Turn the Tides Gently is a novella for Kindle by Matt Wingett. It takes place in Matt’s hometown of Portsmouth and neighbouring Southsea, centring around a character named Dave. Dave is being looked after in a hostel as he appears to be suffering from schizophrenia.

The scene is set with some beautifully descriptive language as Dave wanders on Southsea common near the sea. As the novella develops, there is more in terms of action and dialogue. Dave is frustrated by the treatment he is given at the hostel and attempts to escape. He hallucinates and is constantly drawn to the sea where he is convinced he sees a mermaid on more than one occasion.

Matt Wingett

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Solace by Belinda McKeon is a novel about loss and the difficulty which so many people have communicating about important issues, particularly across generations. It is set against the background of Ireland in the early part of this century, at a time when rural areas continued to cling to traditional values and ways of life while brash modern Ireland epitomised by the Dublin property boom gradually began to encroach.

Mark Casey is a PhD student in Dublin, struggling with his thesis after losing enthusiasm for his work. He is writing about a Victorian novelist who lived near the small farming village where he was brought up – she once seemed important to him, but now seems irrelevant and lacking in interest.

Belinda McKeon

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To paraphrase a quote from the Sharukh Khan film Don, ‘capturing the Don is not difficult, just impossible’. Oswald Pereira’s Newsroom Mafia explores a perennially fascinating terrain for fans of any kind of Mafia fiction. Pereira used to be a crime reporter in Mumbai before he retired, so he draws on his experiences to tell his story. Newsroom Mafia is the tale of the invincible Don Narayan Swamy and the struggle of ‘supercop’ Donald Fernandez to bring him to book. Narayan Swamy is based on the infamous godfather of Matunga Vardarajan Mudaliar and bears full testimony to the accuracy of the gangster films that crop up in Bollywood. Supporting him the Don has an entourage of journalists who run planted stories in exchange for lucrative remuneration and bottles of scotch.

Oswald Pereira

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If I am looking for a light and entertaining read then I am always happy to pick up any of Mike Gayle’s books. His novels are always amusing and provide a fabulous insight into a lad’s point of view. In his latest book, The Stag and Hen Weekend, the readers still gets this but they are also treated to the female perspective too. To be honest, this is really two books in one as the reader is invited along on both Helen’s hen weekend at a country spa and Phil’s stag weekend in Amsterdam. This couple have been together about ten years and finally after turning down Phil’s numerous proposals, Helen finally popped the question herself. Helen has quite a bit of emotional baggage though especially as she nearly made it to the altar once before until she discovered what a lying cheat her former fiancé really was. Not that that is likely to be the case with Phil though who she knows really loves her.

Mike Gayle

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Joanna Trollope is one of my favourite writers and her latest novel, The Soldier’s Wife, is just as good as, if not better than, as all of her other books. This story is a keen observation and fascinating insight into what it is like to be an army wife.

Dan Riley is a major in the British army and is returning home from a six month tour serving in Afghanistan. This should be an exciting time for his wife, Alexa, but she can’t help viewing his return with a certain amount of trepidation. She has been in this position before and knows that she will need to be patient while Dan readjusts to life back home but she also knows that it will be hard.

Joanna Trollope

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“When Hitler came to power, I was in the bath”.

In Sydney, Australia in the 1990s, Dora Becker receives a package, containing the writings of a long dead friend. Those writings and the memories of Dora, a German woman now in her nineties, form the narrative structure of this thought provoking novel. I have read a lot of novels and non fiction about this period recently, but All That I Am is more than just another tale about more victims and survivors of Nazism.

Anna Funder’s first book, Stasiland, was a non fiction work about the former DDR (East Germany), the secret police and their victims.

Anna Funder

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The exploration of the unknown has fascinated writers since time immemorial, wanderings, encounters with a new culture and the induction into it. This has been seen in popular fiction as well as literary – the latter starting perhaps with Marco Polo, who was accused of manufacturing much of his information. What is also curious is that people have been fascinated by encounters between the west and the orient – one could number books like Lord Jim, Shogun, River of Smoke and most recently The Yellow Emperor’s Cure, the last two written by Indian authors. Amitabh Ghosh and Kunal Basu. In fact, the last two have hit the public gaze within a year of each other. Ghosh’s is specifically about the opium trade with China during Britain’s reign while Basu’s pinpoints the encounter of a Portuguese doctor with Chinese medicine. Specifically a son’s quest to find a remedy for syphilis, the plague that was for 400 years or more the world’s forerunner to AIDs and that was similarly regarded by society and the Church, and save his father, ironically a respected physician who is helpless in the face of the scourge.

Kunal Basu

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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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Aravind Adiga’s latest book ‘Last Man in Tower’ explores what it takes to turn ordinary respectable middle-class people into evil, devious, greedy beasts prepared to contemplate murder. It looks at how neighbours so emotionally and physically close that they live like extended family can become enemies. I would also say it offers wholly believable insights into the psychology of bullying and persecution – tracking how the perpetrators of abuse can convince themselves that they are in fact the victims despite their abusive behaviour. It’s fascinating stuff; a sort of ‘Lord of the Flies’ for India in the 21st Century but with seemingly sensible, normal, respectable adults instead of schoolboys. It’s the sort of book that has you thinking “That could never happen to me” at the beginning and gradually realising that this type of salami-slicing of morality could probably happen to almost anyone.

Aravind Adiga

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The Teahouse of the August Moon, by the American novelist Vern Sneider, is a gentle comedy about the American occupation of Japan after the Second World War, where the Japanese get the better of the Americans, the Americans organise the Japanese more efficiently, and everyone learns to love each other’s way of life. My fascination with this book began because it was a beautiful fairy story with a happy ending. Later, I reread it to enjoy the tidy way that everything worked out just fine: I do like the practical organisation of happy endings. I also reread it endlessly to get to the bottom of the mysterious geisha girls: why were they such a problem? They seemed so nice, and did their own sewing.

According to his obituary in the New York Times, during the Second World War Vern Sneider had been part of the American military government team that installed itself in Okinawa in April 1945, as an occupation force. He became the military commander of Tobaru, a small Japanese town of 5000 people. This book is based on his experiences, and must be one of the most gentle novels about army occupation ever written. It must also have been a whitewash, a sanitised recounting of a traumatic time at the end of war.

Vern Sneider

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