A choice for one of my book clubs, this 2008 novel opens with sixteen-year-old Florens telling us not to be afraid. As she goes on to relate her story, we come to know the other people on the plantation where she is a slave: Jacob Vaark, the self-made man who has inherited the land in Virginia; his wife Rebekka, who came from London in response to Jacob’s ad for a capable wife; the Native American slave Lina, whose tribe was wiped out by smallpox; the silent slave Sorrow, who lived on a ship for her first ten years, never setting foot on the ground; and two indentured servants, who have been hired from their owner by Jacob. The time is the 1680s and1690s, a period when slavery is just beginning to be enshrined in law and custom.

Throughout the book, using methods both subtle and apparent, Morrison examines how slavery—how dominion over another person—affects both the owned and the owners. Jacob hates the idea of having slaves and only took on the three women because he believed he was rescuing them from a worse situation. Yet he invests in sugar plantations in Barbados—worked of course by slaves unseen by him—and his reluctance to confront his own reality feeds the pride that works against his generous impulses. Rebekka, at first afraid of these others who she has been taught to believe are savages, not quite human, begins to accept and trust them as the women work the farm together. However, Rebekka, like Jacob, suffers losses that seem unbearable to her, losses that Lina attributes to the bad luck brought by Sorrow being in their midst.

In grappling with the condition of slavery, the story of the slaves brought from Africa is just a starting point for Morrison. The indentured servants are slaves in all but name, their period of servitude extended for real or false infractions. The burden a mother must bear in making choices for her child—something I have thought about often—reveals another aspect of the cost of having power over another person. In an even broader sense, all of the women in the story are under the dominion of a man, even Rebekka who was essentially sold into the marriage by her father. And the women do not have the option of someday finishing their indenture or becoming a freedman like the blacksmith who comes to help with the mansion that Jacob is building. A woman without the protection of a man faces dangers from all sides.

These are all motherless children, men and women alike. Orphaned, lost, given away, all of these characters struggle with their sense of abandonment as they try to become their own selves within the constraints that cage them. The structure of the book reinforces the story. Within Florens’s overall narrative arc are embedded a series of extended flashbacks in which we learn the background of each of the characters in turn. Within these encapsulated stories each character is alone, reinforcing the isolation each experiences.

The transitions in and out of these flashbacks are seamless and something I will be studying for a long time. Some members of my book club thought the language, with its biblical cadences, affected. One suggested that the self-consciously literary language distanced the characters and made it hard to care about them. I loved the language. I loved the attention paid to each description, each sentence, even in little ways, such as when Jacob at the end of a long ride gazes at the ocean and sees the moon dappling the waves; the association of the word “dapple” (at least in my mind) with the horse he’s riding pulls the scene together in an unexpected and subtle way. And the poetry of the way Florens describes the blacksmith made me gasp. Another member of my book club felt that reading this book was like falling into a dream. I felt that way too.

After a brief interview with his sister-in-law, the housekeeper starts a new assignment, working for a professor whom she has not met but who has had problems retaining housekeepers in the past. When she arrives for her first day, he immediately asks her what her shoe size is. Thus begins this quirky and—reluctant as I am to use the word—charming story.

Since a car accident seventeen years previously, the professor can only retain his short term memory for eighty minutes, although all of his memories prior to the accident are intact. Thus, he can perform complicated math operations in his head, but must be reintroduced to the housekeeper every eighty minutes, A delicate relationship between them begins to grow, in the smallest of increments.

The details of the story reflect the thought Ogawa has given to what it might mean to live constantly in the present. The professor’s clothing is decorated with little notes held on by binder clips, some new while others are crumpled and the clips rusty. The housekeeper introduces herself by pointing to the note about her, and one of the chores she takes on is while he is sleeping to renew the notes that have gotten too tattered.

The other thing that Ogawa does beautifully is to integrate the math into the story, so that it does not interrupt the flow. The professor understands the world through numbers, and finds associations between a number and the larger universe: perhaps the number in question happens to be the sum of all prime numbers between one and one hundred million or the number of home runs in Babe Ruth’s record. He falls back on equations when he finds people too difficult to understand. Intrigued by the mathematical terms the professor explains to her, the housekeeper begins to explore them on her own time, looking things up in the library, puzzling them out with pencil and paper. Thus, we are introduced to the math with her.

