Smokin’ Seventeen by Janet Evanovich

Seventeen books in to her bestselling series, Janet Evanovich has her high-voltage, man-juggling bounty hunter Stephanie Plum right where she wants her. With pneumatic partner Lula always close at hand to provide comic relief and practical back-up, Stephanie enters Smokin’ Seventeen with a romantic dilemma and, possibly, under a curse.

As in previous outings, she continues to juggle an open relationship with a local cop, Joe Morelli, with regular trysts with a security expert, Ranger. Indisputably, she neither needs nor is seeking further personal entanglements – but her family puts paid to that by ushering in one Dave Brewer, the son of a family friend who has returned to the Plum stomping ground, blue-collar Trenton, New Jersey, following a messy legal entanglement and subsequent business and marital failures.

Shortly before the predictably awkward set-up, Stephanie is bailed up at a doughnut shop by Morelli’s fearsome grandmother, Bella, who gives her ‘the eye’ and curses her with unspecified maladies.

At the same time, a body is discovered on the property of Vincent Plum Bail Bonds, where Stephanie works for her cousin. In all, five bodies are found, and Trenton authorities are on the trail of a serial killer. It speaks to the rich vein of mirth in Evanovich’s storytelling that the killings and the apparent effects of the curse carry equal portions of the plot.

The curse, it transpires, may relate to Stephanie’s libido, and certainly relates to a memorable scene involving a Porsche 911 and a blind alley in the bad part of town. The serial killer, for his part, will be lucky indeed to elude the snare of Stephanie and luscious Lula, who advocates regular fried-chicken breaks and takes imaginative umbrage at being called ‘fat’ (news of an upcoming Stephanie Plum movie, with Katherine Heigl in the starring role, is heartening chiefly for the prospect of Lula being brought to celluloid life).

It’s fitting that Smokin’ Seventeen reads like a high-camp action movie. When Lula tires of the histrionics exhibited by one of the pair’s ‘FTAs’ (for failure to appear, the people they make a living from tracking down and returning to custody), she merely pulls her stun-gun out of her purse and zaps him. He’s not a threat – he believes himself to be a vampire, and Stephanie and Lula have tracked him down at the local funeral home, where he spends his days in a casket.

Later, Stephanie refutes the unwanted advances of an admirer by belting him in the side of the head with her hairdryer and leaving him outside her apartment to take his leave once he has come to. She also pulls the stun-gun trick on a less-than-kindly stranger who elbows her in a queue. Never are Stephanie and Lula subjected to legal chastisement or read the civil rights riot act. That would just spoil the fun.

It’s light fiction, no question, but Evanovich has a rare talent for comic writing, and readers rightly keep returning to her tightly bordered world in which the usual rules don’t apply. While Sizzling Sixteen seemed to suffer from a lack of inspiration – Stephanie went through her paces, but appeared plagued by a vague malaise – Smokin’ Seventeen has her back on form.

3 / 5 stars: Evanovich doesn’t falter for a moment in Stephanie Plum’s most audaciously camp outing yet.

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Fallen by Karin Slaughter

Karin Slaughter likes a strong woman. Take one of her recurring characters, Special Agent Faith Mitchell, for whom she has created quite a backstory. Pregnant at 14, Faith mustered the fortitude to give birth to her son, complete high school, and later train to serve in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, where she eventually met her professional partner, Will Trent.

Not content with this degree of multitasking, by the time Slaughter opens her new novel, Fallen, she has given Faith a four-month-old daughter, who is cared for by her grandmother, retired Atlanta police chief Evelyn Mitchell, while Faith works.

Slaughter, true to form, makes the opening passages of her nearly 400-page tome count. Arriving home later than expected because of a meeting overrun, Faith exits her car to see a trail of blood leading to the front door, her infant daughter locked in the shed, and her mother’s gun missing from the shed safe. Minutes later, her home is filled with the bodies of local gang members and drug mules.

Evelyn, whose blood is at the scene, is nowhere to be found, and thanks to a curtain-twitching neighbour, questions emerge about what the ex-cop was really up to of a morning. Why was she leaving the house for hours each day with an Hispanic man with gang connections? And does it have anything to do with the corruption scandal that tainted members of her squad and forced her departure?

