The Tiger is structured around the hunt, and Vaillant uses the time between the tiger’s two kills to build up the historical narrative that is so integral to the current conflict. But, as the days grow shorter (the book takes place in the weeks leading up to Christmas) and the timeline grows tighter, the intensity of the hunt builds until you’re forced to read at breakneck speed, barely pausing to breath, because the tiger could be anywhere. When the inevitable confrontation occurs, though, Vaillant slows everything down; a second becomes a minute and, as if the page is a lens, he pans around the attack, allowing you to see it from every angle before speeding everything back up to realtime. It’s an incredible finish and it will leave you gasping.

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In The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag, the second book in the series, Bradley took us away from Buckshaw and into the village of Bishop’s Lacey and all the gossip and memories of other people. By setting A Red Herring Without Mustard back on Buckshaw’s grounds he’s bridging what we know about the villagers with what we’re learning about the de Luce’s. Coming closer to home means seeing more of Flavia’s inner world, including how hurt she is by the meanness of her older sisters, and how much she grieves for Harriet, a mother she never knew. I’ve always thought of Flavia as distinctly Miss Marple-esque, and although that comparison stands in terms of sleuthing and poking around, Bradley takes care in his third book to remind us that she is still a little girl and, although she’s adept at solving crimes, the puzzles of life and relationships still need working out.

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At the New Yorker Fest talk, Diana Athill’s name didn’t come up among the panelists’ lists of writers’ writers, but I think that’s because, more than that, she’s a reader’s writer. That sounds obvious maybe (I mean, shouldn’t all writers be that?), but what I mean is that her work, and specifically Midsummer Night in the Workhouse, is the kind you can read over and over again without feeling you’ve heard it all before. Although her writing is straightforward and fairly unadorned, she manages to slide in so many details and suggestions that I think at least half of them slide off on first-read, waiting for you to come back and soak them up later. Athill’s stories are so much about the everyday, almost mundane, pieces of life that they seem new when held up for you to walk around. It’s that innocence Lahiri was talking about – that anyone will care about these snippets of life – that make Athill’s stories glow, making her a writer for readers and writers alike.

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It’s hard to talk about The Virgin Cure without making comparisons to The Birth House, Ami McKay’s debut, because both novels have such strong central characters, and both have so much to do with the way female sexuality was controlled by men. I devoured both books in only a couple of days, but after finishing The Virgin Cure, I woke up in the middle of the night overcome by worry for Moth, who I guess I had been dreaming about. It sounds silly now, but at the time I was so concerned about what had happened that it took me a while to get back to sleep. McKay has a way of writing historical fiction in which the story is subtly transposed to modern-day by the reader. She is not anachronistic, but the stories she tells about women and sexuality are relevant and moving, and they’re stories that don’t allow you to move on simply by re-shelving the book.

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Island of Wings begins with the McKenzies arriving on Hirta and ends shortly after they’ve left, many years later. In many ways, the structure is that of a coming-of-age novel: Neil as a minister, the McKenzies as a family, and the island as a developing community. Read in that light, the bleakness of the narrative is softened by the suggestion that the spiral will reverse itself, and if things don’t turn around completely, the winter will end, the birds will return and life will pick up again.

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I’ve made no secret of the fact that I like layered narratives. I like the way different parts of the story unfold depending on who’s at the centre of the action, and I like getting to know different characters and having the opportunity to see other characters through their eyes. The tricky thing, though, is managing to maintain several characters without either forgetting about one along the way, or without having them all show up at the same party just so they can meet. The connections between the characters in Alligator are so believable that nothing seems convenient so much as natural, and the rising tension that comes at the end is thrilling because you both know and can’t quite believe what is happening. In that sense, I’m glad it took me so long to get to Alligator, because it’s a book that will keep you up all night and, like the life for Moore’s characters, not necessarily give you the exact ending you thought you were heading towards.

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Reading The Little Shadows is a breathtaking experience. Like a champion vaudevillian, Endicott pulls at a range of emotions and can take you from heart-stricken worry to laughter in a matter of paragraphs.  Vaudeville was not a world I knew anything about before reading this book, but Endicott makes me wish I could go back in time so I could sit in the theatre and watch one of these shows unfold. But then, perhaps I have – The Little Shadows is rather like vaudeville on the page, and just as the audiences would often return to see the same show more than once, reading it just makes you want to read more.

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There’s an author’s note at the end of The Cat’s Table explaining that although Ondaatje also traveled by ship from Sri Lanka to England at the age of 11, this is not an autobiographical novel. I found it distracting, though, that the main character’s name was Michael, and that later in life he too had become a writer. It wasn’t distracting enough to take away from the novel, though. Rather, I think having that question firmly in the back of my mind while reading made me pay closer attention – the way you do when an elderly relative tells you a story of when they were young and you listen for any details that tie their younger self to the version you know. I don’t know Ondaatje, but reading about a man searching for details about himself by revisiting his past is a surprisingly riveting experience, and as much as I was wound up with the story of the boy on the ship, it’s the older narrator who has stuck with me. (Click the photo to read the rest of the review)

I have read a lot of books that are supposed to be about my generation, and the majority of them ring true in various ways, but Girls in White Dresses gets at something many narratives miss: how female friendships, which start off so tight and all consuming, become looser as you get older. You don’t need to spend an hour on the phone every night, or live together, or whatever, and it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with men, it just happens. Close’s ability to capture that feeling with humour, and slide in the built up annoyance over weddings (they are expensive!) makes Girls in White Dresses a great read, and perhaps a cathartic way to wind down the summer wedding season.

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We often ooh and ahh over novels that ring so true we can’t believe they’re fiction. The characters are so perfect, the (often) period is rendered just so, and we get caught up in everything that happens. That’s as close to non-fiction as a lot of readers get. But, for all our admiration of these hyper-realistic novels, we rarely talk about the non-fiction that reads like fiction – stories so crazy with such a strange cast of characters that we think it must be made up. Of course, it isn’t (usually, anyway), and that just seems to heighten how surreal the story it. Sex on the Moon, Ben Mezrich’s latest non-fiction thriller, is just like that.

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