It seemed important to read Ian McEwan’s Atonement before watching the film which is now available on a DVD. It was as enjoyable as so many critics have said.

I found myself checking on the Internet. Did Aero already exist in 1935? Yes – it came out in that year! The historical background is convincing even to the negative comments on women rowing in eights. My mother-in-law rowed, that year, in the first race on the river when the Oxford ladies were actually on the river at the same time as the Cambridge ladies. (Until then, they had rowed separately and competed to have the best time).

McEwan exploits the attitudes towards sex of the 1935 Tallis family, when 13-year-old Briony intercepts a compromising letter, witnesses what she interprets to be threatening acts and makes an accusation that affects her own life and the lives of her sister and her sister’s lover.

Robbie’s ‘atonement’ takes him to Wandsworth Prison and into the infantry. Sections of the book take us to the retreat from Dunkirk. We relive the squalor of the retreat and its effect on British hospitals, through the eyes and minds of Robbie and Briony, who, as part of her atonement, has become a nurse.

In an intricate metafictional twist, Briony is writing the book as atonement. We meet her finally when she is 77, still coming to terms with her error of 1935.

Now I am really looking forward to the film!

We met an old friend at a barbecue and she spoke to me at length about the immense relief she is feeling and the wonderful new life her daughter is living after receiving a donor kidney. Her daughter suffered kidney failure and has coped with nightly dialysis for years. Our friend couldn’t speak highly enough about the people who are willing to leave an organ to save a life.

This set me thinking about texts that touch on this topic.

Jodi Picoult’s ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ is probably the most readable of them all. Would you deliberately conceive a second child in the hope that her genetic make up would be the same as that of your sick first child? Anna, the younger sibling, is one of the voices we hear in the novel. She is willing to prosecute her parents to stop them using her blood and bone marrow. Jodi Picoult maintains the tension and makes a very readable story of the debate – right up to the astonishing twist at the end.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go deals with the same issue in a far more subtle way. The students at Hailsham School are evidently privileged. Kathy H, the narrator, only slowly comes to awareness that she has been cloned in order to provide replacement organs. The reader moves with her into her desolate young adulthood.

The novels are very different, yet both are thought-provoking.

Anne Enright’s The Gathering won last year’s Man Booker Prize then seemed to die an early death. Critics were somewhat negative about this gloomy Irish novel about the effects of a suicide. As it was in the Waterstones’ 3 for 2 pile, I decided to give it a try.

It is perfectly clear why this novel won the prize. The language is a delight and we reach right into the heart of an Irish family with twelve children. Veronica, the narrator, blames her father for his prolific procreation, and her mother for her fecklessness.

The real blame for the suicide of Veronica’s beloved brother, Liam, goes further back than that. We share Veronica’s fantasising and some of her recollections of a dark episode that happened at the house of her Gran, Ada. This has led to the dislocation that Veronica, too, suffers in her marriage and her relations with her family.

Ireland plays its role in the novel with attitudes towards religion, sex and alcohol being adjusted by the nine surviving children as they struggle with their heritage. We meet them through Veronica’s memories and finally at Liam’s wake. This is a dark, complex and surprising novel

Joanne Harris’s second novel, Sleep Pale Sister, was originally published before she made her name with Chocolat and all the other bestsellers that now place her in the pile nearest the door with every new novel she publishes.

In her foreword to the new edition, published by Black Swan in 2004, she writes, "It takes a certain kind of person to want to raise the dead." This opening statement is delightfully ambiguous, as that is exactly what the novel does. The novel that never made it to the bestseller list lives again and, in it, the dead are raised in a gothic horror setting.

Henry Chester, an ageing artist, is compulsively obsessed with the purity of his model. He marries Effie and reduces her to a drugged wraith of her former self. However, Effie becomes involved with a self-seeking lover, Mose, and the brothel owner, Fanny. Fanny is seeking revenge for the death of her own daughter, Marta, who was murdered ten years earlier on the night of Chester’s brothel visit.

Through all their voices, we hear the story of Henry Chester’s debauchery, of Mose’s scheming and of the mesmerising possession of Effie by the spirit of Marta. The pace never falters. This is a very different Harris from the one who wrote Gentlemen and Players, Coastliners and Five Quarters of the Orange – but equally enjoyable.

Zugzwang is a blockade position in chess in which any move is disadvantageous to the blockaded player. Of course, he has to move. It is an intriguing idea for a thriller and Ronan Bennett‘s Zugzwang lives up to its name.

In St Petersburg, in 1914, we accompany a psychoanalyst, Dr Otto Spethmann, through a chess game with the musician he considered to be his old friend. At the same time, we live, with him, through an increasingly complex involvement with Bolshevik intrigue and an attempt to assassinate the Tsar.

Among his significant patients are a brilliant chess master, a leading Bolshevik, and the daughter of the head of a secret police organisation. His own daughter has become involved with a terrorist who is brutally murdered.

The tension builds up and, as the pace quickens, we wonder who to trust – if anybody. This engrossing thriller is as complex as the game of chess that it recounts.

