The Illusion Of Security

Set in the nineteen sixties, Exposure is the story of Simon, a civil servant in the Admiralty accused of espionage, and the ruinous consequences this has for his wife and three children. Like other books by Helen Dunmore, the focus is on the brutality of ideology and the way that ordinary people are crushed within the political machine.

At the centre of the story is Simon's wife, Lily, a Jew who, as a girl, escaped the horrors of Nazi Germany only to be unwittingly ensnared in the machinations of communist infiltration within British society. As the pressure mounts on Simon and Lily and on the children they so badly want to protect, the couple struggle, each in their own way, to retain their humanity.

It is not an easy read. Compassion is always on the brink of being overcome by cruelty. Yet Helen Dunmore's characters manage to triumph over a seemingly implacable enemy through stubborn resilience and an instinctive understanding of what is most important in their lives. They have to contend with mean-spiritedness from some of those around them but they are also buoyed up by the quiet everyday decency of ordinary people.

This is a novel about illusions - the obscene ideal of a master race, the inhuman belief in the superiority of historical materialism over individual human lives and, above all the illusion of security, that most fragile of human possessions that is so easy to lose and so terribly difficult to regain.

A Paean To Self-Improvement

Alma Whittaker, born in 1800 in Philadelphia to a hugely wealthy plant importer and supplier of herbal medicines, is a highly-intelligent woman who has the misfortune to be physically unattractive to men. Materially affluent but emotionally impoverished, she becomes a botanist specialising in the miniature world of mosses.

When she meets an eccentric illustrator of orchids she falls hopelessly in love and quickly accepts his proposal of marriage but their union is never consummated and they split up. He travels to Tahiti where he dies prematurely. Later, in an attempt to understand his enigmatic personality, she follows in his footsteps.

After an epiphany in Tahiti she begins to develop a theory of evolution but declines to publish her work because she finds herself unable to explain the phenomenon of altruism. Eventually she sees very similar ideas propounded by Darwin to universal acclaim.

The Signature Of All Things is an intelligent, original and provocative piece of historical fiction. Full of colour, underscored by a gentle but unsparing humour, it is an examination of our relationships to the natural world and to each other, as well a paean to self-improvement and scholarship.

There is so much about this novel that is satisfying - the strongly-evoked characters, the confident storytelling voice, the compelling evocation of intellectual excitement, the brave and powerful depiction of female sexual longing, the unflinching examination of the assumptions and misunderstandings that underpin so many romantic relationships.

But, and this is a big but, it all goes on far too long for me. Things that could have been said once are said three times, characters who are meant to be endearing become irritatingly over-indulged. There is an organic proliferation to the text that is no doubt entirely in keeping with the spirit of the book but it did make me wish the editor had done some judicious weeding.

A Compelling Story Of Endurance

A nineteenth century whaling expedition to the Arctic - among the crew, a disgraced Irish surgeon, a captain intent on insurance fraud and a serial killer. That makes it sound rather more commercially-focused than it really is. Instead, the focus is on the pithily -drawn characters who positively leap off the pages, and the powerful evocation of the Arctic setting in which the crew eventually find themselves stranded.

McGuire's storytelling focuses on essentials - the struggle for survival, the need for identity and the desire for a position in the world. The writing is often strikingly poetic, the world, and the men who inhabit it, frequently brutal, the challenges they face, elemental.

It all adds up to a compelling story of endurance, carefully researched, skilfully crafted, and powerfully told. At times the world that Ian McGuire creates seemed more real and solid to me than that one that lay beyond the covers of the book. Extremely enjoyable with a satisfying, if ever so slightly hurried, ending.

A Portrait Of Middle-Class Life

Three sisters, their brother and his new wife, along with assorted children and teenagers, spend a summer holiday in a house in the country that used to belong to their grandparents where they indulge their insecurities, engage in flirtations, misunderstand each other, wilfully or otherwise, and rehearse old grievances. There is also an extended flashback to the breakdown of their parents' marriage forty years earlier, an event that had a profound impact upon them all.

It's a beautifully observed study of a particular strata of modern English life - liberal, self-indulgent, faintly apologetic - and the portrait is painstakingly built up, detail by detail. I can see why some critics have described Tessa Hadley as one of England's finest novelists.

I was reminded in places of Elizabeth Jane Howard. Like Howard, Hadley distributes the perspective equally among the characters, young and old; like Howard, she has a tendency to summarise dialogue rather than reproduce it faithfully. - something that I found rather irritating; and like Howard, Hadley's sensibility is so very English and so middle-class.

My problem with it, however, is that there is absolutely no story. I don't necessarily want a driving plot every time I read a novel but I do like to have some sense of momentum. Otherwise I find it simply too much like hard work; and that is how I felt about this: the characters and their world are exquisitely drawn but the whole thing is so terribly dull.

The story of a Mormon couple living in Merseyside failing to cope with the death of one of their children, A Song For Issy Bradley is a deeply moving portrait of a family in rapid disintegration which also manages to be very funny.

