Literary fiction
The Investigation by Philippe Claudel
And you think you had it bad. Our hero gets off a train at the right station, but doesn't get collected by those he's working on behalf of, can't have his order at the bar fulfilled, cannot get to the place of work on time, then cannot find the hotel almost opposite without a major trek through a snowy, unsavoury but completely empty city. And when he gets to the hotel - well that and the other people he meets there are a whole new category of odd. Is this how things are supposed to be - is this limbo, a nightmare or just a novel our hero is trapped in? Full review...
The Friday Gospels by Jenn Ashworth
There are five in the Leeke family. Martin is the father and he works in the mail sorting office. There's not a lot of pleasure in Martin's life, but if you were making a list you'd put Bovril at the top of it. She's a labrador and Martin's obsessed with her training. Well, he's partly obsessed with the training and the training is partly an excuse for his other obsession. Nina owns two labradors and Martin sees them (he and Nina, that is - not he and the labs) as having a future together. It would be easy to be critical, but Martin's wife is in a wheelchair. Pauline's been unwell since the birth of their youngest child. She's not quite doubly incontinent, but accidents are frequent and embarrassing. She's also got a penchant for spending on home improvements - despite the fact that there really isn't the money for them. Full review...
The Taste of Apple Seeds by Katharina Hagena and Jamie Bulloch (Translator)
Iris Berger isn't a stranger to loss. Her cousin died at 15 and her grandmother has just passed away leaving Iris her house. It all echoes with memories, for instance the wardrobe full of her mother and aunts' childhood dresses, the beautiful garden and the apple tree that played such a large part in the family history. While wandering outside, Iris bumps into Carsten Lexow, family friend and garden caretaker. Over lunch he tells her of a family secret. There's a reason why, on a certain June night a lifetime ago, a certain apple tree bloomed twice. Although significant, Iris discovers more secrets as she settles in, and not only secrets concerning others. Full review...
In Caddis Wood by Mary Francois Rockcastle
Middle-aged, married and (comparatively speaking) middle class Americans Hallie and Carl seem, at first glance, to be happy. Hallie (a poet) and Carl (an architect) have all the trappings of success including two adult twin daughters and a holiday home in the beautiful Caddis Wood. However, Carl becomes a little shaky on his feet and, while he's able to shrug it off for a while, he begins to realise that something's seriously wrong. As his health deteriorates other cracks materialise as he realises his marriage isn't as steady as he thought and so he and Hallie must come to terms with her past and, indeed, future. Full review...
Whisky Galore by Sir Compton Mackenzie
The inhabitants of Great Todday and neighbouring Little Todday enjoy embrocation provided by a tot or two of whisky. Unfortunately this is war time. To date the sacrifices in the Hebrides have included their young men and a token black-out (the harbour lights remain on so there seems little point) but more follows. The water of life itself is becoming scarcer and they're approaching Lent. The timing is unfortunate as they don't exactly give it up for Lent, but drink extra as Shrove Tuesday approaches in the spirit of the season. So, as supplies dwindle to extinction, imagine their surprise when a ship containing practically a million bottles of it en route to America founders off the coast. The community launch a covert army-like operation to liberate the alcohol fighting, planning to outwit not the Germans but the islands' Home Guard, HM Customs and Excise and an inept British Intelligence officer. Easy then? Well, an easier task than that which local headmaster George Campbell has. He wants to get married but his mum won't let him. Full review...
Jammy Dodger by Kevin Smith
It's 1980s Belfast and Artie McCann has it sorted. Having left uni with a literature degree, a love of poetry and no real urge for hard work, he and his mate Oliver discover the joy of Art Council grants. All they need to do is establish a literary magazine and bring out an issue (very) occasionally. This frees them up for reliving the best bits of their former student lifestyle and discussing the comparable merits of biscuit varieties. However things start to go awry; not all the magazine's would-be contributors are happy (or unarmed) and life begins to appear more unsettled. There is a way out but it will take some hard work, an actor and a remedy for that smell of rotting milk. Full review...
Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt
Joe is a salesman on the verge of giving up. Having lost all confidence in his ability to sell vacuum cleaners to Middle America, he creates and elaborates on a fantasy just for fun. It includes a woman being 'serviced' from behind, her partner obscured by a waist high wall. The only thing any over-the-wall voyeur sees is an innocent activity e.g. she may manicure her nails. Full review...
Edisto by Padgett Powell
Welcome to the household of the Duchess and our narrator, Simons (pronounced as with two Ms), a luxurious building set in the Carolinian coastal town of Edisto, and a white household in a friendly black neighbourhood. Our story starts when a man arrives, trying to serve a court order to the maid's daughter, an act which drives the maid to flee, and which leads to the man replacing her in her shack. He doesn't exactly do the housework as she did, but he does help the household out, for the Duchess is quite Bohemian in attitude, and wants her twelve year old boy to be a dazzling authorial prodigy. He already has a stool with his name on at the local black bar, but the man – who Simons decides to call Taurus – is going to be a peculiar father figure, opening his world up into that of adulthood. Full review...
