Well done to Francesca and Joe Gil for creating such an interesting, and might I add seductive-looking, website for all us booklovers, even if we're not writers. I might have requested one of the books myself, except that I happen to have a copy of one of then - Joe Blues' Teaching the Headmaster - sitting right in front of me already. I wonder how that happened...ever been anywhere near the South Bank?

Disturbing and at times darkly humorous, Dead Fathers Club is a grittily and sometimes gorily real portrayal of a young boy struggling to maintain his sense of right and wrong as the adults around him fail him time and time again. Philip, an immature eleven-year-old growing up in Newark, has his very average world ripped apart when his father is kills in a traffic accident and his mother rapid succumbs to the dubious attractions of oily Uncle Alan. His father’s ghost, who no-one but Philip can see or hear, rides to the rescue, offering Philip a way of ‘saving’ his mother and assuring his father of eternal rest and peace. But, bullied at school and neglected at home, Philip is increasingly torn between his sense of right and wrong and loyalty to his father: he is manipulated further and further into a mental and behavioural decline.

This isn’t a bad book: Haig has a good story to tell, but he delivers it with a workmanlike detachment, that offers little to engage the reader. An initially engaging style, if one can get over the mildly pretentious tone, the story becomes increasingly and wretchedly predictable. Leah, the serene and slightly mystical centre of Philip’s awakening sexuality, provides some light reveal but is left undeveloped as other, less interesting, characters take centre stage. My main reaction to this book was ambivalence: it’s good, but not that good and mildly derivative with strong reminders of the numerous stories of troubled childhood which seem to fill the bookshops at the moment. If that genre of fiction appeals to you, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, or We Need To Talk About Kevin are both much better. Dead Fathers Club is a depressingly sad picture of modern childhood in a world where everyone seems to believe that something has gone wrong. Pity the reader who takes it too seriously.

Father Anselm is an unlikely hero in detective fiction. The former barrister turned monk displays remarkable tenacity and loyalty but he is fallible, often prevaricating, often drawing false conclusions. In this regard, he is engaging human, without any of the gritty roughness so often associated with literary sleuths. Yet, in The Gardens of the Dead, William Brodrick has created an eminently English, eminently likeable, detective. Reminiscent of Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair, the novels unfolds with gentle twists and turns that gradually reveal the truth behind the lie, beneath the deceit. Elizabeth Glendinning QC is a barrister on the track of a criminal who out-manoeuvred her a decade ago. Her task becomes harder when she succumbs to a genetic heart condition and dies in her car in London’s East End. Her legacy is to pass the mystery on to her former colleague, Father Anselm, and she leaves him a series of pieces of information and tips which try to map his route through a labyrinth of deception. Written in lucid, sophisticated style, the plot evolves in with rigid constancy. Gripping and intriguing, this is one of the best mystery novel of the year.

This is not a book for the lily-fever. Bold, courageous and confrontational, The End of Alice is most disturbing. It is also very, very good. There is absolutely nothing engaging or delightful in this story which relates, through correspondence, the exploits of an imprisoned paedophile and his young, wild prototype. It is uncomfortable reading: repulsive and gripping in almost equal measure. Deliberately shocking, Homes forces unpleasant questions, at each and every turn of the page judging perfectly how readers are likely to react, catching them in their own doubts with scary precision. The erotic correspondence, delicious to the letter writes, works well in revealing how a paedophile, imprisoned twenty three years old is also witty and intelligent, manipulative and guiltily complicit. Turning the final page comes as a relief: can’t imagine anyone actually enjoying reading this novel but it is rewarding in its own way. A unforgettable literary questioning of liberalism and modernity, it deserves attention.

Set in a Restoration London, bursting with vibrancy and licentiousness after a decade of puritanical abstinence during the Commonwealth, Susanna Gregory’s A Conspiracy of Violence, is an atmospheric and tightly interwoven tangle of murder, mystery, political intrigue and buried treasure. Thomas Chaloner has returned to London in search of employment in his chosen profession – as a spy. But as the former employee of Cromwell’s spymaster-general and the nephew of a regicide, he struggles to secure a position. Driven by the nagging of his Dutch lover, he is forced to accept a mission which is unattractive and dangerous and he soon finds himself hunting for gold in the Tower of London. But everywhere he turns he finds signs of plots to kill a king and, struggling to make sense of coded information, he no longer knows who to trust.

