When Dave Harding’s music magazine folds up, he becomes the agony uncle for Teen Scene. His own happy marriage has just coped with the distress of a miscarriage and he and Izzy have decided that they will choose to remain childless. Yet, secretly Dave longs to be a father.

Dave is soon flooded with adolescent outpourings that are treated very humorously and he begins to write ‘man’ pages for glossy women’s magazines. He is immediately regarded as an expert and we hear the marital disasters of all the couples’ friends.

However, one letter from a thirteen-year old girl, Nicola O’Connell, opens up a whole new world for Dave. She has recognised her father in the agony uncle. She was the fruit of a one-night stand in Corfu, thirteen years earlier.

Dave has the daughter he has so long desired but, clearly, this is not going to be easy for Izzy.

Mike Gayle’s male-confessional novel is amusing and fast moving. It is fascinating departure into a new literary area – it isn’t at all the sort of novel I would expect a man to write.

An attractive cover, the recommendation of a well-known writer, a previous Pulitzer Prize winner – these are all features that would tempt me to buy a paperback. Alison Lurie‘s The Last Resort has all three.

Key West, Florida, is unknown country to me but Alison Lurie portrays it in an unforgettable way. Her resort is peopled with the rich and the gay. Famous professor Wilkie Walker and his much younger wife, Jenny, arrive to spend a warmer winter than their historic New England town offers them.

The readers are party to the fact that Wilkie is convinced that he is dying of cancer, and plans to make this his last resort by swimming out to sea and not returning. Jenny is aware that things are amiss and she becomes involved in the gay community.

The intrigue unfolds against a background of lush vegetation with a rich cast of characters ranging from the desperate couple hit by AIDS to the naive young wife besotted with saving the manatee. Efficient women star in the story and fate intervenes time and time again, for example, pouring rain on Wilkie’s attempts to swim out to sea. The final acts in the drama are amusing and unexpected.

For me this was a fascinating dip into a foreign world.

Greg Mortenson’s father was involved in the creation of the International School at Moshi in Tanzania and he spent his formative years there. Years later he is in the Karakoram Mountains in Pakistan with the intention of placing his sister’s bracelet on the summit of K2, the world’s second-highest mountain in homage to her. Christa’s recent death has marked him deeply.

The K2 venture is a failure when Mortenson becomes weakened and exhausted after the rescue of another climber. He drifts into the impoverished and isolated village of Korphe where he is so affected by the kindness of the inhabitants that he makes a promise to provide them with a school. He has seen the village children, sitting in the open in icy conditions writing multiplication tables with sticks in the mud.

The title Three Cups of Tea refers to the words, “Here, we drink three cups of tea to do business: the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join our family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything – even die.”

The story recounts Greg’s struggles to acquire the funds to build that first school and to overcome the problems. No school can be built until a bridge is built over the Braldu river so that the materials can reach the area. The donation of a benefactor, fellow climber Jean Hoerni, creates the Central Asia Institute and, over the next decade Mortenson builds not just one but fifty-five schools so that even girls can be educated.

The story is an amazing testament to what one determined man can achieve.

In Anne Tyler’s Saint Maybe, seventeen-year-old Ian Bedloe is a member of an ordinary American family living on a rather seedy street in Baltimore. When he blurts out to his older brother that his wife’s new baby is probably not his, Danny kills himself. Lucy, his wife, takes an overdose of sleeping pills soon afterwards and the her three children are left orphans.

Danny’s sense of guilt is overpowering. A chance encounter in the local ‘storefront’ Church of the Second Chance leads him to his redemption. He drops out of college to take over the raising of the three children from his weary mother and helpless father. He becomes a carpenter and for almost twenty years attempts to atone for his teenage error. The baby of the family engineers the unexpected happy ending.

For me, this novel was like straying into a different world: a middle-American world with the domestic details of an ordinary family, Bible camps, the powerful influence of a neighborhood church and the cleaving together of ordinary people in a time of crisis . There is sincerity and humanity on every page.

This hilarious account takes us back over fifty years to the cold-war period when the UK was still requiring all eighteen-year-olds to do two years of national service. Brasso, Blanco and Bull is Tony Thorne (recruit no 23339788)’s detailed factual account of how it was for a boy straight from school to be licked into shape (or ‘gripped’ in the language of the book) by his semi-literate L/Corporal Prudence.

We accompany him through his disastrous medical to the training camp and through two years of slow progress through the ranks towards a hilarious court-martial where he is the witness. (His colleague, in a drunken stupor, had demolished the cookhouse!)

There is a ‘laugh-out-loud’ moment on almost every page, yet the entire two-year experience is portrayed as a crude, senseless and brutal way to create a standing army. The most moving message that emerges from the text is the lasting friendships that were created during the national service experience.

Many Americans are very well-informed about their struggle for independence from Great Britain. On the eastern fringes of the Atlantic, there is of course some understanding of the consequences of the Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1776: the final result, at least, is clear! However, the desperate struggles of George Washington to maintain an organised armed resistance in the face of apparently overwhelming forces are less well known. The early winter of 1776 saw American efforts to secure independence close to failure.

