In the Appalachian mountains, a man lies down to sleep and doesn't wake up. He isn't dead yet, but he isn't far off. A handwritten letter instructs his four surviving sons to build a coffin out of rosewood and bury him on the land. With their wives and partners in tow, they set to, but there are tragedies all around them. The ghost of a young girl whose bones are delivered to them in a rosewood box. The slow death of a way of life as a land speculator schemes and manipulates to drive people out of their homes. As the sons struggle to come to terms with their father's impending demise, more death lies in wait.

'More death lies in wait.' Heh, that's melodramatic, and accurate, but this isn't a melodramatic book, for all its gothic and thriller elements. The narrative hearkens back to the previous century, as one lot of people face disruption and displacement, to the present of the book, when another lot of people face the same. The latter-day land-grab may not be as bloody, but it is still protracted, painful and rife with injustice. McCrumb builds to a final, heartbreaking, suspense-filled climax in a setting haunted by ghosts and secrets and terrible tragedies.

Hackberry Holland roars through Mexico searching for his estranged sun, killing and sort of wisecracking and making friends in his inimitable way. He sets fire to a hearse full of guns but not before relieving it of a curious religious artifact. There's an Austrian arms dealer who wants it back, but meanwhile Hack's son goes to war and his wife and his ex-sweetheart - no the same person - and a bordello madame he met in Mexico are all on a kind of collision course, a frantic tug-of-war over the injured and disoriented son, and this is quite possibly the maddest Burke I've ever read, probably because the character of Hackberry lends himself to demented and violent and highly illogical adventures with rumbling spiritual undertones. It's quite the romp, actually, though full of familiar Burkisms of tortured macho souls driven by demons but hoping for redemption, trying to do the right thing almost always the wrong way. Satisfying stuff.

I've always had a hard time engaging with Ireland as a subject for fiction. It's like a teenager being embarrassed by their Dad, even though they love their Dad they can't stand to see him up in front of everyone carrying on and expecting people to take him seriously. So maybe I'm finally out of that difficult teenage phase once and for all.

This is pure brilliant.

Dominick MacMahon and his two children and a priest flee the Cromwellian massacre of Drogheda. There is as much horror and brutality ahead of them as their is behind - can they find a place to live without fear? The soldier Murdoc who Dominick saves twice might be able to provide it for them, but he may have to sell his very soul to the devil to do it - the repulsive Coote, ruler of Connaught.

The oddest thing about this wonderful book is the presence of Sebastian, the priest. Such a saintly figure should rankle a bit, yet it's possible to detect ambiguity under the surface of his depiction. It's hard for many modern Irish readers not to view Catholicism as a malignant force in Irish history, yet so welded to the Irish identity and clung to so strongly by the oppressed masses (while all the time the Spanish Inquisition is merrily doing its thing.) So when Sebastian starts to preach - particularly his denouncing Murdoc and Columba - it's natural to despise him from our point of view. And yet Sebastian is a saintly man, full of love and kindness, and he himself is not giving the people anything they do not desperately crave. He embodies the courage of the type as well as the subtle, corrupting, oppressive misogyny and conservatism. Isn't that just like us, as more than one character notes of the Irish temperament through the book.

Anyway, this is written at a level close to perfection, whether it is describing people or places or psychological states or brutal horrors. it is a big tale of small people surviving wretched misery and nightmare, but its achievement as a novel and its humanity transcends the degradations of its subject. A classic for a reason.

The second half of the brightly-coloured future noir world that has obsessively embraced privacy, and the difficulties of being a PI in a society where everyone wears masks. Our heroes' quest for a killer has lead him to a conspiracy to bring back, of all things, Internet. Murder and mayhem and pointed commentary on whether a hyper-private or a hyper-public world will end up making everybody more self-obsessed and generally useless. Fabulous art, sharp writing, and a brilliant climax. Good stuff.