Gregory’s novel evokes an engaging and warm, if one-sided, vision of Restoration London and many of her characters are exploitations of the slim facts known about real people. Between the historical facts, she has cleverly woven a complex, compelling and utterly believable fabric of betrayal and treason. The plot is intriguing and, despite what some reviews have said, it is not heavily weighted down with a history lesson, but rather by a vast array of critical characters. Each is nicely drawn and some has characteristics, like Kelying’s love of animals and Evett’s passionate hatred of wild beasts, which Gregory exploits mercilessly to extract the humour, but there are so many it is difficult to keep track of them all or of who has said what to whom. As a result the plot unfolds only slowly and at times one has to flick back a few pages to check who’s who.

There is a historical note at the back of book which is helpful in tracking which parts of the book are fictional and which are based on fact. For those who are interested in such things, I’d suggest turning to it first. My favourite part of book was the inclusion of the bookselling Leybourn brothers – a lovely touch since the Leybourns were responsible for producing the maps of Restoration London from which, surely, Gregory must have drawn much of her landscape of London.

An enjoyable, and finely written mystery, that would have been better slimmed down to the bear bones.

Claire Tomalin offers a radical re-assessment of arguably the nation’s favourite author in her account of the life of Jane Austen. There is no room her for the prim, endearing and content ‘Aunt Jane’ that was the core of her image for most of the 20th century. In tracing Austen’s life from her birth in a Hampshire parsonage in 1775 to her untimely death in 1817, Tomalin reveals first a home-loving child unhappily sent away to school and then an independent minded young woman who resents her dependence on wealthier relatives and prizes the rare times when she has the luxury of leisure to write.

Eminently readable, this biography places Austen not only within a family and locality, reveals the extent to which her connections provided close links to the politics and social trends of her times. Aunt to the illegitimate daughter of Warren Hastings, Governor General of Bengal and the loving cousin of a French émigré, Austen had no opportunity to live a life constrained to the round of local society. Tomalin shows that, schooled with the sons of West Indian slave owners and her father the trustee of an Antiguan sugar plantation, Austen cannot have been unaware of the contemporary debates on abolition and chattel slavery, as some her most ardent admirers would have it. Tomalin’s brief but thorough analysis of each of Austen’s major work’s shows how such issues, fair from absent from Austen’s novels, are subtlety worked through by a sophisticated and socially aware, professional author.

One of the real delights of this book is the account of the all too brief time in which Austen could enjoy the fruits of her talents, following the publication of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice: the small income she derived from her novels gave her a degree of personal freedom while the recognition of friends and family provided satisfaction, even if the limited public recognition she obtained made her uneasy.

Many of Austen’s letters and her diaries were destroyed by her family – her sister Cassandra and, later, her niece, Fanny, but Tomalin exploits the available material to the full, studying not only what is left of Austen’s correspondence and notes but also the correspondence and journals of those who knew or met her. And yet this is more than a mere history. With intelligence and sympathetic deduction and Tomalin provides a more rounded, and more credible, picture of her subject than many Austen biographers have managed, something which amounts to a fresh, revealing and intimate biography.

I enjoyed reading The Interpretation of Murder but for all the wrong reasons. Rubenfield writes reasonably well and the atmosphere he evokes of turn of the century high society in New York is engaging even if it’s one-dimensional. The interweaving of the (historically inaccurate) break up between Freud and Jung is interesting and the application of psycho-analysis to otherwise straightforward detective fiction is just about enough to make it stand out from the crowd. But all these good points are side issues – or at least should be – to really strong detective fiction, and it’s this aspect of the novel which lets it down. The plot is utterly unbelievable, the development too slow-weighted down by far too much discussion of Hamlet-and the end is like something out of a b-rate comic whose editor finds he has to cut the last 4 pages.

The high point of the novel for me was the interesting take on the relationship, albeit contracted, between Freud and Jung. Surely there was enough material there alone for a good, short novel? But it’s dealt with within a few pages, randomly dotted across the course of other devious, often pointless, plot turns. And the character of Detective Litttlemore is enjoyable, but he’s left a carbon cut out while attention is given to far less interesting and less plot-dependent characters.

