The Great Swindle by Pierre Lemaitre

The cover blurb describes this as a masterly epic of post-war France.’ It’s quite a compelling read, though perhaps not masterly. The story begins in the WWI trenches, with descriptions of the horrors that remind me of Pat Barker’s novels about that war. Emerging from this horror are three characters, the dastardly bastardly Henri, officer but not gentleman; the effete, cynical Edouard; and the lowly bumbling mouse of a man, Albert. Albert and Edouard are more or less bonded for life because of the events that happen in the trenches and they work together to create the great swindle of the title. The book is as much a commentary on the corruption of the wealthy, on greed, and on the devastating impact of war as is it about the swindle. It’s shocking, dark of mood but an accomplished page turner.

The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi) by Alessandro Manzoni

I understand now why there is a street in every Italian city called Via Manzoni. This is the Italian classic novel. While the English were producing Bronte and Austen and Blake and the French Moliere, Hugo and Dumas, the Italians produced Manzoni, the father of Italian romantic literature. This is a whacking great novel , 700 odd pages, that traces the unhappy journeys of two innocent peasants Lucia and Renzo as they go on the run from a despotic warlord, Don Rodrigo, who wishes to despoil Lucia’s innocence. But it is much much more than a romance. Their separate journeys take them through the plagues, the wars, the famines, and the riots of the 1600s; not only that, Manzoni also lays into the politicians, the judiciary, the church and the aristocracy as the young innocents come face to face with them. I am ready to suggest that it’s one of the first in the much maligned historical fiction genre. And it’s fascinating, utterly fascinating. It takes some reading and I could only manage a chapter, maybe two, at a time because of the density of the commentary about whatever aspect of society was attracting Manzoni’s attention at the time. The lovers really became insignificant as I read on, so absorbed was I by the descriptions of what life was actually like during the plague, with the spectre of the dreadful ‘anointers’, and so forth. I’m told Italian school children used to read half of this book one year, and the other half the next, better to absorb its lessons perhaps. It’s no wonder then that all the Italians I know are so attuned to the polemic!

Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick de Witt

The blurb on the back of this book describes it, among other things, as ‘nervy’ and ’beautifully strange’. And it is. The story is rather like a fairytale, with all the elements of fairytale such as beautiful maidens, mad barons, pickpockets, supernatural visitors and castles. But it’s not a fairytale. It’s a story about a young man, an antihero of sorts, pale and vapid and pretty much clueless, who sets out from his home village and a fairly unloving mother to make a living as a servant in a castle. He falls in love. And as with all love stories, there are ups and downs, competitors, love lost, love recovered etc etc etc. The story is told in the emotionless tone of a fairytale character too, so we are not privy to the depth of thought and suffering and joy that you might get with a more usual novel about a young man. There’s no embellishment around incidents such as the death of one of the character – you walk into the room with our hero and so and so has died. End of commentary. It’s as if you are in another sort of world as you read. But there is definitely a sense of wonder about the whole thing, as our hero Lucy travels through his experiences to find his place in the world.

Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

You don’t have to have read My Name is Lucy Barton to appreciate this marvellous collection of linked short stories, but it does add depth to your appreciation. These are not independent short stories; they are the stories of the people who are in some way connected to Lucy Barton, either as family or acquaintance or friend of an acquaintance. The characters sometimes appear in other people’s stories. And sometimes you learn that the situations they were in when their story finished have been resolved offstage, as it were, and you discover the endings of their story in someone else’s story. It’s a fascinating and brilliant technique. So while these stories are not so much plot driven as character driven, plot still has agency. This technique works beyond even the stories in this book, because the original Lucy Barton novel leaves so much unspoken, and you find yourself gathering more clues about her early life as you read this. So the dimension changes. It’s brilliant really. And as characters, these people just shine. They are so very real, such ordinary people with such ordinary lives and such normal problems. They are the sorts of problems, though, that people do not speak about – infidelity, perversion, incest, debilitating neglect and poverty, loneliness, envy and so forth. Strout tells their lives with kindness, empathy, understanding, sensitivity. She’s like the therapist listening and recording. She knows that most of them will not muster the strength to change their circumstances. This is one of the very best, most moving books I’ve read this year and even last. I will be going back to Lucy Barton.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Greer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for this book. It’s a sweet book, about a sensitive soul on a mission to distract himself from his miseries. Arthur Less is an aging gay writer, whose novels are not show stoppers but who is continuing to try. His lover of nine years has left him to marry another man. He is about to turn fifty. So he escapes on an around the world journey that takes him places like Milan and Paris, Morocco and Mexico, Germany and Japan. It’s a charming book, and a sweet love story. It has humour and grace, and the character of Arthur Less is beautifully observed. There’s tongue in cheek humour, as subtle as it is clever, and lovely, lovely language and metaphor.

Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages by Jack Hartnell

The most frustrating thing about books like this is that I forget most of what I’ve read almost as soon as I have finished the chapter. And this wonderful book is packed with fascinating details that I do so much want to remember! Jack Hartnell is an art historian so here he is writing about medieval bodies as the people themselves saw them and lived in them, and how we can see evidence of this in the contemporary art of the times. The book is divided into chapters about the various areas of the body, such as head, feet, stomach and so forth. Each chapter contains wonderful anecdotes (Jack Hartnell understands the importance of story telling to capture an audience), medical opinions and treatments of the time, and spin offs – in the chapter about feet for example, we look at travel and cartography. I enjoyed some aspects of this book so much that I sent emails to long suffering friends about characters like Roland the Farter, a member of Henry II’s court, employed for his skills in jumping, whistling and farting all at the same time. Because this is fundamentally a serious book though, and absolutely packed with information, it requires some concentration to read. Not for the beach but definitely for a rainy day on the couch!

Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr

This is such a lovely book. Anthony Doerr writes about the year he spent in Rome with his wife Shauna and baby twins Henry and Owen in 2004. On the day the twins were born, he received a one year fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, which involved moving the family there and living and writing there. So what he ends up writing, three years later once all that experience has had time to mature, is this story of his year in Rome. For someone who knows Rome well, has lived in Italy herself for a year and returned over and over and over again, this is like reliving the experience all over again. It’s not a travelogue, but rather a quiet and detailed observation of daily life in Rome throughout the year, the small sights, sounds and tastes of the city. With two tiny babies in a pretty basic rented apartment, no car and a book to write, Doerr and his wife are not tourists per se, but genuine visitors absorbing the life of the city. Quite simply, it made me very, very homesick for a city I love. And I haven’t even mentioned the writing, which is quite simply gorgeous. Doerr’s language is beautiful and his observations thoughtful. This is a lovely book.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

This is the classiest piece of historical fiction I think I have ever read. It’s the story of Count Alexander Rostov who, after the Russian Revolution, is confined to the elegant Metropol hotel in Moscow for the term of his natural life. Life, however, comes to him in his captivity and we meet the most fascinating array of characters against the backdrop of all the political machinations that took place during the period between 1922 and 1956. Not only is the story fascinating, it’s also beautifully told, with a lightness and elegance of touch that leaves me desperate to read more of this writer. Along the way we also learn what it is to be a true Russian gentleman, reminding me somehow of some of those English period pieces where to be a gentleman is the be all and end all of polite society.

A Long Way from Home by Peter Carey

I am a dedicated Peter Carey fan and this book did not let me down. It is the story of Titch Bobs, a flashy car salesman, and his feisty little wife Irene Bobs, and their neighbour Willie Bachhuber. In order to get publicity for their business they enter the Redex Trial with Willie as their navigator. The trip around the back roads of Australia takes them to both physical and metaphorical places they could never have imagined; it changes their lives forever. It also unravels a history that none of them ever suspected and provides Peter Carey with an opportunity to look closely at the shameful history of racism in this country. One of the things I admire most about Peter Carey is his ability with character and voice. This wonderful book is written in several voices, predominantly though in the utterly convincing voices of Irene and Willie. I was totally absorbed by them and often really surprised as their characters developed in unexpected ways. Willie’s gradual self-realization is a major and quite moving focus of this story. From the outset he seems to be able to sense the racial violence that has occurred in the landscape and as his journey continues, he finds himself attempting to record the truth.

