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!