A Robot in the Garden, by Deborah Install

This is a lovely, lovely story that is really quite special and completely heartwarming - don’t mistake it for sci-fi just because it has the word ‘robot’ in the title!

One morning Ben looks out his window to find a small robot sitting at the end of the garden, watching the horses in the field next door. Ben can’t get much sense out of the robot except his name – Tang – but, much to the disgruntlement of his wife, decides to take Tang in.

Tang is like a small child, fascinated by everything and leaving a trail of trouble, but Ben – like I couldn’t help doing either – quickly becomes rather attached to him. The question is, though, where did Tang come from? He doesn’t remember, but when Ben discovers a vital part of Tang is on the verge of breakdown, he and Tang set out to find Tang’s first owner to see if he can save him. Following the trail of clues around the world, both Ben and Tang are set on a path of discovery and the makings of a friendship like no other.

“A story of the greatest friendship ever assembled,” is the tag line on my copy of the book, and I’d have to agree. Deborah Install fills A Robot in the Garden with the perfect mix of humour, adventure and discovery, and subtly makes you question the balance between father and child. It's a very gentle story, yet an awful lot happens all at the same time - Ben is a bit of a lay-about at the beginning of the story, but Tang's presence changes everything and their road trip helps them to both grow an enormous amount. A book that leaves you feeling all warm and fuzzy inside; I loved it.

A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara

This is a book that gets under your skin in a million little ways; a book that demands to be read; a book which you simply have to keep reading, and even when you stop to do something else, is there in your mind, the story and characters ticking away, urging you to go back to them.

A Little Life is, at the beginning, about four college friends, but really it is all about just one of them: Jude. Once I reached the end of this immense, heart-wrenching story, though, I began to reassess: rather than being about Jude, it’s ultimately, perhaps, about the relationship between Jude and Willem. Because, if anything endures from our lives, if anything lives on beyond us, then surely it is the relationships we form around us, and the impact we have upon other people’s lives.

I’d heard that this book was breathtaking and should be read, but that it was depressing. It is breathtaking and it should be read, but it’s not depressing: if anything, it is incredibly sad, but even this is certainly not all that it is. It is everything; it is life encompassed. Hanya Yanagihara has an amazing power of observation, especially of people, and the book is full of little things that strike home and made me think, yes, that is so right; and it has made me re-evaluate how I think about my own friends and the relationships we share, how not everyone thinks or is able to respond to things the same way that I do.

In the first section of the book we hear only from Malcolm and Willem and JB: what we know about Jude, we only know from them, and I was expecting this style of storytelling to continue, so was pleasantly surprised when Jude’s voice is introduced in part two, followed swiftly by another change to a mix of first and second perspective storytelling, care of a fifth key character. It was interesting to me that as Jude’s ‘little life’ progresses, Malcolm and JB begin to take a back seat, and we only rarely hear from them again other than through Willem and Jude.

Jude is a conundrum: on the surface, in his professional life, he is so assured and confident and capable, but underneath he suffers such turmoil. He is impossibly, unimaginably damaged, and as his secrets are gradually, devastatingly revealed, Yanagihara paints what feels to be an unutterably true portrait of how it must be to be stuck inside the head of a person who feels about himself and believes about himself the things that Jude believes, in spite of all that the people who love him try to tell him otherwise. He is not haunted by ghosts so much as by hyenas. When he is young he seems mostly to be able to lock them away, but as he gets older they begin to truly start clattering about, demanding to be felt, and only one person has the power to help him tame them – or partially tame them, at any rate. I found myself thinking, if only he would speak about it, but the worse it gets, the harder it seems to become for him to articulate the things that haunt him.

The lives of Jude and Willem and Malcolm and JB are strangely, seemingly timeless. As I began reading, the story felt contemporary, that it begins perhaps now, or perhaps, at a stretch, in the nineties, but surely no further ago than that (though maybe it is simply my own vantage point that controls this; someone else might imagine a different decade). Yet, as I read, and the characters grew older and I knew that time was passing, it stills feels like it is the same; no future world is imagined here, it is all the present. And even the characters – even though I knew they were now forty, forty-five, fifty – seemed in my mind to be the same in age and looks and appearance as when they were twenty. Perhaps this is the conundrum of being an adult, though, for even as I know I am getting older, that my appearance must surely be changing, I find it hard to believe. I still feel the same; I still feel like me, not some older version of me.

As well as the concept of experience and how this shapes our lives, I also found interesting the question of healing and the human fixation on fixing things, whether physical things or mind things. That, after all, is why we have shrinks: to fix ourselves, to fix others; the idea that we all need to be perfect and whole. But what if something cannot be fixed, what if it is so deeply imbedded within the soul that it simply is; perhaps then the only way to fix it is to acknowledge and accept it and find a way to live with it, to work with it, to reduce it’s ripple effect rather than fruitlessly attempting to eradicate it. Acceptance, sometimes, is everything. This is an idea that has been touched upon in several books I’ve come across recently in terms of physical health, and it’s an idea that I try and try again to apply to myself. And so to see it here, so beautifully considered, is wonderful too.

As Jude ages, the things that matter changes: from being safe, to being loved, to the question of legacy. This is what A Little Life does: it incorporates a lifetime; even as things stay still, so do they change; the progression of thought and understanding and also, not-understanding. Our lives may be little, but they are also big.

This book absolutely deserves all the praise it is receiving. The words will become blurry with tears as you read and yet it is somehow wonderful, full of real things and real feelings that burst upon you with every page and every turn of events. It is beautiful and sad and truly extraordinary.

Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn

Ella Minnow Pea has one of the best subtitles I think I’ve ever come across: ‘A novel without letters’. It’s ironic, clever, amusing, the truth and a lie all in one go. This is a book in which certain letters from the alphabet gradually become outlawed – ultimately leaving just five (four consonants and a single vowel) for the author and characters to work with – yet is a story told purely though the medium of letters and notes, making it simultaneously a novel without letters and a novel full of them!

Ella Minnow Pea is a teenaged girl who lives with her parents on a small, independently governed island just off the coast of the United States. The island – Nollop – takes it’s name from a now deceased citizen of its nation, Nevin Nollop, who famously (or perhaps not so famously) created the sentence, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” This pangram, a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet, is held by the islanders in highest elevation, representative, they believe, of a greatness of language to which all of its citizens should aspire.

Eschewing modern technology as far as possible, letter writing appears to be the dominant form of communication on Nollop, and so the story begins with Ella writing to her cousin Tassie, who lives in a village in a far corner of the island. There is a great deal of hubbub in the capital of Nollopton, we learn, where an alphabetical tile has fallen from the classic sentence that adorns Nevin Nollop’s statue in the town centre: the letter Z, to be exact. While most people begin by assuming it is simply an act of nature precipitated by weakened glue on said tile, the High Council soon pronounces that there is a much higher purpose to be gleaned from the event: namely, that the tumbling of the letter Z is “a terrestrial manifestation of Mr. Nollop’s wishes.” And Mr. Nollop’s wishes are? That ‘Z’ be expunged from the alphabet forever more.

As of midnight on August 7th, no citizen is allowed to speak, write, or be in possession of the letter Z. At the outset, Ella isn’t terribly concerned by the pronouncement: Z, after all, is a fairly little-used letter. The outlaw of its use shouldn’t provide too great a challenge, and the challenge that it does represent is one that she is happy and eager to embrace. But Tassie sees things differently… And when August 8th comes around and Z is no more, it becomes startlingly clear how widespread an effect the removal of even this small alphabetical letter can have.

Mark Dunn is a supreme master of the English language, and as Ella Minnow Pea (or L-M-N-O-P) unfolds it soon becomes clear what a fascinating construct it is. As missives go back and forth, between Ella and Tassie initially, and then between other characters as they are gradually brought in to the story, adding new shades of light and dark, we are quietly led to realize that, despite it’s hearty subtitle, there is much more to this tale that just letters. First, a rather strict series of punishments is put into place by the High Council for any alphabetical transgressors and then, as more letters begin to fall, utopia rapidly descends into classic dystopian territory, all notion of human rights and morality deserting the island leaders as their obsession with Nollop takes over.

