The Winter’s Tale. A modern rendition of the Shakespeare play. The first half is absolutely brilliant. Gripping, thrilling and the people come bursting off the pages. The second half falls apart totally. As I suspect so does the play but it’s been a while since I saw or read it. Even when we get to our longed for end, when the lost Perdita is reconciled with Leo (Leontes) and her mum comes back from the dead (as a statue in the play, as a recluse here), she cuts it short and flips into an essay on Shakespeare and his heroines. Because of course she, the author, is an abandoned daughter, a Perdita, and lost to her own mother, and to her that is of course more interesting than the reconciliation with a fictional mother, which never in her life happened. And of course she hated her foster mother and wrote two absolutely brilliant books about this monster of a woman. If it had only stopped at page 123 I would be raving about this. But sadly it doesn’t. Pity. What with Howard Jacobson having a go at Shylock this is quite the age of novelising Shakespeare.

Superbly written short stories I could easily re-read again. Read on Kindle on flights and in Hotel rooms on the road. He is just fabulous. One of the stories actually concerns two North Korean defectors, which was interesting. He seems to know so much about the Koreas. The stories are: Nirvana, Hurricanes Anonymous, Interesting Facts, George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine, Dark Meadow and Fortune Smiles.

A sort of sentimental novel, a memory of war and love and visits to an old man on an island. Robert Hendricks never quite seems to enjoy love affairs with any of the women offered up to us. Instead spending his life quietly denying his thirty years regret of not being with the Italian woman Luisa he met and had an affair with during the war. Anzio is described well from the British perspective and he is supposed to have written a book about new ways of looking at the mad, but all in all it feels like that rather sentimental type of movie, where the nurses wear starched white and no one quite gets to do anything. He is of course reconciled with Luisa once she is tragically stricken with cancer. An odd thing. Many good things but… I think I have also read by him Charlotte Gray, and The Girl at the Lion D’Or.

So well and succinctly written, even if we hadn’t become accustomed to Helen Mirren playing the role. The first case of Detective Jane Tennison, and she is up against the full prejudice of the Police force. This adds a piquancy to what is already a great tale.

Amazing how good all these contemporary female thriller Writer's are. This is the English language debut of a Dutch writer. Masterly (mistressly?) construction, gripping and unexpected.