's motives seemed simply ludicrous to me.

It's a shame because Will Carver is obviously a talented writer, and I did keep reading to the end to find out what happened, but overall I found this unsatisfying and unmemorable and can only give it three stars.

Chris Morgan Jones - An Agent Of Deceit

Rating: 4/5

Review: A good, involving thriller

I thought this was a very good book. It is well written, carefully researched and very gripping in the end.

Chris Morgan Jones writes of what he knows - the world of industrial intelligence, in which he has worked for many years - and it shows very clearly in the narrative. The story involves the attempt to unmask the criminal activities of a billionaire Russian oil oligarch. It is detailed, intricate and in a way it is slow-paced, but I found it involving and convincing and I never felt bored or that the story was dragging. There is a limited amount of action and certainly no fast car chases, but a growing sense of menace and an interesting (and illuminating) story made this a gripping thriller. I also found the denouement very plausible, which is something of a rarity and a real bonus in a thriller.

Jones's characters are generally believable and his prose is excellent: straightforward, unflashy and very readable. There is some rather heavy-handed stuff about What Is Really Important In Life, but overall I thought this an involving, interesting and enjoyable read. Recommended.

James Sallis - The Killer Is Dying

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Involving, thoughtful and haunting

I found this a remarkable, haunting and extremely rewarding novel. I hadn't come across James Sallis before so didn't know what to expect and a description of the book might well have put me off. There is very little action but there is a mystery to be solved by both a contract killer in the last stages of terminal illness and a policeman whose wife is also about to die. We also see things from the point of view of a young teenage boy who has nothing whatsoever to do with the case, never meets or communicates with anyone involved, but has the killer's dreams. Against my expectations I found it extremely involving, thoughtful and very moving in places.

The pervading theme of terminal illness and the sense of neighbourhoods in decay give the book an elegiac feel. Sallis writes brilliantly in brief unaffected sentences and very readable prose. His characters drew me in from the start and I found them believable and engaging. He makes a lot of very shrewd observations about the way lives pan out, but makes them in an unobtrusive, deceptively simple way. For example, a rather world-weary detective is musing internally on his idealistic youth: "Big words, big ideas. Fit OK when you were young. And it wasn't that you outgrew them, it was just that after a while you just started looking silly wearing them." I liked that a lot, and similar things crop up throughout the book.

I though this was engrossing, wise and, in its own way, a real page-turner. Warmly recommended if you like a thoughtful and involving read which will stay with you long after you finish the book.

Ryan David Jahn - The Dispatcher

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good thriller

I thought this was a very good, well-written thriller which I enjoyed far more than I thought I would. The book revolves around the disappearance of a child and the effect on all those around her, and the attempt by her father to recover her once he realises she is sill alive. These are very well-worn themes, but Jahn makes them fresh and gripping and gives some very sharp insights into the minds and motivations of those involved. The characters seemed very believable to me, and the bleakness of both the Texas landscape and the lives of some of the protagonists is very well evoked. The narrative grips from the start and doesn't let go, and I was utterly hooked for most of the book.

Jahn's prose is excellent - spare and precise, it uses just the right description of an event or thought process to bring the whole thing vividly, and sometimes horribly, to life. The almost flat style contrasts with the sometimes violent and extremely gruesome story, making it all the more real to me and built the tension remarkably effectively.

I thought this was several cuts above the average thriller and I recommend it very warmly.

Deon Meyer - Trackers

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Gripping and intelligent

I thought that this was a very enjoyable, well written and engrossing thriller which ended up being two almost separate books which didn't quite mesh together in the end.

The plot revolves around a web of suspected terrorism, smuggling, gangs and organised crime. Deon Meyer is a very talented writer (excellently translated here) who can tell a terrific story full of fascinating and convincing insights into modern South Africa - a really strong feature of the book which never become dull or intrusive. His characters are well drawn and convincing and I found the whole book thoroughly gripping.

My reservations lie in the structure, which didn't quite work for me. The book is in four sections and the first three fit together excellently. However, we leave this story at a (slightly unconvincing) climax and jump forward a few months to a completely new group of characters and a seemingly unrelated missing person investigation. Although the connection to the previous narrative eventually becomes clear, I thought that the dénoument, such as it is, felt rather rushed and unresolved and I felt a little disappointed in the end of the book.

Despite this, Trackers is a gripping and intelligent read. Meyer seems to be setting us up for at least one sequel, and I will certainly look out for it. Recommended.

Parker Bilal - The Burning Gates

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An atmospheric, enjoyable thriller

I enjoyed this book.  It's the first Makana I've read, and I'll be trying others as a result.

Makana is a private investigator in modern Cairo.  The Burning Gates is set in 2004;  Mubarak is in power and the invasion of Iraq is a major factor in the region.  The story is convoluted and involves looted art treasures and a vicious, high-ranking Iraqi officer wanted by both the Americans and a group of mercenaries, set against a background of a corrupt government and police force, vested interests and organised crime. 