Fallen is less of a whodunit than a who-are-they. Regular Slaughter cast members Will Trent and Dr Sara Linton enter the fray to conduct the investigation, establish the identities of the dead men and help locate Evelyn, whose whereabouts are hinted at in brief, grisly scenes. Just as importantly for long-time readers, the pair continue their fraught but unconsummated liaison, complicated by Will’s unstable estranged wife and the ghost of Sara’s late husband, who was a prominent presence in earlier novels.

Slaughter has painstakingly developed the personalities of Faith, Sara, Will and others over 10 years’ worth of books, in her series set in the fictional Georgia region of Grant County. In an enlightening postscript to Fallen, she sheds some light on her reasoning for moving her characters to the big smoke of Atlanta: among them, that the rising number of grisly deaths in Grant County would beg the question of why anyone would continue to live there, and that the blank canvas of a large city was too rich for a writer to ignore.

Fallen isn’t her best work – despite her evident care, the plot feels flimsy and the pay-off, though plausible, is almost cynical. She is a writer of substance with a clear, fluid style, and it seems that with this outing, she has chosen to devote more energy to character growth than to the atypically pedestrian storyline. In particular, close calls for both Sara and Will appeared less important for plot purposes than for forcing each to confront their feelings.

Slaughter patently adores her characters, and takes some pride in planning their trajectories several novels ahead, leaving hints for readers as to what may come. The fictive potential of the city of Atlanta will be a test of this writer’s considerable skills.

3 / 5 stars: With character arcs to burn, this is one for the fans.

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The Girl in the Polka-dot Dress by Beryl Bainbridge

John Fury, a horse-farming, spiritually awakened Los Angeles lawyer.

Monsignor Secker, conducting Mass for the American casualties of Vietnam in a small town near the Great Lakes.

The two are among the large, well-drawn supporting cast of a beguilingly demented road trip that is the subject of Beryl Bainbridge’s final novel, The Girl in the Polka-dot Dress.

Rose and Harold are at the centre of the maelstrom. Rose arrives on the east coast of the United States on a one-way ticket from her grim home in Kentish Town, while Harold, an oddball bachelor, commandeers the rattletrap van in which they strike out for the west.

The two are introduced by a mutual acquaintance and at first, trying to work out precisely who they are is like peering through a dusty window – only the vaguest outlines can be discerned. Rose is young, pretty and damaged; Harold is older, and queer in the old-fashioned sense. He might be a sex pest, or merely lacking social skills (a little of both, it turns out).

Their madcap, disorienting cross-country journey is intended to ferret out one Dr Wheeler, which whom each has an unspecific yet powerful connection. Along the way they stop where they might chance to find him, colliding with the novel’s other peculiar inhabitants and discovering repeatedly that he checked out a few days ago, two weeks before.

It is hard to believe Wheeler really exists, or that either of the increasingly redoubtable protagonists is the most absorbent towel on the roll – but the sheer beauty of Bainbridge’s prose is addictive, her ability to conjure whole people calling to mind the descriptive power of F Scott Fitzgerald.

Of Harold’s first encounter with the mysterious Dr Wheeler, at a reception to mark Robert Kennedy’s appointment as Attorney General, she writes:

“When [Wheeler] crossed a room he glided rather than walked, head slightly inclined. Sometimes, when speaking, he shielded his eyes with his hand, the way people did when gazing into the distance. It wasn’t altogether contrived, simply that he was one of those fortunate people who made an impression.”

The adventure spans much of the extraordinary period in 1968 between the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King in early April and that of Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy in June. Both men cast long shadows: one character describes his witnessing of King’s killing, while Kennedy’s movements on the campaign trail, mentioned in passing, grow more poignant as the duo journeys toward the fated Ambassador Hotel.

The plot thickens, then elongates, and as California looms the reader wonders whether the pay-off will be forthcoming or if, as they say, the journey is the destination. Then they hit the coast and all becomes clear. It’s quite surprising that it does, because when Bainbridge died last July the novel was not yet complete. Her long-time friend and editor Brendan King prepared the text for publication from her working manuscript, taking into account suggestions Bainbridge made at the end of her life and adding no extra material.