Claire was a convert to Mormonism. She joined because she fell in love with Ian, now Bishop Bradley. Her religion has always been more of an accommodation than anything else and she has tended to ignore those parts of the doctrine that she inwardly baulked it. Now, the death of her daughter Issy has pulled the rug away from beneath her comfortable self-deception. Everything about the religious community in which she has embedded herself, seems irksome and pointless.

I didn't know anything about Mormonism but I do now and, as with all religions, what appears perfectly normal to the initiate seems very weird indeed to the outsider. Carys Bray, who grew up in a Mormon family, brilliantly manipulates the disjuncture between the interior space of a deeply religious family and the uncomprehendingly secular wider world, much of which is seen through the eyes of the dead girl's siblings who have been brought up on tales of miracles and divine intervention but are now confronted with the mundane reality of bereavement.

This is one of those novels that opens a window into a hidden world and, in doing so, simultaneously highlights the strangeness and the sameness of all human behaviour. Sometimes harrowing, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, this is a wonderful read.

A Post-Apocalyptic Nightmare I Didn't Want To Wake Up From

The premise of this post-apocalyptic thriller makes it sound like a real piece of pulp fiction. The story is set on a military base that is one of the last outposts of humanity. Most of the rest of the human race have been infected by a parasitic fungus that turns them into flesh-eating zombies known as 'Hungries'. Here on the base they are desperately seeking a cure.

Don't be fooled. The Girl With All The Gifts is much more than a genre thriller. It is an intelligently written, character-based piece of speculative fiction. Seen largely from the point of view of one of the Hungries, a highly-intelligent child who only gradually comes to understand her true nature, it presents the reader with a series of moral dilemmas and avoids offering easy solutions.

It's also compelling reading. I had to regularly stop myself reading so I could get on with the rest of my life. Now that's it's over I wish I could start all over again.

Elegant Literary Fantasy

Seen largely from the point of view of his servant, Eustace, The Maker Of Swans is the story of Mr Crowe, a remarkable individual who seems to have existed for many centuries and who has secretly been the author of many of the world's greatest works of literature. Seen largely from the point of view of his servant, Eustace, The Maker Of Swans is the story of Mr Crowe, a remarkable individual who seems to have existed for many centuries and who has secretly been the author of many of the world's greatest works of literature.

It is also the story of Clara, a child in Crowe's charge. Clara's abilities will surpass her guardian's by as much as his own abilities outstrip those of ordinary mortals. Despite being mute, she will learn how to use written language to alter and to create reality and her developing talent will attract the attention of those who seek to use her as a gambit in a long-standing power game.

It is not a perfect fantasy. There are gaps in the backstory that left me slightly dissatisfied. We never learn much about Mr Crowe's origins, for example, or those of his young ward.

What makes this novel stand out, however, is the boldness of the language which richly compensates for the author's apparent disinterest in the finer details of his overarching mythos. Here, for example, is the appearance of one of the minor characters, materialising out of the Gothic twilight in which so much of the action seems to take place:

He appeared at the far end of the street, having rounded the corner, and stood for a moment in the gown of decaying light that hung beneath a street lamp.

Poetic and elegantly mannered, The Maker of Swans is an impressive piece of literary fantasy.

Trapped In A Political Carapace

When asked what he most feared in politics, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan replied, 'Events, dear boy, events.' In Allan Massie's fictional account of the life of Augustus there is a similar awareness of the way that political life is all about reacting to unpredictable realities.

Massie succeeds admirably in bringing to life the architect of Imperial Rome and the society that surrounded him. He does so far more effectively than all the hefty volumes of toga-lit with their obsessive detailing of military hardware. That's because his focus is on character and psychology, rather than blood on the floor of the arena.

He shows how the need to respond to inconvenient events shaped Augustus as much as it shaped his politics, constraining and hardening him until he became trapped within the political carapace he had created. He ends his life eaten up with regret, fearful for the security of the empire he has built and unable to communicate with those he loves most.

The decisions over which Augustus deliberated so long and hard resonated down through the centuries. Massie's achievement is to illuminate the forces behind those decisions. The result is a compelling study of the man, of the world that he was born into and of the way he transformed it.

Funny, Heartbreaking, Compassionate

Set in Rome, both during the Second World War and in the nineteen seventies, Early One Morning is the story of Chiara Ravello, a young woman, who witnesses the Jews being rounded up and driven away from the Trastevere Ghetto and who, on impulse, persuades the supervising soldiers that a mistake has been made and that one of the children is really her nephew, thereby saving him from the fate to which the rest of his family are consigned.

But this is not another Holocaust story. It is actually concerned with what happens next: the implications of this terrifying decision for Chiara herself, for her disabled sister Cecilia, for Daniele, the boy she impetuously decided to rescue and, thirty years after the event, for a sixteen year old Welsh girl called Maria whose world is about to be turned upside down by the discovery that she is not the person she has always thought herself to be.

Virginia Bailey's writing is beautifully observed. The evocation of Rome - its sights, smells sounds, even its weather - is extraordinarily vivid. It is the next best thing to actually being there. But what gives this book its compelling emotional core is the story of Chiara's fiercely protective love for the angry, uncommunicative little boy she has adopted. This is the story of parenthood writ large.

