The Shadow of the Pomegranate Tree

by Tariq Ali
The story of one muslim family in Southern Spain at the time of the expulsion of the Moors. The family are very engaging and the portrayal of family life is beautifully drawn against a background of the harsh realities of the time. 9/10

Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Attwood
A reread of a book I read first over 10 years ago. I enjoyed it much more this time. It is the tale of Snowman formally Jimmy who is trying to survive and make sense of the post apocalyptic world he lives in. Through flashbacks we learn how this came about and the roles that Crake and Oryx played in it. 8/10

Thank you for this moment

by Valérie Trierweiler
The inside scoop on the Francois Hollande love triangle and what really drove him to the croissant on a scooter caper. Very trashy but some interesting insights to life at the top of French politics. One feels the lady doth protest too much however. 4/10

Money

by Emile Zola
My second reading of this book and still very enjoyable. One cannot help feeling Zola would have loved to have been around in the years following 2008 and have written about unscrupulous bankers and a corrupt financial system. There is nothing new under the sun! 9/10

Holy Disorders

by Edmund Crispin
A tale of Geoffrey Vintner, church organist, summoned to Devon in wartime by his friend Gervase Fen who has asked him to bring a butterfly net. Murder and mayhem ensue, not to mention a spy ring and very little use for a butterfly net. This is a crime mystery told with tongue firmly in cheek and very enjoyable as a result. 8/10

The Sportswriter

by Richard Ford
The life of an ordinary American, Frank Bascombe, living an ordinary life. It was interesting but not gripping and I am not sure how quickly I will return to the other books in this series. 6/10

The Origins of Totalitarianism

By Hannah Arendt
I worked through this as an audiobook which was not the best format in which to read this book. Having said that the book, which is now over 50 years old was fascinating. A lot of her analysis still holds true despite subsequent shifts in power. Definitely a good -but dense-read 7/10

Suspended Sentences

by Patrick Modiano
This is a book of 3 short novellas whose link is Paris and looking back. This is writing for the soul. Nothing great happens and yet the writing is beautiful and a credit o the translator. This has to be near the top of my favorites list for this year 9/10

Perfidia

by James Ellroy
This is the first novel in a second LA quartet but set in the second world war-ie before the first quartet.
It is a wild ride and I found the slang hard to follow at times. It portrays the unreal world of LA just as Pearl Harbour takes place and is told around the murder of 4 Japanese from the same family.
It is hard to split the good guys from the bad guys-which is a large part of the books appeal. I would recommend you try and read this in big chunks-it is 700 pages long-as that helps get into the language and the staccato writing style. 7/10

The Search Warrant

by Patrick Modiano
The winner of the nobel prize so as I had not come across him before had to be worth a try.
The book is simple in concept and very short but I found it absorbing. The narrator sees a newspaper article about a girl who disappeared in the middle of occupied Paris in 1942. He sets out to discover what happened to her. Written in journalistic style it takes us through his investigations over a number of years. It grew on me as I went through it. 8/10

The Night Watch

by Sarah Waters
A foray out of the nineteenth century for Sarah Waters as she writes a book about London during world war 2 and its immediate aftermath. The book starts at the end in 1947 and works backwards in 2 leaps to 1941. It is a device I was sceptical of before reading the book but it is brilliantly executed and very gripping. It will certainly satisfy those who always read the last page of the novel to see what happens! The characters are rendered with so much care and I so wanted to know what happened to Kay. A great read 9/10

We are all completely beside ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler
A family reflection narrated by Rosemary and concerning her parents and two siblings. A quirky enjoyable novel touching on some current issues. It has been shortlisted for the Booker but I would be surprised if it won

The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien

By Georges Simenon
The third Maigret starts with Maigret performing a swap of a suitcase that leads to suicide. The action then moves from Bremen to Liege to Paris and back to Liege as Maigret uncovers a 10 year old crime. Really enjoyable 8/10

The Children Act

by Ian McEwan
The story is of a high court judge in the family division and her long term husband who is about to turn 60 and is having a sexual crisis.
The book interweaves the stories of some of her cases with her personal drama in a compelling way that McEwan as a great storyteller makes effortless. I found the book thought provoking as well as enjoyable if not a little uncomfortable. 9/10

The Late Monsieur Gallet

by Georges Simenon
The second Maigret novel and a story of hidden identities. Quick and enjoyable caper but not one of his best 6/10

How to be Both

by Ali Smith
This is a book in two halves, one half being about a modern day teenager who has recently lost her mother and the second about a fifteenth century fresco painter. The painter is real but the story is built from the very few fragments that we have. The stories are tenuously connected and I discovered afterwards that the book has been published in 2 versions with the stories placed in a different order in each. I was very frustrated reading the painters tale second as I kept wanting it to return to the other story. I wonder if I would have felt differently reading them the other way around. Now I will never know. Very well written but a frustrating read and an unsatisfactory ending for my tastes 7/10

Orfeo

by Richard Powers
The quirky story of Peter Els. At the time of the novel he is a 70 year old composer/retired music professor who in his kitchen has set up an amateur genetics laboratory. By a string of events this comes to the attention of homeland security and suddenly our hero is on the run. During the course of his running he reflects over his life and we see how two sides of his life have converged to produce his current predicament. Very amusing in places and  an interesting ending. Should have made the Booker shortlist. 9/10

The Long Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

It is unusual for me to start writing about a book before I have finished it but this book has evoked strong responses in me that have varied enormously.

The book follows an Australian surgeon, Dorrigo Evans, who joins the Australian army at the start of the war and is captured by the Japanese, ending up working on the Burma railway construction. Just before leaving for the war he has a short affair with his uncle's young wife, that has an impact on the rest of his life.

The book ranges back and forwards from the war years to the current day, following the fortunes of both Dorrigo and his fellow prisoners and their captors.

The writing is intense and at times almost poetic with short arresting sentences. At other times any beauty in the language gets overwhelmed by the sheer barbarity of what is being described. It is at this point I have to question whether this is gratuitous gore or something that is necessarily shocking to make us confront man's inhumanity. I don't know. It is certainly not an easy read and has left no options for a happy or hopeful ending.

With the last world war so far away for many of us, it is important that we do not forget the realities of it and the huge waste of humanity that results but is fiction the way to do this, or is it just another form of forgetting? I don't know. I will revisit my musings on this when I finish the book.

So I have finished and I have to say that I found the end of the book a little indulgent. Did we need a chapter on the execution by hanging of a Korean guard-especially one ending in a very clichéd mid –sentence halt as the trapdoor opened. Did the book really need our central character saving his family from the middle of an inferno in a forest fire? It was more Rambo than anything else.

The book has made the Booker shortlist but I would be disappointed if it were to win. 7/10

Pietr the Latvian

by Georges Simenon
The first Maigret novel and great as a straightforward police novel. Maigret has the most accommodating wife in the world who is always there with a good hot meal when he comes home a week late from work. It is of a certain time but a good light read for a journey 8/10

The Dog

by Joseph o' Neill

Longlisted for the booker prize and by the author of Netherland which I really enjoyed.
This is the story of an American lawyer who for various reasons ends up in Dubai working for wealthy emiratis. It is very funny in places but the book never quite grabbed me. It may be more engaging if you had lived in the emirates 5/10