Best reads of 2016

Hi from Uruguay! Just popping in to post my list of favourite books of 2016. I've been reading and reading, so I thought I'd best wait till the last minute and, indeed, there are a couple here I've just finished.

I really neglected my poor blog this year, particularly in the second half. Part of it was that work was particularly busy, but really, mostly it was all the stuff going on in the world. I guess objectively I could say I've had a good year personally, however crap this year has been for the world, but the world stuff has felt much too personal for that. The Brexit campaign and vote, particularly, felt like a kick in the teeth for me (I've possibly taken it a bit too personally, but I can't seem to help it), and things only got worse as the year went on. The angrier and more bitter I've felt, the more I've moved towards feeling disconnected and disengaged. I know myself, and when I'm upset, I withdraw and become alienated. I used to be a bit of a news junkie, but I have now not watched the news since November 9th (I'd already switched to France 24 from BBC News in June), and my social media use has plummeted. Fortunately, I've got a really good group of wonderful offline friends with whom I feel safe and happy, and I've been spending a lot of time with them, but the world outside of my immediate social sphere feels scary and horrible these days.

Anyway, on the plus side, my withdrawal from news and social media has meant I've been doing a hell of  lot of reading. I just haven't felt motivated to connect to others about it, and that's what I want to do more of from now on.

And that starts here. I read some absolutely fantastic books last year, and they deserve to be celebrated. My favourites were mainly on the non-romance side, and particularly in the non-fiction area. I did read a few good romances, but I'd characterise them as solid and enjoyable, rather than books that wowed me.

So, starting with the non-romances, non-fiction first:

HHhH, by Laurent Binet: A

HHhH is the story of the plot to assassinate a high-ranking Nazi in Prague. It's also just as much the story of the writing of that story. It could have felt gimmicky, but it never did. Instead, the experimental structure enhanced the tension and brought the extremely high stakes even more to life. I loved it.




SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, by Mary Beard: A-

SPQR is exactly the kind of history writing I like the most. Beard tells her reader fascinating things and does so with excellent, lively writing. But most of all, she pays as much attention to how we know things as to what we know.




East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity", by Philippe Sands: A-

This one is hot off the press, as I've literally just finished it (a bit of an incongruous book to read by the pool, but that's exactly what I did). The author traces the origin of the concepts in the title by exploring the stories of the men that originated them and got them into the Nuremberg trials. He gets into it through a personal connection, and this makes what could be a dry subject fascinating and emotional. It's beautifully written, and well worth it.


And next quite a few non-romance fiction titles:

The Neapolitan Quartet (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child), by Elena Ferrante A-

This quartet tracks the life of two women, childhood friends from Naples. They're the rare books that are actually about women themselves, and not about their relationship with men. While there are plenty of men in Lila and Elena's lives, the focus of the story remains squarely on them and their relationship . The books are extremely absorbing and the story that emerges is feminist and powerful. I listened to these on audio, about a half hour each day, so I had several months of living with Lila and Lenù and all the other characters. It was hard to let them go.

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie: A-

This might be cheating, since I had read it before. Not for many, many years, though, so it counts. This one is not what most people think when they think of Agatha Christie, but it classic Christie in its surprising, twisty plot, which is impossible to guess, while being completely fair. It also has really good characterisation and manages to be fun to read, while treating its objectively pretty dark and scary subject seriously.




Little Black Lies, by Sharon Bolton: A-

A very dark mystery set in the Falklands. I loved the setting and the way it was so present in the plot and the characters. And I enjoyed the characters just as much. They were flawed and interesting and real. And the book had a cracker of an ending. Just don't read this if you can't tolerate bad things happening to children in your fiction.




This Rough Magic, by Mary Stewart: A-

I rediscovered Mary Stewart this year. I'd read a few of her books about 10 years back and liked them well enough, but was not wowed. I think I'm now at a point in my life where they really hit the spot, because this time round, I absolutely loved them. This Rough Magic was my favourite of the ones I read this year, but I read several more. I love the settings, the adventurous heroines, the thrilling plots, not to mention the way Stewart treats the local characters like actual people, with their own interests and motivations.


His Bloody Project, by Graeme Macrae Burnet: A-

One of the two books nominated for the Man Booker prize that I actually liked. It's historical fiction, exploring a triple murder which took place in a remote Scottish crofting community in 1869. At the start we think we pretty much know everything about it, but through a collection of documents, we start realising there's much more to it than we thought. The plot is fascinating, but it's also a great portrayal of a place and a psychological exploration.




The Sellout, by Paul Beatty: originally a B+, but I've moved towards an A-, since I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.

This is the other book I liked that was nominated for the Man Booker prize, and what do you know. it actually won! I was really pleased about that, because it was challenging to read, but definitely worth it, a wince-inducing exploration of race in the US. I listened to it on audio, and that's an approach I'd recommend with this one, as it feels a bit like an extended stand-up routine.





A Study in Scarlet Women, by Sherry Thomas: B+

This one is Thomas's first historical mystery. It's a wonderfully fresh take on the Sherlock Holmes story, with a Holmes who feels just perfect, and plenty of significant female characters. I look forward to reading upcoming books in the series.




The Bees, by Laline Paull: B+

If you told me I'd enjoy a book set in a beehive and narrated by one of the bees, I would have laughed (the last 'animal' book I read was not a great success). But this was genuinely gripping and a fabulous read. Great characterisation ad an inventive,fun plot.



Kitchens of the Great Midwest, by J Ryan Stradal: B+

This was really interesting in the way the story was told, by telling the stories of people around (in some cases a bit peripherally, even!) our central character. But it was also a fun, satisfying story in its own right. I really enjoyed it.




And now for the romance!


Lay It Down, by Cara McKenna: B+

It took me ages to pick up the first in this series, as I was under the impression it was a motorcycle club book. It's absolutely not, just plain romantic suspense, with a romance that is classic McKenna: intense and powerful, with a dynamic I would probably find a bit skeevy with any other author, but which I'm absolutely fine with when it's McKenna writing it.


Give It All, by Cara McKenna: B+

Uncharacteristically for me, I started Give It All as soon as I had finished Lay It Down. What I'd seen of the GIA main characters in the first book made me really want to read their book (prissy, hyperserious hero, badass heroine, that's my catnip). I enjoyed these two very much.


The Obsession, by Nora Roberts: B+

Most readers seemed to be a bit meh about this one and it's a book where I can see exactly why, while loving the book to bits anyway. A fantastic setup, and a solid, satisfying development made me a happy reader.

Hold Your Breath, by Katie Ruggle: B+

I feel like I've gone on and on and on about this one, but I did love it. The setting is great (an ice rescue dive team) and I loved the hilarious and really sweet heroine and the super-controlled hero. The second book in the series wasn't great, unfortunately, but Ruggle did get it back on track for the 3rd, so I'm looking forward to reading more by her in future years.

Apprentice in Death, by JD Robb: B+

A solid entry in the series.. I enjoyed the mystery, and I liked how Robb dealt with the mentor-mentee relationship, contrasting the culprits with Eve and Feeney. Fun.



I'd love to hear any comments you may have on this, as well as hear about your own favourites. Thank you for reading, and my best wishes for a much better 2017 than the year we've just had!

Gone Too Deep, by Katie Ruggle

TITLE: Gone Too Deep
AUTHOR: Katie Ruggle

COPYRIGHT: 2016
PAGES: 428
PUBLISHER: Sourcebooks

SETTING: Contemporary US
TYPE: Romantic Suspense
SERIES: 3rd in the Search and Rescue series

George is a mystery.
Tall. Dark. Intense.
He's at home in the wild,
And she'll need him by her side if she wants to survive.

