Reading Matters

Bookish bits

• Penguin has published a special edition of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the book. Can't say the design turns me on. I'd much prefer the look of Burmese Days and Shooting an Elephant which have been republished in the livery of those Penguin Modern Classics I admire so much. Meanwhile, the New Statesman has published an interesting piece about Orwell's essays.

• The Guardian has published an interview with Pultizer prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson. I still haven't read Gilead nor Home, her Orange prize shortlisted novel which I purchased two weeks ago. I'll get around to it eventually...

• The Book People are selling a 10-set collection of Anita Shreve books for the knock-down price of £9.99. If I hadn't read most of them already I'd be buying this set in a blink of an eye. (You can see all the reviews of the Anita Shreve books I have read here.)

• I know I am very late with this, but the shortlist for Australia's Miles Franklin award has been announced. By all accounts it's caused a bit of a surprise, namely because there's not one woman on it. The five books on the list are: Breath by Tim Winton; Ice by Louis Nowra; The Pages by Murray Bail; The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas; and Wanting by Richard Flanagan. The winner will be announced on June 18.

• I'm a bit of a John McGahern freak, so I was surprised to find I'm not the only one to obsess about his work: the National University of Ireland, Galway is hosting the John McGahern International Seminar & Summer School in late July. (You can see all my reviews of McGahern's books here.)

• This story by Peter Temple marks the return of Jack Irish, the Melbourne-based hero who solves crimes while moving in legal, racing and cabinet-making circles. He first appeared in Bad Debts in 1996 and was followed by Black Tide (1998), Dead Point (2000) and White Dog (2003). His next one, Truth, is due out in Australia in November.

• Here's a book for cyclists worth checking out, although it's obviously got an American bias.

Decisions, decisions: trying to find a book to suit my mood

I have mountains of books, so why is it I can never decide what to read next? I look at the piles and I think I will most likely die of old age before I ever get to the bottom of them. The amount of books sitting on my dresser would comfortably last me well into the next decade. The ones on the top shelf of the wardrobe (who needs clothes, when you can have books?) would easily provide me with two or three years' worth of reading. I won't mention the extra hundred or so that have been put in storage.

During the week I read -- and finished -- Samantha Harvey's The Wilderness. It's been shortlisted for this year's Orange Prize and with good reason. The prose is so beautiful and eloquent and the narrative so expertly structured I can't see why it shouldn't win. (I'll try and get my review up sometime over the weekend.) But having finished that yesterday I woke up this morning scrabbling around for a new book to suit my mood.

Over the past couple of weeks I've been trying to read Claire Kilroy's All Names Have Been Changed, but it just hasn't been doing it for me. I'm not sure why, because it's another book filled with beautiful, well-crafted prose, but the characters haven't really gelled in my brain and apart from the narrator and the star of the piece, a successful literary writer, they fall flat and so I don't really care about them. And, as shallow as this may sounds, this means I don't really care for the book. Perhaps I just need to be in the mood for it...

So, this morning after struggling with about 20 pages of Kilroy's book, I put it aside and thought I might try Paulo Giordano's The Solitude of Prime Numbers, a proof of which was sent to me by the publisher for review about six weeks ago. I thought this book would be a brilliant read, which was why I agreed to review it, but the proof is basically a computer print out, bound together with glue, that has revisions typed on the margins. That's fine; I can cope with proofing marks (it's what I do for a living, albeit for a specialist newspaper) and I can cope with flimsy paper. But the text size is minuscule -- my guess is 7pt. Now, I don't know about you, but text size is very important to me, and if I have to strain to read text I'd prefer not to read it. Sorry Doubleday, but I don't think I can read this one just yet...

Which leads me onto Helen Walsh's Once Upon a Time in England. The kind folks at Canongate posted this to me last week on-spec, and having read the blurb I wasn't sure it was really my cup of tea: did I really want to read about a family in northern England during the 1970s and 1980s?  I filed it away and thought I might read it when I was "in the mood", so when I opened it up this morning and started to read, I hadn't expected to get much beyond a couple of pages before abandoning it on the premise that my gut reaction to the blurb was correct. How wrong could I be! I'd raced through the first 45 pages without realising it. This is shaping up to be a great book...

