In Depth:  Sarah Allen

\u2018You put together two things that have not been together before. And the world is changed\u2026\u2019

It is 1910. The snow is falling thickly, preventing Dr. Fellowes from attending Sibyl Todd who is in labour with her third child. The baby is delivered dead with the cord around its neck.

What would they have to change? Friends? Career? What they watch or read? How would you help them make those decisions?

Ask a teenager what they are reading and, if they are, it will no doubt be something online.

This is an easy read by an accomplished writer.

Rachel Joyce has written radio-dramas for a number of years and it shows in her writing. She can hold her audience, create character and twist a plot.

Mabel and Jack are establishing a farm in the frozen wastes of Alaska, seeking relief from the pain of their childlessness.

Barry Fairbrother has died suddenly, and so a casual vacancy arises on picturesque Pagford’s Parish Council.

I was not surprised at all that this won the Booker prize. It is a fascinating and utterly convincing story, retelling the nine months leading up to the execution of Anne Boleyn. I’ve started rereading and find it even better a second time. If you can, try to read Wolf Hall first to understand better the rise of Thomas Cromwell, whose story this is.

This is a polemical book, unashamedly left wing, written in a sharp journalistic style, which quotes freely from other journalism, TV shows and politicians.

In the East End of London at some time during the 19th century, an eight-year-old boy met a Bengal tiger in the street and stroked its nose.

If you don’t normally read my column, then you are exactly the person who should be reading this book.

The cover of this book is bright and immediate, grabbing the attention with strong colours and simple lines, and in many ways the cover style reflects the contents.

This book, whose opening sentence begins ‘I remember’, pulls the reader into a world of memory and history.

Never again will I believe an iota of the critical quotes on a book’s cover.

Rejected by some now as saccharine and sentimental or offering a restrictive view of women, it is cherished by many more who recognise the realism, humour and integrity of Alcott’s work.

Christine had a traumatic accident when she was 29 and lost her memory.

I haven’t read anything like this book for years.

Although popular and now made into a film, it had completely passed me by, perhaps because of my taste for history, subtlety and domesticity; The Road is as far removed from that as can possibly be. It is a dystopian view of a post-holocaust world, raw and gut-wrenching, written in striking prose.

It seems a bit lazy to recommend a book which is out of print and over 15 years old.

Please don’t write and complain about this review! I am not commending this book, or the rest of the Millennium Trilogy.

Contemporary writing, he says, apart from genre stories, has no need or place for the hero. In the last few months I have been reading and delighting in a book all about a hero. Admittedly it is a biography, not a novel, but I think my fascination proves Mr. Faulks wrong.

This is quite a tome of a book; doorstopper size and with the weight of the Orange Prize for Fiction behind it as well. It comes from an author of impeccable literary qualifications (more of which later), so I was really looking forward to reading it on what I anticipated would be a rather wet week in Scotland.

By Marilynne Robinson

BLOODY FOREIGNERS

My husband found this book for me in a book-end bargain shop; what a good discovery, deserving better attention than it seemed to have there.

Michael Beard, the protagonist of Solar, is a memorable creation: a philandering, greedy academic resting on his Nobel Prize reputation.

Jemimah, aged six, came home from school yesterday saying that she had done well at school because ‘I believed in myself’.

Philip is discovered hiding in the basement of what will become the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1895. He has run away from the Potteries with their poverty, disease and smoke with a desire to make something beautiful. He is discovered by other children and is drawn with the reader into the overwhelming and confusing world of middle-class Bohemia.

Dexter and Emma had a one-night stand on the last day of their university careers, July 15 1989. Emma is a working-class girl: earnest, hard-working and not a little chippy. Dexter is a public-school educated charmer who changes his girlfriends almost as often as he changes his sheets.

I guess we all know the story: Henry’s frustration and infatuation, the break with the Pope, Anne’s rise and fall. Wham, bam, England has turned Protestant in a rather inglorious way. Hilary Mantel has entered this tired territory and triumphed. Her 650-page novel relays the story from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, highlighting the detail of the period and offering a very sympathetic portrait of arguably the key figure in the break from Rome.

