The Big Over Easy is the first in the Nursery Crime series by Jasper Fforde and, while it was not published until 2005, it was actually written in 1994, well before his highly successful Thursday Next series. It is a reworking of his first written novel which was initially titled “Who Killed Humpty Dumpty”, and is set in a similar alternative universe to the Thursday Next novels; the main characters, DI Jack Spratt, DS Mary Mary, Dr. Gladys Singh and others appear in “The Well of Lost Plots”.

With each Jasper Fforde book, I look forward to the smorgasbord of hilarious, occasionally ludicrous names that Fforde’s rich imagination throws up: journalists Joshua Hatchett, Archibald Fatquack, Hector Sleaze and Clifford Sensible; detectives Inspector Moose, Hercule Porridge and Miss Maple from St Michael Mead; Giorgio Porgia, William Winkie, Tom Thomm (the flautist’s son), Incomprehensible Greene (landscaper), Seymour Weevil, DCI Bestbeloved, Mr & Mrs Sittkomm. Winsum & Loosum Pharmaceuticals, and Spongg footcare. Fforde also treats the reader to occasional gems like: “She opened the door…..letting out a stream of cats that ran around with such rapidity and randomness of motion that they assumed a liquid state of furry purringness.” I found this book thoroughly enjoyable and I look forward to the second in this series, The Fourth Bear.

The Secret River is the first in the Thornhill family series by Kate Grenville. It tells the story of William Thornhill and his wife Sarah (Sal) from their childhood together in London, through William’s career as a Waterman, his eventual transportation to New South Wales and the life his family made for themselves in the harsh landscape of 19th century Australia. Grenville’s thorough research is apparent in the level of detail about everyday life in the new colony, detail that gives the reader a good idea of how life was for the early settlers. Grenville’s beautiful prose captures well the characters’ hard life and their fleeting glimpses of happiness, as well as the timeless landscape of the Australian continent. The settlers’ ignorance of the indigenous population’s philosophy and lifestyle becomes clear as the story progresses and the white man’s attitude to the blacks is skilfully rendered with a violent climax. In order that he and his family survive, William Thornhill finds himself not only turning a blind eye to injustices, but eventually taking part in atrocities he never dreamed he would encounter. A moving and powerful read.

Black Swan Green is the 4th novel by David Mitchell. It describes a year in the life of Jason Taylor, an intense, thoughtful but stammering thirteen-year-old budding poet living in darkest Worcestershire. Set in 1982, this is a very realistic rendition of the anxieties and challenges faced by teenagers in the early eighties. Each chapter details the events of one or more days in the months of that year. Through the beautiful prose of his narration, we join Jason in boyish adventures and coming-of-age rituals (first cigarette, initiation rites, first kiss), and we learn of his ambitions (poetry, forestry) and his anxieties (stammering, the Falklands war, his parents’ relationship, girls). In that time of life when image is all important and peer pressure is strong, Jason tries to navigate a path that does not betray his values and ambitions but doesn’t damage his credibility of make him look “too gay”. Jason’s relationship with his family and his true friends is heartwarming and the poet hidden inside the young man is apparent in his thoughts and descriptions. Ultimately, he finds the courage he needs to face his demons. His naiveté, observations and occasional ignorance make for many laugh-out-loud moments, but the scariest thing about this novel was that I knew all the songs and artists mentioned from first appearance. This coming-of-age novel is at least as good as Jasper Jones. A dazzling read.

The Bluest Eye is the first novel by American author Toni Morrison. It is set in 1941 in the small town of Lorain, Ohio, and tells the story of an 11-year-old Negro girl, Pecola Breedlove, who becomes pregnant to her father Cholly. Pecola’s family and environment is such that she is certain she is ugly; so convinced of this is she, that she wishes for blue eyes, believing this is the only thing that will relieve her ugliness. Narrated in part by a 9-year-old neighbourhood girl, Claudia, the perspective of young girls in this situation is novel. Some chapters detail the history of Cholly and Mrs Breedlove, giving some clues as to how this crippled and crippling family evolved. This reissue of Morrison’s first novel includes a new Forward by the author wherein she explains what she was trying to achieve. Some of the prose is quite stunning: “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved.” The prose may be beautiful, but as a Dutch-born Caucasian living in Australia with a limited experience of the Negro, I found it difficult to relate to this book.

