Spitsbergen comes to life in Michelle Paver‘s Dark Matter. The reader is with Jack Miller in his first enthralling encounter’s with the island in the summer. With him, too, we are left alone in the terrifying bay of Gruhuken when his partners in the expedition, Gus and Algie, have to leave because of a medical emergency.

Jack is poor and desperate for a change and leaps at the chance to become the wireless operator on the expedition that is to spend a year in the bay. With him, we get to know Spitsbergen, we learn to love the dogs and Isaak in particular and we witness the departure of the sun and the arrival of the winter where there will be fierce storms and nothing but occasional moonlight for four months.

We are with Jack, too, as he realizes that the ghostly figure that he sees really is threatening him and attempting to reclaim Gruhuken. The story is spellbinding and chilling and told in beautifully evocative language. It is difficult to put this novel down.

Michelle Paver is the author of the Chronicles of Dakness series for children. She is just as accomplished as a writer for adults.

I have been a Kate Atkinson fan since her very first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and found her Jackson Brodie ‘crime novels’ intriguing and different. I thought they were going to be a trilogy, so it was a surprise to find this new Jackson Brodie novel, all 494 pages of it, featured in the bookshop.

Jackson Brodie is back in his native Yorkshire, behaving like a tourist and recalling those wives and partners of the past that we have already encountered. He rescues a dog that is being maltreated. Meanwhile, in a parallel incident, Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police detective who is working in security in the Leeds Merrion Centre, ‘rescues’ a maltreated child, Courtney, by ‘buying’ her from a skinny prostitute, Kelly Cross.

We are led through a clutter of memories – of the Yorkshire ripper, of disappearing children, of a murdered prostitute and of an inexplicable adoption where no papers or records surface – so that for the readers, the central issue is as clouded as it is for Jackson Brodie, until the resolution of the mystery ties together the threads and we understand, for instance, why we have been entering the mind of senile Tilly, who, with us, witnessed the incident in the shopping centre.

This is a novel to take with you when you have a long journey to fill.

Nick was working in Moscow when he was ‘picked up’ by the enigmatic Masha and her ‘sister’/'cousin’ Katya. He is seduced by Masha and believes himself to be in love with her as she shares the Russia of nightclubs, restaurants and dachas with him. He is a lawyer and willingly assists Masha and Katya in their plans to help their ‘aunt’, Tatiana Vladimirovna, to sell her relatively comfortable Moscow apartment and move out to a new flat in Butovo. Nick even invests his savings in the plans.

From the beginning of the story, we, the readers, are suspicious of the situation, especially as the story begins with one of Moscow’s ‘snowdrops’ appearing when the spring snows melt – ‘that’s what the Russians call them – the bodies that float up into the light in the thaw -’

A.D.Miller’s book is a psychological thriller. There is a villain in Nick’s legal transactions at work, too. We are told on almost every page about Russian corruption, that everyone is involved in using forged documents and taking a financial cut from any transaction. The Cossack convinces Nick and his colleague, Paolo, that the oil they are investing is real, but we, the readers again suspect from the start that this is a shady situation.

A.D.Miller’s Snowdrops is packed with Russain flavour, – we feel that we are with the rather naive and honest Nick as he loses his innocence. We anticipate the final pages of this novel, ‘longlisted for the Man Bookeer Prize 2011, with dread.

Ignazio Silone was an exile in Switzerland when Bread and Wine first appeared in print in a German version. He completed this work and his classic Fontamara in exile, from which he only returned in 1944.

The novel is a deeply moving revelation of the way the fascist state dominated the minds of its people and brutally suppressed opposition. Pietro Spina has returned from self-imposed exile and, masquerading as a priest, aims to help the peasants resist the evil regime. Silone, with Orwell and Camus, was regarded as one of the great political writers of the period.