Raised from the Ground by Jose Saramago
Domingos is a feckless man, a man often neglecting his family, and hitting his wife due to too much drinking, a man often leaving everyone behind as he chases work and flees his debts. He calls himself a shoemaker but really he's little different from those around him, who actually do have to move about, chasing what seasonal agricultural work is available. Certainly his children and their children in turn will mostly be bound to the land they sprang from - the 'latifundio' – and the spirit of both all of them, and of it, throughout the Portuguese twentieth century, are the subjects of this early Jose Saramago novel, in English for the first time after a thirty-year wait. Full review...
Professor Andersen's Night by Dag Solstad
A Christmastime in Norway. Spending his Christmas Eve alone, yet celebrating the age-old occasion the traditional way just by and for himself, is Professor Andersen. While taking time to muse on the party-hosting neighbours lit up in their own apartments across the way, he sees a young woman get roughly manhandled by what he thinks is a young man, after which their curtains are closed and suspicion is allowed to mount in the Professor's mind. He attends a dinner party – arriving far too early, to have the opportunity to talk the case over with his best friend – and goes away, spending many hours with his colleague, yet carries on doing nothing about reporting what he is sure was a murder. He and the relationship to the criminal in his mind are the basis of this short novel. Full review...
The Human Part by Kari Hotakainen and Owen F Witesman (translator)
Salme Malmikunnas attends a literary fair with her daughter, Helena but before going inside, Salme meets an author who offers her a small fortune in exchange for her story. He seeks inspiration and feels that Salme's biography is it. Salme agrees only after a fee increase and so their regular meetings begin. The author gets a story and Salme unloads her past and present onto this stranger. Meanwhile, Salme's family continues speeding towards a devastating event. Full review...
Desolation Island by Adolfo Garcia Ortega
In Madeira, in the first months of the new millennium, a man named Oliver Griffin collars a total stranger to explain his lifetime’s obsession with a South American island called Desolation. Griffin is a narrator as gabby as Melville’s Ishmael but twice as rambling, and what he recounts is less a coherent story than a neverending cabinet of curiosities. This magical realist take on the history of a place involves forbidden love, sixteenth-century automatons, mysterious Balkan castles, war crimes, death at sea, Jewish folklore, the personal lives of French authors and the sexual conduct of famous Spanish explorers, each bizarre strand twisted together by the novel’s own weird internal logic into one astonishing and delightful pattern. Full review...
Monsieur by Emma Becker
She is a twenty-year old student, with an average cleavage and a big bum. He is 45, a married cosmetic surgeon, and a friend of the family, having worked with her uncle for years. They might be an unlikely couple – at least outside the realms of erotic fiction they are – but as she puts it, she wants him to show me what a man was like, a real man, a man who could fill my body and my mind. The consequences are in this novel. Full review...
The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally
Expectations ahead of Thomas Keneally's 'The Daughters of Mars' are understandably high. He regularly features on the Booker shortlist and has won the prize in the past with Shindler's Ark. While his subject matter, World War I, is hardly the most original, his slant on the story is, and this is a book that deserves to sit with the very best of the many books on that subject, including All Quiet on the Western Front and Birdsong. It's that good and that powerful. Full review...
Where Have You Been? by Joseph O'Connor
Irish novelist Joseph O'Connor has had quite a 2012. Earlier in the year he joined the ranks of such authors as Edna O'Brien, Roddy Doyle and Seamus Heaney when he became a recipient of the PEN award for his outstanding contribution to Irish literature. What could possibly top that for a sense of achievement? Well this, his first book of short stories in 20 years, must come pretty close to at least equalling it, amply illustrating the reasons for the panel's decision. Full review...
The Crime of Julian Wells by Thomas H Cook
American travel writer Julian Wells walks out of the house he shares with his sister, wanders down to the garden lake, rows himself out to the centre and slits his wrists. He dies alone as he silently watches his life drip into the water. Devastated, his friend and frequent travel companion Philip Anders, tries to come to terms with the loss the only way he can: by attempting to understand. Julian dedicated a book to Philip, mentioning a 'crime' that Philip had witnessed. Philip had always thought it to be a flip reference to his comment from years before that it would be a crime for Julian to waste time writing a certain piece, but, in the light of tragic events, is this actually the case? Is there a crime in the author's past? As Philip retraces the essence of Julian through his words, the places they visited and people they encountered he slowly uncovers secrets and a dangerous obsession. Full review...
