The chimney sweeper's boy

By Barbara Vine. Penguin Classics, 2008.

Why bestselling novelist Gerald Candless assumed a new identity years before his marriage and the birth of his two daughters isn't revealed until the last chapters of the book, but the effect of his deception on his family drives this story. The search for the origins of a child is themed throughout. In Gerald's wife, Ursula, and his daughters, Hope and Sarah, Vine [Ruth Rendell] has created three complex women and in Gerald, an equally complicated and compelling man. Each chapter is headed by an extract from one of Gerald Candless' fictional novels and Gerald's mystery is wrapped around a forgotten murder.

I loved this book – every word. It deserves to be a penguin classic!!

- Wendy

The garden of last days

by Andre Dubus III. Heinemann, 2008

Cover photography Getty Images, Corbis Images.

Those who enjoyed Dubus’ previous book, House of Sand and Fog, will be quick to pounce on his new long novel, The Garden of Last Days. Three characters find themselves in the Puma Strip Club in Florida – Bassam, a young Muslim with contempt for Westerners; AJ, a father recently separated from his wife and missing his son; and April, a dancer at the club, who has had baby-sitter problems. The novel is told from multiple viewpoints., allowing Dubus to take us into the lives of these three individuals and their families with great intimacy. Again, Dubus explores how the USA strikes someone from an alien, hostile culture. The narrative is compelling, and you will want to skip ahead to find out whether your worst fears are to be realised. This is much more than a run-of-the-mill thriller – fiction writing of the highest calibre.

- John.

Surveillance

by Jonathan Raban. Picador, 2007.

Surveillance is a disturbing but immensely readable novel which reflects the uncertainties of our world. Set in Seattle, where Raban now lives, it portrays ordinary people in a seemingly ordinary world where security, mock-terror exercises, surveillance, deception, suspicion and questions of identity increasingly intrude into their lives.

This is the Seattle of tomorrow, but only just. Everything Raban describes is already there in some degree (as it is in every other big city) and the gradual and insidious loss of personal freedom is something we already live with. In Surveillance, Raban shows how easily government controls can escalate and how easily people adapt to them and treat them as normal and harmless.

Lucy Bengstrom is a freelance journalist, a parent by accident and single by choice, and an intelligent, likeable character. Her daughter, eleven-year-old Alida, speaks and acts like any normal American pre-teen (Raban has a superb ear for dialogue), testing the waters of adulthood life, puzzled by its emotional intricacies. And Tad Zachary is an actor, a neighbour and a good family friend. He has adopted the role of stepfather to Alida, but he is dealing with the recent death of his partner, Michael, and his own questionable health. Into their lives come Mr Lee, the new owner of their apartment block, who has identity problems and grand plans, and August (Augie) Vanags, author of a best-selling book about his survival as a boy in Europe during the horrors of the Second World War.

Lucy is commissioned by a big magazine to find and interview Vanags. She finds him surprisingly easily and discovers that he is not the recluse he is made out to be. But her growing familiarity with him and his wife, together with the way in which he and Alida get along, threatens her journalistic objectivity. When doubts are raised about the veracity of Augie's identity and the truth of the claims he makes in the book, Lucy is in a dilemma.Alida is clever at maths but a dunce, so she thinks, at human relationships, so she is trying to analyse these using algebraic formulae. It is complicated and it doesn't always work, but it helps. One of her classmates is arrested (it would spoil the book to explained why, but the crime is thoroughly modern and completely understandable) and Alida is full of admiration for him. She is full of admiration, too, for Augie Vanags, who teaches her to kayak and treats her like an adult.Mr Lee's plans for his own future include the need for a wife. He carefully lists Lucy's assets (including: being a US citizen, secretarial skills, a ready made family and potential gratitude to him for being chosen) and decides she will do. Lucy's reaction when he offers her this great opportunity precipitates a crisis, but meanwhile Tad has discovered a valuable secret about the unsavoury Mr Lee.

