Lief GW Persson - The Sword of Justice

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Terrifically enjoyable

I enjoyed the Sword of Justice enormously.  I'm a bit lukewarm about a lot of Scandi-crime stuff and only tried this on the recommendation of a friend – and I'm very glad I did.

What makes this book stand out is its protagonist, Evert Bäckström.  He is, to the public, a national hero of policing: wise, diligent and superbly effective.  In fact, he is idle, vain, drunken, corrupt and dishonest.  Much of the book is narrated from his point of view, and we also see, from his internal monologue,  that he is bigoted, lecherous, grasping, self-deluded, treacherous, sexist, racist…and pretty well every other unpleasant "-ist" you can think of.  These attitudes are brilliantly parodied by Persson, and it makes the whole thing slyly funny. 

Bäckström is quite shrewd, however, and even though he leaves all the work to others, he does grasp what is going on well enough to maintain his public reputation, even if many of his colleagues see through him.  Just as an example of his behaviour, there's a scene in which he discovers a vital piece of evidence in a valuable antique vase…because he had picked the vase up to try to steal it from the crime scene, and is now secretly furious that he's drawn attention to it so he can't take it. 

There's lots of very amusing stuff, but it's based in a good police procedural story involving stolen art works, crooked lawyers, violent gangs and so on.  It's very well told and has well-drawn characters.  I found the book a genuine pleasure and I'll be searching out the two previous Bäckström novels very soon.  This is a great read and very warmly recommended.

Emma Donoghue - Room

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent book

I thought this was an excellent book.

The narrative is by Jack, a five-year-old boy who has lived entirely in the same small room with his mother since he was born.  He believes that there is no outside world and that what he sees on TV is fiction.  The circumstances of their incarceration slowly become clear to us and eventually to him.  His responses to his world and the changes which take place are at the heart of this book.

It is a brilliantly told story.  Jack’s voice is utterly convincing virtually throughout and his beautiful, naïve descriptions of things and events give them a real poignancy and really bring them home to the reader.  For Emma Donoghue to maintain Jack’s voice as convincingly as she does is a real tour de force of writing.  The book is also very well structured and paced so that I was utterly gripped by the narrative which is at times humorous, often moving and in places nail-shreddingly exciting.  I found it hard to put the book down and although the last section is perhaps slightly less convincing than the rest, it is engrossing right up to the last page.

I think Room well deserves all the attention it has been given.  It’s not just hype – this really is an excellent, readable and engrossing book.

Mark Sanderson - Snow Hill

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Very disappointing

This book has an excellent opening, a short extract from the main character's diary: "I went to my funeral this morning. I expected more people to be there..." The remainder of the book is narrated in the third person and I am sorry to say that I found it dull, badly written and a real struggle to get through.

It's a good idea for a story: set in 1936 it features a young reporter looking into murder and its connections to police corruption and homosexuality (illegal then, of course). The trouble is that it is so badly told. For example, at the outset we are clumsily introduced to a cast of deeply unconvincing, stereotypical characters: the boozy journalist, the bullying boss, the troubled PC with a heart of gold, and so on. One is a posh bloke who is a rival reporter to the main protagonist who "tosses his flowing, chestnut locks." Lazy cliché mars the whole book - later someone is actually dragged somewhere "kicking and screaming" - and the prose is dreadfully clunky and downright inappropriate in places. There are irrelevant and tedious reminiscences about childhood scenes which add nothing and slow down an already sluggish narrative, apparently inserted to show how much research the author has done.

Characters do implausible things for the flimsiest of reasons, often putting themselves in danger for the sole purpose of setting up a predictable "tense" situation. For example, the protagonist goes to meet his only informant in a dodgy alley at 3.30am. No-one is in the alley when he gets there, but he spots a large, deserted cold-store building with its doors closed but unlocked. He knows people want to silence him, and anyone with a grain of sense would get away from there as fast as possible. I wouldn't dream of giving away plot details, but you may find yourself able to guess what he actually does, what he finds and what happens to him after he's found it.

I could go on, but I'm sure you get my drift. I didn't like the book at all and often found myself muttering "oh, for heaven's sake" out of sheer irritation. Other reviewers have clearly enjoyed this book and you should read their reviews before being put off by mine - tastes vary, after all. Apparently it's the first of a trilogy but I certainly shan't be bothering with the next two.

Anne Zouroudi - The Lady Of Sorrows

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An enjoyable read

I enjoyed this book very much. It is a well-written, leisurely-paced mystery set on a small Greek island. There is a lot of description of local culture, atmosphere and characters and not a great deal of plot, but that was fine by me. My copy carried an endorsement from Alexander McCall Smith, and I can see why he would like it. Although very different from Smith's books in many ways, its pacing and morality put me in mind of Mma Ramotswe more than once.