I loved this novel when I first read it, years ago – not because of its underlying political message but because of the gripping story, the wonderful Italian colour (when, for example, the young donkey is being christened ‘Garibaldi’, and is beaten until it recognises its name) and the flashes of humour and gentle love stories that underly the harsh political satire.

Silone was a superb writer and one can but wonder what he would have produced had he lived in a different and more liberal society.

The reader of Jo Parfitt‘s Sunshine Soup gets more than a privileged glimpse into the life of expats in Dubai. Maya, one of the two people through whose eyes we mainly experience the claustrophobic expat circle, is a gifted cook and we share her recipes, with extra spice added by the Dubai environment. The recipes are shared with the reader at the end of the story.

Several aspects of expat life in Dubai will be familiar to Geneva readers. We live so intensely in the minds of Barb, the American wife of one successful man, and Maya, the new arrival, that we come to anticipate the problems of women who have been successes in their own lives but who are now not allowed to work in Dubai. The ‘Twist’ organises replacement activities and mothers cope with teenagers who have been uprooted from their social circles and are now trying to fit into a new life.

The work permit is one problem but larger ones develop as Maya’s pilot husband, Rich, becomes increasingly troubled and distant. We see behind the lively façade built up by Barb as her deep-seated misery emerges, and we come to understand why Liv will hand out no personal details to promote her professional activities.

Leila comes into the story, shocking the reader with her account of the suicide of another girl who married a local, and, with Maya, we finally make contact with real Dubai locals.

This is a densely-written narrative, with spice and humour – an entertaining read for a Geneva expat wife! You can obtain your copy via Amazon, in time for Christmas!

From start to finish this wonderful début novel did not disappoint. I have not the slightest hesitation in naming Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, of all the novels I have ever reviewed, as the one most likely to survive as a classic. Nor is it surprising that it is the 2011 winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction. My only astonishment is that Téa Obreht, who is only 27 and who was not born with English as her first language, could write such a compelling novel. (Of course, we remember Conrad who performed similar linguistic miracles!)

Ex-Yugoslavia is the setting and the novel moves principally between two time periods, the grandfather’s childhood when a tiger roamed the hillside above the village of Galina, and the current divided state where two committed young medics (the granddaughter and her colleague and friend) cross the new frontier to take medicine to a community possessed with the vital correct burying of a victim of the internecine hatreds of the period.

We are enthralled by the frequent encounters with the deathless man, sightings of the tiger and themes like the obsessive drawing of Bis the dog. There is intertextuality with the Jungle Book and the fate of the grandfather’s copy becomes as important to us as it does to the heroine.

This is stunning writing. It reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez A Hundred Years of Solitude. It is just as rich, as entertaining and as glowing with magic realism. I loved it!

I have just thoroughly enjoyed a real page-turner, co-written by Ingrid Schippers and Thomas McKerley. Bloodlines – Touch Not the Cat takes us to the heart of the Scottish Highlands where an American homicide detective, a member of the Macpherson clan, finds herself drawn into a mystery set in motion by her ancestors a hundred years earlier.

Cathy is reluctant to go back to her roots at Ballindalloch Castle, the home of the Macphersons for over 450 years but instinct takes over and she comes face to face with the family mystery, the disappearance of the laird over a hundred years earlier.

Flashbacks take us to the life and times of Alexander Stewart, the castle gamekeeper, ancestor of Catherine’s partner. We share his love for an earlier Katherine Macpherson and witness the evil way he is separated from her by the laird, and suspected of involvement in the inexplicable disappearance of Gordon Macpherson, the laird.

The story is beautifully paced, moving deftly towards the climax that we have been anticipating since Cathy arrived in the castle.

A wealth of Scottish colour fills this delightful sortie into genealogy as, with Cathy, we experience the land of her ancestors: tartan, midges, highland games, even an explanation of that clan motto, ‘Touch not the cat!’