So, what are you reading right now? And do you have as much trouble as me when it comes to selecting the next book to read?

A post about Australian novels

In yesterday's rant about Helen Garner's novels, a few of you asked me to write a post about Australian novels and to perhaps suggest some of my favourites.

I don't claim to be any kind of expert, especially given that when I lived in Australia (almost 11 years ago now!) I didn't much appreciate what was on my back doorstep, preferring instead to read British and American fiction.

In fact, if I'm honest, I'm a little out of the loop as far as the latest Australian fiction is concerned, so I'd advise you to visit Angela Meyer's Literary Minded blog and Perry Middlemiss' Matilda blog. In fact, Perry runs a magnificent website about Australian literature, which provides information about Australian authors and their works, that you simply won't find anywhere else in the one place.

A few years back I wrote a post about my top 10 favourite Australian novels, which might provide some pointers. Finally, since 2004, I've reviewed around 23 Australian novels, which I've listed here:

James Bradley's The Resurrectionist
Peter Carey's Theft: A Love Story
Bryce Courtenay's Jessica
Richard Flanagan's Wanting, The Unknown Terrorist, The Sound of One Hand Clapping and Gould's Book of Fish
Robert Dessaix's Night Letters
Helen Garner's The Spare Room
Kate Grenville's The Secret River
Wendy James' Out of the Silence
Gail Jones' Sorry and Sixty Lights
Susan Johnson's Life in Seven Mistakes
Steven Lang's An Accidental Terrorist
Elliot Perlman's Three Dollars and Seven Types of Ambiguity
Heather Rose's The Butterfly Man
Peter Temple's Bad Debts and The Broken Shore
Carrie Tiffany's Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living
Patrick White's The Solid Mandala and The Vivisector

Recommendations for other Australian novels and novelists are welcome, particularly if you live in Oz and keep up with "the scene" as it were!

The post in which I ask why Helen Garner's work is restricted to Australian-based readers only?

I'm thinking of starting a new series of blog posts entitled "Why aren't these books available outside of Australia?"  I've become quite partial to the lovely-looking livery of Penguin Modern Classics, and have even started to collect them, but why is it that Helen Garner's books haven't made it to the Northern Hemisphere yet?

I looked at ordering these from various Australian online booksellers, but the cost of postage is prohibitive. Given Garner's remarkable success (despite last year's Booker snub) with The Spare Room, surely there's an international audience for her work? Isn't it about time Penguin snaffled up her UK publishing rights? Penguin UK, if you are listening, please please please can you make these brilliant books available to British readers?

Far too many Australian authors deserving of international recognition never receive it, because their books are never published outside of Australia and New Zealand. I suspect there's a whole host of economic reasons for this, but I wish that would change. I find it particularly irritating, if you haven't already guessed, that I can view these books on the Penguin Classics Australia website but they're nowhere to be seen on the Penguin Classics UK equivalent. Grrr.

Now don't get me started on Elizabeth Jolley's novels...

'In the Woods' by Tana French

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 464 pages; 2008.

When I first picked up Tana French's In The Woods at JFK airport on my last trip to New York last October I envisaged it would tread similar territory to Edna O'Brien's dark, claustrophobic In the Forest. After all, they're both Irish crime books by Irish writers (who, in my opinion, even look alike, almost as if they are mother and daughter) with much the same titles, but that's where the similarities end. 

In the Woods lacks the literary flourishes that made O'Brien's book somewhat difficult to read; instead you get a completely absorbing, rocket-fuelled narrative that zips along at Formula One pace. I read this in about two days while on a recent trip to Ireland and found myself thinking about the storyline long after I'd finished the book and repacked it in my suitcase.

The story, a police procedural, is told from the perspective of Rob Ryan, a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad (which, by the way, does not exist in real life), who has a secret past that only his immediate family knows about. When he was a young boy he was playing with two friends in the local woods, but when dusk arrived none of them returned for their evening meal and a search party was organised. Rob was found clinging to a tree with blood-filled shoes, so traumatised by whatever had happened to him and his friends that he was unable to recall a single detail. His friends were never found, and 20 years on, Rob is still unable to remember what happened.

