Tigers in Red Weather by Lisa Klaussman

Narrated consecutively by five different characters: the beautiful forceful Nick, her daughter Daisy, downtrodden cousin Helena, handsome husband Nick and Helena's trouble son Ed, Klaussman effortlessly evokes the life of the glamorous top echelon of East Coast American society.  Tiger House is the island holiday home of Nick and her ancestors.  Their yacht bobs at the end of the dock, days are spent playing tennis, nights at the club drinking martinis.  We move back and forth through time as events are narrated from the different character's perspectives, from Nick and Helena's time living together in the late 1940s awaiting their husbands' return from World War II and Hughes' time in wartime Europe, through their first days as full time wives, to the late 1950s with Daisy and Ed as tweens, to the late 1960s, counter culture beginning to percolate even into the island world of pastel dresses and sports blazers, Daisy and Ed now full grown.  Beneath the polished and dazzling surface of this world lie bitter misunderstandings, secret passions and damaging secrets.  This could have dissolved into cliche, but the quality of Klaussman's writing never this, each of her characters speaks with clarity and individuality.  Her descriptions evoke the world of Tiger House in all its summer heat, scents and colours are vivid:  flowers, privilege, perfume.

The Horologican: A Day's Jaunt Through The Lost Words Of The English Language by Mark Forsyth

 

A thoroughly entertaining romp through rare and obsolete words that are appropriate for different times of the day. Forsyth arranges his 19 chapters chronologically from waking to turning in for the night, taking the reader from 6am to 12 midnight, from dawn, dressing, breakfast and commute through work, lunch and procrastination to tea time, food shopping, going out and returning home to bed. This book was to me a delight, light and witty in tone but erudite in knowledge. Forsyth readably conveys his passion for words that beautifully express more exactly our daily mundane experiences. Thanks to him I can now confidently forecast that post Christmas lunch my husband will pass out wamble crompt on the sofa, a word that perfectly rolls in the mounth to onomatopoeically speak of overindulgence and concomitant lethargy.

Communion Town: A City in Ten Chapters by Sam Thompson

A hallucinogenic book.  Thompson presents us with 10 chapters, each a different character describing their experiences in a city almost like any other great city: of slums, murders, subway stations, warren-like alleys and bright public façades.  The Flâneur of Glory Port - a Jack-the-Ripper type bogeyman - and deformed mutants haunt the shadows in many of the stories.  The narrators vary in widely in social position and the stories in timbre.  A hard-boiled detective speaks as if channelling Sam Spade, another Sherlock Holmes.  Slaughtermen, immigrants, reclusives, automatons, all speak and reveal a different city, one that is just slightly futuristic, tangible, chilling and mesmerising.

The Ghost of Grotteskew by Guy Bass

Stitch Head, the small patchwork first Frankensteinesque creation of mad scientist Professor Erasmus faces a new threat. To his home in gothic Castle Grotteskaw, to his friends the almost-living creations of Erasmus, and to his only human friend the fearless Arabella from the nearby village of Grubbers Nubbin. As he lies on stage trying to remain motionless playing his part as the dead body in the Creative Creations Collective Amateur Dramatics Society's murder mystery production he hears a voice. And no one else is hearing it. Arabella identifies a haunting but as they follow the voice through the castle unusually for her she becomes terrified. The ghost is the spirit of Mawley Crackbone, a fiend who terrorised Grubbers Nubbin. The villagers colluded with Professor Erasmus and he agreed to poison Crackbone in return for his body to experiment on after death. And Stitch Head has something Crackbone wants back. His heart. Oh, and revenge on the people who had him killed. The discovery of a new creation deep under the castle leads Stitch Head to make a terrible deal with the ghost of Crackbone and mayhem is unleashed.

Guy Bass' text is accompanied on every page by Pete Williamson's evocative cartoony black and white drawings and the whole is an immersive experience, bits of text in spooky fonts, chapter pages with hilarious insane quotes from Professor Erasmus, diagrams and maps. A wonderful book for any reader with a taste for the ghoulish, probably suitable for 7 to 9 years old. My 9 year old loves it.

The Heart Broke In by James Meek

The book opens with Ritchie Shephard, ageing rock star now tv talent show judge, as he walks through his tv studio surrounded by rumours an affair with a underage girl on his show - untrue as it happens in this case. He himself is reflecting on the extramarital sex he is having with previous contestant Nicole. In Ritchie Meek gives us a narcissistic self obsessed seedy sterotype we all believe we know so well from the endless flow of tv shows of this kind, the man as morally bankrupt as the 'talent' on such shows. His wife Karin, once also his partner in their band the Lazygods, and their children Dan and Ruby immediately attain a kind of martyr halo. So far so ordinary. However, nothing is ever that simple and Meek deftly leads us through a portrait of an extended family and away from sterotype to understanding.

Ritchie's sister Bec appears at first to be the light to Ritchie's dark. A researcher on malaria, striving to find a cure for the disease that maims countless lives in the developing world, she has infected herself with a parasite that gives immunity but brings on blindness. Bec's mentor and boss is Harry, estranged from his evangelist son but much closer to his nephew Alex who he treats as the son he wished he had had. Alex is a scientist working on the architecture of the human cell and he follows Bec's research with a gentle obsessiveness.

Alex's marriage to Maria is dissolving under the strain of infertility. Meek draws the characters are drawn together as Bec and Alex's lives finally intersect, Ritchie's construction of deceit begins to fall apart and Alex's younger brother Dougie and Bec's former lover newspaper editor Val are thrown into the mix. Halos and horns alike begin to slip with the pain of betrayal and misunderstandings.

Meek has given us a meticulous work which is so well crafted stereotypes are undermined the moment they are presented, and I will never look at tv science programmes in the same way again.

Comics Sketchbooks: The Unseen World of Today's Most Creative Talents by Steven Heller

A hefty coffee table book packed with the studies and notes on sketchbooks from 82 of the foremost comic book artists working in the field today. It is a generous work, artists showing how the pristine work that we read in their comics comes to the page. And it is inspiring, showing how different artists work their way from idea to finished product.

Grimm Tales For Young and Old by Philip Pullman

Pullman's skill as a master storyteller is brought here to bear on Grimm's fairy tales, both familiar and less so.

I own several books of fairy tales including the definitive The Annotated Brothers Grimm so why should I want this? Because Pullman doesn't just regurgitate Grimms' tales, he selects and retells them so beautifully. Because the book itself is beautiful, a large weighty hardback with a ribbon to mark the pages. And because after a hiatus I am now reading to my 9 year old again and together we are discovering / rediscovering the stories that are the underpinning of our culture. Many are disturbing and gruesome, all are annotated with good brief notes on the other versions of these tales in existence.