I thought the story was pretty well done.  Parker Bilal writes well and creates good characters who speak in believable dialogue.  It is decently plotted, although I thought that the first half of the book was a little slow, the twists in plot could be a bit hard to follow, and some aspects of the denouement were pretty silly.  Nonetheless, it kept me reading.

Where this book really shines is in its depiction of modern Egypt and in the character of Makana himself.  I really did get a feel for the world of 21^st Century Cairo; the atmosphere and physical sense of the place were excellently done, I think.  I also found Makana an engaging, believable character.  For once, comparisons between Makana and Chandler's Philip Marlowe, aren't just a lazy Private-Eye-Equals-Marlowe cliché.  Of course the setting, period and style are very different, but there is a similar sense of a fundamentally decent, moral man trying to do the right thing in a dirty world.  In The High Window, Marlowe describes himself as a "shop-soiled Sir Galahad," which I think would be a decent description of Makana.

This isn't a perfect book, but I think it's a good one.  It's thoughtful, evocative and a good read.  Recommended.

Anna Funder - All That I Am

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Worthy but a bit turgid

Only three stars for a novel on this subject from a deservedly highly-respected author will probably be regarded by many people as tantamount to sacrilege, but the truth is that this book failed to engage me fully either in its story or its characters.

The novel is based on the true story of real people who opposed the Nazis rise to power and then, at immense personal risk both in Germany and in exile, tried to alert the world to the evil the Nazis represented. It is an important and inspirational story which I ought to have found gripping and moving, but I'm afraid it was neither for me. I find it hard to put my finger on why - it is well researched, Anna Funder writes good, clean prose and the story itself is of very direct personal relevance to me. Somehow, though, it felt rather turgid and worthy. I also found the fractured timescale annoying; it's not so much confusing as very distracting and it felt like an unnecessary trick which kept preventing me from really engaging with the story.

I can see why plenty of other reviewers have thought this a very good book, and I wouldn't want to put anyone off trying it, but for me it was quite a struggle to get through and ultimately rather disappointing.

Madeleine Miller - The Song Of Achilles

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Well written, but...

This book is very well-written and very involving in places but I did have my reservations about it. Patroclus's narrative voice is believable and gives a convincing account of his childhood misfortunes, the events which lead up to the Trojan War and the War itself. I like the depictions of characters like Odysseus and Agamemnon very much, place and mood are very well evoked, and there are some exciting and very interesting episodes.

Madeline Miller is very keen to portray the relationship between Patroclus and Achilles as one of deep, enduring love, both spiritual and sexual. Whether or not this is justified by the source texts is arguable, but it is a noble aim. However, what we actually get is long, long periods where Patroclus moons around after Achilles like a love-sick puppy, to the point that I felt that the author herself was the one in love with Achilles and wasn't going to miss an opportunity to write a beautifully constructed sentence about his muscles, his hair, the curve of his chin or the soles of his feet (which seem to hold an endless fascination for her) and so on, which I eventually found almost unendurably tedious in places.

There were sufficient good things about this book to make a three-star rating seem very churlish, but it's only just four stars for me. Many other reviewers here have obviously enjoyed it very much, but I can only give it a qualified recommendation.

Sam Bourne - Pantheon

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Disappointing

I was expecting this to be a very good book. Sam Bourne is the pseudonym of Jonathan Freedland, an excellent journalist and broadcaster whose work I enjoy very much. Sadly, the same cannot be said for his fiction.

Set in 1940 the main protagonist is James Zennor, an Oxford don wounded in the Spanish Civil War, physically and mentally scarred and unable to join up and fight the Nazis. His wife and son vanish and he eventually traces and follows them to Yale in the USA where he realises that Something Suspicious Is Going On and that He Does Not Know Whom He Can Trust. This, basically, is the plot of the first 300 (yes 300) pages of the book. There is a great deal of scene-setting in flashback, details of the Spanish Civil War, stuff about the contrast between life in Britain in 1940 and that in the USA and, frankly, a huge amount of superfluous verbiage. There are endless paragraphs where Zennor repeats to himself what we already know and speculates about perhaps this or maybe that and it all adds up to very little. It is phenomenally slow and even the bits where something actually happens didn't really grip me. I found that there were several "oh, please" moments and the "revelations" were largely visible from a long way off. When the Dastardly Plot is finally revealed it is self-evidently repugnant, but we still have to have its repugnance explained to us through yet more of Zennor's internal monologue, and I began to feel seriously patronized at this point.

The prose is competent and there is a lot of laboriously demonstrated research on show but details, particularly in the dialogue, fail to convince. For example the Master of an Oxford College in 1940 denies responsibility for something with the phrase "It's not down to me," and a hard-bitten Irish American cop who has just informed Zennor that he "don't like limeys," actually says, "Forgive my little impromptu examination just then." This sort of thing crops up frequently enough to ruin any sense of character which has been developed.

