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This is a difficult memoir to review, because it is so personal, so tragic, so intimate, it is like reviewing someone’s heart.

It starts as an adolescent love story, and moves on to a developing but never easy adult relationship. Thus far I felt perfectly ready to review it – a nicely but uncritically told story, I felt, of a girl who seemed far too much of an eager doormat, too infatuated, too willing to accept small crumbs from a self absorbed young man who from the outset treats her indifferently. The romance is told adoringly, but he clearly wasn’t at all nice and not worthy of her adoration. Even a bit later, when they get together more seriously after years of her gratitude for his occasional moments of (usually unfaithful) attention, even when things start to warm up and they’re tentatively living together, he doesn’t treat her well. Why is she so needy? She’s a sportswoman: capable, able, intelligent, and clearly a lovely person. Sure, he has nice eyes and nice hair, but couldn’t she do better?

But then bam. The young man develops an aggressive form of the invariably fatal ALS (motor neurone disease) and the memoir moves on to infinitely darker places. She becomes by default, and with ever more profound love, his carer. As he becomes sicker and his dependence on her grows, so their relationship deepens. Almost to the end he refuses to believe that his condition is fatal, and though she knows better, they both cope emotionally through living out the fantasy that there will be some breakthrough and he will “beat it”. He will be walking again by Christmas, running around by Spring, getting married, having a family and a long happy life together. As the inexorable decline into life-destroying paralysis continues, they try everything: alternative medicine, group prayer, magical/spiritual thinking, experimental trials. And monumental doses of optimism. It’s a vile disease. Anybody living with ALS will need all the fantasy they can find.

To be truthful, although nobody could read this story without their heart reaching out with compassion, I felt ashamed throughout by how little I warmed to the young man. He’s dying for goodness sake! At the end of the book he’s clearly going to be dead. He must have been dead before the book was written, so he’s dead already. De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum! How can I not be liking him? But hey! Why should the dying be any different from anyone else? Most of the rest of us aren’t saints, so why should he be? And in a sense, as the book progressed, I found the answer to the question that troubled me at the start – why was this girl with him at all?

As I read on, I increasingly thought – and I’m not given to such feelings as a general rule – she was with him because it was meant. It was in their stars. This man didn’t know it, but maybe her soul did: he was going to need her, and desperately. His needs were going to be absolute, and he had a right to have them met, and nobody, nobody on the planet, could meet them better, more patiently, more bravely, and more compassionately than this young woman did. Thank god she really loved him!

He dies of course, and death from ALS is brutal. Yet I found it very moving that the singularity of his death was not the end of the book. Death isn’t like that. There is the clearing up, and the funeral, and the slow recovery - stop start, forward and backward. The author confronts these unflinchingly in her narration, as she did the appalling time leading to her lover’s death.

She writes simply and powerfully, and clearly she lived through these times with consummate courage. She managed to eke meaning and strength and love out of one of the vilest experiences that any lover can endure. Young though she was, she found maturity and strength and wisdom to be what he needed her to be, and to see it through to the end. There is a bit of a promise, at the end of the book, that in moving on, she not only carried the memory of her first love, but found new riches, new joys. If anyone deserved this, I’m sure she did.

Set in some version of ancient Egypt, before the biblical flood, but in time when the Jews were well established in Egypt (it’s a fantasy and bit woolly when it comes to timelines) this is a strange and haunting book. The skies are full of water and have been through living memory. A cataclysmic flood is looming.

The world is populated by humans and not-quite-humans, and the ‘humans’ in the story aren’t the way we think of them now. Human society is dominated by aliens from the sun who have built the pyramids to protect the world from harmful forces introduced by previous invaders– but they cannot protect humans from the devastating hybridization which those other invaders have introduced, except by rendering the human race sterile. Are these aliens from the sun benign gods or ruthless technocrats? And the hybrids – are they monsters or something else?

Enter our heroine, Akasha, a ‘human’ woman who cannot accept the forced sterilization of the human race. And who carries the future of the human race in her destiny.

