Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Lost track of how many times I've read this brilliant definitive graphic novel. This is what happens when superheroes grow old and retire but someone is out to discredit their reputation and murder them. Some superheroes hide their kit and bury their past, others cannot let go, the brilliant Roshach is a vile but deeply understandable anti hero

Halting State by Charles Stross - great fun

AZ: "It was called in as a robbery at Hayek Associates, an online game company. So you can imagine Sergeant Sue Smith's mood as she watches the video footage of the heist being carried out by a band of orcs and a dragon, and realises that the robbery from an online game company is actually a robbery from an online game. Just wonderful. Like she has nothing better to do. But online entertainment is big business, and when the bodies of real people start to show up, it's clear that this is anything but a game. For Sue, programmer Jack Reed, and forensic accountant Elaine Barnaby, the walls between the actual and the virtual are about to come crashing down. There is something very dangerous and very real going on at Hayek Associates, and those involved are playing for more than experience points. No cheats, no extra lives, no saving throw - make a wrong call on this one and it'll be more than game over."

Black Rabbit Summer by Kevin Brooks

AZ: "Pete Boland was busy doing nothing that summer. Long, stiflingly hot, lazy days stretched ahead of him. Then she called. 'Listen, Pete . . . you know that funfair, up at the recreation ground . . . I thought we could all meet up . . . You know, for old times' sake.' But, where there are old times, there are old tensions. And as secrets, bitterness and jealousies resurface, five old friends are plunged into the worst night of their lives"

Brooks is an extremely powerful writer for teenagers and this was a really good read, I wanted to know the outcome so much, but was hugely disappointed plotwise. There are 2 strands with two people disappearing, a popular beautiful girl and the narrators best friend, a damaged boy who believes he is talking to his pet rabbit. The mystery about the girl is solved but the boy, the one I really wanted to know what happened to, remains lost. Maybe that's the point!

Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

AZ: "My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. This is Susie Salmon. Watching from heaven, Susie sees her happy, suburban family devastated by her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet ..."

Another one of those books everyone talks about but which I'd never got round to reading until BBC Radio 4s book group featured it today so I read for it. Accidentally brought 2 copies from charity shops. Books that make me go and cuddle my family, smell and touch, be goddamn grateful for being able to.

The Winter Rose by Jennifer Donnelly

AZ: "Set in London and Africa in the early days of the twentieth century, "The Winter Rose" introduces some remarkable new characters. India Selwyn-Jones is one of the rare new breed: a lady doctor. Her family, her eligible, ambitious fiance, the male medical establishment all object but she insists on defying convention and finds a post in London's East End. There she meets a gangland boss called Sid Malone. Criminal he may be but he also has a hidden charm, and a devastatingly attractive personality, and when India is called to treat him after a dockside brawl, their friendship becomes more intense. But Sid Malone is not his real name: and he has a past and enemies by the score, including India's determined and ruthless fiance whose intention is to marry into the family money as well as becoming a leading political figure. The stormy, noisy, brawling docklands are a natural home to the political fight as the fledgling Labour Party gets underway, and the struggle for the women's vote becomes more strident. But the East End is also a place for those who have a past to hide, a new beginning to find. And so the complicated strands of betrayal and pretence, of ambition and family, are woven again into a new drama, in a new country"

Doorstep fo a book but a wonderful engaging read, kind of a sequel to The Tea Rose, which I've read but don't seem to have written in, focuses on a gangland leader and his changing life in Victorian London and later in colonial Kenya. Incredible detail as with her other book and, as Shakespeare wrote, 'a sad tale is best for winder'. I was driven on by wanting to know what happens to the characters.

Vanishing Acts by Jodie Picoult

AZ: "Delia Hopkins has led a charmed life. Raised in rural New Hampshire by her widowed father Andrew, she now has a young daughter, a handsome fiance, and her own Search and Rescue bloodhound - which she uses to find missing persons. But as she plans her wedding, she is plagued by flashbacks of a life she can't recall. Then a policeman shows up at her door, arresting her father for the kidnap of a little girl. And Delia's past and present fracture into little pieces. "Vanishing Acts" is a book about the very nature and power of memory. It explores what happens when the past we have been running from catches up to us, and questions who we trust to tell us the story of our lives before we are capable of remembering it ourselves."

Ouch, read in one day. About a grown woman who is making plans for her wedding to her fiance when her beloved father is arrested for abducting her as a child. Raises familiar ground of uncomfortable choices, the desperation of a father versus the rights of a mother to her child and about the fragility of memory. Also about learning that what you thought was right may not be so clear.

Plain Truth by Jodie Picoult AUDIO

AZ: "The discovery of a dead infant in an Amish barn shakes Lancaster County to its core. But the police investigation leads to a more shocking disclosure: circumstantial evidence suggests that eighteen-year-old Katie Fisher, an unmarried Amish woman believed to be the newborn's mother, took the child's life. When Ellie Hathaway, a disillusioned big city attorney, comes to Paradise, Pennsylvania, to defend Katie, two cultures collide and, for the first time in her high profile career, Ellie faces a system of justice very different from her own. Delving deep into the world of those who live 'plain', Ellie must find a way to reach Katie on her terms. As she unravels a tangled murder case, Ellie also looks deep within to confront her own fears and desires when a man from her past comes back into her life."

Long due to being an audio book but still held me the way her books tend to. Taught me a lot about the Amish, who call themselves Plain, and I identified with the Plain movement away from consumerist individualism. Plain is not being different but being the same, against the need to be an individual.