Whatever Love Means, by David Baddiel

Vic is a nearly-famous rock guitarist thinking about shacking up in south London with his foul-mouthed thirty-something girlfriend Tess; Vic's best friend Joe is a geeky, AIDS-researching biochemist who shares a son and a flash yuppie pad with the beautiful and slightly Irish Emma. On the day of Princess Diana's death Vic falls into bed with Em; a few months later Joe sort of does the same with Tess. If that were all there was to this book, it would hardly be worth bothering with: just another Hampstead (or rather, Herne Hill) adultery novel. What raises it up a considerable notch, quite apart from Baddiel's obvious gift for very good jokes, is his less expected gift for deadpan but dryly insightful prose, and his even more unexpected talent for fleshing out character. Every player in this touching, tragic tale: female as well as male, minor as much as major, villainous alongside virtuous, is eminently believable, and harrowingly feasible. Not quite so convincing is the Princess-Diana-death subplot that forms a background to the early chapters. Like the hysteria over the Queen of Hearts itself, the whole thing rather peters out, and provides little more than an excuse for the book's well-chosen title (it's a famous Prince Chuck quote apropos his then fiancé Diana). Taken as a whole, small misgiving aside, this is a fine and impressive novel: funny, sad, warm, dark, tender, wise and bleakly memorable.

Killing Me Softly, by Nicci French

Alice Loundon's life couldn't be any more fulfilling. She is a successful career woman and is engaged to a wonderful man named Jake. Even though her personal life is in order, she feels that there is something, that there is a void that needs to be filled. Her ordered life lacks excitement. But things change as soon as she meets a handsome and mysterious stranger named Adam. After a night of passionate lovemaking with Adam, she dumps her fiancé and marries Adam. Little does Alice know that she has embarked on a roller coaster ride of obsession and malice. Killing Me Softly has a Fatal Attraction quality to it that will keep you turning the pages. There are many thrillers out there -- especially thrillers about obsession -- but Nicci French's language is original.

Soul, by Tobsha Learner

In 1860, seventeen–year–old Lavinia Huntington is transported from her Irish village to start a new life in Mayfair, London, as the wife of a gentleman anthropologist, thirty years her senior. A year later she is standing trial for his murder.
In modern–day Los Angeles, forty–year–old Professor Julia Huntington, geneticist, returns from a field trip to Afghanistan. She has received a prestigious commission from the US Defence Department to research a genetic propensity to kill without remorse. At the same time, she discovers that her husband has betrayed her terribly.
This is a story that crosses generations, a story of two women and their struggle with obsessive love and revenge. Part murder mystery, part psychological thriller, part commentary on genetics and human behaviour, sexual jealousy and betrayal, Soul is both provocative and unputdownable.

The Witch of Cologne, by Tobsha Learner

From the author of the sensational and erotic bestseller Quiver… An epic love story of the 17th century.

This is the story of Ruth Elazar ben Saul, a Jewish midwife who returns to her home of Deutz outside Cologne. Imbued with the radical ideas of Spinoza and with ancient Hebrew Kabbalism, her revolutionary methods of dealing with illness lead to accusations of witchcraft and imprisonment.
Her love affair with Detleff von Tennen, a local Catholic bishop, may save her in the short term, but at a time of brutal repression and religious persecution there are few options for those who break taboos.

Tremble: Sensual Tales Of The Mystical And Sinister, by Tobsha Learner

Erotic, dangerous and divine - Tobsha Learner, author of the sensational bestseller Quiver, is back with a new collection of extraordinary desires.
In a Welsh village, a young woman's sensuality is awakened by an outrageous inheritance.
In Oklahoma, a drought-stricken town is offered salvation by a travelling rainmaker. But his price is controversial - and one that the women of the town are more than willing to pay.
A Sydney record producer struggles to balance his wife and his mistress - until one of them takes matters into her own hands.
From the deeply erotic to the fatally romantic, Tremble dissects love and desire from all angles. Passion, magic and sinister tones interweave to stimulate the senses and explore the wishes of the human heart.
Learner's acute observations, sensual style and knowing wit combine in this elegant, deliciously provocative and page-turning plunge into a world where anything might happen.

The King's Last Song, by Geoff Ryman

A great king brings peace to a warring nation. Centuries later his writings will bring hope to those facing the heart-rending legacy of Cambodia’s recent history.