If you like your thrillers intermingled with history, try Michael Frayn’s Headlong instead.

Edward Trencom’s Nose, debut novel from the popular history writer Giles Milton, is funny, witty in a neo-Wodeshousian sort of way and full of delightfully engaging characters.  The Trencom family have been the acknowledged masters of cheese for 10 generations, running their London cheese shop since before the Great Fire of London and passing it done from father to son for over 300 years.  Each eldest son also inherits a remarkable nose, a large aquiline nose with a prominent bridge and an extraordinary talent for smelling cheese, which Milton exploits too capacity.  Weight-watching cheese-lovers should avoid this book or the numerous evocative, aromatic scenes describing the finest cheeses from around the world will have you diving to the fridge for more than one too many wee morsels. 

This is a novel fashioned with style and elegance. An elaborate plot structure is interwoven with an account of Greco-Turkish conflict and delicately balanced with a narrow group of amusing, if somewhat one-dimensional, characters.  The plot develops as Edward, the current owner of Trencom’s Cheese Shop and possessor of the finest nose in generations, discovers a package of family papers in the cellar. His discoveries, together with the machinations of friends and foes, start him off an a path of adventure – adventure that is in 1960s middle class sub-urban style – which eventually both exposes and ties him to the fate of his forebearers. And here we come to the weakness of the novel: the way in which Edward’s adventures play out is utterly, utterly ludicrous and the farcical denouement is deeply unrevelatory – a brave and not wholly unsuccessful attempt, one suspects, to match the well conceived plot to the mindset of its average players.  Yet the overall result is unsatisfying.  Make no mistake, this is a good and fun book to read, with lots of laughs and lots of cheese throughout, but the ending just doesn’t quite live up to expectation.  Read the book for the pleasure of the journey, but don’t expect to enjoy the party when you reach your destination.

Brockmeier’s second novel, The Brief History of the Dead, is as intriguing and eerie as its title suggests.  The dead live in a city, not unlike a normal city, accept that it doesn’t seem to have any boundaries and all its habitants know they have died.  Each has his own story to tell of how he arrived in the city and each is affected in different ways by the experience of death.  Brockmeier manages to present the myriad, entrancing possibilities within a few short pages, hooking the reader from the very first.  The city, and its population, is intimately linked to the world of the living, and, indeed, the even numbered chapters of the book recount a story of the living while alternative chapters trace the changing fortunes of the city of the dead.  As the novel’s lyrical and harmonic qualities reveal themselves, Brockmeier weaves the two stories, and the characters, together in a way which ultimately, satisfying if a little predictable.

The premise of The Brief History of the Dead may seem like fantasy, but this is no typical fantasy saga. It is a tightly worked, highly structure novel which presents first, a picture of the very near future on earth that is as unsettling as is believable, and second, a hopeful, somewhat idealised view of another life.  If it seems a little over-worked at times, this is a same fault compared to the pleasure of reading a highly original and thought-provoking novel.

This is, as Arthur Golden says on the front cover, a remarkable book.  Remarkable because it is the utterly engrossing story of two extraordinary conjoined twins. They are not extraordinary because they are conjoined – although that in itself is remarkable enough – but because they are such warm, lively and sympathetic characters. Lansens device of distinguishing between the voices of Rose and Ruby works very well, so well in fact that the different type face employed for each sister really isn’t necessary: they are so clearly each their own person.

Rose and Ruby, born in the midst of a tornado, are abandoned by their natural mother and taken in by the nurse, Aunt Lovey, who delivered them. (I want an Aunt Lovey of my own please.)  Aunt Lovey is married to Stash, a Slovak immigrant to the United States: his history and distinct cultural identity give the novel a greater scope than is often found in popular fiction and Larsen’s makes good use of it.

There’s no denying I enjoyed reading The Girls.  Despite the sometimes disturbing subject matter and a continually growing foreboding of untimely death, there is little hint of darkness, and Larsens navigates the reader through the ups and downs of Rose and Ruby’s childhood with such skill and warmth, that it becomes a celebration of life rather than a tale of illness and death.  Yet, put the book down for a moment or close the pages for the final time, and there seems to be something a little thin, a little hollow, about the whole. A missed opportunity, perhaps? Or a sense that there really could have been so much more. Or perhaps it’s just a general sadness that there’s no going back to meet two such wonderful people again.  I doubt that this is a ‘great’ book, as some reviewers have claimed, but it is touching and tender, and good: a novel that will linger in the mind for a long time.

