Adventures in the Screen Trade – William Goldman

A wonderfully readable insight into the world of a top Hollywood screenwriter, the book combines a how-to guide with some deliciously gossipy anecdotes. The stories of the making of All The President's Men and A Bridge Too Far are a hoot.

This was published in 1982 when Burt Reynolds was the number one star worldwide, which sometimes makes the insights feel dated but occasionally illuminates for us how things have changed.

Wish You Were Here – Graham Swift

In his masterpiece Waterland, Swift adopts a narrative strategy involving multiple plot strands and timelines that twist around each other to brilliant effect. Wish You Were Here attempts a similar feat but, rather than the strands tightening to a coherent whole, they somehow dissipate.

The plot revolves around the return of a soldier’s body from Iraq, an event that triggers various family revelations and resonates with other news events, particularly BSE and the subsequent mass slaughter of cattle. The focus on Devonian rural folk in a miserable cycle of poverty and suicide inevitably recalls Hardy.

The best sequence describes the repatriation ceremony when the coffin arrives at a military airbase, a commonly seen media image that I will now look at with new eyes.

The books major misstep is in an unforgivably clichéd minor character, a financial whiz called Toby who cares only about money and is having an extramarital affair with his PA. Puh-lease.

The Matisse Stories – A.S. Byatt

Sometimes the efforts to link these short stories to the works of Matisse are subtle but often they are less so, amounting to little more than using a lot of colour-based adjectives. Nevertheless this is one of the better works by the infuriatingly inconsistent Byatt.

The Empty Family – Colm Toibin

Short stories are not usually my bag, but the new Toibin is always worth a read. This obviously contains some glorious prose and many affecting moments, but by nature it is a patchy affair.

Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens

This is one of Dickens’ more rambling, picaresque novels and is consequently rather patchy. Many of the secondary characters overshadow the rather bland protagonist, including the batty Mrs Nickleby and the dastardly Wackford Squeers.

A Landing On The Sun – Michael Frayn

This is a curious splicing of farce and Kafkaesque bureaucratic dystopia, written with author’s trademark wit and with the occasional laugh-out-load moment. The tone is distinctly odd, and the story slightly overstays its welcome.

An Education – Lynn Barber

Barber is a fine journalist and her skills are shown here to extend to memoir. She does not suffer from false modesty and she’s had some remarkable experiences along the way, so the result is a rattling read.

The Stranger’s Child – Alan Hollinghurst

Hollinghurst is a genius, and I will be surprised if this beautiful and substantial novel does not take this year’s Booker.

The first section of the novel details the romantic, homosexual liaison between a doomed WW1 poet and his university friend at the latter’s fadingly aristocratic country home. We follow the house through generations, as the memories of the individuals involved and their chroniclers becomes further removed from what we know to be the truth. The effect is insightful, lyrical and deeply moving.

The setting and structure is reminiscent of McEwan’s Atonement, whilst the conflicts between reality, memory and biography recall Byatt’s Possession.

Mr Weston’s Good Wine – T.F. Powys

A fascinatingly odd novel, I picked this up at random in a charity shop and was charmed by its off-kilter allegory and moral sense. The story brings to mind Under Milk Wood (a night in the life of a collection of villagers) and The Master and Margarita (a major Christian figure walks among us), but it predates both.

Hideous Kinky – Esther Freud

I don’t understand the fuss about this book, which I found to be lightweight and inconsequential. There’s a real problem with the narrative voice too, which is meant to be that of a young child but is all over the place.

The Getaway – Jim Thompson

This tough-as-nails gangster novel is stylishly written and stays well within genre conventions except for its most memorable passage, in which the moll has to hide out in a tiny coffin-like cave for 48 hours to chilling effect.

Landscape of Farewell – Alex Miller

I found this tale of friendship between two academics, one an elderly German man and the other a vigorous aboriginal woman, a little lame. The author is reaching for profound meditations on Australian colonisation and German war guilt, but I found it ineffectual.

The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch

It seems odd that this unwieldy beast of a novel won the Booker in the 1970s, I detect a whiff of a reward for lifetime achievement rather than this odd book. It tells the tale of a theatrical impresario retired to the seaside until his past comes back to haunt him. The echoes of The Tempest are exploited cleverly, and a curious strand of humour runs through it.