When Will There Be Good News, The Naive and Sentimental Lover and the accidental

I very rarely read crime fiction. And never one with a detective like Rebus or Dalgleish. The last book of this sort was William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms which was OK. I picked When Will There Be Good News, despite being the next in the series of Jackson Brodie novels. Fortunately, he hardly appeared. Kate Atkinson is certainly a good writer. Her characterisation of the sixteen year old, world wise Reggie, Doctor Joanna Hunter and DCI Louise Monroe turns a standard thriller into something more humorous, real and intelligent. I have put another of her novels on my list.

After reading the wonderful A Most Wanted Man, I needed another fix of John Le Carre. Having enjoyed his last fifteen novels, I went back in time to his 1971 publication The Naive and Sentimental Lover. I have to admit, it was a bit of a struggle, not helped because halfway through I read the two novels for my book club. It was a complete departure from his spy stories that latterly have turned into modern day subterfuge. We follow the experiences of Aldo Cassidy, a rich and successful business man caught up in a relationship with the wild Shamus and his wife Helen. It is a very long book, almost as if Le Carre is practising writing the high quality prose of his later works. If it had been half the length, it could have been great.

One of the best books I have read for a long time is Ali Smith's the accidental. Yes, the title is all in lower case, and the gimmicks do not stop there. But I am a complete sucker for original presentation, and this book succeeds brilliantly in this respect, as well as being superbly written. One reviewer talks about "pyrotechnic prose". Take two extracts : "Michael = what? He looks like an Airfix model put together by a boy not concentrating properly, so a wing got stuck on a little crookedly, a wheel got superglued out of joint with the others; dull blobs of too much glue on it in all the wrong places." Then later down the very same page "Everybody at this table is in broken pieces which won't go together, pieces which are nothing to do with each other, like they all come from different jigsaws, all muddled together in one box by some assistant who couldn't care less in a charity shop or wherever the place is that jigsaws go to die. except jigsaws don't die." This is a novel about chance encounters, with many references to modern day culture (cinema, music, books etc). It is funny with many laugh out loud moments (unusual for me), sad and moving. There is even a reference one character's book club. "Eve was a member of a very nice book group in Islington, six or seven women and one rather beleaguered man". Sounds familiar?