I am sorry to be so critical, but I really found this book a struggle and, in the end, a chore. I will be sticking to Mr Freedland's journalism from now on.

Stuart Neville - Stolen Souls

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good police thriller

I enjoyed this book. It is the first of Stuart Neville's I have read and although there are references to what has gone before in Inspector Jack Lennon's history, it isn't necessary to have read the previous two.

It's a good story involving Eastern European gangs and people smuggling and an unexpected plot generated from this which I won't spoil. Neville creates very believable characters, he paces his story well and the dialogue in particular is excellently done. He generates a very powerful sense of place - the place being mainly the seedier bits of Belfast - and I found the whole thing very readable and involving.

There were some flaws. I do wonder why it is considered necessary for every fictional policeman or woman to have an Incredibly Complicated Personal Life and I did get a bit fed up with the rather cliché-ed tension over whether he would keep his promises to get home to his daughter. I could also have done without a paranormal element in which his young daughter dreams about details of a case she knew nothing about, although luckily this didn't feature very large, and *two* arch-enemies for one policeman seems a little over the top. I didn't find the irritations too intrusive, though and, to his credit, Neville managed to subvert my expectations several times and I enjoyed being genuinely surprised.

So, this is a very decent, well written book with a good plot and well-developed characters. For some reason I can't quite put my finger on it reminded me slightly of the Rebus series, which is a very good thing, and I'd recommend it to anyone who likes a gritty, thoughtful police-based thriller.

S. J. Bolton - Dead Scared

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good thriller - in the end

I enjoyed this book, the first of S.J. Bolton's I have read. It has a decent plot, some engaging and reasonably believable characters and in the end it had me thoroughly gripped. The plot, which was pretty fresh and original, revolves around an undercover officer posing as a student in Cambridge in order to investigate a spate of suspicious-looking suicides. S.J. Bolton managed to produce quite a few of the clichés of the genre - officer in peril, not knowing whom she can trust, eventually taken off the case and so on - but handled them well enough for them not to grate. She introduces a character fairly early on who seemed to stand out a mile as the villain, but she is truly ingenious in playing with expectations and I genuinely didn't know whether he was a baddie or not until the dénouement.

I did have some reservations. I think the book is too long and by the time I'd read the first half I was thinking I'd be writing a fairly critical review. I found the very short chapters and the fast cutting between points of view very distracting and irritating - particularly between the first person narrative of the main protagonist and various different third person narratives. The pace seemed slow, the prose was a bit pedestrian and the crackling sexual tension between the two police officers didn't crackle and wasn't particularly sexy or tense. Having set the book in Cambridge, I thought Bolton failed to generate much sense of place, and there is a wholly unnecessary prologue which aced more as a major spoiler than as an appetite-whetter.

However, around page 200 the book seemed to hit its stride and the prose became tighter, the plot picked up pace and became genuinely creepy, and Cambridge suddenly came alive (one scene with Evensong in St John's Chapel in the background was particularly good) so that I ended up thoroughly engrossed and finished the book in preference to watching a TV programme I'd planned to see. The ending was slightly disappointing - not entirely convincing in its resolutions and schmaltzy enough to have been created by Richard Curtis in a particularly sentimental mood - but I didn't really mind by that point.

Although you may have to do a bit of wading through the first half of the book, I can recommend this as a very decent thriller in the end and well worth the effort.

Clare Morrall - The Roundabout Man

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent, absorbing novel

I really enjoyed this book. It was very well written and had some very insightful things to say.

The theme of the book is the sometimes tangled relationship between truth and fiction and how that may affect our lives in different ways. The story centres around Quinn, a man now past sixty who grew up in a household very like that of Enid Blyton in which his mother wrote extremely popular children's stories about the fictional exploits of Quinn and his older triplet sisters and created a myth of a cosy, loving family, but who showed her own children very little affection. Quinn has now chosen to escape the fictional self of his mother's books whom everyone thinks they know, living alone and without money in a caravan on a roundabout on an English motorway interchange and surviving on what he can find.

Clare Morrall uses this to explore the way in which the stories we tell about ourselves and others can influence the way we behave and relate to each other, and how they may profoundly influence the course of our lives, and she does it extremely well. In clean, very readable prose she creates very believable, complex characters and paces her story beautifully. There is a fractured timescale as the first person narrative moves between the present and events of the past. Done badly, this can be dreadful, but Morrall has a deft touch and I found the whole book involving and quite gripping. She paints wonderful portraits of growing up in an English literary household in the late 1950s and of modern characters, each subtly subject to their own or Quinn's fictions about them but without this ever becoming laboured, and she gives Quinn a wholly convincing male narrative voice.

I found this book original, absorbing and involving. The characters and what they convey about our lives and relationships will stay with me for a long time, I think. Very warmly recommended.