Crochet: The Complete Guide by Jane Davis

This is just such a wonderful book, it is spiral bound and laid out just like I would wish. Each stitch is described with excellently clear illustrations and text with the symbol alongside, the stitch patterns library works logically from easy to harder stitches and the small selection of patterns are simple and inspiring. Unfortunately the book can't be used as a beginners book for the UK because the stitches given are American crochet, what they call single crochet we in the UK call double crochet, their double crochet is treble. My concern would be that if I learned US crochet it would be more difficult to switch to UK crochet. It is such a shame, this would otherwise be the perfect starter book.

Mo Said She Was Quirky by James Kelman

24 hours inside the mind of Helen, pretty much stream of consciousness.  Helen is a croupier working nights at a London West End casino.  She has a 6 year old daughter Sophie, is divorced from Sophie's father and lives with her boyfriend Mo in a tiny flat in south London.

On this day Helen is on her way home from her shift in a taxi when she is startled by the sight of a pair of homeless men walking in front of them.  He seems to be Helen's brother Brian, lost to her years earlier when he walked out of their Glasgow home after a fight with their father.  Unable to rest as she so desperately needs to do she is sat in the kitchen as Mo and Sophie wake, startling her from her reverie on old family photographs.  As they begin their day Helen retreats to bed waking as Sophie's school day ends and Mo prepares to go to work as a waiter.

Kelman brilliantly evokes the fractured sense of a life of drugery, Helen is never rested enough or present enough to be a parent to Sophie and the shadow of her own past, unloved by her mother, abandoned by her beloved brother, negatively affects her judgement of Sophie's actions and innocence.

It is so noisy in Helen's head, things unspoken, sentences half spoken making the reader wonder and speculate.  Helen worries incessantly and conversely talks herself into not acting on the things her instinct warns her are not right.

This was a book that returned to my mind over and over, the sad bleakness of Helen's life living the twilight world of a nightshift worker fighting to make ends meet, not a comfortable book but a brilliantly written one.

Four Children and It written and read by Jacqueline Wilson

Rosalind has been sent to live with her dad and stepmother for the summer while her mother goes to sumer school and is not best pleased.  Rosalind is a bookish girl, her brother Robbie is similar, lost in a world of playing with his toy animals.  But at their dad's house they have to cope with their new stepsister Samantha, always appropriately known as Smash, and life with a dad who always seems to be disappointed in them.  However, there is compensation in the form of Maudy, their new half sister, an adorable toddler.  On a day out having a picnic in the local woods they find a strange creature in the sand and Rosalind recognises it, it's the sand fairy or passamead from one of her books, a creature that can grant wishes.

In a wonderful tribute to E Nesbit's Five Children and It Wilson shows just what can happen when your wishes do come true, and continues the tradition of the children learning a series of hard and entertaining lessons when things go wrong.  Wilson brings Nesbit's classic right up to date, rather than five children from one family we have a fractured family with all the conflicting loyalties and difficult feelings that Wilson writes so deftly about.  But there is the same feeling of 'what if' that still enchants.

Wilson reading her own book brings an extra wonderful touch, she is as entertaining a reader as a writer and her love for her character and story is so evident.

Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Perception by Claudia Hammond

Claudia Hammond presents solid evidence culled from scientific papers and in this wonderfully accessible book presents an overview of how we perceive time and our minds can betray us.  She looks at how our brains perceive the passage of time and the illusions that reveal our weaknesses, how people with synaesthesia perceive time and how we can work with the feeling of never having enough time in our days.  Hammon writes in a clear good humoured style, describing the extremes psychologists have gone to in the cause of discovering how our brains perceive time, from shutting themselves away in ice caves to recording then trying to recall every day of their lives.  She speaks elegantly of the pysiological structures in our brains and bodies that perceive the passage of time without the presence of an actual internal clock. A really enjoyable education.

Freddie & Me: A Coming of Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody by Mike Dawson (gn)

An interesting chronicle of life lived with an obsession with Queen.  Mike Dawson is born Scottish but grows up in the Midlands before moving with his family to America, where Queen are virtually unknown.  Like many of us of the same generation he describes the first time he saw the groundbreaking band on television with their strange videos and Mercury's awesome voice.  I liked the nice touches of Mike's parents giving him his first Queen album on tape.  Relations with family and the tensions of growing up with an older brother and younger sister are well narrated.

Ocean of Life: How Our Seas Are Changing by Calum Roberts

This is a clarion call to action by a Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York.  Much of his prose is a slow read because he writes as a scientist, there are few quick soundbites, just a mountain of evidence with regard to how the seas have changed since humans evolved.  He takes us through all the science of oceanography and marine biology, winds and currents, tides, deoxygenation, dead zones, disease and marine farming, history, acidity and warming with remarkably little repetition.

Roberts begins at the beginning, with our impact as hunter gatherers, and moves through industrialisation and mechanisation showing how our methods of using the seas, both as a source for food and as a sink for our waste, have grown exponentially over the past 200 years.  The seas are not as visible to the lay person as land and the effects of global warming upon them have been less obvious, but they are now becoming more so as the sea warms, the ice caps melt, the water becomes more acidic, areas of deoxygenated water grow and the stresses the seas are placed under are exacerbated by human needs for food.

The science Roberts lays out from multiple sources demonstrates the untenability of claims of climate change, but remarkably this book is not a gloomy one.  Roberts is a scientist and as such he gives the fully balanced view.  He demonstrates there are many unknowns, that life within the seas is evolving  and the ways in which the marine environment ultimately evolves is unknown and may be of benefit, but that the problem may well be that humans will not survive the changes they have wrought.  Roberts works with many marine conservation agencies and believes that conscientious stewardship of the sea is both possible and beginning to take place.

A worthwhile task to read, thoroughly educating and well balanced, and you will never look at the seas in the same way again.

Judge Dredd The Art of Kenny Who: The Cam Kennedy Collection by John Wagner, Alan Grant, Gordon Rennie and Cam Kennedy

I simply have not laughed this much at a comic in ages.  Judge Dredd is Mega-City One's infamous police officer, the 2000AD parody of American policing culture, a man who is judge, jury and executioner (frequently) in a futuristic police state city, the man who's famous tagline is 'I am the Law!'.   Kenny Who comes to Mega-City One from the Caledonian Hab Zone to make his fortune as an artist for Big 1 Comics.  An innocent abroad in the predatory city he quickly brings himself to the attention of Dredd, getting himself bitten by a rouge human and ending up in jail after threatening the Senior Editor of Big 1 Comics and smashing the robots who it turns out are actually drawing the comics.  It's a merciless parody of the big American comics publishers, of stereotypes of Scots and just brilliantly illustrated by Kennedy.  And that's just one of the stories in this collection, pages of artwork that are so far from the standard grid plan.

