This is my review of American Rust by Philipp Meyer.

This impressive American "debut" novel must have flowered from the diverse influences of growing up with book-loving bohemian parents in a tough working-class suburb, dropping out of school to gain raw experiences but somehow getting to college, avidly reading Joyce, Faulkner and Woolf, and carrying first-hand research to the extent of riding freight trains and interviewing men on trial for murder.

Set against the backdrop of the crumbling American dream, as foreign competition knocks the heart out of once thriving steel-making towns, Meyer explores the drama of an unlikely friendship: on one hand, puny and eccentric but brilliant Isaac English, haunted by his mother's suicide and burdened by the task of caring for his cranky invalid father, on the other athletic but indolent Poe who has thrown away the chance to train as a football champion. Both share a confused desire to escape the depressed backwater of Buell, mixed with inertia and a love of the area's natural beauty. When one commits a serious crime, acting on impulse to save the life of the other, who will be blamed and with what outcomes?

After a dramatic opening, the story slips into a slow-paced cycle round the inner thoughts of six linked characters: Isaac, his favoured sister Lee who has managed to escape to Yale and a wealthy marriage, his crippled father Henry, Poe, his long-suffering mother Grace and Harris, the local police chief who fancies her, himself a survivor of the Vietnam war. Sometimes, Isaac's streams of consciousness become too obscure and tedious, the boozy sex between Grace and Harris a little repetitive, the minor scenes, as when Lee or Harris is socialising, too corny or banal. The strongest charge is that the denouement seems a little rushed and underdeveloped compared with the rest, although I liked the upbeat but open ending. Yet overall, this is gripping, with sufficient tension and unresolved drama to keep you reading in the belief that Meyer is ruthless enough to opt for tragedy, although it will never be unrelieved.

Less ambitious and "epic" than its successor "The Son", for me, "American Rust" is a technically better novel since the structure is tighter and the characters are more fully developed and therefore you care about their fate, with the possible exception of Lee who is the only one who might be regarded as successful, which perhaps is perhaps intentional on Meyer's part.

A good choice for a reading group as there is so much to discuss, it bridges the blurred gap between literary and popular fiction.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes.

This quirky biography of Flaubert wrapped up in an eccentric almost plot-free novel from the viewpoint of Geoffrey Braithwaite, an uptight retired English doctor obsessed with the French author is unusual, often amusing and, as some reviewers have commented, at times too clever by half.

If I had not read in French "Madame Bovary" and "Un Coeur Simple", I would have found it much harder to appreciate this book, which further restricts an appeal already limited by its status as a "literary novel".

I have learned a good deal about Flaubert, which I wish I had known when studying him for A Level decades ago, only no doubt his penchant for whores, young foreign boys and smutty jokes would have been considered unsuitable by my teacher. I can see that he was an original and truly independent thinker, probably still don't quite grasp the contribution he made to the modern novel, but do not find him very likeable as a person. He comes across as immature and opinionated at times, perhaps because his epilepsy isolated him, although he seemed to think he needed to be set apart, an observer looking on, to be able to write.

With his quicksilver intellect, Julian Barnes lets slip in passing a host of fascinating details and anecdotes. Flaubert wished he could afford to burn every copy of the very successful but deemed scandalous Madame Bovary. Did he mean it? Flaubert was bothered by his tendency to use metaphors. Was the famous parrot one of these and, if so, was it meant to be a symbol of the writer's voice, his obsession with "the Word"? Sartre, in what I find a surprisingly intense desire to attack Flaubert, rebuked him for, as Barnes cleverly puts it, being the "parrot/writer" who "feebly accepts language as something received, imitative and inert".

Barnes's mouthpiece Braithwaite lambasts the critic who claimed that Flaubert was so careless about the outward appearance of his characters that he gave Emmma Bovary three different eye colours: deep black, brown and blue. Instead, he shows how Flaubert subtly described her eyes in different lights and situations. Barnes uses some entertaining devices, such as three different versions of the chronology of Flaubert's life, the first very positive, the second negative, the third a series of striking quotations from different years of his life – or I think it is, but it's hard to know when Barnes is quoting and when he is making things up, which the novel format permits him to do.