John Verdon - Shut Your Eyes Tight

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very enjoyable thriller

I enjoyed this book very much. When the sequel to a successful first novel turns out to have over 500 pages I always worry that the author has become self-indulgent and that it will be turgid and over-long, but not in this case. The pace is quite slow for large parts of the book, but I really liked that: Verdon writes very well and drew me into both his developing story and his characters very successfully. He writes with insight and a rather biting wit occasionally and I found the prose elegant and very easy to read. (I don't think you need to have read Think of a Number first, by the way.)

The plot, while having the elements of implausibility one would expect from a book in this genre, hangs together and is believable with a bit of good will. It is extremely well told and, for me, excellently paced. Looked at coldly in retrospect it is loaded with the clichés of the genre: the retired detective with a strained marriage lured into one last case, the chalk-and-cheese partners, the Tense Climax and so on, but they are so well done and intelligently handled that I hardly noticed them as clichés while reading. The only cliché which did irritate me was the old Detective Under Threat thing, which added nothing to the plot, didn't rack up the tension as intended and was a wholly unnecessary distraction. However it was only a minor flaw in an otherwise very enjoyable thriller which is several cuts above the average and, in my view, rather better than its predecessor. Warmly recommended.

John Harstad - Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You In All The Confusion?

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Gripping and insightful

With a quirky title like this, I thought this book would be either excellent or dreadful. It turned out to be excellent. It certainly won't be for everyone: it is slow and meditative, and the serial killers and action which abound in a lot of other Scandinavian fiction are wholly absent. It has very little plot, other than a strange, isolated young man eventually washing up in a tiny institution on the Faroe Islands for recovering psychiatric patients. What the book does have are thoroughly believable, flawed and sympathetic characters treated with genuine compassion, and real insight into the human condition.

Although it has a very different feel, there are shades of Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident..." in that the book is narrated by Mattias, a man with a very unusual view of the world. We see things through his eyes and with his perceptions so that his view seems wholly understandable, and the empathy of the author with his damaged protagonist is remarkable. Enough happened to make me keep reading and wanting to get back to the book, and I found myself completely taken up in Mattias's world. The writing and translation are excellent - unfussy, direct and beautifully structured - and this makes the book something really special, I thought.

I still cherish Mattias's company after finishing the book and feel I've been on a very rewarding adventure with him. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a thoughtful, character-driven read. It's a great experience and one you won't forget in a hurry.

Simon Lelic - Rupture

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Engrossing and rewarding

This is a very engrossing book with a good deal to say about how people react to an appalling crime committed by a twelve-year-old and how it affects not only the victim and the perpetrator and their respective families, but also those in the justice system who become involved.

Simon Lelic generally writes very well in a direct and straightforward style which gives the book a real narrative drive and great power at times, I thought. He tells the story of a local solicitor who ends up representing a very young murderer with insight and understanding of those involved, and he paints a very convincing portrait of a man first caught up in a desire for celebrity and then struggling to do the decent thing but being horribly insensitive to the needs of his wife and daughter. Although one plot development in particular wasn't completely plausible, I was prepared to forgive this as Lelic uses it to examine his protagonist's attitudes thoroughly and not just as a tension-builder.

As with Rupture, Lelic's first novel, I found this a really gripping book and felt that I had a lot to think about afterward, and warmly recommend it as an involving, original and rewarding read.

T.H. White - Mistress Masham's Repose

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A wonderful, hugely entertaining book

I think this is a wonderful book. I first read it many years ago and have loved it ever since, and I am delighted to see it reissued. It is a terrific adventure which is wise, humane and very funny indeed in places.

The plot revolves around Maria, a shy and lonely girl in a decaying mansion, who discovers a group of Lilliputians living on an island in the lake in the mansion's grounds. There are some terrifically bad baddies in the governess and the vicar and a fabulous pair of good allies in the cook and a magnificently scatty but amazingly erudite retired professor who lives on the estate. As with White's much better known The Once And Future King, the adventure story is beautifully told, extremely involving and contains all manner of nuggets of knowledge and wisdom - for example, Maria has to come to terms with being able to force these tiny people to do what she wants, and there are some very important ideas about the responsibilities of power within the story.

I cannot resist quoting one of my favourite passages, spoken by the professor:
"As we all know, I am a failure in the world. I do not rule people, nor deceive them for the sake of power, nor try to swindle their livelihood into my own possession. I say to them: Please go freely on your way, and I will do my best to follow mine. Well then Maria, although this is not a fashionable way of going on, nor even a successful one, it is a thing which I believe in - that people must not tyrannize, nor try to be great because they are little. My dear, you are a great person yourself, in any case, and you do not need to lord it over others, in order to prove your greatness."

I love this book. It is a terrific romp in which villainy is confounded in the end, but which also has real substance. I think intelligent readers of all ages would enjoy this hugely, and I recommend it very warmly indeed.