Can Ella and her fellows find a way to stop the madness before it is too late?

The characters, the politics and their relationships are all wonderfully and intriguingly developed, but it is the structure of this novel that’s left the greatest mark on my thoughts. What result does losing just one or two letters have? Books, names, and foods are all lost, while neighbor turns upon neighbor, the close-knit community quickly imploding. The Nollopian desire to elevate language is met, though, in a sense, as the characters strive to talk around the words they would otherwise say or bring into employ less common usage words for the same meaning.

As letters fall in ever greater numbers, though, language starts to falter. First things are renamed (with the loss of D, for instance, days of the week become Sunshine, Monty, Toes, Wetty, Thurby, Fribs, and Satto-gatto). Then, instead of the flowery and well-considered manner of speaking and writing from before, sentences become stark and grammarless. Spellings are changed to make words that sound the same but which avoid the illegal lettering and ultimately, language loses all essential meaning, becoming a base form, impossible to write or speak, while most of the community is torn asunder and spread to the four winds.

The only way out is if they can find a new sentence that supersedes Nollop’s 35 piece sentence: a pangram of 32 letters or less. Then, the Council, promises, they will accept that Nollop is not, perhaps, the be-all and end-all of language that they currently believe. But is it possible? Can Ella find the magic sentence before the deadline the Council has set? Is there even a sentence to find?

By turns funny and disturbing, tender and thought-provoking, Ella Minnow Pea is wonderful and brilliant, letter-less and letter-full and which takes language to a whole new level.

Bellman & Black, by Diane Setterfield

William Bellman is a smart young man, who’s worked hard, taking advantage of opportunities as they present themselves, and built himself a good life. But William Bellman is also a man who easily falls prey to obsession; he can use this to turn a penny or two in business, to dedicate himself to nursing his sick children to health, or to identifying the strange man, dressed all in black, who hovers in the background of every funeral William Bellman has ever attended. And when tragedy strikes, William Bellman’s life is torn asunder, not only by his losses, but by the ensuing conversation he has with a man in a graveyard, a man named – or so Bellman believes – Black.

Who is Black? Was he following William? Will he come back? And what will he want if – when – he does? If only William could remember the finer details of the bargain he is sure that they struck: that Black would save William’s daughter in exchange for William embarking on a new business: the business of death. And as he waits and wonders and frets and worries, Bellman turns his obsession to the realization of the seed that Black has placed in William’s mind: the construction of Bellman & Black, the Mourning Emporium. This, surely this, will be enough to appease Black. But what if it isn’t? What if Bellman & Black isn’t what Black wanted at all?

Diane Setterfield has followed up her extraordinary first novel, the gothic and mysterious The Thirteenth Tale, with quite a strange tale that leaves the reader wondering. She begins her tale with the recounting of a repressed memory from William's childhood: how, whilst demonstrating his prowess with a slingshot, hits and kills a rook in a tree fifty yards yonder across a field. He is repulsed by the act: it was never really his intention to kill the bird; he didn’t think he’d ever actually hit it. So he goes home and outs the memory aside. The rooks, however, we are told, don’t forget so easily. Thus, as we watch William grow into a man, become a husband, a father, an entrepreneur, the rooks are watching him too.

I enjoyed reading Bellman & Black, but I’m just not sure what exactly to make of it. Essentially, it’s the story of a man’s life, the changes, the tragedies and the hope that wend their ways through it, and how a particular event bounces him off onto a different path. As William becomes consumed by his new business, to all intents and purposes shutting out the one thing he loves most – the one for whom he bargained – I couldn’t help but wonder where the Bellman we knew before had gone. But the chapters following Bellman’s life are intersected with snippets from the rooks and ravens: so are the choices Bellman makes his own, or are they influenced by something other? Is Black a rook? Or death itself? Or are the rooks somehow a representation of death? It’s easy, after all, to associate corvids with graveyards.

Rather than fretting over how it all links up, perhaps I shouldn’t try to read too much into it. We make our choices and we live by them. And we die by them. What begins as a tale of a smart and eager young man making good on his meagre beginnings becomes one of tragedy as obsession and loss take their toll. Like I said, it’s a strange book, but no less interesting and no less readable for all that. It’s definitely an interesting choice, especially for readers who are looking for something with gothic undertones, or for something to leave them questioning.

Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country [America],” we are told about two thirds of the way through Americanah. “If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too obvious… So if you’re going to write about race, you have to make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race.”

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from Americanah before I started reading. Having read one of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s earlier novels, Half of a Yellow Sun, and, more recently, Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, I had what I now realize was a rather abstract notion that I liked what, in my head I termed, “African fiction”. Reading Americanah, however, has shown me what a sweeping judgement this idea of African fiction is that I had. That, like the labels westerners paste on Ifemelu and Obinze (Adichie’s protagonists in Americanah), I was pasting a similarly pointless and potentially offensive label on her work.

If anything, in my judgmental state, I was expecting Americanah to be a book about Nigeria. However, if anything, it is a book about America. Which I probably should have figured out from the title. But it is also a book about judgments and race, and want and dreams, and love lost and found. If Adichie believed the statement that Ifemelu's acquaintance Shan makes, above, about writing racism in America, then she has defied this belief: Americanah is both honest and lyrical; no reading between the lines necessary.

Ifemelu and Obinze are high school sweethearts, together practically from the day they meet. But, growing up in Nigeria against a backdrop of military dictatorship and failing public services, the dream of all their contemporaries is America. And so Ifemelu and Obinze make a plan: when Ifemelu is accepted to an American university, they agree that she will go while Obinze finishes his studies in Nigeria and follow her later.

Things do not go to plan. When Ifemelu steps off the plane in America, she walks into a world entirely different from the one she imagined:

“I did not think of myself as black and only thought of myself as black when I came to America.”

I am white. I live in a white community. I notice if there is a black person walking down the street. I am not racist; I do not make (I hope) any judgment about a person by the colour of their skin; but I notice. And I never thought about this as meaning anything before I read Americanah, but Adichie shows that it is meaningful. Because for Ifemelu, she wasn’t noticed in this way before she went to America.

To begin with, America is like moving through thick columns of fog, only gradually figuring out the difficulties and differences of American culture and society through experience and the reading of American books to absorb the language, customs, mannerisms, sayings. But all around her are things that tell her she is different. Adichie shows us these things gradually and quietly as Ifemelu’s side of the story unfolds: her struggle to find even the most menial form of work, the way that everything around her is tailored for white people, the quickly masked reactions of waiters when she has dinner with a white man.

Adichie highlights throughout the book the way that white people have of piling black or African people into one single denomination, when in fact there is much, much greater variety within non-white than within white. Most often she uses hair to bring the realities across. In the opening pages we join Ifemelu as she journeys to a salon to get her hair braided and so I learnt here, and throughout the story, of the difference between white hair and non-white hair. I did not know that powerful chemicals called relaxers are frequently used to “tame” black hair, that to be considered a professional black woman in America you have to use these to get sleek straight hair like you see in white people magazines, that black people have to make themselves closer to white conformities to look “professional”. It’s surprising and shocking and eye-opening.

And so race and the concept of race flows strongly through Americanah, but alongside it runs the relationship between Ifemelu and Obinze. Events compound events and Ifemelu and Obinze lose touch. As they get older, they each feel a terrible shame for the things they’ve had to do to make it through the difficult periods, and this shame forms for many years an unbreakable barrier between the two of them. As Americanah unfolds, we jump from present to past, Ifemelu to Obinze and back again, as their stories track across the years. And so to the moment when they finally meet again. What new choices will they have to make? Can they pick up where they left off? Can they break down the barriers they’ve each erected?