Reading The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society is a rare treat.  It is a joyous celebration of the ageing process as a liberating experience, with a cast of engaging, eclectic and eccentric characters. It isn’t always entirely believable: there is a series of remarkable co-incidences which, should one analyse it too closely, makes the plot incredible. But if you are the sort of reader who can just go with the flow and enter into a world that isn’t quite the one we think we know, curl up with Christine Coleman’s novel and you’re in for a real treat.  (As an aside, I would recommend that you start reading early in the evening, otherwise you will find yourself propping your eyes open in the wee small hours as, on top of its other qualities, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society is quite unputtdownable: the story motors along with such verve and vitality that leaving Agnes, or Jack, or Felix, in the midst of their latest drama would seem like treachery.)

Agnes, seventy-five next Tuesday, gathers all her courage together to overcome her fear of heights and flee from the care home in which her loving but unthinking and repressed son, Jack, has placed her.  She sets off in search of her grandchildren with whom she has lost contact following the break-up of Jack’s marriage. Through a series of bizarre and hilarious encounters with good people who have all lost their way somehow, Agnes not only casts aside the shackles imposed by society on the elderly but also her own fears: she learns to live life and to love doing so. 

There are elements here that reminded me of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, not least the unusually satisfying and life affirming denial of being old and the side-splitting wit with which subjects such as death and emotional betrayal are handled. But where A Short History fails, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society succeeds with style and aplomb. The story is not artificially weighted down with pop psychology nor overlaid with memories of political conflict. It is simply what it is: a witty depiction of the third age, full of hope, full of vitality and brimming over at the edges with humanity.

I really enjoyed this engaging literary romp around the mind of a philosopher (or, perhaps, more correctly, I should say his mind and his other mind) and through the 16th century dutch art world. Pleasantly written, with plot that jogs along just as you need it to, you find yourself digesting large amounts of European history without realising you are doing so. This is entertainment learning at its very best.

I liked the way the story flitted between 16th century Holland and 20th century rural England with such ease. I liked the recognisable, engaging characters - especially as they all seemed to warm and fill out as the book went along. Frayn's wit is sharp and pointed - almost to the point of pain at times.  I was laughing out loud as Martin circled St James's Square for the seventh time in his clapped out landrover pulling a trailer bound together with baler twine and stinking of sheep's urine, only to miss out on the parking space because he wasn't looking! If there's one thing I didn't think matched the style of the rest of the novel it was the rather flat, cowardly denouement. But I'm not going to spoil the novel for you by telling how it ends.

One other thing. About half way through I realised the book would be so much more enjoyable if I'd had a big, glossy art book with all of Bruegel's pictures in it to hand. I didn't. And the book was too engrossing to put down for a few days while I requested one from the library. So, take a hint, unless you are familiar with the work of Peter Bruegel the Elder already, get a Bruegel book before you start.

It's a slim novel which relates the story of Manon Gaudet, the wife of a harsh and humourless slave-owning planter in the American South. Set in the 19th century, it is a vivid portrayal of the effects of slavery on slave owners and the ways in which an evil institution victimises slave-owners as well slaves, although in very different ways. Evocative and disturbing, this single-sitting read lingers in the mind long after you've closed the book.

Next up was a few hours delving into the delights of the latest Good Fiction Guide to tempt me into parting with my money.  Actually, this one, edited by Jane Rogers, stands out from its rivals for its introductory essays which cover specific genres and regional writing.  They are written with enthusiasm and a passion rarely found in such volumes, engendering a genuine, if momentary, desire to 'read everything'. I resisted - but even so, my wishlist grew at an expodential rate for a few hours.

Diving into John Keay's The Honourable Company: A History of the London East India Company, was a sheer delight. Keay, who always writes engagingly, exploits a mass of primary and secondary evidence to present a history of the Company in a manner which reads more like an adventure story at times, although he is not slow to debunk conventional wisdom, especially relating to the foundation of the British Raj, whenever he can.

