Reading matters

'Losing You' by Nicci French

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Books; 293 pages; 2007.

I'm a long-time Nicci French fan, but it's been more than two years since I picked up anything written by this husband-and-wife team. Once-upon-a-time I would anxiously await each new release, sometimes even buying them in hardcover when expenses would allow, because I enjoyed reading these psychological thrillers so much.

But I found the last French book, Catch Me When I Fall, slightly disappointing. It felt like the girl-on-the-run-from-a-stranger franchise had become tired and too formulaic, or perhaps I'd simply cottoned on to the fact that Nicci French is a one-trick pony and I wanted a little more from the reading experience. Needless to say, I didn't rush out and buy the next one: I bided my time and acquired it via BookMooch a month or so ago.

Losing You, I am happy to report, is a welcome breaking of the mould. This time it's not a young woman being stalked that forms the backbone of the narrative, but a mother searching for her missing child. It's a refreshing change.

The novel -- the 10th one in the French catalogue -- is set on Sandling Island, 60 miles from London, "but, rimmed as it was by the tidal estuary and facing out to open sea, it had the feel of a different world, gripped by weather and seasons; full of wild spaces, loneliness, the strange call of sea-birds and sighing winds". It's the ideal claustrophobic and slightly creepy setting for the story that enfolds over the course of the next 290 pages.

Nina Landry, recently separated from her husband, is about to embark on a Christmas break to Florida with her new beau and her two children, 15-year-old Charlie (Charlotte) and 11-year-old Jackson. The day ahead looms large, with a million tasks to do before the family heads to Heathrow for their 6pm flight, but things go off kilter before it even gets started. First, Nina's car breaks down, then her house is swamped by people throwing a surprise 40th birthday party for her -- and all this before 11am. 

It's only when Nina notices Charlie's absence that the suspense gets ratcheted up a notch or two. When she calls the police, they assume it's simply a case of a teenager running away because she's unhappy at home. But Nina knows this isn't true.

Embarking on her own investigation, she slowly pieces together Charlie's last movements and, in doing so, learns that the relationship she has with her daughter is not as open or as trusting as she first thought. Nina slowly begins to uncover secrets within secrets, all of which lead her to believe that Charlie will turn up dead if she doesn't find her quickly...

This is typical French fare in the sense that the suspense doesn't really let up from the word go, helped in part by absolutely no chapter breaks. The prose style hurries along at an ever-quickening pace without losing the rich detail and vivid descriptions that bring the narrative to life -- you get a real sense of the people, the places and the events that occur in ways that a less-busy, tell-don't-show style would fail to deliver.

There are plenty of twists and turns in the plot, and many characters are not what they first appear to be, and all the while the story never really escalates into all-out melodrama. Indeed, it reads as quite an authentic account of a panicked mother trying to find her missing child when the rest of the world doesn't seem to take her concerns seriously enough.

Losing You is a thoroughly entertaining read, one to quicken the pulse and test your powers of deduction all the way through. I can honestly say I did not guess the ending, nor the perpetrator, which is quite rare in much of my recent reading experience.

Now, that French seems to have worked her way into my good books once again, I wonder where I can get my hands on a copy of her latest novel Until It's Over...

'Lullabies for Little Criminals' by Heather O'Neill

Fiction - paperback; Quercus; 384 pages; 2008.

Quercus may be my new favourite publisher. In recent months I have read several books -- Nefertiti, The Tenderness of Wolves and Bad Debts -- published by this burgeoning publishing house based in London, and so when Lullabies for Little Criminals landed in my mailbox this week -- the result of a mid-week "trolley dash" around Amazon.co.uk -- I decided to bump it right to the top of my incredibly long reading queue.

Despite being longlisted for this year's Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Lullabies for Little Criminals has received little press attention here in the UK. But in its native Canada it has been critically acclaimed, winning the 2007 Canada Reads, an annual battle of the books competition, as well as the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Best Novel 2007. It  was also shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General's Awards, the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award 2007, the Amazon.ca/ Books in Canada First Novel Award 2007 and  the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal 2007. With such ringing endorsements, I was anxious to see if it lived up to all the hype.