Funny, heart-breaking, compassionate, Early One Morning is undoubtedly the best book I have read in 2015 and I suspect the experience of reading it will remain with me for a very long time.

Structural Whimsy

A satire on the commodification of modern life, Number 11begins with ten year old Rachel and her brother visiting their grandparents in their quiet suburban house. Her brother drops out of the story entirely but Rachel grows older, goes to Oxford and becomes a tutor to the children of a super-rich family.

The story also follows the fortunes of Rachel's school-friend Alison and her mother, a former pop-star who only ever had one-hit . Alison becomes an unemployed art-student and is set up by a journalist to look like a benefits cheat. Her mother appears on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here and the experience ruins her life. In different ways, Rachel and Alison and her mother all fall victim to the machinations of the Winshaws, an influential family at the the heart of the British establishment.

Like all Coe's work, this is a highly political novel and you are left in no doubt about the author's perspective. He is disgusted by the inequality in our society, appalled by the callousness of the rich and powerful, and sickened by the omnipresence of the market. I wouldn't argue with any of that. What wearies me, is his tendency to labour the point. There is no room for the reader to make up his or her own mind. You are constantly directed what to think and which conclusions to draw.

For me, the biggest drawback about this book, however, is not the polemic but the uneasy mixture of the real and the fantastical. Towards the end of the book the story becomes more and more surreal as people begin disappearing and their murders are investigated by a clownish policeman who is obsessed with his media image. Finally giant spiders emerge from excavations under the house of the super-rich family for whom Rachel works and begin dragging people off to their underground lair. It's deliberately left unclear whether this is real or simply the product of Rachel's exhausted imagination. I found this ambivalence something of a cop out.

The tone of the book veers between the sententious and the farcical and that's an uncomfortable combination. There are parts that are genuinely funny and parts that are intellectually engaging but they are all wrapped up in a kind of structural whimsy as the novel takes on the form of the narratives being studied by the characters Rachel encounters. Coe is playing with form here in a way that is certainly clever but which nonetheless left me feeling distinctly underwhelmed.

A Remarkable Piece Of Social History

Thomas Harding's great grandfather, a successful Jewish doctor living in Berlin in the early twentieth century, built a summer house by a lake just outside the city where he and his family spent all their leisure time. Then Hitler came to power and the family was forced to flee to Britain.

Their house underwent a series of incarnations. Seized by the Nazis, it was subsequently bought for a knock down price by a successful music publisher. But he, too, lost possession when the land it stood upon became part of the East German Republic. The house was appropriated by the local government and a series of tenants enjoyed the tranquillity of the the lakeside view until suddenly, overnight, the Berlin Wall was thrown up, right outside the back door.

This book is the story of all the individuals who lived in that house and by illuminating their lives Harding renders the colossal upheavals of the twentieth century deeply personal, and therefore understandable. Compassionate and full of insight, The House By The Lake is a remarkable piece of social history.

History As Theme-Park

Amory Clay has been enjoying an uneventful middle-class childhood until her father returns, deeply traumatised, from the trenches of the First World War and unsuccessfully attempts to kill himself and her by driving them both into a lake. Now it is Amory who is traumatised. Her promising academic career disintegrates and instead of going to Oxford to study History, she becomes an assistant to her uncle, a society photographer.

It turns out to be the beginning of a career as a photo-journalist that allows her to witness Berlin at the height of its pre-war decadence, Oswald Moseley's Blackshirts marching through East London and the Allied invasion of Normandy. She rubs shoulders with celebrities - even Marlene Dietrich makes a cameo appearance - and has a series of affairs, finally marrying a Scottish Lord and settling down with him on his estate where she is unable to prevent him drinking himself to death.

Gambling debts and her husband's carelessness about his will, leave her in greatly reduced circumstances. So she dusts off her camera once more and sets off for Vietnam. She's in her sixties now but it doesn't stop her dodging bullets and having sex with men half her age.

Structured as pseudo-autobiography, the text is peppered with photographs purporting to be by Amory herself and there is an acknowledgements page at the end in which, I suspect, real and fictional names are deliberately mixed together to bolster the illusion. It's a clever device, allowing the author scope to include almost anything he likes from the compendium of the twentieth century's worst excesses. The downside is that the overall effect is somewhat episodic and the impact of the novel depends to a very great extent on what you feel about the central character.

Therein lies my principal dissatisfaction with this novel. I didn't really care about Amory Clay, perhaps because I wasn't entirely convinced by her. She always felt to me a bit too much like a man's idea of a free-spirited woman. And if you don't care about the protagonist the whole thing feels a bit like history as theme-park. It's highly readable and very entertaining but I was always slightly troubled by a sense that terrible events were being trivialised.

An Inter-textual Jigsaw

Iain Pears' latest novel begins by with a description of a pastoral landscape that feels just a shade derivative; and that is entirely is as it should be since we soon discover that it's part of a story being written by Henry Lytten, a lecturer in English literature.