It is a worthy capping to an extraordinary career.

4 / 5 stars: Beryl Bainbridge’s final novel is a subtle masterwork.

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Madeleine by Kate McCann

The McCann family once was ordinary. Kate and Gerry, a Liverpudlian GP and Scottish cardiologist respectively, had a thriving young family and promising careers which had taken them far and wide – from New Zealand, where their relationship evolved from friendship to romance, to Amsterdam, where Gerry advanced his training for a year while Kate cared for their yearned-for firstborn child.

The only blight on their married life had been infertility, which they conquered through the use of IVF. Three healthy children were born: Madeleine, and 20 months later, the twins Sean and Amelie.

It was in May 2007 that the McCanns were whisked from anonymity to international fame and notoriety, when Madeleine was taken from her bed as her parents and their friends ate dinner at a tapas restaurant within the Portuguese resort at which they were holidaying.

Madeleine is Kate McCann’s account of what happened that night, what led up to it (canvassed in brief preliminary chapters covering her early life and marriage to Gerry) and, exhaustively, the period since she last saw her daughter, with particular focus on 2007 and what she calls the “worst year”, 2008, when she and Gerry were named arguido (suspects) by the Portuguese police – who, few readers will not conclude, were woefully inept at best and corrupt at worst.

She recounts the days at the resort before the abduction, and how the group of friends they were with, all of whom had young children, took turns checking on their sleeping offspring during uneventful dinners in the preceding evenings. She remembers comments from Madeleine and other apparently innocuous details that in hindsight may indicate that someone was watching the family and might have entered the children’s room before the night she was taken.

She addresses the criticisms of police and the public; that the McCanns neglected their children by leaving them alone, and that they know more about what happened to their daughter than they have let on. Reading Madeleine, it is impossible to merit any of these misgivings.

As Kate McCann explains, she was not without qualms in telling the story for the first time from her family’s perspective. In particular, she feared that it would unduly expose the twins. In the end, she says, she hopes the book will help prove to her younger children that their parents did everything possible to find their sister, and indeed, the fourth-anniversary timing of publication is designed to trigger another round of publicity and raises funds for the continuing search.

Even for a non-parent, Madeleine makes for inordinately painful reading (and those with children should be warned). It is troubling not only for its well-known horror, but for the clarity with which McCann describes events and their effects on her family, thanks in part to the detailed diary she began keeping shortly after the abduction on the suggestion of a former intelligence officer.

(Later in the book, describing the leaking of the same diary to a tabloid, her words have the air of a resigned shrug: as indignities and betrayals go, it is far from the worst she has received from authority figures.)

Madeleine is a powerful portrait of grief, loss and hope, and a story that leaves you hoping for something greater than the subject’s safe return: that every child should have parents like hers.

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Promises, Promises by Erica James

Ah, ‘tis an enterprise as unpredictable as the performance of an Antipodean cricket team, the creation of light fiction aimed at a female audience (chick-lit, if you prefer); for every considered, clever Jennifer Weiner output, there is a clunker from an off-her-game Maeve Binchy.

Sitting somewhere in the middle, in this instance, is a New Year release from Erica James, Promises, Promises. In keeping with a prolific publishing rate that has seen the British writer produce 15 novels since 1996, it appears a little less than 12 months after the well-received The Queen of New Beginnings.

The timing is optimal – James is nothing if not the ideal summer-holiday companion – and here she sticks to the formula that has served her well since her debut, A Breath of Fresh Air: introduce two or three main characters, each with A Big Problem Somehow Related to Love or its Absence, and watch as this problem is addressed in a sequence of daffy, often humiliating conversations, accidental encounters and outright pratfalls. By the end . . . well, that’s for you to guess.

You should not expect Ms James to have you on tenterhooks – her books are designed not for suspense but for comfort, of the sinking-into-a-mid-winter-bubble-bath-at-the-end-of-a-hard-day variety. Her knack for creating Manichaean, hero/villain dichotomies among her characters turns what would otherwise be a weakness – two-dimensionality – into a virtue, enabling her to set up climactic, life-changing events that allow every member of the cast, whether lead or supporting, to receive his just deserts.