'Long Way Down' by Ewan McGregor & Charley Boorman

Non-fiction - hardcover; Sphere; 352 pages; 2007.

Three years ago fellow actors and biking buddies Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman set off on a voyage from London to New York the long way round. The resultant 10-part TV series following their 20,000 mile road trip across Europe and Asia proved a huge hit, as did the book that accompanied it. I came to the whole Long Way Round phenomenon quite late, having stumbled upon a repeat screening of the series on Sky TV about 18 months after it had been made. But I was immediately enraptured and thought it was one of the most entertaining travel documentaries I'd ever seen. I promptly went out and bought the DVD and the book.

Fast forward a year and the double-act were back on board their motorbikes, this time traversing the globe from top to bottom -- from John O'Groats at the northernmost tip of Scotland to Cape Agulhas on the southernmost tip of South Africa -- in a new 15,000-mile adventure being billed as the Long Way Down. The popularity of the first series had obviously paid off for them: this time the trip was being documented on a live website and the resultant TV series was being screened on BBC 2 during prime time Sunday night viewing.

'The Litvinenko File: The True Story of a Death Foretold' by Martin Sixsmith

Non-fiction - hardcover; MacMillan; 320 pages; 2007.

Anyone who was living in London in November 2006 will know that the hot topic of conversation -- in the pubs, at work, on the news and in the papers -- was the poisoning of Alexander "Sasha" Litvinenko.

Mr Litvinenko, a former member of the KGB and its successor the FSB, was granted political asylum (with his wife and child) in the UK in 2000. An outspoken critic of the Russian Government, he fell ill on November 1, 2006 and died three weeks later. Doctors could not say what caused his death, but it later emerged he had been poisoned by radioactive material known as polonium-210.

This book by the BBC's former Moscow correspondent, Martin Sixsmith, explores Litvinenko's murder and looks at who might gain the most from his death. During the course of his research Sixsmith discovered that Litvinenko had made many enemies. "What I found out about Litvinenko's past," he writes, "both astounded me and threw up so many potential reasons for his murder that I ended my research more surprised he survived as long as he did than that he eventually fell victim to the assassins who sought him out in London."

'Little Face' by Sophie Hannah

Fiction - paperback; Hodder; 357 pages; 2006

Little Face was one of those books I added to my wishlist after I read several favourable reviews online. Last week I was lucky enough to obtain a free copy via Bookmooch and as soon as it arrived I ripped open the envelope and waded in.

The story is one of those rip-roaring woman-in-peril narratives that starts out at a ferocious pace but eventually loses steam and ends up making the reader want to throw the book across the room out of disappointment and frustration. If truth be told, that's actually what I did, and I do believe the words "what a crap ending" came out of my mouth!

Little Face capitalises on every mother's fear: the loss of a child. And Sophie Hannah does this with aplomb, making her main protagonist, first-time mum Alice Fancourt, nervous, jittery and anxious even before anything happens to her new bub. Then Alice's nervous disposition morphs into very real fear and paranoia when she becomes convinced her two-week-old daugher, Florence, has been "swapped" while in the care of her husband, David.

Of course, David thinks the claim is ridiculous, but Alice's mother-in-law, a control freak who is not all that she seems, isn't quite so sure. Over the course of the next few days Alice's world is turned upside down as her husband becomes more vindictive and nasty towards her. It is only later when the reader realises that David's first wife has been murdered that you begin to really fear for Alice's safety -- physically and psychologically.

'Lost Souls' by Michael Collins

Fiction - paperback; Phoenix; 292 pages; 2003.

Dark, depressing and claustrophobic. These are the words that best describe this unconventional crime novel set in the heartland of industrial America, where "the smell of sulphur made the air taste bitter, a haze of pollution hanging in the wintry light, the chimneystacks breathing fire".