Americanah, for me, was a surprising book. It has shown me new things, a different way of looking at the world. There is much that may have passed me by, though, because there is much about Nigeria and what it is to live there and come from that very different world that I do not know and am not likely ever to really know, not like Ifemelu does or Obinze does or, I presume, Adichie does. Sometimes, in reading, it was difficult to imagine Ifemelu, what she looked like, or to fully grasp the different descriptions of her hair, but I hope that ultimately that doesn’t matter because Adichie’s storytelling brings the reader inside Ifemelu; what is on the outside is, after all, irrelevant.

Golden Boy, by Abigail Tarttelin

Golden Boy is, in every sense, a breath-taking book. Abigail Tarttelin’s mature and stunning storytelling is heart-rending and brilliant, and left me still thinking about the story, the characters and the subjects that she raises days after I had finished reading.

At its essence, Golden Boy is the coming-of-age tale of Max. When his supposed best friend betrays Max’s trust in the worst way imaginable, Max is forced to confront and rethink his identity. At sixteen years old, he’s mostly been okay with who he is, but suddenly all the things that were supposed to be worries for the future have arrived: will anybody ever be able to accept him? Will he ever be able to fall in love? How will the choices and decisions he makes today affect his future?

As the past is dug up and the future is pulled apart, Max has to fight for the right to choose who he wants to be, whilst simultaneously dealing with a traumatic event no one should ever have to go through, least of all on their own.

What labels and boxes do we put ourselves and others in? Male, female; sporty, nerdy; gay, straight; cool, uncool. What is my personal identity and what factors contribute to that? How do I choose to present myself to the world and what assumptions do others make about me? These are all questions that Tarttelin raises through Max’s story: gender, identity, sexuality, labeling. Every single one of this is bendable, there is rarely a clear-cut option of one or the other, yet we cannot help but set up neat little boxes for ourselves and try to force people to fit within them. As Tarttelin changes points of view from Max to his mum, his little brother, his doctor, these themes are reflected in each and every one of their parts of the story, the things they consider important, the way they react to events and people around them.

Max does not fit into western society’s average box. He is intersex. He presents himself to the world as a boy, but he has both male and female anatomy. How does he know which he supposed to be? His family doesn’t discuss his “condition”; he has memories of doctors and specialists, of being prodded and poked as a child, but nobody has ever really explained to him the details of his body. The terminology seems to change over the years, but rarely the understanding or the compassion.

“It doesn’t matter if I think like a boy or a girl. It doesn’t matter anymore if I’m either or both or neither. All that shit seems so petty and immaterial now. There’s so little difference between one human being and the next, it’s just hypotheses, human ideas about life and the world and words, that mean nothing; about definitions that mean nothing to the earth, to nature, to the universe.”

But now Hunter has not only committed the most heinous act, but is blackmailing Max, using Max’s identity against him to keep Max quiet. As Max tries, desperately, to seek help from his parents, a chain of events is set in motion that sends Max down a tumbling hill of fear and pain. His mum wants the best for him, but her version of the best is to find a way to squeeze him back into the box of perfect son, her progressively more desperate actions stripping Max of his choices and making him just as powerless as Hunter did. It is almost a form of torture to watch these events unfold and to not be able to help Max, or shake his mother back to reality.

Where will his inability to speak up take him as he looks for a way to regain control over his life? It seems like, gradually, everyone is betraying him, even himself, his own body. Sixteen years of being quiet and being good, of keeping off the radar, makes it practically impossible for Max to express or even fully determine what it is he really wants for himself; it is like he is drowning but no-one can see it. As he spirals, the tension of the story is palpable, electrically charged, and just so very emotionally powerful. Tarttelin is a masterful writer raising incredibly, incredibly important issues that are all too easily swept away beneath the stiff upper lip and ill-conceived pride of generations of society; and she does so with deft and balance and in a way that is hard to be ignored. This is a brilliant, must-read book.

The Bees, by Laline Paull

The Bees is a most unusual book. Although billed primarily as an innovative and chilling dystopian thriller (which it is), what stood out for me most strongly were the rhythms of life and nature, the rhythms of the hive through the seasons.

This is the story of Flora 717. We meet her as she is born to consciousness and follow her through her life in the hive and her encounters with the world. As she goes about foraging for nectar, feeling the air on her wings and using the air currents to speed her along, Flora forms a symbiotic relationship with the flowers and plants: they yearn for her touch as much as she yearns for theirs.

The outside world is packed with enemies, though, enemies both natural and man-made: the Myriad - spiders and birds and wasps – as well as cars and pesticides and cell phone towers. Thus, as well as being a song to nature, The Bees stands as a warning too: an alarm call to the devastating effect human technology has on the natural world, how they unbalance the ecosystems and race through the food chain, how what might seem minor or unnoticable by you or me is devastating to wildlife.

But enemies reside not only in the outside world, they are in the hive too. For this is not some softly cushioned place but a dystopian horror. The society of the hive is divided rigidly into caste levels, each bee ‘kin’ kept in their place by the Melissae priestesses who use scent barriers and antennae controls to keep the bees in their places, and the Queen who extends her love through the hive like some sort of addictive drug. Information is limited, freedom is an essentially unknown concept, individuality is restricted and dissent or deviation is punishable by death.

What is different about this dystopia, though, is our protagonist: unlike the typical dystopian hero, Flora 717 does not actively seek out change, does not intend to question the laws of the hive; rather these things just seem to happen by some other force of nature. There are secrets hidden everywhere, but Flora doesn’t look for them because she wants to challenge the hive or the Queen or the Melissae, she looks for them only to answer her questions about the world or only when she needs the knowledge. Flora loves the Queen as much as every other bee; it is the Melissae who frighten her.

So when Flora commits the ultimate act of rebellion, the greatest sin of the hive, what will the consequences be? What exactly are the implications of the Melissae’s most closely guarded secret: that of feeding? The Melissae are undoubtedly in control, but what will happen if the icon of the Queen is lost? How tight will their grip on the hive be then?

This is a fairly ingenious idea by author Laline Paull; I would be interested to know what inspired her story and to learn how close the relationship is between the functioning of Flora’s hive and non-fictional hives. How is it, for instance, that Flora is able to commit this act of sin – and so unintentionally too? I wasn’t completely enraptured by The Bees, perhaps because it doesn’t hold the same level of pace as I’m used to from YA dystopias, but it is a wonderful and thoughtful song brought lovingly to life.

I especially loved the relationship Flora had with the outside world and the symbiotic relationship the bees have with the hive itself; I loved the rhythms of the hive, the dancing of foraging directions, the encoding of knowledge within the structure of the hive itself. This perhaps make it sound like a very airy and light book: it is not. The passages involving the spiders were especially creepy; there is terrifying visit to a greenhouse with carnivorous plants; and I’m sure I felt as sick as Flora did when she got trapped by the cell phone tower - though nothing is as shocking to all involved as the Obeisance to the Males. I did find it kind of fascinating that the males were given such an elevated place in the hive, despite it purportedly being a matriarchal society, though their greed and their demands were sickening enough for me to feel more than a little smug once it became clear what the Obeisance rite was really all about.

The final denouement is satisfyingly dramatic: will the Melissae lose their grip? And what fate awaits the hive? If you’re looking for something different to read this summer, The Bees is it.

The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion

Genetics professor Don Tillman does not comprehend subtleties, cannot lie, does not respond naturally to social cues, plans his day down to the minute for optimal time usage, cooks the same meal every Tuesday night, and thinks purely on rational terms. Until Rosie arrives in his life, that is. Before long, Rosie has taken over.

Every thought and sentence that Don Tillman (aka author Graeme Simsion) emits during this book is perfection. The language, the structure - every part captures the character of this funny and frustrated man, a man who knows and wholeheartedly accepts that his mind is wired differently. What he wants, though, is to find a woman who will accept it as well. And so he initiates The Wife Project: a sixteen-page questionnaire designed to eliminate those who will not be able to accept his strictures from the outset, rather than causing him to waste time going on dates with people who will only eat one specific flavor of ice cream (ref. The Ice-Cream Incident).