Lytten is a former colleague of Tolkien with a past life in espionage that is a little reminiscent of George Smiley. His feudal fantasy is a donnish indulgence but the elaborate fiction he is concocting to uncover a traitor in British Intelligence is rather more serious.

What Henry doesn't know, however, is that his fantasy world is about to be hijacked and activated as part of a time-travelling mathematician's experiment to create an alternative reality.

All of these plotlines become deliciously entangled as characters invade each other's narratives and create unforeseen plot-twists for their respective stories, A schoolgirl from the nineteen seventies is mistaken for a fairy. Security officers from the future are arrested as Soviet spies. Lytten enters his own story and is worshipped as a deity.

Sometimes sombre, often farcical, Arcadia is a glorious inter-textual jigsaw that is also a witty commentary on the creative process. I can see it becoming a cult book.

Dystopia As A Metaphor For Adolescence

The Age Of Miracles is a coming of age story set in a near-future in which the earth's spin has begun to slow, leading to a gradual unravelling of society as crops become harder to grow and the earth's magnetic field begins to deteriorate.

However, the emphasis is not so much on the disaster as on the emotional life of Julia, the teenager narrator, who has to deal with exactly the same problems that all adolescents face but against a backdrop of slow-motion global catastrophe. People's behaviour - including her own - begins to change as they adjust to the new reality:

'We took more risks. Desires were less checked. Temptation was harder to resist. Some of us made decisions we might not otherwise have made.'

It is hard to concentrate on school, harder still to believe in the future. Her best friend, a Mormon, takes off with her family to Utah to live in a purpose-built complex and await the end of the world. Her parents' marriage seems to be collapsing.

Julia takes refuge in an all-consuming relationship with a boy from school and together they wander through their stricken world finding a precarious happiness as the situation around them grows gradually more hopeless.

Although this is a disaster story, it's really all about the everyday. This is dystopia as a metaphor for adolescence and it's beautifully done. The voice of the teenage narrator is pitch-perfect. The tone is sweetly poignant. It's an accomplished debut.

A Window Into Italian Society

Offering an alternative view of Italian society from the usual gastronomic travelogue ,Interpreting Italians consists of a series of essays on historical, political and cultural topics that have had a significant influence of the development of Italian mores and behaviour.

Discussions include: the admiration for furbizia, or shrewdness - something that goes some way to explain the enthusiastic support enjoyed by Silvio Berlusconi; attitudes towards the official Italian language and the various other competing languages and dialects spoken by Italian nationals; the importance of bella figura - which could be translated as beautiful appearance, except that this goes nowhere near explaining its true significance; and the symbiotic relationship Italians enjoy with tourism.

Obviously, a book like this could easily descend into meaningless generalisations but the author is always aware of that danger. He is not seeking to describe a fictional Italian temperament, merely to point to influences on the society and to try to consider their possible impact. My favourite example of this was his suggested explanation for the many different varieties of pasta:

"That pasta achieved widespread popularity in Italy during the Baroque period is more than coincidental; the vast array of pasta shapes and sizes is itself a consummately Baroque expression. Each form of pasta has its own accompanying sauce which can be mixed with other forms in any desired manner to augment not only taste but also presentation – in other words, to enhance the aesthetic appearance of food."

At the end of the book there is a series of appendices packed with suggestions for further reading and additional information about Italian history, geography and cuisine. Altogether, this is one of the most useful books about Italy I have come across.

Other People's Lives

Rachel's life is falling apart. Alcoholic, overweight and still hopelessly in love with her ex-husband, she gets the same train into the city every morning even though she was fired from her job months ago and spends her days hanging around in parks and public libraries.

Each morning the train stops at the same signal and Rachel stares at the back of the same house, occasionally getting a glimpse of the couple who live there. She fantasises about that couple, creating for them the dream life that she wanted for herself.

Then one day she learns that the woman who lives in that house has been murdered and she realises that she has a vital piece of information about that woman, something she has glimpsed from the train that makes all the difference.

The cleverly-structured narrative drip-feeds you just enough truth to enable you to navigate through the maze of confusion and misery that clouds Rachel's vision. Is she just a sad sensation-hungry drunk, looking for meaning in other people's lives because she has lost all hope of finding it in her own? The police certainly think so. To them she's just another one of those sorry individuals so fascinated by a violent crime that they cannot stay away. But what if she really does know something about the murder?

A tightly-plotted character-driven thriller, compellingly narrated and full of twists and turns, The Girl On The Train draws you into the lives of a group of characters you may not want to know but cannot ignore.

Set in ninth century Britain and narrated by Uhtred, an eleven-year- old boy whose father, a Saxon noble, is killed fighting the Danes in Northumbria, The Last Kingdom is the story of the Viking invasions of England and the resistance of Alfred the Great.

The story follows the fortunes of Uhtred as he learns to love his captors, grows up to become a formidable warrior fighting against his own country, and finally returns to the English fold, lured back by the shrewd, pious and deeply complicated figure of Alfred.

Full of colour and incident, cleverly-plotted and richly-detailed, Bernard Cornwell's novel brings the period vividly to life. This is a real tour-de-force of storytelling and one of those books that you stay up much too late reading because you simply must get to the end.

