Sometimes you can be reading a novel which starts well and just feel the air go out of it. I like William Boyd’s writing very much and have enjoyed almost all his books, though not his last one, the Bond job, and this at first excited me and raised my expectations because he strayed into W.G. Sebald territory by including pictures, but somehow it collapsed. I ceased to believe in it. Mainly I think because I didn’t feel he wrote a convincing woman. I felt he has used this shape before in a novel I really liked, (Any Human Heart) but that he was dealing unconvincingly in slightly clichéd areas. I am sorry for this and to have to say this as I think he is a very fine novelist.

Essays. And this led me to read…

A puzzling book, about memory and a good beginning about Stendhal with Napoleon, Kafka in Italy, Casanova in Venice and he himself going back to South Germany. I wrote in 2006 when I first read it “Sometimes great, sometimes banal. He seems unable to distinguish between the particular and the prosaic. Highs and dulls.” This was a first edition I picked up in Hatchards.

I very much enjoyed this beautiful short novel of the Swedish settlers in Hanover, Nebraska. Love and loss and lyrical writing. Great. Written in 1913.

A brilliant ghost story, a form I never would have imagined enjoying so much, but he has made it so modern and above all so believable that you are seduced into it and cannot put it down. I read it from cover to cover between JFK and LAX and was utterly pleased and thrilled. I have very much enjoyed his previous books and he is an astonishingly good writer. This I think will be a best seller for him. It’s chillingly good.

A very funny novel. Satirical and withering. And deadly topical. I read it just before the Paris attacks. He demolishes modern France a step at a time, through the eyes of his louche academic who studies Huysmans and teaches at the Sorbonne. Step by step he goes from the contemporary to the inevitable. It is both a warning and a great gag about the triumph of Muslim fundamentalism. I liked it a lot.

Short, funny, sexy and hilarious, he can make drama out of four characters and an empty island.