Bloodlines – Touch Not the Cat is available from summertimepublishing

www.touchnotthe cat.com

Info@touchnotthecat.com

Here’s a bit of crossword news too. The BBC CiNA 3D Calendar Crossword, the sales of which all go to help Children in Need is now available for purchase on-line. Well-known compilers like Pasquale, Rufus, Enigmatist and Lavatch have given their work to the project. It will make a fine Christmas present for any crossword-lover and all the money produced by sales goes to the children (a company is even printing the first 500 copies for free!)  Here is a link.

The back cover of Sarah Winman‘s ‘When God Was a Rabbit’ tells us that ‘More than anything it’s a book about love in all its forms. That is exactly what it is. Not least of those forms is the love that the narrator, Elly, has for her rabbit, God, the gift of her adored brother, Joe.

A teacher tells Elly that it is blasphemy to call her rabbit God, but he is a little god in her childhood world and plays a delightful role in the early part of the story, until his sad demise. I would have liked to have seen more of the ‘God’ who occasionally returns to her older world but,  for the second, adult part of her narrative, he is just a fleeting visitor.

It was the title that captivated me but the entire novel held my attention. There are a number of love affairs that we follow, homosexual love, heterosexual love, love between school friends and the bonds that bind family members and old friends.

Sarah Winman deliberately takes us through the trauma of crises; terminal cancer, family brutality, the destruction of Twin Towers and a number of world-shattering events. Yet love triumphs. This is a most enjoyable first novel.

Joyce Carol Oates’ A Fair Maiden has the subtitle A tale of dark suspense.

I was hooked from the start. We have been here before (or I though I had) with Nabokov’s Lolita – a sixteen year-old nanny, a rather tough New Jersey teenager, is earning her summer wages with the Engelhardts, a not very attractive couple with two toddlers, Tricia and the baby.

A rich, white-haired neighborhood benefacter befriends her and her resistance to his overtures is slowly eroded as she becomes a model for his sketching and painting. We hear her thoughts as she rejects his advances, then is drawn slowly into what seems to be a sinister web.

Katya’s feckless mother renders the situation more menacing when Katya is obliged to beg for money to bail out her mother’s drinking and gambling behaviour. The readers are drawn in much as Katya is.

Does Marcus Kidder abuse her sexually when she has deliberately consumed his wine and is posing nude for his drawing? We are left in suspense but her nasty jailbird cousin sees an opportunity to exploit her relationship with the old man and make a financial killing.

What follows is gripping and there is a superb twist in the final chapters. This is another Joyce Carol Oates triumph that I can thoroughly recommend.

Joyce Carol Oates’ Rape a Love Story is not for the faint-hearted. The opening scene, a gang rape of a woman in her mid thirties and the brutal attack on her 12-year-old daughter is one of the most graphic scenes of violence that I have read, yet it is so powerfully written that the book is hypnotising.

The ‘lover’ in the story is a young police officer, Dromoor. He had met Tina Maguire, the rape victim, a couple of years earlier but the main reason for his involvement in the case is that he is the first on the scene when 12 year-old Bethie stops the police car outside the boathouse the morning after the brutality. Her mother was left for dead by the five rapists who were high on drugs.

Bethie identifies the five and they are indicted but the father of two of them engages the best lawyers available and, despite conclusive DNA evidence, the community turns nasty with ‘She was asking for it’ and the usual language and attitudes that rape-victims encounter. We witness soul-destroying ostracism and mental torture suffered by Bethie as her mother, severely damaged by the brutality, attempts to return to life.

This sounds like grim reading but it is a wonderful story told by Joyce Carol Oates. (I have to add my voice to the many that wonder why she has not yet been the winner of a Nobel Prize for literature – what talent!)

Of course, no police officer should take the law into his own hands, but when social mores dictate, and justice is being perverted by a corrupt legal system where money talks (a well known miscarriage of justice is repeatedly cited), the readers are overjoyed as, one by one, the nasty thugs are eliminated.

The voice we never hear is that of the rape victim, until a joyous postcard at the end.

Fabulous writing!