When the professor finds that she has a ten-year-old son who is home alone after school while she works, he insists that the boy come here where his mother is, even though it is against the agency’s rules. The two become friends. This part really touched me, that he showed the same affection for the boy every time they were reintroduced. It reminded me of Mimi, my friend when I was a child though she was elderly even then. Later, when I was grown and she was over 100 and not recognising anyone around her, I used to stay with her one night a week, feeding her and putting her to bed while her caregivers (her granddaughter and grandson-in-law) had a night out. Mimi had always been sweet to me and to everyone, gentle and patient and kind, but I admit I was surprised that she retained her sweetness even into dementia, when every moment was a new one for her, with no remembered social conventions to restrain her.

As a child, I never quite trusted adults, believing that the face they showed me was probably not their true face. But Mimi was the real deal. As is the professor. This book made me think about how we create relationships, how we can bear to trust each other, and how we stubbornly continue to do so against all obstacles and in spite of all common sense.

Some years ago when she lived in L.A., my sister and her friends used to compete as to who could spot the most celebrities. Perhaps everyone in L.A. does this. It didn’t matter which celebrity it was; elderly Jack Lemmon counted as much as the then-young and glamorous Warren Beatty.

I first met a celebrity when I was still a shy and skinny kid. My parents were considering buying land on Piney Island, which is located next to Chincoteague and Assateague Islands. While looking around, we visited the owner of Misty, the pony made famous by Marguerite Henry’s book, first published in 1947. I don’t remember how my parents connected with him; friend of a friend probably. What I do remember is that during the visit, my siblings and I got to ride Misty herself.

To be sure, it was just a brief walk around a paddock, Misty being pretty geriatric at that point, but still thrilling for this horse-mad girl. I’d only ridden briefly, during a couple of sessions at Happy Hollow Camp. The horse I rode there was named Ironic, a word I at the time thought meant iron-like and therefore appropriate for this huge, strong brown beast with an imperturbable air. Even now, when I know the correct definition, hearing the word ironic always brings back a brief memory of horse-smell and meadow grass, and my own secret meaning.

Regular lessons were out of the question—too expensive—so I compensated by creating a whole stableful of imaginary horses, each with an elaborate history. I exercised them regularly, cantering up and down the neighborhood alleys, but have to confess that I didn’t pretend to muck out their stalls, partly because I’d never actually done that part of caring for a horse and partly because, well, I wasn’t stupid. Imaginary horses have their drawbacks but at least they don’t poop.

At one point, there was a rumor going around the neighborhood that a family on the other side of Roland Avenue was stabling a horse in their garage. We didn’t have a garage, but I pleaded with my parents to let me turn the dusty place in back of our house, under the sunporch extension, into a stable. It seemed an obvious place: with the steep hill beyond, no one on the street below would be able to see that we had a horse there (one horse? perhaps several!) and the neighbors on either side were sufficiently elderly or far away that they wouldn’t notice our violation of city ordinances.

Of course it never happened. And it’s only now that I’ve gotten around to indulging that childhood passion by taking riding lessons. I will never own a horse, but welcome my weekly visits to the farm. I rationalise my distaste for imposing my will on an animal by recognising that the horses have a job to do, even if it’s only to teach me this skill, just as the cat’s job is to dispose of mice and crickets and the dog’s job (when we had one) was to protect the house. Just as, for that matter, my job is to sit at a desk for a certain number of hours each week whether I feel like it or not. And, since the horse can’t talk to me, riding has made me more conscious of—and I hope more adept at—reading body language.

Someone on one of my maillists mentioned this week, after hearing of Dick Francis’s death, that it was reading his mysteries set in the world of horse racing that inspired her to take up riding lessons in her mid-thirties. For me, it was this book that made me want to ride, back when I was a girl. What a treasure for any girl with no prospect of ever earning enough money for lessons much less a horse of her own, this story of two children with a dream of owning a pony, a story that actually happened! Paul and Maureen Beebe want not just any pony but the legendary Phantom, a mare who has never been captured in any of the annual pony roundups on Assateague. Paul participates in the roundup for the first time and comes across Phantom and her foal, whom he immediately names Misty.

