Eva Stachniak’s The Winter Palace is a colourful tale of the first years spent by Princess Sophie – who in the course of the novel becomes Catherine the Great – in St. Petersburg’s infamous Winter Palace. Told from the point of view of Vavara, a Polish girl who finds herself at the heart of Empress Elizabeth’s court, The Winter Palace is a veritable assault on the senses as well as a thoroughly absorbing tale.

Left an orphan Vavara, the daughter of an impoverished bookbinder who enjoyed the patronage of the royal court is permitted to serve in the court of Russia’s Empress Elizabeth. She begins her life in the palace sewing room but Vavara is a hopeless seamstress and she has to endure the wrath of the critical wardrobe mistress.

Eva Stachniak

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In Helen Dunmore’s The Betrayal we catch up with doctor Andrei, his nursery school teacher wife Anna and Anna’s younger brother Kolya, now a teenager and the source of much anxiety for his sister. The family first appeared in Dunmore’s Whitbread and Orange short-listed The Siege set during the harsh Leningrad winter of 1941-42.

It’s now the 1950s and Andrei is working as a pediatrician. Like most Russians Anna and Andrei try to live as quietly as possible, avoiding anything that will get them noticed by the authorities. For Anna in particular this quiet existence means a great deal as her father was a writer who was not on the right side of the authorities and whose politics caused problems for the family.

Helen Dunmore

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When Oskar asks an old university friend to look after his apartment while he goes to attend to his divorce in Los Angeles, he clearly has some inkling that the property may not be looked after exactly as he would wish. Why else would he leave notes hidden around the flat outlining the action to be taken should the worst occur? The worst, it seems, would be damage to the apartment’s pristine wooden floor and Oskar’s notes stress the importance of acting quickly should anything be spilled on the boards.

The apartment is on the first floor of an old building in the heart of some unnamed eastern European capital city where Oskar lives with his two cats Shossy and Stravvy.

Will Wiles

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When Father Ted presented her with a machine that would ‘take the misery out of tea-making’ TV’s most aesthetically challenged housekeeper Mrs. Doyle lamented ‘some people enjoy the misery’. It’s more or less the way I feel about camping; I certainly don’t camp for any pleasure I derive from it, rather a belief that it’s somehow character building and morally robust. I’m certainly not the first to think so and in The Art of Camping Matthew de Abaitua takes us on a trip back in (fairly recent) history to look at those people for whom camping was a means to rehabilitation or a way of instilling certain values, using socialist in principle.

Part history, part memoir (though happily much less so than Emma Kennedy’s ‘The Tent, the Bucket and Me’, a recent book about remembered camping trips in the 1970s that was so awful it set my teeth on edge) The Art of Camping:The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the Stars reminds us that while a camping can be a much needed tonic from the irritations of modern life, a way of getting back to nature and temporarily forgetting the rat race, the practice has also been (and continues to be) advocated by extremists and oddballs.

Matthew de Abaitua

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The Galician tourist board really ought to be paying author Domingo Villar; his Leo Caldas novels set in the coastal city of Vigo are an enticing advertisement for the region. Imagine having long leisurely seafood lunches with a glass or two of wine; follow that with a quick paddle before going back to work or even a drive to a country vineyard. It’s almost worth dealing with the occasional mutilated corpse to lead that kind of life.

In Water-blue Eyes Caldas has to investigate the mysterious death of Luis Reigosa, a jazz musician. When the call comes through, Caldas is taking part in the weekly radio programme in which he tries to help members of the public with the questions they have for the police; although Leo finds that he has to pass most questions to his colleagues in the traffic section, his new found fame helps to open doors that might otherwise remain closed, a definite advantage when for a homicide detective.

