A Town Called Solace: ‘Will break your heart’ Graham Norton

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Through long walks in nature as she finds a true sense of belonging, connectivity, renewal and hope, so do we, her readers. As a novel in its own right this is a slow paced character study of how life in a small town and the disappearance of a teenager affect 3 interconnected people.

I truly believe that attention is the most sacred resource that we have to spend on this planet, and books are perhaps the last places where we spend this resource freely, and where it means the most. Angry, rebellious Rose, had a row with their mother, stormed out of the house and simply disappeared.

And Imperial Nostalgia (Manchester University Press) by Peter Mitchell, which explains how the delusions of the Raj continue to shape our national psychology today. On the National Post 's Paperback Fiction Best-Sellers list in 2007, Lawson's second novel, The Other Side of the Bridge, took the number-one spot. I like a novel to grab me and The Book of Form and Emptiness (Canongate) by Ruth Ozeki gave me very peculiar dreams for a long time, as though it did not want to release me to other things. In Mrs Orchard’s case, that earthquake arrived in the form of a little boy and the aftershock continued for decades afterwards, proving that a single moment and one bad decision can leave a shadow on a life that can be hard to shake off.

Sal Flint has written and published over 300 chapter books for children and has recently branched out into writing picture books about topics close to her heart, such as dementia and generating kindness. There’s a more fable-like treatment of political violence in one of the surprise inclusions, An Island; South African Karen Jennings’s small-press parable centres on an isolated lighthouse keeper who has suffered under colonialism and dictatorship in an unnamed African country. I enjoyed Hugo Hamilton’s The Pages (Fourth Estate), narrated with verve and ingenuity by an actual book, a novel by Joseph Roth, which got saved from the Nazi bonfire and then taken on a picaresque journey across the Atlantic and back to Germany. Amos Tutuola, Gabriel García Márquez, DO Fagunwa, Shahrnush Parsipur and other exponents of tree anthropomorphism are perhaps the outsiders in the know. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize that year and selected for the Richard and Judy book club.It mines the same narrow, dangerous territory as Beryl Bainbridge and Ivy Compton-Burnett: the dysfunctional family unit. Ian Duhig’s New and Selected Poems (Picador) is a must have, must read gathering of the best of his work. There’s a similar marvel of ventriloquism in Adam Mars-Jones’s Batlava Lake (Fitzcarraldo), a story about war and soldiers delivered by the hopeless, weirdly endearing Barry, which builds to a blindsiding final paragraph. Only on his third novel, but already with a second Booker nomination, Sahota is a significant voice. I came across this author by chance having seen another of her books reviewed and after a period of not reading, her novel(s) sounded like something I’d quite enjoy as a way back in to reading.

When I finished the book, I felt like I watched a cheap movie with good actors but a bit of a lousy script.I also really enjoyed Vanessa Onwuemezi’s Dark Neighbourhood (Fitzcarraldo), a collection of short stories from an unforgettable, searing voice. Yes the carpenter and his son, the sheriff, the cafe owner, even the ex-friend, beautifully portrayed. In life, time runs together in its sameness, but in fiction time is condensed—one action springboards into another, greater action. David Harewood’s documentary Psychosis and Me was an eye-opener for his honesty in reflecting on his experiences in the mental health system.