It’s always a little scary to reread beloved books from childhood, but this one holds up well. The details of life on Chincoteague, which I didn’t notice as a child, delighted me: frying platters of oysters dredged in cracker meal, using a mixture of goose grease and onion syrup to prevent a cold, “treading” for clams by feeling for them with your toes and lifting them out on your foot. I confess I got excited all over again, reading about Pony Penning Day, when they round up wild ponies on Assateague, swim them across the bay to Chincoteague, and herd them down the main street to the pens. The event is a town celebration, and people come from all over to enjoy the feast, watch the annual race of local horses, and buy the colts who are being thinned from the herd. Then the remaining horses are allowed to swim back to Assateague and resume their independent lives.

I haven’t been to Assateague in years. I almost don’t want to know if the ponies are still there or if the annual roundup still happens. My vicarious participation in Paul and Maureen’s story is one of my most beloved memories of childhood, along with that meeting with my first (and still my favorite) celebrity. Maybe there’s still a part of me that believes the fantasy of buying my own pony at one of the Assateague roundups will one day come true.

In Soseki's early works, he made sure that they conveyed some kind of lesson, conforming to the then-common notion that fiction should have an educational purpose. The title of this work makes it clear that there will be no definitive ending hammering a moral home.

Daisuke, a 30-year-old Tokyo bachelor, seems from the outside to have a most pleasant and undemanding life. Having received an excellent education, he is supported by his father and brother in his own home where he is free to study his books, visit his sister-in-law, and indulge his aesthetic tastes. However, Daisuke is plagued by anxiety, often feeling his chest to make sure his heart is still beating. His family believes he is intended for great things someday, but he continues to drift from day to day, full of romantic notions but afraid to take a definitive step in any one direction lest he have to deal with the consequences. He is cared for by his elderly housekeeper and his houseboy, Kadono, whom he teased into taking the job, criticising Kadono for being lazy because he didn't work, never noticing his own hypocrisy. With his intellectual and aesthetic talents, he feels superior to his father and brother, who are both successful businessmen.

This life is disrupted when Hiraoka, an old school-friend, and his wife Michiyo move back to Tokyo. For the last three years, Hiraoka has been working in the provincial office of a bank but got caught up in a scandal when one of the men working for him embezzled funds. As a result, Hiraoka resigned and is now asking Daisuke for help in finding a new job and a place to live. Back in the days when they were close, Daisuke actually helped along Hiraoka and Michiyo's marriage, but now he is dismayed to see how distant they are from each other and Michiyo's ill health. He examines his memories of how close he was to Michiyo before the marriage, before his then-best friend asked for his help in gaining her hand and he felt honour-bound to comply.

First published in 1909, four years after the end of the Russo-Japanese war, And Then reflects Soseki's sense of being in the cusp of two cultures. Daisuke's father is part of the culture of pre-Restoration Japan, with its authoritarian precepts based on the Samurai code, while Daisuke's other friend Seigo, a writer, looks ahead to the new culture, with its more naturalistic morality that values individuality over conformity. Daisuke is disillusioned by the heroes of his father's generation, but has not taken the next step of envisioning what a new hero might look like. Daisuke's detachment reflects Soseki's own detachment in writing his earlier novels, where he forced the story to a conclusion that would convey the desired lesson instead of, as here, allowing the story to follow naturally from the characters themselves.

In Chaos and Order by Angela Yiu, I found the interesting notion that And Then is actually based on a traditional form of Japanese drama. In addition to the history plays (jidaimono) of the puppet theater (joruri) and kabuki that feature Samurai warriors, there were love-suicide plays (shinjumono), usually featuring commoners, sometimes a prostitute, who are caught up in a love affair that is in some way a transgression, some kind of forbidden love, where their suffering can only find relief in death. Romeo and Juliet of course comes to mind as a Western equivalent.

I find this very interesting, this idea of using a traditional form but playing with it and the reader's expectations. As Daisuke begins to admit his love for Michiyo, now forbidden because she is married, he invites her over for tea and in preparation fills the room with lilies. This delicate scene took me by surprise, as perhaps it took the readers of Soseki's day by surprise, by not following the script I expected. Being surprised is a good thing, and I very much liked this book, with its (to me) unexpected turns and lovely descriptive passages.

