The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

`Few historical novels come close to acquiring the literary gravitas of Umberto Eco's superior thriller, perhaps because it is as much concerned with semiotics and the science of deductive reasoning as it is in conjuring up the fearful atmosphere of a 14th-century Italian monastery' - Metro

The year is 1327.

Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate.

When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the over of night.

A spectacular popular and critical success, The Name of the Rose is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.

He began to write it in 1978 because he "felt like poisoning a monk."

The novel works on many levels. It is a compelling murder mystery, as young narrator Adso of Elk accompanies the wise William of Baskerville as he uses logic and semiotics to not only solve a murder mystery, but to decipher labrynths and hidden secrets of the vast monastery library.

Interwoven with the murder mystery is a virtual course on philosophy and late Middle Ages religion, as Eco provides detailed accounts of the histories of various sects, includes scholarly debate on topics such as the poverty of Christ, and a history of the Catholic Church leading to the establishment of a papacy in Avignon, France.

One is reminded of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as William and Adso use logic and determination to piece together numerous bizarre deaths and occurences at the Abbey, while encountering obstacles and outright hostility by the Abbot and his librarian, to name a couple. The setting of the novel, and the glimpse into a culture that few of us can even imagine, is reason enough to read The Name of the Rose.

About the Author

Umberto Eco, an Italian philosopher and best-selling novelist, is a great polymathic fabulist in the tradition of Swift, Voltaire, Joyce, and Borges. The Name of the Rose, which sold 50 million copies worldwide, is an experimental medieval whodunit set in a monastic library. Within the mystery is a tale of books, librarians, patrons, censorship, and the search for truth in a period of tension between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. Eco was born in the city of Alessandria in the Italian region of Piedmont,  right in the middle of the Genova, Milan, Turin triangle. Young Umberto and his mother, Giovanna, moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside during the Second World War. Eco received a Salesian education, and he has made references to the order and its founder in his works and interviews. His father came from a family of thirteen children, and was very keen fo Umberto to read Law, but instead he entered the University of Turin in order to take up medieval philosophy and literature. Umberto's thesis was on the topic of Thomas Aquinas and this earned him a BA in philosophy in 1954. In that period, Eco abandoned the Roman Catholic Church after a crisis of faith.

Following this, Eco worked as a cultural editor for RAI, Radiotelevisione Italiana, the state broadcasting station, he also became a lecturer at the University of Turin (1956–64). A group of avant-garde artists—painters, musicians, writers—whom he had befriended at RAI (Gruppo 63) became an important and influential component in Eco's future writing career. This was especially true after the publication of his first book in 1956, Il problema estetico di San Tommaso, which was an extension of his doctoral thesis. This also marked the beginning of his lecturing career at his alma mater. He divides his time writing and lecturing between an apartment in Milan and a vacation house near Rimini. He has a 30,000 volume library in the former and a 20,000 volume library in the latter.

"I myself like easy books that put me to sleep immediately. But the normal reader who does not spend his day fighting with Kant or Hegel feels respected if there is a jujitsu with a novel, a resistance, a seduction. If the book says yes immediately, it is a whore."

Umberto Eco

To find out more about the Author click here...

The Name of the Rose translated surprisingly well to screen in 1986, with a masterclass in laconic understatement from Sean Connery, an early appearance from US bad boy Christian Slater and a convincingly medieval setting.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

'Extraordinary...Life of Pi could renew your faith in the ability of novelists to invest even the most outrageous scenario with plausible life.' New York Times

'This enormously lovable novel is suffused with wonder.'

The Guardian

In the author's note that prefaces this vertiginously tall tale, Yann Martel blends fact and fiction with wily charm. Yes, he'd published two books that failed to shake the world - eager, studious-young-man's fiction with a strain of self-conscious experimentalism - and taken off to India nursing the faltering seeds of another. But no, he didn't there meet a wise old man who directed him to a putative "main character", now living back in Martel's native Toronto: a certain Piscine Molitor or Pi Patel, named for a French swimming pool and nicknamed for an irrational number, who in the mid-1970s survived 227 days lost at sea with a Royal Bengal tiger.

Despite the extraordinary premise and literary playfulness, one reads Life of Pi not so much as an allegory or magical-realist fable, but as an edge-of-seat adventure.

When the ship in which 16-year-old Pi and his zookeeping family are to emigrate from India to Canada sinks, leaving him the sole human survivor in a lifeboat on to which barge a zebra, a hyena, an orang-utan and a bedraggled, seasick tiger, Pi is determined to survive the impossible. "I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen every day." And Martel writes with such convincing immediacy, seasoning his narrative with zoological verisimilitude and survival tips about turtle- fishing, solar stills and keeping occupied (the lifeboat manual notes that "yarn spinning is highly recommended"), that disbelief is suspended, like Pi, above the terrible depths of the Pacific ocean.

Extract from the opening of the novel...

...in Toronto, among nine columns of Patels in the phone book, I found him, the main character. My heart pounded as I dialed his phone number. The voice that answered had an Indian lilt to its Canadian accent, light but unmistakable, like a trace of incense in the air. "That was a very long time ago," he said. Yet he agreed to meet. We met many times. He showed me the diary he kept during the events. He showed me the yellowed newspaper clippings that made him briefly, obscurely famous. He told me his story. All the while I took notes. Nearly a year later, after considerable difficulties, I received a tape and a report from the Japanese Ministry of Transport. It was as I listened to that tape that I agreed with Mr. Adirubasamy that this was, indeed, a story to make you believe in God.

It seemed natural that Mr Patel's story should be told mostly in the first person, in his voice and through his eyes. But any inaccuracies or mistakes are mine. It also seemed natural that the end of the story should come first, that the beginning should be in the middle, and that the story should come last. Such is the logic of fiction. A story is always better appreciated if its ending is known first.

About the Author

Yann Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain, in 1963, of Canadian parents who were doing graduate studies. Later they both joined the Canadian foreign service and he grew up in Costa Rica, France, Spain and Mexico, in addition to Canada. He continued to travel widely as an adult, spending time in Iran, Turkey and India, but is now based mainly in Montreal. He obtained a degree in Philosophy from Trent University in Ontario, then worked variously as a tree planter, dishwasher and security guard before taking up writing full-time from the age of 27.

His first book, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, was published in 1993 and is a collection of short stories, dealing with such themes as illness, storytelling and the history of the twentieth century; music, war and the anguish of youth; how we die; and grief, loss and the reasons we are attached to material objects.

This was followed by his first novel, Self (1996), a tale of sexual identity, orientation and Orlando-like transformation. It is described by Charles Foran in the Montreal Gazette as a ' ... superb psychological acute observation on love, attraction and belonging ...'

In 2002 Yann Martel came to public attention when he won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his second novel, Life of Pi (2002), an epic survival story with an overarching religious theme. The novel tells the story of one Pi Patel, the son of an Indian family of zookeepers. They decide to emigrate to Canada and embark on a ship with their animals to cross the Pacific. They are shipwrecked and Pi is left bobbing in a lifeboat in the company of a zebra, a hyena, an orang-utan and a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Life of Pi will eventually be published in over forty countries and territories, representing well over thirty languages, and the film rights have been optioned by Fox studios.

In 2004, a collection of short stories was published entitled We Ate The Children Last. His latest book is a further novel, Beatrice and Virgil (2010), which deals with the holocaust.

To find out more about the novel click below...

http://www.lifeofpi.co.uk/

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

'The Secret History tells the story of a group of classics students at an élite American college, who are cerebral, obsessive and finally murderous ... it is a haunting, compelling and brilliant piece of fiction.' The Times

'Donna Tartt has discovered not the usual collegiate mix of sex, drugs and rock and roll, but a heart of darkness as stony and chilling as any Greek tragedian ever plumbed ...A thinking person's thriller.'  Newsday

Truly deserving of the accolade modern classic, Donna Tartt’s novel is a remarkable achievement – both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an élite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries.

But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and for ever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill …

About the Author

The Secret History, made her the international literary sensation of 1992. Until the publication of her second book in October 2002, Tartt endured rumours of writer's block and nervous hermithood. But now that The Little Friend is safely in the bag, she says calmly, "it just took a while to write." Trying to meet readers' high expectations after The Secret History was never going to be easy, but Tartt wasn't intimidated by the search for a new idea. She said at the time, "I have my life to resort to."

Raised among the antebellum mansions of Grenada, Mississippi, Tartt experienced the shabby gentility of a changing south. Her extended family members were the stuff of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner and, for Tartt, "books were the great escape". Fixated by Robert Louis Stevenson and Peter Pan, young Donna was taken on her own imaginative odyssey by her grandfather. A believer in the power of medicine, he fed his granddaughter codeine cough syrup, and much of her childhood was a "languorous undersea existence". A less dubious family contribution was a love of Dickens and Kipling, and Tartt's own storytelling talents were later nurtured at college. Her professor told her she was a genius and, even among classmates such as Bret Easton Ellis, the chain-smoking, Nietzsche-sprouting Tartt cut a dash.

While fellow graduates sought conventional employment, Tartt became a "professional houseguest" who started writing The Secret History. Nine years later, the classical cleverness and adolescent angst of her murderous aesthetes sold millions and meant the author need never again pick up her pen. But despite being translated into 23 languages, Tartt remains "a writer, not a TV personality", whose job it is to "dive deep". Now aged 38, the gamine-featured, pint-sized perfectionist is unfazed by the transitory nature of celebrity, concentrating instead on "the five books I have in me".  Of her own style, Tartt remains vague, following Kipling's instructions only to "drift, wait and obey". Her continuing royalties have afforded her as much time to drift and wait as she needs to produce another opus. Her army of fans may be champing at the bit for more of her work, but Donna Tartt remains a defiantly bookish character, "moving a comma round very happily for hours".

There was a ten year gap between Donna Tartt publishing her first book, The Secret History and her second, The Little Friend.

To read an interview with her in the Guardian about both books, click on the link below:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/oct/19/fiction.features

A Shadow Falls... - Senior lecturer in English at University College, London, John Mullan deconstructs Donna Tartt's The Secret History - click on the link to find out more...

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

'Her best book yet, an astonishingly complex and moving literary detective story that made me sob but also snort with laughter. It's the sort of novel you have to start rereading the minute you've finished it.' The Guardian

'NOT JUST THE BEST NOVEL I READ THIS YEAR BUT THE BEST MYSTERY OF THE DECADE.' Stephen King

'MORE DEPTH AND VIVIDNESS THAN ORDINARY THRILLERS AND MORE THRILLS THAN ORDINARY FICTION…A WONDERFULLY TRICKY BOOK.'
New York Times

Cambridge is sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of one accounting sheet – Lost on the left, Found on the right – and the two never seem to balance.

Jackson has never felt at home in Cambridge, and has a failed marriage to prove it. Surrounded by death, intrigue and misfortune, his own life haunted by a family tragedy, he attempts to unravel three disparate case histories and begins to realise that in spite of apparent diversity, everything is connected…

Case Histories continues a winning streak for Kate Atkinson which began when her impressive novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Since that book, Atkinson has gleaned a keen following of readers who are prepared to follow in the surprising directions the unpredictable author takes us on. And Atkinson--so far--hasn’t let us down.

The perfectly judged prose that distinguished Human Croquet is fully in evidence in Case Histories, and a new frisson here comes from the genre-stretching that Atkinson is indulging in. In some ways, this book could almost be seen as a new take on the crime novel (not the first genre one would expect the author to tackle), but the crime elements here Atkinson uses are peripheral. The protagonist here is a former police inspector who now makes a living as a private investigator. Jackson Brodie is making ends meet in a sweaty Cambridge summer and trying to deal with his own failed marriage. But if his life is adrift, perhaps Brodie can justify his existence via his belief that he can do some good for the people he encounters in his job. But he is to find that he will be irrevocably changed by those he is trying to help.
 
As a vividly created cast of characters surround the beleaguered Brodie, all the novelistic skills that shone in Atkinson's earlier books are fully in play. Those deluded into thinking they've picked up something resembling a standard private eye novel will find something much more rich and strange; Atkinson goes from strength to strength. Barry Forshaw

A writer's life: Kate Atkinson - An author known for her dark, funny stories of domestic life tells Helen Brown why she has now written a crime novel with a male hero...

About the Author

Kate Atkinson was born in York in 1951 and studied English Literature at Dundee University. After graduating in 1974, she researched a postgraduate doctorate on American Literature. She later taught at Dundee and began writing short stories in 1981. She began writing for women's magazines after winning the 1986 Woman's Own Short Story Competition. She was runner-up for the Bridport Short Story Prize in 1990 and won an Ian St James Award in 1993 for her short-story "Karmic Mothers", which she later adapted for BBC2 television as part of its 'Tartan Shorts' series.

Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year award, beating Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins' biography Gladstone. The book is set in Yorkshire, narrated by Ruby Lennox, who takes the reader through the complex history of her family, covering the events of the twentieth century and reaching back into the past to uncover the lives of distant ancestors. The book has been adapted for radio and theatre and has been adapted for television by the author. Her second novel, Human Croquet, was published in 1997 and relates the story of another family, the Fairfaxes, through flashback and historical narrative. Her third novel, Emotionally Weird, was published in 2000, and in 2002 a collection of short stories, Not the End of the World.

Kate Atkinson has written two plays for the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh: a short play, Nice (1996), and Abandonment, which premiered as part of the Edinburgh Festival in August 2000. She currently lives in Edinburgh and is an occasional contributor to newspapers and magazines.  Her latest books are Case Histories (2004), One Good Turn (2006), shortlisted for the British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year, When Will There be Good News? (2008) and Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), all four forming a crime series featuring ex-policeman Jackson Brodie.

To find out more about the author and her other books click here...

Regeneration by Pat Barker

'A brilliant novel. Intense and subtle.' Sunday Times

Regeneration is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men. It is the first book in the Regeneration trilogy.

Regeneration is a work of historical fiction focusing on Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland in 1917.

Though Barker traces her interest in World War I back to her early childhood, she attributes the immediate inspiration for Regeneration to her husband, a neurologist, who was familiar with Dr. W.H.R. Rivers's experiments on nerve regeneration in the early twentieth century.

At least three of the novel's characters are based on real individuals who knew each other while they were at Craiglockhart. Siegfried Sassoon, a soldier and famous poet, protested the war in 1917, and for this, he was sent to the mental hospital. Wilfred Owen, perhaps the most famous war poet of his era, was also at Craiglockhart, and was greatly influenced by his older and more experienced fellow patient, Sassoon. Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, a scientist known originally for anthropological studies, served as a psychiatrist at the hospital for a short period near the end of the war; nevertheless, his influence on Sassoon was substantial. Sassoon mentioned or referred to Rivers in several publications after his "treatment."

Although Barker bases her characters on real individuals, her work is a fictional account of the period they spent together at Craiglockhart.

Regeneration is a morally nuanced anti-war novel, reflecting the issues and the concerns in wartime Britain. By focusing on the experience of Rivers, the psychiatrist who attends his patients, Barker heightens the conflict between duty and sympathy.

Principles become blurred as similar experiences are viewed through different lenses. Barker, with her insightful and direct writing style, succeeds in presenting a microcosm of "madness" in society. Yet the novel refrains from drawing conclusions for us.

Ultimately, Regeneration asks us to question for ourselves the large concepts of duty, sanity, and sympathy.

About the Author

Novelist Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees in Yorkshire, England, on 8 May 1943. She was educated at the London School of Economics, where she read International History, and at Durham University. She taught History and Politics until 1982. She began to write in her mid-twenties and was encouraged to pursue her career as a writer by the novelist Angela Carter. Her early novels dealt with the harsh lives of working-class women living in the north of England. Her first book, Union Street (1982) won the Fawcett Society Book Prize, while her second, Blow Your House Down (1984), was adapted for the stage by Sarah Daniels in 1994. The Century's Daughter (re-published as Liza's England in 1996) was published in 1986, followed by The Man Who Wasn't There in 1989.

In 1983 she was named as one of the 20 'Best Young British Novelists' in a promotion run by the Book Marketing Council and Granta magazine. Her trilogy of novels about the First World War, which began with Regeneration in 1991, was partly inspired by her grandfather's experiences fighting in the trenches in France. Regeneration was made into a film in 1997 starring Jonathan Pryce and James Wilby. The Eye in the Door (1993), the second novel in the trilogy, won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Ghost Road (1995), the final novel in the series, won the Booker Prize for Fiction. Another World (1998), although set in contemporary Newcastle, is overshadowed by the memories of an old man who fought in the First World War.

Her novel Border Crossing (2001), describes the relationship between a child psychologist and a young man convicted of murder 13 years earlier. Double Vision (2003), concerns the atrocity of war and two men who are caught up in its shadow.

Pat Barker was awarded a CBE in 2000. Her most recent novel was Life Class (2007).

Watch the trailer to the 1997 film version of the book here...

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Nominated for the Booker Prize and one of Mr Jenkins' favourite novelists...

'A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.'

When an unorthodox teacher breaks ranks and spells the truth out to her bemused charges, we are not entirely surprised....

'You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided.'

From the very first page of this thrilling dystopian vision, hints have been dropped that the pupils of Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school, are not ordinary children. There is, primarily, the way that the novel's narrator, Kathy H, who is now 31, peppers her story with unexpected and incongruous vocabulary: who are the 'donors' for whom she is a 'carer', and what does it mean when they 'complete'? Why is Kathy so proud of her meagre trappings of independence - a bedsit and car - and so alert to the jealousy they might inspire in others?

As Kathy's reminiscences of her schooldays unfold, and we learn more of her and her friends Tommy and Ruth's peculiar upbringing, the sense of mystery deepens: not only are the children clearly being groomed for an obscure mission, but their lives are also marked by other inexplicable rituals and processes, apparently designed to cut them off from the outside world.