This work is hard to pin down. It has a haunting, shifting, oneiric quality, playing with memories of biblical stories, imagery from ancient hieroglyphs and pyramid paintings, and the reader’s desire to see the human race flourish. The writing is beautiful. For me, though, the book loses a star because of its many lose ends. Hard to list them without spoilers, but there were questions raised throughout the book which I felt were unanswered at the end, and that left me dissatisfied. But I guess human life is like that. Above all, this book worked for me as an interrogation of what it means to be human. It didn’t give me the answer. I didn’t really want it to.

A quiet but curiously satisfying little book – a trip back to the 1980s in an ordinary street with generally ordinary people, children and adults and several pets, as their lives criss-cross. Its depiction of the time – which I remember well – is perfectly coloured, and despite the usual insistence in the front matter that all characters are fictional, it is close to impossible to believe that this is other than a thinly described memoire of the time, perhaps drawing on childhood diaries in their detailed insistent focus on moments deeply felt at the time but usually forgotten later. It is set in an English middle class estate, which may make it seem even more quaint from an American perspective, though the family themes are universal. Apart from the inevitability of children growing up over the course of a year and some interesting changes of perspective about a few of the characters, there is no clearly defined story arc to unify the book – rather it is a series of episodes, a few quite dramatic, but many of them closer and more intimate, building up into a detailed collage of figures and events. The effect is rather more cheerful than Breugel or Lowrie, but with a similar sense of small lives captured in their day by day intensity. I read this book at a moment of struggle in my life, and it comforted and refreshed me. Recommended.

What a brave, haunting, beautiful and moving book!
Combining a fantasy, a parable, Jewish folklore and historic events from the holocaust, this is a remarkable book. At its heart is Uriel, a mute child from a community famous for its choir - a community devastated by the holocaust. Uriel survives, but only just. He is a beautifully and simply drawn character who would win over the hardest of hearts. He has lost everything except his faith, his book of stories and his readiness - as it turns out - to help the angels at whatever cost.
Who is this book for? It has illustrations that make it look like a book for children, and it certainly has threads of story that could work for all ages from child through adolescent all the way to old lady like me, but the adult themes - including some depictions of massacre and of torture - mean it would need some parental guidance for little ones, and some care even with teenagers. But hey - radical idea! Why do we think of books in this way? Wouldn't this be the perfect, perfect book for a family to read together? Yes, really, you could do it. Make an evening of it, in installments, switch off the television and the computer, sit round, and take turns reading it aloud. Listen. Talk about it. Share the stories, fantasy and otherwise. We must never forget the holocaust, and this would be a way of making it real to another generation, Jewish and otherwise. This is such a beautiful, enriching book: even in this fractured century, I think a family could make that work...

Reminiscent of the some of the works of Jodi Picoult, this is a book that takes a life-defining disorder and explores how this impacts upon an individual and a family.

Gavin and Devon are identical twins, physically the mirror image of each other, but temperamentally opposite. Devon suffers from (and yes, he suffers too, though the suffering is more obviously imposed on others) malignant narcissistic personality disorder. Gavin by contrast is a normal, sensible and kindly individual, who finds himself cast, from infancy into adulthood, as his difficult brother’s lesser foil, supporter, victim and protector.

Behind the relationship between the brothers there lies a damaging three-way dynamic between the twins and their domineering father. Driven by his own ambitions and inadequacies, the father force-feeds one son with a baseless narrative of superiority, whilst projecting his shame and insecurity onto the other. Into this toxic mix is thrown an insipid mother who (for reasons I could never fathom, since she is competent, assertive, insightful and has immense social capital) seems unable to remove either her sons or herself from her husband’s toxic input, with devastating consequences for all of them.

Individuals with malignant narcissistic personality disorder compensate for a fragile sense of self by taking flight into a grandiose, arrogant, delusional identity, devoid of empathy for others and demanding constant admiration and attention. They cannot sustain healthy relationships, and are frequently antisocial, aggressive, sadistic, controlling. The prognosis is poor. Their impact on those around them is typically nightmarish.

Thus it is for Gavin, who has no escape, The experience of growing up with Devon is deeply corrosive to his own identity. In adolescence he is overshadowed and dominated; into adulthood, he struggles to separate, while his brother pursues an ever more pathological quest for domination.