Jonathan Lee - Who Is Mr. Satoshi?

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Thoughtful and involving

I enjoyed this book very much. It is very well written and has plenty of interesting things to say.

The story is of a traumatised and damaged man who finds a letter to "Mr Satoshi" after the death of his mother and is persuaded to go to Japan to try and find him and deliver the letter. Writing in the first person, Jonathan Lee manages to immerse us in this world and I think he is quietly insightful about his protagonist's response to trauma and psychiatric drugs. He tells a well-paced story full of believable, often likeable characters and generates a fine sense of mystery. I also thought that he was very insightful about the loss, melancholy, hope and redemption in human lives. Lee is also very skilful in painting a portrait of Japanese society. This forms a vivid and memorable backdrop to the story but is never intrusive and I never felt that he was lecturing or showing off how much he knew.

I found this book thoughtful, involving and memorable in spite of what I think is an off-putting title. Warmly recommended.

Patrick Flanery - Absolution

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Less here than meets the eye

I'm afraid I didn't get on as well with this book as some other reviewers did. It has all the hallmarks of a book which expects to be considered for literary prizes - elegant prose, themes and setting chosen for their Great Importance, multiple narrative voices and fractured timescale, and so on - but I found it a long slog and in the end I wasn't convinced that it is as profound as it thinks it is.

The publisher's synopsis on this page gives a good account of the book's plot and themes, and there were certainly good things about it. It paints a vivid picture of immediately post-apartheid South Africa with the constant fear of violent crime and the difficulty of straightforward relationships between races even for people of good will. The elderly writer Clare's character in particular was believable and well drawn and there are some horrifyingly haunting scenes. But, oh dear, it did go on. Flanery explores the nature of guilt and redemption but, in spite of the importance of the setting and set-pieces like the long, stilted, quasi-legal discussion between Clare and her lawyer son toward the end of the book, I didn't find much in the way of new insight here.

Flanery is also playing with the idea of memory and its failings and distortions with differing versions of events so that we are constantly unsure of what is fiction, what is lies and what are imperfect memories. This can work well in a story but and I found that it wore very thin in the end and didn't really say much of importance. Then, close to the end of the book Clare says "Perhaps the literal truth is not what you have remembered, but the truth of memory is no less accurate in its way." This is nonsense dressed up as profundity. It may be no less important or influential, but no less *accurate*? If a doctor mis-remembers the proper dose of a drug, for example, and kills a patient as a result, the truth of the doctor's memory is less accurate than the literal truth, which Flanery side-steps so blithely, of what is the correct dose. It made me extremely grumpy after I had slogged through the best part of 400 pages because it suggested that I had spent a long time trying to make sense of nonsensical ideas about truth and memory.

I agree that this book will probably be a contender for some of the year's literary prizes, but I felt that it was written with more than half an eye on exactly that and not enough attention to what it was actually trying to say. I think that, while it does have some merit, there is a lot of style and setting here and not as much substance as there should be.

Tana French - Broken Harbour

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A terrific book

A 500-odd page novel set in the Irish recession isn't a description which attracts me, I must admit. I only tried this on the recommendation of a friend and I am extremely glad I did. I thought it was an exceptionally good book - well written, completely gripping and very intelligent. It is told in the first person by the detective investigating an attack on a family which leaves the father and two young children dead and the mother seriously injured. The investigation of the crime itself is very well done but it is the depth of Dana French's characters and the sharpness and humanity of her insights which marks this out as an exceptionally good book.

The narrative voice is terrifically believable and readable. The narrator, Detective Mike Kennedy is, for all his flaws, a very sympathetic character and the revelations about his personal life and past are delicately and insightfully done. The story unfolds at a very measured pace but is utterly gripping throughout and is genuine it's-very-late-but-just-one-more-chapter stuff. We get a real feel for the lives of both narrator and the victims, a heart-wrenching portrait of what the boom-and-bust economy in Ireland has really done to some of its people, and varied, poignant portraits of what it means when certainty and control of one's life begin to unravel and when well-intentioned actions go wrong.

I thought this was a terrific book. An unequivocal five stars and very warmly recommended.

James Smythe - No Harm Can Come To A Good Man

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good but slightly flawed

I thought this was a good book, but not quite as good as the excellent The Machine.

Smythe does some things very well indeed in this novel. It is set in the near future, and he creates a very convincing picture of the type of predictive technology which might determine a good deal of our lives. He builds the tension very well with the sense of inevitability of Greek tragedy, and he gives a chillingly convincing portrait of how people cannot or will not distinguish between reality and what they see presented on screen, even if that presentation has not actually happened, and how this might twist events.

However, I found some of the psychological aspects of the novel less convincing, especially the central character's behaviour and state of mind, and there is a pretty well-worn sci-fi trope at the heart of the dénouement which seemed a little predictable to me, so as a whole I thought it lacked something as a novel.