This troubled history comes rushing to the fore, when Rob and his colleague, Cassie Maddox, are assigned a murder investigation involving a 12-year-old girl whose body is found near the very same woods from Rob's childhood. Are the crimes linked? Could the perpetrator be the same person responsible for the disappearance of Rob's friends?

This is the crux of this superbly realistic debut novel -- and to say anything more would ruin the plot for those who have not yet read it.

What I liked most about this book is that it doesn't come with a neat, well-rounded conclusion, which makes the story seem even more authentic, because how many murder investigations have neat, well-rounded conclusions? It makes you think, makes you fill in the gaps, makes you come up with your own theories and I cannot understand those readers who think they've been short-changed by this -- and judging by the reviews of Amazon there's quite a few.

My only quibble -- and it's a relatively minor one in the grand scheme of things -- is the "voice" of Rob Ryan, which didn't seem authentically male to me, but perhaps that was a deliberate device to explain why he got on so well with his female counterpart. In fact I couldn't quite work out how I felt about their platonic, almost sibling-like relationship, because as much as it provided additional depth to the storyline, at other times it came across as slightly too cloying. Had neither of these characters discovered the concept of "me time", I wondered.

In the Woods recently won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and I'm not surprised. It's an astonishingly well written book by a first time author, one that grips you from various different angles -- will Rob's secret be discovered; will Rob have a nervous breakdown from the emotional, psychological stress of the investigation; what happened to his missing friends that fateful day in 1984; what happened to the girl who was murdered more recently? -- and provides plenty of red herrings and dodgy clues, so that it's almost impossible to guess the outcome. And the period details -- of Ireland in 1984 and the vastly different New Ireland (before the very recent collapse of the Celtic Tiger) in 2004 -- make the story seem particularly believable.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this one, and will eagerly eat up her next one, The Likeness, which is lying in wait on my bedside table...

Books long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction 1996-2009

As we all know, the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009 is announced next week.

I thought it might be an interesting exercise to see how many of the long-listed books I'd read for this prize since its inception in 1996, not the least because I don't read a lot of women writers.

Here's the list for all books long-listed between 1996 and 2009. I have bolded up those I have read; hyperlinks take you to my reviews published on this site.

UPDATE: Apologies, but I failed to include the books long-listed in 2008, I only included the short-listed titles. You would think I would have twigged there were some notable absences -- Anne Enright's The Gathering and Gail Jones' Sorry, for instance -- given I'd read them. But not to worry; that's why I have eagle-eyed readers of this blog to alert me! The missing titles have now been included on the list below.

'The Second Plane' by Martin Amis

Non-fiction - paperback; Vintage; 224 pages; 2009.

Martin Amis is best known as an English novelist with some 10 titles to his name. But Amis is also a short story writer, literary critic and essayist, and this book comprises a collection of 14 pieces -- two short stories, eight essays and four reviews -- around the theme of September 11, 2001. These pieces were written between 2001 and 2007, and have been produced in the order in which they were written. Amis says he has added to them, but cut nothing, although he was briefly tempted "to cover my tracks".

Now, this is where I put up my hand and confess that I'm not well versed in Amis's work. I read Times Arrow many moons ago and it did not convince me to try any of his other stuff. My sister, who doesn't read as much as me, enjoyed London Fields, but I'm still not convinced.

Reading this collection I'm still no closer to understanding Amis or what makes him tick other than I now know he's an atheist turned "weak-agnostic" and he doesn't think much of Islamists, George Bush or Tony Blair. Join the club.

There's something about these pieces that seems too dry and too highbrow for one to truly engage with them. At times it felt like I was reading a novelist pretending to be a journalist -- and on that basis, he fails, because there's too much style and too many literary flourishes getting in the way of the facts.

A case in point. Or four cases in point, actually. He reviews three books and one movie -- United 93 directed by Paul Greengass; The Looming Tower: Al Quaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright; State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III by Bob Woodward; America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It by Mark Steyn; and The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left by Ed Husain -- in this collection and with the exception of the book by Steyn, whom he describes as an "oddity" who "writes like a maniac", I'm not really clear where he stands on them: did he like them or not? In many ways, he simply summarises the contents, adds his two-bits worth on the subject and refuses to tell us what he really thinks of the works in question.