George Holloway has spent his life alone, exploring the treacherous beauty of the Colorado Rockies. He's the best survival expert Search & Rescue has, which makes him the obvious choice to lead Ellie Price through deadly terrain to find her missing father. There's just one problem—Ellie's everything George isn't. She's a city girl, charming, gregarious, delicate, small. And when she looks up at him with those big, dark eyes, he swears he would tear the world apart to keep her safe.

Ellie's determined to find her father no matter the cost. But as she and her gorgeous mountain of a guide fight their way through an unforgiving wilderness, they find themselves in the crosshairs of a dangerous man in search of revenge. And they are now his prey…

In the remote Rocky Mountains, lives depend on the Search & Rescue brotherhood. But in a place this far off the map, trust is hard to come by and secrets can be murder...

The first 2 books in this series were very different. I loved the first one, Hold Your Breath, which had an interesting suspense angle and a really nice romance. The second one, however, was a dud. I found the characters in Fan the Flames very problematic, and I ended up DNFing it.

I'm glad to report the third book in the series is much more like book 1, and I really enjoyed it.

This series includes an overarching suspense plot, which concerns the murder of the man whose headless body was discovered by the heroine, Lou, in an icy lake in a memorable scene in the first book. There might have been some developments I missed in book 2, but I never felt lost. Turns out there was a witness to the murder, and it's a man, Baxter Price, who has some pretty severe mental health issues .Combined with fear, this means he is very reluctant to go to the police. As the book starts, Baxter calls his estranged daughter, Ellie, in a panic. The killer is after him, so he's going into hiding in a cabin in the mountains and he's calling to say goodbye, in case he doesn't make it.

Ellie might not have seen her dad for many years, but it's not for not wanting to. After a chaotic episode when she was a girl, when he barricaded them in a room during a mental break, Baxter disappeared and hasn't been in touch. As soon as she hangs up, Ellie knows she needs to find her dad and get him help, particularly because the cabin he's going to happens to be the one where he barricaded them all those years ago, and even though she's sure all that stuff about him being chased by killers is not real, she knows it's not safe for him to be wandering in such territory in the cold on his own while not being mentally well.

And so Ellie heads from Chicago to Simpson, right in the middle of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, an environment as different as could be from her very civilised life. The first person she meets is George a bearded mountain of a mountain man, and a person from whom even the very chatty Lou can't extract more than monosyllables. George happens to be the most knowledgeable man in town about the mountains, and to everyone's amazement, Ellie manages to convince him to guide her to her father's cabin (he very emphatically does NOT guide tourists normally).

But what's supposed to be a simple, albeit grueling, hike in the mountain turns a lot more risky when it becomes clear that the danger to Baxter was not a hallucination of his, and the baddies intend to use Ellie and George to lead them to him.

This was so good, particularly the romance. George is just incredibly adorable, a shy, sweet and inexperienced man in what seems at first an intimidatingly huge package. And Ellie is hilarious. I really liked her determination and sense of humour. It's pretty much adoration at first sight between these two, and after a bit of clumsy dancing around each other (aided by the enforced proximity of the hike in frigid weather), they give that mutual adoration free rein. And that could be nauseating, but it's not, not in the least. What it is, is lovely. They like and respect each other, and I enjoyed them very much.

I also liked that the romance is a slow burn, with focus on the feelings, rather than the sex. Yes, there is sex, and it's really well done, but it's seasoning, rather than the main dish.

The suspense is good as well, although more run-of-the-mill. Ruggle did surprise me with the identity of the villain (she really had me going in the wrong direction), but the contortions to prevent Baxter simply revealing it were a bit on the unbelievable side. I did very much like the bits where Ellie and George were hiking in the cold mountain. It was fascinating, and Ruggle managed to bring in quite a lot of detail about the mechanics and logistics without sounding in the least infodumpy. It was similar in Hold Your Breath, in which for all that the mystery was a bit meh, I loved all the stuff about ice diving.

I'm glad I didn't give up on the series after book 2, and here's hoping this represents a return to form and book 4 is just as good. There's a revelation right at the end that sets up a plot for it that is not normally to my taste, but I'll give it a shot.

MY GRADE: A B+.

Man Booker Prize 2016

Turns out me saying things have slightly calmed down in my review of Eileen was an example of 'famous last words', because these last few weeks have been complete pandemonium at work. Way too many late evenings, which is not usual for me. Still, needs must, sometimes. I won't say things have calmed down again, just in case I jinx it, but I will say I now have a bit of time to do my round-up post before the Man Booker prize is announced later today. It's too bad I haven't been able to do proper reviews for all the books I've read, but this is better than nothing, I guess.

This year's list really hasn't been my favourite. It was worth doing this, as usual, since I discovered two books I thought were fantastic and really enjoyed. The difference is that in previous years I've found lots of other books beyond my favourites that I felt were worth my time, even if they didn't work for me 100%. This year, unfortunately, with everything other than my top 3, I felt I'd rather have read something else instead .

Let's start with my two standouts, Paul Beatty’s 
The Sellout and His Bloody Project, by Graeme Macrae Burnet. And two more different books you could hardly imagine!

The Sellout (my review here) is a powerful and creative satire of US race relations. I'm kind of surprised it worked so well for me, because I tend to be all about characters who feel real, and that definitely wasn't the point here. Beatty is not really concerned with characters (or even story, actually), but with ideas and language. The characters and storyline are all in the service of that, and it works perfectly. I described it in my review as being a bit like the best kind of stand-up, and the more I think about it (and this is a book I've thought about often, since I've finished it), the more I think that's right. I gave it a B+ at the time, but I think I've moved towards an A grade since.


Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project is completely different. It's historical fiction, exploring a triple murder which took place in a remote Scottish crofting community in 1869. We know who did it right from the start, a 17-year-old called Roderick Macrae. We also know why he says he did it, as he himself tells us so in a memoir prepared from his jail cell at the behest of his solicitor. But that's only the first half of the book, and the documents we are presented with right after that (court reports, witness statements, a section of a book written by a psychiatrist who interviewed Roddy) make us doubt all we were certain about.

This worked for me on several different levels. At the most superficial level, it was a bit of a psychological thriller, with plenty of plot and all the appearance of true crime. It was also a fantastic portrayal of a time and a place. We see what life is like for poor crofters at that time, and we see the effect that life has on relationships. We also see how Scottish criminal justice functions, and the effect of prejudice on the life of those who are affected by that prejudice.

But what this book really is about is the unknowability of the truth. The author gives us a multiplicity of perspectives, and it turns out they're all unreliable. Different characters and their actions look completely different when they're told by different narrators. There is no one truth, and we readers are left to wonder and doubt. And I don't know how Macrae Burnet does it, but this feels extremely satisfying. I was happy to be left doubting what the real truth was, or even if there was one. This was an A- for me.



David Szalay’s All that Man Is (my review here) was the first book on the longlist that I read, and it got me off to a good start. I liked this collection of short stories well enough (and it's definitely a collection of short stories, no matter how much people try to claim it's a novel). Enough of the stories and themes resonated with me to count it a success, but it's a qualified success only, because it's not really a book that has made an impression and stuck with me. Worth my time, though. I gave it a B.



And then we come to the rest! Of the remaining three books on the shortlist, I finished one and DNF'd the other two. The one I finished was Eileen, by Otessa Moshfegh (my review here). It's a book that more or less succeeds at what it's trying to do, but I found spending time with its utterly repugnant and self-hating protagonist overpowering and horrible. It felt like all we were doing was wallowing in filth, and then when something actually happened, I didn't buy it. I've since heard Moshfegh speak and she's described her protagonist (who's narrating her story 50 years later) as an unreliable narrator, which does throw a somewhat different light on the dénouement, but I'm afraid I really didn't get that when I was reading. It was a D for me.


Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk was a book I can honestly say I only picked up because it made it to the shortlist. I tried to read her Swimming Home a few years ago, and I'm afraid I had pretty much exactly the same experience both times, so much so that I could probably do a bit of copy-paste from that review and I wouldn't be far off. My problem was the characters, who behave in ways that no person ever would and that make no sense. I kept going "Are we really supposed to believe that....?", and as a result didn't care a jot about anything that was going on.

I've been thinking about what the difference is between this book and The Sellout, which also features characters behaving in what can only be described as outrageous ways. I think it's basically that in The Sellout we're not meant to find the behaviour realistic, and at the same time there's a strong core of truth at the centre of those characters which makes me buy them in their context. I understood those people on a visceral level. The characters of Hot Milk just felt like completely fictional, flimsy and inconsistent constructs... a bit like puppets. Nothing about them rang true, so I just made it a DNF at about the halfway point.

I guess I just don't get Levy. It's a shame, because whenever I hear her speak she sounds really interesting, and so does what she says about her books. Eh, well.


Finally, I also tried to read Do Not Say We Have Nothing, by Madeleine Thien. I was really looking forward to this one. It's the story of a Chinese family, starting just after Tiananmen and then moving back and forth between that and the time of the Cultural Revolution. It's a setting and stories that could have been absolutely fascinating, particularly because it's one I don't tend to see a lot. However, Thien somehow manages to make it feel wooden and tedious right from the start.

I also had a bit of an issue with the writing. In her bits set in the past Thien uses a sort of fairytale-ish tone which is very hard to get right. It does work more or less ok to evoke a mood and an atmosphere, but mostly it feels like an excuse not to bother with character motivation.

I struggled for quite a while with it, but finally gave up about a third in.

---

So, that's the shortlist. It's a pretty diverse selection, I thought, not just in the kinds of characters and settings, but in how the books feel. I can't really see much of a theme in common, other than a degree of experimentation (in some cases, successful, in others, not so much).

As you will probably guess, I would be happy if either The Sellout or His Bloody Project won. I think I'm edging towards The Sellout. I probably enjoyed His Bloody Project a little bit more, but The Sellout feels like there's more depth to it, more substance. And actually, I think it's got a chance. If I had to guess, I'd say the winner will be between it and Hot Milk (I seem to be really in the minority in taking against it). I tend to be really terrible at predicting the winner though!

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I read a further three books from the longlist that didn't make it into the shortlist. I didn't feel any of them should have.

The Many, by Wyl Menmuir is a very short novel, almost a novella. It tells the story of a man who moves into a derelict cottage in a fishing village, a cottage that used to belong to the mysterious Perrin. The man, Timothy, plans to fix up the cottage and live their with his wife. The villagers, and particularly Ethan, one of the fishermen, have other ideas. They're still mourning Perrin, and the stranger is not welcome.

The mystery of just what happened to Perrin is not the only one here. The village itself is a kind of mystery. There seems to be some sort of enforced isolation going on, some sort of quarantine. There are rules about how far the fishermen can go, and the few fish they do catch seem to be mutants. They are to sell every single one of those fish to the mysterious people who await the boats every day.

But that's not what the book is about. No one seems to care about all this strangeness or to think it's very interesting at all. It's just there in the background, and no one questions it. Our attention is on Timothy and Ethan and Perrin and their tangled relationships.

The point of this book seems to be the the mood. It's dreamlike and there's a palpable sense of unease, of something very wrong. But there's no urgency, we just drift around in the strangeness and menace, moving seamlessly between dreams and hallucinations and reality that's no less strange than the dreams and hallucinations. The setting of the mood is actually done very effectively, but it was hard for me to see what the point of it was. It didn't really work as a work of fiction, as a novel. It felt more like a poem. So, it was good at what it was trying to do, I guess, but it was not something that worked for me. It was a D.


Serious Sweet, by AL Kennedy (my review here) was a book I was really looking forward to. And at first, I thought I was getting something I would love.

It's about two damaged people, a senior civil servant who's become disenchanted with both his work and his life and an accountant who lost her life after alcoholism cost her her career and relationships. They have connected through letters and in the course of a single day, they try to connect in person.

This was an extremely frustrating book, because there really was something good in there. Unfortunately, the writing obscured it. There was so, so much stream of consciousness blabbering that I found it very hard to keep going at times. I admit to a bit of a prejudice against stream of consciousness writing (it too often feels self-indulgent), but the problem was not that Kennedy chose to use that narrative technique, but that it didn't work. It was a C for me.


Finally, I read Work Like Any Other, by Virginia Reeves. The book is set in the 1920s in rural Alabama, where Roscoe T Martin is struggling with his new life. Roscoe is a trained electrician, and he is obsessed with it. His wife has just inherited her father's farm, however, and they've moved in to take it over. But Roscoe just can't reconcile himself with being a farmer, and in his resistance to becoming a traditional farmer leads to his decision to electrify the farm by illegally tapping into the nearby high-tension lines. It's a fateful decision that leads him to jail when a man is electrocuted.

We see what Roscoe's life in jail is like, and it's actually quite an interesting portrayal. He's at what's supposed to be a sort of model jail, so he has it 'easy', but it's still a degrading, humiliating life. And we see the contrast between the consequences for Roscoe and the consequences for one of the long-time employees of the farm, Wilson, who helped Roscoe and was therefore found to be jointly responsible. Wilson is black, so no model jails for him. That was quite heartbreaking.

We also see the deterioration of the Roscoe's relationship with his wife and son, which wasn't solid in the first place. That I found a lot less effective. It could have been really interesting in how it explores the effect of both guilt and anger, but I just found it hard to connect with it all. I think the main problem was that I just didn't get Marie, Roscoe's wife, or quite understand her motivations fully.

On the whole, this one was a bit meh for me. I gave it a C.


So anyway, there we go. A bit disappointing this year, particularly because so many of the books sounded like something right up my street, but turned out to be disappointing. Let's hope for a better year in 2017!

Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegh

TITLE: Eileen
AUTHOR: Ottessa Moshfegh

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 272
PUBLISHER: Penguin

SETTING: 1960s US
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: None

Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize

A lonely young woman working in a boys’ prison outside Boston in the early 60s is pulled into a very strange crime, in a mordant, harrowing story of obsession and suspense, by one of the brightest new voices in fiction.

So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature.

Poor blog must be feeling quite abandoned! Really busy time at work = no time or inclination to sit in front of a computer any more than I absolutely have to. Things have slightly calmed down, though, so as the announcement of the Man Booker Prize winner approaches, I'd better start getting my reviews posted.

Eileen is probably the book in the shortlist that has got the most lukewarm reviews, with many readers actively disliking it. I'm one of them, although I probably hated it more while I was reading it than afterwards, when I was thinking back about it.

This is the story of Eileen, a twenty-four-year-old young woman living a life she fantasises about leaving. She lives with her alcoholic and verbally abusive father, grudgingly taking care of him (that mostly means buying alcohol for him and maybe some tins of food). She's an admin worker at a youth correctional institution, a job where she's surrounded by people she detests. But for all that she hates her life and dreams of running away, it's clear she won't do it. Until a fateful Christmas Eve.

