The Road Home by Rose Tremain AUDIO

AZ:"In The Road Home, Tremain tells the story of Lev, an Eastern European migrant worker who has left his village and travelled to England so that he can finance a better life for his mother and daugther. He takes with him his grief for his dead wife. There is an almost fairytale-like quality to Lev's chance encounters and where they lead him, although, that said, they also feel natural and possible; Tremain has always been good on the essential randomness of experience."

An amazing story of economic migrant life in the UK, utterly believable characters caught up in the narrative of a widower trying to make a life for his mother and daughter he had to leave behind. Both the depiction of under-class work in the kitchens and fields of the UK and the bleakness of life in an ex-Soviet state were stunning in the effect of making me really think

The Big Blowdown by George Pelecanos

AZ: "Spanning the two decades from the 1930s to the 1950s, this is the story of a groups of friends struggling to find work after the war. The friends' lives interact to form a complex pattern that rocks the Italian and Greek communities of Washington DC with violent repercussions."

The magazine Psychologies advised me to step outside my comfort zone and do something spontaneous or differently from the way I usually would, so instead of browsing in the library I reached out and picked a book at random. It was a book I wold never have picked, the blurb about 1950s gangsters in Washington and the Greek community disinterested me even when I read it after reading the book, but I would have missed something amazing. Well plotted and beautifully written, I just could have drowned in his descriptive passages about the shocking reality of immigrant life in 50s DC. The deep joy of being touched by an unknown writer as happened with Shreve. And it's the first of a quadrology!