Into this "crouched, grand, sad and burned out landscape" dotted with factories, shopping malls, dilapidated motels and highways, Lawrence, a divorced policeman, discovers the body of a three-year-old girl lying face down in a pile of autumn leaves by the side of a road. It appears as if the toddler, who is dressed as an angel, has been the victim of a hit-and-run accident during the town's busy Halloween night festivities.

But why was she by herself? And why did the driver fail to stop and give assistance?

During the ensuing investigation, the town's star quarterback, a 17-year-old schoolboy called Kyle, emerges as the chief suspect.  But in a soulless town desperate for heroes a cover-up takes place to ensure the teenager's promising football career remains untarnished.

Lawrence, his sense of right and wrong dulled by his own personal and financial problems, becomes an unwitting pawn in the mayor's plan to "fudge" the investigation. When he later finds his own life threatened by an unknown assailant, Lawrence begins to question his role in the power games being played out by those around him. His actions, fuelled by fear, loneliness and paranoia, only serve to turn him into a suspect in the very case he is supposed to be investigating...

'A Long Shadow' by Charles Todd

  Fiction - paperback; Harper; 354  pages; 2006.

A Long Shadow is one of nine mystery novels featuring Inspector Ian Rutledge written by an American-based mother-and-son writing team.

Rutledge, who works for Scotland Yard, survived the trenches of the Great War but the horrors of the battlefield still plague him and he is haunted by the ghost of a soldier friend who did not return.

In this evocative novel set in London and rural England in 1919, Rutledge is being stalked by someone who keeps leaving brass cartridge casings for him to find, an eerie reminder of his former life on the battlefield.

At the same time, he is sent to a small Northamptonshire village to investigate an attack on a local constable, shot in the back with a bow-and-arrow in Frith Wood which is said to be haunted by Saxon ghosts.

But all is not what it seems and before long Rutledge is embroiled in another mystery involving the disappearance of a teenage girl, who is believed to be buried in the woods, several years before.

Are these incidences -- the casings, the constable's attempted murder, the girl's disappearance -- all linked and, if so, by what?

'The Leavetaking' by John McGahern

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 176  pages; 2000

First published in 1974, McGahern revised The Leavetaking, his third novel, a decade later because he thought it "lacked that distance, that inner formality or calm, that all writing, no matter what it is attempting, must possess". The result is a tautly written novel composed of two halves, each radically different to the other.

Essentially it is a love story, about a teacher, Patrick, who is facing dismissal by the school authorities for marrying an American divorcee while on a year's sabbatical in England. A battle of wills ensues: he won't resign because he does not feel he has done anything wrong; the church won't recognise his marriage and make it 'holy'. His wife, meanwhile, is holed up in rooms in Howth, a seaside suburb of Dublin, happily going about her business until they are found out.

'A Long Long Way' by Sebastian Barry

Fiction - hardcover; Faber and Faber; 304 pages; 2005

It is 1915 and the Great War has just begun. Ireland, with the promise of Home Rule in its sights, agrees to send its own to fight for the nation.

Seventeen-year-old Willie Dunne, who desperately wants to please his loyalist father, a much respected member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, joins the Army because at 5ft 6in he is too short to join the force.

But when he came home and told his father, the big, blank, broad face of the policeman wept in the darkness. And then his three sisters, Maud, Annie and Dolly, lit the candles in the sitting-room and they all felt part of the tremendous enterprise because Willie was going to be in it, and they were proud and excited, though it might last a few weeks at most, because the Germans were known to be only murderous cowards."

'Long Way Round' by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman

Non-fiction - hardcover; Time Warner Books; 320 pages; 2004.

I'm often not very quick off the mark at the best of times, but when it came to discovering the wonder that is the 20,000 mile road trip from London to New York (the long way round) undertaken by actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman I am positively turtle-like.

This book, published in late 2004, accompanies the 10-part television documentary of the motorbiking adventure, now available here in the UK on DVD. I recently watched the DVD and fell immediately in love with it, so much so I promptly tracked down a secondhand copy of the book to immerse myself in.