My friend Jill recently completed an art project where she took a six-foot-tall branch, curved like an “S”, and hung from it at intervals paintings of people who had been important in her life. The hangers are separated by clear plastic spacers, making the stick look even more like a spinal column. She plans to be videotaped walking with this staff down the streets of her hometown, signifying the way we carry our past with us wherever we go, while also being supported by that past.

Gilead is a book weighted by the past. The year is 1956, and John Ames is a 76-year-old preacher in the small, midwestern town of Gilead. Nearing the end of his life and concerned at not being around to support his young wife and raise his seven-year-old son, he writes a series of letters to the boy. These letters are what make up the book. Since he assumes that the boy will not read them until he is grown, Ames includes descriptions of the boy's daily activities and of the townspeople, such as Boughton, Ames’s best friend, and Boughton’s son Jack, who is Ames’s godson and a bit of a ne’er-do-well.

In attempting to pass on life lessons to the boy, Ames talks about his own father and grandfather, both preachers, both also named John Ames, but with very different views. Ames’s grandfather preached his flock into the Civil War, conducting services with a gun in his hand, declaring that there could be no peace while people were enslaved. Ames’s father was vehemently opposed to all war and many of the anecdotes have to do with the testy relationship between the two. The relationship between fathers (of all kinds) and sons is the backbone of this book.

As befitting a preacher, the events Ames recounts are given a religious framework. A scene where his father breaks a biscuit and gives him half is considered communion. His father taking him to Kansas to find his grandfather’s grave in the middle of a great drought is compared to Abraham leading Isaac up the hill.

All the preaching left me cold, making the book seem like one long rambling sermon. I have to confess I was pretty bored the first time through. I found myself waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen. There were some promising signs—a few asides that hinted at the possibility that some of the relationships might be more tangled than they appeared—but they came to nothing. Still I was left with the sense that I had not heard the whole story, a not-uncommon problem with first-person narratives, as I’ve mentioned before. We never hear from the other characters, only occasionally a scrap of dialogue quoted by the narrator.

A story should have dramatic ups and downs, we’re told. Here, however, the hills and valleys are as flat as a Midwestern cornfield, forcing the reader to be even more aware of each gentle slope. I liked the book better the second time through. I knew what to expect and could slide over the Bible stories. I found I liked the narrator, especially his appreciation of the small things of this life: going into his old church in the pre-dawn silence, watching his son blow soap bubbles. He’s trying to make sense of his life, circling back to certain incidents over and over. I found this part very true, being haunted by certain incidents, not necessarily the ones we think at the time will be important. Ames says, “. . . you never do know the actual nature, even of your own experience, or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature.”

Robinson’s first book, Housekeeping, is one of the best books I’ve ever read, so I wasn’t surprised that the language here is lovely. In describing the way his son looked at him when the boy thought he was laughing at him, Ames says “It’s a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I’m always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I’ve suffered one of those looks.” Like the old church which carries its history in every broken step and ancient bullet hole, the language shimmers with Biblical references, yet it is plain and powerful in its simplicity. Ames’s life too has been a simple life, but one filled with grace. A good man, at least by his own account, Ames wants to hand on to his son what his father gave to him. As he says, “There are many ways to lead a good life.”

First published in 1913, Trent’s Last Case dates from the earliest days of detective fiction, at the beginning of the Golden Age that featured Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, among others. Bentley, who was a friend of G. K. Chesterton, author of the Father Brown books, wrote this story to poke fun at the genre. As P. D. James says in her marvelous Talking about Detective Fiction, “Bentley disliked the conventional straitjacket of the orthodox detective story and had little respect for Sherlock Holmes.”

However, a funny thing happened once he started to write: a real story began to emerge and he couldn’t resist writing it. Most writers are familiar with this magic. You can outline all you want, but once you start writing, the story can take you places you never intended. And you’d better hope it does, because otherwise the story won’t ever come to life, in my opinion anyway.

