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.