The Viceroy of Ouidah - Bruce Chatwin

I found this a little irritating. Brief but over-plotted and over-written, I found the tale of colonial West Africa far inferior to Werner Herzog's loosely adapted movie.

The Go-Between - L.P. Hartley

A writer looks back on an experience in early adolescence, during a spell at an English country house. The young woman who lives there is conducting an affair with a lower class local man, and the adolescent's naive misunderstanding of the situation results in a catastrophic intervention that begets irreversible and tragic consequences for all three individuals. So, Ian McEwan, now I know where the plot for Atonement came from.

To my great surprise and delight, this 1953 novel is every bit the equal of McEwan's work. Its unoriginal themes are the English class system and the loss of childhood innocence, but told with a devastatingly sad precision worthy of Forster. As the plot gradually unfolds, a sense of fatal mischance overwhelms the reader until the unexpected yet inevitable denouement comes to pass.

L.P. Hartley is a name I only know from the fading spine labels in the cheaper second hand bookshops. This is the only novel of his I could name, although I intend to find out more. I suppose he was once very popular but has since faded. Even The Go-Between is probably chiefly remembered for Joseph Losey's film version or for its epigrammatic opening line:

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

Bone; eyes of the storm - Jeff Smith

More gently entertaining comic fantasy from the Bone series. The end of this, the third part, involves some major plot revelations that set up the series as something rather more conventional than the earlier episodes would have suggested. Will it descend into cliche or will Smith keep things interesting?

Gould's Book of Fish - Richard Flanagan

I didn't enjoy my previous attempt at Flanagan, so I was pleased that I allowed my preconceptions to be overcome here. Whereas The Unknown Terrorist was hectoring and literal, Gould's Book of Fish is oblique, bizarre and compelling, if often also fatiguing. The mode is a kind of grubby magical realism, Garccia Marquez trapped in a colonial Tasmanian sewer, with a little of Peter Ackroyd's shifts in time and identity thrown in. At times it is thrilling, at other times baffling, and the postscript throws everything else into a new relief.

London; a pilgrimage - Gustave Dore & Blanchard Jerrold

This portrait of London in the late 1860s really captures the flavour of the capital at its riotous peak. Portrait is the right word, too, as it is Dore's masterful illustrations that conjure up the extremes of poverty and wealth as well as the sheer industriousness of the place. Jerrold's rather syrupy prose is less exciting, but the depiction of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race as an event enjoyed by Londoners of every class was something of an eye-opener.

Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse

This is a kind of Pilgrim's Progress for Buddhists. In a simply told tale, an emblematic figure journeys through various spiritual states befoer achieving final glory. I know very little about eastern religion beyond the fact that it's as big a pile of cods as the western variety, so it was interesting in that sense and at least I've read another Nobel Prize winner.

Kowloon Tong - Paul Theroux

I was in Hong Kong just before the 1996 Handover, but I spent most of my time carousing with other poms passing through, so I was interested in this depiction of a very different gwailo community; the leftovers of Empire that have been there for 50 years. The depiction of the weird culture is convincing, but the book shifts into an unconvincing sub-Greene thriller plot halfway through and loses both credibility and interest.

The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood

Whilst reading this I had several people say something along the lines of "You've never read The Blind Assassin? I thought everyone had." It has the rare distinction of appearing regularly in both critic's favourite lists and popularity polls, so I guess I was a little behind.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It has one of those Russian doll style structures incorporating stories within stories within stories, but it is a mark of Atwood's class that the reader retains the thread of every narrative line and remains equally invested in all of them. Her mastery of such nuts-and-bolts skills as pacing and gradual plot revelation is so good as to become almost invisible.

The outermost "doll", narrated by an elderly woman in the present looking back on her life, is convincing and revelatory, and a moving study of the effects of time on our lives. An alternative title would be the one Martin Amis used for his autobiography - Experience.

If This Is A Man - Primo Levi

This devastating memoir of survival in Auschwitz is nigh on unreviewable. What can I say that could equate to the story told herein? The tone is bleak, honest and incredibly lacking in rage, although a quiet anger does sometimes show through. This would be the perfect introduction to this horrific period for teenage readers, and the most eloquent possible response to those insidious antisemites who deny the Holocaust.