Pass The Parcel

Oliver Orme, the middle-aged protagonist of The Blue Guitar is a commercially successful painter who has lost his inspiration and whose emotional life is disintegrating before his eyes. A self-obsessed pedant whose secret pleasure involves stealing small objects from everyone around him, Orme is the embodiment of the artistic process.

The trouble is that this does not necessarily make for a particularly engaging character. Orme is constantly the spectator of the world around him, preoccupied with surfaces, possessed by a longing for authenticity, struggling to express the essence of what he sees, tormented by his own emotional fastidiousness.

It is easy to recognise aspects of oneself in Orme, but very difficult to like him in the round. That's not surprising since even he, himself, struggles to understand himself as a complete human being:

'the I I think of, that upright, steadfast candle-flame burning perpetually within me, is a will-o'-the-wisp, a fatuous fire. What is left of me then, is little more than a succession of poses, a concatenation of attitudes.'

This is fiction about fiction, full of allusions and constantly reflecting back upon itself. As in all Banville's novels, there are layers and layers of precise observation and wonderfully accomplished writing but at the end of all the unwrapping there is precious little real storytelling in the parcel.

The Fragility Of Identity

Set in the mid nineteen sixties this is the story of Charlotte a young, talented painter, struggling with the demands of motherhood and the pressures of surviving on the salary of her academic husband, Henry.

Deeply rooted in Cambridgeshire, she is nevertheless persuaded by Henry to emigrate to Australia in search of a better life; but the reality of their new environment is nothing like the brochures Henry has browsed.

In this new, alien country, Charlotte becomes entirely unmoored, while Henry, an Anglo-Indian who had not previously questioned his Britishness, finds himself confronted by an insidious barrier of covert racism.

Their marriage quickly starts to unravel and ultimately Charlotte begins to fall apart, unable to give herself to her children or her husband because she no longer possesses enough of herself to do so

Precise, unflinching, sometimes painfully sad but always beautifully-observed, The Other Side Of The World is an exploration of what we understand by the idea of home, and a study of the fragility of identity. A first-rate work of literary fiction

Trying To Be Clever

I loved The End Of Mr Y but Scarlett Thomas's latest novel has left me entirely cold. The story features a family of famous botanists, the older generation of which disappeared on a hunt for a miracle plant. The plot revolves around a series of moments in their lives after the death of the surviving family matriarch.

The trouble is, it's almost completely unreadable. There are umpteen characters and they're impossible to tell apart because they aren't properly described or differentiated. They're also deeply unpleasant and universally preoccupied with rather shabby sexual fantasies.

It's not a world I recognise or one I feel able to care about. None of these characters is even remotely like anyone I've ever met. They are, at best, ideas about people because this is, like all Scarlett Thomas's fiction, a novel about ideas – ideas about consciousness primarily.

I understand that Scarlett Thomas is trying to do something interesting with her writing and I applaud that. But, for me, there has to be something more to a book than verbal and conceptual experimentation.

There have to be characters who feel real; there has to be dialogue that is emotionally engaging; there has to be a plot that contains some element of drama. This book has none of that. It's trying way too hard to be clever.

The Terrible light Of Childhood

Discovered wandering and amnesiac when she was ten years old, Madeline, now in her mid-thirties, has been locked away in an asylum where she has become deeply institutionalized. However when a new doctor arrives he is determined to get her to recall the events of her childhood.

Aided by the diary she kept at the time, Madeline reluctantly sets out on a journey towards recollection, painfully reliving the claustrophobic experiences of a childhood dominated by the religious zeal of her father, a childhood in which she perceives the world with a hallucinogenic intensity:

All around me the garden rustles and sways. It watches, it tries to distract me. As I look at it, green becomes greener, the flowers glow like little lights...At night when I take off my clothes there are seeds in my socks, there are stains on my knees, my nails have soil beneath them and my hair smells of sky.

Struggling to make sense of what she sees, Madeline uses the only frame of reference she knows - the stories of the bible. The result is a vivid and passionate confusion in which poverty, isolation, and a passionate response to the natural world are all mixed up with her understanding of the personality of God.

But when sexuality begins to dawn, Madeline comes to believe she is responsible for the financial mire into which the family is steadily sinking. She has sinned and the only way out, she decides, is sacrifice.

Brimming over with the dazzling and terrible light of childhood, this is a courageous and compelling study of innocence and misplaced spirituality.

Deconstructing Innocence

Set in the nineteen fifties and inspired by real events, this is the story of a community devastated by a series of terrible plane crashes. The narrative perspective is shared by a large cast of characters but at the centre of the book is fifteen year old Miri, a girl coming of age at a time when the certainties of small town life are disintegrating all around her.

The America of the nineteen fifties, comprehensively evoked in the carefully crafted vignettes that make up this novel, is a country in which masculine authority is at its most confident; but in that very assurance lie the seeds of its own undoing. The great victory of World War Two is in the past, the messy compromise of Korea is beginning to become evident. This is a world in which promises are going to be broken, above all the promise of safety.

