Cloud Atlas / David Mitchell

I remember when we lived in London, this novel was in all the bookshop windows. It had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004, and may have outsold the winning title that year. With the movie coming out in 2012, I thought it time to play a little catch-up and read this 500-page novel.

It consists of six separate, but remotely interconnected stories that take place in different locations and in different times. The opening story is set in the South Pacific in 1850 and was immediately captivating and had me pulling out atlases and googling facts to find out if they were historic, or merely fiction. When the first story broke off in mid-sentence I cursed my Nook, thinking that it was a transcription error in the electronic copy. No, it was just the concept of the book, the first narrative a fragment of a diary that a subsequent character reads, only later finding the remainder propping up one leg of a bed in a Belgian chateau—that’s the level that in which stories are interconnected, and the fact that the main characters in each episode are revealed to share a comet-shaped birthmark.

There was one segment, an episode that takes place after environmental and societal collapse in the far future, that really bogged me down with its nearly impenetrable lingo. It was a little like reading A Clockwork Orange. Maybe that’s why it took me a month to finish this book, because after I left post-apocalypse Hawaii, things moved along quickly again.

Anyway, Cloud Atlas might be considered difficult, but it’s fascinating and rewarding. Some of the stories were so compelling that I wanted the whole book to be about them. All in all the segmented structure works, which I’m not so sure was the case with the movie version, based on what I’ve heard. A very unique and memorable novel.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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