“Smut: two unseemly stories” is, as the title suggests, an omnibus of two short stories by English author and actor, Alan Bennett. The first story is The Greening of Mrs Donaldson. Mrs Donaldson, recently widowed, finds herself a little short on cash and decides to take a student couple as lodgers. When they find themselves unable to pay the rent, they come to a novel arrangement with their landlady. Mrs Donaldson’s other source of income is working as a Simulated Patient in medical student training; she becomes so talented at this that the consequences are almost grave. Bennett provides the reader with plenty of laugh out loud moments; the dialogue is oftimes dryly witty and occasionally hilarious. Full of understated British humour.
The second story is The Shielding of Mrs Forbes. When Graham Forbes decides to marry Betty Greene, Muriel Forbes’s objections are manifold: name, age, looks, religion and something else she hasn’t mentioned. Edwards Forbes has no such objections, wondering only if his fastidious son has “done it” with Betty yet. As more of their private lives is revealed (and I found that somewhat reminiscent of Maupin’s Tales of the City), we learn that everyone is intent on shielding Mrs Forbes to safeguard her innocence. According to Alan Bennett, there is a lot more promiscuity in staid British households than you or I were ever aware. Very entertaining.
These two stories are at least as funny as his earlier work, The Uncommon Reader, if in a completely different vein. I really enjoyed them.

The Lake of Dreams is the long awaited second novel by the bestselling author of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, Kim Edwards. It is 2006, and almost 10 years since Martin Jarrett was drowned in the Finger Lakes town of The Lake of Dreams. His daughter, Lucy, a hydrologist, is living in Japan with her engineer boyfriend, Yoshi, when she gets emails from family telling her of her mother, Evie’s wrist injury. Since her father’s death, she has been constantly on the move between countries, jobs and people, running from the responsibility she feels for the events of that night. When she travels back to The Lake of Dreams, she comes across relics from the past in the house of her childhood, clues to an unknown ancestor. As she searches further, she finds herself drawn to this distant relative, feeling a commonality with her. But what she eventually uncovers has the potential for explosive consequences for everyone in her family. In this beautifully told tale, Edwards touches of a myriad of subjects: glass art and stained glass in particular; genealogy and family history; the suffrage movement; the conservation of land and water, lakes and marshes; comets; women in the bible; dreams; locks, keys and lockcraft; emigrating. The story is absorbing, exciting in places and emotional: love, deception and betrayal, courage, sacrifice, fear, ambition, pride, envy, desire and regret all feature. I loved the tiny cameo that Edwards inserted: describing the cover of her first novel as being read by one of the characters. There were some wonderful passages and sentiments: “…..that evil is a force in the world, a force that seeks, and it finds its way into our lives through anger and loss, through sadness and betrayal, like mold on bread, like rot on an apple, it takes hold.” The message of acting out of love and not out of anger is powerfully conveyed through the narrative. A marvelous read.