So, putting aside the reviews, how do the other pieces fare? By far the best piece here is his opening essay entitled The Second Plane which was first published in The Guardian just seven days after the attacks on the World Trade Center. There is raw emotion here and a desperate attempt at comprehending the incomprehensible. (In his author's note at the start of the book Amis describes the piece as "hallucinatory" because it was "fevered by shock and by rumour".) But it's the opening sentences that really sets the scene, for this short chapter as well as the book as a whole:

It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment. Until then, America thought she was witnessing nothing more serious than the worst aviation disaster in history; now she had a sense of the fantastic vehemence ranged against her.

In The Voice of the Lonely Crowd, first published in The Guardian in 2002, he makes a salient claim, later championed by many others, that the event had brought literature to its knees. He argues that "many novelists chose to write some journalism about September 11" because "they were playing for time". I think, in this instance, he may be right.

I think he's also right about a lot of the stuff in the rest of this essay, not the least his theory that religion is a sham.

... religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward -- and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

Similarly, The Wrong War -- written in March 2003, before the invasion of Iraq -- is a strong piece about how America is "behaving like someone still in shock" and that the "axis of evil" is a theological construct invented by Bush because it "makes him feel easier about being intellectually null". 

As you can see, Amis doesn't pull his punches. But what he says makes sense.

I especially like his claim that the Coalition planned to go to war because there was a lack of weapons of mass destruction, not the other way around:

The surest way by far of finding out what Iraq has is to attack it. Then at last we will have Saddam's full cooperation in our weapons inspection, because everything we know about him suggests that he will use them all. The Pentagon must be more or less convinced that Saddam's WMDs are under a certain critical number. Otherwise it couldn't attack him.

On the whole this is an interesting collection, although it probably won't tell you anything you don't already know or haven't come to figure out on your own. But what it does do is provide an insight into a dreadful time in our recent history and shows how the public realm has been shaped and altered by terrorism and war.

Melbourne-based author Christos Tsiolkas wins £10,000 Commonwealth writers' prize

So when is his prize-winning book The Slap going to be published in the UK?  Inquiring minds -- and desperate readers -- want to know!

Public relations in postwar British fiction

When was the last time you read a book featuring a journalist as a character?  Popular fiction is littered with journalists -- usually investigative, it has to be said -- as the main protagonist. Think Evelyn Waugh's Scoop or Michael Frayn's Towards the End of the Morning.

But how many novels feature characters who work in PR (public relations)? Can you think of any?

I've rattled my brain and cannot come up with one example. I have a sneaking suspicion that there might be a few populating chick-lit novels but seeing as I don't read the genre I cannot be sure.

If you can think of any examples in British fiction, Philip Young would love to hear from you. Philip, who is a senior lecturer in PR and Media Ethics at the University of Sunderland, is writing a paper on public relations in postwar British fiction. He tells me that he's not just looking for main characters. "Relatively fleeting mentions of either people who work in PR or even just reference to the art and science of PR are just as welcome," he says.

You can find out more here.

292

That's the number of books in my reading queue!

I've just spent a productive afternoon sorting through all the books in my possession that I haven't yet read. It kind of feels like having my own little bookstore, so whenever I'm in need of a new book to read I peruse the shelves and always find something I feel like picking up. If anything, the choice is a little too wonderful, because I pick up one book and think "this is the one for me" and then I see another that I want to read and then I see another... and another... and you get the point.

You can see my complete list here.

How many books do you have in your queue?

The winner of 'Molly Fox's Birthday' (and Bertie the bear bookmark) is...

Thanks to everyone who entered my draw to win a brand new copy of Deirdre Madden's Molly Fox's Birthday, which has been shortlisted for this year's Orange Prize for Fiction. As promised, I said I would also throw in a bookmark, so that poor homeless Bertie would be homeless no longer!

All up there were 42 of you who put your name in the hat, so to speak. It was nice to see a lot of new faces daring to de-lurk.

As per usual I used an online random number generator to determine the winner.
That means Christina of Jackets & Covers is the lucky winner.

Congratulations Christina, I'll be in touch shortly to find out your mailing address.  Please make sure you've got somewhere cosy and warm for Bertie to reside. I do believe he likes very chunky books!