And, so, finally, for me at least, the world of Gormenghast. The great gothic fantasy of Dickensian characters, vast engines of ritual and excitable melodrama and amazing names. The first thing is the writing. Words upon words upon words like brick upon brick. Sentences wringing imagery out of language, constructing the inconceivable, brooding edifice, the endless twisting warrens and halls and rooms, the towers and battlements and crenelations. Painting huges canvases of coloured landscapes and twisted psychology. Sketching visions of characters and poses and attitudes and physical features animate and inanimate. Digging deeper and deeper into the constructions of stone and mind and habit and tradition and loyalty and rebellion and madness. Because there is a story here, oh yes, scurrying between the piling thunderheads of paragraphs looming through the pages are the tiny figures, the little mechanisms that are part of the living machinery in the great dead thing that rules them. Steerpike, the upstart boy who flees the kitchen on the day of the birth of the next Earl of Gormenghast, who, through physical effort and starvation grasps at every slender advantage and uses it to haul himself up and up through the ossified social strata. He's no sympathetic lower-class rebel though, overthrowing tyranny, but a brutal, manipulative sociopath who wishes to rule. So he plots and plans and arranges his calamities and shakes the deeply insular world to its foundations, and so, climbs higher and higher.

What an incredible achievement. What a vision. Executed with a kind of sprawling, passionate precision. There is the enormity of the castle, and the tiny, banal, domestic lives, but each life is sculpted in features at least odd and often bizarre, from the depressed Earl and the somnolent Duchess and the emotionally incontinent daughter and the the tittering Doctor and the angular retainer. But the Earl's depression is kept at bay by ossified ritual, not caused by them. The distracted Duchess conceals one of the most powerful and formidable characters in the whole trilogy. The daughter's heart is true and good, if confused and starved of parental affection. the Doctor's mind is fine and decent. Melodrama rages through their lives. Comic and satirical; deadly and brutal; strange and heartbreaking, from our first visit to the Hall of bright Carvings in Titus Groan to the astonishing climactic flood of Gormenghast, their lives are small but enacted on a stage that dwarfs opera.

Then there is the third book, that orphan, that outcast, that shredded thing of intermittent brilliance. Half-formed, half-baked, a series of sketches and interludes and abrupt transitions in search of coherence, with a hero whose only heroic quality is his insistence of his lineage and the existence of his home, utterly unknown in the city, where he drifts into haphazard adventure, where he is saved and rescued over and over again by others, never himself, where he is haunted and tormented by Gormenghast at first psychologically and at the end literally in a cruel theatre of revenge for motives that are underdeveloped like so much else in the book. It would have been a difficult book to write at the height of the author's powers - to either find a unity or make proper thematic use of the disunity. Sadly, Peake was not at that height. One senses that it conveys a particularly callow and chaotic stage of Titus' development, and wonders what he would have grown into given the chance.

The first two books are works of genius. The third is that of a genius in decline, but still capable of moments of brilliance. Perhaps we should express dissatisfaction at this, or perhaps we should forgive. I do not think people who read the first two should neglect the third. What it lacks as a novel, it makes up for in the poignancy of its failure.

It all starts with an old woman cutting a chicken's throat on St Martin's Eve, Bleeding for St Martin. Fromthere we take an extended journey through memory and history, myth and superstition, the mix of pagan and Christian that informs the impoverished hardscrabble rural life that was going into decline as the author grew to manhood. There so much here, from the arts and crafts of rural life centring around the major points of the agricultural year, to stories of saints and kings and fairies and rogues, to nostalgic memories of Christmas and Halloween and packages from America, to building roads or hay ricks or drying oats, to Mummers and Wren Boys, poitin makers and about a hundred ghosts. A poetic meditation on the wealth of life-lore in a small poor community tinged with regret for everything lost. This is a rich treasure trove of a book and I do not want to send it back to the library I want to keep it as a reference on my desk. Invaluable.

Johannes Kepler wants to unite the heavens in a glorious mathematical and astronomical harmony, and he has the genius to do that very thing. Everything else about his life is out of tune, from his own abrasive personality to his marriage and his religion, as well as his reliance on wealthy patrons to fund his scientific endeavours and with whom he is always at odds or out of step.

I think Banville's books are less about either the explicated sciences or the accurate biographies of these men, but about their hidden inner lives as they grapple with the huge questions of the universe and discover that they can gain knowledge but not meaning or understanding, and they are forced to question the worth of this undertaking when set against the banal vicissitudes of life and the looming certainty of death.

Superb novel, a sequel of sorts to the Arthur Trilogy, following the adventures of Gatty, Arthur's earthy, spirited field-worker friend as she is taken on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. A coming of age tale as she blossoms into maturity, learning to read, write and sing, this is a marvelous story, stirring and sad, full of pageantry and colour, ultimately heart-warming.