There is much to like about this book. Philip Trent is a painter who has fallen into occasionally investigating stories for a newspaper. The paper asks Trent to investigate the death of American tycoon, Sigsbee Manderson, who was found shot outside the English country house where he and his wife, Mabel, spend their summers. Is it murder or suicide? At the house, Trent runs into his chum, Inspector Murch with whom he has a friendly rivalry as to who can first figure out the answer to their cases. They even have rules: “It was understood between them that Trent made no journalistic use of any point that could only have come to him from an official source. Each of them, moreover, for the honour and prestige of the institution he represented, openly reserved the right to withhold from the other any discovery or inspiration that might come to him which he considered vital to the solution of the difficulty.”

As James says, “Bentley is seen as an innovator, not a destroyer of the detective story.” Two of his innovations are that Trent doesn’t actually solve the case, but he does fall in love, and that romance becomes a major part of the story. This romance was one of the things that bothered me about the book. Trent falls in love with the widow, knowing full well that he shouldn’t get involved with a suspect in the case, and much of the story concerns his conflict over his feelings for Mabel and the possible consequences of his actions.

Bentley does a good job with both the romance and Trent’s internal conflict, treating them subtly but with convincing emotion. Chalk it up to a personal preference, but I’m not too fond of mixing genres. I’d rather keep the romance in romances. Sure, there are exceptions: I loved Sayers’s Gaudy Night and Margery Allingham’s Dancers in Mourning. I think those two books work because the characterisation is so strong, not just of Wimsey and Campion, but of all the characters.

The plotting here is terrific, with many twists and turns, and a satisfying conclusion. Less satisfying is the character of Trent. In the beginning of the book, he talks a lot of piffle, as though trying to sound like Bertie Wooster, but somehow is not as amusing. Then, once he starts on the case, he drops all that and becomes a normal, intelligent young man bent on solving the riddle. At the end, however, he returns to this banter that doesn’t quite work.

It’s hard to keep the tone of a book consistent from beginning to end. Some writers use the same tone for every book, while others try to vary the tone from book to book, coming up with ways to remind themselves as they go, such as associating a particular piece of music with the book. Writers of a series of books featuring the same detective have the difficult task of maintaining the tone throughout the series.

Maybe Bentley’s original satirical intentions kept him from keeping his tone consistent and from putting his imagination into his characters. It’s unfortunate because, with a little more work, this good book could have been great.

Robert B. Parker, best known as the author of the Spenser detective novels, died this week at the age of 77. I first started reading his books because their Boston setting soothed my homesickness for that part of the world. I kept reading them because I was enchanted by Spenser's knowledge of literature, sense of humour and code of honour. Also, the books were simply fun to read, especially the early ones. I watched the television version, Spenser: For Hire, but felt it did not do justice to the books. It did, however, give us the excellent Avery Brooks as Spenser's friend, Hawk.

I met Parker twice. Once was at a book signing at Murder Loves Company in Baltimore. It was a weekday afternoon, so the turnout was sparse, and I actually had time to speak with him. Already a best-selling author, he was generous enough to talk with me a little about writing, about Boston. I thanked him for providing my sons, also big fans, with a different model of what it means to be a man in our society. Embarrassed, he ducked his head and said, “Jes' doin' my job, ma'am.”

He did do his job. His work ethic was one of the first things that I, as a writer, learned from him. He turned out five-to-ten pages a day, five days a week, every week. I heard him say once that you couldn't help but write a whole book if you just kept piling up those five pages every day. And that was where he was found dead on Monday, at his writing desk.

He was the first author to teach me about using setting as a character in your books. I studied how he used Boston and its environs to anchor his stories. He also taught me about pacing, and lightening dark stories with a little humour. Finally he gave me a lesson in courage: late in his writing career, when anyone might have expected him to just keep pumping out more Spenser novels, he embarked on two new series, one featuring Sunny Randall and the second featuring Jesse Stone.

The other time I met him was at a reading he gave at a local bookstore. This time—an evening—the place was jammed. He read a little and talked a lot, keeping the audience laughing with his low-key humour. During the question-and-answer period, he patiently responded to the usual questions about where he got his ideas and what time of day he worked. Then, an attractive woman, maybe late thirties, got up and said that Spenser was pretty much a perfect man. She started counting off his attributes on her fingers: strong and resourceful yet not afraid to show his deep love for Susan; a man who could cook a gourmet meal, crack a joke, and handle himself in a fist-fight; etc. Just as we were starting to wonder if she actually had a question, she threw both hands in the air and cried, “Where can I find a man like Spenser?”