So yes, I had a horrible time reading this book and had to force myself to finish. The problem is that Eileen is one of the most unpleasant, pathetic, mean-spirited characters I've ever read. She's ugly, in that her character is ugly. She's utterly self-involved, but not in a narcissistic sort of way. Rather, she hates herself, from her personality to her physicality. The book positively revels in how repulsive everything is. There is a lot of focus on bodily fluids... the piss, the shit, the pus, the vomit, even the menstrual blood (which certainly felt different... male authors, who tend to be more into writing books with a lot of bodily fluids than women, are too squeamish for that, however much of a macho image they try to project). Everything is disgusting and repellent, and it's overpowering.

Once I was done reading, however, I was able to try to think about the book more objectively: does it do what it's trying to do successfully? Actually, for the most part, I think so. Much as she repulsed me, I found Eileen believable. The narrator, who's telling the story from the vantage point of being a 75-year-old who's lived a full life after she became a completely different person, is clear-eyed about just how pathetic she was back when she was 24. She's basically our omniscient narrator, and there's no obfuscation. She portrays Eileen almost savagely, pointing out her failings and all the many ways in which she's a horrible person. But she also makes it clear why it was so, and why Eileen is also pitiful, someone whose character is completely influenced by her circumstances.

Where the book falls down is in the ending. Most of the book is just Eileen going round hating everything around her and in her, and nothing much happens. When things happen, it's very near the end, and it's revelation after revelation, with characters acting in ways that I didn't quite buy. The change was too sudden, possibly, and I thought it didn't work.

MY GRADE: So I guess Eileen tried to do something that really wasn't for me, but had some success in doing it, until it fell down in the end. Since my grades are about my personal enjoyment and appreciation of the books in question (I'm afraid I'll say that a lot in the next couple of weeks), I'm afraid I'll give this a D.

Fan the Flames, by Katie Ruggle

TITLE: Fan the Flames
AUTHOR: Katie Ruggle

COPYRIGHT: 2016
PAGES: 422
PUBLISHER: Sourcebooks Casablanca

SETTING: Contemporary US
TYPE: Romantic Suspense
SERIES: 2nd full length title in the Search and Rescue series

He's a firefighter.
He's a Motorcycle Club member.
And if a killer has his way...he'll take the fall for a murder he didn't commit.

Ian Walsh is used to riding the line between the good guys and the bad. He may owe the club his life, but his heart rests with his fire station brothers...and with the girl he's loved since they were kids. Ian would do anything for Rory. He'd die for her. Kill for her. Defend her to his last breath?and he may just have to.

Every con in the Rockies knows Rory is the go-to girl for less-than-legal firearms. When she defends herself against a brutal attack, Rory finds herself catapulted into the center of a gang war, with only Ian standing between her and a threat greater than either of them could have imagined.

In the remote Rocky Mountains, lives depend on the Search & Rescue brotherhood. But in a place this far off the map, trust is hard to come by and secrets can be murder...

I've gone on and on about how much I loved the first full-length title in this series, Hold Your Breath... basically, enough to make me read a book with a motorcycle club in it (really, really not my thing). Unfortunately, this gamble didn't pay off, as Fan the Flames was nothing like Hold Your Breath.

The heroine, Rory, is the owner of the town's gun shop, while the hero, Ian, is a firefighter who happens to also be a member of the local motorcycle club. Ian has had a thing for Rory for years, but never made a move (why? no idea). When stuff starts to happen, with someone trying to get into her shop at night, he decides it's time to make a move and protect her.

My main problem was that I had huge ethical issues with what the hero and heroine did, and the narrative was trying to tell me it was all ok and nothing I should worry about. From what I could see in the first half of the book, which is as much as I read, the motorcycle club Ian is a part of is not a bunch of mostly decent guys who just happen to like riding motorcycles, or even tough guys who simply club together to protect each other. They are proper lowlifes, the sort of people who think nothing of assaulting and killing people. Ian doesn't seem to be like them, but I just could not accept as a romance hero someone who'd be part of that group. As for Rory, she sells guns to these people -illegally, since, as she says, they would not pass a background check. Both she and Ian should be in jail.

I also hated that the book read like an NRA pamphlet. Everyone in this story is obsessed with guns. It's not just that this was boring, just because this was an obsession I don't share. If it had been something else I'm not interested in (say, classic cars), that would have been boring, but ok. Guns are not neutral, though. Gun nuts like these people will probably hold certain political positions related to that interest, which is an element that's purposely left out here. The way Ruggle dealt with this element, though, you'd think guns were harmless trinkets, and that it's normal to have a veritable arsenal in your home. No. Just no.

As for the romance... well, there was very little of it in the sections I read, and it wasn't great. Ian is a much too high-handed with Rory for my tastes. He decides she needs him to stay at her house because an intruder is looking around, and that is that. And we're told that as soon as he adopts a masterful tone, Rory will just automatically obey, out of training from when her father was running drills when she was a child. Ugh.

Yeah, this was definitely not for me. I should have given up earlier, but this series has a continuing suspense thread (the famous Headless Dead Guy from book 1), and I wanted to know what would happen with that. If I do read book 3 (hoping it's more like book 1 than book 2), I guess I'll have to hope Ruggle provides some catch-up.

MY GRADE: A DNF.

Walk On Earth a Stranger, by Rae Carson

TITLE: Walk On Earth a Stranger
AUTHOR: Rae Carson

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 448
PUBLISHER: Greenwillow Books

SETTING: 1849 US
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: Starts Gold Seer trilogy

The first book in a new trilogy from acclaimed New York Times-bestselling author Rae Carson. A young woman with the magical ability to sense the presence of gold must flee her home, taking her on a sweeping and dangerous journey across Gold Rush era America. Walk on Earth a Stranger begins an epic saga from one of the finest writers of young adult literature.

Lee Westfall has a secret. She can sense the presence of gold in the world around her. Veins deep beneath the earth, pebbles in the river, nuggets dug up from the forest floor. The buzz of gold means warmth and life and home—until everything is ripped away by a man who wants to control her. Left with nothing, Lee disguises herself as a boy and takes to the trail across the country. Gold was discovered in California, and where else could such a magical girl find herself, find safety?

Rae Carson, author of the acclaimed Girl of Fire and Thorns series, dazzles with the first book in the Gold Seer Trilogy, introducing a strong heroine, a perilous road, a fantastical twist, and a slow-burning romance, as only she can.

I loved Carson's previous Girl of Fire and Thorns trilogy, so I picked this up as soon as it came out. Walk On Earth a Stranger is the first in a new trilogy set during the Gold Rush, which made me really happy.

Leah Westfall lives with her parents in 1849 Georgia. There used to be lots of gold in their area, but by the time the story starts, no one is finding much at all. No one but Lee, that is, but that's because she has a special ability. Leah can sense gold, and that allows her to find any nugget and tiny piece anywhere around. Over the previous years she's found enough that people would suspect if they were to take it into town to sell, so the Westfall's fortune is just hidden in their cabin.

And then tragedy strikes and Leah is left alone in the world. It appears her abilities are not a secret from her evil, greedy uncle, and he's determined to use her to find even more gold than he stole from Leah's family. Faced with that prospect, Leah decides to turn into "Lee", a boy looking for adventure, and follow the crowds to California, where it's rumoured there's plenty of gold for everyone, and someone with her abilities would be able to build a life quite easily.

Walk On Earth a Stranger tells of Lee's journey West, and Carson really doesn't sugarcoat things. Things start out well. There are loads of people going, all sorts of convoys, and everyone is well-prepared for what they know will be a difficult trip. Only they're not quite prepared for just how tough things get.

It was really interesting, particularly because I wasn't quite prepared for it, either. This is not a part of US history that I was too familiar with. I'd heard of the California gold rush and I knew the journey West was not an easy one, but no more than that. It was fascinating to see just why it was tough, and just how much so.