The central character is an enigmatic detective who, like Mma Ramotswe, is interested in goodness, justice and the restoration of wrongs rather than the Law and the police. It is never made clear whom he works for, but he is an engaging character whose insight, powers of investigation and self-certainty in the dispensing of justice verge on the Olympian - perhaps hinting that his connection to the Messenger of the Gods extends further than just his name. He may not have wings on the heels of his shoes, for example, but he is inordinately careful about ensuring that they are immaculate at all times - but this never intrudes and is just an interesting background notion. I liked him a lot.

The plot revolves around an ancient, miraculous icon and some dark goings on among the inhabitants of the island where it is displayed in the church. I strongly recommend that you don't read the publisher's blurb on this page or on the back of the book - in a couple of sentences it gives away the entire plot of the first half of the book. This actually emerges with a pleasing slowness from the local atmosphere, which Zouroudi creates with great warmth and skill, painting the local characters with sympathy but an unsparing honesty, too.

This is an ideal summer read. It's not great literature, but it is well-written, charming, engaging and sun-soaked. Recommended.

Alison Bruce - Cambridge Blue

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Could have been much better

In spite of some good things about this book, I found it rather hard going. It has a decent plot (although I found the denouement very muddled) and at times Alison Bruce writes very well - I thought the post-mortem scene was excellently done, for example - and she generates a good sense of Cambridge, but stilted language too often made both narrative and dialogue feel rather forced to me.

My biggest problem with the book, though, was that I found the character of the main protagonist, DC Gary Goodhew, increasingly implausible. I suspect that Ms Bruce is more than half in love with her creation - she makes him attractive but unaware of it, fabulously empathetic and non-sexist, far more intelligent and intuitive than any of his colleagues, and so bursting with integrity and the desire to do good that it's a wonder it doesn't give him a nose bleed. He even has cool taste in music. And just in case we haven't grasped the point, we get an anti-Gary against whom he can shine; a colleague who is vain, arrogant, bigoted, faithless, careless...and so on.

The author's infatuation with her creation means that he is allowed to get away with frankly ridiculous behaviour. He constantly acts unprofessionally and sometimes illegally, but (of course) unearths vital clues which skilled and experienced teams of experts have missed. His DI takes him off the case (of course), but within a couple of hours he is reinstated and, although he is exceptionally young and totally inexperienced, the same DI immediately entrusts him with conducting the interviews with the prime suspects in a high-profile murder case on his own. There's rather a lot of this sort of thing and I'm afraid I ended up finding it absurd, irritating and very distracting.

I didn't think this was a terrible book by any means, but it could have been far, far better. Alison Bruce is obviously setting Gary Goodhew up for a series of novels; if she sticks to writing in the unaffected style of the best parts of this book, cuts out the clichés of the genre and brings rather more discipline to her treatment of her characters the novels could turn out to be rather good, but I'm afraid I can only give this one a lukewarm recommendation.

Charles Cumming - The Trinity Six

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An enjoyable spy novel

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is a modern spy novel which deals with the consequences of cold-war events, in which a present-day academic stumbles upon secrets from years ago and is drawn into the world of espionage. Charles Cumming provides a well-researched background of true (or at least on-record) events against which to set his story and this gives it a very convincing feel. The plot is plausible, the story is well paced and gripping, and he describes and uses locations in different European cities to very good effect. There is very sparing use of violence which makes it all the more shocking and effective when it does occur. Cumming doesn't rely on grisly scenes or "adrenaline-packed" action sequences to generate tension but racks it up very satisfactorily through implied threat and uncertainty. I found myself gradually drawn in and in the end thoroughly gripped.

The prose is literate, unaffected and very readable. Characters are generally well-drawn and believable, although I raised a slightly cynical eyebrow at the rather implausible keenness of a beautiful young woman to go to bed instantly with a somewhat older protagonist who, coincidentally I am sure, is roughly the same age as the author. Also, Cumming clearly has a burning moral indignation about a number of things and wanted to get this off his chest, which leads to some rather unconvincing speechifying toward the end of the book - but these are minor flaws which didn't spoil my enjoyment of an enjoyable, literate and engrossing read. Recommended.

Francesca Kay - The Long Room

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Beautifully written

I found this a gripping, superbly written book but I did have my reservations about it.

It is almost impossible to give an outline of the plot (such as it is) without divulging far more than I would have waned to know before I began.  Set in 1981, the protagonist is Stephen, a young man from a very ordinary background who, after going to Oxford is working as a "listener" for the Intelligence Services, listening to hours of surveillance tapes each day…and becoming completely besotted with the wife of one of the subjects.  The book is an almost forensic portrayal of his internal state as his infatuation leads him by tiny degrees into deeper and deeper water.

It's brilliantly done.  The atmosphere of the time, the period detail and the sense of cold and bleakness as Christmas approaches for Stephen are wonderfully evoked, and Francesca Kay's psychological portraits of both Stephen and his mother are exceptionally good, built up utterly convincingly from the minutiae of their everyday lives, thoughts and feelings.  Don't look for a fast-paced spy thriller, because this is anything but that, but it has a gripping, doom-laden feel which builds powerfully throughout the narrative and it's one of those books where I had to make an effort to bring myself out of  its world and readjust to reality after reading for any length of time.