Huracan by Diana McCaulay
1986 – 30-year-old Leigh McCaulay (White gal!) is returning to Jamaica, the land of her birth. Her mother is dead and there is an estate to be settled. Her estranged father is somewhere on the island. Her brother is in England. This isn't the closest of grieving families. Leigh doesn't even know how her mother died. Indeed, she's a bit surprised to find out she'd gone back to Jamaica. The residual family had left the island not long after the father's desertion. Full review...
The Confidant by Helene Gremillon and Alison Anderson (translator)
It's 1975 and Camille, having lost her father a while ago, is now coming to terms with the recent death of her mother. After plucking up courage and strength, she goes through the condolence cards but there's one item in the correspondence pile that's out of place. It's addressed to her but from Louis (whom she doesn't know) about Annie (of whom she's never heard). As Louis pours out his story, reminiscing about his youth in wartime France, Camille is convinced it's a mistake; she shouldn't have received it. However the envelope is definitely addressed to her and, what's more, this won't be the last instalment of Louis' sad memoir that comes through the post. Full review...
Alone In The Classroom by Elizabeth Hay
'Other children were out picking that morning, but she passed them by in her light-blue dress and sandals... she had an empty kettle in each hand and was alone, despite having three sisters.'
Coming back to Hay's writing is like a kind of homecoming. She has such a soft way of words: a gentleness that gathers you up like a story-time school teacher asking if you're sitting comfortably. Full review...
The Guard by Peter Terrin
Harry and Michel are very good at their job, even if we might think their job is not that great. They and they alone are responsible for protecting the building they live in. Designed as an impregnable fortress containing many immense, palatial apartments inhabited by the ultra-rich, the only way in is through the basement carpark, where they reside in their own small patch of territory. They are certainly diligent – inspecting their stash of munitions twice a day, even if nothing could possibly interfere with their supply of bullets, and navigating around the large expanse of space where each of the forty floors above them has space for three supercars. But while one seems to be dreaming of things he might not get to witness – promotion to guarding villas in Elysian fields with becoming owner's wives, the other seems to be hearing things that might not actually be there to be heard… Full review...
Canada by Richard Ford
Richard Ford's Canada opens with one of the best opening lines that I've read in a long time:
'First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the most important part'. Full review...
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
Daniel Murphy ('Murph') is 18, in the American army and about to embark on his first tour of duty in Iraq. By his side is John Bartle, three years older and more experienced in the army. However neither of them has any notion of the sort of life or job they will face when they get there. The fighting is dirty, unpredictable and not set out in any text book. Their commanding officer, Sergeant Sterling, is sadistic and without any apparent humanity. But everything will be alright: Bartle has made a promise to Murph's mother, a promise that will ricochet from the US to Iraq and back again. Full review...
Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth is part spy novel but more a love story and a tale of deception and half truths. It's also, more subtly, a book about the power, role and importance of fiction. Set in the 1970s, with frequent musical and political references to the UK at that time, Serena Frome is a beautiful, Cambridge-educated daughter of an Anglican bishop with a taste for unsuitable romances. From an early affair with a man who turns out to be homosexual, to an affair with an older lecturer she moves on to a surprise job at MI5 where she had a crush on one of her bosses, again and awkward, repressed and unattractive individual before encountering talented author Tom Haley as part of her job with whom she once again falls in love. Few of these men are what they seem, and neither for that matter is Serena when she has to hide her job from Haley. Full review...
Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil
Novels about narcotic substances are notoriously hard to pull off. The challenge is to make the induced events interesting and meaningful to the, presumably, non-induced reader. In Narcopolis, Jeet Thayil pulls this off surprisingly well for me, although it's fair to say that it won't be everyone's taste. It's not a book that the Bombay/Mumbai tourist office will be keen to promote. A cover quotation links the book to a similar vein (OK, that's a poor choice of words in the circumstances) to Trainspotting and that's not far from the mark. Full review...
NW by Zadie Smith
Fans of Zadie Smith have had a seven year wait since her last book On Beauty. In NW, Smith returns to more of the issues addressed in her brilliant debut novel White Teeth. Set in parts of London that should be obvious from the title, the book takes the lives of four people who grew up on a rough estate and looks at how they have moved on - or not. All four still live nearby the estate where they grew up. There's multi-cultural tension and the have and have nots of power and money and Smith looks at how much individuals are in control of their destiny and ability to rise out of their upbringing, and how chance encounters can bring you back to your past with a bump. Full review...
The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura
The Thief is content roaming the streets of Tokyo, living on the contents of its wealthier citizens' pockets until, his original partner in crime (literally) introduces him to Kizaki, a local shady big shot. Kizaki wants the Thief's help on a straightforward job. He will just be one of a team tasked with breaking into a rich speculator's home, scaring him a little, taking the contents of his safe and departing. No rough stuff and the financial settlement Kizaki offers will more than compensate the pickpocket for his time. Full review...