Nonetheless, this is a thoughtful, well written and engrossing book and even if it's not the exceptional work The Machine is, I can still recommend it

Noah Hawley - The Good Father

Rating: 3/5

Review:
A bit of a struggle

I'm afraid I didn't get on very well with this book. I admire its aims and courage in dealing with difficult and in many ways unappealing subject matter: trying to understand the motivations of the assassin of a noble and popular politician and the effect of the assassin's actions on his family isn't an easy route to popularity and a wide audience, and Noah Hawley does a creditable job in attempting to explore these things. It's just that it didn't really work for me.

Hawley writes reasonably well in that his prose is generally well crafted, but it felt rather turgid to me and often left me with a slight sense of wading through treacle. The narrator's voice isn't badly done, but I didn't really find that it engaged my attention and it has some very trying traits - he used the phrase "As a doctor, I..." so often, for example, that I began to want to give him a slap. I found that the whole thing had a sense of trying just a bit too hard, and in the end, however laudable its aims and conclusions, it became quite a slog getting through it.

My problems with this book are plainly very personal because lots of others have found it very good indeed so please don't let me put you off - it's just that it didn't really appeal to me.

Elly Griffiths - Smoke And Mirrors

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not really for me

I didn't get on as well with Smoke And Mirrors as most other people seem to have done.  The story is set in Brighton in 1951 where Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens and his two sergeants are investigating the disappearance of two children.  Stephens's old friend, the stage magician Max Mephisto is appearing in pantomime there, and this forms the backdrop to a somewhat convoluted, almost Agatha Christie-esque investigation.

Elly Griffiths writes quite decent prose, but the whole thing felt a bit stolid and plodding, somehow.  The period background didn't really convince me (although she did get the cold bedrooms right!)  Modern usages like "feisty" or "autopsy" (it was very definitely "post mortem" in England in 1951) crept in to mar the dialogue occasionally, and some of the attitudes were frankly absurd for the time.  I could just about accept the female sergeant with views on women's equality which were at least 25 years ahead, but the idea that a Police Inspector would be annoyed with one of his officers for his hostility to homosexuals is just silly.  It would have been his duty then (God help us!) to arrest and prosecute men for homosexual activity, just as much as it would have been for burglary or any other crime.  Like Griffiths, I'm appalled by many of the attitudes of the time, but that doesn't mean you can change the history of them. 

All this wouldn't matter so much if the story was good, but I didn't think it was, really. A rather stodgy feel to the characterisation, the pace and the plot, plus a dénouement which I found very unconvincing made it all a bit of a struggle.   I ended up quite interested in what was going to happen, but not really wanting to have to read to the end to find out.

So - not for me, I'm afraid.  It's not terrible by any means and others have plainly enjoyed it very much, so don't let me put you off, but with neither the background nor the story really engaging me, I can't really recommend it.

James Runcie - Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very enjoyable stories

I enjoyed the six stories which make up this book. Set in 1953-54, the book has a slight feel of a Sunday evening TV programme in the Miss Marple/Call The Midwife tradition. It is well-written, engaging and gentle in tone and also has some moral weight, albeit lightly worn. Sidney Chambers is a likeable protagonist and the plots are interesting without being sensational. Sidney's moral and ecclesiastical musings add an interesting depth and the whole thing carries you along very nicely.

Runcie's style is readable and he creates believable characters who behave plausibly, which is not always the case in detective stories. I thought the period was quite well done although, as someone who was born around that time and who remembers life just a few years later, I wasn't altogether convinced by it. The 50s' sense of recovering from the war and still rebuilding and making do and mending wasn't really there, and while the language was largely convincing, people didn't use modern phrases like "on a weekly basis" and "it sends out the wrong signals." Perhaps I'm nit-picking a little but those of us who were there (and I suspect that there will be a lot of readers who were) will be rather thrown out of the atmosphere by this.

Minor niggles aside, I can recommend this as a charming book with more substance than may at first appear and a very enjoyable read.

Joanne Harris - Runelight

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Well written, but...

This is the sequel to Runemark and I strongly recommend that you read Runemark first. The story continues (a few years later) the fantasy based around Norse gods and their associated worlds and myths. It is the sort of thing I would expect to like and there were plenty of good things about it but somehow it just didn't quite draw me into its world or grip me with its story.

Joanne Harris writes very well. She has an easy, readable style and creates original characters. I liked the modern-day characterizations like the two dim, thuggish wolf-humans calling each other "dude," and her world is well painted. I find it hard to put my finger on why I didn't really respond to the book. One factor was that the writing, although good, seems a little one-paced. Around page 130, for example, a tremendous event occurs but the tone didn't really change and it didn't seem to excite me any more than the scene-setting before it. I found this throughout the book and ended up being a little unsatisfied by it.