My reservation is that, however lonely and besotted Stephen is, and however much he drinks, I couldn't quite believe that as a highly intelligent man he would be quite so foolish and naïve as to do some of the things he does, or to be blind to some of the obvious things he ought to see.  Toward the end, I even muttered "Oh, for heavens' sake" as he makes yet another ridiculous decision (or, more accurately, fails to make an even remotely sensible one).  This did take the gloss off an otherwise excellent book for me.

That aside, this is a fine book; it is exceptionally well written, very insightful and quite gripping, with brilliant portraits of a time and of its characters.  Recommended.

Kate di Camillo - The Magician's Elephant

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Trying a bit too hard

Kate DiCamillo has obviously written good books (you don't win a Newberry Medal for nothing) but I'm afraid this book didn't really work for me. It is an attempt to create a modern fairy story, and it does have its merits including some quite touching moments, but I found the book a struggle to get through and ultimately rather depressing and unrewarding.

On the dustjacket, DiCamillo is quoted as saying "I wanted, I needed, I *yearned* to tell a story of love and magic," and I think that has possibly led her to try a bit too hard. She has created a mythical city which seems to be somewhere in central Europe in the late 19th Century. It is cold and dark there and it is peopled by odd characters with a strange mishmash of names. The prose tries to be poetic and of the period but ends up just feeling rather affected with some very jarring slips out of style ("Quit moving your lips," for example). It read to me like a not-very-good pastiche of a Victorian translation of a Grimm Fairy Tale. The illustrations are dark and gloomy, and I remember finding books like this quite disturbing when I was small.

Please be aware that others have found this book charming and uplifting. You should read their reviews before being put off by mine - these things are often a matter of personal taste after all - but I'm afraid I didn't enjoy it and shan't be reading it again myself, nor to any young people.

By Jack Rosenthal - An Autobiography

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A brilliant, touching and funny autobiography

I have always enjoyed Jack Rosenthal's TV plays - The Evacuees, The Knowledge, P'Tang Yang Kipperbang, Eskimo Day and the original London's Burning among others. This autobiography is written in his natural medium as a screenplay - a prospect I found rather off-putting, but I gave it a go anyway. I needn't have worried. By the end of the first page I was hooked and reading it with ease and enjoyment. The screenplay format conjures up wonderful images and scenes and Rosenthal's use of dialogue is just brilliant - insightful, moving and often hilarious.

The book covers his life from 1930s Manchester until the turn of the millennium, with a postscript (beautifully, wittily and movingly written) from his wife Maureen Lipman. The whole thing is wonderful and I found that I was always very keen to get back and read some more and was often kept awake too late because I was reluctant to stop reading. There are plenty of anecdotes about the famous, great insight into the workings of showbusiness, and a warm depiction of family life, all told with wit, insight and self-deprecating humour by an obviously lovely man. It's a joy - and several cuts above the average showbiz autobiography.

If you have any interest in Jack Rosenthal, TV and film in the last 50 years or just in a really fine and funny book about family life and life in general, I recommend this very warmly indeed.

Andrew Taylor - The Ashes of London

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A readable book, but not Taylor's best

This is a decent, very readable book from Andrew Taylor, but it's not one of his best, I think.

Ashes Of London is a thriller set during and after the Fire Of London, between September and Christmas 1666.  It involves murder, financial skulduggery and political intrigue and introduces us to James Marwood, a clerk in Whitehall who becomes an investigator on behalf of the King's fixer.  We also meet Cat Lovett, the intelligent but oppressed young woman with both the desire and skill to become an architect, who becomes embroiled in the whole business.  Both are well painted and sympathetic characters who are being set up for a "massive series." 

There is actually little mystery here as the perpetrators of the crimes become known to us pretty early on, but there is plenty of tension and pursuit, and I found the book an enjoyable read overall.  Andrew Taylor's knowledge and research is, as always, extensive and deep.  (Unusually, it's not flawless this time; the errors are wholly insignificant - like Wren already already being a Commissioner for the Rebuilding of London while the Fire was still at its height, which is a bit previous, for example – but Taylor is normally so accurate that I was surprised.)  He creates a good picture of London at the time of the Fire and of the political and religious intrigues and tensions which still remained after the Restoration.

In previous books, most notably the excellent Anatomy of Ghosts, Taylor strikes an excellent balance between the speech of the time and modern English in the mouths of his characters, making the dialogue both readable and seemingly natural to the time.  Here, he is not nearly so sure-footed; for example, modern contractions are used almost invariably, so we get "We'll see," or "You don't need to know" rather than "We shall see" or "You need not know."  I found this shift of balance to the modern vernacular rather spoiled the period feel for me, and this and the somewhat workaday plot and the now apparently obligatory cliché of the Modern Feminist Woman In A Historical Novel did tarnish my enjoyment rather.  I know Taylor is making valid and important points about the historical (and modern) treatment of women, but it's becoming a tired device through which to do it.