When archaeologists discover an ancient book written on gold leaves at Angkor Wat, everyone wants a piece of the action but the police, the Army and the UN are all outflanked when the precious artefact is stolen, and its guardian, Professor Luc Andrade, kidnapped along with it.
Luc’s love and respect for Cambodia have won him many friends, including ex-Khmer Rouge cadre Map and the young motoboy William. Determined to rescue the man their consider their mentor and recover the Golden Book, they form an unlikely bond. But William has no idea just how closely Map’s violent past affects him.
The Book contains the wisdom of King Jayavarman VII, the Buddhist ruler who united a war-torn Cambodia in the twelfth century. With his enlightened wife he created a kingdom that was a haven of prosperity and learning.
The King’s Last Song skilfully interweaves the ancient story of Cambodia’s greatest king with the modern tales of Luc, Map and William. It is an unforgettable and dazzling evocation of the spirit of a land and her peoples in all their beauty and tragedy.

“Love was still possible. Kindly love, alleviating love, love which warmed and elevated. Love which made sweat sweet, feet beautiful, grass into a soft bed. Love gave anyone with the capacity to be happy for others a moment of pleasure. Love gave hope to anyone with a particle of courage left. It gave anyone whose strength was not exhausted a reason to think that life could always offer something.”

“I canoe through that inundation of sadness now at the end of my days. I have canoed through all my other battles on that same lake of tears. For we are angels, we are demons, we can be anything we care to be, but when the blood dances, the blood spurts. And then tears follow.”

“Khla krap kón tha khla sampéah. If the tiger lies down quietly before you, don’t say it respects you.”

Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake was begun in March, 2001. I was still on a book tour for my previous novel, The Blind Assassin, but by that time I had reached Australia. After I'd finished the book-related events, my spouse and I and two friends travelled north, to Max Davidson's camp in the monsoon rain forest of Arnheimland. For the most part we were bird-watching, but we also visited several open-sided cave complexes where Aboriginal people had lived continuously, in harmony with their environment, for tens of thousands of years. After that we went to Cassowary House, near Cairns, operated by Philip Gregory, an extraordinary birder; and it was while looking over Philip's balcony at the red-necked crakes scuttling about in the underbrush that Oryx and Crake appeared to me almost in its entirety. I began making notes on it that night. (says Margaret)


“Pigs might not fly but they are strangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and racoons. A man, once called Jimmy, now calls himself Snowman and lives in a tree, wrapped in old bed sheets. The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, teasingly haunts him. And the green-eyed Children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility.”

Welcome to the outrageous imagination of Margaret Atwood.

“There’ll be the standard quintuplet, four men and the woman in heat. Her condition will be obvious to all from the bright-blue colour of her buttocks and abdomen – a trick of variable pigmentation filched from the baboons, with a contribution from the expandable chromosphores of the octopus. As Crake used to say, Think of an adaptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first.
Since it’s only the blue tissue and the pheromones released by it that stimulate the males, there’s no more unrequited love these days, no more thwarted lust; no more shadow between the desire and the act. Courtship begins at the first whiff, the first faint blush of azure, with the males presenting flowers to the females – just as male penguins present round stones, said Crake, or as the male silverfish presents a sperm packet. At the same time they indulge in musical outbursts, like songbirds. Their penises turn bright blue to match the blue abdomens of the females, and they do a sort of blue-dick dance number, erect members waving to and fro in unison, in time to the foot movements and the singing: a feature suggested to Crake by the sexual semaphoring of crabs. From amongst the floral tributes the female chooses four flowers, and the sexual ardour of the unsuccessful candidates dissipates immediately, with no hard feelings left. Then, when the blue of her abdomen has reached its deepest shade, the female and her quarter find a secluded spot and go at it until the woman becomes pregnant and her blue colouring fades. And that is that.
No more No means yes, anyway, thinks Snowman.”

Jonathan Nasaw – Fear Itself

“Then a letter for Pender arrives at FBI headquarters. Dorie Bell is afraid. Last year she attended a phobia disorders convention in Las Vegas. Since then three attendees have died in strange circumstances… Carl Polander had acrophobia. Fear of heights. So why would he have jumped from the nineteenth floor of a building?... Mara Agajanian had haemophobia. Fear of blood. So how could she have cut her own wrists in the bathtub?... Kimberley Rosen had pnigophobia. Fear of suffocation. She was fished out of a canal – but there as no water in her lungs.Dorie herself suffers from prosoponophobia. Fear of masks. She suspects there may be a twisted killer on the loose. Someone who preys on people’s worst phobias. Someone who, quite literally, enjoys scaring his vitims to death.”

And a soft but nice paragraph:

“Then Dorie remembered something else, a parable her father once told her when she handy sold a painting in a year and was thinking about giving up and taking a straight job. It was about a man sentenced to death who promised the king that if his life was spared, within a year he would teach the king’s favourite horse to talk. His friends told him he was crazy, that he’d set himself an impossible task. But a year is a long time, he told them. A lot of things can happen in a year. The king could die. The horse could die. Or maybe – who knows? – maybe the horse will actually learn to talk."