'Monster Love' by Carol Topolski

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 272 pages; 2008.

It's been quite awhile since I've read a book as dark and oppressive as Monster Love, which was long-listed for last year's Orange Prize. In fact, I found myself in a bit of a funk all week, for no good reason, and the only thing I could put it down to was reading this highly disturbing book. It's almost as if the story within had resonated off the page and enveloped me in a cloud of gloom.

I think the most chilling aspect of Monster Love, which tells the story of a married couple accused of killing their four-year-old daughter, is that it could have been lifted from today's newspaper headlines. It reminded me very much of the the Baby P case (still ongoing), which readers in the UK will know well, and for that reason it seemed a little too authentic for comfort.

This realism is helped, in part, by the way in which the story is recounted through a series of testimonies -- monologues, letters and official reports -- made by people -- neighbours, social workers, family members, jurors and prison officer -- who have been affected by the crime in some way.

The parents, Brendan and Sherilyn Gutteridge, recount their side of the story too, and I am not revealing any crucial plot spoilers by saying that they are perhaps the least realistic of the narrators because they appear so damn weird. Their "perfect love" comprises a strange telepathic connection and, in the latter third of the novel, a series of simultaneous sexual fantasies which stray into sheer kookiness. Still, the author, Carol Topolski, is a practising psychoanalytical psychotherapist, who's probably treated clients much odder than these two.

There's no doubt that Monster Love is a fascinating, if wholly unpleasant story, but it's not nearly as thought-provoking as it could have been. This is partly because the narrative is so fragmented that you don't get a proper overview of the case. You know from the outset that the accused are guilty, so you know what happens in the end, too. And the huge cast of characters all sing from the same hymn sheet so there's no room for ambiguity or doubt of the couple's guilt. It also doesn't help that so many of the testimonies are recounted in the same voice -- there seems little to distinguish one character from another.

Structurally, this is a poor novel, but in terms of subject matter you will be hard pressed to find anything so startling and dark.

Two more awards for Sebastian Barry

He might not have won the Booker Prize last year, but Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture has been on a roll this year.

Following hot on the heels of his Costa Book of the Year prize, he scored two accolades at the Irish Book Awards announced last week, winning both the Tubridy Show Listeners' Choice award and the Hughes & Hughes Novel of the Year award.

Special congratulations must also be made to Edna O'Brien for being honoured with the 2009 Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award.

You can find a full rundown of other award winners via the official Irish Book Awards site.

Win a copy of 'Molly Fox's Birthday'

I knew this would happen. No sooner do I go out and buy a copy of Deirdre Madden's Molly Fox's Birthday than the very kind folks at Faber and Faber send me an unsolicited copy for review. That means in the space of two days I acquired two copies of the same book.

Instead of taking one back to the shop for a refund, I thought I would offer the review copy to a lucky reader of this blog.

If you fancy winning this copy then simply leave me a comment below. I will close the comments at 10am GMT on Sunday, May 17. I'll then choose the winner using an online random number generator (or some such).

The competition is open to anyone, regardless of where you live, but you can only enter once.

And, as an added bonus, I'll also throw in a bookmark -- poor Bertie is yet to find a new home, as his new owner has failed to claim him.

'The Preacher' by Camilla Läckberg

Fiction - hardcover; Harper Collins; 422 pages; 2009. Translated from the Swedish by Steven T. Murray. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Camilla Läckberg is yet another Scandinavian crime fiction writer making it big on the international scene. The Preacher, her second to be translated into English, is set in Fjällbacka, the small Swedish fishing village where she was born.

The book opens with a six-year-old boy discovering the naked body of a young woman in a local beauty spot known as the King's Cleft. When police and forensics are called to the scene they discover the skeletons of two other women, who disappeared 20 years ago, lying underneath the body. Are these murders, committed two decades apart, linked and, if so, in what way? This is the puzzle that local detective Patrik Hedström must try to figure out. And, just to heighten the tension, he must do it before another girl, recently kidnapped from the area, turns up dead.

Suspicion is immediately cast on two warring branches of the Hult family, a clan of misfits and religious fanatics descended from Ephraim Hult, a distinguished and charismatic preacher and healer.

