Happy New Year to all. Here’s to joy and good health as we enter a new decade. As promised here is the first of my summer readables for January 2011. There is no particular form to these. I’ve chosen works I’ve read over the last five months and thrown in a couple of old favourites from my bookshelf.

Kate Morton www.katemorton.com really fell on her feet as a debut novelist. The Shifting Fog (The House at Riverton-OS branding) and The Forgotton Garden have sold over 3 million copies. I haven’t read the first one although The Forgotten Garden was very enjoyable. Having said that I do believe that considering the time poor society we live in enjoying a book is all about having time and peace and not being overtired or stressed. I read The Forgotten Garden while in Greece in 2008-so clearly I would have enjoyed reading a treatise on the numerical significance of the square root of infinity considering the environment and bearing in mind I did vegie maths at School!  Morton’s third work The Distant Hours (A&U 2010)  is a gothic tale bordering on the fanciful. It intrigued me from the beginning after all who doesn’t like a story involving a castle and three sisters. It flows between present day to the early twentieth century, from first person narrative (jarring initially) through to the Blythe sister’s perspectives. It has a bit of everything, a tower, a moat, madness, deaths, unrequited love and lives lost to duty. By half way through however I had a fair idea what was going to happen and the story lost some of its magic for me. I also found it a little repetitive and long and I didn’t get that sigh factor once it was finished.

In comparison most people know the bloody end that came to the Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family during the Russian Revolution. The myths that abound regarding the Tsar’s daughter, Anastasia have made for some fascinating reading. It’s interesting then that The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas author, John Boyne www.johnboyne.com would weave a tale around such a well known story. The House of Special Purpose (BLack Swan 2009) is an intriguing, highly researched work that doesn’t leave the reader guessing, but remains highly enjoyable.  Boyne brings fresh eyes to a well known story, once again shifting perspective and timelines so that the heart of the story centres around Georgy Jachmenov who is privy to the secrets of the Russian Emperial Family and their eventual fate. Sixty years on his memories haunt his life as his wife Zoya lies dying in a London hospital.

The author A.S. Byatt said of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, ‘A Magnificent achievement…an American masterpiece’. Beloved (Vintage 1997.First printed 1987) is a disturbing, brilliant, beautiful work from Ms Morrison who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. It’s best that I reprint the back of book blurb rather than make a comment on a work such as this.

Beloved : It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists… The world of Sethe is to turn from one of love to one of violence and death-The death of Sethe’s baby daughter, Beloved, whose name is the single word on the tombstone who died at her mother’s hands and who will return to claim retribution.

Quick pick for this week-Debut novelist Elisabeth Storrs- The Wedding Shroud (Pier 9) A finely tuned narrative set in the ancient world, (406 BC) it reads like a historical romance yet tells the story of a girl trying to find her place in an ancient Italian civilisation. Caecilia finds herself tempted by a mystical, hedonistic culture which offers pleasure and independence to women.