The Loss Adjustor - Aifric Campbell

Rather bleak novel about a woman trapped and isolated by memories of a teenage tragedy and the resulting loss of her first love. A compelling read, but I found it strangely difficult to connect with one of the main characters because of the author's careful refusal to label her "difference" (eventually revealed as autism on page 228) which had me confused at times as to whether she was perhaps just younger than the others, or simply a "difficult" personality, and prevented the central relationships from coming fully into focus for me.

The Hours - Michael Cunningham

Having found Mrs. Dalloway itself a little inaccessible, I was delighted to find that this re-imagining did a great job of capturing its essence and interpreting it for a modern (lazy?) reader. It is a powerful novel in its own right, beautiful and full of vivid characters, but also full of echoes of Mrs. Dalloway, and a mark of its success for me was that it made me feel that I could go back to the original novel and get more out of it after reading this. Most memorable - and unsettling - for me were the sections about the 40s housewife Mrs. Brown, describing the sense of unreality that can come with being alone at home with a small child: "Alone with the child, though, she loses direction. She can't always remember how a mother would act.".

Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

I read this as preparation for reading Michael Cunningham's 'The Hours', and must confess that it took so much concentration that it felt a little like doing homework... Virginia Woolf is an author that I've always wanted to like, but never really managed to. I'm not even sure exactly why - perhaps because her approach has been so influential that it no longer has the same impact? I suspect that as someone who often picks up a book in order to be immersed in someone else's world to drown out my own inner monologue for a while, I just find it too challenging to be confronted with other people's! Strangely, for me the book started to feel less depressing at around the point that the shell-shocked Septimus committed suicide.

The Queen's Sorrow - Suzannah Dunn

This fed my new-found hunger for historical fiction perfectly - a really gripping story that kept me hooked right up to the terrible (but totally satisfying) conclusion, combined with lots of atmospheric period detail as London under Mary Tudor is described by a sundial maker just arrived from Spain. I believed in the characters and in their (sometimes shockingly naive) choices, and I also came away wanting to find out more about the real Queen Mary.

The Piano Teacher - Janice Y K Lee

This captivating novel describes two love affairs involving the same man in colonial Hong Kong, set a decade apart. The narrative structure, switching between the 1940s and the 1950s, works well, as the central plot is revealed through a mixture of memory and real time, and the characterisation is interesting as the main characters switch roles, with Will being first the more naive and then the more cynical partner in his two relationships. I found it an unexpectedly traumatic read in places - having picked it up thinking it would be a light period romance, I found it to be a surprisingly disturbing story including political intrigue and some shocking material about the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. I think that this would repay a re-read at some point.

The Camel Bookmobile - Masha Hamilton

Thoughtprovoking story about a meeting of cultures, as the books brought to a small settlement in the Kenyan desert have a strong impact - and unexpected consequences for the people of the tribe and the American woman who is so passionate about the project. Nicely written, with varied narrators so that different perspectives are voiced, and an honest - if painful - conclusion. The book shows the potential benefits of the project, but also reveals the dangers of wrong assumptions, and the risks of arrogantly trying to 'educate' others - one character reflects on "how uncivilized it was to bring an unsolicited gift from their world and then dictate how it must or must not be used".

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka

I'd heard a lot of positive comments about this book but when I finally got around to reading it I was a little disappointed. In my view the lighthearted writing style, although funny, distracts from the subject matter, which is actually pretty serious in places, dealing with family memories, identity, and the impact of wartime traumas on adult relationships in addition to the main plotline about two women's attempts to disentangle their elderly father from a bizarre marriage.