I also liked how Carson brings alive the people in the convoy Lee is travelling with, and their interesting interactions. It's a convoy made up of several distinct groups who didn't know each other before the trip but decided to club together at the start point to give themselves a better chance. So it's basically a small collection of tribes, and when the going gets really difficult, the tensions between working together as a group and each person choosing the welfare of their own little group and doing their own thing come to the forefront.

The only real problem with the story is the villain, Lee's uncle. Carson is pretty subtle with most of her characterisation, but not with him. He's just over-the-top evil, and in one of my least-favourite tropes, he's the sort of all-powerful villain who seems to be able to find his prey anywhere. Hmmm....

The other thing I should mention is that this book doesn't really feel like a whole story itself (although the journey sort of functions as one), but as the setup for the real story. There's a sense that the story about the girl who can sense gold is only going to start once Lee gets to California, and this book only serves to get her there, ready to start the real thing in book 2 (nothing much is made of Lee's gift here). That didn't bother me that much, although it did make the ending feel a bit anticlimactic.

Book 2 is coming in September, so if you haven't read this one and it sounds interesting to you, now might be a good time to pick it up.

MY GRADE: A B.

The Sellout, by Paul Beatty

TITLE: The Sellout
AUTHOR: Paul Beatty

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 304
PUBLISHER: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

SETTING: Contemporary US
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: None

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant.

Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.

Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

Another of my Man Booker reads.

The Sellout is satirical exploration of race in a supposedly post-racial USA. The plot, such as it is, involves the narrator's efforts to bring back the city of Dickens, a poor suburb of LA wiped off the maps by city planners too embarrassed by it to acknowledge its existence. So how will he do it? Why, by bringing back segregation and slavery!

The plot doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's not really meant to. Because the plot is not the point here. It's simply a backdrop for what's basically (and I'm totally stealing this from several amazon reviewers) an extended standup routine.

And it's great standup. The humour is ceaseless, with devastating one-liners and images coming fast and keeping coming. It's not the kind of humour that makes you laugh-out-loud, but the kind that makes you wince, because it's a bit too true. Beatty creates a fully-realised world, populated by characters who feel real even when they accept the absurdist occurrences Beatty throws at them with complete naturalness.

My only "issue" is that this is very much a book about the US experience of race, so at certain times I felt that I was missing some of the references (this book is so dense with meaning that I could very well believe that every single word and image choice is chosen for a very particular reason). But I got enough that the book worked perfectly well for me, anyway.

I should also mention that I listened to this one on audio, which might well be the best way to read it. The narrator, Prentice Onayemi, is fantastic, and the audio emphasises the "standup" element.

MY GRADE: A strong B+.

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie

TITLE: And Then There Were None
AUTHOR: Agatha Christie

COPYRIGHT: 1939
PAGES: 320
PUBLISHER: Harper

SETTING: 1930s England
TYPE: Mystery / Thriller
SERIES: None

"Ten . . ."
Ten strangers are lured to an isolated island mansion off the Devon coast by a mysterious "U. N. Owen."

"Nine . . ."
At dinner a recorded message accuses each of them in turn of having a guilty secret, and by the end of the night one of the guests is dead.

"Eight . . ."
Stranded by a violent storm, and haunted by a nursery rhyme counting down one by one . . . as one by one . . . they begin to die.

"Seven . . ."
Which among them is the killer and will any of them survive?

The BBC broadcast a much-talked-about adaptation of And Then There Were None last Christmas. I missed it (oh, poor me, I was sunning myself in Uruguay instead!), but the raves about it made me want to reread the book.

This is one of the non-typical Christie books, the kind which you read and love and then are disappointed when you realise there aren't any more quite like it in Christie's oeuvre. An odd group of people are lured to a mansion on a lonely island off the coast of Devon. None of them know any of the others, and it turns out none of them know the person who invited them. This becomes clear right the first night, when a recording suddenly starts playing, accusing each of them of a crime they've so far got away with.

Ridiculous!, they all cry. This U.N. Owen or Una Owen or whatever their host is really called must be playing a joke, but it's in bad taste, and they will all be leaving in the morning. When one of their group dies, it's a bit worrying, but it must have been an accident, surely. They'll just be careful and leave as soon as they can. But then another person dies, and another, and all in exactly the way coyly described in the nursery rhyme prominently displayed in each of their bedrooms:

Ten little Indian boys went out to dine;
One choked his little self and then there were nine.
Nine little Indian boys sat up very late;
One overslept himself and then there were eight.
...
...
...

And then the next morning there is no boat to take them away, and there is a storm, so there's not much they can do. And after a thorough search of the island makes it clear they are all alone and there's no master villain hiding anywhere, picking them off, the remaining guests start eyeing each other nervously...

This really is a masterful book. The plotting is top-notch: incredibly tense and well put-together, and running like clockwork. There is no way anyone will guess whodunnit, and yet when you find out and you go back and reread, Christie hasn't cheated at all. It's all there.

I was also really impressed by her characterisation. You get 10 people who are basically a type: the soldier of fortune, the hanging judge, the drunk doctor, the athletic, ambitious young woman, the rigid spinster. And yet they are all impressively distinct right from the start. At no point did I confuse them, wonder "Oh, so is X the doctor or the judge?". Even more impressive: I remembered most of them from the time I last reread this, many, many years ago.

I was also pleasantly surprised by something else, which was how well it's held up. Oh, it's very much of its time, starting with the title (the previous one, Ten Little Indians was changed to And Then There Were None for obvious reasons, but that was the second one, changed to after the first one, which used the N word instead of "Indians", became clearly inappropriate even earlier), but continuing on with some of the attitudes expressed. Oh, so the accusation is that you abandoned some natives in Africa to die? But they were only natives, says the character we come to think of as our heroine to the soldier of fortune. The thing is, it turns out she's not our heroine (I hope that's not too much of a spoiler), and we're not being told this by the narrative. The narrative is not insisting that some of these characters are innocent, the narrative is telling us they're guilty and responsible for the consequences of their actions, even the spinster whose rigid morality led to the death of a young servant in her house who 'got herself in trouble'. That's actually a remarkably modern worldview.

The characters were not all I remembered from all those years ago. I fully remembered the resolution, and the fact that I still enjoyed it as much as I did is a testament to just how good this is.

MY GRADE: An A-.

Serious Sweet, by AL Kennedy

TITLE: Serious Sweet
AUTHOR: AL Kennedy

COPYRIGHT: 2016
PAGES: 528
PUBLISHER: Jonathan Cape

SETTING: Contemporary London
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: None

A good man in a bad world, Jon Sigurdsson is fifty-nine and divorced, a senior civil servant in London who hates many of his colleagues and loathes his work for a government engaged in unmentionable acts.

Meg Williams is a bankrupt accountant—two words you don’t want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your résumé. She’s forty-five and shakily sober, living on Telegraph Hill in London, where she can see the city unfurl below her.

Somewhere out there is Jon, pinballing around the city with a cell phone and a letter-writing habit he can’t break. He’s a man on the brink, leaking government secrets and affection for a woman he barely knows as he runs for his life.

Poignant, deeply funny, and beautifully written, Serious Sweet is about two decent, damaged people trying to make moral choices in an immoral world, ready to sacrifice what’s left of themselves for honesty and for a chance at tenderness. As Jon and Meg navigate the sweet and serious heart of London—passing through twenty-four hours that will change them both forever—they tell an unusual and moving love story.

Another read from the Man Booker longlist.

Serious Sweet tells the story of a day in which two damaged people try to meet up and find something good in a world that's otherwise full of cruelty and indifference.