Everything in this novel moves at high speed against a background of incidental events and conversations associated with security. Lucy watches as a casual acquaintance is arrested on suspicion of terrorist activities; Tad surfs the Net looking for leaked secrets, corruption and incompetence to fuel his hatred of the President and administration; Augie argues for the recognition of the real threat of terrorism and the need for less complacency in this fight, which he calls World War Four. Nothing is ever certain and Raban handles it all with skill and humour. So well, in fact, that we easily identify with these people and accept as perfectly normal the world in which they live. Just so, can the increasing restrictions imposed on our own freedoms in the name of security creep up on us until those freedoms are irretrievably lost. But Raban is never polemic (although Augie can be, at times) and we are drawn in by his story until we want to know what happens to these people and how the specific problems they face are resolved. The disappointment is that we never do, because the ending is as uncertain as everything else in the book. Maybe that is realistic, but it seems as if Raban has taken an easy way out. Maybe this book is just the first in a series and Raban will enlighten us in the next volume. Maybe: but judging by the way the world is in this book, I wouldn’t count on it.

Copyright Ann Skea 2007

Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/

Losing you

by Nicci French. Michael Joseph, 2006

The husband-and-wife team who write as ‘Nicci French’ have produced nine novels in recent years which tend to circle similar themes – kidnapping, paranoia, and women in danger. French’s earliest novels, Beneath the Skin and Killing Me Softly, were justly successful and, although in the same vein as Ruth Rendell, rather less grotesque than Rendell’s recent productions. However, later novels by French had become a tad too predictable, so I held out no great hopes for Losing You. But in fact, it’s a belter.

It describes events in a day in the life of Nina Landry, her fortieth birthday. She lives on Sandling Island, on a tidal estuary 60 miles from London, a small, close-knit community. Mid-morning, she realises that her teenage daughter has gone missing. She has trouble getting anyone to take her seriously. From then on events crowd in on her, her alarm increases rapidly, and the momentum builds. French piles on the tension and action, and you want to read with increasing rapidity. Ideally this book should be read in a single sitting. Although a re-reading shows up a couple of creaky places in the plot, it’s a very satisfying thriller, just crying out to be televised.

- John

The Mission Song

by John Le Carre. Hodder & Stoughton, 2006.
Cover photograph: Tim FLach/Getty Images.

John Le Carre excels at packaging revelations about corporate and political corruption in an entertaining thriller. He researches his subjects more thoroughly than most current affairs reporters.

His latest book, The Mission Song, is about the East Congo, part of The Democratic Republic of the Congo, where elections just took place on October 29. Conservative estimates claim that around 4 million have been killed in wars and massacres in the Congo since 1998. The East Congo is beautiful and mineral rich. One of these mineral is coltan, short for columbite-tantalite, “If you were unwise enough to dismantle your cellphone, you would find an essential speck of it among the debris.”

A group calling themselves ‘The Syndicate’, plan a coup, a ‘humanitarian’ coup to deliver democracy from the barrel of a gun. The story is told in the first person by Salvo, son of an Irish missionary and an East Congo woman, who is fluent in major and minor African languages. Called a ‘zebra’ by one of the players, he must decide where his allegiance lies – with his white strip or his black one – when he discovers the Syndicate’s real agenda.

Funnily enough (!) in 2004 Mark Thatcher (yes, son of Margaret) was arrested in South Africa with a cache of weapons and charged with planning an assault on Equatorial Guinea. The idea was to overthrow the ruler-tyrant and install a puppet president, who would then turn over a large slice of the country's considerable oil revenues to what was known as "the Syndicate".
If you want to know more about how The Congo was sabotaged from the beginning of its independence, then borrow the DVD in our collection, Lumumba.

- Ines

The Falls

By Ian Rankin, Orion, 2001.
Cover photograph Ross Gillespie & Tricia Malley.

I must be one of the last people on earth to read an Ian Rankin book – but I have now entered his dark, bleak world, and there is no turning back. The Falls is where I started in his vast catalogue – recommended by a fellow Scot, who commented that by this stage Rankin’s characters and plots have more fully developed.

The protagonist of this series is Rebus, a rebellious detective in the Lothian and Borders Police Force. Even from reading this one book, it’s obvious that there is a lot of history involving Rebus, his colleagues, and superiors. The plot in The Falls involves a missing female student, some little replica coffins that have been found, and an internet game. I was drawn into the story and found myself reading till late at night to find out what had happened – perhaps not the best time to be reading a story about murder!

The first thing that warmed me to Rankin was his accurate, in-depth descriptions of the geography of Edinburgh. Having lived there for several years, I could picture the action as it unfolded in its twisting historic streets. The characters were also effectively portrayed, in a believable and compelling way.

I obviously don’t want to tell you more about the story, since it is a mystery novel after all. Suffice to say to say that I was hooked in and kept guessing till the end, heart pounding as the final scenes were played out.

I have already started my next Rankin book! - Richard

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