Unfaithfully Yours by Nigel Williams

This book is written exclusively in the form of letters between six people – five old friends who have lost touch and a private investigator.  Setting out the book like this means it is sometimes artificial as plot turns have to be crowbarred into a letter in a way which does not read very naturally.  This is not helped by the fact that the plot itself is unrealistic.  I appreciate this is intended to be a black suburban comedy rather than a real life story but it is still a little incredible.  And it is not funny.

Purge by Sofi Oksanen

I found this book incredibly boring. It jumps around between the two main characters (an older woman and her estranged young niece) over a number of years. As a result there is no narrative thread and you do not feel any affinity with or interest in either of them. The book is set in Russia, Estonia and Finland during the 1950s and 1990s so there is some interesting historical context but the plot is not at all gripping. There is also no discernible ending - the book just runs out of pages like someone's torn out the rest. In fact, if there hadn't been an "Acknowledgments" I would have suspected my husband had run out of toilet paper. I wouldn't bother.

C by Tom McCarthy

Scene at the publishers

Dave: Where's the synopsis for the back cover?
Jo: I thought you were doing it?
Dave: Nope
Jo: Shit. OK let's write one together now. Right - what happens?
Dave: I can't remember.
Jo: Didn't you literally just finish it?
Dave: Yes - 10 minutes ago - but I can't remember a single thing about it. It's like a black hole. Oh my God - I've had a stroke or something.
Jo: No. I finished it yesterday and I can't remember anything about it either.
Dave: Are you sure? I'm not brain damaged?
Jo: No, seriously, I am not sure anything about it registered in my brain in the first place.
Dave: Maybe we could say something like "The mastery of Tom McCarthy is that he can produce an effect remarkably similar to rohypnol through the medium of the written word."
Jo: We don't want to open that can of worms. We must be able to remember something?
Dave: I think there may have been a bit about a war.
Jo: Which war?
Dave: First? Maybe.
Jo: And I am pretty sure the main character is male.
Dave: Hmm... That's probably not enough.
Jo: Well I'm not reading it again. It might enduce a coma the second time round.
Dave: Fuck it, we'll just tell him the book is written with such an intense, global force that's too powerful to be summarised and that readers shouldn't be patronised by a trite 'Readers Digest' synopsis.
Jo: That actually sounds quite good.
Dave: Well, it's pretentious and condescending. I expect he'll love it.
Jo: Definitely. And everyone will think it's really, really clever so all the critics will be too scared to say it's impenetrable bollocks in case someone thinks they don't understand it. It'll probably win a prize!
Dave: Just fill the back cover with white squiggles - and for Gods sake keep our logo small.

This concludes my review.

The Man Who Disappeared by Clare Morrall

There are websites where you can input information, such as your name, a city and the name of your boyfriend, and the website outputs a short story for you (admittedly usually a dirty story). There must be one for novels about happy middle class families whose lives are turned upside down, and then they build it up again. The variable of course being what turns their life upside down. In this case, the father’s money laundering activities. Exciting stuff.

So, a very formulaic story with pretty average writing and dialogue and very two dimensional characters. It is light hearted so a bit of escapism but not recommended for boys.

Down graded half a star because HMS Victory is docked at Portsmouth not Plymouth. How hard is that to check?

The Island by Victoria Hislop

I read this book whilst on holiday in Crete at a hotel overlooking the island of Spinalonga, which is The Island of this book. I’ve given this book an extra half star because I was “on location” and so the story was marginally more interesting. Overall, I thought it was a very girly, very unsubstantial book.

The narrative follows the history of a Cretan family, two members of which suffered from leprosy and were exiled to Spinalonga which was a leper colony until 1957. I thought the book was poorly researched. It is very irritating to be smugly (and perpetually) informed that the popular misconceptions about leprosy are incorrect without being given any information on the disease whatsoever. I appreciate that I should not be looking for education in a chick lit trashy novel but I do expect at least a half hearted attempt at some background research. A google search would have done.

This book is definitely overrated. I suspect that the high sales can be traced back to our hotel’s gift shop, which stocked thousands of copies of this book and a few bottles of suntan lotion.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif

Don't bother.

This is a very dull book. It is very hard to build up any sort of connection with the characters or to care enough to concentrate on the fairly disjointed plot. I think the story is about Pakistani military cadets and middle eastern politics. But I couldn't be sure as this book is not as interesting as my day dreams about being a gangster so I was really focusing on them rather than the story.

I gave this an extra half star because it is not as offensive as The Still Point (the worst book in the world), but seriously - don't bother.