Parker was obviously taken aback, and paused for a moment before thanking her for her kind words about his detective and talking rather generally about not drawing characters from real life. I, however, was itching to stand up and shout, “Are you blind? He's standing right in front of you!”

Not that I thought Parker based his detective on himself. Nor was I unclear on the difference between fictional characters and real people. It just seemed obvious to me that so many of the characteristics she had been enumerating were shared by this good man standing in the front of the room, demonstrating his kindness and sense of humour in almost everything he said. He was well-known for his generosity to other writers and his devotion to his wife, Joan. He clearly knew a lot about both cooking and boxing. And I believed that in order to create Spenser, whose most outstanding characteristic for me is his code of honour, Parker must have thought long and hard about what it means to be an honourable man. He must have cared about such things in order to notice the moral code that writers like Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, and Raymond Chandler gave their detectives.

I didn't know Parker personally, but by all accounts he was the good man I thought he must be. I am more grateful than I can say for his books and the way they have comforted me when I was sad and reminded me of what writing can do.

Okay, yes, zombies. But they are almost beside the point. This is an amazing book, one that sank its claws into me on the first page and didn’t let up until I finished the last. As the subtitle indicates, it is a series of interviews with veterans of the war against the zombies. These interviews, which range from one to four pages, are in the person’s own words, with only an occasional question interposed, and prefaced by the location and a sentence or two of background.

Michael Chabon has much to say about the literary community turning up its collective nose at genre fiction. Me, I like science fiction. It gives us an enemy—Martians, Romulans, whatever—about whom we have no preconceived notions or political stances. It can also show us the logical consequences of current cultural trends; I'm thinking of Hal the computer in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey and the social structure in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Brooks gets in a few good jabs at our current culture, mostly sad rather than satirical, such as the spread of the plague (initially called African Rabies—sound familiar?) by infected organs provided by China on order and how do they just happen to find an organ matching the most obscure set of criteria in just a few weeks? Or that the war against the zombies can only be won if all nations come together in a truly multi-national force.

The book challenges us to reconsider our philosophy. Isn't it always right to remember that your enemy is human too, with reasons and dreams and emotions? In the brilliant and subtle depiction of the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, I'm thinking yes. Zombies? Nah. Is it ever right to sacrifice the few for the many? How about sacrificing the many so that at least a few will survive?

Brooks also gives us a sadly accurate view of the limitations of a military machine still fighting the last war, unprepared for a new form of warfare. One voice is a former Director of the U.S. Department of Strategic Resources, explaining how in World War II the Allies won by having more food, more bullets, more men than the Axis powers, but here the enemy doesn't need rest or food and has no home front to worry about. Therefore, cutting off food supplies or transport lines is meaningless; shock and awe are emotions they are not capable of feeling; and anyone they kill immediately becomes another recruit in their army. I was reminded of the fiasco when British soldiers in their bright red coats and formal ranks first encountered guerilla warfare in the American Revolution.

But what really makes this story work is the writing. What an amazing symphony of voices! Brooks does a good job of making them different from each other, no easy task. And the dramatic momentum never stops. I've been thinking a lot about drama, how to create it, how to sustain it. Here, while there is certainly plenty of action, the drama comes primarily from the intensity of emotion. The stakes are high: the future of humanity. The peril is dire: gruesome death. But no dramatic soundtrack is needed. The various narrators' emotions come out of the conflicts, not just with the zombie horde, but with themselves and with other people. There are conflicts over strategy, over questions of right and wrong, over past politics. There are conflicts even among the survivors; I loved the references to the LMOEs (last man on earth) holed up somewhere resisting the liberating army. Even more curious are the quislings, people who believe they are zombies, imitating them, attacking others. Even in big battle scenes, it is not so much what it feels like to fight with zombies—though there’s some of that—as it is what it feels like to be sent into battle with the wrong kind of ammunition, the wrong kind of armour. Sound familiar?