The title refers to the promises made to themselves by the main characters: by the put-upon house-cleaner and wife, Maggie Storm, to stick up for herself when her sloth-like husband demands another beer or his comically vile mother hoves into view; by the decorator Ella Moore, who swears off unwise emotional attachments after a seven-year relationship founders in the face of unconquerable hostility from her widowed boyfriend’s teenage daughter; and by Ethan Edwards, a serial philanderer who is really a nice chap underneath it all and is ripe for rescue and redemption at the hands of the right woman (there is a subtle strain of feminism running through James’ work).

Maggie, Ella and Ethan all bear sufficient resemblance to real people to be plausible, and James adds heat, flavour and amusing absurdity with Brenda, the aforementioned mother-in-law and mistress of Evil Sid, the carnivorous canine who plays an unwitting role in the liberation of Maggie; Francine and Valentina, Ethan’s grasping wife and daughter; and Ella’s former de facto stepchildren, Toby and Alexis.

The gist of Promises, Promises is easily gleaned from the cover blurb; the value in reading it lies in its reliable provision of light diversion, much as a tea-and-chocolate break gives respite during an afternoon’s work. Fifteen novels in, Erica James remains on form.

2.5 / 5 stars: Brain candy.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens

Few matters of great political or cultural import have escaped the lacerating gaze of journalist, columnist and author Christopher Hitchens over the past four decades. British-born and Oxford-educated, and now a United States citizen, Hitchens has worked as a foreign correspondent and contributor to publications including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair and Slate, in between producing 11 books (on Thomas Jefferson, Mother Teresa and atheism, among other topics).

His turn of phrase is rightly legendary. He once described Mother Teresa as a “thieving tyrannical Albanian dwarf”, and he is no kinder to the objects of his contempt and dislike in his memoir. His account of a meeting with Argentina’s murderous General Videla is one of Hitch-22’s finest passages: “I possess a picture of the encounter that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer . . . Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush.”

Hitch, as he is called by those who know him, writes lovingly, almost romantically, of his dear friends the writers Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Peter Fenton – whole chapters are titled ‘Martin’, ‘Salman’, ‘The Fenton Factor’, and the book is dedicated to Fenton.

Though there is no suggestion that any of the friendships have been more than platonic, Hitchens is frank about the commonplace nature of homosexual encounters in British boarding schools, and his own participation in such adventures, having been dispatched to prep school at the age of eight: “The three great subjects of Beating, Bullying and Buggery are familiar enough to me in their way . . . “, and of the latter, “[t]he unstated excuse was that this was what one did until the so-far unattainable girls became available.” In the end, though, Hitchens concludes that the entire schooling experience was emancipatory, and in fact, the whole book, with one notable exception, is suffused with a sense of his appreciation of life.

Parts of the book are somewhat sluggish – I could have done without quite such an exhaustive recollection of his worthy experiences as a young political activist in Europe and Cuba – and the level of detail in relation to his public life, and his friendships, serves to highlight what is starkly absent from Hitch-22: any account of his relationships with his first wife or his current wife, the writer Carol Blue, or with his three children from the marriages. He explains this away, rather weakly, in a preface, where he notes that he can claim copyright only in himself, so as to imply that he lacks the right to share his family’s stories. But then, he calls it a memoir rather than an autobiography, so fair play.

(In a cogent review in the Guardian, Blake Morrison points out that Hitchens’ objective is intellectual historiography rather than emotional catharsis, which I think is on the money. He has never been one to talk about feelings.)

One aspect of his private life from which he doesn’t flinch is the suicide of his mother, Yvonne, when he was 24 (the aforementioned exception). It occurred as the result of a pact with her lover, with whom she had fled to Greece after the breakdown of her marriage to Hitchens senior, a Royal Navy man referred to by his son as The Commander. In the opening chapter, which bears her name, he movingly describes his last conversation with her and his journey to Athens to deal with the aftermath of her death. Characteristically, this is followed by an intellectual examination: ‘A Coda on Self-Slaughter.’