He is Jon Sigurdsson, a disenchanted senior civil servant who's been rebelling against what his department is doing by leaking information. Jon is recently divorced from a woman who treated him with cruelty and contempt, and as a reaction to this, took to writing kind and sweet letters to women. He set that up as a sort of service (advertising it and charging a modest amount for a dozen of bespoke hand-written letters), but he gets as much, if not much more, out of it than his correspondents.

Not that his correspondents don't get quite a lot out of his letters. The second person is one of them, Meg Williams, a woman who's struggling to rebuild her life after a few years in which alcoholism cost her both relationships and career. Jon's letters touched her and helped her, enough to make her take the uncharacterstically bold step of finding him in person.

Jon was just as drawn by Meg's replies to his letters, so that was the first of a couple of meetings. So the meeting on the day of the story is just one more, but as circumstances conspire against their getting together, this one becomes more and more significant.

The bare story told here was one that appealed to me. These are good people who have been deeply wounded, and I was rooting for them to find something good, the kindness and tenderness each desperately needed. At its heart this is a romance, and the relationship was one I believed in. The tone was sad and yet hopeful, and this worked well.

However. Oh, however. My main issue was the writing. It's very challenging. That's not a problem per se; the thing is, it was not challenging in a good way. There's lots and lots and lots of internal monologue interspersed throughout any dialogue or action, and that felt overpowering. It often starts fine, but then devolves into stream of consciousness nonsense. I confess to a prejudice against this particular narrative technique. I accept it can be done well, but I find it all too easy to lose interest when it's not. And I didn't feel it was great here. There are some nuggets of sharp observation, yes, but it felt like wading through treacle to get to them. And there was such a lot of pointless treacle. I really had to force myself to keep going.

The other thing that didn't work for me was the... I guess I could call it "setting" of Jon's life. Jon's supposed to be a senior civil servant, and quite a lot of the plot, such as it is, revolves around that. I was actually drawn by this, because this is my world, and it's not one I see portrayed in fiction very often. There was an initial thrill of recognition: Oh, his office is in Tothill Street? That's probably Caxton House, I wonder if he's supposed to work in DWP. Oh, he clearly does! But that was all it was, superficial recognition of some of the trappings of his life. I didn't really recognise the characters. Jon didn't feel like any senior civil servant I know, with his dithering and seeming isolation (funny thing is, I actually know someone who used to do the job I'm guessing Jon is supposed to be in!). The world of the civil service Kennedy portrays is the stereotype: faceless, anonymous, middle-aged white men. That's not what I see day to day, and it was disappointing.

The whole thing was disappointing, actually. And the most frustrating thing is that the book demonstrates what Kennedy can do. There are these little vignettes at the ends of chapters, basically showing us little scenes around London, and these are fantastic. They are sharply observed and interesting and poignant. I wanted more of that, less of the waffle.

MY GRADE: A C.

Ice and fog

TITLE: On His Watch
AUTHOR: Katie Ruggle

After reading and loving Hold Your Breath, book 1 in Ruggle's Search and Rescue series I went looking for more books and discovered all that was out there was a free prequel novella. I really wanted a bit more time with Ruggle's voice, so I downloaded and started reading it immediately.

On His Watch happens right before Hold Your Breath. The Search and Rescue team are at a school for careers day, demonstrating what ice diving rescue entails. Derek Warner is part of that team, and he's pretty distracted by the presence of one of the teachers, Artemis 'Artie' Rey. Derek and Artie were once together, and Derek is still madly in love with her. When things go pear-shaped and two of the kids get lost, Derek and Artie pair up as part of the search team, and spending time together leads to them finally talking and sorting things out.

I'm afraid the romance here was fine, but a bit lackluster. Nothing to be offended by, but nothing to be excited about, either. The voice was the one I enjoyed so much in Hold Your Breath, though, full of gentle humour. And I loved the glimpse of Lou and Callum, the protagonists of that book. We see here how they met and how the dynamic I enjoyed so much in their own book got started, and it's hilarious.

I think if I'd started with this one I'd probably have decided to buy Hold Your Breath on the strength of the voice and the Lou and Callum scene, and in spite of the lukewarm main romance, but I can't be sure. The perils of the introductory novella when it's clearly not the author's strongest skill!

MY GRADE: A B-.

TITLE: The Tiger in the Smoke
AUTHOR: Margery Allingham

Allingham is the only one of the famous "Golden Age" mystery writers that I hadn't tried yet. I think I saw this one mentioned somewhere and thought I'd start here.

What started as a strange plot where a young woman is about to get married and starts getting letters from her supposedly-late husband quickly turns into a story of underworld characters and a dangerous killer on the loose. I liked the former, but the latter got old really quickly. The sections with the criminal gang are preposterous and horribly dated, and I honestly didn't care (or really get, to be completely honest) about any of the characters or what was going on.

I gave up at about the halfway point. Having read some reviews after, it appears that: 1) Quite a lot of the secondary characters here are recurring characters. I'd probably have got a lot more joy out of them if I'd read previous books, but I hadn't. 2) This is very different from Allingham's other books. I might have to give her another try. I might just start right at the beginning.

MY GRADE: This was a DNF.

All That Man Is, by David Szalay

TITLE: All That Man Is
AUTHOR: David Szalay

COPYRIGHT: 2016
PAGES: 448
PUBLISHER: Jonathan Cape

SETTING: Various European contemporary settings
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: None

A magnificent and ambitiously conceived portrait of contemporary life, by a genius of realism

Nine men. Each of them at a different stage in life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving--in the suburbs of Prague, in an overdeveloped Alpine village, beside a Belgian motorway, in a dingy Cyprus hotel--to understand what it means to be alive, here and now. Tracing a dramatic arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, the ostensibly separate narratives of All That Man Is aggregate into a picture of a single shared existence, a picture that interrogates the state of modern manhood while bringing to life, unforgettably, the physical and emotional terrain of an increasingly globalized Europe. And so these nine lives form an ingenious and new kind of novel, in which David Szalay expertly plots a dark predicament for the twenty-first-century man.

Dark and disturbing, but also often wickedly and uproariously comic, All That Man Is is notable for the acute psychological penetration Szalay brings to bear on his characters, from the working-class ex-grunt to the pompous college student, the middle-aged loser to the Russian oligarch. Steadily and mercilessly, as this brilliantly conceived book progresses, the protagonist at the center of each chapter is older than the last one, it gets colder out, and All That Man Is gathers exquisite power. Szalay is a writer of supreme gifts--a master of a new kind of realism that vibrates with detail, intelligence, relevance, and devastating pathos.

As I've done for the past few years, I'm aiming to read as many of the books on the Man Booker prize longlist as I possibly can before the winner is announced. This year's list actually has quite a few that sound really intriguing to me, and I almost randomly chose All That Man Is to get started.

There's been some low-level controversy about the inclusion of this book in the longlist, as the rules call for novels, and this is more of a short story collection. The only connection between the stories here is in theme and, I guess, sensibility. Whether that is cohesive enough to move this from "collection of works" to "a work" I don't know and, to be honest, I don't care.

Each of the stories gives us a portrayal of a man at a certain point in his life. These are different men, from different backgrounds and nationalities, and at different stages of their lives (we start with a 17-year-old and the central character gets a few years older in each story, until we finish with one close to the end of his life). We see these men in some sort of crisis, somehow displaced from their regular lives and contemplating the meaning of those lives in some way.

These are more vignettes than full stories. The point seems to be to examine a character, rather than to tell a full story. There are no real resolutions here; the stories kind of fade away, rather than come to a climax. I didn't mind this at all, actually, because the observation is well done. Internal lives (and there's a lot of internal contemplation) feel true and well observed, and I liked the little external details reflecting those internal lives. And the key thing is that we're observing these people and the prose is remarkably value-free. We're not judging, we're observing and understanding.