The black maid from the Southern US States seems a bit of a stereotype. From Gone with the Wind to Tom and Jerry, she is hardworking, plain speaking, loyal and overweight. Kathryn Stockett, a white writer, has written this well-plotted and entertaining story The Help about the reality behind this stereotype and the culture of the deep South.

Well over one million copies of The Lost Symbol were sold on its first day on the shelves. It looks set to follow The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons as a great money-spinner for Dan Brown.

‘Utterly haunting’, ‘profound and moving’, ‘exquisitely measured’, say the critics.

In this novel, Andrew Sharp is a grown up ‘Miss-kid’; he works as a GP in Leicester and comes from an illustrious line of (mostly medical) missionaries. He was brought up in Uganda where his parents established a hospital before Idi Amin’s rise to power. It’s no wonder then, that the protagonist of this, his first novel is a surgeon, the son of missionaries, brought up in Uganda.

I’m so not a tomorrow’s person. I’m hardly a today’s person; this book came out six years ago, and I’ve just got round to reading it! However, I am glad I did.

I’m afraid I stayed up far too late one night finishing this novel, partly because it was so compelling and partly because I knew that if I put it down unfinished I would be thoroughly distracted the next day thinking about the story until bedtime came around.

By James Cary

Daniel Everett travelled to the banks of an Amazon tributary as an SIL (Wycliffe Bible Translators) missionary in 1977. 30 years later he is still studying their language, but not as a Bible translator, instead he is an academic researcher. Everett’s time with the Piraha tribe has led to a revolution in linguistics and a personal revolution in his own life — he lost his faith and with it his family.

So another Indian writer has won the Man Booker Prize. Like the Booker judges, I’ve a keen appetite for Indian literature, though whether for the exotic ‘samosas and saris’ or the fresh writing I’m not quite sure.

By Thomas Hardy

Or a short history of delusions

This is not a work of fiction, though its title and dust jacket suggest as much. Instead, it is a brilliantly written examination of one of the 19th century’s most notorious murders.

This is not a new book, but, until a friend enthused about it, I had never heard of it or its author. Perhaps that’s to my shame; Sinclair Lewis published Babbitt in 1922, and a few years after was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature.

By Patricia Wood

I spoke to two friends this week about Alexander McCall Smith’s hugely successful series The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and discovered two completely opposing opinions.

By Irene Nemirovsky

WIVES AND DAUGHTERS

Here is a book narrated by Death. It’s a story about children in war, about loss and mortality, as well as the power of words. Wow! What more could an evangelical want?

HALF OF A YELLOW SUN

The Bookies were disappointed by the Booker Prize this year. They were expecting good old Ian McEwan or at least Lloyd Jones (no connection) to win, but instead a little-known Irish novelist took the prize.

She was Children’s Laureate for 2006/07, and her most famous creation must be Tracy Beaker, a series of books which has spun off into TV shows, a stage play and full length film, not to mention school bags, pencil cases, lunch boxes...

‘Book of the year’ is quite an accolade, and for a first time novelist it is an award which will mean an ongoing contract, a place in the best seller charts and a display in Waterstone’s window. The recipe? Well, take a lot of snow, mix in a 19th-century fur-trading post, some pretty tough women and a sprinkling of Native Americans, then carefully stir in a murder. Stef Penney has taken some dramatic ingredients for her first novel The Tenderness of Wolves and formed an ambitiously complex mystery out of them.

‘I guess I write about God because God is in our lives, whether we want him there or not.’ So said Brady Udall, author of The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, and in this, his first novel, he writes about providence, faith, and forgiveness.

By Jodi Picoult

By Andrew Marr

Science fiction is a genre I would normally associate with outlandish goings on, strange beings and lots of technology; definitely not my cup of tea. But in some ways you would have to put Never Let Me Go in a science fiction category, because it deals with an alternative vision of Britain, a present day in which science has travelled down a different route and allowed the production of human clones.