In Edward Hogan’s Blackmoor, a half-blind albino mother leaps from a window to her death after believing she has seen her child fall to his death from the same window. That doesn’t sound like much of a start. But add to it the setting of a Derbyshire mining village, the closure of the coal pits, a hot lawn, mysterious deaths, explosions, the earth erupting with firedamp and suspicion of witchcraft!

The dreadful past of Blackmoor is relived through Beth herself, through her husband and through the memories of miners – Edward Hogan has clearly been down the pit, the experience is gripping! With them, we live through the bitter Thatcher mine closures. The village is destroyed and the hostile and suspicious community rehoused in New Blackmoor.

Vincent, the little boy who fell (and survived) is bullied at school, and blamed by his outcast father for Beth’s death. A school project finally reveals to him the truth of his past.

The novel is a richly realistic evocation of very recent history. The key events are meted out with such fine pacing and delicate mastery that the reader is enthralled from start to finish. This is a terrific read!

Teenagers, it seems, are frequently not enthusiastic about reading.

A parent of teenagers commented to me this week that part of the problem lies in the density of the examination programmes we impose on them. They simply do not have time to give to a long story. Short Internet summaries often suffice. They write their examinations with no real pleasure in the texts they have not even read.

Perhaps the solution lies in a delightful, short, comic novel. Kiran Desai’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is just that.

A twelve-year old could love every minute of the action-packed story of Sampath Chawla, a bored post-office clerk who has failed at every step of his life and takes to the trees, only to be hailed as a guru. The monkeys join him as they find life easier eating the gifts of his acolytes than stealing peanuts outside the cinema.

The family is worried about the consequences – their image and the marriage-prospects of their children. Yet Kulfi, the enchanting, rather unusual mother, understands and supports her son.

How could Desai possibly draw this lovely fable to an end? And yet she does, in a totally satisfactory way.

The story works on many levels and is a rewarding dip into Indian culture with a rich note of satire. It is no surprise that it won the 1998 Betty Trask Prize.

Michael Charon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a ‘police procedural’ with a difference. In fact, a lot of differences.

In  gloomy Sitka, Alaska, the enclave set aside to shelter Jews after the failure of the Jewish state to survive in 1948, moves, after 60 years of existence to ‘Reversion’. it is to be re-integrated within the USA.

Landsman, the failing detective (and, of course, member of the Yiddish Policemen’s Union) with a failed marriage, rooms in a crummy downtown hotel. Thus he is on the spot when one of his down-and-out neighbours is apparently murdered.

Who is he? Why was he shot? What does the chess game set up on his table mean? When Landsman fails to investigate the shaft in the hotel basement, we know it’s a mistake. He and his partners go on making mistakes and worrying away at the case in what will be to many readers an unfamiliar but intriguing social structure: a transplanted Jewish society.

Almost nothing is what it seems, from the dentist’s models to the unusual cow Landsman spots in a field at a remote drug rehab centre.

The chessboard is, of course, eventually explained.

Charon is a Pulitzer Prize winner with his The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. This 2007 novel, which won the Nebula Award, lives up to his reputation.

A friend said he was reading Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and finding it spellbinding. Could a novel written a hundred and fifty years ago be so thrilling that it was impossible to put down? It was the most popular 19th century novel and it is easy to understand why.

It is a cliffhanger. The heroines cope with the threat of murder. There’s a fatal fire. One of them is incarcerated in an asylum. The villains are arch criminals. And yet the whole story fits together like a well made jigsaw puzzle. The pretty heiress, who is the victim of a cruel marriage because of her fortune, wins and keeps our sympathy.

The mystery of the woman in white who lurks on the fringes of the story with a secret she claims to have but is unwilling to divulge is the central idea round which the story develops.

The modern nature of the narrative is striking with a range of different and very disparate voices. Troubling, though, is the different social climate of the book – women, lower classes and the servants are disenfranchised and know their place. That is not the only facet of this exciting novel that disturbs the modern reader. How I wished they had the telephone or Internet in the novel. So many problems would have been obviated.

Lots of inexpensive paperback editions exist. Mine is a Vintage Classic with 628 pages. Of course, the more you pay, the bigger the print and the better the quality of the paper but, whichever you opt for, it is easy to understand why this story was chosen by Andrew Lloyd Webber as the basis of the West End musical.

Glamour claims that Body Surfing (2007) is one of Anita Shreve’s finest works yet. The Pilot’s Wife and Light on Snow certainly compete for that label and both would be difficult to emulate.

The Pilot’s Wife was particularly successful with its almost prophetic story of a pilot unwittingly carrying the bomb that destroyed his 747. It was made into a television film.

It is in the second part that Body Surfing becomes a real page-turner. Sydney, who is tutoring a troubled teenager, becomes the object of attraction for both the older sons of her well-to-do employers and the cause of conflict – so much so that Ben, the older one, will not even attend her wedding to Jeff. The wedding becomes a disaster.

From this point, the story is gripping and we feel we really know the gentle and wise father and the lovely daughter. Even the hostile mother is a careful and realistic portrait of a disturbed mother.

Anita Shreve again writes of the New Hampshire coast which she has so graphically evoked in the past. We are absorbed in the summers on the beach that Sydney experiences. This is a highly recommended summer read.