Full Dark, No Stars is an omnibus of four dark tales of retribution by Stephen King.
In “1922”, dedicated Nebraska farmer, Wilf James, murders his wife, Arlette, when she threatens to sell her portion of the family farm to buy a dress shop in Omaha. He involves his 14-year-old son, and, though they get away with murder, Arlette never really seems to leave and life goes downhill from that moment on. 4/5
In “Big Driver”, mystery novelist Tessa Jean takes a shortcut home from a book-club engagement with almost fatal consequences. Although frightened of her attacker, Tess refuses to let things lie: the New Tess uses the Old Tess’s skills as a crime-writer to exact revenge. This tale has a very strong female lead character: I really enjoyed her inner monologue and I found it “edge of the seat” reading. 5/5
In “Fair Extension”, cancer-ridden Dave Streeter makes a deal with a man selling all sorts of extensions, George Elvid (that’s right, rearrange the letters) for a life extension. His cancer disappears, but a price has to be paid: it turns out that Elvid wants more than mere money. A reflection on the “fairness” of life. 4/5
In “A Good Marriage” , Darcy Anderson accidentally stumbles on something that has her questioning just how well she really knows her husband of twenty years. Her neat, clean, organised husband, the father of her children, appears to have a dark secret, a terrifying pastime she has never suspected, something that will irrevocably change her life and that of her children if it becomes known. Another strong female character. 5/5
Plot, characters and their interaction are all things in which King is the expert. His characters are ordinary people in extraordinary situations and King explores how they act and react. His natural dialogue has the voices speaking in the reader’s head. Black humour ensures plenty of laughs. Horror is another thing that King excels at, and the horrors in these tales include rats, rape, murder, decaying corpses, disease, torture and madness. Scary too, is how people will justify their actions. In each story, the characters feel a change come over them, as if a stranger inside them has taken over. For Wilf it is the Conniving Man; for Tess, the New Tess; for Dave it is someone inside him who has held a grudge since grammar school; and for Darcy it is the Dark Wife within, for Bob, the ghost of his childhood friend, BD. King skilfully builds the tension so that the stories are real page-turners. These four stories prove, once again, that King is the master of the long dark tale.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is the 2nd novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. The main story is narrated by nine-year-old Oskar Schell whose father, Thomas, died on 9/11. Some years after his Thomas’s death, Oskar finds a key in his father’s closet. His determination to find the lock that the key opens is fuelled by his desire to find out exactly how his father died. One small clue with the key leads him to touch the lives of many people and the idea is the six degrees of separation is brought to mind. Oskar is clever, funny, aware, quirky, somewhat precocious, earnest, thoughtful and very resourceful. As he tries to beat his grief-related insomnia, Oskar invents amazing things in his mind, like a birdseed shirt so birds will save the wearer falling from a great height (like the WTC). Interspersed with Oskar’s narration are replies from famous people to letters Oskar writes them, photographs Oskar takes with the camera that belonged to the grandfather who left 40 years before he was born, and pictures he downloads from the internet. Adding to the intrigue are the thoughts that Oskar’s paternal grandmother sets down in letters to him about her life and unsent letters from the long absent grandfather to his now-dead son. This novel examines how people react to tragedy in their lives, what they do to cope, and what they do to protect those they love from facts they believe will harm them. The ultimate message seems to be to live life as if each moment is your last, and tell the people you love that that you love them. This novel made me laugh out loud and it made me cry. I loved the characters and the private codes they used. A moving and brilliant read.

from an uncorrected proof
Albert of Adelaide is the first novel by Howard L. Anderson. Albert is a platypus who, sick of his imprisonment there, has escaped from the zoo at Adelaide, and has taken the train to Tennant Creek in search of the “old Australia”, a land of liberty, promise and peace that the other animals in the zoo kept whispering about. Albert is hoping to find a world like that of his childhood in the muddy banks of the river Murray, or at least, something that’s better than Adelaide: what he finds is a very long way from those expectations. Albert seems innocent and a bit naïve, but he turns out to be not entirely helpless, especially when someone makes him angry. Whilst he chances upon some generous friends, Albert also encounters ignorance and prejudice (he’s not a marsupial!), and soon finds he is a platypus with a price on his head, wanted for arson and cheating at two-up. Anderson gives the reader a rich cast of characters: an insane possum, a wallaby with megalomaniacal tendencies, a pair of alcoholic bandicoots, an ex-champion wrestling Tasmanian Devil, a singing pyromaniac wombat, marsupials playing two-up, one kangaroo working as a bartender and another as (fittingly) a bouncer, a surprising snake, several dingoes with deceptive qualities and a gun-happy foreigner in red long-johns with a black eye mask. And it seems they are all armed: pistols, rifles, an Enfield carbine, knives, rockets, a cannon, shotguns, muskets, and swords all feature. Anderson’s very original plot includes fires, highway robbery, bribery, betrayal, ambush and more than one battle. He gives his characters some wise words that will have the reader thinking about loyalty, mateship, justifying one’s actions and just how far one would go for a friend. I loved Albert’s thoughts on being lost. I was interested to see how Anderson, a resident of New Mexico, USA, would acquit himself with a story filled with Australian native animals: I was very impressed with the result. I laughed a lot, I cried, and I heaved a sigh of satisfaction at the end of the book (although I would love to read more of Albert’s adventures). A captivating tale.

