More Than This by Patrick Ness

A boy drowns in the cold ocean.  To begin with we know little about him beyond the brutality of his death, but details begin to emerge and we learn about teenage boy Seth's life in America.  His circle of friends and growing love for one of them, his brother Owen, damaged by a terrible incident in the boys' childhood, his emotionally distant mother and medicated father. His life before his death.

But Seth wakes somewhere else, a place beyond his death.  He is alone in the English town and house he lived in until he was 8 and the terrible thing happened to Owen.  The town is overrun with weeds and in places a burnt wasteland.  Is this his personal hell, purgatory, or something else?

Ness never lets the reader stand on firm ground, making us ask questions about what we know to be real and our relationship with reality and technology.

Lorelei's Secret by Carolyn Parkhurst


Paul's beloved wife Lexy is found dead having fallen from the branches of the great apple tree in their back garden.  The only witness is her Rhodesian Ridgeback Lorelei.  Paul, a university professor in linguistics, is desperate to know why.  Did she slip and fall, did she commit suicide.  As Paul delves further into his memories of his time with the woman who was everything to him and further into a kind of madness trying to enable Lorelei to tell him what happened he maps beautifully the torments of the shining artistic soul who was the love of his life.

One of few non thriller / action / crime books which has gripped and held me from the first page to the last, poignant, and deeply comforting in that Lexy's feelings of inadequacy, being lost and fearing her own self were a mirror to my own 3am reflections on my self.

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

Set in an unnamed country in the Balkans, the story is narrated by Natalia, a doctor taking medical care over the border to an orphanage, to a village which was once part of her own country, where her surname and accent mark her as the enemy.  She receives a call from her grandmother telling her of the death of her grandfather and the book spins off into an intricately constructed web of stories about her grandfather's past and that of her war scarred country, of the death that stalks every tale, of the tiny parochial village his grandfather was raised in.  There are many unspokens, children are orphaned and raised by grandparents without explanation, war has marched across the countryside so many times bodies are buried in vineyards and mines hidden in the beauty of forests.  Not least of all, every anecdote is achingly beautifully written and captivating, myth, superstition and the power of story plaited together.

Ways to Live Forever by Sally Nichols (AUDIO)

Sam is dying from leukaemia. But Sam is also a typical 11 year old boy. He loves facts and warhammer, wants to be a teenager, fly in an airship, go into outer space, try smoking and kissing a girl. Sam wants answers to the questions nobody ever asks: what does it feel like to die? does it hurt? Why do people make such a fuss about dying when it's as natural as falling asleep? There is no self pity or fear in Sam, this wonderful book is instead full of the joy of a life lived to the full, a very normal family living with a heart breaking reality of time running out fast, I was in floods of tears at the end.