David Starkey’s recommendation on the front cover of the Bloomsbury Press edition of this work of historical biography was sufficient to tempt me to buy Mary Tudor, England’s First Queen. He calls Anna Whitelock’s work  ’An impressive and powerful debut’, and indeed it is.

British children were taught at school about ‘Bloody Mary’ and we all learned that she died with the words ‘Calais is on my heart’ on her lips but this is not the Mary that Anna Whitelock evokes with such scholarship and passion.

In four parts, entitled ‘A king’s daughter’, ‘A King’s Sister’, ‘A Queen’, and ‘A King’s Wife’ we meet Mary as the fêted daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon. We follow her tribulations during the years of the ascendency of Anne Boleyn, when Mary was declared a bastard and became almost a servant in the household of her sister Elizabeth. We admire her refusal to bow to the new religion even under duress and when commanded to do so by her brother, the young King Edward VI.

Finally we see her fight for survival and her struggle to claim her throne when denied succession by her own younger brother. Anna Whitelock focuses on Mary’s success as a queen which contrasted sadly with her failure as a woman.  Married late in life to Philip of Spain, she suffered phantom pregnancies, debilitating illnesses and the frequent absence of her husband. However, she filled her royal role with wisdom and ability.

We learn, through Anna Whitelock’s clear presentation of the facts, that Mary’s role has been deliberately distorted by politicians almost since the moment of her death when she was denigrated in ‘Foxe’s Martyrs’. This work, totally devoted to Mary, does much to reinstate this first English Queen.

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.

Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes revisits the plane crash that killed Pakistan’s military dictator, General Zia ul Haq in 1988. Visiting in  alternate chapters the General himself and Under Officer Ali Shigri, a hilarious satirical picture is built up of a simple-minded dictator who relies on daily dips into the Quran to predict his future and of the boot-licking people who surround him.

Shigri is preparing a silent military drill but the disappearance of his room beloved roommate in a stolen plane leads to his arrest and to two months and seventeen days of imprisonment, torture and involvement with the four-star generals. He is the only one who walks away from the fatal plane, claiming that he has committed the crime.

However, the delightfully funny novel presents us with a number of other candidates for the perpetration of the assassination – if it was one: the CIA are interested in dispatching Zia and yet the US Ambassador is on the plane;  all the generals have sufficient motives, yet all but one of the important ones are also on the plane. There is a blind woman with a motive, an angry First Lady and even a crow, as well as a lethal air-conditioning system and a few cases of poisoned mangoes. Even the pilot has reason to loathe the dictator.

This darkly comic book was published by Vintage Books in 2008, and has been nominated for a number of literary prizes.

Paddy Ashdown, A Fortunate Life

Ed. note: Paddy Ashdown is the guest speaker Tuesday 2 June at the Chateau de Prangins. The event is  sponsored by Executives International. Details, registration He will also be appearing Wednesday 1 July at a book signing at Off the Shelf in Geneva, followed by a presentation at an evening event sponsored by the British Swiss Chamber of Commerce at the Hotel Beau Rivage.

Paddy Ashdown, for eleven years leader of the UK Liberal Democrats, Britain’s third political party, has a special significance for Genevans. For years he was one of us, and his love of skiing, the Alps and nearby Savoie and Burgundy rings through his autobiography. He even has a French son-in-law and French grandchildren.

Paddy’s Bedford School reports claim that he had ‘no aptitude for languages’.  He modestly declares in a footnote that, when asked how many languages he speaks, he says he has forgotten six and is ‘nowadays only comfortable in French’. This from a man who has the equivalent of a first class honours degree in Chinese and who, in the course of a thrilling career, has functioned in Hindi, Malay, German, and what used to be called Serbo-Croat!

Such modesty is typical of the man we feel we know well from his political days. Many of us remember his years in Parliament, the initial triumph in the Yeovil seat and the growing strength of his party. We recall a scandal where he was hounded by the press. We sympathise with the failed ambition to partner Tony Blair in a move towards the proportional representation and constitutional reform that the UK’s third party would so warmly welcome. This section of Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon’s autobiography leaves us with a sense of  ’déja vu’ where we love Paddy for his honesty. In the current British political climate of corruption, it is refreshing to read of such political passion, defence of liberal ideas and devoted enthusiasm for a cause.

