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.