Reckoning by Magda Szubanski

This is a deeply personal story – well it is an autobiography – from the very funny, very human comedian Magda Szubanski. It’s coloured by the tragedy of family experiences in war torn Poland and her own struggle to come to terms with her sexuality. The book focuses mainly on the impact both these major issues have on her relationships with her family and with her career. Magda is not a literary writer, so a lot of this reads pretty much like a personal journal and in fact I think may be just that. However the personality of this woman shines through and you cannot help but warm to her and feel sympathy for her as she battles to understand both her father and herself.

Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer

I really like the pacy writing style of JSF. A lot of his fiction reads like Woody Allen is talking, fast and furious, with a New York accent. This book is about Jewishness, as played out in a family that spans Israel to America. Against a background of debate about Jewish questions - Zionism, faith, how far you should uphold tradition, loyalty and betrayal - it charts the breakdown of a family relationship as the individuals in it try to find their inner selves. It’s a bit fraught and I found it a bit wordy, but then that’s probably just me being impatient and being on holidays so not wanting to get too bogged down in having to think too much.

The Brief Wondrous Life Oscar Wao by Juno Diaz

While the last book I read was about Jewishness, this one is about Dominican-ness. Set in America and the Dominican Republic, this complex book tells the story of a young Dominican, Oscar, and his struggles to fit in with society. But it’s really a device to focus the reader’s attention on the story of the Dominican Republic, about which I knew nothing, and the horrors of the Trujillo dictatorship, the violence, the corruption and the aftermath. It takes a while to figure out who exactly is telling the story, though that’s part of the interest actually, and it’s told in an authentic Dominican voice. The narrator adds numerous footnotes to explain who characters or or what events relate to. It’s not an uplifting story, but certainly a fascinating one. Diaz is obviously some sort of genius when it comes to structuring his novel as well; there’s the usual range of plot structures that 99 per cent of writers use and then there’s this, which doesn’t really fit any mould. I got a bit lost in some of the rantings from some of the characters, and skipped a few pages here and there, but that was as much wanting to get to the end to find out the worst because the suspense was killing me!

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

What an achingly, heartbreakingly, beautiful tragic story. It reads as the intimate exploration of Lucy Barton’s life and her journey of self realisation. She reflects on her appalling childhood, beautifully understated so that one can only imagine the true horror of it. You don’t need to know the detail but the damage it has done is evident. The glimpses - of her as a child locked in a truck while her parents work, of her brother paraded round the streets because he dressed in her clothes - suggest a brutality that has marked her for life. Her desperate longing for some sort of acknowledgment of her mother’s love, never realised, is heartbreaking. Yet Lucy Barton quietly arrives at a peace with herself, an acceptance and understanding of who she is and along with that the ability to move forward into a kind of contentment .

White Houses by Amy Bloom

This is the fictionalised account of Lorena Hickson’s love affair with Eleanor Roosevelt. It features all the characters and had me running to Google time and time again to look up the details of who they were in real life. It’s a sensitively and beautifully written love story, which shows the push-pull nature of such affairs between strong and independent women. The character of Hick, who tells the story, just shines.

Adventures of a Young Naturalist by David Attenborough

This is a collection of three books David Attenborough wrote describing his expeditions to Guyana, Indonesia in search of the Komodo Dragon and Paraguay in search of armadillos. They date back to the 1950s so the practice of collecting animals from the wild to put into zoos was quite acceptable then. He makes a point of noting this in his introduction, saying that the practice is no longer acceptable. It’s a fairly old fashioned read, but very interesting. I was surprised, because I’d never really thought about it I guess, about the amount of time wasted getting visas, gathering provisions and waiting for the weather to improve enough to go out. The connections between places were almost non-existent and David and his photographer partner on the expeditions, Charles, take the most incredible risks in the pursuit of their quarry. They sail in leaky boats to god knows where, fly around in small planes held together by string and chewing gum, and head off into the unknown with no food supplies. Extemporisation is the name of the game. I doubt whether they’d be allowed by their employers to travel in this way these days. I liked reading about the animals but these books are more about the journeys, the customs of the local people (before the days of mass tourism) and the characters that these adventurers meet. David Attenborough’s voice permeates the whole thing of course, and I have such a fondness for him that it was like spending an afternoon with an old mate.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