John Carter: A Princess of Mars by Roger Langridge and Filipe Andrade

This is a graphic novel adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' first Barsoom novel and I have to admit I haven't read the original, but the adapatation is well drawn and full of life.

John Carter is a prospector in the Arizona desert in the early days of America.   He wakes up from being overcome by fumes while escaping men on horseback to find himself stranded on Mars, the prisoner of green many armed lizard like creatures who call themselves Tharks.  He can understand them but they cannot understand him.  When they capture a human princess Dejah Thoris Carter's affections are engaged and he fights to free her.

Andrade's drawings of the humans has an epic feel, all muscle definition, flowing hair and a Grecian feel.  The martians with their green flesh and multiple arms are scary but are bipedal and easy to perceive as sentient intelligent beings and the battle scenes are beautifully drawn.

The Fourth Crow by Pat McIntosh

Maister Gil Cunningham is Blacader's quaestor, the man in medieval Glasgow charged with investigating suspicious deaths and bringing the perpetrators to justice, in effect a detective.  A woman has been tied to St Mungo's Cross to cure her melancholic madness, not unusual in itself, but now she is dead.  Gil's investigation rapidly becomes more convoluted, McIntosh weaves together medieval Scots with early Glasweigian life where the church ordered the hours of the day and the law of the land into an engrossing mystery with plenty of twists and turns.

Tony Robinson's Weird World of Wonders: Greeks

Robinson has written an excellent book, rather than just being a collection of disparate facts about Greeks it is a narrative of what we know of Greek history over time, how our knowledge of Greek history has been obtained and how reliable it is, how myth and fact can be connected. All the usual suspects are there, gods, the olympics, architecture, alphabets, Alexander the Great and warfare, but it's couched in a coherant narrative excellently illustrated with loads of photographs and cartoons by Del Thorpe. Really brings history to life.

Tilly: The Ugliest Cat in the Shelter by Celia Haddon

Celia Haddon fosters cats for her local Cats Protection League, some have become permanent residents, some are just passing through.  When she meets Tilly the terrified 18 month old is wedged at the back of her pen trying desperately not to be seen.  On being taken home she is for a long time the invisible cat, only venturing out at night, but in time Haddon's patience wins her over and she becomes the affectionate sweet cat she never had the chance to be.  Haddon meanwhile is struggling with the emotional effects of caring for her terminally ill husband reflects on the ability of her feline companions to be sensitive to and respond to her sadnesses.  A great book for any cat lover, written not from the point of view of the mad woman stinking of cat pee overrun by 50 cats, but an animal behaviourist who has a deep understanding of feline nature and their species and individual needs.

Doodlepedia by Doring Kindersley

I ordered this for my 9 year old who is really into her drawing and art and she loves it.  It's quite large, about 25 by 30cm, and each double page spread contains a drawing, information about and around the drawing and white space for your child to add to and create their own drawings.  The range of information is broad and perfect for boys and girls, for instance, the page I'm looking at on crocodiles contains a spread of black and white illustration of a swamp and your child is invited to colour all the crocodiles.  Information is given on the page, that crocodiles are carnivores, what they eat, how big they grow and where they live.  This would and has been a perfect book for car journeys, just add a pack of coloured pens / crayons and I don't think you'll hear anything for a while!

The Deadman's Pedal by Alan Warner

Warner returns to the Port, the fictionalised version of Oban which was the setting for his earlier novels Morvern Callar and The Sopranos in this wonderful book. He has spooled the clock back four decades to the early 1970s and given us a male narrator: 15 year old Simon Crimmonds. His family relatively affluent; his father is a Yorkshireman running a fleet of 10 red and cream liveried haulage lorries, he has a small brother Jeff and his mother endlessly tends the grounds of their large modernised house in the village of Tulloch just outside the Port. Tulloch Villa is 'a large, two-storey, Victorian dwelling with hardly a whisper of Gothic' on the shores of the sea loch. 

Simon finds first love and sex with 'little ray of golden sun' Nikki Caine, escaping together on his 50cc Yamaha motorbike, 'wenching' where they can, be it dark lanes or the back green behind her council house, outside the tiny bedroom she shares with her older sister Karen. 

Simon is not sure what he wants from his life, but it isn't the life his father - who left school without qualifications - has planned for him. Idly wandering into the Labour Exchange one day he ends up applying for what he thinks is a job at the hospital where Karen is a nurse, but turns out to be a trainee railwayman working with the new diesel engines in direct competition with his father. Despite his best efforts he gets the job and is pitched into a world of older men, men with bodies shattered by decades of hard manual work, hands immune to pain from endless hours shovelling coal as firemen for the steam trains they served on.

The Deadman's Pedal is in some ways a coming of age novel, we witness Simon grow as learns to handle the engines and haul passengers and goods from the Port blindly over the moors to link with the Glasgow trains, to drink heavy with the railwaymen and fend off rampant socialist Red Hannan's imprecations to join the cause. He meets Alexander, English boarding school educated scion of the great house at Broken Moan high above the port, his restless sister Varie and their ex army officer class father, Commander of the Pass, Andrew Bultitude. Alexander introduces Simon to the addictions of foreign literature and vinyl music, Varie to lust after a girl moving into the world of university beyond the Port and smoking dope.

But this book is much more that a simple bildungsroman. What shines, as ever with Warner, is his precise detail and dialogue. The evocation of provincial Scottish life in the early 1970s is utterly compelling and meticulous, from the characterisation of war-raised conservative parents versus their more sexually liberated but still emotionally conservative children, to the particulars such as ownership of colour tv to mark out the more affluent families. Warner's exquisite passages of Simon and the other railwaymen on the trains could in less able hands have easily been pedantic, but are here infused with the freshness of Simon experiencing it for the first time, a gone world of mechanical manual railways, signalmen and paraffin lanterns. Warner metonymically uses touches such as cigarettes smoked: the old railwaymen smoke roll ups, Simon and his friends Embassys, perhaps symbolic of wartime frugality versus 70s convenience, or a move from the values of hand work and craft to consumerism. Warner's writers craft is there in the difference in the feel of Nikki and Varie's hair, the way that one when riding pillion lays her head on Simon's back turning from the road ahead while the other looks over his shoulder to see it, in bare feet with red nail varnished toe nails, in the colour of a pair of eyes. It is in the fact that the date roundel at Tulloch Villa, built in 1881, has never been engraved.