Judy Blume is most famous for children's fiction and her insight into the difficulties of adolescence, and at times this feels a bit like a Young Adult novel that has outgrown the limitations of its genre. However, it soon becomes clear that this is not writing for children; it is writing about childhood. Intelligent, compassionate and moving, In The Unlikely Event is a meticulous examination of the way society constructs and dismantles notions of innocence and responsibility.

Ancient Drama, Modern Blood

Published with an endorsement on the cover from S J Watson, The Amber Fury is being billed as a 'thriller' and a 'page-turner'. This seems to me to be an example of what happens when the marketing department is allowed too much influence in a book's categorisation. Yes, there is murder here - two murders in fact - but Natalie Haynes' fictional debut is really a novel of ideas.

Alex, a promising young theatre director, whose boyfriend was killed while intervening to protect a woman in a street brawl, moves to Edinburgh to start a new life and takes on a job teaching in a unit for children expelled from the regular state system.

She decides to teach her class of problematic fifteen-year-olds about Greek drama and in a series of distinctly improbable conversations that takes up most of the first hundred pages, they discuss plays plays by Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides.

The effect of considering all this heavyweight dramatic material laden with explosive themes such as guilt and sacrifice , destiny and revenge is that one of her dysfunctional students becomes obsessed with the tragedy that overtook Alex before her arrival in Edinburgh and decides to intervene in her life, with dreadful consequences.

This is really interesting and thought-provoking premise. I enjoyed reading the novel greatly and it certainly fulfilled one of the author's intentions in that it made me want to go back and re-read those Greek tragedies. I just think that to label it as a thriller does the author no favours whatsoever.

An Authentic Voice From The English Civil War

The English Civil War is so often portrayed as a conflict between the royalists and the puritans that one forgets it began as a conflict between the king and parliament. So it is interesting to read a novel set during this initial period before the whole edifice of English society had been overturned but when, nevertheless, structures were beginning to crumble.

Cleverly dovetailed into history, with its spurious but convincing provenance and its cast of real and invented characters, The Last Roundhead is the story of Blandford Candy, who is obliged to join the parliamentary army to avoid a scandal at home.

It's a period of political and military uncertainty. Both sides are at war but both sides are also involved in a protracted series of negotiations. Many of the parliamentarians still feel a good deal of loyalty towards their king and although attitudes are hardening , there is still room for sympathies to change. It is in this environment that Blandford finds his true vocation. He becomes a Scout, a spy for the parliamentary party with a licence to unravel the enemy's machinations.

To his own surprise, he proves successful at espionage but everything else in his life goes awry. His friends are killed; he loses the woman he loves; and his two brothers, who have joined the royalist party, are determined to see him dead. Finally, he becomes the target of an a determined assassination plot.

Laced with disenchantment at the incompetence of powerful men, the novel pulls off that difficult trick of seeming entirely authentic while simultaneously resonating with a contemporary sensibility. When I got to the end, I immediately wanted to go back to the history books and find out more about the characters who flitted in and out of its pages.

Original post: briankeaney.booklikes.com/post/1185386/an-authentic-voice-from-tAn Authentic Voice From The English Civil Warhe-english-civil-war

A Land Fit For Misfits

Set during the Second World War, Crooked Heart is the story of two complete misfits: ten year old Noel, a precociously intelligent but socially inept orphan who lives in Hampstead with his ex-suffragette godmother; and thirty-six year old Vera, an uneducated widow living in St Albans whose life has been a shabby catalogue of failures and whose energies are devoted to a series of semi-criminal money-making schemes

The two are thrown together when Noel's godmother loses first her sanity and then her life, and he is evacuated. Vera volunteers to take him in solely for the allowance that comes with him, in the mistaken belief that he will be easy to manipulate.

Despite his age, Noel turns out to be a great deal better at scheming than Vera and soon the pair of them are working as a team, posing as charity collectors and pocketing the takings. Then, just when things seem to be going well for them, Vera's feckless son, Donald, throws a spanner in the works: all their ill-gotten wealth is lost and they are suddenly homeless.

Lissa Evans is a wonderfully witty author, her writing sprinkled with nicely-turned phrases. Anxious Vera is compared to a 'magpie hanging around a picnic'. Always intimidated by authority, she worries that Noel's teacher will 'pick the truth out of her like a splinter'.

This is not the picture of wartime Britain with which we are normally presented. It is much less monolithic and altogether more quirky. And these are not the wartime heroes one has come to expect. They are too flawed, too anti-social. Indeed, at the beginning of the novel I found it difficult to empathize with them; but by the end as they discovered in each other a refuge from the world and a kind of redemption, I was cheering them on.

Original post: briankeaney.booklikes.com/post/1184376/a-land-fit-for-misfits

Rebellion In The Hive

A sanitation worker, a member of the lowest and most disregarded caste, it's obvious from the moment she emerges from her cell that Flora 717 is different to her kin. She's bigger, more alert, more articulate and more able to question her environment. She's going to be trouble, both to herself and to the community of bees into which she has been born.

