The story of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s desperate rush to the South Pole and of the death of the polar team through cold and starvation on the return journey is well known. Clive Powell-Willians’ Cold Burial recounts an equally ill-calculated journey at the other end of the earth.

Edgar Christian was eighteen years old when he accompanied his cousin, Jack Hornby, and Hornby’s moody friend, Harold Adlard, on an ill-prepared venture into the frozen Canadian north.

They had learned nothing from Scott’s failure, and, like Scott failed to take the essential dogs. With wild idealism, they based their hope of survival on the chance of encountering the migrating caribou herds and living off their meat.

The gruesome story of their failure is told in the journal Edgar Christian, a document that survived their death and was found, with their three bodies, in a log cabin two years later. The document was kept in the archives of Dover College and came into the hands of Clive Powell-Williams who has used it to construct a beautifully written narrative illustrated with original photographs.

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!

When the second sentence of a book contains the words ‘laying in bed’, you can’t help but wonder what sort of writer and proof reader produced it. Mike Carter’s Uneasy Rider continues in the same casual language for 352 pages.

However, the writer changes. He starts his narrative the morning after the Observer newspaper Christmas party when he is newly divorced, smarting and consciously fending off a mid-life crisis, at the age of 42. He learns that, in his cups the night before, he has made the rash promise that he will take off on a large motorcycle. He has never ridden one in his life but the kudos his declaration is earning makes it difficult to back out.

We follow him through northern Europe and Scandinavia, to Finland and Latvia, Poland, Turkey, even Albania and we share his sexual adventures – or failures. Invariably, he is warned that the next country is dangerous or unwelcoming. And, sometimes, it is! He travels almost 20,000 miles through 27 countries and makes friends and enemies along the road. We get an inside view of the motorcycling fraternity.

At first, the protagonist seems brash, angry and not very fond of himself but, by the end of his narrative, he has found his equanimity and we learn to like him. This is not only a travel story; it is also a record of personal growth and victory over a man’s mid-life crisis.

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.

Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje

I loved Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, both the novel and the film and therefore approached this first Ondaatje novel for seven years with a high level of anticipation. At first, I was not disappointed.

The first strand of the novel  Divisadero concerns a farmer and his teenage daughters. Claire was adopted when Anna’s mother died in childbirth – Claire’s mother had also died. Coop is also adopted into the family and rivalry for his love develops between the two girls. Anna wins his love, but a dramatic incident breaks the family up forever.

We would love to follow this story to its conclusion but Ondaatje takes us into two different environments. We follow Coop into a gambling career where he is finally beaten senseless and suffers total amnesia. Claire comes to his rescue and is at last able to adopt the role of Anna. She takes him to visit the father who raised him. Sadly for the reader who enjoys conclusions, this strand of the story is never completed.

Instead, we find Anna, who is fleeing the past that has scarred her so. In a France that seems unnecessarily idyllic and literary for those of us who live in the real country, Anna is writing and researching the life of Lucien Segura.

We travel back into Segura’s past and also follow the thread of the roma people who share his life. The novel shifts in time and place until we feel there is no coherence in the narrative, except, pehaps in the themes that are common to the different threads.

This is not a novel for the reader who requires a beginning, a middle and an end. However, it is written in beautiful evocative language – a work of poetry.

Maps of My Life, Guy Browning

Guy Browning loves maps and each chapter of Maps of My life is prefaced by a map. Some of these are real maps of exotic places, with hilarious annotations. For example, Thor Heyerdahl figures in many of them, usually ‘unable to admit a navigational mistake here’.

Others are mind maps. We see a map of Guy Browning’s ego as it was systematically reduced by a ‘North Oxford Girl’. We see his mother’s mental map of the Isle of Wight which places it convincingly somewhere between New Zealand and the Indian Ocean.

The text is ‘laugh-out-loud-funny’ as we follow Guy Browning from his early childhood in Botley to young adulthood. He is almost invariably accompanied by his brother, the ‘Fatted Calf’ who succeeds in all his ventures, while Guy Browning is self-deprecating and frequently fails.

Guy’s father is an Oxford don who believes in subjecting his family to long marches. Gentle fun is poked at his inability to acquire a real car for the family or to give house-room to a television set once the boys have reached secondary school age. Each of these situations, and dozens more, is the source of a humorous anecdote, as the family moves around the world on sabbaticals or holiday trips.

This is a delightful comic read by a very amusing writer. Guy Browning also writes for the Guardian.

Margaret Forster’s Lady’s Maid is a book to choose when you have plenty of time to read and feel like plunging into a different world. Forster takes us back more than a century and a half, into the literary circle of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Lily Wilson, a girl from the north of England, simply called ‘Wilson’ in her maid role, becomes the personal maid of Elizabeth Barrett. With her, we witness the runaway marriage with Robert Browning and the itinerant life in Italy of the couple.

Most striking is the social gap between Miss Barrett and her maid. Wilson does manage to marry and have two children, but her work obliges her to send these to her sister to be reared. Finally, she is heartlessly replaced, despite her years of loyalty.

Forster skilfully evokes the strange, repressed life of the Barrett family of Wimpole Street and the bleak existence of a maid and the other members of the domestic staff in the nineteenth century. She has constructed a Victorian novel, using her imagination to fill out the facts that have survived and the documents that have been preserved.