I particularly liked the chapter written from the viewpoint of Flaubert's longsuffering mistress Louise Colet, who seemed to want to be his wife rather than his Muse and confidante, although she must have had "better offers". In the excellent chapter, "Pure Story", the narrator Geoffrey Braithwaite explores with great poignancy his relationship with his wife, managing in the process to draw comparisons with Madame Bovary.

Although I found some of the middle chapters tedious and rambling to little purpose, the book contains so many sharp insights it deserves to be kept and read more than once.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of Honour by Elif Shafak.

Elif Shafak is a born storyteller, who knows how to hook the reader in a first chapter which ends, "He is my brother. He, a murderer". Although appearing to give so much away early on must detract from some of the dramatic power of later events – you could also argue this gives you the thrill of anticipation – a few red herrings and twists are left to the end.

I do not mind that the story of Turkish Adem Toprak, damaged sins-of-the-father style, and his beautiful Kurdish wife, Pemba Kader, or "Pink Destiny", flits between multiple viewpoints over five decades, but accept that this may confuse some readers. The author often seems to digress, caught up in her own fertile imagination, but most characters and incidents have some bearing on the complex plot which proves to have been carefully thought through. For instance, the forbidden lover Elias, a man of great tolerance, moderation and adaptability, symbolises the ability to survive in any culture since he does not belong to a particular one.

The scenes in Kurdish villages near the Euphrates are too unfamiliar for me to assess their authenticity, but I was convinced by the portrayal of a community held together by superstition and tradition which also have the power to destroy those who do not conform. The folktale aspect which Shafak likes to employ, a world of ghosts, spells, binding customs, unbending beliefs and unlikely coincidences is easier to accept in rural Turkey.

The culture shock of the Toprak family's move to London is well drawn, although too many of the sub-plots struck me as unrealistic with weakly developed or stereotyped characters: Roxana in the Chinese gambling den, Iskender's English girlfriend Katie, Yunus's escapades with the squatters – it seems implausible he is only seven, but I suppose at a more realistic ten plus he might be too old to share a room with his sister Esma.

With fewer characters and incidents to distract the reader, there might have been the space to develop the core of the book: the nature of honour in different societies and its implications, particularly for women in intensely male-dominated communities.

The author does not shrink from scenes of great cruelty, nor from the tragedy of misunderstandings and lack of communication, yet the story is saved from harrowing bleakness by her humour and warmth – which occasionally becomes a little too cloying for my taste. The soft centre irked me, as this potentially powerful book winds to a somewhat subdued anticlimax. Some passages are so insightful – for instance, the casual way British people say, "It's a shame" – that I wished the author had spent a little time editing weaker patches – continuity errors, cringe-making dialogue, etcetera – to make this a great piece of literature (like "Life and Fate" or "A Fine Balance") as well as a "good read".

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan.

This is oddly reminiscent of "Under Milkwood", perhaps because it uses the poetical yet often also earthy voices of a variety of characters to capture the spirit of a rural community. A short intense and condensed novel, with all the flesh of scene-setting and background information stripped away, it comprises twenty-one internal monologues which combine to show how the collapse of the building boom in Ireland wreaked havoc on the already sad and dysfunctional lives of many ordinary people.

Pain is piled on by the shovel-load, and it would all be unbearably bleak but for the author's ear for the poetry and droll wit of the Irish way with words. There is continuous entertainment in not only the language but the links between the various characters, their different readings of situations, and the poignant plot which gradually emerges around the ever-present figure of the charismatic but troubled Bobby Mahon. Donal Ryan is prepared to take risks: one "voice" is a ghost in limbo, and I was unsure for a while if another was not a "split personality".