Now, the problem with this is that a secondary effect of the detailed focus on these men is that the female characters are not rendered to the same standard. They don't feel as layered and nuanced as the male characters, but more like objects, characterised only in terms of what function they serve in the male protagonist's story. One could say this is only a function of what Szalay is trying to do here, but I don't think I'd agree with that. Better characterisation of the female characters would not have interfered with the focus on the central characters.

The tone is a melancholy one. Szalay's is a pessimistic view of what man is. It seems to be that man is lonely and adrift, struggling with feelings of meaninglessness. I'm more of an optimist myself, someone who thinks one can find meaning and joy in mundane things, so for all that I liked the detailed observation of the characters, the book probably resonated less with me than it might with others.

The length of the stories really works. The characters are, by necessity of the theme, self-involved. In small chunks, it's just right for the reader to care and not just want them to get over themselves.

The other element that I liked was the European theme. This is basically "All That (European) Man Is". Although there's always some English link, the stories happen all over Europe. There's a French guy from Lille taking a holiday in Crete and meeting two English women. There's a Danish tabloid journalist meeting a Danish politician in Spain. There's a couple of Hungarians going to London for work. There's a Belgian guy taking a car to Poland and meeting up with his Polish girlfriend in Germany on the way. But this is the mundane side of globalisation. If you think "lots of European locations" you probably get the impression things will be all glitzy and glamorous, but here, they mostly really aren't. We do get luxury hotels in London and a yacht in the Mediterranean, but we also get industrial estates in Lille, bargain-basement mass holiday hotels in Crete, and flimsily-built condos in the French Alps. There are plenty of very regular people here, and their stories are not dramatic. But these days regular, unglamorous, commonplace people also get to travel and treat exotic-sounding European locations as commonplace. You get the point of just how far European integration has gone. Reading this right after the shock of the referendum result, it felt very bittersweet.

MY GRADE: A B.

Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson

TITLE: Aurora
AUTHOR: Kim Stanley Robinson

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 466
PUBLISHER: Orbit

SETTING: Space
TYPE: Sci-fi
SERIES: None

Our voyage from Earth began generations ago.

Now, we approach our destination.

A new home.

Aurora.

Brilliantly imagined and beautifully told, Aurora is the work of a writer at the height of his powers.

I really didn't know what to expect when I started this book. You might have noticed that the blurb is pretty cryptic, and the person who recommended it flatly refused to tell me much more than the basic premise. I will now do the same, because I really do think that's the best way to read this. So all I'll say is that the story starts as, after over 150 years of space travel, a generation ship approaches the planetary system where its inhabitants plan to settle.

Although we do focus on particular characters, the scope of the book is not narrow, but wide. The story that is being told is that of the mission to establish a colony in a new planetary system, not the story of particular persons. That's very much a stated premise: with some minor exceptions, what we're getting is the product of the ship's Artificial Intelligence being asked to produce a story of the mission. This works wonderfully, as this AI has slowly been becoming self-aware, and you see that increasing "humanity" as its narration develop. It's a nice, organic development of the concept of storytelling making us human.

Also, I listened to this on audio, and the narrator does an excellent job of the narration. The voice sounds quite machine-like, with slightly odd pauses and a somewhat monotone tone. This description of it sounds like it could be unbearable, but the narrator somehow manages to keep it really "listenable".

Is it hard science fiction? There is a hell of a lot of hard scientific detail... a bit too much, to be honest (although the balance gets better as Ship gets more self-aware), but I thought Robinson was just as interested in the social science. The hard science is important, but mainly for the impact it has on the ship's society and how they react when things happen. That's where the drama truly comes from, and I was gripped.

It works because Robinson gets the characterisation right. The people whose story he's telling are all human. Some are arseholes, but there are no cartoonishly evil characters running around purely for the sake of creating conflict. The conflict feels real and understandable and like something that would actually happen, given human nature.

I'd recommend this.

MY GRADE: A B+.

Two Russian non-fiction DNFs

TITLE: The Romanovs: 1613 - 1918
AUTHOR: Simon Sebag Montefiore

I started this with genuine excitement. It's the story of the Romanov tsars, from the birth of the dynasty in 1613, until Nicholas II's execution in 1918. The introduction promised some truly wild stories and larger-than-life personalities. I was fully on-board. I happily opened the first chapter...

...and encountered some of the flatest and deadest prose ever. The first chapter is basically a recitation of facts. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. And I'm not paraphrasing that much! We get no sense of the people involved. Even worse, the recitation of facts is so bare-bones that there's not enough there for the reader to understand how one thing led to another or why things happened. It's all "And then the next year Poland invaded". Why? No idea.

The positive reviews talk about how the characters come alive, so I wondered if things would get better in later sections, when there is more source material available. So I continued to try to plow through the first sections. I didn't succeed. I'd read 2 or 3 pages, get bored to tears, and stop. And when I put the book down I felt no interest in picking it up again. I had to force myself to do so. This went on for over a month before I gave up.

MY GRADE: A DNF.

TITLE: Travels in Siberia
AUTHOR: Ian Frazier

Clearly I'm on a Russia kick, because I soon as I gave up on The Romanovs, I picked this one up. Travels in Siberia is also non-fiction, a mix of history, social commentary and travelogue. Frazier first visited Siberia when invited to join exiled Russian friends several decades earlier, and that made him obsessed with the place.

Unfortunately, although there are interesting snippets in the approximately 100 pages that I read, the writing style is really dull, particularly on the travel sections. There's a lot of "I did this, and then I did that", in way too much detail about the mundane and not enough on what we readers are interested in.

MY GRADE: A DNF.

Pairing Off, by Elizabeth Harmon

TITLE: Pairing Off
AUTHOR: Elizabeth Harmon

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 250
PUBLISHER: Carina Press

SETTING: Contemporary Russia and US
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: First in the Red Hot Russians series

American figure skater Carrie Parker's Winter Games dreams were dashed when her philandering partner caused one of the greatest scandals in skating history. Blacklisted from competing in the United States, her career is over…until she receives a mysterious invitation and is paired with the most infuriating, talented—and handsome—skater she's ever met.

Russian champion Anton Belikov knows sacrifice. He gave up a normal life and any hope of a meaningful relationship to pursue his dream. And he's come close—with a silver medal already under his belt, the next stop is the gold. All he needs is a partner. While he's never forgotten the young American skater he seduced one long-ago night in Amsterdam, he never expected to be confronted with their past…never mind share the ice with her.

When what starts as a publicity stunt grows into something real, Carrie and Anton's partnership will test their loyalties to family, country and each other. With only a few months to train for the competition of a lifetime, can they master technique and their emotions, or will they lose their footing and fall victim to the heartaches of their pasts?

Carrie Parker's promising career in pairs figure skating collapsed in a scandal when her arsehole of a partner was caught in bed with a judge. Most people just would not believe she had nothing to do with his transparent attempts at cheating. So when Carrie receives an invitation from a Russian trainer to compete for that country, she decides to accept. She's shocked to discover her prospective partner is Anton Belikov, one of Russia's best, and the man with whom she had a one-night stand several years earlier.

Turns out Anton doesn't recognise Carrie. Even though that night was as earth-shattering for him as it was for her, he was a bit hazy (this happened in Amsterdam, so you can guess what was going on!) and she looked completely different. But even not recognising her, he's always admired Carrie's skating, so when his long-time partner deserted him at the last minute for a partner she felt gave her more of a chance for a medal, he asked his trainer to try to get her as his new partner. After all, it seemed like a bit of a sign that both would be partner-less at the same time.