Needless to say, Flora 717's unique qualities are not looked upon favourably by the hive's ruling caste and it's only a matter of time before she finds herself alienated from the Hive Mind as she struggles to hide her rebellious thoughts and treacherous behaviour.

The Bees has been described as Watership down for the Hunger Games generation. It has also been compared to The Handmaid's Tale and there is definitely an interesting commentary on gender roles and society being sketched out here.

What is most interesting about this novel for me, however, is the alien nature of the environment and of the characters who populate it. This is a world in which the most important sense is smell. It's a world in which individual thought is over-ruled by the imperatives of the Hive Mind and the good of the community is far more important than the survival of the individual. Laline Paull succeeds remarkably well in bringing that world to life and making it convincing. The result is an unusual and very enjoyable read.

The Gravitational Pull Of Sentimentality

A forty-two year old man is lying in a hospice bed, dying of liver failure. To occupy his mind he engages in a game that involves thinking of a part of the body for every letter of the alphabet. In so doing he conjures a series of memories and anecdotes.

From these disordered fragments the unhappy story of his life begins to emerge and as they do so, we begin to understand the weaknesses in his character - his inability to understand what was really important to him, the series of bad choices he made, the catastrophic effect these had upon him and the terrible resentment and guilt with which he has lived.

There is a good deal of very acute observation here which really lifts this book at in places. For me, however, the main weakness is that there is not enough plot. This a study in regret experienced from a sick bed and there's only one place for the story to go. Ultimately the gravitational pull of sentimentality is inescapable.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

It's 1958. A female student has just had a puncture on her way to a lecture in Cambridge. A male student stops to help her. It's the beginning of a love story. However, from this point on we see three different versions of their story play out. Significant moments in the characters' lives diverge: a small hesitation, a loss of confidence and everything is changed.

In none of the version do things work out perfectly for the lovers but some outcomes are definitely better than others. What Laura Barnett demonstrates through these alternative scenarios is how we are both the sum of our decisions and also more than them.

This is a remarkably well written book. The competing narratives could very easily undermine each other. In fact, the reverse is true: the characters are so completely believable and the minutiae of their emotional lives so authentically detailed that the branching plotlines are self-reinforcing, making the characters seem even more solid.

Admittedly, it's a demanding read. You have to remember which version of the story you're following at any one time: who is married to whom, who is divorced from whom and what the other family members are up to. But's it's a thoroughly enjoyable challenge.

A Face In A Crowd

Academy Street is the story of Tess, an Irish immigrant in America and a single mother, who works as a nurse, often on night-shifts, enduring loneliness and isolation and unable to really fit in with either the society she has left behind or the one into which she has entered.

There's a lambent quality to the writing which is both the novel's strength in that the central character seems to be lit up from within, and also its weakness in that the novel feels rather one-paced, almost like a short-story that has outgrown its form.

Starting with the death of her mother, an event that Tess was barely old enough to understand, and ending in the fall-out from a contemporary terrorist incident, the novel tells the story of a character who often seems helpless against the tide of events, unable to fully understand her own distress or to escape from the consequences of her upbringing.

But it also depicts the small victories contained within her struggle, the love she feels for her child, the pleasure she discovers in discovering literature. In doing so it succeeds in bringing into the spotlight an individual who might otherwise me little more that a face in a crowd.

So Much More Than A Disaster Story

The premise of Station Eleven is that a new strain of flu has wiped out over ninety percent of the Earth's population and civilization has collapsed. The era of electricity is over and humanity is limited to a string of small settlements camping amid the ruins of the old world. A group of musicians and actors calling itself The Travelling Symphony journeys between those settlements in a collection of horse-drawn vehicles, putting on performances of King Lear and Beethoven.

It sounds like a fairly routine disaster story but actually this is much more than that. The storyline weaves back and forth between the past and the present as the characters come to terms with memory and loss and try to make sense of the new world and the changed expectations in which they find themselves dwelling.

This is primarily a study in characters rather than a plot-based novel. It's about the effect we have on each other, the overwhelming compulsion to find significance and the power of art to crystallise experience.

Entertaining, thought-provoking and improbably satisfying, Station Eleven is so much more than just a disaster story.

Shadowy Lives...Desperate Longings

Set just after the First World War, The paying Guests is the story of Frances, a young woman living with her mother in genteel poverty in South East London. Her father, now deceased, lost all his money in a series of unwise investments and her two brothers were killed in the war. Much to her mother's distaste, Frances has resorted to taking in lodgers to pay the bills.

At first glance this seems to be a novel about the social upheaval that followed the Great War. However, this being Sarah Waters, it's also an exploration of what that felt like for a woman who, on account of her sexuality, is not able to meet the expectations of the times. Frances has already had one abortive affair with another woman but her mother's disapproval, her own sense of obligation and perhaps also a lack of courage caused it to fall apart.

When Lillian and her husband move in, Frances's first feelings are all to do with the difficulty of adjusting to her lodgers' rather brash, working-class ways. However, it isn't long before an attraction begins to develop between Frances and Lillian and it is what that attraction leads to that forms the core of this book and turns it into an absolutely gripping thriller.