If there are flaws in this original book, one is that some of the "losers" portrayed are a little too similar and so seem superfluous, another that many characters share the same streak of repressed violence plus a fundamentally introspective, articulate, self-aware voice that is probably too much that of the author. At times, I felt I was being told too explicitly what to think about a particular person, as in the case of Bobby's embittered father Frank, rather than left to deduce it for myself. The style is less convincing when Ryan abandons his Irish patter, as for patriarch Josie Burke's educated liberal lesbian daughter Mags.

Although my interest flagged a little in the middle of a book which seemed to have "made its point" about the state of Ireland quite quickly, what proves to be a carefully constructed tale twists to an effective ending.

Overall, it is an impressive first novel, which repays a second reading.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of Laidlaw (Laidlaw Trilogy Book 1) by William McIlvanney.

Curiosity over the recent revival of interest in a crime writer said to have inspired Ian Rankin, led me to read the first in his trilogy on DI Laidlaw. Prickly, sardonic, subversive, a maverick with a rocky marriage and a boss who only tolerates him because he gets results – all this sounds like a stereotype of fictional detectives we have come to know, but Laidlaw was one of the first, appearing in print back in 1977.

This investigation of the brutal murder of a young woman is less of a whodunnit- we are catapulted into the murderer's confused psyche in Chapter 1, and more of a whydunnit, exploring the personalities of the main characters against the background of gritty gangland Glasgow. The images are often striking and original: "A Glasgow sun was out, dully luminous, an eye with a cataract", Laidlaw is described as "looking terrible with a right eye like a roadmap", or a man watches "a blackbird balance its beak like a nugget of gold". The language is often quite poetical and repays reading slowly, but the pressure is on to find out what happens next.

Some scenes read almost like a play, as when Laidlaw's young sidekick Harkness asks how they can begin to relate to the murderer. Laidlaw's unusual view is that, "This murder is a very human message. But it's in code. We have to try and crack the code. But what you are looking for is a part of us. You don't know that, you can't begin."

When we first meet Laidlaw, he is "feeling a bleakness that wasn't unfamiliar to him….doing a penance for being him." Since this negativity, combined with great intensity, often oppress both Harkness (driven to ask "who wants to be batman to a mobile disaster area") and Laidlaw's long-suffering wife Ena ( she's looking after the three kids he claims to love whilst he is out philandering), you may wonder how the author expects his readers to put up with his creation. Yet, the gloom is offset by wry humour and tight plotting. Although I sometimes found the style of writing contrived (and could not get some sentences even after several readings), this novel stays in one's mind longer than the usual monosodium glutamate thriller, and leaves you with the sense that it is both gripping and worth reading.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan.

When unemployed computer geek Clay Jannon takes on the night shift at Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore, he soon suspects it is a cover for some other activity, and so the mystery begins. This is a quirky blend of imaginative tecky inventions, such as a Google project to develop a form of renewable energy that runs on hubris (it is not always so easy for a non-tecky reader to know where to draw the line as to what is feasible), and nostalgic harking back to a Lord of the Rings fantasy world. The bookshop is archaic, with shelves ascending into what reminds Clay of the shade cast by dense trees in some magical forest.

Apart from a highly creative imagination, Robin Sloan writes with continual quick-fire touches of humour. Still unsure as to whether I could cope with what I suspected was intended for a 20-something male computer geek readership, I was won over early on by the image of the aged Penumbra tottering to the solid shop-front desk, "you could probably defend it for days in the event of a siege from the shelves".

Despite my admiration for all this, I fear that it could not sustain my interest. The main characters are two-dimensional, the explanations often tedious, the writing-style too often banal, the basic mystery ludicrous, the denouement which I cannot reveal a bit of a corny cop-out. I only read to the end for the sake of a book group meeting which included a skype chat with the author- a charming and humorous man with a very positive attitude to life.

I could have done with more of the occasional original insights such as that, "we imagine things based on what we already know and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century."

So, I am torn over my assessment of a work that is original and funny in parts, yet also has a juvenile quality, an implausible non-mystery at its heart (try explaining it to someone!) and some dull passages to wade through.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars