Being Emily - Anne Donovan

Engaging tale about a likeable Glaswegian girl with an Emily Brontë obsession trying to find her way in life despite family tragedy and turbulent relationships. Does well at conveying the spiralling effects of grief and self-destructive behaviour as well as the struggle to balance reason with emotion and the difficulty of opening up to well-meaning adults. (I also liked her previous novel, 'Buddha Da'.)

The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie

An epic hallucination of a novel that somehow manages to blend a plot about modern life for immigrants in London with fables about angels, demons, miracles and revelations without diminishing either, asking big questions along the way about identity and morality. The opening section is dramatically supernatural, which I found a little alienating, but before long sincere observations were mingling with the magical farce, as with the description of the contents of a plane falling to earth, starting with the physical detritus but moving on to the "debris of the soul" of the migrants killed in the crash:

"broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home."

I was also struck by the explanation, in the middle of a plot about monstrous mutant immigrants attempting to escape police custody, of how the transformation has been imposed upon them: "They describe us... That's all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct."

The novel's central values are integrity - characters are tested with possible compromises of the truth, or 'easier' false identities - and mercy, as choices must be made about forgiveness or revenge. The way that these choices are handled as the story unfolds is gripping and thought-provoking.

Runaway - Alice Munro

A collection of beautifully written short stories which were utterly absorbing but easier to admire than to love. The overwhelming majority were rather bleak, and while I don't have a problem with a bit of grit in fiction, I did find it disturbing that the darkness in these tended to come from the inadequacies of the main characters themselves, or even more depressingly, from the implied impossibility of meaningful connections or true understanding between people. The story Tresspasses really got under my skin and left me quite shaken - a sign of powerful writing, but not a particularly enjoyable read!

The Road Home - Rose Tremain

A fascinating insight into the lives of economic migrants and the sheer determination required to succeed when starting out with nothing, as well as a compelling exploration of life after bereavement. The past can never be recaptured, and so the road home after a period of exile in England leads not to life as it was, but to a fresh start in a nearby town, and the central journey is about reconnecting with people and finding hope and energy after a period of numbness and flight.

The Forgotten Garden - Kate Morton

A family saga told backwards, as a young woman tries to complete her grandmother's attempts to uncover her own mysterious origins and the narrative shifts between several points in time as the secrets of the past are gradually revealed. Readable and absorbing, but too reliant on a rather predictable plot, with an unfortunate tendency towards melodrama and caricature - fun to read once but would not be satisfying a second time around.

Gifted - Nikita Lalwani

This is the story of the teenage years of a young Indian girl growing up in Wales whose life comes to be increasingly defined by her mathematical ability and her father's ambitions for her, which ultimately tear the family apart. It perfectly captured the painful emotions of a teenage girl out of step with her peers - her self-defeating interactions and compulsive behaviour are utterly convincing and I really felt for her throughout, hoping against all the evidence for a happy ending.

Starter For Ten - David Nicholls

Comic novel set in the 80s, about a working-class boy's disastrous experiences as he arrives at university, joins the University Challenge team, and falls headlong for his beautiful teammate. Funny in parts, but some of his struggles & pathetic behaviour made me cringe too much on his behalf to be fully enjoyable, and the more serious sections about his background and his father's death seemed to sit uneasily alongside the humour.