Rosie is an accident. Following the hilarious and very satisfying Jacket Incident, he quickly ascertains that she is unsuitable as a partner for him and that she would likely fail the Wife Project questionnaire. Yet he allows her to come back and have a meal with him at his flat; allows her to move his furniture around; even allows her to change the time on his clock. And then – even though the chances of success and the world-wide importance of the project are minimal – he begins The Father Project, an attempt to identify Rosie’s biological father for her. Before he knows it, The Father Project takes over too. Even when it seems to pointless to continue, he cannot stop finding reasons to continue. Why?

“Humans often fail to see what is close to them and obvious to others,” he tells us. What is obvious to us is that Don Tillman is in love with Rosie, but he’s so unused to letting emotions in – he finds them so overwhelming – that he fails, for an awfully long time, to see it. But when finally puts two and two together, will it be too late?

The Rosie Project is brilliantly funny and one of the best feel-good books I’ve read in a long time. There are some awful, cringe-worthy yet hilarious moments in it – like when he climbs out the tiny bathroom window on the fourth floor of a building in New York rather than going back into a meeting that’s getting out of hand, or the night he turns himself into a cocktail-maker extraordinaire. A man for whom lying has always been a rather absurd concept soon finds himself concocting false research projects, undertaking regular subterfuge, even theft of a sort. Yet he’s so entirely innocent throughout, it is literally impossible not to root for him.

But is Don Tillman capable of love? Is it right to try and make yourself change so as to fit within another’s expectations of you? Can Don fix his best friend’s marriage as well solve all the kinks in his own life? Will Rosie be able to adapt her worldview as successfully as Don adapts his? And who, at the end of the day, is Rosie’s father?

Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. And it would make a great movie too – especially, I think, if Benedict Cumberbatch took the lead role.

Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi

There’s a scene in Ghana Must Go where Olu Sai is asking his girlfriend’s father for her hand in marriage. Dr. Wei doesn’t say no exactly; rather, he begins a speech on what he views to be the downfall of the African male:

“The fathers don’t honor their children or wives,” he says. “I’m assuming – and it is just as an assumption, I acknowledge – that your father left your mother to raise you alone?” 

It’s an unfortunate truth that Dr. Wei is correct in his latter assumption, but Olu stands his ground wonderfully. He doesn’t defend his father or try to provide explanation, instead he turns the tables on Dr. Wei, pointing out that despite his insistence that children follow their father’s example, Dr. Wei’s children, in their very choice of mates, are not.

It’s a fabulous moment. For a second you’re thinking, what a horrible man… but wait, he’s hit the nail on the head there – and then: but that’s got nothing to do with Olu… and then Olu steps up to the plate and takes back the power. Ghana Must Go is full of moments like this, Taiye Selasi weaving in and out with her characters, twisting and turning, all in exceptional prose and – it may seem strange to say it – just brilliant, brilliant use of punctuation. I’m a bit of a stickler for punctuation, and there are lots of perfectly enjoyable writers who don’t really understand it. Not Taiye Selasi; it’s like she has some sort of symbiotic relationship with punctuation, breathing it into her writing to create wonderful, unusual, thoughtful sentences that were just a pleasure to read and pick apart and consider. Taiye Selasi is a writer’s writer.

Told in three parts – Gone, Going, and Go – Ghana Must Go is the fictional biography of the Sai family. Their father, Kweku Sai, is Ghanaian; their mother, Folasade, is Nigerian; the four children, Olu, twins Kehinde and Taiwo, and the late surprise Sadie, are American. As we enter the story, Kweku stands in the garden of his house, alone, dying, but remembering. Remembering the construction of this house, the construction of his family, and then the simple, single act that tore them apart.

As Selasi takes us into the minds, thoughts and memories of each of the family members, we see the ripple effect of this event, how the Sai family have spread apart from one another, physically, emotionally, just the most tentative of threads keeping them together over the distance: the bond of being a family. This thread is stronger between some of them than it is between others; an elastic thread, stretched to almost breaking point, yet primed to bounce back into it’s centre point if only it’s given a hint of slack. And as the news of Kweku’s death reverberates along it, it’s given a chance, a contraction, an opportunity, not for the past to be rewritten, but for a new future to be sketched out. Can these grown children, like Olu does in his confrontation with Dr. Wei, confront their personal terrors, grieve for their father, and then take back their power?

Chosen as a Waterstones Eleven title in 2013, and a Waterstones Book of the Month in 2014, Ghana Must Go is a story of love almost gone wrong, of people making choices in the belief that it’s the best thing for everyone involved. The trouble is that climbing out of this trap is a lot harder and slower than falling in, but it’s worth it in the end. “Ghana Must Go” is a phrase coined in Nigeria in the 1980s after millions of Ghanaian refugees flocked across their borders to escape from political unrest; I’m not sure why Selasi chose this for her title, but I think perhaps – other than the obvious Ghanaian/Nigerian connection - it’s because it’s sentiment represents how difficult it is to do undo a thing once done. What you won’t want to do undo is your reading of this story, though you might want to check your pocket for a packet of tissues as you near the final pages.

The Girl With All the Gifts, by M. R. Carey

Melanie: a young girl, smart, thirsty for knowledge, eager to understand the world, or the pieces of the world that her teachers let her see. A child who smiles and learns and yearns for love. Or an interloper? A ‘something else’ that controls this young girl’s body and just makes it seem like she is all those other things?

Melanie’s world is very small. She lives in a small, bare cell. Each day Sergeant and his people come and take her down the corridor, through the door at the end and into the classroom. There is a door at the other end of the corridor too, but she never gets to go through that one. She’d like to know what’s on the other side. Her life is controlled and regulated - Plato’s cave - and very little changes from week to week. But then two of the other children in her class are taken away and never come back. The questions start to pile in. What happened to them? Why does Sergeant get so very angry when the teacher touches Melanie’s hair? Why did Kenny snap and snarl at Sergeant like a dog when Sergeant showed Kenny his arm? And what is it inside Melanie that woke up when she smelt Sergeant’s skin?

It’s quite extraordinary that new things can still be done with what, in it’s most basic form, is a zombie apocalypse novel. As external events come into play, Melanie’s world comes crashing down and suddenly that small cell and clinical corridor are replaced with a lot of home truths. It is two decades since the Breakdown; anywhere outside of Beacon is unsafe, populated only by hungries and the survivalist Junkers. She is like people, but she’s not like people. The hungries don’t pay attention to her, but they’re a threat to everyone else. Why is she different?

Melanie and four others slog out into this open world: Dr Caldwell, the cold doctor who thinks only of science, of finding a cure, of solving the equation and receiving her due praise. What lengths will she go to to achieve her aims? Helen Justineau: damaged but caring teacher set on protecting her young charges. Private Gallagher, a young and green soldier stuck between a rock and a hard place, for whom moving forward to Beacon is equal to go backward. Sergeant Parks: the hardened leader who has survived by adhering to strict rules and behaviors as far as hungries are concerned, rules he’s now being forced to bend, but he’s determined to get the group back to Beacon. And Melanie: Caldwell is sure the secret locked inside Melanie’s head is the key to saving them all, if only she can get inside and figure it out.

But what if Melanie is something else entirely, something nobody even thought could exist? Something that turns all assumptions about the hungries upside down; that is at once extraordinary, but will also sound the death knell for them all?

The Girl With All the Gifts is a wonderful new take and new approach to a well-mined genre. It’s easy to figure out early what the deal is with Melanie’s world, yet M. R. Carey simultaneously keeps a lot hidden away from us. What exactly are the gifts that Melanie is holding? Will they make it back to Beacon? What will they encounter, discover, and have to endure along the way? Will Beacon even still be there? Carey’s writing is visually enticing – the world this eclectic group walk through played like a movie in my head – as well as creating that thrill and anticipation of a gripping novel; the questions and secrets perfectly balanced with adrenaline-inducing passages of action. It’s not an action heavy book, it’s not all run-run-run, hide-hide-hide: instead, a level tension runs through every page, every step, every decision these characters take. And it’s a level of tension that is satisfied by answers just as new questions arise, a really slick and effective piece of storytelling.