But this section of the autobiography (just over a third) pales in significance compared with the other parts: the accounts of Paddy’s school years, his leadership of a commando in Borneo, the Special Boat Service, time in Belfast, and his deeply emotional involvement with the cause of Bosnia Herzegovina.

Paddy admits, several times, that a privileged education has led him into his ‘fortunate life’, but Bedford was not easy. Gifted at sport but not keen on the academic aspects of school, he survived  early years of rough-and-tumble of a public school because of his ability to fight.

At 18, he chose the Royal Marines rather than a university. That is where the really exciting sections of the book begin. The descriptions of the jungle patrols of his commando are in such evocative prose that we feel as though we have shared the experiences – like the parachuting, and  nerve-wracking underwater entries and exits from a submarine during his Special Boat Service years.

The most moving element of the work is, undeniably, the involvement with the Balkan crisis. Lord Ashdown himself says in his prologue,

two of my Technicolor days, the best and the worst, fall consecutively in the second week of August 1992. Together they form not just a memory but also somehow a distillation of the theme of my life; that of conflict and its human consequences when the beast of intolerance and bigotry gets loose. Looking back, this seems like a subterranean stream which has appeared, vanished and re-emerged, never completely leaving me, since my earliest days.

He is speaking of his meeting with Radovan Karadzic and subsequent visit to  the brutal prison of Manjaca.

His description of Bosnia Herzegovina, where he spent nearly four years as the International High Representative and European Union Special Representative, is simply beautiful. We live with him and Jane, his wife, through four moving years there.

We leave this book feeling immense admiration for such a gentle and honest man who has given his life so generously for causes he truly believes in.

There is the light-hearted side too! A wealth of anecdotes enriches this autobiography and raises a smile on almost every page – like the wonderful one about a lecturer’s demonstration of how to survive – eat a live frog sandwich - or the description of coping with Balkan politics – ‘like herding cats’.

Paddy Ashdown’s autobiography, A Fortunate Life, can be obtained in Geneva from the English Bookshop, Off the Shelf.

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!

It is not difficult to understand why Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader is such an international success. Unlike The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, this late twentieth century example of Holocaust literature is entirely plausible and sheds a new light on a period of history that is no longer in the living memory of the majority of us.

The story is told in three parts, with a brief epilogue. Michael, at the age of fifteen, is seduced into a passionate sexual relationship with Hannah, a much older woman. In the course of their encounters, he reads aloud to Hannah. His life is changed forever but he never becomes emotionally close to Hannah and does not understand why she flees when promotion is offered in her job as tram conductor.

Years later, Michael, as a law student, is a spectator at a trial of war criminals and is surprised to find Hannah in the dock. As the trial unfolds, Hannah becomes the scapegoat for the group of SS guards who had allowed a convoy of concentration camp inmates to burn to death in a locked church. A lone survivor is the witness who will indict Hannah. Michael becomes horribly aware that Hannah would rather accept the guilt than admit that she could not read. He is faced with the dilemma of intervening or honouring Hannah’s pride and dignity. She is sentenced to eighteen years in gaol.

During her imprisonment, Michael reads books on tape and sends them to Hannah. As she masters the art of reading, her understanding of the past changes. Michael’s own life has been a series of unsuccessful relationships. When the date of Hannah’s release approaches, he feels responsibility towards Hannah.

In the context of history, the readers recognise that there can be no ‘happy’ ending to such a story. We can only admire the subtle way that Schlink, a Professor of Law and a former judge, concludes his narrative. The novel was published by Phoenix Fiction and has also been made into a successful film.

When I Lived in Modern Times, Linda Grant

The Orange Prize for Fiction is awarded to a wide range of books. They are invariably worth reading and When I Lived in Modern Times, by Linda Grant, is no exception. Unlike many of the novels that win the prize, this one is based on history.

