John's January Staff Picks

Holiday reading is the best reading. You have time to read for hours at a stretch, a luxury that you promise yourself you will reproduce on weekends during the year but never do. You have so much time that you can indulge in re-reading the book you have just finished, which I did with Departures by Julian Barnes. A real luxury.

Many writers will be cross at Helen Bain for coming up with this idea for a novel. The Daffodil Days views the marriage of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes through the eyes of those around them. Each chapter is a fully realised world with characters who exist on their own and have more important things to worry about than Sylvia and Ted, but the poets feature anyway. The cleaner has her opinion, as does Sylvia’s doctor. The girl in the dress shop has a brief encounter that colours her views. This very clever approach reads like a book of loosely linked short stories. A thought provoking read.

Lost Lambs centres on the dysfunctional Flynn family, Bud, Catherine and their three unforgettable daughters, Harper, Louise and Abigail, and author Madeline Cash embodies each in their turn, indulging us with rich, abundant, ornate, full-bodied vignettes building a baroque picture of the family and the town in which they live. It is delicious, moreish stuff that sustains the novel and us as it builds momentum. Great fun.

If you are a fan of Julian Barnes you won’t need me to convince you to order Departures, his self-proclaimed last novel. Fans tend to snap up everything he writes, and with good reason, he consistently delivers brilliant work. And Departures, which muddies the water between fact and fiction, is no exception to that rule. If you loved his devastating Levels of Life, you will love this. And so will those who have only read his Booker Prize winning, The Sense of an Ending, or his seductive The Only Story. Departures was a highlight of my holiday reading. I read it twice.

Last year I luxuriated in George Saunder’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, his mesmerising stroll through a handful of Russia’s greatest short stories. We would read a story and then he would pull it apart and look at all the parts and tell why they were needed and what they did. He knows everything that matters about writing. So it isn’t surprising that his latest novel, Vigil, exalts in his mastery of the form, pirouetting, leaping and playfully defying our expectations as it brings an axe to the selfish greed of our age.

I have now read Exit Strategy and it reminded me of some of the early Jack Reacher novels. All the best elements of the most memorable Reacher novels were present: low life scum bad guys, successful mid range bad guys and bad guys so far up the chain as to be untouchable. Add in a few likeable ex military helpers, lashing of logistical details, an impregnable bad guy fortress, sudden eruptions of extreme unarmed Reacher violence and a knotty, layered plot and you have a book to keep you reading on a long flight, or through the night, or by the pool. Go get yourself a copy with confidence.