Blue Latitudes is the 4th book by Pulitzer prize-winning American journalist and writer, Tony Horwitz. It has been described as part-travelogue, part-history and in it, Horwitz follows, to some extent, the three Pacific voyages of British explorer, navigator and cartographer, James Cook. Horwitz compares points of interest from Cook’s journals with their current day state and comments on contrasts and similarities. Observations from Cook’s diary of the peoples and lands he discovered, which might have made for dry reading, are made more interesting when related to Horwitz’s own present-day experiences in those places. Horwitz admits that it is difficult for him to faithfully follow Cook’s travels when he is not doing so in a wooden ship sailing to inaccessible, inhospitable and antisocial places like Antarctica, which he expediently omits. Horwitz starts his experience with a short stint on HMS Bark Endeavour, to give him a taste of a sailor’s life in the 18th century. He then travels on, by more modern means, to Tahiti and Bora Bora, New Zealand, Australia, Niue and Tonga, Yorkshire and London, Alaska and, finally, to the scene of Cook’s death at Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawaii. His companion is cynical, drinking, swearing, Aussie (ex-Yorkshire) Roger, whose wry reflections add plenty of humour. Horwitz comments on the changes wrought to peoples first discovered by Cook, because of that discovery, and the impossibility of Cook’s missions: terra australis and the North West Passage. If the eyes begin to glaze over in the Tonga chapter, the mention of Cook’s descendants soon remedies this. Amid the dearth of authentic Cook relics in Yorkshire, Horwitz finds a clue to Cook’s character in an unlikely place. It was interesting to learn of the derivation from Polynesian of certain words and expressions now in common usage in the English language, among them tattoo and taboo. Bougainvillea and kangaroo also had surprising origins. An interesting and informative read.

The Sense of an Ending is the 11th novel by Julian Barnes. In his sixties, retired, Tony Webster sees his life as pretty ordinary: career, marriage, amicable divorce, one child, two grandchildren. So the letter from a lawyer, informing him of an unexpected bequest of money and some documents, is surprising and intriguing. A blast from the past, it has him thinking back to high school friends, Adrian Finn in particular, and his first girlfriend at college, Veronica Ford. As Tony examines his memories of 40 years ago, present day events have him wondering just how true his memories are, and how justified his actions really were. Quotes from his sixth form History class come to mind: “Is history the lies of the victors? Or the self-delusions of the defeated?” Tony decides it’s the memories of the survivors, who are neither victorious nor defeated. Barnes has given the reader a clever plot and realistic characters. I found the suicide philosophy (life is an unsolicited gift you can refuse to accept) thought-provoking and the twist at the end left me gasping. I found it very reminiscent of Ian McEwan’s writing. This is a short but very powerful read.

March is the second novel by Australian author, Geraldine Brooks. It tells the story of Mr March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, Little Women. But as well as giving the reader an idea of his experience “at the war” (the noise, smell, blood, cold and death are almost palpable), Brooks provides background on the Civil War: attitudes to slavery in the north and south, behaviour of soldiers on both sides of the war, and the experience of the civilian population. She touches on the North’s mixed record of high idealism, negligence and outright cruelty regarding the contraband (slaves who came within Union lines) and vividly illustrates the moral dilemma faced in war by pacifists who were also ardent abolitionists. A multitude of facts is incorporated into the story in a way that renders them easily absorbed. By having March narrate the first two thirds of the book, Brooks also gives the reader some of Mr March’s history: his youth, his career, meeting Marmee, his involvement in the Abolitionist cause, the reason for his reduced circumstances. Marmee’s thoughts and feelings about her husband’s actions are detailed when she takes over the narration: this wise, dignified, compliant woman is shown to have unspoken opinions while remaining the strength of the March family. All this Brooks meshes seamlessly with the events in Little Women. While Alcott would have been able to write from personal experience, the vast amount of research that Brooks has had to do is evident on every page. March adds some darker adult resonances to the voids of Alcott’s sparkling children’s tale. An outstanding read.

