In Now Then Lad, Mike Pannett recounts, with a fair dose of humour, some of his adventures during his first year as a country bobby in North Yorkshire. This is the county made famous by James Herriot’s series of stories of a vet’s life and Mike Pannett, a Yorkshireman who has already worked in the Met in London’s Battersea, works in the same down-to-earth farming community.

He tells of encounters with burglars, incidents with sheep and cattle and even with a lost mole who was anxious to cross a busy road on  the night of an open-air concert. His work involves, among other tasks, hunting for lost hikers on the moors and investigating the balls stolen from the local colonel’s gateway. Mike’s personal life is glanced at, and his developing relationships with local people and with Ann, who was to become his wife.

Most of all, this book is a celebration of North Yorkshire, the Pennines, the Wolds and the farms and villages that nestle in its Dales. Rich with local flavour, this is a delightful true-life account.

Among the current best-selling novels is Janice Y.K. Lee’s The Piano Teacher. Elle Magazine called it ‘This seasons Atonement‘ - no small accolade.

As we meet the principal characters, we are at first unable to see the links between Will Truesdale, English driver employed by the Hong Kong Chen family, the piano teacher, Claire Pendleton, that they employ to give private lessons to their daughter Locket, and Trudy Liang, a Eurasian beauty.

The story moves back and forth between 1952 and 1941 and links slowly emerge. We are horrified when, with the Hong Kong community, we experience the Japanese occupation and all the horrors it brought with it. Three key figures come into focus.

Vital information about the crown collection is known by only three people in the colony and Otsubo, the occupying Japanese general, is determined to acquire it. Gruesome torture, violent deaths and great wealth are the results of the intrigue.

However, it is Claire Pendleton, the piano teacher, who is a principal player in the final scene of the drama, ten years after the intrigue. Surprising revelations are in store for the reader.

The story is superbly crafted with convincing recreation of wartime and post-war Hong Kong.

Chuckling out loud after only a few paragraphs, I had no doubt at all about why Dinah Lee Küng’s A Visit from Voltaire was on the list of potential Orange Prize winners in 2004. Her early chapters plunge us into a world that is so familiar; the world of the immigrant into the closed society of a small Swiss village. St Cergue is evoked with its railway snaking up through the village, its families who have lived there since the days of Voltaire and its traditional Vaudois ways of shutting out foreigners and all they stand for.

With the narrator, we struggle with the carpenter’s bills which consume all the family’s savings, the Swiss requirements that preclude the placing of an ‘island’ in the kitchen, the wildcats that nest in the roof insulation and the vagaries of the Swiss school system.

Poor, honest Alexander’s academic future is almost curtailed when he is the only child who doesn’t run away after the group of school children have accidentally set a stationary train in motion.

Into this wonderfully familiar world steps an uninvited guest who accompanies the narrator through most of the remainder of her first year in St Cergue. Husband, Peter, is busy with his Red Cross work but Voltaire compensates for his absence. Consuming litres of coffee and mastering the fax machine, the Internet and the telephone, Voltaire, a lively ghost, continues the literary and humanitarian work that occupied his lifetime two centuries earlier. We witness his hilarious response to the parent-teacher meeting and relive, with him, his rich libertine lifestyle.

The narrator’s own real involvement with modern political causes is interspersed with Voltaire’s narrative so that we touch on the unjustified imprisonment of Xu Wenli, the Chinese democracy activist and the human rights struggle for Dr Shaikh in Pakistan.

V is a whimsical and endearing companion who is an invaluable help to the narrator in her struggle to come to terms with her state as an emotional and cultural castaway in an alien environment. He teaches her how to live life to the fullest.  However, he is a demanding and expensive guest who ages as the narrative develops. He has to go. His initial departure leaves too many questions unresolved, but a delightful finale awaits the reader.