These reservations aside, I enjoyed the book and it kept me involved until the (slightly predictable, convenient and somewhat silly) resolution.  This may not be Andrew Taylor's best work, but it's a very readable book and I can recommend it.

John Verdon - Think Of A Number

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Enjoyable and engrossing

I enjoyed this book. It is a well-written and engrossing thriller and even though the idea of Cerebral Cop Pursuing Game-Playing Serial Killer is anything but new, it still kept me involved and gripped and it is an impressive debut novel.

There is a slow but very involving beginning including some intriguing puzzles. I thought the gently quickening pace was very well controlled, the plot largely plausible and the writing literate and enjoyable. Even the mandatory difficulties in the detective's personal life were sensibly and sensitively handled, and I found the analysis of his work-obsession (usually just a given in such novels) penetrating and convincing.

The book does have its faults. For example, Gurney's art work and the relationship complications it threatens to create are carefully and lengthily built up, and then just peter out unnoticed. Later in the book he does something uncharacteristically and frankly implausibly stupid in order to set up a Tense Climax, and I found the climax itself rather contrived and over-the-top. None of this is a real problem, though, and with a bit of goodwill and suspension of disbelief this is a very enjoyable, readable book with more depth than many. Recommended.

Dawn French - a Tiny Bit Marvellous

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very enjoyable

I enjoyed this book a lot. Even though I like Dawn French's work on TV very much, I approached this with some scepticism because you never know whether a book written by a "celebrity" author and launched in a colossal fanfare of publicity is going to be any good. I am pleased to say that this one is.

It's a novel of family life, written from the point of view of three members of the family, each with their own distinctive voice: the rather psychobabbly mother, the angst-ridden 17-year-old-daughter and the pretentious and eccentric 16-year-old son and all three are done very well. They did occasionally sound a little more like characters from a French and Saunders sketch than real people, but I became sufficiently involved in their stories and characters not to mind.

The story is an amusing and quite insightful account of their lives and the relationships between them (and with the almost silent but very much present Dad/Husband). There are plenty of events, and although nothing startlingly original happens it does leave you with a sense of really having got to know these flawed but likeable people and of the importance and solidity of family bonds. It speaks well of the book that I resisited being manipulated by the sentimental ending, but found it very affecting in spite of myself.

I found this a very readable, enjoyable book. Recommended.

Hugh Aldersley-Williams - Periodic Tales

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Enjoyable and interesting

I very much enjoyed this book. The beginning wasn't great, what with the statement on page 6 that the elements came into being a few moments after the big bang (they didn't - they began to be formed a long time later) and then a lengthy and slightly clunky section on gold, but it got better very quickly. Each element is treated in an eclectic and quirky section which may deal with its origins, its importance in human history, its odd properties, its influence in literature and so on, including a lot of amusing and interesting anecdotes.

Badly done, this could be dreadful, but Hugh Aldersey-Williams handles it very well and the whole is highly entertaining and very informative. He is extremely erudite, he makes very wide-ranging and shrewd choices about what to include and above all is genuinely hugely enthusiastic about his subject. He also writes very well and I found myself keen to get back and read more, which is by no means always the case for me with this sort of book. It's an excellent read and I recommend it very warmly.

H.R.F Keating - The Perfect Murder

Rating: 4/5

Readable and amiable, but...

As a readable detective story this is enjoyable and quite engaging. Alexander McCall Smith provides the enthusiastic introduction and one can see why because there is more than a faint echo of Ghote in Mma Ramotswe. They are both innocent but determined and resilient, both beacons of decency in a less than decent world and both rely heavily on a slightly obscure written authority for their methodology, with Mma Ramotswe's relationship with Clovis Andersen's `Principles of Private Detection' bearing a striking resemblance to Ghote's with Gross's `Criminal Investigation'. The plot here is also concerned with puzzling but relatively minor crimes, which all makes for an amiable read, with Bombay and its characters colourfully drawn.

It is this last which made me slightly uneasy about the book. Keating is an Englishman who, in 1964 when this book was published, had never been to India. I am sorry of this seems like Political Correctness Gone Mad, but for him then to paint poisonous portraits of some Indians, and somewhat patronising comic ones of others did worry me. Even if, as McCall Smith says by way of exoneration, such characters exist, it seems to me that it is one thing for a knowledgeable author with experience of India (even if non-Indian) to describe them, but another for a mid-1960s white Englishman to imagine them without any first-hand knowledge.

So...it's an amiable, well-written and engaging book. My reservations are a personal response to wider issues around the book rather than to the book itself and I have given it four stars because I think that's what the text itself deserves. If you don't share my reservations and like fairly gentle detective fiction I can recommend it.

Natasha Solomons - The Novel In The Viola

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Thoughtful and involving

I liked this book very much. It is a well written, involving and very believable story of Elise, a well-to-do teenage Jewish girl from Vienna arriving as a refugee in Dorset in 1938 to work as a domestic servant, hoping that her parents would also be able to escape the persecution soon. Narrated in the first person, it follows both her life as she adjusts to her new circumstances and her emotional life as a refugee cut off from news of her family. I thought it was extremely well done: I found the characters very well drawn with Elise's internal life particularly believable and insightful, and I became very involved in her story. I laughed several times, found other moments piercingly moving and thought Natasha Solomons showed a real empathy with and understanding of the situation of a refugee far from her home and family.

Solomons (as she did in her first novel, Mr. Rosenblum's List) uses a lot of descriptions of the Dorset countryside and its changes with the seasons as a context for the story. I really liked this and it is done extremely well, as is the developing love story. Not everyone will like these aspects of the book, and it is not hard to guess what is going to happen at times - sometimes quite deliberately on the author's part. If these are things you dislike in a book then this won't be for you, but otherwise I recommend it very warmly as a very readable, insightful and rewarding book.

Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Gripping and thoughtful

I thought this was an excellent book - very readable, extremely atmospheric, insightful and memorable. The book begins with the discovery of a body and the circumstances of how it came to be there gradually emerge in an extremely well-told story. It is not a detective story of any kind, but is concerned with the lives of the narrator and two of her school friends and how they came to be involved in the story. It switches easily between the present day and descriptions of events when they were all thirteen in 1997, and I found myself gripped and enthralled throughout.

I don't want to give away any plot details, but I found the story very plausible and the characters extremely well drawn. Jenn Ashworth is excellent at evoking the relationships between teenagers, and I thought truly brilliant in showing the life of a child in a family with a father with mental health problems. The atmosphere of a small City (never named, but with a striking resemblance to Preston) also seemed completely real to me, having spent my teenage years in a comparable city. The book has important things to say about teenage life, families and the effect of guilt both real and imagined, and is also very acute about the public and media response to tragedy.

My one reservation about this book is that I am not sure that someone of the background and education given to the narrator would be able to write so well or make such penetrating observations, but the book was easily good enough to make this seem irrelevant. It's very good indeed and recommended very warmly.

Deborah Harkness - A Discovery Of Witches

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Promising but flawed

I am very ambivalent about this book. It had some very good things about it but I found it badly flawed. I dithered about whether to give it four stars because of the good bits or three because of the flaws: neither seemed right, but the truth is that I got to the end with some relief and realised that I probably won't be bothering with the sequel, so - albeit reluctantly - three stars seems the honest rating.

Harkness is at her best when writing about what she really knows. She is an American academic whose field is History of Science and she is very good at evoking a good story from academic study, alchemy and American witches. The set-up is excellent and drew me in very quickly: she gives a good portrait of the life of a visiting academic in Oxford and there is an outstanding passage where her protagonist is analysing parts of Darwin's Origin of Species - not your standard occult thriller fare and really well done. There are one or two genuinely exciting episodes, too, which kept me reading.

I have some pretty serious reservations, though - the first being that the book is far too long. I found great chunks of it just plain boring: no plot development, endless descriptions of clothes, riding tack and any number of other things, while two characters I found stereotypical and a bit tedious became intimate very, very slowly. I even got sick of endless descriptions of beautiful historical books and artefacts, and I'm extremely keen on books and artefacts. I found it simply self-indulgent in far too many places.

Harkness creates her world with a wealth of detail about culture and academic ideas, but I found that I kept being pushed out of her world by errors which made that world seem false. For example, at times she goes into minute, well-researched detail about genetics, but then displays a complete lack of understanding of the process of evolution; modern American idioms fitted very well in the voice of the narrator who is a modern American, but kept creeping into the mouths of ancient Europeans where they sounded silly, and so on. The atmosphere which Harkness intends to build of immense culture and learning kept being broken by such factual or stylistic slips and while I wouldn't nit-pick about the odd such solecism, there were enough of them eventually to begin to irritate.

It's perhaps hypocritical of me to complain about the book being far too long and then write a review which is itself probably too long, but I did find this a difficult book to sum up briefly. Many others have obviously enjoyed this book far more than I did, but I'm afraid I can only give it a lukewarm recommendation.

S.J. Watson - Before I Go To Sleep

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A terrific book

I thought this was a terrific book - gripping, tense, well written and with important things to say. It is narrated by Christine, who loses all memory of her life every time she sleeps. The opening is quite brilliant as she describes her bewilderment and then panic at finding herself in a strange house, in bed with a strange man and so on. I thought the narrator's voice was utterly convincing and I was completely drawn in after a very few pages. The book recounts how, by keeping a journal, Christine slowly builds up a picture of her history as she records what she is told by her husband and her doctor. There is a subtle but well-maintained air of suspense and menace as she has to decide whether she can trust either of them to tell her the truth, and of building suspicion as fragmentary memories begin to return and untruths are exposed and then explained. It is really well done right up to the nerve-tingling climax.

As well as being a really gripping story, it's a very well-written novel with psychological depth, real insights into how we rely on and process memories and the effect on others of Christine's disability. For example, the passage where she learns of a tragic event in her past and then realises that her husband has had to tell her and see her raw grief many, many times before is truly haunting. S.J. Watson makes Christine a writer in her former life, which makes the fluent, readable prose in her journal fit well with her character and gives credibility to the narrative. I found it an absolutely riveting read and one which has given me much to remember and think about afterward. Very highly recommended.

Elizabeth Gilbert - The Signature Of All Things

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Exceptionally good

I thought this was an excellent book. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it nearly as much as I did because it sounded a bit worthy and turgid from the description: the life story of a wealthy 19th Century woman from Philadelphia who has an interest in the study of mosses doesn't immediately grab my attention as a must-read book, but I found it exceptionally good from beginning to end. It is readable, engrossing, extremely interesting and rather touching in many places.

The plot has been well summarized elsewhere so I won't go over it again. The story kept me reading, but what was exceptionally good, I thought, was the characterization and the sense of period. Elizabeth Gilbert creates exceptionally real, believable characters and Alma, in particular, is an engaging, flawed but deeply understandable and, to me, likeable character. Similarly, Gilbert portrays the life, the attitudes and the preoccupations of the time beautifully. Her skill in this put me in mind slightly of Patrick O'Brian, although the book is very different from O'Brian in many ways. However, it does have that wonderful gift of storytelling with excellent, readable prose and the sense of complete immersion in and understanding of the period. The language is wholly believable and there is a sense throughout of deep learning ,lightly worn.

This also comes over superbly in the intellectual insights into the period's upheavals in biology, particularly evolution. It is a rare pleasure to find such deep understanding in a novel not only of the ideas themselves but of their effect on individuals.

This a book which I was sorry to finish. It was a pleasure to read and had important things to say about all sorts of things: the nature of fulfilment and unfulfilment, of desire, of self-awareness, of what a life well-lived might be...and so on. It is simply terrific, and I recommend it in the warmest terms.

Helen Simonson - Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Excellent

I thought this an excellent book.  In spite of recommendations, I thought there was a strong possibility I would thoroughly dislike it because the story of a relationship between an elderly Major who has lived in the same Sussex village all his life and the Muslim widow who runs the village shop could be toe-curlingly sentimental and patronising in the wrong hands.  This is anything but: it is charming in many ways, witty and heart-warming (a phrase which normally inspires a vague dread in me) but there is real thought and insight here, too. 

It is excellently written and paced, with an unfussy, elegant style which is very easy to read and which allows the characters to emerge from their own words and actions rather than lavish description, much as they do in Alan Bennett or Barbara Pym (although I wouldn’t suggest that it’s in the same league as those two towering masters.)  I found her characters entertaining, engaging and very believable.  Simonson doesn’t resort to stereotype, and people often behave unexpectedly, making the book much more thought-provoking than most “gentle comedies of manners”.  As one of her more robustly-spoken young characters sums it up when speaking to the Major, “You ought to be an old git, but I like you.”

I found this book hard to put down and a joy to read.  Very warmly recommended.

Ann Morgan - Beside Myself

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A brilliant, spellbinding portrait

I thought this was an excellent book.  It wasn't at all what I expected, but it turned out to be brilliantly gripping, illuminating and disturbing. It has important things to say about identity, compassion and mental illness.

I thought Beside Myself was going to be yet another variation on the old Identical Twins trope in thrillers, but it's actually an acute and powerful portrait of Helen, a troubled young girl whose identity is stripped from her, and her subsequent life as she develops bipolar disorder.  It is told in two time-frames as we alternate between the voice of the young Helen as she grows up and "goes off the rails" and the Helen of the present day, whom we meet when she has reached rock-bottom: addicted to alcohol, depressed, hearing voices and living in hand-to-mouth squalor.  It doesn't sound alluring, and it's often not an easy read but it's exceptionally well done; I found it absolutely spellbinding much of the time.

Ann Morgan gets Helen's voice absolutely right, I think, and her portrayal of the rebellious girl as she grows up struggling with the loss of her true identity and the development of her mental illness is quite remarkable.  Helen behaves abominably much of the time, and yet we understand and almost sympathise with her as she suffers and is misunderstood or ignored by those from whom she needs help.  Morgan creates a superbly believable cast of characters around Helen, most notably her mother who just wants everything to be nice and respectable and who has no time for "weakness," which to her includes any need for emotional support  There are some quite heartbreaking scenes between her and Helen, and many other parts of the book are just as good.

It's not perfect.  We get no explanation of how Helen's twin Ellie suddenly manages to lose her behavioural and learning difficulties and take on Helen's persona and there are a couple of coincidences too many for comfort, for example.  Nevertheless, I found the whole thing so well done and so insightful and gripping that none of that bothered me much.  There have been some very, very fine novels about mental illness recently; this may not be in quite the same league as Nathan Filer's The Shock Of The Fall, but it's certainly close.  I think it and stands with The Shock Of The Fall and books like The Mirror World Of Melody Black (Gavin Extence) and Am I Normal Yet? (Holly Bourne) as excellent, unflinching, compassionate and utterly involving explorations of the world of people with mental illness, and of how the rest of the world treats them.

I am very grateful to the publishers and to Netgalley for sending me a free ARC.  I think this is exceptionally good and I can recommend it very warmly.

Gerald Seymour - A Deniable Death

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An extraordinary thriller

In the end I was utterly gripped by this extraordinary thriller. It has a slow, meticulously developed beginning which gradually reeled me in and left me quite unable to put it down for the last hundred pages or so.

The story is of an intelligence operation to attempt discover where a key Iraqi bomb-maker is travelling to for medical help for his wife, and there to kill him. Seymour's research is exceptionally detailed into all aspects of the operation, and he gives us the minutiae of the intelligence work and of the characters of those involved. I found myself thoroughly involved with many of the characters, even though many aren't all that likeable. Seymour really manages to put us in the position of the people involved and to help us understand their difficulties, fear and suffering, and the slow racking up of tension, particularly during the second half of the book, is quite masterly. (Do be aware that there are some shockingly grisly scenes. They are absolutely justified and an integral part of the narrative, but some readers may wish to be warned.)

The book does have its flaws. Generally the detail and character develoment is very successful, but I found the character stuff a little much at times: there are quite a number of key players, including the target and his wife, and Seymour gives us significant accounts of the lives and motivations of many of them. All this, plus the sheer weight of operational detail, began to drag the book down a bit around page 150, and I thought a bit of judicious editing would have helped. There is some rather heavy-handed moralising in places, too, and one speech in particular read less like spontaneous angry whisperings in a hideously uncomfortable observation hide and more like a carefully prepared address to a political rally.

Nevertheless, after finishing the book I was left with the sensation that I had been through something truly memorable, so in spite of some minor reservations this is highly recommended as an intelligent, absorbing read and, in the end, an exceptionally exciting and involving thriller.

Benjamin Black - A Death In Summer

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Thoughtful and readable

This is a consciously "literary" crime novel. How you respond to it will depend upon whether you like the sort of heightened language employed by Benjamin Black (the Man Booker winner John Banville writing under a well-publicised pseudonym). I do like it and so I did enjoy the book, although I thought it had its flaws.

To illustrate the style of the book, Banville describes a buffet table which has "at its centre, a mighty salmon, succulently, indecently pink, arranged on a silver salver..." Or as another example, "The priest was studying him closely again, running ghostly fingers over the Braille of Quirke's soul." I found all this atmospheric and evocative - which is just as well, because there is a lot of atmosphere and character and a great deal of Fine Writing but, frankly, not all that much plot. What plot there is, is a bit thin and covers very well-trodden ground - child abuse, the wealthy believing they can behave as they wish and so on - and it flagged pretty badly in places. However it serves well enough as a vehicle for conveying the author's character analyses and sense of the mores of 1950s Ireland, which seems to me to be the real point of this book

I thought Inspector Hackett (only a relatively minor character, sadly) a wonderful creation, and there is one prolonged interview scene conducted by him which is utterly compelling and quite brilliantly done, I thought. Although less engaging, Black's other characters seem very real and well-drawn to me and I thought he made some penetrating observations about the way people think and behave.

In short, this is not really a whodunit sort of crime novel, but it is a very well written, thoughtful book and an enjoyable, intelligent read.

Carol Birch - Jamrach's Menagerie

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Gripping, moving and haunting

I thought this was an excellent book. It is gripping, moving and haunting and although it deals with a great deal of suffering and sheer horror, it is often very beautiful.

From the title and some reviews which describe it as "rollicking" and a "romp," I expected a jolly story about a young man becoming involved with an exotic menagerie in Victorian London. It turned out to be very different - a complex, literary novel of the sea as our narrator sets off on a journey on one of the last of the whaling ships under sail to find and capture an exotic, possibly mythical, creature. I found it utterly enthralling, with much to say about the nature of friendship, of growing up, people's behaviour in desperate times, guilt and redemption and much more. It never preaches or philosophises, but presents us with a vivid picture of very real-seeming people, often in extremities of endurance and suffering, and asks us to consider them compassionately. There are incidents and characters here which will remain with me for a long time.

The book also captures wonderfully the atmosphere of Victorian London and of life on a sailing ship and whaler. Melville, Patrick O'Brian and others have set a phenomenally high standard for novels of the sea, whaling and the age of sail but I think Carol Birch, while wholly different from either, matches them for believability and her ability to transport the reader into her world. I thought that the description of the pursuit, killing and processing of a whale was simply brilliant, for example, even though it was familiar from other novels. There were several other passages which were just as good.

The prose was a real pleasure to read. It has an individual voice, is extremely readable and manages to convey subtle and complex emotions and situations remarkably effectively. There are times when it is almost poetic and at others verging on hallucinatory, but is always exactly appropriate to the story. I have not read any of Carol Birch's previous novels, but I certainly will now.

Given what I expected, I am surprised to find myself enthusing so strongly about this book, but I genuinely thought it was outstandingly good and I recommend it extremely warmly.