Sarah Waters writes about lesbian characters and there is lots of sex between the two women but it never seems gratuitous. It always feels extremely real and an important part of the story. Equally real is the anguish they go through when everything goes horribly wrong and they find themselves part of a police investigation. Their relationship, always precarious, is placed under enormous pressure and Sarah Waters is unflinching in her depiction of what this does to them both as individuals and as a couple.

For me, Waters' great achievement is that she gives voice to some of those characters who inhabit the background of history. She makes you feel that you are living their shadowy lives and suffering the thousand small agonies they endure. You are drawn into their nightmare and turn every page with a desperate longing to discover whether they will survive the ordeal and how it will have transformed them.

Delightfully-Handled Ensemble Writing

A Spool Of Blue Thread is a portrait of the complicated web of idiosyncrasies, expectations, disappointments and duties that make up the life of an extended family. There are a great many characters but they are all beautifully observed and their well-meaning but hopelessly near-sighted struggle to deal with the decline of their aging parents feels somehow emblematic of American society.

There is a great deal of delightfully-handled ensemble writing here. The dialogue switches back and forth between the characters with all the rapidity and apparent randomness of real life but each individual's conversation is carefully built up out of habits of speech, patterns of behaviour, conscious or unconscious role-playing.

So that when those roles finally begin to break down under the stress of a death in the family, it comes as quite a shock. It also feels very real. Here are people who have grown tired of personalities they have created for themselves in response to the behaviour of their family and who suddenly feel the need to re-evaluate themselves.

As with the rest of Anne Tyler's oeuvre, that need to understand yourself both within and outside your family lies at the heart of the work and in this novel she has perhaps explored it at least as well, if not better, than in any other. Her vision of individuals as both endearing and irritating feels entirely true to experience. For me, what this books displays, most of all, is Anne Tyler's consummate craftsmanship and her abiding humanity.

The Fascination Of The Powerless

A debut novel that has been appearing on lists of the year's best fiction, The Night Visitor is the story of Ruth, an elderly widow living alone by the sea and suffering from dementia.

Ruth's world is transformed by the arrival on her doorstep one morning of a woman who declares herself to be a new carer and who promptly takes over the entire management of Ruth's life. Unfortunately, as the narrative develops it becomes increasingly clear that this cheerful visitor is not all that she seems.

It's a powerful piece of writing but one that I found extremely difficult to read. Not because it was badly written. On the contrary. The detail is carefully observed and the writing is informed throughout by a poetic sensibility. Reading Fiona McFarlane's prose is a sensual pleasure.

What makes this novel so hard to confront is the content .The narrative is recounted from Ruth's point of view and in the confused logic of her vision time has become unmoored, memories drift in and out of consciousness and thoughts are indistinguishable from concrete reality. It's an entirely convincing depiction of dementia.

Consequently, the authenticity with which we witness the accumulating evidence of Ruth's abuse and her powerlessness in the face of it makes this novel so disturbing and so unsettling that I could only inch my way through it with a kind of pained fascination.

An Incandescent Work Of Literature

A story about a writer living in the West of Ireland mourning the death of his wife and struggling to deal with its impact on his children, Niall Williams' intensely poetic novel is almost unbearably moving:

The children are home from school I hear them moving about restless with the empty time. Hannah comes and asks me when will I be going to the village. She needs shampoo. Ten minutes later Jack who was eight years old two days ago stands at the doorway and asks why we do not live in America. They have better television in America, he says. I want to tell him that television is not important. I want to take him inside my arms and hold him here beside me and say I know how things are for you. I know the harrowing the world has already made in the soft places of your spirit. I know your fears and pains and because I am your father I cannot know them for an instant without wanting to make them pass.

But the words, or perhaps the means to say them, seem stolen from me, and instead I say I will try and get better stations on the television.

In flashbacks to the writer's own childhood, this novel is also a glorious celebration of the transformative power of literature and the importance of storytelling in all our lives. The young boy's attempt to find a place for himself in the world of the imagination and his struggle to understand and appreciate the real world all around him has a wonderful intensity that will be painfully familiar to many a bookish adult.

Running alongside the narrator's intensely realised inner world is the constant presence of the Irish countryside brought powerfully to life by Williams' evocative prose:

Autumn progresses. The rain is ceaseless now, and yet seems hardly to fall, a soft grey wrapped like a shroud about all west of the Shannon. Leaves of sycamore blacken and curl their edges. When the wind picks up the rain, they come slanting across the cottage window in stricken flight. All the last blossoms are faded now, and crimson geraniums are stalks of brown seed and yellowed leaves. Everywhere the countryside is tattered, wind-wild. You can feel that somewhere in the deeps of the earth something is slowly souring which once was sweetening. Across the valley small herds of cattle move and stand and move again for shelter. Between the showers huge blackbirds come and alight in your garden. I raise my hand from the table and they do not fly off. They wait there, as though burdened with some significance, when I know they have none.

Out of this interplay of interior and exterior worlds, and out of the conflict between the reality that cannot be faced and the memories that cannot be escaped, Williams has created an incandescent work of literature as well as an intriguing investigation into the process of writing itself.