It is not surprising really. William Grimshaw, the hugely passionate and effective curate of Haworth only died in 1763 (do read Faith Cook’s brilliant biography), and Patrick Bronte, father of Emily, Anne and Charlotte, took up the job in 1820. Patrick has been called an evangelical and their aunt, who looked after the family when their mother died, was known for her ‘Wesleyan tendencies’. This influence, combined with the romanticism of the period, the wild beauty of the moors and repeated bereavement in the family go a long way to explaining the tensions found within the Brontes’ works.

Ali writes well, her opening is striking as she describes her mother’s and grandmother’s upbringing in nomadic clans in Somalia. Life is harsh and honour-based, Islam a mere veneer on ancient animistic culture.

For those of you who have not heard the name, then may I introduce you to the foremost children’s writer of our age? He has published over 100 works since the mid 70s, has won all the prizes available for children’s literature, been Children’s Laureate (from 2003-5) had works made into major films and presented a brilliant series, The Invention of Childhood on Radio Four. He and his wife also run a charity Farms For City Children. It is certainly difficult to be critical of the hard working fellow.

When so many of the world’s Christians are living as a despised and persecuted minority, and when the media at large has little concern to comment on their fate, it is good to find a novel which brings the horrors of an oppressive, persecuting regime to our attention.

Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize in October with this, her second startling and engaging novel. I’m not surprised that she won; this is a fantastic novel, full of intelligence, emotional reality and beautiful writing.

Imagine your widowed 84-year-old father takes up with a blonde Ukrainian in her 30s. She wants a visa and he wants female company. How do you react? Horror? Indignation? Compassion? This wackily titled novel takes this scenario and develops it with humour and insight.

This book has received such plaudits already that it scarcely needs me to add my praise. It has been called ‘dazzling’, ‘remarkable’ and ‘brilliant’ (lots of times), and it is all those things. But I think Saturday is especially important because of what it tells us about our world, the warning it gives us Christians.

I guess you don’t try to get to sleep at night by popping bubble wrap. Alice Chaplin, John O’Farrell’s main character in May Contain Nuts does.

I promise that this will be the last American novel I review for a while, as the column has become rather US-dominated recently. But Gilead is worth our staying across the Atlantic for another month!

BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWNUPS

I’m a bit slow on the uptake with this book. It was first published three years ago, and I’d not heard of it until a month ago, when a friend pressed it into my hands and insisted that I read it. Well I have, and now I want to urge others to read it, too.

I have been fascinated by crime fiction for a long time, but only from a distance, wondering why it was so popular, and yet often so sneered at. Why does crime drama so dominate our TV screens, whether a pretty pathologist or a terse detective is in view? Writing this column has forced me to attempt to answer some of those questions. Where better to start than with P.D. James, ‘The greatest contemporary writer of classic crime’, according to The Sunday Times?

By Marti Leimbach

By Lionel Schriver

I got into a conversation about this book on the train. It ran: ‘Strange title!’ ‘Its a children’s book.’ ... ‘What’s it about?’ ‘Well, the holocaust, really.’ ‘For children? Weird.’

Disapproval

Today’s universal approval has not always been the case. Christians in the past have condemned novel reading. Charles Finney wrote: ‘I cannot believe that a person who has ever known the love of God can relish a secular novel’. And Spurgeon, his sounder contemporary, was only slightly more moderate, saying in a sermon: ‘The mass of popular books published under the name of light literature is to be eschewed and cut down.’

You’ll find the Narnia books in Waterstones, but they are outnumbered a billion to one by stories which either deny the spiritual world completely or escape into fantastic realms of pseudo-spirituality.

It is an extremely readable, personal and passionate (and therefore winsome) exploration of womanhood. But before I sound too positive, I must say that the appeal of Guiness's warm personality does not outweigh the serious flaws in some of her ideas.

This vast nation has seen a fourfold increase in income per capita over the last 20 years and now stands on the threshold of the 'dragon century' in which it will be a true superpower. What will become of the church in this fast-changing environment?