This novel is astonishingly rich in so many ways. The local area of the Geneva basin is evoked with St Cergue coming alive for us even to the 50 bends of the road up from the Geneva basin, and life in the UN and in the foreign community of Hong Kong. The author’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Voltaire’s life and works makes him a convincing figure in the 21st century as well as ‘La Lumière’ – the light of his own century.

A great read with a little more substance than most contemporary novels. Amazon have copies and Books Books Books too, so it is a good tip for Christmas reading.

A truly well-written autobiography can be sheer pleasure to read. I believe that Lorna Sage’s ‘Bad Blood’ is a classic of the genre. Her name briefly hit the headlines when I was at school. She was of my generation and did the ‘unforgivable’  in the tiny village of Hanmer, in Flintshire, North Wales in the sixties. She became pregnant at the age of sixteen, while still at school.

The autobiography recounts her vicarage childhood, living with her eccentric grandparents until her father returned from the army. She tells of the trials of bullying at school as well as her bleak family life. Although Lorna was convinced that marriage was not for her, her pregnancy made her a teenage bride.

In what was liberal and forward-looking thinking in the sixties, Lorna and her husband, Vic Sage, were both admitted to Durham University where both earned firsts. Lorna became a distinguished literary critic before her death from emphysema, just days after her autobiography won the Whitbread Prize for Biography.

All readers must have a favourite book – one they read time and time again and, each time, enjoy in a new way. Pride and Prejudice is one of mine and The God of Small Things another.

It is twelve years since Arundhati Roy’s novel won the Booker Prize (1997). Her story is just as enchanting as ever. We see into the minds of a number of narrators but most of all into the twins, Rahul and Estha, who were forcibly separated after the tragic drowning of their little Anglo-Indian visitor, Sophie Mol.

In a narrative that spans twenty-three years, we meet the family: Mammachi and her self-important son, Chacko. Lovely Ammu, the twins’ mother, Pappachi, violent and embittered and the evil Baby Kochamma the Great Aunt who is poisoning the Ayemenem household as a result of her own early disappointment in love. Rahel has returned to her origins after a life affected by the tragic events of her childhood. We visit her memories as we move with her through the revisited scenes of her childhood.

Ammu’s love for Velutha, an untouchable, is the cause of the heart-breaking central event of the story. We are moved to tears by the dreadful outcome. Yet the telling of this story is delightful and unforgettable. The silent twin and the empty twin win our hearts. This is magical fiction.

The Lost Daughter, Diane Chamberlain

There are over 500 pages in Diane Chamberlain’s The Lost Daughter and, after about 100 of them, I almost abandoned the read. We meet Corinne and, with her, experience her mother’s astonishing revelation that she has significant information about the Timothy Gleason kidnapping case that happened 27 years earlier. She knows he didn’t kill pregnant Genevieve Russell and her baby because she was there.

We then leap back in time and follow CeeCee Wilkes, the sixteen-year old who became involved in the kidnapping. She seems astonishingly naive and the story seems implausible. However, the narrative speed increases and the reader is hooked.

When CeeCee delivers the baby and proceeds to rear Corinne as her own, under a new identity, the potential complications are obvious and it is exciting to follow the story as it unravels, until Gleason is in court 27 years later. The consequences of  CeeCee’s revelation provide intriguing studies of relationships and the story finishes in a very satisfactory way.

Reviewers compare this novel to Jodi Picoult’s writing. If you enjoy her stories about family dilemmas and crises, you will probably enjoy The Lost Daughter.

The Right Attitude to Rain

Anyone who enjoys the adventures of Precious Ramotswe of the Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Botswana, should give the Isabel Dalhousie series a second look. Alexander McCall Smith invests the same honesty and charm in his well-heeled Edinburgh heroine.

In The Right Attitude to Rain, Isabel, the philosopher who is unable to keep her nose out of other people’s troubles, is involved in a number of affairs. Her niece, Cat, seems to have found yet another unsuitable boyfriend. Patrick is a workaholic and a mummy’s boy.

