The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett

This book is a version of Sliding Doors, three different scenarios that depend on whether the young man and the young woman get together or not. I don’t know whether it’s old age or not, but I found it hard to follow three sets of stories that were essentially soap opera plots about the worklife, successes, affairs etc of the same group of characters, without getting confused about who was doing what with whom. Because you’re telling similar stories three times, there’s never enough time and space to develop anything other than the Womens Weekly plot. So, entertaining enough but really only good for holidays on the beach when you have no intention of having to engage your brain too much.

The Green Road by Anne Enright

It says on the cover that this woman is the Laureate for Irish Fiction. She thoroughly deserves this recognition. Her work is incisive and truthful and beautifully written. She captures the rhythms of conversation with a perfectly attuned ear. This book is about a difficult mother, getting old, and living in her rambling and quite valuable house in Galway. She reminds me of many mothers, including my own, and frighteningly a bit of myself as well. She’s not nice, she’s not nasty, she’s just human with all the nasty bits and the disappointments and the feelings of love, disappointed or not. Three of her four children have left long ago to live in Dublin and Africa and Toronto. The fourth, whom I find the most interesting, is Constance. She has married well and lives close to her mother, the relationship between them is so like many mother-daughter relationships that it simply has to be drawn from life. Anyway, the four of them come home for Christmas and they bounce off one another like pinballs in an arcade game. I really liked this book because of its truth and its substance.

Lucky Us by Amy Bloom

In the jacket blurb Colum McCann describes this as a poignant book and that’s a pretty good description. This is the story of and young woman and her family during the post WWII period. The characters are quirky in the extreme, people not quite down and out but almost. I didn’t really believe in them in the same way that I would believe in say Anne Enright’s characters – by that I mean I don’t know any people like these characters and their behaviours are a little larger than life - but because of this I was able to distance myself from them and enjoy them probably more than characters with whom I was more emotionally involved. The book is both funny and sad, and absolutely beautifully written. It’s another recommended read from me.

Edge of Eternity by Ken Follett

I was thrilled to find a Guardian newspaper summer reading list from all kinds of well known writers. This book was on it and I can imagine some cashed up writers prone on a sun lounge in Malaga reading this book from cover to cover. It is a page turner indeed. I am hypercritical of historical fiction and shy away from bodice rippers. However this one is really very compelling. I loved the historical period in which is was set: 1945 to 1989. It follows the lives of a loosely connected family whose various branches live in the Washington, East Berlin and Russia. It charts all those recently fascinating political events including the presidency of JFK, the lives and deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the nuclear arms race, the Cold War, the Bay of Pigs, the Contras, the civil rights movement in the US; in Russia we live through Kruschev and the succession of other leaders whose names I still can’t spell, right though to Gorbachev; in East Berlin of course we live with the Wall, the Stasi and the relentless dehumanization of the population. It is quite fascinating. What is not so fascinating is Follett’s really irritating prose style and interest in trivial detail. We could have cut at least twenty pages out of this 1004 page book if he’d reined in superfluous descriptions of what people ate for ‘snacks’ (for some reason every time I saw that word I wanted to throw the book at him!) and his tedious blow by blow descriptions of tawdry sexual encounters. I do not want to go with the hero as he slips his hand up under her skirt to find the soft triangular mound of her womanhood, for god’s sake. Follett is playing out his own sexual fantasies here and it doesn’t do service to what is otherwise a good story. And finally a bit of a whinge about the characters. There were too many good news stories here, too many easy paths to rock and film stardom, hell even potential Nobel prizes. We skimmed over whole lives, went in and out of marriages, babies grew up and left school, all in a superfluous and quite unsatisfying manner. I guess I found the premise so interesting that I thought someone could have written an entirely different type of book that explored some of these people’s situations in depth. But then, this is historical fiction, and that’s all part of the genre I guess. If you’re going to read it, warts and all, then this a good one.

The Patrick Melrose Novels

Never Mind I was shocked by this book. It is supposedly about a little boy, Patrick, but he hovers around the edge of the story like a little ghost, barely making an appearance and on the run from his vicious violent father (who demeans the mother and rapes the child) and from his completely uninterested mother. Two other couples make an appearance: Victor Eisen, a Jewish philosopher and his American journalist girlfriend Anne, and Nicholas Pratt, wealthy something or other and his very young and very self centred glittering girlfriend Bridget (who is as sure she will have to end up marrying him as he is that he will have to get rid of her!). These people bring insight into the situation. But it is a black and horrible story about the acceptance of the father’s sadism and brutality. Friends had told me this was a funny book and indeed its scathing satire of the upper classes is at times; however the violence of the father overshadows all. And then I discovered that the book is autobiographical. St Aubyn was either going to write it or kill himself. There are more books in the series and I will go on to read them but not expecting the witticisms and light heartedness of the Mitfords this time!

The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracey Chevalier

Tracey Chevalier seems to like these stories about painters and their muses. This one was about the tapestries of the lady and the unicorn that I’ve seen in the Musee du Moyen Age in Paris, set apart in their own room for considered viewing. They are beautiful and unusual, showing a lady seducing a unicorn until it is prepared to lay its head in her lap. They also refer to the five senses and have the most beautiful background of tiny flowers. The story is really chick-lit dressed up as historical fiction but it is a great light read and perfect for holidays. The central character is Nicolas, the painter who conceives the idea. He’s a randy young fellow and his affairs help to define what goes on both in the tapestries and in the lives of the people involved: the noble women in the family who have commissioned the tapestries, the weavers and even the servants. The story is told in a series of episodes narrated by different characters such as the young noblewoman Claude, her mother Genevieve, the weaver’s wife Christine, his daughter Alienor, the painter himself and so forth. In fact you could say the story is weaving in itself – and I wonder whether Chevalier hasn’t intended that.

The Garden of the Gods by Gerald Durrell

The third in the Corfu Trilogy, this is another collection of anecdotes from the four years the Durrell family spent in Corfu. It’s full of delightful yarns, including the time they had a party for their Indian friend Jeejee. These second books in the triology are like appendices though, having no narrative or structure to hold them together. They’re only for people that want more of My Family and Other Animals.