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.