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.

This short novel, subtitled We think we know the ones we love, is set in Kentucky and California, first in the forties and fifties, and finally towards the end of the twentieth century.

Andrew Sean Greer movingly evokes the world of Childress, a small farming community, where Pearlie falls in love with Holland Cook. She meets him again on a California beach and declares that she will take care of the dejected ex-soldier. They marry despite his aunts’ warning.

The arrival of a stranger shatters Pearlie’s contented world. The story now moves backwards and forwards, through two wars with conscientious objection and draft dodging as a theme.

Reactions to the execution of Ethel Rosenberg run parallel to the story and we are immersed in the mindset of the US in the post war period. We experience the US from the position of a black, second-class citizen in the fifties. Most of all, we see what it was like to be sexually different.

The end of The Story of a Marriage comes quickly and effectively when Pearlie is with the survivors of the story at the end of the century. Greer shows us, very effectively, how everything has changed.

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.

Review by guest Peter Gaechter

Set in 1830s India, just before the first Opium War, Sea of Poppies manages to be an epic story and a subtly forceful condemnation of imperialism. Amitav Ghosh writes a story with the opium trade as its backdrop, and tells the tale of a group of people whose stories intertwine and culminate on the Ibis, an American slave ship converted to transport indentured labour from Calcutta to far-off Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. All of them are misfits in one way or another.

There is Deeti, a widow who would have been burnt along with her dead husband but for her dramatic rescue by Kalua, a low-born untouchable and feeble-minded to boot. Deeti, however, is destined for greatness. Then there is Zachary Reid, the son of a Baltimore freedwoman, who ships on to the Ibis as a carpenter and ends up as the ship’s second-in-command by virtue of circumstances. His encounter with Paulette, a young French woman, who tries to, but definitely does not, fit into British colonial society and who decides to escape that life by joining the indentured labourers on board. And Raja Neel Rattan, who has just been evicted from his estate by the British for debts he incurred and could not pay. Along with Ah Fatt, a Chinese opium-addict who ends up in India, Neel is sent to Mauritius as a prisoner, to serve out his time.

Ibis, the name of the trilogy, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2008. Sea of Poppies is an ambitious tale, the first in the Ibis trilogy. The stories of its multiple characters are deftly told, and the depth of its historical and social colour make for a gripping tale. Ghosh’s ear for the colonialist’s English, a peculiar mixture of local languages and English, as well as the pidgin of the lascars, the Asian seamen employed by European traders on their ships, is sometimes confusing but always entertaining. His background as a social anthropologist shows in his detailed portrayal of the myriad social distinctions in India, distinctions that were happily maintained and extended by their British masters.

But it is the opium trade that is the real thread in this story. The extensive cultivation of opium poppies along the Ganges river that Ghosh describes, and their processing in what is still the largest opium factory in the world, at Ghazipur, resulted in total economic dependence, directed by the British East India Company. Opium was shipped and sold to an increasingly addicted Chinese population to compensate for a serious British deficit in its balance of payments. When the Chinese balked, war was declared in the name of “free trade”.

We look forward to the second instalment.

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’.

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.

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.

Mistaken Identity

The clean, attractive cover with two pretty blond US university students smiling on it, is one reason for buying this text. The summary on the back cover is equally riveting. Mistaken Identity is not fiction. Unbelievable though it is, it really happened.

Five students were killed in a road accident in Indiana. We are given little information about the accident but we learn that Laura Van Ryn, severely injured and comatose, was taken to hospital, while the Ceraks buried their daughter, Whitney.

For five weeks, the Van Ryns and Laura’s boyfriend sat at Laura’s bedside in a darkened room, watching over their heavily bandaged daughter until she began to react to stimuli and, to her psychotherapist, declared that her name was Whitney.

The text takes us from the day of the accident to the present. It is written by the two families. To a European, perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of the work is the way that the faith and belief of the two families helps both of them to live with what has happened and come to terms with the tragedy.

God plays a large part in the novel – possibly a disconcerting presence for many who do not share such active faith, but certainly a help for both families who have remained friends even after the astonishing mistake.

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.