First Among Sequels is the fifth novel in the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. The narration starts in 2002, some fourteen years after Something Rotten. Thursday, now 52 and feeling her age, is working at Acme Carpets, Spec Ops having been disbanded soon after the Commonsense Party came to power. Her sixteen-year-old son, Friday, destined to lead the ChronoGuard and save the world, is a typically teenage smelly, grunty bedslug. Landen and Thursday have two daughters, Tuesday and Jenny, and Landen writes at home whilst Thursday secretly runs her own Spec Ops branch and, in the Book World, trains cadet agents for Jurisfiction. Reality TV shows like Samaritan Kidney Swap have become popular, and read rates are dropping dramatically, a cause for great concern in the Book World. Tension is mounting between some of the genres in the Book World, and the Council of Genres is proposing to make books interactive. As things come to a head, Thursday finds herself, unthinkably, going to Goliath Corporation for help. While some of the pieces about time travel and the ChronoGuard almost had my eyes glazing over, things I loved in this excellent novel were the book refitter’s own language, the fictional Thursdays, the Stupidity Surplus, Schrödinger’s Night Fever Principle, the good ship Moral Dilemma on the Hypothetical Ocean, Aornis Hades timeloop prison, books whose genres change, piano exchange, the serial killer pun and the cheese smuggling. Landen has previously been very much in the background, but in this instalment his character is developed and we see more of Thursday’s family life. Fforde is always inventive with names and this book is no exception: Mrs Berko Boyler, Daphne Farquit, Aflredo Traficcone, Anne Wirthlass-Schitt, Cherie Yogert, Hedge Moulting, Cliff Hangar, Irritable Vowel Syndrome, and the various cheese names; Salmon Thrusty’s “The Demonic Couplets” is worthy of Rushdie himself. Thursday makes a lovely speech about the importance of the reader. The cliff hanger ending will send readers in search of the next Thursday Next novel, One of Our Thursdays is Missing. Reminiscent of Douglas Adams, this is another excellent dose of Jasper Fforde.

Edge is the 12th stand-alone novel by Jeffrey Deaver. Set in Washington DC, this gripping tale starts with a prologue in which a lifter, Henry Loving, tortures and kills a government personal security officer, Abe Fallow, for information about locations of people in the witness protection scheme. Fast-forward six years, and Loving has targeted DC police detective, Ryan Kessler and his family; Fallow’s protégé, Officer Corte is the one assigned to protect (shepherd) the family. Under Corte’s care are Ryan, his daughter, Amanda, his wife, Joanne, and her sister, Maree. Matters are complicated by the fact that no-one can quite figure out what information Loving is intent on “lifting” from Kessler and for whom, but Corte has the able assistance of Claire duBois, his own protégé. He also has mostly useful help from FBI agents and interference from the Attorney General’s department, as well as a Senate Enquiry into unwarranted wiretaps threatening. In this riveting novel, Deaver gives the reader a plot with plenty of twists, lots of tension, convincing characters and credible dialogue. He provides a wealth of interesting information about witness protection: the nicknames used, like hitter, lifter, clone, principal, primary and shepherd; the use of behaviour psychology, observation and communication; the resources used, like electronic devices, technical backup, accommodation, vehicles, weapons and surveillance equipment. Deaver also touches on game playing and tactical moves. Corte is perhaps a little too unemotional, but the plot ensures this is a page-turner.