This book is so much better than you think it will be. Don't be surprised if it turns up on my Best of 2010 list.

Alfred Day is returning to Germany to work as an extra in a film set in a WWII POW camp. It hasn’t been that long since he was a POW for real, after his plane was shot down over Hamburg. Alfie, the tail gunner, survives to find himself immured in a camp where he befriends Ringer, an even sadder sack, and finds new purpose for himself in caring for his friend. At the camp he learns what it is to be truly hungry, far beyond being “clemmed” growing up, as the son of the village fishmonger.

This is not an easy book to read but it is well worth the effort. For one thing, though we stay with Alfie throughout, the point of view shifts from third person to first to second, and the other voices that we hear are often unattributed. Also, Alfie’s thoughts jump about in time, touching on various memories, returning to the film set. This is stream of consciousness with a vengeance, but redeemed by the singular and consistent voice, which is Alfie’s voice, even in third person, the voice of a barely educated country boy who doesn’t really understand himself or anyone else, but tries to do the right thing.

The subject matter is the other reason the book is hard to read. Alfie joins up as soon as he turns 16, eager to escape from the fish shop and his abusive father. A simple lad with few expectations, we feel his pride at being the first crew member chosen by his “Skipper”. In fact, the interactions among the crew—their teasing, their fights, their intense loyalty to each other—are the best things about the book. These are the first mates Alfie has had, and it is a revelation to him that he can be accepted by this group and have a valued place in it.

The style takes the reader directly into Alfie’s deepest thoughts and most secret feelings. I seem to have read a number of books recently about the difficulty of coming back after a war. For me, this one more than any other most goes to the heart of the experience. Unflinching, it wades right into the mess of memories and regrets, successes and failures. A hard book to put down, a hard book to pick up again—I found it best to just read straight through, as much as time allowed.

There are some evocative, almost lyrical, phrases that Alfie in his innocence finds to describe his world. In speaking of the way his crew lives in the moment, he says, “It would not be concerned with its past and had no business thinking of its future: its cleverness was in drinking up its minutes, second by second, and making sure to drain each one. It looked at the bods outside it who did not grasp this, looked at the sleepy civilian types—the spivs and 4Fs—and saw how close they were to being dead: how the time streamed off other people like rain and ran away without them missing it.” Later, on the film set, he feels faint and sits down, feeling “the ground rushing beneath you. Your spine tingles and you wonder if this isn’t an echo you’re reading, if so many bombs haven’t changed the earth, haven’t left it always shivering and taken away its rest.”

Kennedy creates characters I won’t soon forget, not just Alfie, but the Skipper who calls him “Boss”, Pluckrose the navigator who refers to him as “A. Day”, Ivor the owner of the shop where Alfie fetches up after the war who calls him “dear boy” when he isn’t swearing at him. Nor will I forget some of the scenes, such as the crew standing in a circle, playing catch in complete darkness, a drill the Skipper thought up. Or the way they started leaving a record playing on the turntable when they left for a mission to ensure that they’d return, one of Pluckrose’s zany ideas that somehow worked. Or Alfred, who excelled with his gun, trying to learn how to fight hand-to-hand, much to the despair of the sergeant who was teaching him.

All of Alfred’s memories are filtered through the surreal experience of pretending to live through them again. Like his fellow extras, he gets caught up in creating a real garden, a tunnel, a stove out of two tin cans, forgetting that he is just supposed to go through the motions for the camera. In this world of ours—of special effects and virtual worlds and second lives—I wonder sometimes how clear we are on the difference between pretence and really living, if we know how to drain each second. This is a remarkable book.

What a great year for reading I’ve had! These are the twelve best books I read in 2009. If I blogged about the book then I’ve noted the date, so please check the archive for a fuller discussion of the book.

1. Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout
11 May 2009
A collection of short stories about a retired math teacher living in a small town in Maine. Doesn’t sound like much, but really, it is. Writers would do well to study these stories to learn structure, pacing and character. But everyone will appreciate the unflinching understanding of small town life and those who live there.

2. Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris
16 March 2009
Set in a company caught in an economic downturn and starting to lay off employees, this story captures the nuances of the life most of us spend our weeks living. The main character is the collective “we” of the cadre of workers, which shouldn’t work, but does. Funny, accurate, and unexpectedly moving.

