The Bat

by Joe Nesbo
The first book in the Harry Hole series and a real page turner that keeps you guessing right to the end.
This is Nordic noir with a twist, not least because it is set in Australia!
 My advice, don't get too attached to any of the characters because if you do they are likely to end up dead!
The central dilemma I have with the book is whether I like Harry Hole or not. This may be deliberate on the part of the author but there are times in the book when you think he is an alright guy. There are other times when you feel sorry for him. Then there are others when you just know that he is a total asshole. I think I may need to read another book to clarify my view of him. It was a good crime thriller either way. 8/10

Professor Hanaa

by Reem Bassiouney
The professor of the title is an ambitious single-minded single woman of 40. We know this because she tells us on the first page alond with what she intends to acheive-all of which she does fairly quickly. The story unfolds from there and is a beautifully told love story against a background of Egyptian society and clashing values and world views which is equally funny and painful at times. As someone who knows very little of the society this is set in I enjoyed it immensely and still felt I could share the very human emotions encountered. One of the highlights of my year. 9/10

The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The idiot of the title is Prince Muishkin, a young man who has just returned to Russia after being treated in Switzerland for epilepsy. The other main characters are Rogojin-another nobleman he meets on the train, Nastasia Philipovna-a woman they both love and who has a questionable reputation and Aglaya Epanchin-a young woman who Muishkin also "loves" and at one point looks like marrying.
I struggled with this book. I found the characters hard to believe and very shallow-especially some of the supporting ones. I should say this was not helped by the fact I listened to this as an audio book, and the narrator made many many of the characters sound like something out of a Monty python sketch. I also found the book incredibly long with many of the passages being an excuse for Dostoevsky to tell a yarn of some sort. Having said that I did enjoy General Ivolgin "retired and unfortunate" and his tall tales of his exploits in the army and his time as a child with Napoleon in Moscow.
I also thought the explanation at the start of part 4 as to why you cannot write a novel about ordinary people was fantastic. But as a novel I did not like it. 4/10

For a much more positive view see this excellent review by AS Byatt from 2004.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jun/26/highereducation.classics 

The Secret History

by Donna Tartt
This book was written over 20 years ago so I am surprised that I have only just come across it as she publishes her third novel.
The book starts with a death and then proceeds for the first half of the book to tell us why it happened;  then in the second half of the book, the consequences of it happening to the protagonists. These said protagonists are a greek class at a small exclusive college in Vermont. The book is beautifully written and left me wanting to do a course in greek mythology! However, while knowing some more might of added to my enjoyment, not knowing any of the greek myths did not detract from how enjoyable a read this was. I am still musing over what I felt about all of the characters. They were all flawed in some way but who was good and who was bad is something I will still be thinking about weeks from now. That has to be a good book doesn't it? 9/10

Alex

by Pierre Lemaitre

This starts as a kidnapping thriller and is very very disturbing. If rats freak you in any way this may not be the book for you.
However, this is an incredible page turner with numerous twists and turns in the plot. If you like nordic noir then I think this would appeal.
I loved the way that regardless of what you learn about the main character the author manages to leave you always with an empathy toward her. Great writing and great thriller. 9/10

Expo 58

By Jonathan Coe
This was a very funny book that rocked along at a cracking pace and reminded me of Our Man in Havana. The ending was sentimental but well done. It is set against the backdrop of the world fair being held in Brussels in 1958. Our hero is sent there by the government department he works for. He has varied adventures of the romantic and espionage varieties. Great larks! 8/10

The Lowland

by Jhumpa Lahiri
This is the story of two brothers from Calcutta. The major "event" of the book occurs very near the beginning and is based in historical facts about a political movement in India known as the Naxalbari.The rest of the book tells the story of how this effected the characters through the rest of their lives. Lives that are very ordinary and yet by weaving backwards and forwards through time and place I became tied up with their lives and cried at the end. At times I felt the characters were so thinly drawn that I did not know then but then I reached the end of the book and found I would miss them. A good read 8/10

Postwar-A history of Europe since 1945

by Tony Judt
Published in 2005 I read this book as an audiobook but thankfully had the book copy to read as well. As an audiobook it is quite dry at times, especially those parts where Judt is listing reams of statistics.
However, this became easier with the paperback copy to refer to afterwards.
The book covers a vast canvas and is a fascinating take on how Europe has developed as a response to two world wars fought on its territory. You might not always agree with what he says or his interpretation of events but I found it raising all sorts of questions that I have discussed with myself and others over the past few months. It was a great read 9/10