Domingo Villar

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Four thirty something friends head to the Scottish island of Islay for a weekend of drug taking and whisky tasting. Friends since their university days, it was a mutual passion for whisky that brought them together but since then their lives have taken different paths. Brash, confident Roddy makes a fortune working in futures; Luke, the quiet one, is a musician who records film soundtracks; happily married Ethan works for the Royal Bank of Scotland; and Adam sells tacky souvenirs (and the odd bottle of Scotch) to tourists in a shop on the Royal Mile. For three of the lads this is a party weekend, a chance to let of steam and get steaming drunk, but one of them has an ulterior motive for the trip.

The weekend starts with a bang when their hire car is stopped by the local police, two hard-cases who don’t take kindly to the fellas from the city but let them off with a warning, or rather a threat.

Doug Johnstone

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Stefan Tegenfalk’s Anger Mode gets off to a dramatic and shocking start, setting the pace for the next 430 pages. A judge coming home from a meeting brutally murders a taxi driver; previously of good demeanour, the judge seems like unlikely murderer. He’s admitting the crime, but can’t explain why he did it. Jaded (aren’t they always?) Detective Inspector Walter Grohn is charged with investigating the case, assigned to him is Jonna de Brugge, a rookie with the Swedish Investigations Unit. Two more equally horrific yet unexplainable murders follow, each one involving an employee of the Swedish judicial system.

Stefan Tegenfalk

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“Twenty-four hours ago, there were 269 people on board a train. Then we became 196. When two men died, we were 194. Now there were only 118 of us left. I thought about Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. I immediately tried to dismiss the thought. And Then There Were None is a story that doesn’t exactly have a happy ending.”

On her way to a medical appointment in Bergen, wheelchair bound former police officer Hanne Wilhelmsen is injured when the train she is travelling in is derailed during one of the worst blizzards in Norwegian history. She passed out when a piece of metal is impaled in her thigh and when she comes round finds herself with the other passengers in Finse 1222, a hotel so called because of its height above sea level.

Anne Holt

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Hapless 23 year old Taras Krohe is torn between two women; while that’s a situation most lads his age would envy, the women in Taras’s life are his mother, an eccentric but kind-hearted Romanian woman who can see not fault in her son, and Katya, his Russian ex-girlfriend who recently dumped him for a middle-aged pony-tailed aesthete. “Mami” isn’t too sympathetic to Taras’s plight; she says he’s better off without the Russian but you get the feeling that no girl would be good enough for her “pourchi”. Taras and his mother have lived for years in the same one and a half bedroomed central London flat; ten years after winning a scholarship to a good private school, Taras now works for a company in the city, the unfortunately named IBS while his mother scrapes a living taking in sewing. All pampered Taras has to worry about is how he’s going to win back Katya, – that is until Mrs. Bartlett dies and everything starts to unravel.

Penny Rudge

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Guido Guerrieri is a defence counsel lawyer living and working in the city of Bari on Italy’s Adriatic coast. He runs his own small but successful office with a team of loyal staff and has plenty of business to keep things ticking over nicely so when an old friend, a criminal lawyer, asks him to take on some work that he feels is not his area of expertise, Guido reluctantly listens to what he has to say. A young woman, a student from Bari but living in Rome has gone missing and, with little to work on, the police are about to shelve the case. Manuela’s family hope that Guerrieri can run a legal eye over the paperwork and spot any errors in the police handling of the investigation that might give them the leverage they need to get the case re-opened.

Gianrico Carofiglio

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Those moments in life when you feel a genuine connection with another person are few and far between; I’m talking about that moment you realise that there’s someone thinks the same as you, has the same values and ideas. Often it can come from books, for me it came through music and the person who made everything make sense was Andy Kershaw. As a teenager I did not follow the crowd; I had my own firm ideas about what made good music and those ideas were fueled by Kershaw’s Radio 1 broadcasts. You might say I grew up with Kershaw; as the content of his shows grew wider and his travels took him all over the world so too did my musical (and often political) horizons expand. Did I mention I also had an enormous crush on the man too?

“No Off Switch” is an autobiography I’ve been eagerly awaiting for a long time. The shelves of bookstores real and virtual teem with so-called celebrity autobiographies but few of them can offer the stories that Kershaw has to tell.

Andy Kershaw

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