The Potter's Hand by A N Wilson
The man of clay that A N Wilson throws onto his storytelling wheel in The Potter's Hand is the great Josiah Wedgwood, but this is much more than a historic telling of his life. Indeed, Josiah already has a thriving business at the start of the book. What Wilson does particularly impressively is to put Wedgwood's achievement and works into the context of the politics and social philosophy of the times, sandwiched between the two great revolutions in America and France. In order to do this, Wilson has to play slightly loose with artistic licence by altering dates and time lines a bit, but it works well. He also balances the real historic figures with several key figures of his own invention and where the historic figures don't quite fit with his narrative, he alters their ages and invents 'facts' to the benefit of the fictional narrative. Full review...
The House of Rumour by Jake Arnott
Jake Arnott sees to be one of those authors - like Will Self whom you'll love or loathe. Occasionally, you'll swing from one extreme to the other and I'll confess to being a little nervous when I opened the book. We really weren't that keen when we read The Devil's Paintbrush. Using the deck of Tarot cards as the structure of the book we look at the twentieth century through the life of Larry Zagorski. Imagine history being gently folded together like a cake mixture with episodes sliding against each other, flavouring that which they touch. Imagine the real - Aleister Crowley (reprising his appearance in The Devil's Paintbrush), Rudolf Hess, Ian Fleming, Cyril Connolly, Jim Jones and L Ron Hubbard blended with a transexual prostitute, a British pop singer and Larry, who writes pulp science fiction. Full review...
The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
When we first meet Futh he's on a North Sea ferry on his way to a walking holiday in Germany. There's no sense of enthusiasm or anticipation: Futh's middle aged and recently separated, seemingly without friends or family. He always wanted a dog, but keeps stick insects. The holiday seems to be something which, when it is over, he will have done it and will then return to his new flat. It begins and will end at Hellhaus, a guesthouse run by Bernard and his wife Ester. He gets on well enough with Ester but is at a loss to understand a rather hostile encounter with Bernard. He sets out the following morning for a week of walking, thinking and remembering. Meanwhile Ester - untouched by her meeting with Futh - continues her lonely life punctuated by the occasional casual sexual encounter which she barely hides from Bernard. Full review...
The Yips by Nicola Barker
Stuart Ransom is a golfing has-been and he's the only one who doesn't realise it. If his recollections are anything to go by (and who can tell?) he was on a par with the best. Times have changed though; the handicap isn't what it once was and age and alcohol have taken their toll. However, hope springs eternal and there's always one more match, so perhaps this is it. Meanwhile Gene, who splits his time between working at the hotel in which Stuart is staying and reading electricity meters, encounters an agoraphobic, exotic tattooist. Valentine is a woman struggling with an unhealthily precocious 2 year-old, a brother flirting with criminality and a brain-injured mother who has become more than a little eccentric. Add Gene's wife Rev Sheila and her personal crisis into the mix and it becomes a recipe for disaster, it's just a case of waiting for it to erupt. Full review...
A is for Angelica by Iain Broome
Gordon and Georgina Kingdom spent years being like many other couples. They had jobs, friends, holidays, a springer spaniel named Kipling and a life together. Then Georgina became ill and Gordon took early retirement to nurse her better. He treats retirement with the same methodical efficiency he employed at work. He records Georgina's care, her progress and shares her waking moments, feeding her and sitting with her. However, as she spends a lot of time asleep, Gordon is left to entertain himself and so, the same man who led the local Neighbourhood Watch, watches his neighbours, noting points of interest and visible activities in alphabetically filed dossiers. They're all there: Don across the road who borrows garden tools on a more permanent basis than Gordon would like, art award winner young Benny who paints with his eyes shut, the lady next door who throws footballs over the fence and the new woman across the road, Angelica. Except, when Angelica moves into the street, Gordon's interest becomes more focused than usual. Full review...
Umbrella by Will Self
Will Self's Umbrella spans a century taking three interwoven strands. One features Audrey Dearth, who in 1918 is a munitions worker who falls ill with encephalitis lethargica, a brain disease that spread over Europe after the Great War rendering many of its victims speechless and motionless. She is incarcerated in Friern hospital where, in the early 1970s a psychiatrist, Zach Busner wakes her from her stupor using a new drug. In the final thread, in 2010 the asylum has closed and the now retired Busner travels across north London seeking the truth about his encounter with his former patient. While that sounds like a fascinating story in its own right, be warned. Self's approach is ambitiously modernistic making this a very heavy going tome even by Self's standards. Full review...