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Back in the old days... Why would Gerald Seymour want to go back now to the setting of his first major success as a writer, Harry's Game ? Things are very different in Northern Ireland in the years since the beginning of the peace-process. It's not like it was in the past. This however is precisely what Vagabond is about and it's cleverly set-up in the opening prologue, which takes a terrorist incident back in the bad old days in Co. Tyrone and looks at it through fresh, more politically accountable eyes. Things have changed, but not necessarily for the better, particularly when those issues now have to considered in a wider global, political and commercial context. For Seymour, it's a good opportunity to consider the relative morality of how we view military, terrorist and counter-terrorist actions then and now (specifically in the handling of agents, informers or 'touts' as they are better known), but typically, Seymour is now able to take a wider perspective...

The beginning of the end The best thing about Edan Lepucki's California is not just the way that the author envisions and describes the social breakdown of a near-future United States, but the fact that she makes it seem scarily inevitable. It's closer to JG Ballard then than the more fashionable Cormac McCarthy that California will inevitably and misleadingly be compared to. While it's just as good as capturing that sense of a world turned upside down by natural disaster - with some man-made assistance - and even has some of Ballard's ambiguous character types, California doesn't quite bring it all together into a conceptual whole with the same sense of deranged visionary zeal as Ballard.   Only touched upon in passing, the sense of what has happened to the US is nonetheless convincingly real in the light of disasters like Hurricane Katrina. A cataclysmic earthquake, the depletion of oil reserves, a few other natural disasters and a flu epidemic following in quic...

Extracurricular Akunin As in the case of Altyn Tolobas , the first of Boris Akunin's novels featuring Nicholas Fandorin (the great-grandson of his Imperial Russia great detective Erast Fandorin), the first volume of this two part follow-up is very much concerned with blood-lines, with heritage and with its relevance to what it means to be Russian in the present day. Like the earlier book this is brought out in Extracurricular Reading (as its Russian title translates) by a comparison in alternative chapters between Nika in the present day and the adventures of one of his other ancestors in the past. That ancestor this time is Danila Fondorin (a variation on the name of Von Dorn, Cornelius Von Dorn being the ancestor who brought the bloodline to Russia in Altyn Tolobas ), a doctor and former personal secretary to Catherine the Great. The historical part of the story however mostly focuses on another unusual character, Mitia, a gifted six-year old, well-read and with a prowess in math...

Chasing demons It's 1945 and someone is killing soldiers in Berlin. That might not sound terribly surprising, but the war is supposed to be over at this stage. These killings however seem to be connected to the atrocities that occurred in Berlin as Russian and allied troops arrived in the city and divided it up into French, Russian, British and American sectors, and soldiers from all those nations are being lured, ambushed and executed by an unknown killer. What has this to do with Kasper Meier? Like most Berliners who survived the war, he keeps alive doing small favours, trading goods and information for scarce basic provisions and medical supplies on the black market. Kasper Meier knows the benefits of lying low and minding your own business, but a young woman, Eva Hirsch - a rubble girl working on one of the clearing teams of Frau Beckmann - has approached him using blackmail to obtain information on a British pilot they are looking to find. As if that's not enough leverage,...

Tied-up and a bit let down In her latest book Michelle Lovric finds a fascinating suitable subject that proves to be worthy of the talents of the author of The Book of Human Skin . The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters is another wonderful, imaginative and often sensual exploration of human experience from an unusual perspective, and this time it's all "tied-up" in hair. After the huge scope and ambition of The Book of Human Skin however, it's possible that one might also be just a little "let down" by all the hair-raising business and domestic matters in the author's latest book. There's not much chance however of the reader being anything but dazzled by the brilliance and wit of the creation of the seven Swiney sisters, or as they become known by their stage-name, the Swiney Godivas. Famed for the extraordinary length and lustre of their hair (Lovric every bit as creative in her descriptions of the ladies' hair as she was ab...

Judge the book by the cover The Pink Suit is about much more than the creation of the iconic costume Jackie Kennedy was wearing on the day in 1963 when her husband John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas. It's also so much more than an insight into the fashion industry during its golden age, but undoubtedly this is also a significant and fascinating aspect of Nicole Mary Kelby's novel, particularly in the loving attention to detail that goes into her descriptions of the cut and craft of the Chanel design, as well as the controversy over the copies and the competition. The creation of the famous pink suit however is actually delicately undertaken by a Manhattan fashion house, Chez Ninon, where Kate is a seamstress. It's a higher class knock-off copy designer house, a kind of a front to ensure that the First Lady is seen to be supporting the US fashion industry and not spending a fortune on importing a fancy French wardrobe. It's Kate, tasked with replicating the Chane...

War and Morality The first thing that attracted me to this book was the setting. 1935 in Italian occupied Eritrea is an interesting time and place, not quite war time, but moving in that direction. The second thing that interested me was the title. The Italian perspective of the events that brought them into the war on the side of the Germans is complex and rarely covered in fiction, so a look at them from the view of a "good Italian" also promises an intriguing moral angle on the situation. Stephen Burke's novel doesn't disappoint on either of those questions - or at least not until the latter chapters that seem to bring some of the most interesting events leading up to the war in North Africa to a rather hurried conclusion. Initially however, there is indeed something Graham Greene-like about the moral position of Enzo Sacchi, a young man from Genoa who finds himself harbourmaster at the port of Massawa. With Italy about to expand their colonisation of the region, d...