Nicole Krauss - Great House

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Exceptionally good

I thought this was an exceptionally good book. It had the potential to be dreadful - five fractured, loosely linked monologue narratives, little plot to speak of, no quotation marks for speech... it sounds like the sort of tricksy writing that I hate, designed to show off the author's cleverness and with little regard for anyone being able to read it. However, it is so well written that it works brilliantly: I found myself completely engaged with the characters and their stories and it also has a lot of important things to say.

It is hard to give an idea of the story in this book. It is told in the first person by five different narrators whose disparate stories are loosely linked by a writing desk. Despite the absence of a driving plot I was completely gripped by the stories and inner lives of the narrators. The stories are largely concerned with the nature of relationships, like those between parents and their children, those between new lovers and those between long-married couples, but it also says a lot about loneliness, hope, loss, the regrets of age, and a great deal more. I thought it made a lot of really penetrating, subtle and important observations about all these things. As well as some truly profound insights, Krauss manages tiny but very recognisable observations which make her scenes and characters wonderfully real.

The writing is excellent. It is readable, engaging and literate and carried me along wonderfully. The different voices are exceptionally well done and I found each of them utterly believable. Just once or twice the aging Oxford Don comes out with an American usage which doesn't ring quite true ("fit" for "fitted" and "morgue" for "mortuary", for example), but I don't raise this as a criticism. The fact that these tiny flaws stand out so vividly shows how exceptionally well the different voices are maintained throughout the book.

I cannot agree with the reviewers here who have said that this book is depressing. I do agree that it is poignant and sometimes very sad, piercingly moving in places and certainly not a light, cheery read. However, it carries such insight and compassion that although it is often melancholy and thought-provoking I certainly didn't find it depressing and I feel genuinely enriched for having read it. It made a very powerful impact on me and has stayed with me strongly afterward. I think it is a book which I will return to more than once and I recommend it very warmly indeed.

Nicci French - Blue Monday

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Enjoyable and gripping

I enjoyed this book. It is a well-written, interesting story, and even though the elements of it may seem to have become tired clichés - a missing child, an independent-minded psychologist becoming personally involved, a grumpy detective and so on - it still remained fresh-seeming and original and it had me completely hooked and reading far too late by the last 150 pages or so.

The opening, a sort of 20-page prologue from 1987, was excellent but I have to say that I found the first hundred pages or so of the main narrative pretty hard going. Frieda Klein, the psychologist, is clearly being set up for a series so there was a great deal of character-establishing stuff which I thought made the opening of the book drag very badly, but once things got going and her life formed a background to the story rather than the other way round it was very good. Some suspension of disbelief is required as people do rather ridiculous things or have implausible insights for the sake of the plot - but then that's almost always the case in such tales, and the story was certainly believable enough to be very enjoyable. The pacing is excellent as the tension climbs, and the easy-flowing, literate prose was a pleasure to read.

This is the first Nicci French I have read (a careless omission on my part) and I was impressed. Once you have waded through the opening it's a very good, exciting psychological thriller. Warmly recommended.

Nicholas Searle - The Good Liar

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Poorly written and morally questionable

There's a decent story here and a clever structure, too, but I'm afraid I didn't think this was well enough done to be successful.

The Good Liar is the story of Roy, now in his eighties, who is a con man.  The narrative cuts between the present-day story in which he is attempting to con an elderly woman out of her life savings, and Roy's history.  This is cleverly done as we get episodes moving back in time so each episode explains how he arrived at the previous one.  This is effective and if it were better done could have made for a very good novel, but I had some very serious reservations about this book.

The first problem is the style, which I found poor and a bit amateurish.  It is plodding and rather laboured a good deal of the time with extensive descriptions and histories which aren't very relevant, and lacks any subtlety or finesse of suggestion which would have been more effective.  The prose is also peppered with very tired cliché: "nattering away thirteen to the dozen", "they had bigger fish to fry", "little did they know that…", " the term bandied about…", people repeatedly say "my little plan" or "my little adventure" like a 60s Bond villain talking about some intricate enterprise, and so on and so on.  It really isn't good enough and made the whole thing a bit of a slog.

Even though the direction of the present-day story becomes pretty obvious so that the denouement isn't much of a shock, I thought the book picked up well around half way…and then there's a section which I really didn't like.  The history eventually reaches back to Germany in the Nazi era and the Holocaust.  If you're going to use the Holocaust to add weight to a book's plot, you need to do it very well indeed; it needs to have subtlety, depth and real human involvement to justify it – and to me this didn't.  The book's general style and lack of real penetration of character or situation made this feel facile and hence bordering on the offensively exploitative.  (Try Natasha Solomons' The Novel In The Viola for a recent example of how to do it well.)  I also found the book's ending predictable, clunkily unconvincing and eventually ludicrously sententious.

So…not a book for me, I'm afraid.  Despite its merits of structure and the potentially good story I thought it was poorly written and unacceptably exploitative in places.  I can't recommend it.