Chesapeake Blue is the fourth of the Chesapeake Bay series by Nora Roberts. It is the story of Seth Quinn, who as a ten-year-old , was bought from his mother (Ray’s estranged daughter, Gloria deLauter) by Ray Quinn and raised by Ray’s adopted sons, Cam, Ethan and Phil. After years of promoting his art around the continent, Seth Quinn wants to come home to St Christopher, to the security of the place he grew up in. When he arrives, he meets Drusilla Whitcomb Banks, granddaughter of a Senator, who has come to St Chris to get away from life in Washington and the stifling demands of her parents. She’s running a flower shop and loving it, and Seth wants to paint her, and more. But everyone has secrets in their past, and Seth’s is insisting on turning up like a bad penny, threatening everything he holds dear. Is there any way someone as sophisticated as Dru can be with someone like Seth with his history? Is Seth underestimating Drusilla’s strength? Has Seth forgotten he is a Quinn, and Quinns stand together? This final chapter in the Chesapeake Bay series will please fans who wanted to know how Seth turned out. Roberts knows how to create characters to love and hate, and a plot that is original. An entertaining read.

The Lost Art of Gratitude is the 6th novel in the Isabel Dalhousie series by Alexander McCall Smith. In this installment, Isabel has to deal with an accusation by Christopher Dove of plagiarism in the Review of Applied Ethics, has to break the news of her engagement to Jamie to her prickly niece, Cat, is coerced into mediating with the father of Minty Auchterlonie's baby, meets Cats new boyfriend (a tightrope walker), engages a professional to capture Brother Fox and has lunch (a salad) with Professor Lettuce. As usual, Jamie is the voice of reason when Isabel feels action is needed, and Isabel's musings on many and varied subjects are a continual source of humour. And despite everything sent to try her, Isabel finds she has much to be grateful for. Alexander McCall Smiths novels are filled with gentle philosophy, charming characters and laugh-out-loud humour. This audiobook, skilfully abridged by Katy Nichol so that no relevant parts are omitted, is beautifully narrated by Hilary Neville. Truly delightful!

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is the first novel by Kiran Desai. In the town of Shahkot, in the shadow of the Himalayan foothills, lives Sampath Chawla, a bored, dreamy Post Office clerk distinguishing himself with lacklustre career ambitions. When he manages to lose his job, his father, Mr Chawla, despairs that his son will ever amount to anything; his mother, Kulfi, says little, but then, she did come from a mad family; his sister Pinky finds him irritating and exasperating; his paternal grandmother, Ammaji, however, is convinced he will come good. Overwhelmed by the attention, Sampath decides to climb a tree in the Guava Orchard to be alone, to clear his thoughts, a deed that, unfortunately for Sampath, has quite the opposite effect. Convinced he is a hermit, people gather to hear his thoughts: this sets in motion events that will affect not only Sampath and his family, but the people of the district, the Chief Medical Officer, the Superintendent of Police, the Army Brigadier, the University researcher, the District Collector and even a spy from the Atheist Society. This novel has a cast of amusing characters, a plot with a few surprises and is filled with wonderful prose like: “A passing car sent its searchlight-glare crazy and liquid over the sides of the buildings and into the trees, revealing not the colours, the daylight solidity of things, but a world of dark gaps cut from an empty skin of light”. Desai is skilled at creating atmosphere and this novel has a uniquely Indian feel. This novel was a pleasure to read and it is easy to see why it won the Betty Trask Award in 1998.