For my tastes there was rather more explicit psychologising than I wanted, particularly in relation to Gavin’s struggle for personal identity - though for anyone struggling with similar issues, this detail might be helpful. There were moments when I felt that the book was really being written as a self-help aid for such a person – complete with one character who seems to have been inserted specifically to provide a therapeutic commentary. I found these passages unwelcome – the novel was doing a perfectly good job at showing me what was happening to the twins at a psychological level; I didn’t want to be told as well.

For me, the book worked best as a psychological thriller. Devon’s psychopathology made him a completely gripping villain, and the sensitive portrayal of Gavin gave a protagonist with whom anyone could identify. Given their unique and beautifully written background, the trajectory of the twins is compelling and plausible, all the way from their seemingly innocent childhood differences to the almost gothic conclusion in adulthood. Throughout the book I wanted to read on, felt gripped by the dilemmas posed. A good read that will stick with me.

I really related to this novel – a feisty older woman as its main character, trust unwisely given, a career-ending betrayal, the enduring need for answers, the longing for an apology… the slow burn of the plot tugged at my heart, tightening as the action moved onwards.

Unusually for a crime thriller, this is a book about older people and the endurance of the past in their current experiences. Marjorie, a retired police officer, is haunted by the recent death of her life partner but is displacing that grief into searching for answers to the loss of her career. How and why did someone she trusted betray her? She has waited a long time for the answer and will put her life at risk to find it Opposite her, though hard to find, is her old informant, Billy – his family, his life options, even his real identity – all lost to a witness protection scheme that leaves him living like an elderly ghost in a distant island, with no real friends except for his dog. There could have been a poignant reunion in the sun, but poignancy and sunshine are replaced by risk and lengthening shadows, as other figures from the past – equally hostile to Marjorie and to Billy - are also closing in.

Isobel Blackthorn knows how to tell a story, ramp up the anticipation, build up tension from the apparently tiny, concrete observations. The plot is intricately woven – a double point of view, as the narrative shifts to and fro from Marjorie to Billy, and also a double timeline, as we move between decades from their working lives to their retirement. The reveal is gradual, cumulative, and completely satisfying.

Beautifully read by Gerri Green, who evokes a vivid range of personalities in her reading style, the audible version is a real pleasure. I also read it as an e-book – well worth the second read.

I loved this brief novel for so many reasons A sci-fi scenario – something is floating down in spores from the moon after an asteroid strike, and it’s setting up residence on earth. Despite its ultra-modern setting it reminded me of John Wyndham, in its psychological depth and breadth. And its alien organisisms: they are properly thought through, strange yet compelling, terrible yet without malice, as plausibly, hungrily indifferent to the lives of earth creatures as we are to the lives of plants.

Just as a great sci-fi read, it’s a gripping, persuasive, terrifying, (and on that score alone it justifies its stars).

But oh! I love it for so many more reasons too. Strong intelligent, complicated female leads, linked by a lifetime of convincing, imperfect friendship. A realistic political scenario, set in the Persian gulf, but with three dimensional people, not American cartoon “foreigners”. A novel with people whose English isn’t perfect and this doesn’t mean they’re stupid; a novel with people who don’t have an American mindset but this doesn’t mean they’re primitive or terrorists (big sigh… such observations shouldn’t have to be made, let alone seem remarkable... but yes, I found these things refreshing).

This is a really careful, thoughtful novel. A future classic of its genre.

A story about a decent man. The author wants you to know that he's a decent man, notwithstanding that he's the main suspect in a murder. He's a doctor who risks his own safety and reputation to help indigent Mexican immigrants. A kindly liberal soul, supportive to the outcast and the pariah. Husband to a Mexican refugee and adoptive father to her mentally disabled son. But trouble does not spare decent men. Everyone is vulnerable. And the investigation of the murder will uncover many old secrets, old infidelities, old betrayals. Everyone is fallible.

It's one of those books that takes you by the hand and leads you wherever it wants you to go, and you trust it completely. Told in the first person, as the doctor recounts the tale to a journalist, decades later, it's sometimes a slow who-dunnit and sometimes a pacey character study. One is quickly caught up in his emotional world as criminals start to close in around him and his family, and in a state that still has the death penalty, he faces the possibility that the fingers pointing at him will succeed in pinning the blame.

