On Loving Josiah by Olivia Fane

DATE FINISHED: June 18th, 2012 

RATED: ****

SYNOPSIS:  Eve is a charming, untameable, sexually liberated wild child, with sociopathic tendencies and a psychiatrist who has utterly fallen for her charms. But Eve bears a child to an earthy, grounded gardener, who takes on the responsibility of tending to the young Josiah along with his plants, while Eve continues to float about happily, perhaps manically, upsetting their care workers. Plucked from their care at the age of 7, Josiah is tumbled from foster home to foster home to residential care home, until at the age of 14 he meets classical scholar Thomas and a world of love he has not known opens up to him. This is the story of a boy who has fallen through too many gaps in ‘the system’.

THOUGHTS:  Eve is a wonderfully drawn, extraordinarily vivid and spirited character – perhaps on the cusp of insanity, but perhaps just ‘different’. Thomas’ introspection and academia are equally well realised, although the nature of his love for Josiah makes reading from his perspective a more uncomfortable experience.

The Silent Land by Graham Joyce

DATE FINISHED: June 17th, 2012 

RATED: *** 

SYNOPSIS:  Zoe and Jake are trapped in an avalanche while on a skiing holiday, but somehow manage to escape. Or do they? They find their hotel and the local village both deserted and the phone lines dead, but when they try to venture further afield for help, they keep finding themselves back where they began. A waiting game begins, while they try to work out what has happened, or – perhaps more importantly – what will happen next…

THOUGHTS:  Joyce has an unpretentious prose style that is easy to read, and a gift for both characterisation and evocation of place which I hoped might lift a storyline that otherwise held little appeal for me.

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif

DATE FINISHED: May 20th, 2012

RATED: **** 

SYNOPSIS:  Alice Bhatti, recently of borstal, has somehow talked her way into a nursing job at the Sacred Heart Hospital (possibly due to being the only applicant), where she finds herself the unexpected object of devotion for young bodybuilding police ruffian Teddy Butt, more at home with a gun than with poetry. Alice’s father Joseph has the  mystical ability to cure stomach ulcers; but Alice has the less welcome ‘gift’ of seeing death in the faces of those she meets.

THOUGHTS: At first I found the narrative quite entertaining as we joined Alice on the day of interview for her nursing job, and simultaneously, Teddy massacres his own thumb so that the police can ‘justifiably’ arrest someone for a previous crime.  

Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

DATE FINISHED: May 16th, 2012

RATED: **** 

SYNOPSIS:  Author St. John Fox stands accused of multiple murder – by his own muse and creation Mary Foxe. He also finds himself on the brink of divorce from his jealous wife, Daphne, who believes he is having an affair. Is St. John in love with Mary or Daphne? And does choosing one necessarily mean the end of the other? What’s a man to do?

THOUGHTS: Stories within stories, slipping times and locations, where do memories and fantasies collide and divide? If you prefer a linear narrative, this is not the book for you.

The Adventures of Vaclav the Magnificent & His Lovely Assistant Lena by Haley Tanner

DATE FINISHED: May 12th, 2012

RATED: *** (3.5)

SYNOPSIS:  Both children of Russian immigrants to Brooklyn, Vaclav and Lena have been inseparable since the first day they met and saw the magic act at a Coney Island sideshow. Vaclav becomes magician-in-training (with his lovely assistant Lena), and nobody questions why Lena barely eats and spends all of her time at Vaclav’s house or why he should do her homework. One night, Lena disappears from 10 year old Vaclav’s life with no explanation, leaving a gaping wound where VacLena has been separated. It is only when Lena re-finds Vaclav on her 17^th birthday that the missing pieces are slotted back together…

THOUGHTS:  The third person, present tense narrative reflects Vaclav and Lena’s growing grasp of the English language, which did initially grate on me, but became less grating as they grew older.

Small Island by Andrea Levy

DATE FINISHED: April 6th, 2012

RATED: ****

SYNOPSIS:  Hortense and Gilbert are a mismatched couple who each have their own reasons for agreeing to marry in haste so that they might leave their small island of Jamaica behind and settle in ‘the mother country’ (another small island). Queenie is their landlady, who met Gilbert during the war, and is one of the few people in London willing to take in ‘coloured’ lodgers (much to the chagrin of her neighbours). Queenie’s own husband is missing, but that seems to be the least of her concerns…

THOUGHTS:   This is the story of four people who have little in common – except perhaps high hopes and disappointment.

The Flying Man by Roopa Farooki

DATE FINISHED: April 2nd, 2012

RATED: ****

SYNOPSIS:  Maqil, Miguel, Mehmet, Mike, slips through life from name to name, wife to wife, border to border, decade to decade, relying on his easy charm and quick wit to see him through the short con and the long, to provide the edge and entertainment he craves. But suddenly he is old, and what does he have to show for it? And who will miss him, once he’s gone?

THOUGHTS:   I was expecting to read about the exploits of a glib, smooth-talking conman, but instead Farooki revealed the other side of the man –

Ella Minnow Pea by Matt Dunn

DATE FINISHED: March 29th, 2012

RATED: ****

SYNOPSIS:  The tiny island of Nollop has built its life and customs around the revered lipogram, ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’. When – due surely to the passage of time – the lettering on the memorial statue begins to fall away, the Nollopian council decrees that useage of the fallen letters must likewise fall from use.  The island’s story is told through a postal correspondence, of correspondingly limited letters.

THOUGHTS:   I was worried that the story would suffer at the hands of its premise and turn into a technical exercise at the expense of narrative flow, but luckily this fear was unfounded.  

The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge by Patricia Duncker

DATE FINISHED: October 8th, 2011             

RATED: *** 

SYNOPSIS:  On New Year’s Day of the new millennium, a group of bodies is found in the snow, echoing an earlier group suicide by members of the Faith. The local police detective, Schweigen, is reuinited with an old flame (the Judge of the title) to solve the mystery. When a curious book of undecipherable symbols is discovered near the scene of the crime, the Judge is led to the Composer, an irresistible attraction, and many questions without answers…

THOUGHTS:  The most mysterious thing about this novel was the consistently unprofessional behaviour of the protagonists.

The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton

DATE FINISHED: August 24th, 2011

RATED: **

SYNOPSIS:  After suffering a childhood trauma (not elucidated until the novel’s end), the title character stops speaking and develops an affinity with opening locks.  As a teenager, the ability to open locks finds Michael making acquaintance with various criminals; while his artistic ability leads to him falling in love…

THOUGHTS:  Michael is first met during a prison sentence that is the direct result of his lock-breaking abilities, telling his life story as a way of passing the time and perhaps redeeming himself in the eyes of his one true love.  The synopsis on the book cover was sadly far more engaging than Michael’s own retelling of events