Warner also uses his usual darkly humourous flair for gifting names and nicknames: John Penalty is paying the price for a life on the railways, hips crumbling; Shoutin' Darroch rarely speaks; and English educated Varie bears the only obviously Scottish name among the younger generation, but her name is an Anglicized phoenetic translation of the Gaelic name Mhairi so English people will not have trouble pronouncing it. Gaelic is a language in which word sound and visual appearance have at best a passing acquaintance and Varie's parents' insidious act of exchanging a language accessible only through local knowledge for transparency and obviousness appears symbolic of her obvious poor little rich girl version of wild child and her lack of mystery and opacity.

And always behind everything is the landscape and its ability to alter people: the desolate lands above the Port that Simon travels through on train and motorbike; the den he and friend Galbraith construct high above the Port; the hydroelectric dam loch Andrew Bultitude commissioned which drowned a village and his mother's home; and the streams that cut through the hills which bring about the dramatic events that end the novel as Simon takes a good train over the moors with and increasingly ailing Penalty.

This is the book Warner has been speaking of for years, and it was worth the wait.

Nightwalk: A Journey to the Heart of Nature by Chris Yates

Yates has used a simple and effective framework, a walk over one night on the North Downs. Although a well known fisherman and writer on the subject, once a year in summer he gets the urge to walk out under the stars and keep moving throughout the night. This book is a record of a single walk but also reflections on his childhood within nature, encounters both on the night and previously with wildlife and their habitats at night, and the differences in quality between night and day.

I was initially a little irritated with Yates' need to name rather than just be within his environment, but his lyrical prose and evocation of all the things that make me need to be in and around the natural environment had be utterly captivated by the end. To me, this is an important addition to the nature writing genre, many books have been written about walking but this is the first I've read about the unique qualities of our night time environment.

Only Human by Gareth Roberts

A good short read for an afternoon or a great book for kids, this Doctor Who story goes right back to series one and features Rose, Christopher Ecclestone's Doctor and Captain Jack.

We open with a strange diary entry from 7 year old Chantal in the year 438,533. Humans are obviously still around, but language has shifted. Chantal speaks of 'wrong-feelings' and genetically re-engineering her cat.

From this unsettling entry we are hurtled into far more familiar territory, the carnage of people in fancy dress in a present day nightclub, a brawl begun over one bloke looking at another's girlfriend the wrong way and the thug who bites off more than he can chew when he picks a fight with a caveman. Except this one really is a caveman, well, a Neanderthal to be precise, a long long way from his own time.

Cue the TARDIS, and Rose, the Doctor and Jack just about to go on holiday to Kegron Pluva when a flashing warning light indicates a temporal disturbance and, as usual, the holiday is derailed for high adventure in 2005AD and 29,185BC involving Neanderthals, Homo Sapiens, humans from the 437th century and some lethal genetic engineering. The very best of Doctor Who, excellent witty characterisation and great imagination.

Walker's idea is very interesting, but the execution less so. Julia is an ordinary Californian teenager, waking up with her friend Hanna from a sleepover to another sunny morning. But everything has changed, the spin of the earth is slowing. Hanna's Mormon family leave for Utah to receive guidance from their leaders and when she returns their friendship has shattered apart. Julia's loneliness and her longing for the boy next door, Seth, is set against a landscape of unfolding horrors. The days continue to lengthen, becoming lethally hot, the night temperatures dipping to below freezing. The magnetosphere falters and fails, unleashing radiation onto the Earth's surface, and flora and fauna begin to die.

This would have been excellent as an epic, but it feels slight and not worked out.  Walker's use of an ordinary teenage life with the horrors of high school, adolescene and the tensions of tensions within her own family and divided loyalties is a refreshing angle. It was a brilliant idea but so disappointing in the end, I wanted to know more!

I freely admit, when it comes to a book I like closure, real life isn't like that so I like books to be like that. 

12 year old Adam Ryan is found standing in a clearing with his shoes full of blood. The police have been searching for him and his friends Peter and Jamie, they are never found. Adam has no memory of what happened to him or his companions.

Twenty years on Adam is now known as Rob and heading up a murder investigation. An archaeological dig is taking place on the site of the woods his friends disappeared in. A little girl's body has been found on a ritualistic stone table, her name is Katy and she was a star ballerina about to go to the Royal School of Ballet. As Rob and his DI partner Cassie investigate their progress is slow and difficult, but there is clearly something wrong at the heart of Katy's family. Rob's life begins to unravel in the presence of the place where so much unknown horror unfolded in his own life and the tension is ratcheted up and up.

I understood the reasons for Rob's constant reflections along the lines of 'this is how it all went wrong' but it irritated me, as did the lack of resolutions. I like neat ends in books, so sue me!

Mountains of the Mind: A History of A Fascination by Robert McFarlane

A wonderful read that is not just for those who feel the need to climb higher and go further than others have gone before, but also for those like me who are content to learn about the seemingly contradictory addictive drive for glory and zen like pursuit of inner enlightenment that makes up that drive.  This is not just a well written book about mountains, it is about how Western society has changed its attitudes towards mountains through history.  McFarlane speaks of the early accounts of travellers and revelations of Romanticism with its reverence for the sublime and wild, high and remote places.  He speaks of our changing in understanding, from mountains as an antediluvian remnant to the current understanding of deep time and the enormous geological processes that have thrust mountain ranges up and the glacial processes that have worn them down.  This is a truly wonderful book that, as with all of McFarlane's, pivots around the life of a man, in this case Mallory, the man who died on his third attempt to climb Everest, and his internal struggle between beloved wife and the drive to reach the summit.

The Adoption by Anne Berry

In 1948 young unmarried mother Bethan signs over her unborn baby to an adoption agency.  In the present day Lucilla contemplates middle age, her happy marriage, her grown up children, her ageing spaniel and the question over the identity of her mother.  Lucilla raised her children with kindness and strength but her own childhood under her adoptive parents was repressive and grim, marred by a lack of love. Indeed, when at 14 she is told she was adopted all she feels is relief.  Berry traces the lives of three very different women and the choices that made a sadness of all their lives.  Beautifully told but very sad.

Pigeon by Barbara Allen

This is my first of the Reaktion series of monographs on individual species of animals and I was pleasantly surprised, I expected the book to be quite slight and received a lovely heavy 230 odd page book that fits nicely in the hand and is full of colour and monochrome illustrations and photographs.

Pigeons are a much maligned species, villified as 'rats with wings', as pests in interesting contrast to their albino versions, doves. They live in such close communion with us, exchanging their natural habitat of cliff faces for the vertical faces of our cities, that they are easily overlooked. They are assumed to be stupid and dirty, but the truth is very different.

