Taking its form from Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, The Deck describes six days during a pandemic, as a group of people escape to a house in the country, where they eat, drink, and tell stories about their lives. It's a brilliant and propulsive read, addictive, inventive, written in an archly satirical style, funny and thought provoking. In the background of the reading of this book is the uncertainty of what is happening in the rest of the world, as the pandemic in the novel seems rather more serious than COVID!

This superbly researched book chronicles John Mulgan's activities in Greece from 1943 until his still mysterious death in a Cairo hotel in 1945, at the age of 33. It's a fascinating story, and casts new light on both Greek politics during and after the war, and Mulgan himself. He ran a resistance group in the wilds of the Roumeli region, carrying out guerrilla actions against the Nazi occupiers.

A hilariously entertaining and beautifully told memoir, episodic and anecdotal, this is a triumph os storytelling. Sam Neill turns out to be a charming companion, by turns gossipy, self-effacing, amusingly grumpy, and very moving - he's undergoing treatment for cancer, which appears to be working. The book includes quite a number of charming family photographs as well as pictures from his long and prolific film career. This is a terrific memoir, worth reading even if you're not familiar with many of his movies.

Orlando Figes has written many books on Russian history, and in this book he presents the distillation of his years of research and knowledge into a 300-pages introductory history of that troubled country. It's authoritative, comprehensive, readable and convincing, tragic and non-judgemental. It opens in the 9th Century and ends with a rumination on its future, Putin and the Ukraine war. He says that no other country has been so divided over its own past, non has changed its story so often. If you want to understand Russia, and we all should, this book will certainly help.

Shy is a strange, lovely and unsettling little book. Only 120 pages, a one-sitting read, telling of only a few hours of a teenage boy's life, it's a true epic in miniature. It's written as a stream-of-consciousness, a multitude of voices, an oblique narrative and an insight into a disturbed mind. It's both uplifting and rather depressing, but an extraordinary achievement nonetheless.

This book is drawn from a 2018 podcast called Lost in Larrimah, and it concerns a man who went missing in mysterious circumstances from a town called Larrimah, in Australia's Northern Territory. At the time Larrimah's population was 12, and they all appeared to dislike everyone else in the town. It's a wildly amusing and intriguing book, as the authors travel around some of the world's most remote regions, attempting to piece together Paddy Moriarty's life and find out what might have happened.