We need new names

by NoViolet Bulawayo
I read a review of this book that complained about the way each chapter seemed to deal with a seperate topic and I would rather agree with that. This caused it to lose its narrative flow and by the end it seemed to have lost its way completely. 4/10

Unexploded

by Alison Macleod
This book is set in Brighton during the second world war and tells the tale of a small family falling apart as the husband takes on additional responsibilities for the war and his wife first distrusts him and then falls for a german artist who is held in a detention camp at the foot of the downs. Her husband is the senior civilian at the camp.
She makes it clear that this is fiction and that she has didtorted the truth to fit her fictional narrative. This did not stop Adam Mars Jones slaughtering the book for its factual innaccuracies in LRB recently. I do not understand this response. It reminds me of people getting upset with the Da Vinci Code for making things up. Hello, the clue is in the genre-this is fiction. I don't read novels for historical facts but for the escape into a good yarn. This book was not great but it was a good story. I would give it a thums up 6/10

Harvest

by Jim Crace
I enjoyed this book. It is set in an unnamed village in England at a time when life was transitioning from open common land to enclosures. It deals with how we have always dealt with strangers-especially in uncertain times. It has a beautiful language that evokes the rural landscape. From the very first page I felt I could smell the woodsmoke and the loss felt by the village folk as their masters barn burned. It ended in a way that I was not expecting but which made perfect sense when I thought about it. This book is shortlisted for this years booker and would be among my favourites to win. 8/10

The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton
Let me start by saying this was a long book. It also has a very intricate structure set around star signs and astrological charts that I did not fully get.
It has a lot of characters and it took me until well after half way through the book to work out who everybody was.
Having said all this there was something strangely compelling about the book that drew me in to the story. The story takes place in New Zealand at the time of the gold rush in the 1860's. We find out very quickly that someone has died(murdered?), somebody appears to have attempted suicide(but did they) and somebody else has disappeared-all on the same evening. We spend the rest of the book trying to find out what actually happened and why. Definitely a book to read in print rather than on a kindle-I seemed to be forever going back to recall what had happened earlier or which date we were at. 7/10

A tale for the time being

by Ruth Ozeki
This is a fascinating book.
It is the story of a diary written by a Japanese teenager who has returned from California with her family and is horribly bullied at school. Her father is depressed and suicidal and her diary together with the influence of her great grandmother is her only way through her troubles.
The diary is found washed up on the beach by a couple who live on an island in Canada. This is not long after the earthquake and tsunami in the north of Japan and throughout the book we are longing to know how this diary got there and whether its author is still alive.
The book is really absorbing as it moves from the second world war to the dot com crash to 9/11 to the present day, introducing the reader to zen and quantum physics along the way. I can't begin to do the book justice but it made me laugh, it made me sad, it made me think and it has the most realistic cat you will ever find described in a novel! I loved this book 9/10

The Quarry

by Ian Banks
This is the story of Kit and Guy. Kit is Guy's son and is somewhere along the Asperger's syndrome. Guy has brought Kit up from the time he was left on his doorstep as a baby. He has never told Kit who his mother is, or he has told him many times but each time he is given a different story. Guy is in the latter stages of cancer.
The story is told by Kit and takes place over a winter weekend, when a number of Guy's old university friends have come to visit, with the purpose of trying to find a compromising video tape they made when they were media students at the nearby university, and lived together in this same house.
On this simple plot Ian Bank's crafts a very funny, poignant novel. The characters are few but are brought to life wonderfully in a way that left me wanting the story to continue beyond the ending of the novel. The book is given more edge by the fact that the author died of cancer before publication.
A word of warning. The book makes liberal use of the F-word and C-word, so don't read if this will put you off. Otherwise enjoy! 9/10

The Testament of Mary

by Colm Toibin
I read this as it is on the Booker longlist. It is by far the shortest book at barely a hundred pages.
It is a retelling of the gospel story from Mary's point of view and it borrows so heavily from those works I am surprised it made it to the list. It is written well but I was not very impressed 4/10

Gone Girl

by Gillian Flynn
A thriller about a woman's disappearance where the clear suspect is the husband. His position is made more untenable by the fact that he tells the readers early on that he is lying to the police.

