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The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga
Azincourt

Bernard Cornwell
The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett
The Shack

William P. Young
The Private Patient (Adam Dalgliesh Mystery)

P.D. James

Given the astonishing length of the writing career of PD James (her first novel was published in 1962), it is perhaps not surprising that her work often consciously refers back to an earlier era of British crime writing -- but it's none-the worse for that. In fact, James' clever and affectionate reinventions of the devices and conventions of that era afford a particular pleasure -- as is the case with her latest, The Private Patient.
Uncompromising investigative journalist Rhoda Gradwyn has booked herself into the Chandler Powell private clinic in Dorset. She has decided to remove a disfiguring facial scar, and is looking forward to what she hopes will be a new life after the surgery. But Rhoda will not leave the clinical alive - she is killed. After her murder, Commander Adam Dalgliesh is summoned to investigate. As he begins to examine suspects, scene and motives, a second death occurs, and Dalgliesh finds himself faced with one of the most complex and challenging mysteries of his career.
In many ways, The Private Patient has the structure of a novel from the golden age of crime fiction, and James is well aware of the very best writing from that era (including Cyril Hare, who James succeeded as premier crime writer for her publisher, Faber). Needless to say, she freights in a very modern level of psychological investigation, more penetrating than that of her great predecessors. If the novel seems less initially engaging than other recent work by the author, there is perhaps a subtle agenda here: James is avoiding the more obvious reader-grabbing tactics to present a low-key investigation of character than she has chosen to deal with in recent books. If a little more patience is required than usual, the result of this understated approach pays dividends. And admirers of James (and her doughty detective Dalgliesh) will be prepared to be flexible for the pleasures of the cogently handled narrative here. --Barry Forshaw
A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini
Breaking Dawn (Twilight Saga)

Stephenie Meyer
The Road Home

Rose Tremain
A Most Wanted Man
The Book Thief

Markus Zusak
The Temporal Void (Void Trilogy)

Peter F. Hamilton
Bones of the Hills (Conqueror 3)

Conn Iggulden

One can only hope that the phenomenal success of his co-authored The Dangerous Book for Boys does not take attention away from the prodigious storytelling skills of Conn Iggulden. As Bones of the Hills forcefully reminds us, Iggulden is the real deal when it comes to historical fiction on the grandest scale. And here, all of his characteristic skills are well to the fore.

A boy was abandoned in the wilderness by his tribe -- but he did not die. As those Iggulden admirers who have read Wolf of the Plains and Lords of the Bow will know, this luckless boy has grown into one of the most feared and powerful figures in history, Genghis Khan. He has persuaded the tribes that had been tearing each other to pieces to ignore their differences and unite under his leadership to battle their oldest enemies. Under his ruthless (and ferociously inspired) leadership, a mighty nation has been forged. But this is only the beginning of his struggles: Khan sends out emissaries, but they are tortured and killed. He attempts to open trade routes; his efforts are met with violent rebuff. Soon, the Mongolian army is stretched to the furthest corners of Khan's realm, and destruction looms.

This is epic storytelling on a nigh-operatic scale. Iggulden has long been the master of the broad brush stroke and conjures up the ancient world with great panache. Of course, the success of a book such as Bones of the Hills depends on the vivid characterisation of its larger-than-life central character, and of the many novels which have attempted to capture Genghis Khan, none have mastered the task as successfully as Conn Iggulden.
--Barry Forshaw
World Without End

Ken Follett
The Brass Verdict

Michael Connelly
Revelation (Shardlake)

C.J. Sansom
The Forgotten Garden

Kate Morton
The Great Crash, 1929 (Penguin business)

John Kenneth Galbraith

Rampant speculation. Record trading volumes. Assets bought not because of their value but because the buyer believes he can sell them for more in a day or two, or an hour or two. Welcome to the late 1920s in the US. There are obvious and absolute parallels to the great bull market of the late 1990s, writes Galbraith in a new introduction dated 1997. Of course, Galbraith notes, every financial bubble since 1929 has been compared to the Great Crash, which is why this book has never been out of print since it became a bestseller in 1955.
Galbraith writes with great wit and erudition about the perilous actions of investors and the curious inaction of the government. He notes that the problem wasn't a scarcity of securities to buy and sell: "The ingenuity and zeal with which companies were devised in which securities might be sold was as remarkable as anything." Those words become strikingly relevant in light of revenue-negative start-up companies coming into the market each week in the 1990s, along with fragmented pieces of established companies, like real estate and bottling plants. Of course, the 1920s were different from the 1990s. There was no safety net below citizens, no unemployment insurance or Social Security. And today we don't have the creepy investment trusts--in which shares of companies that held some stocks and bonds were sold for several times the assets' market value. But, boy, are the similarities spooky, particularly the prevailing trend at the time toward corporate mergers and industry consolidations--not to mention all the partially informed people who imagined themselves to be financial geniuses because the shares of stock they bought kept going up. --Lou Schuler, Amazon.com
Heart and Soul

Maeve Binchy
Lords of the Bow (Conqueror 2)

Conn Iggulden
Doors Open

Ian Rankin