When I read Max Brooks’ World War Z, it gave me nightmares if I read before going to sleep, and at one point I was afraid The Girl With All the Gifts would have the same uncomfortable effect. Thankfully it didn’t, and I think this is because it’s such a character-driven story. Each of the five characters have their own secrets to protect; these secrets drive them forward, make them who they are, influence their reactions to the world and their reactions to each other. Can they let their secrets go? Can they change the others’ inbuilt responses?

As for the cause of the Breakdown - Dr Caldwell’s great project - I love the idea that something as seemingly small and innocuous as a fungus could bring about this level of devastation. In fact, I think it’s one of the best and most sensible explanations for a ‘hungry’ phenomenon postulated yet. Carey’s descriptions of these frozen creatures are enthralling: tendrils of grey sneaking through their bodies, the plants spore-ing and branching and growing and taking over while the hungries stand, waiting, for the next meal to walk by, the next trigger to wake them up and spur them onward. Add to this the abandoned land, buildings, villages, towns and cities left to rot for twenty years, while the fungus gradually, inexorably takes over. It's very cinematic.

Not all the questions are answered, not all the possible explanations given, but just enough is offered up to leave me satisfied. Ours and Melanie’s greatest fears are both realized and unrealized; the conclusion is a terrible work of art that is yet somehow right. The Girl With All the Gifts is being much lauded and rightly so: it is different and gripping and full of care in every respect.

The Rabbit Back Literature Society, by Pasi Ilmar Jaaskelainen

Laura White’s “Creatureville” novels are bestsellers, but what if the mythological beings they feature are based on real beings living in Rabbit Back? Why is the Rabbit Back librarian burning books? And why only now, after so many years, has a new member been invited to join the Rabbit Back Literature Society?

After the end of a disappointing relationship, Ella Amanda Milana has returned to her home town of Rabbit Back and taken on a teaching position in the local school. Everything seems mundane and normal, except perhaps for the part where her father claims he can see gnomes in the garden (but he has Alzheimers, so he’s not an entirely reliable witness), the part where library books are rearranging their stories, and the part where her town is populated by the infamous Rabbit Back Literature Society, an exclusive and rather secretive group of nine acclaimed writers brought together and nurtured from a young age by bestselling children’s author Laura Winter.

And so The Rabbit Back Literature Society is at once a slightly strange and yet fairly regular story of a young woman finding her feet in life. It is peopled with eccentric characters and set in a town with a magical undertow, yet Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen makes this seems all perfectly normal. It does come as a surprise to everyone when Laura White, after reading a story Ella has published in the local paper, invites Ella to join the Literature Society, the first new member in something like twenty years. But when Ella is initiated into the group not only does Laura White mysteriously disappear, but Ella is introduced to The Game: a sacred spilling of internal truths. Is this her chance to uncover the Society’s mysteries? Her own mysteries? Can she, or will she, use them to form her own, new future? What will she have to give up in return, and how far will the society go to prevent her from spilling their secrets? Will she wish, afterwards, that she never knew them?

A lot goes on in this book, each new chapter, each new ‘spilling’ in The Game, revealing another level of mystery. There’s not only the mystery of Laura White herself, of the complicated relationships the society members have with each other, but also of the elusive first tenth member and his powerful notebook. Although they never talk about him, this young boy’s notebook has an intense hold over the society, particularly Martti Winter. But is it actually what they remember it to be?

This is a strangely magical book, but the magical aspect of it not only goes unresolved and unexplained, but also never directly mentioned. It simply exists, underlying the thoughts and words and deeds of this small Finnish town. This, of course, makes the whole thing even more magical and interesting. Perhaps I should read some Finnish mythology – perhaps then I would more clearly understand the significance of the Emperor Rat, be able to divine whether Laura White was actually Mother Snow. It’s a wonderful and unusual story, quite dark in places, ultimately both resolving things and leaving much unresolved. Quirky is perhaps one way of describing it, but it doesn’t really come anywhere near; it’s much more fluid than a single description or term can accomplish, much like Laura White, The Game, and the Society themselves.

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, by Leslye Walton

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender tells the story of three women: Ava herself, a young girl who was born with a pair of softly feathered wings; her mother Viviane, heartbroken and shy of the world; her grandmother Emilienne, haunted by the sorrows of her lost brother and sisters. When Ava was born they called her The Living Angel, but where did this magic come from? As Ava traces her family’s history, the lives of her mother and grandmother, their choices and their fates, she spies a thread of magic that runs through them all – but what love, magic and tragedy awaits Ava herself?

I love the cover on this book, the beautifully engraved feather design. And the title is apt too: the story is one of strange and beautiful sorrows. But, while quiet tragedy does run through the pages, it is not all sorrowful. And it is not just Ava’s story either. Much of the first half of the book is taken up with Emilienne’s story, and then Viviane’s, and I have mixed feeling about this. Their histories are relevant and they have a part to play in the events that follow, but it meant the story took a long time to really get going, especially for a title that’s billed as Ava’s story. Although, of course, their story is a part of Ava’s story – but Ava is a much more engaging character than either her mother or grandmother, each of whom feels the toll of lost love heavily and whose choices I found slightly irritating and naïve in places. But perhaps Ava can break the cycle?

Once Ava herself came to the foreground of the story I was much more interested – a young girl like any other, she just wants to be accepted for who she is inside. But when she ventures beyond her garden gate will people see her for who she is or will they see only her wings? Will they be afraid? Or awed? As she gradually begins to expand her world it’s inevitable that someone out there will react badly. Will it destroy her? Or give her new beginning?

Leslye Walton writes with a style that reminded me strongly of Alice Hoffman, one of my favourite authors, whom I read a lot of in my early twenties, as she weaves in natural magics and gives her characters a quiet sort of sensitivity to the world. Just here and there, though, she lets it get a little out of control – one and half pages on the smell of rain, for instance, felt a little overcooked.

This is a book being marketed for teens/young adults, yet it doesn’t feel like a young adult book. Maybe this is a good thing: teens, after all, are more than capable of reading and engaging with ‘adult’ books, and why should teen books have a certain ‘feel’ about them anyway? The genre should definitely not be restricted in this way. However, I would only recommend it to older readers because of the sweeping sexual references and because, honestly, a younger reader is likely to get bored pretty quickly by the heavy beginning – this is not an action adventure book, it is not a romance or a dystopian thriller. I do love the magical realism aspect, though, and perhaps it’s time the young adult section had something a little different added to its shelves.

While I wasn’t completely overwhelmed, I did enjoy reading The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender; it was satisfyingly predictable in places and nicely unpredictable in others, and as the story built towards it’s conclusion I was most certainly gripped. And it has a slightly ambiguous ending, with a little surprise tucked inside it, as well as giving the feeling that all is right with the world as each of the three women overcome their sorrows and look to the future.

The Coincidence Authority, by J. W. Ironmonger

The Coincidence Authority is, as you might expect, a book full of coincidences. Or is it? Because, as the protagonist Thomas Post believes, there is no such thing as a coincidence. He is the ‘Coincidence Authority’, researching and studying and boiling coincidences down into mathematical formulae, demonstrating that so-called chance encounters usually have a higher chance of occurring than you might think. Until Azalea Banks walks into his office, that is. Her life is full of strange occurrences, coincidences that she feels are not coincidences so much as a demonstration of fate, of some pre-determined path along which her life is destined follow, and in which she has little or no choice of alluding. Can Thomas convince Azalea that she can live outside of her coincidences, or will he succumb to her line of thinking?