The story is told in alternate chapters by the husband Nick on the one hand and his wife Amy on the other. The story is further broken up by the fact that the two protagonists tell there story on different timelines so Nicks first chapter is on the day she disappears wheras Amy's first chapter starts 7 years earlier.
The timeframes get closer and closer as the book unfolds and adds to the mounting tension.
It is a pageturner and uses some great devices to arrest the readers attention, but I think the central device has been done better by Sarah Waters.
I enjoyed reading this book but I did feel a little dissatisfied with the ending. 7/10

May we be forgiven

by A. M. Homes
I enjoyed this. If you like Dicken's I think you would like this book. It is peopled with marvellous characters, some more comic than others. It has a young heroine character, a baddy or two and a happy ending. Perfect Dickens territory but set very much in 21st century America.
The narrator is Harold Silver and the story unfolds over a very eventful and wild year from one thanksgiving to the next. The story starts with his sister in law kissing him at the annual thanksgiving dinner, followed closely by his younger and somewhat bullying youger brother being at the wheel of his car when two people are killed. Harold ends up picking up the pieces that leads to further disaster.
There is always something happening which keeps you turning the pages. I felt the last quarter of the book rather coasted to a soft landing but that aside it was a fun read 8/10

The Third Industrial Revolution

by Jeremy Rifkin
This is a thought provoking book. It maps out a vision for a way through the current climate change problems facing the human race. It does not shy away from the enormity of this challenge and neither does it descent into a doomsday mentality. It is founded in practical case studies that Rifkin is involved with around the globe and the five pillars that he sets out as the bedrock of the third revolution are practical and in many cases well on the way to fruition.
I did have problems with a couple of issues. The first was in chapter eight where Rifkin examines education and changes that need to be made. He suggests that there needs to be a change to collaborative thinking and a working for the common good(my interpretation). There seems to be a belief (hope) that the younger generations will adopt this as a normal way of working. I have trouble reconciling this with my experience which is that there will always be somebody who will see a chance to maximise personal return, albeit at the expense of the majority. I readily accept this may be due to a dose of Calvin in my youth tempered by later Darwin!
Secondly, Rifkin alludes to but did not deal with the problem of the North-South divide. It is a great aspiration to state that the developing countries may leapfrog the developed nations in the roll out of renewable energies etc. but it is hard to see the developed nations letting that happen without a fight. The step back from committment to a green agenda-see recent cuts by the UK and French governments in these areas-suggests that GDP growth will remain the driving force of these nations at any cost.
I applaud the ideas of this book but find it hard to share Mr. Rifkin's optimism for the future of our species. I hope to attend the World forum in Lille later this year and will be interested to hear an update from Jeremy Rifkin on the current state of our planet. I would thoroughly recommend reading this book. 9/10

Felix Holt-The Radical

by Geaorge Eliot
I listened to this book after thoroughly enjoying Middlemarch and I am not so enthusiastic about this. There is still Eliot's enjoyable humour and her fantastic descriptions of nineteenth century life.
However, my main problem was that I did not like Felix Holt or Harold Transome. Part of me is glad about this but at other times I found it hard to engage with these characters. We were promised so much mystery surrounding Harold that was never delivered upon.
The story is set around the Reform Act of 1832 and the book is a great way of looking at social tensions around at that time however, some, like me, may find that there is a little too much detail on this front. 7/10

Flight Behaviour

by Barbara Kingsolver
I listened to this as an audio book read by Barbara Kingsolver herself.
The plot revolves around a "small town America" society, and one family in particular that is jolted out of its day to day routine by a natural event triggered by global warming.
It examines one woman's awakening to both her own plight and the larger issues arising from environmental change. I loved the characters and the ending was close to perfect as far I was concerned. This is a thought provoking book that I would read again. 9/10

A Delicate Truth

By John le Carre
I really enjoyed this book. It involves the British intelligence services and Cornwall and much in between. As ever you are never quite sure who the good guys are. It moves at a cracking pace and ended too soon 9/10

The Blind Man's Garden

by Nadeem Aslam
I loved this book. The use of language is gorgeous in places evoking smells, sounds and a sense of place. The story of two brothers in a small Pakistani town near the Afghanistan just after 9/11 is both moving and unnerving as the pain and hopelessness of the individual caught up in a global struggle unfolds. Having said that it is not a book without hope, and as such, is well worth reading 9/10

Manuscript Found in Accra

by Paul Coelho
I was dissapointed with this book. It read like a book of biblical proverbs-and indeed quotes liberally from the bible. The plot is very thin if existing at all. Like all of his books that I have read the language is beautiful at times and did save the book for me from a premature end. 4/10

The Ghost riders of Ordebec

by Fred Vargas
Another good read featuring Inspector Adamsberg. I like these novels because they are full of quirky characters. This novel is no exception and if anything swings too far into the quirky nature of the Inspector and his team rather than concentrating on the crime that needed solving. It was not the best of Fred Vargas but enjoyable all the same. 7/10