Evelyn Sert is 20 in 1946 when she decides to go to Israel. Her Jewish identity is inherited from her Latvian grandparents, but she has never known her American father and has been raised in England and trained as a hairdresser.

Her mother’s lover encourages Evelyn to ‘return’ to Israel, which is just as old as she is. She conceals her Jewish identity and travels as a Christian tourist but then mingles with the new nation and works in a Kibbutz.

Unhappy with Kibbutz life, Evelyn creates a niche for herself in Tel Aviv and we live, with her, through the heady days of the young city. However, she is soon involved in politics through the dangerous activities of her lover who is working for the Irgun underground movement.

The denouement is, perhaps, disappointing but Evelyn’s return to the Israel of her youth, later in her life, is a realistic view of what it is like to ‘go back’, and possibly a message for all of us to leave our memories intact.

The Private Papers of Eastern jewel, Maureen Lindley

Praise by Jung Chang, Adeline Yen Mah, and Harper’s Bazaar, added to the bright and beautifully designed cover, made this novel irresistible. For me, Maureen Lindley’s The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel did not live up to that promise.

The novel is based on the life of a real Manchu princess, child of a concubine and the fourteenth daughter of Prince Su Qin Wang, a member of the Qing dynasty. Maureen Lindley has used her imagination to pad the meagre information that is available.

Eastern Jewel is caught watching her father make love to a fourteen-year old girl. She is banished to Japan, a gift to her father’s blood-brother. Unwelcome in her Japanese family, she is used sexually and finally married off to a Mongolian prince.

Eastern Jewel flees her passionless marriage and leads a wild life in Shanghai before becoming a spy for the Japanese in her original homeland, China. She is ultimately betrayed. The papers we read are those found in her cell in Number One Prison, Peking.

What I disliked about the text were the details of Yoshiko’s sexual encounters that appear time after time and ultimately interfere with a lively narrative. Far more interesting, for me, were the descriptions of life on the cold Mongolian plains and the background of Japanese and Chinese politics.

Niccolò Ammaniti’s I’m Not Scared is exciting from start to finish.  Michele Amitrano is nine years old and exploring the countryside around his tiny Italian community on his treasured bicycle when he discovers what he takes to be the corpse of a boy in a pit.

Michele tells nobody but, on a later visit, finds that the boy is alive but unable to explain how he came to be there. We slowly come to understand that he is Milanese, victim of the kidnappings that were rife in the seventies. Most of Michele’s community and even his own family are involved in the attempt to extort money from a rich Milanese family.

Michele himself never totally understands what he is relating, nor does he understand the danger, for himself, of his involvement in the kidnapping. As the story develops, we see how the crime destroys Michele’s own family. The climax is thrilling when Michele decides to act to help Filippo,to escape.

This superbly narrated novel, which has sold more than a million copies in over twenty languages, has been made into a film starring the real inhabitants of an Italian village rather than established stars.

Meg Rosoff’s novels are popular with mature teenage readers. She writes about young, independent thinkers who are placed in unusual situations, without the influence of adults. They have exciting experiences and have to act resourcefully. The novels are gripping.

How I Live Now introduces a disaffected young American girl who arrives to live with her four fascinating teenage cousins in a strange England that is just on the verge of an even stranger war.

Daisy falls in love with her cousin, Edmond, and that love guides her through the confusing situation she is soon plunged into when a twenty-first century terrorist-driven war blankets out all news. We are seeing and hearing through Daisy and only slowly piece together the puzzle.

Daisy finds herself crossing a war-torn country with her delightful young cousin, Piper, in search of Edmond. Piper’s survival skills are invaluable but Daisy’s love and maturity are equally important. The novel culminates with a very clear message about the harmful effects of a war.

What I Was is equally enthralling but in a different way. This time, the protagonist is male – a schoolboy in a remote boarding school who develops a passion for Finn, a young person living alone on an East Anglian island.

Finn’s competence and way of life are enchanting to the schoolboy narrator, and he longs to be Finn or share Finn’s life. Slowly a relationship develops but it is shattered by the crisis that occurs.

Meg Rosoff holds a surprise for the reader in her final pages. This is fine writing for a teenage or even an adult audience.