But Hedström's investigation is not straight forward. It's hampered by several red herrings, a long list of suspects, and a cast of hapless and incompetent colleagues from Tanumshede police station. 

This is a wonderfully refreshing take on the crime novel, not the least because Hedström lacks the bitterness and darkness which characterise so many other detectives in Scandinavian crime fiction. In fact, he's a committed family man -- he's about to become a father as his girlfriend Erica is heavily pregnant during the course of the story -- and much of the novel revolves around his contented, if occasionally chaotic, home life as a succession of unwanted house guests drop by to make the most of the hot Swedish summer.

Unfortunately, as much as I appreciated such a domestic focus because it allowed light moments to balance out an otherwise disturbingly dark story, I found it slightly cloying and cliched in places, and, at times, clumsily written. This could easily have been solved with some judicious editing (the book, at 422 pages, is very long) but I suspect there will be other readers who will disagree and claim this is what makes the Hedströms so likable and believable, because you get to know them quite well and see what makes them tick on the home front.

Either way, this is an intriguing crime story, with plenty of atmosphere -- you get a real feel for the hot Swedish summer and the idyllic tourist-driven community in which it is set -- and enough riddles to keep you guessing until the very end. 

According to Läckberg's own website, some 80,000 copies of the The Preacher have been sold in "pocket version" in Sweden alone. I rather suspect when this English translation becomes available in paperback those figures will skyrocket -- and, quite deservedly so, I might add.

'Molly Fox's Birthday' by Deirdre Madden

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 221 pages; 2009.

Deirdre Madden's Molly Fox's Birthday has recently been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009. I had mistakenly thought it was a story about a little girl's birthday, but the title is deceptive: the Molly Fox named here is a thirty-something woman who never celebrates her birthday and what's more we never get to meet her. Instead we come to learn of her complex personality through the eyes of her long-time friend, who narrates the story in a cool, understated manner.

This is one of those mellow, beguiling reads that sneaks up on you, worms its way into your conscience and bathes you in a kind of gentle light. I found it almost impossible to put down and read it at every opportunity: on the tube, in my lunch hour, at home curled up in bed. And when I got closer to the final pages I tried to draw it out because I simply didn't want it to end.

And yet, if I am to explain what Molly Fox's Birthday is about, I find it difficult to describe. There is no straightforward narrative. It's written from the point of view of one woman, a successful playwright, recalling her relationship with Molly Fox, an actor regarded as "one of the finest of her generation" -- how they met, worked together and became firm friends -- and it effortlessly switches from the present to the past and back again, often within a matter of pages, in tune with the narrator's memories.

The narrator also thinks about her friendship with Belfast-born Andrew, a now-famous art historian, whom she met at university, and her older brother, Tom, a Catholic priest.

And all this is done over the course of a couple of days while she stays in Molly's house in Dublin -- a small redbrick Victorian house with  "immense charm" -- while Molly is away performing in New York. When she remembers that it is Molly's birthday she contemplates much about her dear friend, including why she never celebrates her birthday and why she is so protective of her younger brother, an alcoholic prone to depression.

This is a book about friendship: how tough it can be to accept flaws and foibles; how our relationships can be plagued by petty jealousies and secrets; and how important it is to our lives. But Molly Fox's Birthday is also a book about acting: how we play certain roles at certain times of our lives, and show different facets of our personality to different people. It's also about learning to accept the past in order to move into the future. It's a wonderful, atmospheric book and it will be interesting to see whether it wins the Orange Prize when it is announced early next month.

'Kill & Cure' by Stephen Davison

Fiction - paperback; Alice & Fred Books; 320 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Kill & Cure is not your average run-of-the-mill crime thriller. For a start, it's set in the pharmaceutical world and its main protagonist is a chiropractor. But this debut novel, to be published on May 15, is a cracking read, full of murders, betrayals and scientific conspiracies.

The story revolves around David Stichell (Stich), the director of a chiropractic clinic in London, who has sole custody of his four-year-old daughter, Alice. He lives with his fiancée, Susan Harrison, a scientist at Immteck Pharmaceuticals, the same company for which he is taking part in a trial to test a new drug that supposedly shrinks cancerous tumors. But what Stich does not realise is that the results of the drug trial are being fudged -- and that's where his life gets interesting.

