an honourable man BY gillian slovo

It is 1884 and General ‘Chinese’ Gordon has been sent to Khartoum to assume control of the territory. The expedition is viewed from the perspective of Gordon, the boy attendant on him and a young military doctor; unfortunately, Slovo does not seem wholly engaged by any of them. The most vividly realised character is Mary, the doctor’s wife. Slovo’s restrained prose convincingly evokes both the escalation of Mary’s laudanum addiction and, climactically, of Gordon’s madness. This is a finely researched historical novel with flashes of startlingly visceral description but it cannot match the power of the author’s Orange Prize-shortlisted Ice Road.

various pets dead & Alive by Marina Lewycka

This irresistible comic romp has a broad scope, encompassing: the 2008 banking crisis; Fibonacci coding and the shortcomings of free love. This is not to mention Oolie-Anna, a 23 year old with Down’s Syndrome, named after Lenin’s wife and eager to leave home so she can watch Girls at Play DVDs. Some subtlety is sacrificed in the breathless narrative but Lewycka has that rare gift of being warm and satiric all at once. Typical of the main characters is Doro, who says of her time in a commune, that she would have done it all again, ‘But with fewer lentils’.

the roundabout man by clare morrall

As a boy, Quinn Smith was immortalised alongside his triplet sisters in children’s adventure stories written by their mother. In middle-age, years after his mother has died, Quinn is still trying to escape his fictionalised self. He lives fairly anonymously in a caravan called Dunromin, on a roundabout not far from his childhood home, surviving on leftovers from the local service station. This precarious existence seems at odds with the Blytonesque childhood described in his mother’s books. Inevitably, he realises that in order to move on, he must examine the accepted reality of his family more closely. Many readers will have lost patience with this odd novel before then

These reviews first appeared in the Mail on Sunday