The night crossing by Washington’s soldiers of the partly frozen Delaware River to attack the British forces at Trenton on 26 December 1776 (almost all were Hessian mercenaries, in fact) could be seen as a last desperate gamble for survival. The entire campaign up to that time could also be seen as a fine display of British irresolution and incompetence. Indeed, why was it necessary to fight at all, rather than try to negotiate a settlement?

Whichever view you would like to see evidence for or against, David Hackett Fischer will not disappoint. As this was a campaign involving many literate and fiercely independent-minded men (to Washington’s occasional distress when his troops or officers seemed disinclined to  obey his orders), there is a rich surviving archive of viewpoints and opinions from those who took part on both sides, and these are put to good use by the author to increase the reader’s understanding of those few vital days.

Washington’s Crossing was published by Oxford University Press in 2004 and won the Pulitzer History Prize.

The Independent ‘Books of the Year’ calls this ‘The most enjoyable history book I’ve read all year’. Indeed Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England’ is enjoyable. It is shocking and disturbing too. I have been dipping into it for weeks and, each time, find a new piece of factual information that troubles me, or an amusing or worrying image.

Women are dealt with early on. They are ‘described by their marital condition. Thus the medieval mind tends to categorise women as follows: maidens, wives, nuns and widows’. We are told how social status prescribed the clothing one was allowed to wear. We learn about diet, travel – ‘The cabins stink of urine, faeces and vomit, not to mention the smell of rat urine’.

This scholarly text is an antidote for anyone with a passion for romantic historical novels. Detailed information about medicine, hygiene, the law, the population that shrank from somewhere around 5 million at the start of the fourteenth century to about half that at the end of the century, dispels many of our illusions.

The illustrations are familiar ones but there are amusing original ones. Demonstrating the ignorance of the world of many medieval people, Mortimer includes a fifteenth century painting of a gift of white elephants to Alexander the Great- sheer magic.

These were the ancestors of many of us. I cannot recommend the delightful little text highly enough.

I tend to avoid a novel that is over 600 pages long but when Kate Atkinson calls it ‘My favourite book of the year’ and it claims to be ‘The New York Times Bestseller’, it is difficult to resist, especially when my well-read bookseller had just finished it and enjoyed it.

American Wife is about Alice Blackwell and her husband Charlie but it is quite clearly linked to the life and career of Laura Bush and her husband, the past President of the United States. We follow Alice from her ‘middle American’ origins, via an accident that she caused, in which her dear friend died, via an abortion and into a marriage into the wealthy Blackwell family.

An endearing and powerfully portrayed figure in the novel is Alice’s wonderful grandmother whose Lesbian preferences are dealt with in a lively way. She gives sound advice throughout the novel, until her death at a ripe old age.

Alice’s husband is immature and inadequate. A religious conversion, linked with the end of his excessive drinking, leads to his rise to prominence and the final section of the novel deals with Alice’s role as America’s first lady.

Attempted blackmail over her teenage abortion highlights the ‘choice’ issue and Curtis Sittenfeld makes her views very clear. The Times called this a ‘sweeping saga’ and, indeed, it is that!

Of course, we all know Philip Pullman through the His Dark Materials trilogy which came third in the BBC’s 2003 ‘Big Read‘ competition to find the nation’s favourite book. It was intriguing to find that he has also written The Sally Lockhart Quartet.

The Ruby in the Smoke is the first of the series. Set in 1872, in Victorian London, it introduces us to Sally, whose father has recently drowned at sea. A mysterious anonymous letter that she receives causes a man to die of fear at her feet.

Sally is pursued by evil figures and vague opium induced memories of time with her father in India. Sally leaves the guardianship of  hostile Mrs Rees. She takes her affairs into her own hands and confronts the frightening and dangerous Mrs Holland. Enemies surround her and the key to the mystery seems to be the blood-soaked ruby.

The drama reaches its peak in a violent denouement, but little Adelaide, whom we have grown to love, has disappeared. Threads are left untied and we are prompted to read the next episode of this thrilling drama, The Shadow in the North.

The BBC has made a TV drama of The Ruby in the Smoke, starring Billie Piper.

There seems to be a spate of historical works and novels about the Tudor period of English history on the shelves just now. It isn’t difficult to see why. This is history that is shared by most of the English-speaking world – and what history! One man, brutally beheading two of his wives and heartlessly divorcing the ugly one and the one who couldn’t produce a son!

Philippa Gregory’s novel recreates the atmosphere of the Tudor court, seen through the eyes of Anne Boleyn‘s younger sister, Mary who was Henry VIII’s mistress in her early teen years, and bore him two children, including a son who later became one of Queen Elizabeth’s favoured courtiers.

Any feminist will be shocked at the way these Boleyn girls are pawns in the hands of the men of the powerful Howard family and raised to power or discarded according to the whims of the pampered King who is portrayed as an unendearing figure.

Anne Boleyn is shown to be the scheming girl that history has painted yet, even though we all know her fate, it shocks us when, after 500 pages of history recreated, she reaches the scaffold. The rivalry between the Boleyn girls – the thread that holds this novel together – is finally at an end and we follow Mary into an unexpected conclusion.

This is very readable historical fiction.