3. Stoner, by John Williams
16 November 2009
Another surprise: a quiet and unassuming story which mesmerised me with its honest depiction of a man’s life, an ordinary man, a man of his time and place. Growing up at the end of the 19th century on a poor clay farm in Missouri, Stoner life is changed when he is sent to the university as an agriculture student where he discovers the peculiar intoxication of literature. Stoner’s life may be easily summarised, but the joy of this book is in the detail. Although a stolid and quiet man, Stoner’s thoughts and feelings run very deep indeed.

4. The Painter of Battles, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
5 October 2009
The story of an award-winning war photographer who has retired and taken up residence in an old tower on the coast of Spain where he is painting a mural depicting battles ancient and modern. Pérez-Reverte himself was a war photographer, so he speaks from a position of authority about what it’s like to be one, the degree of immersion he feels, and the degree of responsibility he has towards his subjects.

5. Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson
21 September 2009
At sixty-seven, Trond Sander has moved to a small cabin in the woods to create a new life, a simple life, a life alone. Since the death of his wife in a terrible car accident three years previously, Trond has felt increasingly unable to go on with his prosperous life in Oslo. Interwoven with his quiet days are memories of a summer in his childhood at a similar cabin with his father, who was newly returned from the war. The way this book is structured is so delicate and yet completely sound, and the writing is just amazing: clear and simple sentences that resound with emotion.

6. Old Filth, by Jane Gardam
7 September 2009
Sir Edward Feathers, a retired judge, is called Filth by his colleagues (an acronym for “failed in London; try Hong Kong”) in tribute to his successful career as an advocate in the Far East. Since the death of his wife, he has the chilliest of connections to the people around him, but events conspire to make him reflect upon his life and reconnect with people from his past.

7. Life Sentences, by Laura Lippman
11 February 08
Cassandra returns to Baltimore to research her next book and gets caught up in untangling her own past. I believe that what Lippman does here represents the best of what fiction is capable of. Yes, fiction can be entertaining and escapist, but where it really shines is when it opens our minds and our hearts and enables us to see the world from within someone else’s skin. This is what I look for in fiction, and what the books mentioned in today's blog have achieved so admirably.

8. The Friends of Meager Fortune, by David Adams Richards
4 May 2009
This is the story of a logging family and the rough men who work for them in the harsh, 30-below woods. It is also the story of the townspeople whose opinions shift with the wind of rumors born of boredom, envy, greed, or pride. Richards’ incantatory narration reminds us that this story happened a long time ago (just before and after the Great War) and far away (New Brunswick in the Maritimes), making it over into a legend, something that has been handed down in the oral tradition.

9. Maps and Legends, by Michael Chabon
2 February 2009
Readers of Chabon will be familiar with the subjects of some of these inventive essays, such as his passionate defense of genre literature and comics/graphic novels, his appreciation of Sherlock Holmes, the metaphor of the Golem of Prague. Where he takes these subjects, though, may astonish you.

10. In the Woods, by Tana French
14 September 2009
This award-winning mystery revolves around two cases twenty years apart in the same small suburb of Knocknaree in Ireland. It boasts an interesting story, a variety of characters, and enough suspense to keep me reading late into the night. What I loved most about this book, though, was the incredible writing.

11. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery
This is the story of a French concierge who hides her reading of literature and philosophy from the wealthy residents of her apartment building and the young girl who discovers her secret. At 12, Paloma feels as out-of-step with the bourgeois existence her parents and the other residents lead as Renée, the widowed concierge does. A funny and touching tale of masks and secret lives.

12. The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins
27 July 2009
In this book, the first and some say the still the best detective story, Collins starts with a scene worthy of Raiders of the Lost Ark, an account of the storming of Indian town of Seringapatam by the English army, full of riot and confusion, death and plunder. The marauding army is obsessed by the tales of the Moonstone, a fabulous jewel that carries a curse on whoever steals it, said to be somewhere within the town. Collins creates a tangle out of a country house weekend, a returning prodigal son, family tensions, and the long wake of repercussions from a single act of treachery and heartlessness. And it’s a love story too. Amazing.