On a cursory read, Ishiguro's novel could be seen simply as an unusual piece of nightmarish science fiction blended with an evocative reworking of the traditional boarding-school story. The deceptively plain - at times even bland - tone and style of Kathy's narration reinforce the idea that one is reading the jeu d'esprit of an exceptionally talented novelist, an exercise in manipulating form and content. But Never Let Me Go packs an emotional punch that is hard to resist. Achieved through the combination of barely articulated horror and stoical acceptance, it leaves one feeling that Ishiguro has confronted nothing less than human beings' ability to deal with their own mortality.

In a beautifully sketched moment, the three friends make a journey to see an abandoned boat, run aground in some marshes. It is simultaneously an emblem of entrapment and of the possibility of escape; but it occurs to none of them to pursue the latter option. 'At least we've seen it now,' says Tommy, with a poignancy that typifies this wonderfully understated novel.

Future imperfect - Kazuo Ishiguro explains how a radio discussion helped fill in the missing pieces of Never Let Me Go...

About the Author

Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of six novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982, Winifred Holtby Prize), An Artist of the Floating World (1986, Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Primio Scanno, shortlisted for the Booker Prize), The Remains of the Day (1989, winner of the Booker Prize), The Unconsoled (1995, winner of the Cheltenham Prize), When We Were Orphans (2000, shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Never Let Me Go (2005, shortlisted for the MAN Booker Prize).

He received an OBE for Services to Literature in 1995, and the French decoration of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1998.

As Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro's unsettling story of a community of clones, comes to cinema screens, Rachel Cusk finds herself both intrigued and repelled by the novel...

Andrew Garfield and Mark Romanek on Never Let Me Go's existential questions

The star and director talk Japanese cinema, the dangers of praise and the challenges of bringing Kazuo Ishiguro's bestselling novel to the screen:

Atonement by Ian McEwan

'Atonement is a magnificent novel, shaped and paced with awesome confidence and eloquence.' The Independent

Atonement is Ian McEwan's ninth novel and his first since the Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam in 1998. But whereas Amsterdam was a slim, sleek piece, Atonement is a more sturdy, ambitious work, allowing McEwan more room to play, think and experiment.

We meet 13-year-old Briony Tallis in the summer of 1935, as she attempts to stage a production of her new drama The Trials of Arabella to welcome home her elder, idolised brother Leon. But she soon discovers that her cousins, the glamorous Lola and the twin boys Jackson and Pierrot, aren't up to the task, and directorial ambitions are abandoned as more interesting preoccupations come onto the scene.
 
The charlady's son Robbie Turner appears to be forcing Briony's sister Cecilia to strip in the Fountain and sends her obscene letters; Leon has brought home a dim chocolate magnate keen for a war to promote his new "Army Amo" bar; and upstairs Briony's migraine-stricken mother Emily keeps tabs on the house from her bed. Soon, secrets emerge that change the lives of everyone present...
 
The interwar upper-middle-class setting of the book's long, masterfully sustained opening section might recall Virginia Woolf or Henry Green, but as we move forward--eventually to the turn of the 21st century--the novel's central concerns emerge, and McEwan's voice becomes clear, even personal. For at heart, Atonement is about the pleasures, pains and dangers of writing, and perhaps even more, about the challenge of controlling what readers make of your writing. McEwan shouldn't have any doubts about readers of Atonement: this is a thoughtful, provocative and at times moving book that will have readers applauding.
Alan Stewart

About the Author

Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, The Cement Garden, Enduring Love, Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize, Atonement, Saturday and On Chesil Beach.

Here's the trailer for the 2007 film version starring Keira Knightley and James MacAvoy...

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

"Ambitious, outrageous, poignant, sleep-disturbing, Birdsong is not a perfect novel - just a great one."

Simon Schama. New Yorker

"One of the finest novels of the last 40 years."

Brian Masters, Mail on Sunday

Set before and during the great war, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. His life goes through a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives, to the unprecedented experiences of the war itself.

Readers who are entranced by sweeping historical sagas will devour Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks' drama set during the first world war.

The book's hero, a 20-year-old Englishman named Stephen Wraysford, finds his true love on a trip to Amiens in 1910. Unfortunately, she's already married, the wife of a wealthy textile baron. Wrayford convinces her to leave a life of passionless comfort to be at his side, but things do not turn out according to plan. Wraysford is haunted by this doomed affair and carries it with him into the trenches of the war.

Birdsong derives most of its power from its descriptions of mud and blood, and Wraysford's attempt to retain a scrap of humanity while surrounded by it. There is a simultaneous description of his present-day granddaughter's quest to read his diaries, which is designed to give some sense of perspective; this device is only somewhat successful. Nevertheless, Birdsong is a rewarding read, an unflinching war story and a touching romance.

The novel came 13th in a 2003 BBC survey called the Big Read which aimed to find Britain's favourite book.

About the Author

Sebastian Faulks was born on 20 April 1953 and educated at Wellington College and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was the first literary editor of The Independent and became deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday before leaving in 1991 to concentrate on writing. He has been a columnist for The Guardian (1992-8) and the Evening Standard (1997-9). He continues to contribute articles and reviews to a number of newspapers and magazines. He wrote and presented the Channel 4 Television series, Churchill's Secret Army, which was broadcast in 1999.

Though his best known work is the bestselling Birdsong (1993), The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives is a multiple biography of the lives of the artist Christopher Wood, airman Richard Hillary and spy Jeremy Wolfenden. His fifth novel, Charlotte Gray (1998), completes the loose trilogy of books about France with an account of the adventures of a young Scottish woman who becomes involved with the French resistance during the Second World War. A film adaptation of the novel, starring Cate Blanchett, was first screened in 2002. His next novel, On Green Dolphin Street (2001), is a love story set against the backdrop of the Cold War. Human Traces, a book set in the 19th century and telling the tale of two friends who set up a pioneering asylum, was published in 2005. Engleby was published in 2007.

Faulks on Fiction is a compelling and personal look at the British novel through its greatest characters - the heroes, lovers, snobs and villains - and is also a major BBC series. Click on the video link to see Faulks interviewing contemporary writers on characters in fiction.



Sebastian Faulks lives with his wife and three children in London. He was awarded the CBE in 2002.

Find out more by clicking on the link below.

Find out more about Sebastian Faulks here...

Click on the link to hear Faulks discussing Birdsong on the BBC World Service's World Book Club.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/133_wbc_archive_new/page3.shtml

The BBC produced a TV version of the novel in early 2012. Here's the trailer...

Arthur and George by Julian Barnes

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

'The situation at the centre of this richly accomplished new novel isn’t fantasy but fact. Taking a real-life Edwardian whodunit Barnes transforms it into a dazzling exercise in detective fiction of more kinds than one.' The Times

Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village.

Arthur becomes a doctor, and then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham.

Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, George remains in hardworking obscurity.

But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events which made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.

With a mixture of detailed research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just this long-forgotten case, but the inner workings of these two very different men.

This is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes, a novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race.

Most of all it is a profound and moving meditation on the fateful difference between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.

The Guardian reviews Julian Barnes's wonderfully executed Arthur & George which recounts Conan Doyle's own detective adventure

Read more about the book at the Author's own website...

About the Author

Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England on January 19, 1946. He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964 and at Magdalen College, Oxford, from which he graduated in modern languages (with honors) in 1968. After graduation, he worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement for three years. In 1977, Barnes began working as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesmen and the New Review. From 1979 to 1986 he worked as a television critic, first for the New Statesmen and then for the Observer.

Barnes has received several awards and honors for his writing including the Somerset Maugham Award (Metroland 1981), three Booker Prize nominations (incl. Flaubert's Parrot 1984, England, England 1998); Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (FP 1985); Prix Médicis (FP 1986); E. M. Forster Award (American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1986); Gutenberg Prize (1987); Grinzane Cavour Prize (Italy, 1988); and the Prix Femina (Talking It Over 1992). Barnes was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988, Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995 and Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004. In 1993 he was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the FVS Foundation and in 2004 won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.

Julian Barnes has written numerous novels, short stories, and essays. He has also translated a book by French author Alphonse Daudet and a collection of German cartoons by Volker Kriegel. His writing has earned him considerable respect as an author who deals with the themes of history, reality, truth and love.

Read an interview with the author explaining why he came to write about the creator of Sherlock Holmes...

Perfume by Patrick Süskind

‘The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat . . .'

An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation when it was first released in 1987, Patrick Suskind's classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man's indulgence in his greatest passion - leads to murder.

Survivor, genius, perfumer, killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille.

In the slums of eighteenth-century Paris, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift - an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs.

But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood.

Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"- the scent of a beautiful young virgin. And to get it he must kill. And kill. And kill…

Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity suitale for older readers.

About the Author

Patrick Süskind was born near Munich, in 1949. He studied medieval and modern history at the University of Munich.

His first play, The Double Bass, was written in 1980 and became an international success. His first novel, Perfume, became an internationally acclaimed bestseller.

He is also the author of The Pigeon and Mr. Summer's Story, and a coauthor of the enormously successful German television series Kir Royal. Patrick Süskind lives and writes in Munich.

Possession by AS Byatt

Winner of the Booker Prize

'This proves that a serious, intricate book can also be a page turner...manifest intelligence, subtle humor and extraordinary texturing of the past within the present make Possession original and unforgettable' Sunday Times

'This is a novel for every taste: a heartbreaking Victorian love story, a take-no-prisoners comedy of contemporary academic life, and an unputdownable mystery. You turn the last page feeling stunned and elated, happy to have had the chance to read it.' Washington Post

"Literary critics make natural detectives", says Maud Bailey, heroine of a mystery where the clues lurk in university libraries, old letters and dusty journals. Together with Roland Michell, a fellow academic and accidental sleuth, Maud discovers a love affair between the two Victorian writers the pair has dedicated their lives to studying: Randolph Ash, a literary great long assumed to be a devoted and faithful husband, and Christabel La Motte, a lesser- known "fairy poetess" and chaste spinster.

At first, Roland and Maud's discovery threatens only to alter the direction of their research, but as they unearth the truth about the long- forgotten romance, their involvement becomes increasingly urgent and personal. Desperately concealing their purpose from competing researchers, they embark on a journey that pulls each of them from solitude and loneliness, challenges the most basic assumptions they hold about themselves, and uncovers their unique entitlement to the secret of Ash and La Motte's passion.

Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize, Possession is a gripping and compulsively readable novel. A.S. Byatt exquisitely renders a setting rich in detail and texture. Her lush imagery weaves together the dual worlds that appear throughout the novel--the worlds of the mind and the senses, of male and female, of darkness and light, of truth and imagination--into an enchanted and unforgettable tale of love and intrigue. Lisa Whipple

About the Author

AS Byatt is renowned internationally for her novels and short stories.

Her novels include the Booker Prize-winning Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman.

Her most recent novel, The Children’s Book was published in 2009.

Her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and Little Black Book of Stories.

A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, AS Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.

Clik here to find out more about the author and her works...

AS Byatt says women who write intellectual books are seen as unnatural - click here to see if you agree...

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

'The best piece of fiction in English I've read in years'

Financial Times

'Masterful...a rich and compelling work of fiction'

Don de Lillo

'The English Patient wears the triple crown: it is profound, beautiful and heart-quickening'

Toni Morrison

Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as the second world war ends.

The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of sheet lightning.

In lyrical prose informed by a poetic consciousness, Michael Ondaatje weaves these characters together, pulls them tight, then unravels the threads with unsettling acumen.

The final curtain is closing on the Second World War, and Hana, a nurse, stays behind in an abandoned Italian villa to tend to her only remaining patient.

Rescued by Bedouins from a burning plane, he is English, anonymous, damaged beyond recognition and haunted by his memories of passion and betrayal. The only clue Hana has to his past is the one thing he clung on to through the fire - a copy of The Histories by Herodotus, covered with hand-written notes describing a painful and ultimately tragic love affair.

Click here to read The Independent review of the novel from 1992...

For some information about Michael Ondaatje click here...

Here's the trailer for the 1997 film that won 9 Oscars including Best Film...

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Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières

'An emotional, funny, stunning novel which swings with wide smoothness between joy and bleakness, personal lives and history…it's lyrical and angry, satirical and earnest'Observer

'Among de Bernieres's skills are an archaeologists's eye for place, a historian's feel for time and a musician's ear for tone and tempo - the novel has everything, including a happy ending (of sorts). If Captain Corelli's Mandolin does not hold you in its thrall, it might be worth checking to see if your heart is made of stone.' Daily Telegraph

Beginning in 1940, as Italy prepares to attack Greece and enter the Second World War on the side of the Germans, Captain Corelli's Mandolin tells the story of Pelagia, the beautiful young daughter of Dr Iannis.

Engaged to Mandras, a handsome young fisherman, Pelagia is left alone when war intervenes and Mandras enlists. Following the invasion of the island by the Italians, Captain Antonio Corelli, a young and far from fanatical artillery captain with a passion for music, is billeted with Pelagia and her father.

As the Italian occupiers and Greek islanders begin to come to terms with each other, so Pelagia's love for Mandras falters and her affection for the charming and civilised Corelli grows. As an increasingly bestial war comes closer and closer, Corelli and Pelagia find themselves united by their love but divided by their nationality and by the savagery of war.

British author Louis de Bernières is well known for his forays into magical realism in such novels as The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman. Here he keeps it to a minimum, though certainly the secondary characters with whom he populates his island - the drunken priest, the strongman, the fisherman who swims with dolphins - would be at home in any of his wildly imaginative Latin American fictions. Instead, de Bernières seems interested in dissecting the nature of history as he tells his ever-darkening tale from many different perspectives. Captain Corelli's Mandolin works on many levels, as a love story, a war story and a deconstruction of just what determines the facts that make it into the history books.

About the Author

Louis de Bernières was born in London in 1954. He joined the army at 18 but left after spending four months at Sandhurst. After graduating from the Victoria University of Manchester, he took a postgraduate certificate in Education at Leicester Polytechnic and obtained his MA at the University of London.

Before writing full-time, he held many varied jobs including landscape gardener, motorcycle messenger and car mechanic. He also taught English in Colombia, an experience which determined the style and setting of his first three novels, The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990), Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991) and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992), each of which was heavily influenced by South American literature, particularly 'magic realism'.

In 1993, he was selected as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists 2' promotion in Granta magazine. His fourth novel, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, was published in the following year, winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Best Book). It was also shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year. Set on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the Second World War, the novel tells the story of a love affair between the daughter of a local doctor and an Italian soldier. It has become a worldwide bestseller and has now been translated into over 30 languages. A film adaptation of the novel was released in 2001, and the novel has also been adapted for the stage. In 2001, Red Dog was published - a collection of stories inspired by a statue of a dog encountered on a trip to a writers' festival in Australia in 1998.

He wrote the introduction to The Book of Job, one in a series of books reprinted from the Bible and published individually by Canongate Press in 1998 and his play, Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World, set in South-West London, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1999, and published in 2001. He is also a regular contributor of short stories to various newspapers and magazines. His novel Birds Without Wings (2004) was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread Novel Award and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

His latest novel is A Partisan's Daughter (2008), shortlisted for the 2008 Costal Novel Award. In 2009, he published a collection of short stories, Notwithstanding.

Or click here to go to Louis de Bernieres home page.

The Random House Reading Group page for this novel can be found here...

Here's the trailer to the not entirely successful or critically well-received 2001 film version. At least it will give you an idea of what the island of Cephallonia looks like.



Treasured island? Click to read how a change of holiday destination led to the writing of Captain Corelli's Mandolin

The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak

Unsettling, thought-provoking, life-affirming, triumphant and tragic, this is a novel of breath-taking scope, masterfully told...A wonderful page-turner.

The Guardian

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak was the best-selling debut literary novel of the year 2007, selling over 400,000 copies.

The book is extraordinary on many levels: moving, yet restrained, angry yet balanced -- and written with the kind of elegance found all too rarely in fiction these days. The book's narrator is nothing less than Death itself, regaling us with a remarkable tale of book burnings, treachery and theft. The book never forgets the primary purpose of compelling the reader's attention, yet which nevertheless is able to impart a cogent message about the importance of words, particularly in those societies which regard the word as dangerous (the book is set during the Nazi regime, but this message is all too relevant in many places in the world today).

Nine-year-old Liesel lives with her foster family on Himmel Street during the dark days of the Third Reich. Her Communist parents have been transported to a concentration camp, and during the funeral for her brother, she manages to steal a macabre book: it is, in fact, a gravediggers’ instruction manual. This is the first of many books which will pass through her hands as the carnage of the Second World War begins to hungrily claim lives. Both Liesel and her fellow inhabitants of Himmel Street will find themselves changed by both words on the printed page and the horrendous events happening around them.

Despite its grim narrator, The Book Thief is, in fact, a life-affirming book, celebrating the power of words and their ability to provide sustenance to the soul. Interestingly, the Second World War setting of the novel does not limit its relevance: in the 20th century, totalitarian censorship throughout the world is as keen as ever at suppressing books (notably in countries where the suppression of human beings is also par for the course) and that other assault on words represented by the increasing dumbing-down of Western society as cheap celebrity replaces the appeal of books for many people, ensures that the message of Marcus Zusak’s book could not be more timely. It is, in fact, required reading -- or should be in any civilised country. Barry Forshaw.

Find out more about the book here...

Or here...

Here's a fan-made trailer for the book that gives you a real feel for the story:

Markus Zusak explains why failure is his best friend (hmmm, sounds like a teacher I know) and why all writers tend to be loners here...