Allen takes us through chapters on the physiology and natural history of pigeons and doves, their social life, intelligence, the physical mutability which made them beloved of Darwin and other pigeon fanciers, and their ability to home. She identifies the history of doves and pigeons in literature, religion and mythology and examines their relationship with humans, as food and as messengers. Her final chapter is on the pigeon species humans have driven to extinction: the dodo, solitaires, and the passenger pigeon, not from competition but rather wholesale slaughter.

There is some repetition between chapters, but in all this was a really enjoyable education, pigeons have companioned humans since the beginning of built civilization and this book elegantly explores how the relationship between bird and human has evolved right up to the present day.

The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane

MacFarlane completes his trilogy of nature writing with a meditation on walking. It can be read seperately but dovetails beautifully with its companions. MacFarlane's first book, Mountains of the Mind, was an exploration of how the cultural concept of mountains has changed over time. The second, The Wild Places, of the concept of wilderness and our need to reach for it. This third book, The Old Ways, speaks of the lost pathways that were used by our ancestors and are almost, but not quite, forgotten, like lost plague villages visible from the air as marks in a field. 

The book is divided into four parts, each covering a different geographical set of wanderings. 

The first section is of MacFarlane's journeys in England, as he traces the Icknield Way from his home outside Cambridge to the Downs and walks the 'most dangerous path in Britain': the Broomway tidal road across the Maplin Sands alongside Foulness Island, traversing holloways, chalk paths and a Roman Road, sleeping out to be woken by skylarks, crunching in the snow and striding toe to toe with his own reflection across wet sands.

Next he goes north to his beloved Scotland, exploring the trackless motorway of the sea road through the Minches to the Shiants, Rona and Sula Sgeir and across peat and granite moors, reflecting on a post glacial landscape ground out by the ice and bearing the signs of early human occupation. 

In the third part MacFarlane travels abroad to walk in Palestine, to follow part of the Camino pilgrim road in Spain and the pilgrim route around the feet of Minya Konka in Western Tibet, the most sacred mountain in Buddhism. In these less familiar landscapes his writing takes on a tone of wonder at new fauna, flora, weather, people and political strictures.

Finally he homes and returns to following the Ridgeway across Marlborough Downs, the South Downs to Eastbourne, circling in a gyre around a subject that McFarlane touches on again and again before focusing on it in the closing chapters. The life of Edward Thomas, killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917, poet, depressive and compulsive walker is addressed directly in 'Ghost', an account of Thomas' life with his wife Helen and his use of walking as a curative for his raging depressions. In the very last chapter MacFarlane opens out again and shows us the evanescent prints of early humans walking across a mud flat, now revealed by the tides. 

MacFarlane's book is not easy to categorise, it mediates on many aspects, some connected with walking such as the drive of wanderlust and the push of the curious mind, some with the wandering trails the mind takes on such a journey, of geology, deep time, human history, companionship, solitude and spirituality. Another wonderful book by an author I turn to with delight.

Torchwood: Fallout by David Llewellyn (AUDIO)

Not the best Torchwood adventure, the best are the radio plays with all the sound effects and the voices of the characters.  This is just an audio book and relatively short, only an hour long.  Only one of the Torchwood characters: Gwen Cooper, features, but then at this point in the chronology of Torchwood she is the only one left.  She, however, is only indirectly involved via telephone from America.  The major lead is minor character Sergeant Andy Davidson, the hapless Cardiff policeman who was Gwen's link to the police force.  When Andy realises that the shooting that he is dealing with in Cardiff has some very strange, distinctly alien, features, he calls Gwen who realises what the object at the heart of the matter is.  Cue race to save the world.  Though it is nice to see Andy come to the front, the whole was a bit flat.

Black Heart Blue by Louisa Reid

Hephzi stands in her sister Rebecca's dress at her grave, struggling with the loss of a beloved sister and the secrets dammed up inside of her. Hephiz and Rebecca were twins but different in so many ways, Rebecca beautiful and sunny, Rebecca's face twisted by a genetic disorder. Home schooled until Rebecca persuades her parents to let them go to college, the new freedoms of this world give Rebecca a taste of freedom and terrify Hephzi, exposed to the stares and taunts of the other student. However, both sisters hide the secret at the heart of their lives, and the truth of Rebecca's death is revealed step by step. Made me cry, and there's not many books do that.

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro

A gentle set of five stories in which little happens but lives change, the lives of Ishiguro's characters intersect with those of others triggering series of reflections and reverberations through memory, past and future. The stories are beautifully constructed around major life changes narrated in the past tense, striking a minor key of regret and loss. Relationships are pivoting and coming to their closing acts, musicians are recognised by one character but unknown, forgotten by all the others, once shining, glorious and famous, now faded like old photographs. These are stories that haunt and echo, like a melody that awakes memories.

Psychogeography by Will Self illustrated by Ralf Steadman

Firstly the hardback edition here is a beautiful book, Ralf Steadman's illustrations are in full colour and intersperse Will Self's text.  He speaks of journeys taken by foot, largely over urban landscapes and the palimpsest of histories that land has.  His first and longest journey is from his home to Heathrow, a journey made for four wheels rather than two feet, and then from JFK to downtown Manhattan.  His use of extended metaphor is just exquisite, the scatalogical and elegaic brought together to show the world not in a new light as such, just better described.  I must admit I had to read it with a large dictionary at hand, Self's command of the English language is just incredible.  Not an easy book to read, but a real education and enlightenment.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his family are Syrian Americans living in New Orleans, he and his wife Kathy (a converted Southern Baptist American) run a painting and decorating business and let a number of properties across the city. There is some discrimination but Abdulrahman, known as Zeitoun because of people's inability to pronounce his first name, is well respected for his insistence on a high level of workmanship by all his crews, and he has a strong healthy business. The couple have four beloved children and life is good.

When Hurricane Katrina comes in from the Gulf Zeitoun doesn't think much of it, many hurricanes have formed over the years only to peter out on land. Kathy is worried though and takes the children to stay with her family, but Zeitoun stays to watch over their properties and those of their friends who have left. Katrina itself is not too bad, but then the levees break. Zeitoun moves the family's belongings upstairs and as the waters rise sets out in his canoe to offer help where he can. Kathy and Zeitoun's extended family are worried, but he is far from the looting of the city centre and the hellish conditions in the Superdome. He links up with friends who have also stayed behind, feeds the local stranded dogs and keeps in contact with his family by a phone that still works in one of the local apartments.

Zeitoun is just beginning to think about leaving, food is running out and there isn't much more he can do. He has just come off the phone to his brother and is about to call his wife when there is a loud knocking at the door and a story of survival through hurricane rapidly turns into a nightmare, a unforgivable one in which Zeitoun's ethnicity is the tenuous reasoning behind his horrendous treatment by a city under martial law, in a country which is supposed to honour and revere civil liberties. 

