In London we share Lev’s struggle to survive and rise through the working ranks. London offers him work, friendship, sex and money and also some hostility and misery. This novel is an unusual glimpse into the difficult lives of migrant workers.

Back at home, Rudi’s struggles with his American Chevrolet add hilarity to the novel and there is grief when the native village is going to be submerged under a new reservoir. With great charm and sensitivity, Rose Tremain brings the story to a successful conclusion.

The Road Home won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 2008 and it is easy to see why. it is a novel of great humanity.

Roman’s marriage to a WHO leprosy expert has lasted twenty years but Isabel is almost permanently on the move and we are discreetly made aware of Roman’s unfulfilled longing for a son. Roman’s practice is threatened, too, by the arrival on the Geneva scene of Isabel’s one-time boyfriend, the ‘Botox King of New York’ who is planning to open a chain of beauty parlours that will eclipse Roman’s more professional clinic.

The patients we meet range from Shino, a low class Japanese gangster who is brilliantly tattooed from head to foot, to the delightful violinist Mira Sullivan. Mira was chosen from an orphanage by her adoptive mother because of her port-wine stain, the same reason her birth mother abandoned her, and is reluctant to lose the mark that brought her into a new life.

The novel follows the various threads, sometimes with delicious humour (as, for example, Shino’s tattoos are removed from his most private places) to great pathos as we get to know Mira. The threads are brilliantly woven together in a very moving finale. This novel is tremendous fun to read. There is an added pleasure in the familiar Genevan landscape that is evoked throughout the novel and the gentle humour at the expense of the Swiss – like for example an interview that takes place with a police officer after an unexplained murder.

It is available from Halban Publishers, London, and a reading guide is can be found at www.halbanpublishers.com

You might also like to know a little more about the basis (or lack of basis) to articles or advertisements on topics such as ‘3-day instant detox wonder’ and complementary or alternative medicine.

Some of these articles and claims do have a tenuous link to real scientific evidence, of course, but Goldacre’s book might surprise you about just how tenuous many of these links are, and just how exaggerated and imprecise most of these stories really are. His chapters on ‘Brain Gym’ and ‘Pill solves complex social problem’ deserve to be in your neighbourhood school science curriculum.

Not that Goldacre minds if you still disagree with his views even after you have read his book: as he says in his introduction, ‘you’ll probably be wrong with a lot more panache and flair than you could possibly manage right now’. Read it and judge for yourself.

Goldacre’s book is published by Fourth Estate, London 2008.

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.

The man and boy have been painfully making their way south through a dead world, in the hope of escaping a bleak, grey winter that has followed an apocalypse. Nothing is left growing in America. The sun is hidden by a blanket of grey. Even the snow is grey.

There are other humans on the road, but they pose a threat that becomes increasingly horrifying with each encounter. Starvation faces the father and child, as there is little left to scavenge in the destroyed world that they labour through as they drag their cart south.

Their hope is to find other ‘good’ humans, who have not resorted to violence and cannibalism. However, when they reach the coast, the same post-apocalyptic scene greets them.

A film version of the novel was released in 2009.

The subject is grim, yet this novel is mesmerising and rich with humanity. If you have time for only one novel, I would make it this one!

He tells of encounters with burglars, incidents with sheep and cattle and even with a lost mole who was anxious to cross a busy road on  the night of an open-air concert. His work involves, among other tasks, hunting for lost hikers on the moors and investigating the balls stolen from the local colonel’s gateway. Mike’s personal life is glanced at, and his developing relationships with local people and with Ann, who was to become his wife.

Most of all, this book is a celebration of North Yorkshire, the Pennines, the Wolds and the farms and villages that nestle in its Dales. Rich with local flavour, this is a delightful true-life account.

This edition is also more beautiful than ever. The cover alone is enough to tempt a potential buyer – a far cry from the plain powder-blue with white writing of our old 1953 second edition.

All the old favourites are there; Mallory’s renowned response to the question why he wanted to climb Everest, ‘Because it’s there’, Mark Twain’s, ‘The report of my death was an exaggeration’ and  Barack Obama has even made his appearance with, ‘The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice’.

Browsing the book becomes compulsive and you are left with Oscar Wilde’s famous thought, ‘I wish I had said that’, to which of course Whistler replied, You will, Oscar, you will.’

He had teamed up with a fourth year medical student from Belgium and was making the relatively easy descent of the Dent du Geant – that little spike that sticks up at the end of the Mont Blanc range, when he unaccountably slipped and fell to his death.

Arthur’s skill is legendary in the climbing world and his life has been remembered in Memories of Dolphin, compiled and edited by Tom Greenwood, published by the Green Woods Press in 2009.

The book is particularly welcome as any profit that may result from the sale of the book will be donated to the ‘Jack Bloor Fund’. This fund was created to help those who lack the means to pursue their dreams in the outdoors by allocating grants. www.jackbloor.co.uk The book comes with a free DVD that shows Arthur in Action on the climbs in the Lake District.

Sirius 3D Crosswords.

Many of us enjoy crosswords almost daily and we are familiar with unusually shaped ones. Sirius 3D Crosswords have come up with a new idea:  the three-dimensional crossword. These have not just across and down clues, but also a third kind, called AWAY, that intersect with the other two.

The crosswords are constructed on a calendar framework, with one clue for each day and a monthly grid. There is a monthly competition with a prize and a trophy for the annual winner. If you download the January competition today, you still have time to enter and participate in this year’s series.

Sufficient enticement for any cruciverbalist will be that Araucaria has composed the January 2010 puzzle which ‘notes the 350th anniversary of a birth on January 1st 1660′. Araucaria also wrote the site’s foreword.

If you follow the link, you will see that every penny of net profit from the sale of the calendars goes to help children in need. Downloads are free, but you are encouraged to send a contribution to a children’s charity, and asked to do so if you wish to participate in the competitions.

Sirius is a former teacher of Sciences, Mathematics and Cognitive Acceleration. He was forced to retire by loss of eyesight. He is registered partially sighted going on blind. He therefore declares an interest in nudging generous solvers to donate to RNIB and his other charities. As a former York student with severe learning and financial difficulties he seeks to encourage donations to the York Annual Fund which supports students in need.

Here, then, is a delightful way to enjoy your crossword habit and, at the same time, help children in need.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Two main stories are intertwined: the troubles of Millenium magazine when one of its editors loses a libel case against the corrupt Wennerstrom industrialist and the murky history of the Vanger family.

Mikael Blomkvist, the disgraced journalist, takes a year off from his editorial role and is hired by Henrik Vanger, head of the Vanger family interests, ostensibly to write the family history. His real function is to investigate the forty-year old mystery of the disappearance of Harriet Vanger in remote Hedestad Island. Henrik is convinced that one of the dysfunctional family was the murderer, as the Island was cut off, at the time from access to the mainland.

Lisbeth Salander, the punky disturbed research aide, is the real star of the thriller. She enters into an unconventional partnership with Blomkvist and her computer-hacking skills produce spectacular revelations.

Sometimes when a novel moves from place to place and character to character, the result can be distracting, but this time it works and we follow all the thrilling threads of the story until the hunters become the hunted in an exciting climax.

Stieg Larsson’s unexpected death in 2004 meant that he never learned of the success of his novel. Fortunately for readers, he had already written the two sequels, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.