Another problem for me was the sheer complexity of the world's make-up and of the relationships, friendships and enmities among its huge number of characters and peoples (I use the word loosely.) There is a very helpful diagram of the Worlds, a good map and a cast of characters (plus a good synopsis of Runemark for new readers) but even with this I found myself rather lost among who was at war with whom and why.

Plainly others have enjoyed this book enormously and I can see why so please don't let me put you off, but I'm afraid it didn't quite do it for me.

R.J. Palacio - Wonder

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A sweet morality tale

I enjoyed this book, which is well written and carried me along very well. The story is of August, a ten-year-old boy with severe facial abnormalities who is about to go to school for the first time, of his experience there and the experience of others. It is told from the different points of view of various young people - August, his older sister and several of the people they know. It is a sweet, simple morality tale of love, acceptance and triumph over prejudice and adversity.

My main reservation was that the various voices seemed almost identical to me which made it hard to really identify with anyone other than August himself. However, it has a laudable subject and I am sure it will appeal to many young readers and to adults who (as I was by the end) are prepared to allow themselves to be shamelessly emotionally manipulated.

Liz Moore - Heft

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Unexpectedly enjoyable

I thought this was a terrifically enjoyable book. A tale of an immensely fat, reclusive New Yorker and a slightly troubled young man from a difficult home doesn't sound that alluring because there are so many ways in which it could have been dreadful, but it turned out to be remarkably insightful, compassionate and readable.

It is almost impossible to give an idea of the story without giving away more than I would have wanted to know before starting the book so I won't try, but told in two first-person narratives, this is a novel about loneliness and belonging, family and bereavement, kindness and possibility. Liz Moore shows real insight into the inner lives of her two male narrators and gives them completely convincing voices. They are very different characters, but both are fundamentally good-hearted people with problems. Moore avoids the pitfalls of tedium or sentimentality which could so easily ruin a book like this, and she paints illuminating and compassionate portraits of both characters so that I found myself very bound up with their stories. I was drawn in from the start and, even though it isn't a "suspense" novel, there are secrets to be revealed. It is very well structured and paced, so I became really gripped as things unfolded and it kept me up far too late because I didn't want to stop reading.

Rather against my expectations, I found this a really thoughtful, enjoyable and touching book and I recommend it very warmly.

Mark Haddon - The Red House

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Gripping and insightful

I thought this was an outstandingly good book. It is excellently written, remarkably insightful and - to me anyway - very gripping.

Be warned - there is almost no plot. An adult brother and sister take their respective families on holiday together in a cottage in Wales. Things do happen, but the book is concerned with their respective thoughts, experiences and interactions with each other. Novels of this kind can sometimes be dreadfully tedious, precious and self-indulgent; I only tried it because it was by Mark Haddon but I'm very glad I did. He writes in short sections cutting between the points of view of all eight characters and he shows the same extraordinary ability as he did in The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time to really get inside someone's head and then to express that brilliantly for the reader. He uses tiny details to conjure places and moods and gets every detail exactly right, making the whole thing utterly believable to me.

The book is full of small but profound insights into character and the ways people feel about themselves and how they interact. As a couple of tiny examples he refers to the way someone's "sense of self depended so much on other people being in the wrong," and another sitting "half appreciating the view and half pretending to appreciate it and being horribly aware of the stupidity of this combination." I found that Haddon regularly put into words for me things which I recognised but hadn't really been able to crystallise for myself. He manages to capture the slightly haphazard way we really think, and is simply brilliant at the young people - the hormone-filled young man, the two teenage girls with their respective angsts and their friendship/hatred/friendship... cycle and I don't think I've ever come across a better evocation of the inner world of an eight-year-old boy than that of Benjy in this book.

Haddon treats his characters with understanding and compassion. There are some profound insights here, but there are no neatly tied-up solutions nor cosy Life Lessons learned. All the characters are subject to human frailties, unawareness, selfishness, failures of courage, ingrained habit and so on just like the rest of us, and I thought this was one of the book's great strengths.

I though the whole thing was terrific. I couldn't put it down and it has stayed with me very strongly since I finished it. Plainly a lot of other reviewers here didn't like the book and it's obviously not for everyone, but I would urge you at least to try it. You may well hate it too, but if you do find it's for you it will be a hugely enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Mary Ann Shaffer - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An Unexpected delight

This is a truly delightful book. I worried before it arrived that an amusing and whimsical title might have persuaded me to request something which would turn out not to be very good, but I was wholly wrong. I enjoyed it immensely; it is witty, erudite without being smug, interesting, laugh-out-loud funny in places and very moving in others.

The novel is set in 1946 and is in the form of letters, mainly to and from the central character, Juliet Ashton, a successful writer who becomes, wholly coincidentally, involved with a group of people on Guernsey who lived through the wartime German Occupation. The characters are thoroughly engaging and Mary Ann Shaffer (although born in the USA) manages to capture the English voice of the time beautifully: the prose is a pleasure to read.