When Susan and Stich make a visit to see Susan's Uncle Maxi in the countryside, things begin to go awry. Through the window of Maxi's house they witness him being murdered, then it's Susan's turn to be fatally shot. Stich miraculously escapes with a superficial wound to the leg and goes on the run from the murderer. From here the pace never lets up, particularly when it becomes apparent that the police think him responsible for the deaths, so he must run from both the law and the criminals who want him dead.

Along the way he is accompanied by a trustworthy friend, Vicky, and assisted virtually by a newspaper editor who has contacts in all the right places. When one of Susan's colleagues is found dead with a syringe -- originally full of hydrochloric acid -- sticking out of his arm, Stich is convinced the murders are linked and embarks on a quest to unravel the truth before the hit man finally tracks him down ...

Kill & Cure is fast, furious and incredibly well plotted. I hesitate to use the word compelling but there's no better word to describe this novel. I simply had to race through it, almost cover to cover, because I was so determined to find out what happened. And even then, I still didn't guess the culprits, and the twist at the end came as a real surprise.

The prose style is short and snappy -- in fact most of the narrative moves forward almost exclusively through dialogue -- but that's no bad thing.

There's quite a bit of science in it, but this is all explained clearly and without patronising the reader, no small feat when you're dealing with complicated subjects.I'm not going to jump up and down and say this is the best book I've read all year, but it's an entertaining read that has a touch of the John Grisham's about it. I also very much appreciated the London references throughout, and I rather suspect it would make an excellent movie. ITV, where are you?

BOOK END book ends

After a month of chaos, disorder and what seems like six tonnes of builder's dust, I finally have a new kitchen and living room. I even have a new wall unit with space for the TV and lots of room for books. The best part now is buying the finishing touches, so the place looks less like a show room and more like a home.

During my lunch hour yesterday afternoon I was delighted to accidentally find these book ends (pictured above) when I wasn't even looking for them. Aren't they brilliant? They're metal and sprayed white. I bought them at JOY but I have since seen them online at Store -- just in case you were thinking of ordering some for yourself.

'Time After Time' by Molly Keane

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 247 pages; 1990.

I have Sinead Gleeson and regular commenter Tony S. to thank for my introduction to the late Molly Keane. Both suggested I try the Irish writer when I was casting about for female authors to read early last year. Two of her novels, Time After Time (first published in 1983) and the Booker shortlisted Good Behaviour, were promptly added to my wishlist.

Fast forward 15 months, and I finally got to read my first Keane a couple of weeks ago. And boy, was it worth the wait.

Time After Time is a gorgeously fun novel that seems frothy and lighthearted on the surface, but underneath there's a very dark heart forging its own steady rhythm. It's not immediately obvious but this is a story about cruelty and the nasty things people do to each other.

It's set in a beautiful but crumbling mansion in Southern Ireland where four elderly siblings reside. Each of them is eccentric, fiercely independent and set in their own ways. The only things they have in common is their love of animals -- each fusses over their own cat or dog, treating them like substitute children -- and their treasured memories of their darling Mummie. There's one-eyed Jasper, who rules the kitchen, and his three ridiculously named sisters, April, May and Baby June.

April, the only one to have married, is now widowed but still bangs on about her late husband, Colonel Grange-Gorman, and is somewhat obsessed with preserving her looks and her figure. She's stone deaf so any conversation with her is full of misunderstandings, making her ripe for comedic effect.

May is the one obsessed by handicrafts -- she's been president of the Flower Arrangers' Guild for years and instructs members of the Irish Countrywomen's Association in the art of picture-making from scraps of tweed, wool and sprigs of heather -- despite the fact she was born with only half a finger and a thumb on one hand.

Baby June is the hard grafter, the one who runs the farm with the help of a local Catholic boy, and is an accomplished horsewoman, who achieved much success in point-to-points when she was younger but now considers herself too old to ride. 

(That's all of them pictured above -- I simply love this cover, because it depicts each chacracter perfectly, right down to the types of clothes they are wearing as described by Keane in the text.)

