Slade House by David Mitchell

Classic, brilliant Mitchell

Reads like a companion piece to the brilliant Bone Clocks. David Mitchell speaks in multiple, authentic, utterly believable voices, about things so bizarre, they would be laughable under any other pen. Part murder mystery, part ghost story, but the core is the real humanity of the characters, beautifully brought to life as they await their inevitable doom.

Short, totally unputdownable, essential.  I loved it.

Narrow Road to the Deep North

Just finished reading Richard Flanagan's deserving Booker winner.  An astounding deeply-affecting novel of love and loss, good and evil, man's inhumanity to man and the ultimate futility of existence.  Sounds grim?  Yes, at times, some of the most disturbingly grim writing I have come across.  Grim but compellingly, beautifully written.  He has a prose style which makes you stare deeply at scenes you would otherwise turn away from.  He brings a deep humanity to situations which should have none.

In Dorrigo Evans we are presented with a brilliantly flawed hero, his life, his love, his loss and all against the devastating back-drop of the brutality of a Japanese POW camp and the building of the Thai-Burma railway.

The scenes from the camp will remain with me for a long time, and yet the abiding emotional legacy is of the over-whelming loss of what might have been had Dorrigo not believed the one lie his wife told him.

Read it.