Two war reporters decide to settle down to a more ordinary, domestic life, away from the world’s conflicts, in Paris. They are having a baby. This effort at normal life turns out to be more stressful for them both than they could have imagined.

Janine di Giovanni has had a long and successful career reporting conflicts around the world, including Sarajevo, Grozny, Pristina, Baghdad, Mogadishu, Algiers and many others. I remember reading her articles and finding them powerful and moving, and the content horrific.

Janine Di Giovanni

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Ad woman turned writer, Judy Balan takes her readers on a romp through a two state marriage with a nod at Chetan Bhagat and a twist of the title. Deepika is a Tamilian married to a Punjabi Rishab and it was a love marriage. Their odd assortment of relatives from the north and south have more less accustomed themselves to the mingling of cultures, since it’s been four years anyway, but Deepika is convinced that she and Rishab have fallen out of love. Both of them are fed up with their every day lives – Deepika wants to quit advertising; Rishab wants to leave the executive perks that his IIM status entitle him to and become a writer. Sex is fleeting though passionate and Deepika thinks that’s another problem.

Judy Balan

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Egypt’s and the Middle East are much in the news. I often think that understanding the literature of a country is helpful in understanding the state of mind of its population or at least that proportion of the population who read . In this context, I was very interested in Professor Hanaa by Reem Bassiouney, originally published in Arabic in 2008. It won the Sawiris Foundation Literary Prize for Young Writers, Egypt’s leading literary award, in 2009 and was also selected as the only novel to come out in Egypt’s “reading for all book” series in 2010.

Reem Bassiouney is an academic specialising in sociolinguistics, and Professor Hanaa is a novel set in an Egyptian University.

Reem Bassiouney

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The Scottish novelist John Buchan is the writer about whom I know the most. I‘ve been reading him, and working on him, on and off, for over twenty years. But I get bored with his most famous character, Richard Hannay, and with The Thirty-Nine Steps, which is his most famous novel. So, here’s a Buchan novel that isn’t about Richard Hannay. The Gap in the Curtain (1932) is a great read, for several reasons. It’s narrated by Buchan’s other great protagonist-narrator, Edward Leithen, who is a hard-working lawyer and politician. He has nothing to do with the secret services, nor does he take orders from the Foreign Office or the police: he is an independent adventurer.

John Buchan

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Hatred, Ridicule & Contempt is the first novel by David Cooper. As a solicitor, it is perhaps unsurprising that he has written a novel about the law, sticking to what he knows.

Hatred, Ridicule & Contempt follows Alex Harris, a solicitor who at the start of the novel is made a partner at his firm. Having been passed over the previous year, Harris is pleased to finally have his hard work recognized, yet as the novel goes on he learns more and more of the firm’s dark secrets and management style. The main story centres around Harris’s case defending a newspaper against libel accusations, which soon turns out to be connected to a much bigger picture.

David Cooper

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I remember a friend’s mother teaching me how to make a kadhi with mango juice and cumin seeds. She was a Gujarati and a great cook – whenever I went to visit her son, a small plateful of snacks would appear like magic or an invitation to lunch. And thanks to her, I grew to appreciate the wonderful variety of vegetarian dishes that her westernised son occasionally sniffed at.

Bhanu Hajratwala’s treasure trove of Gujarati fare was originally learnt from her family in Fiji and then taken with her to the US after her marriage.

Bhanu Hajratwala

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As you can guess from the title of Simon’s Cat in Kitten Chaos, in the latest addition to the wonderful world of Simon’s Cat, a kitten has joined the household. Kittens are wonderful things, so playful and inquisitive, and always hilarious with their antics. But of course Simon’s Cat is not too impressed with this cute new housemate – the kitten grabs Simon’s attention easily, and refuses to learn to behave as a dignified cat should.

Simon Tofield

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It goes up and down, hits the lows and then just when you think that it’s stopping it begins shooting up on the upward track. Rajorshi Chakorborti’s first young adults’ book, Mumbai Rollercoaster is set in the city in which he spent the formative years of his life. Of course, Mumbai has a lot going for it apart from this – the very size makes it a great sprawling landscape for cops and robbers chases. And it has an active underworld. According to Rajorshi, in Mumbai, ‘You get the feeling that at any moment, an adventure could begin’. There are streets to be explored on foot and on bicycle and interesting twists and turns of road. And this is the philosophy that he follows in his novel. With every chapter a new adventure begins.

Rajorshi Chakraborti

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Some time ago I read and reviewed Tim Butcher’s Blood River, about his journey along the Congo River, and I’m afraid to say I wasn’t terribly complementary about it. I didn’t like his style or attitude, and thought I would rather find other books on Africa. Yet when I learnt about his recent book, Chasing The Devil: The Search for Africa’s Fighting Spirit, I found myself keen to give it a go. Perhaps it was the African journey again which drew me in, but I have to admit there was also a hope that I might enjoy Butcher’s writing more second time round.

Chasing The Devil is Butcher’s account of a journey across Sierra Leone and Liberia. Like Blood River, he is again recreating an earlier journey, this time the trip made by author Graham Greene and his cousin Barbara in 1935.

Tim Butcher

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The Penal Colony by Richard Herley has recently been available as a free download on Kindle, and from the synopsis given it sounded like it would be a reasonable read for a freebie. Although published in the late 1980s, I hadn’t heard of it before, and I assumed it was written more recently.

The Penal Colony is about a man named Tony Routledge who is convicted of a crime he did not commit. Set in the late 1990s, so the near future for reads in 1897, prisons are now on islands offshore, where convicts are left to fend for themselves with weekly helicopter drops of supplies. Routledge is sent to Sert, where an organised and civilised community exists in the Village, but the island is also populated with groups of Outsiders, who want access to the supply drops controlled by the Village.

Richard Herley

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