Obviously this is a book that gets you thinking about coincidences and the logic behind them, but it is thought-provoking in other ways too, for it is not just a book about coincidences; it is not just a love story or a story about one woman’s extraordinary and unusual life. As the different parts of Azalea’s life gradually come to light, J. W. Ironmonger takes us from London to the Isle of Man, to rural Britain, and across the continents to Africa, and here he introduces the horrors of Joseph Kony and the LRA (‘Lord’s Resistance Army’), real people whose real and despicable actions I had not heard of before, and Ironmonger’s words and descriptions of them strike steel into the heart.

And so this is not a book about any one thing. It is a about a man who studies statistics, but who discovers that life defies numbers. It is about a woman who believes in fate only to discover that the interpretation of fate is a blurred and fuzzy thing. Ironmonger balances theories and thought games with real life occurrences, with deftly created fictional characters and fictional lives, focusing in on coincidences and then spanning out to a wide-shot view of a person or a family or a country, mixing chance with belief with misunderstanding in a complex web that bursts open as the book nears it’s conclusion. It is interesting and unusual, sweeping and vivid.

Do you believe in coincidences? Does J. W. Ironmonger believe in coincidences? Perhaps in the end you just have to except that things are the way the they are and just go with it.

St Agnes' Stand, by Thomas Eidson

As a bookseller, I read an awful of lot of children’s books, especially young adult titles, and when I do read adult books they tend to be recent releases. This is great, and I read these books because I want to read them, but it does mean that I miss a lot of good stuff that has been around for longer. Like St Agnes’ Stand, a book I most certainly wouldn’t have looked at twice had it not been for a recommendation by my cousin, someone who is so extremely well read that perusing her bookshelves can have the effect of making me feel very small. Ironically, really, my role as a bookseller should be to introduce readers to these rarer, lesser publicized titles, to champion the books that get tucked away into corners, but it’s so easy to become swept up by the marketing machine that I had almost forgotten. So, thank goodness for my cousin C and her fascination, in particular, for the literature of the American West.

Nat Swanson is a young man with a dream: a piece of Californian land. He has the deed in his pocket and a plan in his head, but already things are going awry: in the last town he stopped in, he got into a fight and killed a man. Pursued across the desert by the man’s friends, can he reach California before they catch him? But when he comes across a band of Apache holding up a wagon trail he’s haunted by the face he sees hiding there, and something makes him turn back to help. What he finds is not what he expected: three nuns and seven small children desperate for their lives. For the next five days, Swanson and Sister St Agnes must face their personal demons, overcome loss and injury, and struggle against drought and starvation while the Apaches close in around them.

Thomas Eidson’s language is simple and bold, and he tells his story through a series of different perspectives: Swanson, Sister St Agnes, and the Apache warrior Locan. St Agnes is adamant that God sent Swanson to save them, and she and her companions do seem strangely blessed despite their circumstances, but Swanson is determined – mostly – that it was just chance; chance that he was passing by and chance that made him turn around to help. Locan, however, as Swanson picks off his men, sees this luck as an evil magic created by the strange black-clad women and, while his compatriots wish to cut their losses and leave, he sees that if they follow that path his reputation will be forever lost – the only way to restore it will be to destroy the white man and the black-clad women.

I was a little wary, to begin with, with the depiction of the Apache as a group of blood-lusting warriors who, as St Agnes says, “know no better”. However, I assume that Eidson has based their aspects on historical behaviors by the Apache. What is not explained is exactly why the Apache raided the nuns’ wagon party to begin with. Once things begin to go wrong for them, it becomes a matter of pride and honor for Locan to see things through to their conclusion. That I understand. But what was the original purpose? Just theft?

Of course, all of mankind is entirely capable of carrying out atrocities equal to and worse than Locan and his compatriots. What is frustrating in traditional Westerns is that cultures are frequently painted in a right/wrong, white/black way – white good, everyone else bad. Eidson treads a difficult line here, but his intention is not to dispel such myths, rather to step authentically into the minds and opinions of his characters, the people of the time in which he is writing, and tell a story. This he does with aplomb. Furthermore, although he dabbles in the discussion of God and faith, by telling the majority of this aspect of the story from the mostly agnostic Swanson, Eidson avoids making it into an agenda. It is a deft and accomplished piece of storytelling, and certainly makes me want to read more about this era and/or setting. Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy has been on my list of must-reads for a while, and I think perhaps it’s time I brought it the top, and I’ll be thinking more about reading and recommending those rarer seeds, books that are as evocative and unusual as St Agnes' Stand.

The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer

I read a really excellent review for The Interestings which was instrumental in my picking it up to read, predominantly because of the reviewer’s gently scathing view of how books about families were looked down upon until men started writing books about families. Meg Wolitzer, obviously, is a woman and has, according to the reviewer, been writing excellent books about families for several years and because it is now – thanks to those male writers out there – ‘cool’ to be writing about families, her newest offering is set to make her name more solidly recognized within the public and literary domain.

As for 'The Interestings', they are a group of teenaged New Yorkers who attend a yearly arts camp and strike up a set of friendships and intimacies that will follow most of them far into their adult lives. From innocent beginnings, however, a dramatic act a couple of years into their group life sets waves rolling through their future  that, while they may get smaller as time passes, never fully disappear. Chopping and changing between past and present, young and middle-aged Interestings, we see the changing of their lives, the ebb and flow of their friendships, the good and the bad within each of them.

We have Cathy, a talented dancer, but cursed by her body shape to never be more in that arena beyond her teenage years, and after ‘the event’ she drops out of their group physically, though perhaps not emotionally. Secondly, Goodman, Cathy’s occasional paramour, and the cause of all the trouble. Ash, Goodman’s sister, a fey hypocrite who lies to her husband about Goodman’s disappearance and refuses (despite the pursuit throughout her life for women’s equality) to even consider the possibility of Goodman’s guilt – a man who never grows up, relying instead on his family to provide for him and never taking responsibility for a single action he makes. Or perhaps Ash is simply unable to consider Goodman’s guilt because of what it would mean?

Fourth, we have Ethan. Ethan is Ethan, and that’s about all there is to it. He gets caught up in the opportunities afforded him, and if he lies to his wife on occasion or struggles to connect with his son, hiding behind his work, is it any worse than Ash’s lies and denials? Jonah, meanwhile, spends his entire life overshadowed by the events of his tweens. Would it have been any different for him if he had told somebody what happened? Or would he still feel the same about it all anyway?

And, lastly, Jules. She is so determined and desperate to be away from what she feels is her small family and small life, she abandons it at the drop of a hat to infuse herself in the busy and glamorous city life of her 'Interestings' friends. Ironic that she winds ups spending so much of her life struggling to make ends meet and envying Ash, even after she grows up.

Each member of The Interestings is likeable and unlikeable, each one of them trying to escape something or find something. Is Jules cruel in the abandonment of her childhood? It’s ironic that she’s so desperate to grow up when she is young, only to spend much of her adult life desperate recapture those feelings she had when The Interestings first came together, trampling everyone in her way to get what she thinks she wants only to find it’s not what she thought it would be once she gets there. Is this what we are all really like? I guess so: the good bits and the bad bits; perhaps it’s only that by reading five, six lives condensed into 500 pages makes everything so much more apparent, human behaviors more alarming somehow than how we see each day as we take on our own lives.

The passing of time and the changing of the New York streets was perhaps most interesting to me, along with the subtle feminism that Wolitzer works into the book: just because you’ve slept with a person before doesn’t mean it’s not rape if a girl says no this time, or asks you to stop; and the fact that any media attention Ash receives for her theatre work always comes with the addendum of who her husband is, her work never held up purely for it’s own merit, as if she is worth that bit more merely by being married to who she is married to.

The Interestings, thus, is an intriguing and thoughtfully interwoven story of life, love and friendship, the twists and turns we cannot predict, the choices we do or don’t take. Life is an odd thing and Wolitzer shows this without reservation.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is such a wonderful book. It’s a book that makes you question worlds and question reality, and yet everything it makes you question feels innately true and real. It’s simple but intense, magical but scary, dark but hopeful. It’s perfect.

