A small, perfecly formed little masterpiece. Pure wonder. 

'He was a bastard, but she loved him.' That was the first parody of romance fiction I ever encountered, and I'm not sure I understood it until I read the Lymond Chronicles, and I certainly wouldn't have bothered if I hadn't read Niccolo first. Because Lymond is a supreme bastard, a villain, a traitor, a rogue, with a tongue like a flaying knife and utterly unremitting and remorseless. Or is he? Well, yes, but in service to a greater strategy which Dunnett unfolds, move by move, in this, her extraordinary first novel, a brilliant, occasionally clumsy, (but clumsy in way that would make experienced novelists green with envy) rigorously intelligent examination of a brilliant soul under severe duress and inflicting pressures and complications on people who he desires to protect, in his almost ridiculously backhanded way, or who come under, or place themselves under, his influence. Dunnett's skills and subtelties only get more impressive as she develops as a writer, but everything that follows is influenced by the introduction of the magnificent batsard who, despite everything, we come to love.

In a fictionalised New York the twin pains of the Depression and Prohibition are making life dreary and difficult. Someone, however, is pumping beer to the mouths of the thirsty, which is all very well until one of the pipes is discovered. A rich, vibrant, hilarious period comedy, with hints of darkness round the edges. A pure joy of a read. 

Bloody murders, an esoteric society, a haunted medium, a credulous lady, a reluctant archivist in a house full of people that it, the house, absolutely loathes, though only the archivist seems to be aware of that. 

An extremely racist boxing match is arranged for the day of the catastrophic Galvestown Flood. The white boxer, as loathesome a piece of work as ever appeared in a Lansdale book, is supposed to kill the black boxer. Also, everybdy has lots of sex, some in healthier and less toxic ways than others. Actually, no, most of it is nasty and toxic. Meanwhile, out on the Gulf, a storm is building the likes of which has never been seen before. The waters start to rise, people start to get nervous, but the boxing match must go ahead. 

Lansdale's deliberately rough and raw storytelling is matched by the savagry of the storm. The ending is gutwrenching, but Lansdale's a master, so it's also unexpectedly moving. Still one of his most memorable works. 

Simonides the poet and singer, born ill-favoured enough totempt his parents to exposing him, grows up with a love f poetry and song and manages to become aprenticed to a wandering poet, embarking on a journey around the Greek Isles, encountering other poets, athletes, Tyrants, warriors, and is on the sidelines of dramatic and bloody events. It's written with Renault's usual piercing beauty and rich powers of description and characterisation, while occasionaly drenching the whole thing in homoeroticism. It even has a well-developed female character, unusual for Renault's historical books. A lovely read. 

The definitive mole-hunt of spy literature, a procedural whodunnit mystery as Smiley threads the grubby Whitehall labyrinth of the Circus in search of the elusive Gerald and an unthinkable betrayal. Superbly contructed, intrictately plotted, filled with memorable characters, and proof that you can generate suspense and tension and grip readers in a vice through scenes of people having conversations 

1991 and in Russia the Mafia wars are about to kick off. The son of an old-school boss with a kind of code of honour falls in love with the daughter of a Jewish boss, just as they start to clash. The cops are on the case, but the cops have decided the best thing to do is to help them kill each other. It's hard to see this nasty brutal world as romantic, but Littell melds the mob thriller to the model of a classic tragic romance, because by comparison with what's coming, it's all puppies and fluffy clouds. Reminds me of Jack Womack's Let's Put The Future Behind Us - the end of an era that by no means can be looked on with nostalgia - except in comparison to the things that follow. 

I first read this book on the Irish ferry taking me to Wales for a slightly traumatising summer working as a waiter in a Butlin's holiday camp in the early 90s. It wasn't all bad - it was the summer of an absolutely debilitating London-melting heatwave, and you could hike u to a fairly nice dune-lined beach and watch a pod of dolphins splash around in the distance. Also the fudge was exceptional Still, it wasn't until I read Anno Dracula that I suddenly became a Newman fan, and in all the fuss and bother and angst this kind of passed me by. 

I read a Tom Clancy that summer, too. Clear And Present Danger maybe? Clancy could write fairly riveting international techno-thrillers, but it probably helped that I was extremely callow and ignorant of international politics but it was good and chunky and not very challengingI reread some Douglas Adams, too, and that was when the phrase 'Eddie's in the time stream' started echoing in my brain as I wandered through the mazes of bright yellow chalets wondering what to do about getting showers in the swimming pool now thay my towel had been stolen. I also finally, finally got my hands on the collected V For Vendetta, the culmination of years of obsession after finding a few issues of Warrior inexplicably in some department store in Limerick, and I read most of it in the dunes in bright sunshine while dolphins frolicked in the bay. Anyway.

Of course this anticipates the world of Anno Dracula with its setting of a world where every film noir ever made co-exists side by sde in a city where it's always 2.30am and it's always raining. It's a virtual world - this is cyberpunk! - created by a master villain using it as an escape from prison and a means of subverting and taking over the benign AI that runs the world, Yggdrasil. Two Dreamers - artists adept at creating stories and settings in such environments - are sent in after him, the second after the first gets completely absorbed by his noir Humphrey Bogart-esque persona. Whatever else about the book, I never forgot the discussion about which female persona the second Dreamer should adopt, all the standard female characters being too useless or meeting grisly ends that would be forced on her by the conventions and rules of noir that prevailed in the City. Newman as never been unaware of the limitations of the fictions he clearly loves. I'd forgotten the truly ghastly bit where a black character turns up, just in case you thought women had it bad in the genre.

The battle for supremacy in the City commences, through plots and settings and involving characters from decades of black and white crime films all jostling around in the background when they're not getting in everyobody's way, and occasional intrusions from other genres as characters try to change the rules and assert control. There's even a terrific inevitable car chase before the climax and a twist reveal. It's really great and I enjoyed revising it, traumatic associations and all. The audio book I listened to includes four extra short stories, two of them from the same setting, though they'll probably be familiar to regular Newman readers. 

Stonkingly good psychological thriller which manages to conceal its damage and its gothic undertones beneath a slick, witty narrative voice, so that what begins as a serial killer chiller turns into a portrait of family at its most malignant.

Camille Preaker is a second-rate reporter at a second-rate Chicago newspaper. After a second girl goes missing in her old hometown of Wind Gap she is sent to investigate and finds herself living with her mother, step-father and half-sister. The second girl turns up dead and Camille and a special investigator from Kansas City begin to peel back a little bit of Wind Gap's facade. Her relationship with her mother brings ugly psychological problems to the surface, many of them tied up with the death of a younger sister twenty years before. But Camille has more scars than she is willing to show, and even as she is deeply troubled by the behaviour of her young half-sister, cracks begin to appear in the surface of her own psyche and she springs more than one shock on the hapless reader before the truth begins to emerge.

A terrifically readable book, for all its shocks and disturbances. It's not terribly gruesome by the standards of this sort of thing, but for what it lacks in blood it makes up for in vomit. Don't let that put you off. After the first thirty pages or so, I couldn't put the book down. Riveting.