I started reading Kipling's Kim too, but didn't get much further than the somewhat dry introduction.  I got distracted by Embers by Sandor Marai. 

All in all, a great new year so far.

Ok, I confess, I'm a sucker for novels with whacky titles...like this one...

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Simon Sherrill

I can't deny that I really enjoyed reading this - I raced right through it in a few hours. At the same time, however, I think it is a little disappointing. I love the concept - the Minotaur of Knosses, still alive and now living within society somewhere deep in the American South. The possibilities promised by such an premise are endless: unfortunately, Sherrill simply fails to deliver. Here is no exploration of immortality or historicity, no hilarious misunderstandings, very little plot and absolutely no use of the dynamic between fantasy and reality which itself should have been able to sustain the novel. The Minotaur is a an engaging character, and the picture of his loneliness and isolation elegant and touching. His friends and work colleagues are well-drawn and interesting characters - no one could fail to be repelled by Shane and his sidekick Mike, or the way in which they exploit the Minotaur's insecurity - but it's not enough to raise this engaging and easy to read novel above the average.

If you'd like to read this book, I'll send you my copy. You can request it through either Bookcrossing or Bookmooch. Strictly first come first served. This book has now been given away.

Ok, so I've taken my eye off the ball a little and am somewhat late with this, but the sequel to The White Masai, Reunion in Barsaloi is now available in the shops!  Corinne Hofmann's account of her obsession with a Masai Warrior and her attempts to live with him in Kenya caused quite a stir last year...and now the next installment is ready and waiting for those eager to follow her exploits as she returns to Kenya.

It must be my week for books with odd titles. I read 'Death and the Penguin' earlier this week. Next up on (or perhaps I should say next off) mount-to-be-read is 'The Minotaur Takes and Cigarette Break' - a book grabbed from a fellow bookcrosser at a recent meet purely for the title. Intriguing, hey? Well, I'll tell you about it when I've read it.

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov

Kurkov’s understated humour and perfect, deadpan style makes this quirky little story, full of quirky characters, a gem.  Death and the Penguin is the nectar of booklovers and Misha, a penguin rescued from a struggling zoo, is one of the most animated, engaging and touching characters in contemporary fiction. But there’s more to Kurkov’s writing than a sideways laugh at human foibles. Death of Penguin shows many pictures of loneliness and human isolation.  Viktor is an aspiring writer but lacks the energy to follow his dreams and, by settling to bread today and giving up on the idea of jam tomorrow, finds himself drawn into a mafiaesque world of crime and assassination in the chill starkness of post-Soviet Kiev.  Misha comes to live with him when the local zoo can no longer afford to feed him. Both are lonely, Viktor isolated from human society and Misha alone amid it.  Yet it is Misha who seems able to make strong relationship – first with Sonia, a little girl who comes to live with Viktor when her father is swept away into oblivion by his life of crime and then with the reader: who cannot fail to adore the quite, reliable, predictable animal, or to delight in his pleasure in fish and cold bathes, or sorrow over his inability to adjust to life in a climate so much warmer than his native land.

Here too is a stark, if one-sided, portrayal, of life in the former Soviet state of Ukraine. And it’s not a nice life. It’s cold, it’s hard and seemingly pointless. Deprived of the structure of the state, each seems to struggle to embrace with vigour the concept of democratic freedom. What Death of a Penguin amounts to is a strong indictment of a political reform which has left a population, bereft of communism community, without any societal fabric at all: without hope, without security and unable to realise the promise of liberty. This book is very funny. It’s very sad. And it’s very, very good.

Pure co-incidence that I'm posting this on a Sunday... does moral philosophy allow for co-incidence?

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith

A light and gentle mystery, engagingly written in an easy and accessible style. Isabel Dalhousie, editor of a philosophical journal, witnesses a young man fall to his death. Haunted by the memory of a young life wasted, she begins to inquire about his life and friends and finds herself drawn into a tangle of insider dealing and sexual entanglement, while her beloved niece becomes engaged to the wrong man and Isabel herself develops inappropriate feelings for the right man!

This is an enjoyable read - I particularly liked the way it evoked Edinburgh New Town: reading the novel was like walking around my memories of this glorious city. But the mystery itself is understated throughout the novel, and I found the interspersement of philosophical jottings pretentious and distracting rather than complementary.