All beloved Hitchens topics are canvassed – atheism, God, Islam, his conversion from Trotskyism to conservatism, his support for the Iraq War, the Jewish Question – in service of a text that, depending on the depth of your existing knowledge of Hitchens may not greatly enlighten you as to the man, but will certainly leave you more informed than you found it.

4.5 / 5 stars: A rich romp through the mind and memories of one of the intellectual heavyweights of our time.

Note:

There is a sad addendum to the publication of Hitch-22: while on tour in the United States in June to promote the book, Hitchens fell seriously ill and was shortly after diagnosed with oesophageal cancer – the same disease that claimed his father’s life. In subsequent interviews, and in this extraordinary piece on vf.com, Hitchens has indicated his condition is terminal, though he may have up to five years to live. There is no sign that he feels sorry for himself, though; he said in an August interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper that his long-time heavy smoking and drinking – the cover of my copy of Hitch-22 features a close-up photo of the author mid-cigarette – made him a “candidate”. On a lighter note, he instructed Cooper to disbelieve any rumours he might hear of deathbed conversions.

The Search by Nora Roberts

The Search is the latest output of a woman at the height of her considerable powers, the greatest of which must be her ability to just write. By the criteria of commercial success (400 million books in print) and sheer productivity (The Search is one of six books she will publish this year, in addition to the 165-plus she has written since 1979), Nora Roberts is practically matchless. What’s more, while the likes of hyper-prolific James Patterson are abetted by factories of minions, Roberts appears to do it all by herself.

And what does she do? In this case, tells an erudite and compelling story that is surprisingly neat; it is unusual to find a drama-thriller of nearly 500 pages that could not have done with a little fat trimmed, but in the case of The Search, any downtime in the plot, such as a mid-point visit to a spa retreat by the heroine and her girlfriends, is used to add emotional heft, and is the one of the reasons the book succeeds.

This heroine is Fiona Bristow, and the descriptor is accurate in more than a literary sense. Eight years before the start of the book, she was the only one of a dozen women to escape from the clutches of a serial killer nicknamed the Red Scarf Killer. The offender, George Perry, was eventually incarcerated, but not before taking his revenge on Fiona by murdering her policeman fiance.

Fiona has since retreated to Orcas Island, a remote area in the US northwest. At 29, she lives a quiet life, running a canine rescue centre that tracks dogs to train missing persons, and teaching classes to domestic dog owners on the side. She has a close-knit group of friends and a great bond with and passion for animals, but a subterranean wound festers in her inner life, and with two events – the emergence of an apparent RSK copycat killer, and the arrival of an enigmatic, eligible furniture-maker – the wound is suddenly exposed.

Fiona first encounters the bachelor craftsman, Simon Doyle, when he brings his puppy for training. The pair’s initial mutual distrust, followed by will-they-won’t-they tension, adds a frisson to the first half of the book and pays dividends in the second, as the suspense, both emotional and criminal, is ratcheted up. (On a side note, Roberts does the notoriously tricky literary sex scene rather well.)

Roberts expends substantial creative energy on luring us into Fiona’s world, and when a writer has the skill to make her readers care about her invented populace as much as she does, she must have a similar facility with plotting, or it’s all for nought.

Happily, Roberts has this in spades. That there will be some kind of showdown involving Fiona, Perry and the mystery killer seems likely, and what does happen is both unexpected and immensely satisfying. The Search, peopled as it is with slightly eccentric figures, is absorbing not only for its storyline but also the relationships that form and deepen.

Roberts reportedly does much of her research via the internet due to a great aversion to flying; that she may never have been to Washington or spent time with K-9 squads is undetectable. The level of detail and deftness of touch are to be savoured. In Fiona and her creator, two masters are at work.

4/5 Stars: A classic page-turner, and one for dog-lovers.  Click here to view more Easy Mix book reviews.

My Name is Memory by Ann Brashares

The rather lovely notion of enduring passion across many lifetimes is at the centre of My Name is Memory, the seventh novel by Ann Brashares, perhaps best-known as the author of the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants series for young adults. 

This new book is her second in the adult fiction genre, after 2007’s The Last Summer (of You and Me), and, clearly emboldened by her earlier successful renderings of the torment and complexity of teenagehood, she introduces her two main characters, Daniel and Lucy, as they experience a profound connection that comes to a climax at a high school ball.

The encounter, as fleeting as it is dramatic, leaves both Lucy and the reader baffled: who is Daniel and where did he come from? Why does he insist on calling Lucy ‘Sophia’? How can she be so drawn to someone she doesn’t even know?

Answers start to emerge in the following chapter, when the action jumps from present-day United States to North Africa in 541, and the tense from the third person to the first, with the narrator musing: “I was first born to the north of the city that was then called Antioch . . . I consider it my first life . . . I guess it’s possible that I’ve lived lives before that.”

This faltering voice belongs to Daniel, who has lived dozens of lives in succession and can remember them all. (The possibility that reincarnation is very common and that only the individual’s awareness of it is unusual is alluded to by Brashares but regrettably not fully explored.)

It is in this first life that he meets Lucy, then a nameless young girl who disappears inside a burning house that Daniel has torched in battle. Tormented, he searches for her down the centuries, finding her, in different women, in 700s Asia Minor and in England in the shadow of World War I. But how to engage Lucy’s memory of Daniel’s role in her previous lives, and what – or who – will intervene to thwart their love?

Aspects of My Name is Memory are reminiscent of Geraldine Brooks’ remarkable 2008 novel People of the Book, which tracked not a love affair but the journey of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book, through centuries of European unrest.

Brashares’ tale, hinging as it does on character rather than setting, is neither as well-researched nor as meticulously detailed as Brooks’, but both writers have a knack for moving swiftly through time and from place to place without discombobulating the reader. Considering Brashares’ action can leap from 2006 Virginia to the coast of Crete in 899 in the course of two chapters, it’s an admirable feat.

That said, if you’ve had any more than a glancing encounter with Audrey Niffenegger’s megaselling The Time Traveller’s Wife, it will occur to you, within a handful of pages, that Brashares is either unabashedly ripping Niffenegger off or out to prove she can do it better.

For this and other reasons – the pure romanticism, the dastardly villain standing in the way of true love – Brashares’ storyline will be familiar in a favourite-blanket sort of way. It’s nothing out of the comfort zone, but good to spend some time with – and proves a surprisingly tender read that is best undertaken in a minimum of sittings. 

3 / 5 stars: The seven ages of man’s yearning.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

After the Party by Lisa Jewell

What a relationship looks like after 11 years and two small children is the subject of British writer Lisa Jewell’s unexpectedly moving new novel, After the Party.

Ralph and Jem meet as flatmates in a romantic London hovel; they fall in love at an art gallery in Ladbroke Grove when Ralph, an artist, unveils an exhibition of which the subject is Jem. As Jewell writes, Jem takes one look at the paintings, another look at Smith, Ralph’s friend and her erstwhile boyfriend (who is at that moment drunkenly proclaiming his love to a different, entirely uninterested woman), and promptly and passionately collapses into Ralph’s arms.

What follows is seven years of unrelenting bliss. They move from the flat to a house, have thriving careers and luxuriate in lie-ins and champagne-fuelled picnics in Battersea Park. Then Jem, approaching 32, decides she wants a baby. She has always desired a family; Ralph doesn’t see the need to add another person to their harmonious existence and proceeds with reluctance. The five childbearing years which ensue strain the relationship, with Jem suffering miscarriages before and between the births of Scarlett and Blake, and Ralph failing to bond with his infant son.

The book is cleverly structured, not following a linear form but opening with a prologue detailing Ralph and Jem’s separation and shared custody of the children – they spend the first half of the week with their mother and the second with their father. When Ralph fails to pick them up for his allotted three days, Jem knows something is wrong, and his vague explanation and subsequent disappearance heightens her concerns.

Part one (of four) begins one year earlier, as the relationship is disintegrating.  Panicked by Jem’s apparent disinterest in him, Ralph decides to go to California for a week to visit Smith. There, he meets a captivating Australian named Rosey, while back in London, Jem finds herself drawn to Joel, the solo dad of Scarlett’s friend. The week apart initially tightens the family unit, but the emotional distance remains, and when a plausibly unexpected and problematic event occurs, the couple’s foundations are shaken perhaps beyond recovery.