It’s been well publicized that the story of Ocean began to form in Neil Gaiman’s mind when he discovered that a lodger in his childhood home had, one night, stolen their car, driven it down the road, and committed suicide inside it. And, essentially, this is where Ocean begins too. When our narrator’s lodger commits this very same act, it opens up a rift, awakens an old sort of evil, and mistakes compounding mistakes brings it into our world. But is it truly evil? What does it want? Can our narrator avoid its clutches? Can they put the world back to rights? And what will be the price to do so?

“I remember my own childhood vividly… I knew terrible things. 

But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them” 

        – Maurice Sendak, 1993

This choice of introductory inscription to Ocean speaks volumes, somehow encompassing all that is to follow. Our young narrator is about to learn terrible things about the world. It has the same sort of creep factor that Gaiman created in his earlier book, Coraline – you know that something is terribly, terribly wrong with what is happening, but no-one else seems to notice. Only the Hempstock family, who live on the farm down the lane and on whose ground the ocean lies, can help. They are a family who are as equally unknowable as they make perfect sense. It seems entirely normal - and right - that the strange Hempstock family should exist.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is beautiful and terrifying and touching and utterly, totally, overwhelming good. Everything is up for question and yet it is hard to pinpoint exactly what I should be questioning. Gaiman writes about a world in which the abnormal, the magical, the mysterious, makes perfect sense. Knowing the origins of the story and the way in which the narrator remains unnamed leads us quietly to question how much of this story is based on reality. But it can’t be – can it? In any other circumstances such a thought would be preposterous, and yet Gaiman’s beautiful evocation of this tale makes it seem not only entirely valid but a completely reasonable possibility.

Elliot Allagash, by Simon Rich

Elliot Allagash is a rich little snob of a boy with a huge God complex and absolutely no moral compass. People bow down to his every need and every whim – and if they don’t… well, you probably don’t want to learn the hard way what the consequences will be. Because: You. Do. Not. Cross. Elliot Allagash.

Seymour Herson, by contrast, is mediocre in every aspect. While his parents may dote on him and pay out for his private school education, Seymour is a serial un-achiever. Until he meets Elliot and Elliot takes him under his wing. Although to say ‘under his wing’ implies there is some sort of caring aspect to their relationship; there isn’t. Elliott is conducting an experiment with Seymour in much the same way that when he was younger he probably tore the wings off butterflies to see what the consequences would be (and, going by how spoilt he is and how inept his father’s parenting skills are, there probably weren’t any consequences). Elliot’s experiment? To make Seymour popular.

Reading Elliot Allagash reminded me a little of the storyline to 1990s film Cruel Intentions, where rich step siblings Kathryn and Sebastian make a bet that Sebastian can/can’t bed goody two-shoes new-girl Annette. Simon Rich’s creation, however, is considerably darker and Elliot plays considerably dirtier. And as Elliot’s games began, at first I took a sick kind of pleasure in them, rooting for the two boys as they took on and manipulated the jocks and the all-stars, wanting the underdog to win. Except, of course, it soon became clear that as long as Elliot Allagash was bankrolling the project, the real underdog would never win.

This a slick piece of writing, drawing me in to Elliot’s world, making me simultaneously dumbfounded and wanting a piece of the action. Elliot has many guns to his arsenal, and the different manipulation techniques he employs veer from clever and artistic to brutal and crass. He truly knows no bounds and, as the story goes on, the term psychopathic comes to mind.

I began by hoping that Seymour can make a friend of Elliot. Even as Elliot announces, “I’m not doing this out of kindness or generosity. I’m doing this purely for sport. It’s an intellectual exercise – a way to occupy my days during this hellish period of my life” (pg. 37), I assumed this was simply a naïve statement, a brush-off, a side comment to deflect the fact that Elliot wants a friend as much as Seymour does… But perhaps Seymour and I should both have taken him a little more at his word? Soon the question becomes: when is Seymour going to wake up and smell the music? And, even as Seymour does begin to emerge from his dream state and begins to lie to Elliot, you know – surely – there can’t be a happy ending? Can there? Because no-one crosses an Allagash.

Filled with brilliant quotes and terrifying tales, the politics of high school writ large, this is a story of power and persuasion and our willingness to see what we want or chose to see, rather than what is actually in front of our eyes. Simon Rich has got to be one of the cleverest satirical writers around. And he’s annoyingly young to boot. Read anything by this guy and you will not be disappointed.

MaddAddam, by Margaret Atwood

The simply-worded opening pages of MaddAddam form the perfect introduction to this crazy world (or not so crazy?) that Margaret Atwood first introduced us to ten years ago in Oryx and Crake. 'The Story of the Egg' recounts how the Crakers were born in the Egg, brought to life by Oryx and Crake, surrounded by the Chaos until Crake washed the Chaos away, and perfectly encapsulates the essence of the Crakers and of the storyteller, Toby. The Crakers' history, their penchant for singing and praise, and their idealised view of the world is laid out alongside Toby’s frustration with the Crakers’ quirks and yet simultaneous desire to maintain their innocent view of the world.

Simultaneously bringing the reader up to speed with previous events whilst giving us a taste of where the story is going to go - the Crakers’ world and the Crakers’ worldview - even if you haven't read any of the series before you'll surely be hooked, wanting to find out what it all means and what on earth the author is thinking. MaddAddam is everything I expected and hoped it would be - the continuation of this strange, potential future world that in some ways is a warning alarm for our own suspect future, whilst also being a proper kick-ass read and a thought-provoking piece of speculative fiction from one of the masters of the genre.

Unlike The Year of the Flood, the 'sisterbook' which ran alongside Oryx and Crake, detailing the same world and the same timeframe, but with mostly different characters, MaddAddam ties the two together, the stories from the first two books converging here into a single narrative; like two forks in the road becoming one path. Although, actually, to describe MaddAddam as having a single narrative would be entirely wrong. Rather, it is a collection of stories and perspectives and pieces of the jigsaw:

Toby continues the narrative in present time, keeping us apprised of the events going on in and around the new MaddAddam compound, where, a little less than a year on from the Waterless Flood, the survivors have converged – a mixture of God’s Gardener’s, MaddAddamites, Crakers, and Snowman-the-Jimmy. Woven into this timeline is Zeb’s story, the man whom Toby loved from afar in The Year of the Flood, and as he tells his history, we begin to see how intimately linked it is with everything that has happened so far. And then there are the stories the Crakers persuade Toby to tell them each evening - they want to know the histories too, how Zeb ate a bear, of Zeb’s birth, of Zeb and the Snake Women. And so we hear the ‘real’ version, or Zeb’s version, and then the simplified version that Toby tells the Crakers.

Through Toby's narrative we see how this band of survivors are trying to make a new life, to find food, to protect themselves in the aftermath of the Waterless Flood. Alliances and dalliances are formed, jealousies diverted, human assumptions are challenged. But fears are ever-present: fear for the future, fear of the Painballers, the roaming Pigoons, and whatever else might be lurking outside the compound they’ve set up home in. And Zeb is sure that Adam is still alive, but can he find him?

The backbone of MaddAddam, though, are the Craker stories; there is the distinct sense that, continuing on from where Snowman-the-Jimmy began in Oryx and Crake, Toby is creating a mythology for the Crakers, something they will hold onto and repeat through the generations. But myths, of course, twist and turn the truth, building gods and heroes out of ordinary people, creating explanations for un-understandable events – if these are the tales that will be passed into the future, then the kernels of truth from which they began will be lost as Crake and Oryx, Zeb and Toby and Jimmy become new beings, beings to be semi-worshipped rather than beings whose actions are, by Toby’s standards and by ours, questionable, morally debatable and, sometimes, fearsome. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

And for every new thing that Toby tells the Crakers, every new thing she introduces them to or tries to explain to them, is she changing who they are and who they will become? Is she removing their innocence? Would it be better to leave them uninfluenced? It's just one of Toby's many worries, and a relevant one, but in the end it’s perhaps irrelevant because from the moment, at the beginning of MaddAddam, that the Crakers and the humans begin to properly interact with one another, the Craker evolution is inevitably set on a new path.