I don't know Texas, or anywhere remotely close to it, but reading the book I had a strong sense of place, landscape, culture. The characterisation is superb. The book has a large cast, but each character is vividly distinct and compelling. I wanted a different outcome, but when the outcome came, it was deeply satisfying.

Like everything that we experience, this book is part of a wider picture. The art of the author is to take this segment of time, shape it as a thing unto itself, and yet at the same time allow it to play a meaningful part in the wider whole. Isn’t that what we are all constantly trying to do with our lives?

Marian Thorpe does this well.

We are introduced to Gwenna, a well schooled and mature eighteen year old. a princess who is heir to a principality that itself is part of a wider empire. Opposite her is her father, the now ailing Princip, along with her mother (both queen and warrior), her brother (who would rather study diligently as a doctor than be a pampered prince), and a lattice work of other characters whose relationships to father, daughter and each other are precisely and delicately drawn.

Her father is coming to the end of his reign. Gwenna must protect him – for she clearly loves him and he faces political threats as well as failing health – but also prepare for his inevitable death and the challenges that this will bring. In the precarious balance of power across the wider empire, she will need to exercise great diplomacy. As a woman, she will have to face distrust from others whose culture expects a man in her role. And as a young woman she needs to choose her future partner - carefully, balancing emotion and strategic interests, the personal and the political. The book traces this complex, precarious dynamic as she travels with her family and their retinue to the dangerous capital city of the empire, where the empress's son may – or may not – be Gwenna's successful suitor. Gwenna’s lover, Lynthe, a princess in her own right but also Gwenna’s bodyguard, is travelling with them. Her claim on Gwenna is tentative and untested, and her fierce loyalty is very poignant.

The world building is historically informed, and within its wider framework the “special” cultural qualities of Ésparias are elegantly set out. It is done so thorough-goingly however, that I felt it was occasionally at risk of slipping into self parody. So Gwenna AND her father AND her mother AND most of the significant characters in the story have same sex lovers and are only doing heterosexuality for the sake of succession? Yes, I get it, and it’s fine and inclusive, but all of them? Similarly, I liked the emphasis on their deep and loving family ties, their courtly, cultured and civilised interests, their benign and dignified outlook, their very delicate approach to the inequalities of class and rank on which their postition depends…. but I found these virtues a little relentless, like one of those Christmas round robins where one learns that Natasha has qualified as a barrister and Inigo has secured his PhD in Mandarin, and Claire and Martin are going to Africa to do VSO together, and one ends up almost hoping that when one turns the page the difficult middle child will have just been done for dope dealing… . Do these people never unwind? Do they never bitch or bicker or banter a little, or get a bit sweaty without taking an elegant bath, or make a selfish wrong decision or otherwise let themselves down? It’s very very courtly.

These are small and small-minded criticisms however, and I probably shouldn’t disgrace myself by harbouring them. Virtue is all too rare in the novels that I read, and, to be fair, it’s actually quite refreshing. The characters are deeper no doubt than their manners, anyway, and if I really feel the need for a bit more conflict I can allow myself an unseemly speculation as to what jealous bodyguard Lynthe might do to her privileged rival prince Alekos…. In the next book maybe….

I listened to the audiobook, over a week or so, while walking many many miles delivering leaflets . Each day kept disappearing into the stories, and each time I got to the end of the book, I just kept going back to the start. Some of the stories certainly washed over me the first time, so the second time they seemed new. Some of them meant more the third time than the first, some seemed to mean something different at each hearing, some came to feel like old friends.

I don't know America at all. It didn't seem to matter that I barely knew the names of the states: all of the people felt real to me.

The third time through, I thought, "well, I'm going to have to review this and I can't review fifty stories separately, I'd better find a theme". It was hard, but then I thought of the story "The Best Life", and then "Forget me nots", which speaks about "the best day", and then "The Engagement". And it came to me. These are stories about coming to terms with, coming to celebrate, the fact that the life we have is the best life we're going to have, so we need to be ready to grasp hold of it, whatever it is, whatever its constraints and disappointments, long or short, and make the best we can of it. I was pleased with this, it seemed, curiously, a good message for me just then.

But then the fourth time through, that didn't seem right at all - this was a book about something altogether different... There is so much in this book. It will be about something different again when you read it. Enjoy.