The millionaire American visitor seems to be the prey of his young fiancee, Angie, and we soon suspect that she is more concerned with his money than his welfare.

Isabel herself is involved in obtaining accommodation for her housekeeper, Grace, but is concerned that she has given the wrong impression to Mrs Macreadie. That gentle lady is willing to sell her flat at a lower price because she is enchanted that Isabel has come to view it with her young partner, Jamie – but he is not her lover – or is he?

Jamie was Cat’s boyfriend and she rejected him but Isabel finds herself loving him deeply. But can you have an affair with your niece’s ex-boyfriend?

The phenomenal success of all Alexander McCall Smith’s books perhaps lies in the fact that we know we will smile all the way through and that we can anticipate a happy ending.

Like all the novels in the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, Alexander McCall Smith’s Tea Time for the Traditionally Built is a joy to read.

Mma Ramotswe is faced with a number of troubles in this most recent novel in the series:

Her beloved little white van is reaching the end of its days and she visits Fanwell’s home, with him, in the hope that he can perform a miracle repair. Her loving husband, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, would be sure to condemn the little van and provide a new one – but she loves her faithful van.

Mma Makutsi is out of sorts because her fiancé, Mr Phuti Radiphuti, is being pursued by Violet Sephotho, a Jezebel who has inveigled her way into selling beds in his furniture store. There is a mystery behind her astonishing success at selling beds.

The Molofololo case will bring welcome legal fees to the detective agency but Mma Ramotswe has little interest in or knowledge of football and has difficulty working out why the Kalahari Swoopers are involved in a long losing streak. It will take the wisdom of a child to solve the case.

As always, the novel is set against a background of Botswana with honest, genuine and peaceful people who love their country and celebrate its countryside and traditions – in this case the regular meetings over cups of tea. And, of course, as we know, Mma Ramotswe is ‘traditionally built’.

the other hand was shortlisted for the COSTA novel award. Chris Cleave’s novel is moving and very powerful.

We meet Little Bee as she is unexpectedly released after two years in an immigration detention centre. She makes her way to the home of the O’Rourkes, the only people she knows in England.

At the time of her arrival at the O’Rourkes’ home, Andrew, the clinically depressed husband, kills himself. We  learn that his marriage has failed since he learned of his wife’s affair with Lawrence, who is a press officer connected with immigration. Sarah O’Rourke’s missing middle finger is a key to the story of the O’Rourkes’ first meeting with Little Bee in Nigeria.

As we relive the experiences of Nigeria, two years earlier, we are awakened to the true horror of the refugee situation and to the way it has moved into the lives of Sarah and Andrew. Lawrence is torn between his professional duty to denounce a paper-less immigrant and his desire to retain his relationship with Sarah. Little Batman, Sarah’s son, disappears one day and Little Bee, an illegal immigrant without papers, calls the police. Deportation naturally follows – but we follow the deportee.

The entire story is gripping and, despite its frightening and disturbing topic, at times searingly comical – a first-rate read!

Michael Chabon’s detective fiction is superbly written and delightfully different. The Final Solution is a very short and entertaining murder mystery. However, it is not so much the solving of the mystery as the discovery of the whereabouts of the missing parrot that is the focus of the aged detective.

The red-tailed African grey parrot is the love of a small mute escapee from Nazi Germany. The parrot recites strings of numbers in German. When Shane is murdered, the parrot disappears. The elderly detective is soon warned off his sleuth activities by the Secret Service, who have an unexplained interest in the parrot.

He has sympathy and affection for the young boy and is determined to retrieve his pet. The penultimate chapter of the novel, when the parrot is about to be saved (or eliminated!) is delightfully told through the consciousness of the bird.

This is a gem of a short novel and the reader is challenged to understand what those strings of figures really mean. We are given a number of interpretations about what the parrot calls ‘the train song’. Don’t begin at the last page!