Clearly it’s ‘chick-lit’ (an annoyingly reductive categorization), but whether you consider that a selling point or an alarm bell, Jewell’s writing is artful and confident, elevating her story far above the mundane.

The tale’s focus is Ralph and Jem’s relationship, so the character development of the peripheral figures is less than robust; Smith, Rosey, Joel, Jem’s sister Lulu and others are ciphers designed to move the plot at breakneck pace towards a satisfying and thoughtful conclusion. (Though any one of these characters would make an engaging protagonist; Jewell has a knack for exposing the more intriguing elements of the human personality in a few paragraphs.)

After the Party is a sequel to the first of Jewell’s seven novels, Ralph’s Party, which covers the eventful period preceding Ralph and Jem’s coupling. It’s an intimate, cogent depiction of how a stable, loving relationship can start to fragment – and how people might behave in the face of this and amid the vicissitudes of life.

Jewell writes in the preface to After the Party that faithful readers’ excitement at the prospect of a sequel both spurred her on and terrified her, and she hopes she hasn’t let them down. On the contrary: this will win her many new fans.

3 / 5 Stars: The perfect mix of levity and sobriety. Click here to view other Easy Mix book reviews.

Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig

A novel which examines contemporary life in a churning, teeming city with a complete absence of judgement is a rare thing. Even rarer is one which tells us something new about how we live now.

Hearts and Minds is ambitious, not least because Amanda Craig devotes equal space to five main characters in today’s London: Polly, a divorced human-rights lawyer and mother of two; Job, an illegal Zimbabwean immigrant working as a cab driver and car detailer; Anna, a 15-year-old Ukrainian prostitute; Katie, a young American working at a prominent magazine; and Ian, a South African teaching at a dysfunctional inner-city school.

The novel opens with the dumping of the body of an unknown woman in a pond on Hampstead Heath. Who the woman is, how she is connected to the other characters and how the five eventually meet each is the novel’s ostensible plot, and it is sharply rendered.

However, what makes Hearts and Minds one of the most exceptional contemporary novels of the past year is the clear-eyed, quiet pathos with which Craig tells her tale. At moments it feels like five books in one, with each the record of a person being drawn, steadily and almost magnetically, to those who will change their existence.

It is the connections formed between the characters that tells us who each one is. Polly, who has just ridden in Job’s cab, is caught out by the sudden departure of her nanny, Iryna, and needs someone to ferry herself and her young son around. She calls him back and, over hours together in a car, the two forge an unexpected bond.

Katie, bereft after breaking up with her fiance, is afforded by her solitude the chance to become the saviour of another character. Other encounters are fleeting and unrealized: Polly nearly runs down Ian, cycling in Hampstead; Job and Polly never know how closely they are tied to Anna.

Hearts and Minds is the sixth novel by Craig, a long-time reviewer and broadcaster and the children’s book critic for The Times. She says on her website that the seed of the novel was planted in 2001, when she began to notice just how many people in her daily London life were immigrants, from the cab drivers to the local café waitresses and the drycleaner – and started to consider whether they were legal or illegal, happy or unhappy, what had brought them to where they were.

The novel, intended for publication in 2004, was delayed by Craig’s serious health problems, and all the operations she required were performed by first or second generation immigrants, in hospitals in which she was nursed by women from all over the world. For a time after her hospital stay she was cared for by a series of au pairs from eastern Europe.

Craig’s experience is reflected in her work: there are conversations, recollections and musings that are so authentically depicted they could only have come from real life. As she says, the au pairs had fascinating stories to tell of war, ambition, misery and triumph over adversity. Craig has paid close attention to what she has been told, and has rewarded their faith with a novel filled with compassion and devoid of sentimentality.

It is not an easy read: there are scenes, particularly some involving Anna, that will make you wince. But, though the story begins with five people in varying states of fear and misery, it ends rather differently. What is in between is remarkable.

4 / 5 stars: One for the 2010 top 10 list.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.