I would have liked there to have been a bit more about Adam and the beginning of MaddAddam and the God’s Gardeners, as I don't feel completely aquainted with the history of this part of the story - but in the long run perhaps these inner details aren’t relevant, or aren’t relevant to the formation of the Craker mythology, on which MaddAddam is focused. Or perhaps if I re-read Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood again, the pieces will be filled in for me there. What I especially enjoyed, though, was the way in which Atwood challenged our human assumptions about certain aspects of this new world and how, gradually, the Crakers, instead of relying on Snowman or Toby,  begin to take over the formation of their stories for themselves. Towards the end of the book we see 'The Story of The Battle' and 'The Story of Toby' only through Craker eyes, a subtle reflection of the new world order as it gradually comes about.

I could have gone right back to the beginning and started reading MaddAddam all over again as soon as I finished it. But what I want to do even more now is go to the very beginning, back to Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood and read all three parts of the trilogy again, to see how all the dots connect up, how the threads of all the different stories and characters weave and warp together. MaddAddam is a wonderful conclusion to this immense and foresightful story. It is full of human drama, human weakness, and human strength. By turns humorous and poignant, I can't for all my friends to read it as well so that we can gather round and 'discuss'...

Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson

Ursula is born into the middle of a snowstorm. She is born to a family of middling privilege, the middle child of what will ultimately be a family of seven. It is January 1910.

She dies.

She is born again and survives to the age of four.

She dies.

She is born again and survives to the age of five.

Life after life, this is the story of Ursula and the infinite variations by which she lives and survives and dies and lives again. Her lives are as turbulent as the period of history through which lives: WWI, WWII, and all the changes around and in between. They are lives of passion and plenty, of desperation and survival, heroism, love and despair, mistakes and fixes, frustrations and foresight. All of these things make Life After Life an amazing and intriguing book, and you feel Ursula’s love and frustration and determination in every word and on every page.

Why does Ursula live again and again? To get it “right”? But what is “right”? As her reincarnations build up, echoes seep into her consciousness, causing little changes here and there, unexplainable fears that – for the most part – seem to prevent her from repeating past tragedies. With every chapter I wondered: what will change here? How will she fix this problem? Which path will she choose this time? Generally, she follows a similar route through adolescence and early adulthood each time, with just the occasional larger deviation. What does this say about theorized forces of fate and destiny – that, at heart, we are always the same? Perhaps that the same wants and desires will always drive us (no matter how many chances at life we or Ursula may get), and thus the outcomes will always be similar. We cannot control everything around us, after all; other lives will inevitably bounce off our own.

How much, though, does Ursula really take with her each time she starts again? As time goes on, it seems as if her previous lives become more and more distinct, her decisions more determined and precise, more planned to a specific end. The dramatic opening chapter gives a hint as to what she might be capable of changing, but what happens next?

While some characters appear and disappear, others pop up again and again; similarly the same tragedies weave their way through her lives, some of which she can limit - or even prevent in some lifetimes - while other incidents remain frustratingly out of her sphere of influence. Or are they? And where does it end?

Life After Life is a bittersweet story that brings to life the turmoil of WWII and the turbulence of being alive. A “high concept” novel this may be, but Kate Atkinson realizes it truthfully and tragically.

The Aftermath, by Rhidian Brook

Rhidian Brook’s extraordinary new book, The Aftermath, is a disarmingly good piece of writing. Set in 1946 in Hamburg, a city virtually destroyed by allied bombing towards the end of the war. Orphans roam the rubble strewn streets and shelter in broken houses, work is spare, and a huge chunk of the population live in camps for displaced persons. Brook’s writing conjures the tragedies of a country brought to its knees. It seems almost unbelievable the way that war wipes out towns and cities and families – what happened to the people who survived? When do they stop going to work? What happens to the shops, shopkeepers; how do people, live, eat, sleep in this mess? And yet they did – as they do today, in cities that are being destroyed right now, Syria today, Yugoslavia twenty years ago.

Into this destroyed world come the allied forces – British, Russian, American - tasked with re-educating the German people, sorting out the country and getting it on its feet again. It is Colonel Lewis Morgan's job to oversee the rebuilding of Hamburg, and his staff have requisitioned a large house for him and his family – a wife and son on their way over from England – to live in. But instead of sentencing the house’s owner to camp life, Lewis makes a radical proposal: they should share the house, thus setting up a small, close-set reflection of the social and environmental tensions taking place in the country as a whole.

One of the biggest problems, as Brook quickly makes clear, is the tension and communication between the two ‘sides’ – the Germans and the Allies. Each stereotypes the other, making sweeping statements and criticisms: Germans “have little moral compass” (pg. 5); “the English may be uncultured” (pg. 13).

From a distance, with the perspective of time, this riles me. But of course, they are people who have just been through a terrible thing, and they are still in the midst of it, prejudiced by the horror, terror and monstrosity of how they have torn each other’s countries to pieces. It reminded me, actually, of the dystopia I like to read; trying to de-Nazify a population who have been trodden down by their regime, backed into corners and taught to think one way and one way only. It must have been a nightmare, trying to distinguish between those who were true Nazis and those who essentially had no choice but to toe the line. But then there is also the idea that the nation as a whole was responsible – that if you did not stand up against Hitler and his ideology then you were basically accepting it. As Herr Lubert, the owner of Colonel Morgan’s requisitioned house comments,

“He had performed his act of self-recollection – Besinnung – which all Germans had been encouraged to make as part of the process of acknowledging their part in the great crimes their nation had committed. He disliked the idea of collective guilt, but he was not one of those yesterday’s men who blamed the Allies for Germany’s current woes.” (pg. 157)

Into this world steps Morgan’s son Edmund and his wife Rachel, grieving for another son who died in a bombing, a woman who, like much of England, holds/held the Germans responsible for all the ills of the world, not least her son’s death. And now she must share a house with two of them, Lubert and his strange daughter Frieda, in turn grieving for a lost mother. Morgan soon shows himself as person who is not quick to judge – the simple idea of sharing the house with Germans a clear indicator of his temperament and attitude – but Rachel struggles to get Lubert to conform to the boundaries she wishes to lay. What consequences, exactly, will this unusual arrangement lead to? Can Lubert – and, especially, can Frieda, who has grown up knowing only Nazi rhetoric – be trusted?

It’s a fascinating topic. Brook examines it quietly, packing his pages with metaphor and tension, telling his story through lots of different eyes as he flips from side to side with his point of view – Colonel Morgan, Lubert, Rachel, Frieda, Edmund, and feral Ozi. Edmund, for instance, trying to build cred within a group of soldier’s sons on their way to Germany, builds a house of cards as he tells his war stories, only for it to collapse in perfect timing as an older boy in the group blows smoke – literally and metaphorically – on his tales.

The Aftermath’s trajectory takes all sorts of twists and turns, deception and betrayal not least among them, as Rachel, Morgan, Lubert and Frieda try to step their way into a future they either want to believe in or escape from, but what stands out for me – what, for me, is the bigger story – is the background setting, the political and the social tension that runs through everything that happens and makes the people the people they are. Perhaps it’s because I grew up with my parents’ war-associated stories, perhaps because it’s near and yet so far, but there’s something about WWII fiction that I find fascinating. In the privileged lifestyle I have today, it can be hard to imagine how it must have been to live through that turmoiled and tragedy-filled period. But what seems oft forgotten is that on VE day and VJ day, while the war was over the fight certainly wasn’t, and I’ll admit that I hadn’t much thought about how England, Germany, Europe – and everywhere else – got from that disaster zone to where we are today. Rhidian Brook's Aftermath summons this dark world with astonishing and devastating clarity.