Shuggie Bain

 by Douglas Stuart

The winner of this year's booker prize and something I had put off reading because of the subject matter.

Shuggie is growing up in Glasgow with his alcoholic mother and this is the story of their life together up until the point she dies. This is not letting out a secret as we find out this fact in the first few pages of the book. Despite the inevitable sadness of this book it sparkles with life and occasional humour. I enjoyed it far more than I expected and think it a worthy winner from the shortlist. It maybe got a little bit long in the last third of the book . 8/10 

Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

I found this a very hard read.
It started well enough in a lab developing nematodes but this is only the background to  the story of a black man in a postgraduate school that is predominately white. He is also gay and a victim of child abuse. The gay sex was difficult but what I really struggled with was the violence of all his encounters. The writing is good but this was not my type of story. As such it may well win the Booker this year 6/10

The Shadow King

by Maaza Mengiste

I may have enjoyed this more if I had known a bit more about Ethiopian history beforehand. As it was, I did get drawn into this story about the Italian invasion and occupation of Ethiopia in the late thirties. The story revolves around a woman called Hirut and a soldier called Ettore who becomes the photographer of a sadistic general. Hirut becomes a resistance fighter and ends up a prisoner photographed by Ettore. I found the characters a bit flat and difficult to relate to but by the end I was desperate to know how they all ended up. The shadow king of the title is a character in the resistance army who posed as the emperor to rally the ethiopians. 6/10 

Such a Fun Age

 by Kiley Reid

This book has an adorable toddler in it whose voice is caught brilliantly on the audibook I listened to.
The start of this book left me wishing it to end. It felt like what I imagine chick-lit to be and I was not enjoying it. The story unfolds around an incident in a food mall when a black woman baby sitter is held by a security guard for kidnapping a white child she is babysitting. 

It develops into an interesting and toward the end absorbing reflection on attitudes to race and identification. Look out for that Mrs Chamberlain!! 7/10

Apeirogon

 by Colum McCann

This book left me flummoxed even while I enjoyed it enormously.

It is the story of two men, one Palestinian and one Israeli, both who lost a daughter in the conflict between the two countries and both of whom are committed to peace and an end to the occupation of the west bank.
The unusual thing about the book is that it is about two real people, still living and yet this is not biography or politics or history but a novel. We know this because the subtitle says that it is a novel. But is it? In an author's note we are told that apart from some interview notes in the centre of the book, McCann has been given freedom to go where he wants. He does and produces a great book in the process 9/10

Burnt Sugar

 by Avni Doshi

The story is a mother and daughter story set in urban india. The mother is starting to suffer from dementia and everyone around is supportive and sympathetic. For the main protagonist this is not so simple. Every incident in the present takes her and us back to an episode in the past and a childhood / growing up that was not always good and times very  painful. The structure I liked but I never settled into the story and found the characters difficult to engage with. A great idea that did not work for me 5/10

Love and other thought experiments

 by Sophie Ward

An amazing book that is full of inventiveness. I found myself losing the thread and then picking it up again when I was on the verge of defeat. It will stay with me for a while because of the raw energy of the writing.
The last two chapters let it down for me but I wish I could be half as creative as this. 7/10

This Mournable Body

 by Tsitsi Dangarembga

This book is the third of a trilogy, a fact I only learned after reading the book.

This maybe why I struggled to come into land with it. Set in Zimbabwe the main character Tambu suffers from depression and clearly has a backstory which I presume is fleshed out in the earlier novels. Without that she is difficult to understand and the story becomes a set of cameos of Tambu at various places in life.

It is written in the second person and I am not sure that works. If I find time I would come back and read the earlier novels. 5/10

Redhead by the side of the road

 by Anne Tyler

A short book about Micah Mortimer.
Nothing much happens apart from a teenager turning up claiming to be Micah's son and Michah's girlfriend dumping him but this was a great book with characters drawn really well and that you wanted to engage with. 8/10

The Mirror and the Light

by Hilary Mantel

The third book in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy and a very long one! The writing is wonderful as you would expect and the characters are wonderful and of course fictional. Do we know more about the real historical figures. Probably not, but then who do we really know. Dominic Cummings may have an endearing side to him but we would never know it. Maybe, in four hundred years time somebody will write a sympathetic novel about his rise to power. Lets hope not. The book was I felt too long by two hundred pages or so but I expect it will still make the Booker shortlist and it was still a good read 8/10