You wonder whether there can be yet another perspective on either of the world wars but yes, Anthony Doerr has done it. This book involves one of those backwards/forwards structures, where you move between the experiences of the two main protagonists and one more minor character, and backwards and forwards in time as well. Yet it’s not confusing. It tells the story of WWII from the point of view of a young and sensitive German boy, Werner, who is picked out of an orphanage because of his genius for radio technology and sent off to a Hitler Youth school to prepare for war. It follows him to St Malo and charts his failure to stand up against what he knows is inhumane in the face of the fanatics behind the Nazi war machine until his redemption, which you know has to be coming, in the end. It must have been something countless Germans had to deal with as the war progressed. And it’s a question I’ve long been interested in – what would I do in the face of relentless propaganda and the danger of resisting authority. Would I buckle or be brave? The other protagonist is a blind French girl Marie Laure, daughter of a museum locksmith, who flees Paris with her father carrying one of the museum’s greatest treasures, a blue diamond. The diamond and the quest of the third protagonist, a Nazi sergeant major, to obtain it provide another form of conflict and suspense in the book, though I think the internal conflict suffered by Werner is far more interesting. The language in this book is exquisite. Doerr not only tells a good story but he also expresses it in the most beautiful figurative language, so lovely that I found myself stopping to read passages over again.

Victoria the Queen by Julia Baird

What a marathon effort! This enormous book, though, is extremely readable. Julia Baird is a journalist, not a literary fiction writer, so her analysis of Victoria’s life is fluent, exceptionally well researched and couched in very accessible language. Despite its five hundred odd pages, I had no trouble coming back to this book over and over again, always surprised at how engaging it was. It’s full of gossipy details, a little bit of speculation, and lots and lots of explanations about the politics and personalities of the time. It’s a fascinating, five star read.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

People, unspecified because I can’t remember who but nevertheless people I must respect because I listened to them, raved about this book. In fact they recommended the whole trilogy. So I was nearly going to buy it but got it from the library, just in case it wasn’t worth the investment. It WASN’T! Poorly written, blatantly derivative – at times I didn’t know whether I was in The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe or Harry Potter or The Hobbit and he even has a bloody QUESTING BEAST straight from TJ White’s Once and Future King in there – and just plain tedious. I ploughed on and on through this book, skimming great chunks of it, just to see it through. But really I don’t know why I bothered. It’s clearly aimed at the adolescent market, with all its clumsy attempts at sexual allusion and doing drugs and getting drunk and the difficulties with relationships between this group of schoolies. Maybe Grossman thought he was channeling Donna Tartt? Anyway, he’s making a fortune because it obviously appeals to someone. Just not me.

Light and Shadow: Memoirs of a Spy’s Son by Mark Colvin

What an interesting life Mark Colvin led. There’s a little about his father but no real detail, probably unsurprisingly when you think about it. The rest of the book details his travel and reporting on various places around the world. It was interesting reading about Moscow in the seventies and about political crises in other parts of the world that I remember from the time. The depth of course is not there, because of lack of space, but from time to time Colvin in extremely prescient in his comments – for example when he talked about the potential for a power vacuum should Saddam Hussein fall, which is of course what happened and we all know what filled it.

The Pigeon Tunnel by John Le Carre

My second book about spies in a couple of months – must be something going on. This one was a fascinating collection of memoirs and family snippets covering Le Carre’s career as a spy and later as a novelist. I absolutely lapped it up. It was full of veiled detail about spies he knew and diplomats he met and worked with, as well as a lot of detail about the workings of the post WWII government in Germany, which remained full of Nazis who had changed their spots. He talks at length about his conman father, who sounds like a combination of a complete bastard and an utter charmer, the sort of personality they make movies about. It’s not written in chapters but in sections, some as short as a few lines and others continuing over twenty or more pages, so it’s ideal to pick up and put down. Neither is it chronological, which also makes it accessible for the haphazard reader. And of course his writing is superb. I now want to go back and reread all his fiction!