Port Mortuary is the 18th book in the Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell. As the chief of the new Cambridge Forensic Centre, Scarpetta has been away for 6 months at Dover Air Force Base training in CT-assisted virtual autopsy. She is rushed back to the CFC by Marino and Lucy to handle a bizarre case that could shut down her new facility, an apparent arrhythmia victim who may have been alive when he was locked in the centre’s cooler. While she has been absent, her second in command, Jack Fielding, has been behaving very strangely. Her husband, Benton, is involved in a case where a young man with Aspergers has made a patently false confession that he murdered a young boy with a nail gun. And a young footballer was shockingly tortured and dumped in the nearby harbour. It seems these events are all connected. After 6 novels narrated in the third person, Cornwell returns to first person narration by Kay Scarpetta for this book, which I found easier to read, although the constant analysis of Kay’s feelings and borderline paranoia did become tiresome. As with previous Scarpetta books, Marino is still doing and saying stupid things; Lucy is still acting willfully; Benton is still being evasive about what he tells Kay, and Jack is letting Kay down, once again. As with many James Patterson books, the text of the first chapters is littered with brand names, something that might have the reader wondering if Cornwell profits materially or financially from this. What was interesting information: the concept of CT scanning autopsy; blade wounds; MRI scanning and metals; posthumous sperm harvesting; nanotechnology applications for surveillance and drug delivery; GSR testing for different types of bullets; robotic vehicles and flybots. The plot was original and thought-provoking so it is a pity Cornwell chose to pad the text with technical details of things like helicopter flight procedures and CT scans, which might only be of interest to technophiles, as well as trivial minutiae of driving a car and walking on icy surfaces. Some of the information was delivered by one character to another lecture-style; some of the dialogue between Benton and Kay was so wooden, they could have been casual acquaintances instead of husband and wife. The story was very slow-moving and the book would have been much improved by having the padding edited out.

Escape is the 41st stand-alone novel by popular author, Barbara Delinsky. One Friday morning, New York lawyer Emily Aulenbach takes stock of her life and realises it has strayed so far from her dream that she needs to escape. She takes off her watch, turns off her Blackberry, leaves behind her laptop and, without telling anyone or having any firm plans, heads north. After a few days, she finds herself in Bell Valley, New Hampshire, a place where her life changed radically one summer, ten years ago, and a place where she hopes to, once again, find herself. In Bell Valley, she renews a neglected friendship with Vicki Bell, submits to the healing powers of the Animal Refuge and reconnects with the mystical coyote of that long-ago summer. But an old lover, Vicki’s brother Jude, has also returned to Bell Valley; Emily is wedded to James, but the problems she ran away from include her fulfilling job, her demanding family and friends and her dysfunctional marriage, so is Jude’s presence a help or a hindrance? In this novel, Delinsky gives the reader characters with depth, spirit and integrity and a plot that is original and unpredictable, with an exciting climax. Delinsky touches on a range of topical subjects: the pressure of modern-day life; damage claims against large corporations; animal refuges; trust funds; intimidation and stalking; infertility and life balance. I had not read any Delinsky novels for quite some time, so I had forgotten what a pleasure these are to read. I really enjoyed this one.

Minding Frankie is the 16th book by popular Irish author, Maeve Binchy. When Noel Lynch, an alcoholic in a dead end job, is told he is the father of Stella Dixon’s baby daughter, Frankie (Frances Stella), it turns out to be a major turning point in his lacklustre life. He makes some big decisions and, with the help of his American cousin Emily, his parents and a multitude of friends, he is determined to raise Frankie to the best of his abilities. His friend from night college, Lisa Kelly, needs to escape from her family home and helping out with Frankie seems a small price to pay for sharing the flat with Noel. Of course, Moira Tierney, the unfriendly social worker, is convinced that it will all end badly and maintains a dogged surveillance on Noel, Lisa and everyone involved in Minding Frankie. In this novel, Binchy illustrates beautifully that saying “it takes a village to raise a child”. While this story can be enjoyed without reading Binchy’s prior novels, fans will be rewarded with appearances (some cameos, some major) of characters from previous novels including Scarlet Feather, Evening Class, Tara Road, Quentins, Nights of Rain and Stars, Heart and Soul and The Whitethorn Woods. This novel has births and deaths, weddings and funerals, long lost sons, major bequests, happiness and heartache. Reading a Maeve Binchy book is like coming home: it feels comfortable and you’re coming back to people you know and love. Binchy must have been close to seventy when she wrote this novel, but her characters and plots have moved with the times: she has lost none of her magic.