A brave and deeply moving book, well written and dedicated. It changed my view of Islam, showing that beyond every radical in every religion there are a raft of kind hearted people attempting to follow the benevolent teachings of their creed, and who face terrible and unthinking discrimination.

The Library Book by Ann Cleeves

This is a great little collection for all those who feel that tingle up the spine when they step into a library, who have had their emotional lives saved by what lies between the covers of a book. Authors and other defenders of libraries come together in this collection, some of them speaking of how their lives were touched as children when they first fell in love with libraries, others speaking of the current situation and why libraries continue to be of abiding importance even in a digital age of ebooks, internet and online shopping. Of the importance of a place where you can take a chance on a book you might never have normally picked up, but also a place that brings people together. Heartwarming.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

We are in Ancient Greece, a young boy Patroclus fails to live up to the hope of his father the king and finds himself exiled for being too weak to defend himself after accidentally killing another boy. His weight in gold pays for his place at the court of another king, and it is whilst trying to make himself invisible that Patroclus comes to the attention of golden child and prince Achilles. Deemed by prophecy to be unbeatable in battle, Achilles is the child of the king and a sea nymph. The story follows the boys as their friendship deepens, through their time studying medicine, astronomy and hunting with the centaur Chiron to the Trojan War and the events of The Iliad. 

I was captivated, the story was well told and the fantastical elements of gods walking with mortals, begetting children and influencing events never seemed like whimsical fantasy, they were as real as the other characters.

Apocalypse Cow by Michael Logan

If you like Mars Attacks you'll love this. A hilarious and completely sick thriller in which a deadly virus is unleashed on Britain, via a lab in Milgavie. An infected cow turns up at a nearby slaughterhouse and chaos ensues. The virus gives the cows a taste for blood, for raping anything they catch and enhanced strength and resiliance, they are harder to kill than a normal animal. And the virus can be passed on to any land based animal except humans. Cue killer squirrels, bunnies and sheep, out for revenge on the people who have exploited and hunted them for thousands of years. 

The only hope for mankind are a rash infested horny teenager, his vegan ecowarrior parents and their new money neighbours, an escapee worker from the abbatoir and an inept journalist. As Europe closes its borders the small band travel from London to the Channel Tunnel in an attempt to escape the virus before it mutates and infects humans.

Living in Scotland did help, I understand the ironies of a peace loving hippie living in Cumbernauld and of yobs getting their comeuppance in Easterhouses when their muscle dogs get their revenge. This is one of those books that is so unfunny it's hilarious, the satire is biting and spot on, the ironies pile on top of each other.

Shane Spall has in effect written  three books in one. On the simplest level this is a tie in to the BBC 4 TV series, a narrative of Shane and Timothy Spall's attempt to sail from London to Wales in their sea barge The Princess Matilda. They are hilariously hapless, on their first journey they don't make it beyond the Thames Barrier and Timothy takes a thorough crash course in navigation before they set out to sea. They encounter beautiful moorings and full on prejudice and snobbery in equal measure.

This narrative itself would have made for a good book, Shane Spall's mercurial nature in contrast to Timothy's laid back nature and penchant for pink crocs is hilarious but Spall intersperses this story with the heartbreaking one of Timothy's battle with leukaemia and her diaries from nights sat by his bed when he hovered between life and death. Shane had already lost her father and best friend to cancer and her words are honest and searing.

Thirdly there are snippets of Shane's own life, again written with unflinching honesty. Of her previous life as a flower child, of her drug addiction, of the Welsh husband she lost and her experience of giving birth to their daughter Pascale. 

These elements turn a very good book into a firm favourite, and one that I read into the night. I knew Timothy Spall from tv and film, a respected and beloved actor, and this book deepened that respect.

Auslander by Paul Dowswell

Young Piotr Bruck shivers as he waits naked in a draughty corridor to be examined by two men in white coats with curious instruments. The year is 1941, the place Warsaw and Piotr is an orphan and outcast, not Polack but Volksdeutscher: a Pole of German ancestry. The queue of boys is split into two and Piotr prays not to be sent to the right, to the covered army truck visible through the open doorway. He does not know the meaning of the truck but senses it cannot be good. Instead his blond hair and Nordic looks mean that the Race and Settlement programme choose him to be returned to the heart of Nazi Germany and placed with a good Nazi family in Berlin. Kaltenbach is a doctor conducting experiments for the Reich, with a wife and three children. Piotr is renamed Peter and tries to adapt, but is still treated as an Auslander: a foreigner. 

Peter finds a friend in neighbour Anna Reiter and her family, German but not Nazi. The evidence of his eyes and his friendship with the Reiters opens Peter's eyes to the true nature of the Third Reich and the Nazis. As the net of a brutal regime that brooks no resistance closes in around him Dowswell's book quickly becomes a thriller and Peter and Anna are in a race against time.

Excellently written, compelling and as enlightening about the Nazi regime as Anne Frank. A fantastic book for older children about a period of history that must not be forgotten.

Reckless by Cornelia Funke

Will Reckless has followed his brother through a magic mirror into a strange fairy tale world and been slashed by a Goyl, a terrible creature made of stone whose wounds turn flesh to stone courtesy of the magic of a dark fairy.  Jacob found the mirror in his father's study and although he has never found his father in the world beyond there is plenty of evidence that he was there, iron bridges, mementoes from his world in the city museum, and the memories of people.  But the world is under threat, the troglodyte Goyl have come out from beneath the mountains under their warmaking King Kami'en and the Empress is preparing to sacrifice her daughter for the price of peace.  A spellbinding ride through the darker side of fairytales, the corpses of Sleeping Beauty's failed suitors hang from the thorns of the roses that defended her castle, trees pinion humans to have their eyes pecked out, magic is as deadly as it is glamarous.  My only niggle was the apparent lack of care of Jacob for the mother and brother he left behind, but a great imagination

The Story of Stone by NM Browne

Jaret is a member of the Brood Trove, the children of his father's four wives who live in cold and squalor below the luxury of his father's apartments in the Tier House at the centre of his father's lands. His society is feudal, his upbringing brutal, at the age of 3 the Brood Trove are separated from their mothers and placed in the Brood Trove, if they survive they are trained to fight and protect their father and his territory, but many don't survive. Warlike farmers and mighty warriors the Lakesiders are fearful of the Night People who live in the unfamiliar forests that boundary their lands.

Separated from Jaret by a gulf of time Nela is searching with her father for traces of the history of their civilization. She is unusual, in her society women marry and have children, but she is unlikely to find a husband as she fits which appals those around her She has shaved her head as a sign that she is not marriageable and she and her father move in a small band with his apprentice Findsmen and a bondsman, a slave tethered to the boundary of their camp.

