The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

AZ: "Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. He never learns very much about her and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany's Nazi past and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: what should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? "We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable... Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?"

A book group read, and a good fascinating one, although it only really came alive in the second half. Makes us ask ourselves hard questions about what we would have done in Hanna's situation. About it part the effects of the Holocaust on the next generation and in part about the sexual awakening of a 15 year old boy, about levels of responsibility and absolution. And, in a way, about the power of reading and redemptive power of words.

M is for Magic by Neil Gaiman

A collection of short stories for children, some of which I've encounterd before. Gaiman's imagination never fails to entertain, and here where he's writing for children he writes less self consciously, children don't need to be asked to suspend disbelief! In this collection of short stories I most loved the short story about the boy born in a graveyard but wanted more of it, luckily Gaiman also felt the same and expanded it into his The Graveyard Book. I particularly liked reading again 'The Price' which is about a family who are adopted by a mysterious black cat who sustains terrible injuries night after night.

Alone on a Wide Wide Sea by Michael Morpugo

AZ: "Orphaned in WWII, Arthur is separated from his sister and sent to the other side of the world. There his extraordinary journey continues as he and his friend Marty survive brutal captivity on a working farm, find a new family with the eccentric Aunty Meg and her animals, and discover their talent for designing yachts. Sixty years later, Arthur's daughter Allie sets sail single-handed in a yacht designed by her father, determined to find his long-lost sister in England. Can family love stretch across time and the vastness of the oceans? And will the threads of Arthur's life finally come together?"

This book is split into two parts, the memoir of Arthur Hobhouse as a boy who is shipped to Australia in 1947 and his daughter Allie's account of her single handed yacht journey from Australia to the UK in 2005. It is hard to believe that the memoirs are not genuine, Arthur's experience of being ripped from his family (his sister Kitty), his home and his country and sent without any consultation to an alien country is heart rending and made me so angry, but Morpugo also captures 18-year-old Allie's voices, those of her emails and those of her own thoughts, utterly convincingly.

Save Cash and Save the Planet by Friends of the Earth

A briliant little book that does what it says on the tin! Well designed and easy to find your way around, from the easy to the more complex ways of saving the planet and living more light footedly

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Another one I took too long to read, and back to his normal fare of unstinting depiction of people making mistakes for who he gives no chance of redemption, didn't feel to me as if it had the heart of his, to me, better works. A bit unsatisfying for the idealist in me. I think I started this but was disappointed and didn't finish it. Hmm, haven't got Saturday or Atonement, or Rose Blanche, must fix that!

AZ: "When good-time, fortysomething Molly Lane dies of an unspecified degenerative illness, her many friends and numerous lovers are led to think about their own mortality. Vernon Halliday, editor of the up-market newspaper The Judge, persuades his old friend Clive Linley, a self-indulgent composer of some reputation, to enter into a euthanasia pact with him. Should either of them succumb to such an illness, the other will effect his death. From this point onwards we are in little doubt as to the novel's outcome--it's only a matter of who will kill whom. In the meantime, compromising photographs of Molly's most distinguished lover, foreign secretary Julian Garmony, have found their way into the hands of the press, and as rumours circulate he teeters on the edge of disgrace. However, this is McEwan, so it is no surprise to find that the rather unsavoury Garmony comes out on top. McEwan is master of the writer's craft, and while this is the sort of novel that wins prizes, his characters remain curiously soulless amidst the twists and turns of plot"

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

I was first introduced to McEwan by my sixth form English teacher, through a slim little book called The Child in Time, a small book with a massive impact, and he's been my companion ever since, shining a light on the unspoken areas of our world, lost children, incest, grief and despair, and writing about them with heartbreaking sparse beauty. Few other authors could write about the marriage night of a newly married couple and extend it into a book length heart wrenching tale of misunderstanding, social life in 1962, hierarchies of life coming from academia and money (her) and squalor and madness (him) and hinted at incest and its devastating consequences for both. A book that makes me hope that I can be less judgemental and more forgiving in my relationships. This is more tender than his usual, a beautiful elegy to lost opportunity that made me more determined to live and speak without restraint, McEwan always has something to teach me.

AZ: "It is June, 1962. In a hotel on the Dorset coast, overlooking Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence, who got married that morning, are sitting down to dinner in their room. Neither is entirely able to suppress their anxieties about the wedding night to come ..."On Chesil Beach" is another masterwork from Ian McEwan - a story about how the entire course of a life can be changed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken."

Exit Music by Ian Rankin

AZ:"It's late autumn in Edinburgh and late autumn in the career of Detective Inspector John Rebus. As he tries to tie up some loose ends before retirement, a murder case intrudes. A dissident Russian poet has been found dead in what looks like a mugging gone wrong. By apparent coincidence a high-level delegation of Russian businessmen is in town, keen to bring business to Scotland. The politicians and bankers who run Edinburgh are determined that the case should be closed quickly and clinically. But the further they dig, the more Rebus and his colleague DS Siobhan Clarke become convinced that they are dealing with something more than a random attack - especially after a particularly nasty second killing. Meantime, a brutal and premeditated assault on local gangster 'Big Ger' Cafferty sees Rebus in the frame. Has the Inspector taken a step too far in tying up those loose ends? Only a few days shy of the end to his long, inglorious career, will Rebus even make it that far?"

Rebus' last days before retirement dealing with 3 cases that may or may not be connected, a grisly murder of a Russian dissident poet linked timewise with the murder of Litvenenko, the murder by fire of a sound recordist and one time session player, and the attempted murder of Rebus' nemesis Cafferty. Read it in one sitting, absorbing in its fast pace and dreamy in the depths of Rankin's writing and memories of Fife.