Together the Swift siblings rub each other the wrong way. Meal times are fraught with petty squabbles and half-imagined slights. The sisters belittle each other in order to compensate for their own failings, while Jasper seeks refuge in his closely guarded friendship with a local monk.

Into this mêlée comes cousin Leda, who arrives unannounced for a short stay. Now elderly, fat, blind and widowed, Leda was once a very beautiful young half-Jewish girl with whom the Swifts lost contact during the Second World War. Indeed, the family believed she had most likely died in a concentration camp. Her visit is but the first in a string of surprises that shakes each of the siblings to the core and leaves them all wishing she really had died in the Holocaust... 

I told you there was a dark heart to it.

Time After Time is a black comedy filled with the type of people you'd never want to meet in real life. I loved every minute of it and can only imagine that Good Behaviour will dish out more of the same.

'The Secret Scripture' by Sebastian Barry

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 320 pages; 2009.

When I read Sebastian Barry's 2005 Booker shortlisted novel A Long Long Way several summers ago I found it one of the most moving books I'd ever read. There was something about the story of an Irish lad caught between two wars that really resonated with me, and I promptly ordered my father a copy because I knew he'd enjoy the Great War element. Almost three years later I still find myself occasionally thinking about this story, always the sign of a great piece of fiction.

Then, last August, I acquired a copy of Barry's 2008 Booker shortlisted novel The Secret Scripture. It languished on my bedside table unopened and unread for months, and even its triumph at the Costa Book Awards in January, where it won the Costa Book of the Year Award, didn't spur me to pick it up. Then, on my recent trip to Ireland, I discovered a copy of it in the holiday cottage I was renting and felt it was no use putting it off any longer: I had to read it to see how it measured against my very high five-star opinion of A Long Long Way.

The Secret Scripture didn't disappoint. It is a magnificent story about memory and the tricks our minds play on us, and how society has a habit of condemning the innocent to live lives of quiet desperation and unnecessary struggle.

The story is split between two narrators, Roseanne McNulty, possibly the oldest woman in Ireland who has been a patient at Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital since 1957, and Dr William Greene, the senior psychiatrist who is charged with determining which patients can be re-released into the community once the present building is demolished.

Dr Greene, an outsider (in the sense that he's not Catholic) grieving over the death of his wife, spends a lot of time with Roseanne, whom he describes as "my old friend" and the "oldest person in this place".

She has been a fixture, and not only represents the institution, but also, in a curious way, my own history, my own life.

During their sessions in which he assesses Roseanne's suitability for discharge, he finds himself confessing things to her that he would normally keep quiet. Meanwhile, Roseanne gives little of herself away, preferring to make her confessions in a secret diary that she keeps hidden under the floorboards. It is these revealing diary extracts which make up her side of the narrative.

Eventually, over the course of the book, you learn of the joys and horrors of Roseanne's life and how she came to be incarcerated in the asylum. But because she readily admits that everything she recalls "may not be real"  and that she has "taken refuge in other impossible histories, in dreams, in fantasies" you're never quite sure if she is a reliable narrator or not. Towards the end of the novel she confesses that her memories and her imaginings are "lying deeply in the same place" and that the process of excavating them is troublesome.

Dr Greene, who is not privy to Roseanne's written confessional, has his own suspicions about her inconsistent memory, which he puts down to "tangled histories":

Not only can I not get her story from herself, I have versions of her life that I think she would reject.

Eventually, these two diverse narrative threads, which dance around each other, meld together, culminating in a surprise ending, which is devastating in its impact.

Unfortunately -- and this is where I tend to agree with the Costa judges who called it "a flawed novel" -- this tightening of loose ends felt too contrived for my liking, too neat, too packaged. It didn't help that I guessed the ending but had spent the last 50 or so pages convincing myself that I had it wrong, because surely Barry would leave in the ambiguities to allow the reader to come to their own conclusions about what really happened.

Does this matter though? No book is ever perfect and while The Secret Scripture might rely on two major coincidences for its climax to work, it does not detract from the highly emotional story told in such an effortless, beautiful way. And it certainly wouldn't put me off recommending it to anyone looking for something exquisitely written, intelligent and moving.

If you liked this book, you might also like Salley Vickers' The Other Side of You which treads similar territory in terms of narrative, content and style.