A dance to the Music of Time-Spring

by Anthony Powell
This is the first volume of the four part version of Powell's story of 20th century England, consisting of three of the twelve novels in the series. I found myself drifting from wrapt enjoyment to wishing he would just get on with it throughout the story. Some of the characters are really enjoyable. The alcoholic Stringham, the arrogant Widmerpool and the crazy left winger Gypsy Jones spring to mind among others. The narrator, Nicholas Jenkins I found tedious in the way he was so detatched from the story he was intimately involved in.
We move from his schooldays-just after the Great War-to the 1930's, and it is a well drawn picture of a very narrow section of British society during this period. It is comical in places but overall it left me with a feeling of melancholy. Will I read the rest of the series? I think I probably will, but need a break first. 6/10

Hard Times

by Charles Dickens
The only major novel by Dickens I had not read previously. I thoroughly enjoyed this as Dickens lays into nineteenth century capitalism with all guns blazing.
Yes its full of melodrama, and cartoon characters but it is also full of comedy (read the first few chapters to see where Monty Python got there "shoebox in the middle of the road"sketch), and great characters like Gradgrind and Bounderby, Stephen and Rachel.
If you have never read any Dickens, this is not his best novel, but it is short and would be a good place to start. I am biased because I love Dickens so don't be swayed by my score. 9/10

The Second World War

by Antony Beevor
I covered this book through a combination of audio book and print. If I am honest, I may not have finished this in print as I am not a big follower of military history, and inevitably there is a lot of description of battles. However, this book covers a lot of the politics and social history as well, and is an excellent overview of a war that changed the face of the world.
The numbers become incomprehensible and the depths of savagery that man can fall too are made very apparrent. I think everyone should make themselves aware of this conflict in the hope that we may never go there again. History is written by the victors and this book is no exception (so for instance bomber Harris is treated far more leniently than he would have been if German), but for all that it tries to be as objective as possible. A chilling book, a depressing book, but with this subject matter, it should be. 9/10

Waiting for Sunrise

by William Boyd
When your lead character has a name like Lysander Rief, and the book opens in 1913 Vienna with him visiting a contemporary of Freud to deal with a complaint called Anorgasmia (you will have to look it up or read the book), then you know you are in for another great tale from William Boyd.
Lysander is an actor by profession, the son of a famous actor, and we follow him from Vienna to London to avoid a scrape, and into the First World War, espionage and more to boot. Anything I have read by William Boyd is always enjoyable. I enjoyed the twists and turns in the latter stages of the novel but found myself a little disappointed with the ending. 7/10

The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire, 1852-1871

by Alain Plessis
This is a book in the Cambridge History of Modern France series. I enjoyed it because I have an interest in all things to do with the Second Empire in France, and this book is a good backgrounder to the social and political events of that time. Having said that, it could be a bit dry at times and may be better to dip into than read cover to cover. Mind you, it is not that long at 212 pages.
It gives some fascinating insights into a period of significant change in France resulting from the railways and changes in industrial and commercial practices. It also approaches the topic of Napoleon III's reputation and whether he was a force for good or bad, and I think concludes that the jury is still out! 7/10

A Cold Day for Murder

by Dana Stabenow
This is the first in a series of 20 novels featuring Kate Shugak. She is an ex police officer who lives in the middle of a cold Alaska, where crime is rife and racism is not far under the surface. This case involves an investigation of two missing persons. It is a quick read but I liked the characters and the description of an unknown landscape. Not sure she will be boosting the local tourism economy though. Good relaxing reading if you like crime novels 7/10

The Cleaner of Chartres

by Sally Vickers
This was not my normal choice of read but I enjoyed it. The descriptions of Chartres and the Cathedral are very good and the plot-while not exactly complex-moves along at an engaging pace. The cleaner of the title has a mysterious past that is unveiled as the story progresses and has a good upbeat ending.
Some of the story line seems a bit unnecessary-do we really need a mother superior running off with a monk in Rome? Still apart from some monor irritations along this line it was still agreeable. 6/10

The One Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

by Jonas Jonasson 

This is a book that lives up to the promise of the wacky title.
It follows the fortune of its hero, Allan Karlsson, following his climb out of the said window as well as going back over his remarkable life.

The book is very funny in places but falls into the tallest of tall story categories and is ultimately a feel good story that I was more than ready for by my Christmas break. Apart from the real life historical figures there are a great array of support characters that you cannot help cheering on as the book progresses. 7/10