On the shore of the same Lake Jaret lived beside they find a stone, a stone which conjures in Nela fits filled with visions of the life of Stone, a Night Person, and the narrative begins to move back and forward between Jaret and Stone's lives in the prehistory of Nela's world, and Nela's own life. As Jaret and Nela's lives come together on the death of his father and the casting out of much of the Brood Trove a terrible spell is unleashed on their world.

I felt the book needed to be a little longer, there was sometimes confusion and I felt there was not enough development in the climax of the story. However, all the characters were brilliantly deliniated and I always wanted to turn the next page and know more.

Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie

Jamie writes in a spare uncompromising style in this set of essays about landscape and her travels through some of the most remote parts of it. She shows us things most of us will not see, icebergs, the aurora from the Arctic circle, killer whales off the remote abandoned islands of St Kilda and Rona, cave drawings, and the estuary like view of human cells down a microscope in a pathology lab. What links the essays is a search for wilderness but Jamie is never cliched, never glorifying 'the wild' as something pure that we should attain to, but taking each experience as and of itself, never fearing to be crude or uncomplimentary. There are so many books about our experiences with nature that anything new to the canon needs to say something new, and Jamie does.

What I found curious was her urge to search for wildness, people do seem drawn to try and find the most remote 'untouched' landscapes, but that's to mistake what is before you.  I was at the Coop yesterday, just beside it the Dighty Burn flows out from a culvert, it's come from the Panbride Estate and past our house before getting there.  Beside the burn a tree leans over with grasses and bulbs at it's feet.  It's picturesque and a glimpse of wilderness in its own way, the small, as well as the epic, can be wild.

Wired for Culture: the natural history of human cooperation by Mark Pagel

Not an easy book to read, but ultimately rewarding and informative. Pagel draws on anthropology, evolutionary biology, neurology and philosophy to demonstrate how culture has evolved via natural selection of ideas and memes in exactly the same way as genes have evolved. Pagel takes us back to paleo-archaeology, presenting the evidence for physical changes in human physiognomy since hominids left Africa in parallel with the cultural changes. He examines the current scientific evidence with regard to issues such as changes in brain size and physiology, the emergence of cooking, language, agriculture and cities. He reveals our extraordinary evolutionary leap from beings who like most great apes would have loyalty only to people related to them, to the complex networks of altruism, mistrust and self regulation that are necessary for our complex cultures to exist. Densely written requiring concentration and time, but Pagel does repeat information in different chapters in a slightly different framework meaning that complex concepts do become clearer. Worth the effort!

200 Healthy Feasts by Jo McAuley

Having shifted from a high sugar and sedentary lifestyle to healthy eating and regular exercise 3 months ago I was beginning to need to move beyond steamed fish and vegetables, good as they are. This book has offered me inspiration and ways to use ingredients such as lentils, beans and quinoa that I was not so confident with, and in fact offers far more that 200 recipes as many of them have alternatives. I am gluten intolerant but most of these recipes are either naturally gluten free or very easy to adapt.

The book is split usefully into sections on Breakfast & Brunch, Starters & Light Bites, Soups & Stews, Fish & Seafood, Meat & Poultry, Vegetarian and And to Finish... It opens with a useful section on nutrition and the value of high fibre slow energy releasing foods, the importance of 'little and often' before the recipes each nicely illustrated with a full colour plate and well laid out ingredients list and recipe, with alternatives at the end. Usefully, for storecupboard ingredients that might be harder to get hold of, such as harissa and thai curry paste, McAuley gives the recipe for making them from scratch. However, most of the recipes are for four people, and I have a family of three with very different nutritional needs and dividing the ingredients by four is difficult in some cases.  Still, this is definately my favourite of the Hamlyn 200 recipe series so far.

The Intolerant Gourment by Pippa Kendrick

A beautiful cookbook that is as delicious to look at as to cook from. It's a proper foodie cookbook, helping the intolerant cook use and celebrate seasonal changes in ingredients. Kendrick splits her book into the four seasons with a fifth section for Breads and Baking. In her introduction Kendrick provides comprehensive coverage of the ingredients she uses in her receipes that offer alternatives to wheat, gluten and dairy and at the end gives stockists, although many of these once obscure ingredients are now readily available in supermarkets.

I cooked the Greek Salad sans Feta and Lebanese Chicken and adored both. Many of the receipes are naturally low in fat and high in ingredients that release their energy slowly and in a healthy way. This is one of those books I will return to time and time again, not only for the allergen free aspect, but also just to look at, the photography is enticing and the recipes well written and easy to follow.

Tintin: Herge and his Creation

A wonderful book, taking George Remi's creation Herge and the Tintin books in chronological order, showing how they reflected Herge's growing talent and critical contemporary events.

Willpower: Rediscovering our Greatest Strength by Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney

There are thousands of books on self-help, but I am averse to the kind of unsubstantiated mantras about thinking yourself into success that so many of them espouse. Baumeister and Teirney's book is different, it is completely evidence based. It cites results that have confounded experimenters and forced them to rethink their current ways of thinking about willpower and self regulation, and so to find new clarity. It speaks about the genetic basis of willpower but also the ways in which we can help ourselves find the ability not to succumb to temptation, be it spending, overeating, or sloth.

The book begins with looking at the Victorian notion of willpower and self denial, and contrasting our current social mores and extremely temptation full modern world. It then moves through experimental evidence about to-do lists, how our willpower is sapped, and, most importantly, how we can conserve it, use it best and what power it has when we instil it in our children (and how to do that!)

Like all really good non-fiction texts, it slotted in with some of what I already understood about my own willpower and those around me, while challenging me, putting a mirror up to some uncomfortable truths and giving me ways to help myself. I have always been strongly self directed, content to be alone.  I am wilful to the point of stubbornness, and I do get up off my butt and get on with stuff, I'm currently doing at least half an hour of exercise 5 days a week to become stronger for walking in the Austrian Alps in the summer.  I work from home, I have a data set that I have to keep up to date with and commitments to my boss, but no externally set deadlines.  I regulate my own workflow, and do have a saying in my head if I don't want to do something: 'if it's worth doing it's worth doing well'.  It is better to get through a task and get it done than to fudge it or to rush through it, 'less haste more speed', I make mistakes if I rush and if I leave things undone I feel, in Baumister and Tierney's term, the monkey on my back.  The monkey is that hopping attention that I am so familiar with, that agitation when I'm trying to get lots done at once.  The mindfulness helps and this book helped me put the jigsaw together.  By making a list the monkey doesn't chatter so much, yesterday I calmly worked through all the stuff on my desk that was there to remind me to do stuff, and am so much calmer.  The book speaks of having a mind like a pool of water rather than the chattering monkey, so just as a pool reacts to a pebble falling in it so the mind can be, reacting completely in proportion to the disturbance then returning to calm.  Yesterday I exhausted my willpower working and when my daughter came home and was whiney about doing her homework my patience snapped and I got angry.  On reflection, it became clear what had gone wrong and that I need to do something, probably meditate, an hour before she comes home from school.  Mediation, or religion if you are so inclined, is important because it allows me to act in a situation rather than react, to see my emotions and feelings as a river that I am sitting on the bank of, to clearly see and understand the patterns of my anxieties and fears and let them pass, not fighting them, just letting them come and go.