Carrie's first reaction is to turn around and leave. How can she skate with this man? But she's eventually persuaded to stay, and the work starts.

It's hard. Carrie is initially expected to basically slot into the old partner's slot and just learn the routine that was prepared for Anton and Olga (the previous partner). Problem is, Olga and Carrie are completely different kinds of skaters. Carrie is used to just adapting herself to her partner's preferences (remember, arsehole previous partner), so at first she doesn't complain. But when she and Anton start warming up to each other and actually start talking, their partnership really takes off, both off and on the ice.

I really liked a lot of this book, and a lot of it was down to the setting and setup. Harmon clearly loves Russia. The title of the series, Red Hot Russians, might suggest the sort of icky essentialisation found in so many Harlequin Presents book, where the hero's background (Sicilian! Latino!) serves only as a shorthand way of indicating that he's alpha and macho. This is a much more thoughtful book than that, though, and the setting is much more than a way of screaming "Exotic!". I really can't say how authentic the Russian characters or the setting are, but they felt distinct and vivid, and that was enough for me to enjoy this a hell of a lot.

And I just loved the whole ice skating element, which is a huge part of the book. We get as much of the skating partnership as of the romantic one. I'm not the world's biggest ice skating fan, more the kind that will only watch it when the Winter Olympics are on, but this was just fascinating to me. Again, no idea about the accuracy or verisimilitude, but I loved reading about it.

The romance, unfortunately, while starting out pretty good, didn't quite live up to the rest. The problem was mainly about the characters separately, rather than with how they interacted.

Anton felt a little bit passive, particularly in his relationship with Olga. He's been unhappy with her for years. He mentions he stayed with her after her constant cheating (albeit having agreed on a non-exclusive relationship) because he didn't want to harm their on-ice partnership. Fair enough. But as the present-day section of the book starts, she's dumped her as a skating partner, and he's still travelling to see her every weekend, I'm not quite sure what for. He doesn't even seem to be in it for the sex. He does do the right thing in the end, but I really don't get why he didn't do it much earlier, other than the author wanting to maintain the tension of Carrie thinking Anton is taken.

As for Carrie, she feels a bit naive and almost stupid. She just doesn't get the potential implications of what she's doing, when they really seemed pretty obvious. Her dad is a Southern politician, and his constituents have a little bit of a problem with his daughter pairing up with a Russian skater and (gasp!) taking Russian citizenship. No big surprise. The Cold War might be over, but I can totally see people still having that distrust (my quite right-wing parents, born in the 40s,  still call anyone who's too left-wing for their tastes a "bolche", for bolshevik). So it was obvious that Carrie's actions would have consequences on her father's career, but Carrie just doesn't consider it at all. Even worse, the narrative very clearly takes Carrie's side, implying this is something she couldn't have predicted. Sorry, but no. She really should have known her taking up Russian citizenship was going to go down like a lead balloon with her father's conservative Southern voters, rather than be so terribly surprised. I'm not saying that she shouldn't have done it, just that she should have done it after considering the consequences.

The other issue is that sometimes the book felt a bit rough (it's a debut, and it shows). Mainly this showed in how crudely Harmon created conflict in the second half. There's plenty here that could be really interesting, like cultural differences and the stress of trying to pull off a comeback with the press in both countries against Carrie. Instead, Harmon has Carrie decide that because of her relationship with her dead mother she can't get close to anyone and must therefore push Anton away. It made very little sense to me and was, frankly, a bit tedious. Harmon should have trusted that what she had was more than enough, rather than trying to suddenly introduce this new element right at the end.

All that said, there's a lot of potential here, though. In addition to what I described about the ice skating and the setting, Harmon at times does quite interesting things. For instance, I was initially a bit annoyed at Olga's potrayal... the bitchy other woman who lies, cheats and manipulates. I do think it could have been done a bit more subtly, but then Harmon provides some more layers for her, and she did start making sense as a character and becoming much more interesting. There's loads of little touches like that going on, enough that I'd definitely give this author another chance, and not just because the next book also features ice skating and a Russia setting!

MY GRADE: A B-.

The Dead, by Ingrid Black

TITLE: The Dead
AUTHOR: Ingrid Black

COPYRIGHT: 2003
PAGES: 416
PUBLISHER: Headline

SETTING: Contemporary Dublin
TYPE: Mystery
SERIES: Starts a series

Five years ago, the serial killer known as the Night Hunter vanished without trace after murdering five women. Now another killer claiming to be the notorious Ed Fagan is back prowling the streets of Dublin in search of new victims - but Saxon, former FBI agent turned true crime author, knows that it can’t really be him. Joining forces with Detective Superintendent Grace Fitzgerald of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, Saxon soon finds herself in danger as the body count starts to rise and old secrets come to light.

Ingrid Black is a writing team made up by married couple Eilis O'Hanlon and Ian McConnel. I came across this novel after reading an article written by O'Hanlon last year, after the book had been plagiarised. The article itself was interesting, but I thought the book sounded even more so, so I bought it.

Saxon is a former FBI agent who used to specialise in serial killers. After writing a tell-all book that destroyed her relationship with her former colleagues, she ended up in Ireland, advising the Dublin police in the case of the Night Hunter serial killer. That case ended abruptly when main suspect Ed Fagan seemingly fell off the face of the earth. Saxon stayed, though, not least because of her relationship with Detective Superintendent Grace Fitzgerald.

And then, five years later, Fagan is back. Apparently. Someone is sending letters to the papers claiming to be him and directing the police to bodies, which start piling up. The only problem is, Saxon knows it can't be Fagan. Because five years earlier, she killed him.

This started out well, but ultimately foundered. The case was interesting enough in premise, but the execution of the investigation never really gelled. I think the problem was that we were seeing it from the point of view of Saxon, who although she's getting all of what's going on through her relationship with Grace (and that felt a bit off -this is the boss's lover who's been brought in as a consultant. Even though she's obviously got very relevant and valuable experience, it felt a bit Roarke-ish, and that has never sat well with me), is outside the investigation and doing her own thing. And it feels like she's basically flailing about, happening upon clues almost at random. There's no plan or coherence in how she investigates.

I think the bigger problem is that I disliked Saxon and had very little respect for her as an investigator. She is incredibly cavalier about doing stuff that could potentially get Fitzgerald into huge trouble, like breaking into the home of someone she suspects. She doesn't particularly think about it or every acknowledge the potential consequences of what she's doing on Fitzgerald. She also withholds the very crucial information of Ed Fagan being dead, even though she sees that quite a lot of effort on the police's part is being wasted -effort that, if well-directed, could have had a positive effect on the investigation.

There are also loose ends. At one point Saxon becomes convinced that Fagan must not have operated alone, and gives really compelling reasons for thinking so... compelling enough that I was shocked she hadn't considered that earlier. That gets dropped completely in the resolution.

And oh, that resolution. That's when my respect for Saxon hit rock bottom. This might be a bit spoilerish, although it does not reveal the identity of the killer, so be warned: Basically, what happens is that Saxon realises who the murderer must be, and confronts the person, armed with a gun. And then this person basically goes "oh, well, let's have a drink and I'll tell you all about it" and starts serving her scotch -which she drinks!! Refill after refill. And what do you know, the scotch has poison in it. Seriously!

The other disappointment was in the personal stuff. The romantic relationship between Saxon and Fitzgerald had the potential to be really interesting. Unfortunately, there's really not much there about that. They practically don't interact, other than talking about the case. There's really no chemistry, and the reader is given no clue to what they see in each other and why they're together.

This is all really too bad. The plot really had potential and the authors do succeed in creating a very atmospheric setting. Unfortunately, the story execution and the characters didn't deliver.

MY GRADE: A C-.