It is very hard to summarise any of the developing stories without giving away more than I'd have wanted to know in advance, so I won't try, but the book has something to say about all kinds of things. Among them are friendship, suffering, forgiveness, goodness and wickedness, the resilience of humanity in desperate circumstances, how reading may influence us and the history of the Channel Islanders during the war. All this makes it sound a bit worthy and turgid, but it's neither - anything but, in fact. I never felt that I was being lectured, the history forms a really interesting and beautifully evoked backdrop to a thoroughly involving story and the observations on other things are either implicit in the doings of characters I really cared about or made directly with wit and flair. And there's a really tense will-they-won't-they love story which Jane Austen would have been proud of and which kept me in nail-biting suspense right up to the last page.

One theme in the book is the impact of reading on hitherto unliterary characters, which carries a risk of being patronising or sentimental. Shaffer has a sure feel, though, and avoids both. She does, naturally, use the device to give her views on some of her favourite authors, but it's very wittily and sometimes touchingly done. For example, one of her characters says of Wilfred Owen, "...he knew what was what and called it by its right name. I was there, too, at Passchendaele, and I knew what he knew but I could never put it into words for myself." As a definition of poetry, I think you could do a lot worse than that. And in the same letter there is a paragraph about Yeats's omission of Great War poetry from his Oxford Book of Modern Verse which made me smile and brought a great lump to my throat at the same time.

Another of Shaffer's characters writes, "Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books." That's a very dangerous thing to write in a novel lest it be turned against you, but there is no chance of that here. This is a very good book indeed and I kept wanting to get back to reading it. I was completely carried along by it and when it ended I was very sorry that there was no more. I urge you to read it. I loved it and I'm sure others will too.

Elizabeth McKenzie - The Portable Veblen

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Intelligent,  insightful and readable

I enjoyed this book.  It had its flaws, but it is well written and readable and it has some important things to say.

It's not an easy book to summarize, but it is principally a novel of character.  The main protagonist is Veblen Amundsen-Hova, a slightly quirky 30-year-old in Palo Alto, California, who is to be married to Paul, a medical researcher.  Veblen is named after Thorstein Veblen, the 19^th- and early 20^th-Century radical social thinker.  No – I hadn't heard of him either, but he coined the term "conspicuous consumption" among a lot of other significant insights, and his thinking and place in society plays quite a large part in this novel.

The book is chiefly about Veblen's humane view of the world, her recognisable self-doubt and questioning, and her rich (if slightly bonkers at times) appreciation of the wonder and beauty of the world, as opposed to the shallow, grasping materialism of some of the rest of society.  It's very well done for the most part; Elizabeth McKenzie paints very convincing portraits of a rich cast of characters and shows a believable range of reactions to the difficulties of life –including Veblen's monstrously self-obsessed mother, who is a brilliantly disturbing character.  There is also a well-aimed swipe at the greed, cynicism and corruption in the US health system, and plenty of intellectual content, including thoughtful reflections on what a life should be and what we van expect from it.

I may have made it sound a bit dry, but I found the whole thing engrossing and readable.  McKenzie does let things go a bit toward the end, I think, with a tendency to explain to us slightly clumsily what she has already rather deftly shown us.  Also, lot of people have convenient and not wholly believable insights and moments of self-awareness - and in one case an almost farcical Come-Uppance.  These aren't the saccharine little Life Lessons which sometimes pollute the end of novels, but it didn't feel of the same quality as the rest of the book to me.

Overall, though, this is an intelligent, insightful and readable book which I enjoyed.  I can recommend it.

(I received a free ARC via Netgalley.)

Julian Clary - Briefs Encountered

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A witty, thoughtful novel

I enjoyed this book. Julian Clary writes very well and has created an involving novel. It wasn't quite what I expected - given the title and his persona as an ultra-camp purveyor of double entendres I thought it would be a smut-filled comedy. While he doesn't shrink from occasional smut and there are certainly some very funny lines, this is actually a novel about love, trust and betrayal which is touching, thoughtful and quite scary in places.

The story is based around a house in Kent and cuts between its current occupants, a fictional present-day gay actor and his partner, and the 1920s when Noel Coward and his partner lived there. Julian Clary has plainly done a lot of research into Coward, but it is very lightly worn and I thought he painted a very thoughtful and convincing portrait of Coward and his life. The supernatural goings-on which link the two stories are delicately done and work well and I became very involved with the characters and their stories. The prose is a pleasure to read and the structure is very deftly done, but I must say that I thought the first half of the book needed editing. Julian Clary sets the scene and builds up his characters and their relationships very well, but it did go on a bit and I started to get rather bogged down by page 150 or so. It was worth persevering, though, because it all became very involving when the story really got going. I also thought that the touching and well-crafted close of the book was marred by the unnecessary addition of an Epilogue.

These are minor reservations, though. I can recommend this book as a well-written, readable and rewarding novel with a lot more depth than you might expect.