59 Seconds: Think a Little Change a Lot by Robert Wiseman

Richard Wiseman is speaking to his friend Sophie, a 'bright, successful thirty-something' when she asks him what he thinks of the self-help industry. 10 minutes into his lecture about the scientific research into happiness Sophie stops Richard, points out she's a busy person, can he give her some genuine effective advice that could be implemented in under a minute. This book enlarges on that idea, a refreshing antidote to the avalanche of self-help literature that is at best misguided and at worst psychologically damaging. I really enjoyed it, finding out where I was going right, happy to be proved wrong and vindicated by many of my uneasy gut feelings that making life better for yourself surely could not be as easy as just visualising yourself thinner, richer, prettier etc etc.




Wiseman splits his book into 10 easy to read sections:

Happiness - the effectiveness (or otherwise) of postitive thinking, diarising, and gratitude

Persuasion - how to interact socially and successfully

Motivation - how to plan, overcome procrastination, and think yourself into motivation

Creativity - destroying the myth of brainstorming, the effects of modern art and green plants

Attraction - seduction, roller coaster rides and the art of dating successfully

Stress - punching it out doesn't work, pets, reducing resentment and blood pressure

Relationships - Velcro, photographs and vocalising

Decision making - two heads are not better than one, how to make effective no regrets decisions, how to harness your unconscious and how to tell if you are being lied to

Parenting - the Mozart myth, baby names, effective praise and marshmallows

Personality - graphology, fingers and thumbs, pets, bedtime and OCEAN / CANOEs

develop the gratidue attitude / place pic of baby in wallet (get back) / hang mirror in kitchen (weight loss) / buy pot plant for office (creativity) / touch people lightly on upper arm (dominance persuasion) / write about relat (appreciation) / deal with liars by using email / praise children's effort not ability / visualize doing not achieveing (plan) / consider your legacy (what will they say about you after death)

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly

Andi is in many ways a poor little rich girl, in her senior year at St Anselm's prestigious expensive school in Brooklyn, New York. She is largely ignored by her father with his new girlfriend, a brilliant geneticist in pursuit of his dream of unlocking the genome. But she is engulfed in an ocean of depression and grief, tortured by her inability to save her little brother Truman and struggling to provide for her equally stricken artist mother, who does little but paint pictures of her lost son. Andi is failing at school, well, in all areas but music. It is only here that she feels understood. Her music teacher Nathan who does not tell her to get over her grief, but shows her how to express it through her exquisite guitar playing.

When Andi's father arrives at the house he is horrified and takes action. He puts Andi's mother in hospital and takes Andi with him to Paris to write the outline for her thesis on Amande Malherbeau, a French composer who wrote his music to the backdrop of Revolutionary France. Her father has been engaged by his friend G to undertake the examination of a heart thought to be that of the lost King of France, Louis XVII, son of the guillotined Louis XVI. Andi's father leaves her at G's house, a theatre which G is transforming into a museum of the Revolution.

Andi is at first determined to return to her mother and strikes a deal with her father to have the outline finished in time to return to her within a week, but then she finds the diary of Alexandrine and is drawn back to Revolutionary France. And when she is busking and meets Jules and Virgil, boys from the impoverished banlieue of Clichy, something begins to reach through the haze of drugs and grief that cloak her and draw her back to life.

Extremely good on the sense of being a teenager and struggling with such painful issues at a time when emotions are turbulent enough, but I just felt that at times the plot was a little obvious and forced. Still powerful enough to keep me reading through the night, and very well informed, the sections on both modern day but especially Revolutionary France are evocative and detailed.

Clockwork Prince by Cassandra Clare (Book #2 of the Infernal Devices)

This second book of Clare's Infernal Devices series was a great read. Tessa Gray is living under the protection of the Insitute in a London that features all the dirtiness, darkness and danger of Dickens but with a new layer. Magic and magical beings exist but are invisible to 'mundanes': people without magic. The Nephilim are half angel law enfocers of this world and are at war with the nefarious Magister, a creator of clockwork minions. Tessa can shape change into a person if she touches something of importace to them, but she is a mystery to herself and those around her, with the power of those known as warlocks but missing their marks of inhumanity.

But Charlotte and Henry Branwell, heads of the Enclave and Tessa's protectors, are also at war with divisions within her own ranks, particularly with the devious Benedict Lightwood and his machinations to have her ousted. The Institute are given two weeks to find the Magister by Consul Wayland, head of the Enclave, and a breakneck story takes off. Tessa has to cope with one twist and turn after another as she comes face to face with her brother - who betrayed her and is working with the Magister - with her questions about what she is, with betrayal from those around her and with her powerful feelings for the two Nephilim who brought her to the sanctuary of the Institute: Will and Jem.

As in the first book, Clare's plotting is tight and fast paced but combined with the passion and emotion of teenage love sesitively handled with an excellent understanding of Victorial norms and morals.

Heaven Eyes by David Almond

Erin Law is an orphan, living in Whitegates children's home with 11 other children. Her closest friends are January Carr - named for the month and the hospital he was found on the steps of - and Mouse Gullane, a child desparate to please. Before his father abandoned mouse he tatooed 'Please look after me' on his son's arm. Life is haunted by loss and sadness, by the attempts of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and care workers to get the children to express their griefs and Erin's resistance and anger.

The children often run away, returning after a day or up to a week away, but always returning. January comes to Erin with a new idea, no one has yet run away from Whitegates by raft, and he has made one hammered together from wooden doors abandoned on the local tip. Absconding under the cynical observation of two care workers that they will be back they acquire Mouse along the way and escape downriver, becoming marooned on the Black Middens, a mud flat they crawl across to the security of dry land. They are brought out of the mud by a strange girl their own age, who names herself as Heaven Eyes and asks them if they are her brothers and sisters. She brings them to an abandoned warehouse where she lives with an old man known only as 'Gramps' and offers them food and shelter. Gramps is unstable and confused, and Heaven Eyes has some decidedly odd concepts about people and a sad past herself, but Erin learns about creating a family when you have none.

Moving and interesting, but too brief and concepts of lovelessness and coping alone are not as well developed as in his other novels