This is the shortest novel (116 pages) to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and it would have been a worthy winner. It's difficult to say too much about this book without giving away the story, but it's set in 1985, in an Irish town just at Christmas, and quietly tells of Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant who makes a choice which will resonate for the rest of his life. The fact that the book ends at the point of this choice, rather than telling of the rest of what the reader knows is inevitable, is where its impact lies.

Rickie Lee Jones was born in 1954, and made it really big with her first two albums in 1979 and in 1981. What I didn't realise is just how colourful her life before and after that success had been. Most of this memoir focusses on the before, and delves into her fascinating, gritty family background, and her conflicted, tragic childhood. She struggled to match the commercial success of her first two albums, but has continued to collaborate, record and perform, and has to date released 17 albums.

Mark Edmonds is a professor of archaeology who lives in Orkney, and in this book he traces what is known about the people who lived in Orkney up to 6000 years ago, based on the widespread archaeological sites found there. They were a spiritually sophisticated people, who built houses and other structures from local stone, they farmed, fished and kept livestock, and erected astounding circles of stone and tombs which today appear mysterious. Edmonds relates this ancient history to the present through photographs and extracts from the work of the great Orkney poet George Mackay Brown.

No Reservations is an illustrated companion to his TV series of the same name, and serves as a kind of behind the scenes journal of the making of the TV show. The photographs are mainly informal, shot by the crew during filming, and are intimate, amusing and warm. The book is arranged by continent, and there is a brief text by Bourdain about the experience of filming and eating in each location. It's really a book for fans, there isn't a great deal new here, but it has a great charm, and is an insight into his life before it daisy spiralled out of control.

Eddy, Eddy is an absorbing and compulsive novel, loosely based on Dickens's A Christmas Carol, set in Christchurch post-quake. It traces 4 or 5 months in Eddy Smallbone's life two years after a significant and traumatic event in his life, which he is struggling to deal with. It's a novel that revels in language and character, as the reality of the past is slowly revealed to the reader, and the conclusion packs a real emotional punch. Wryly amusing and superbly literate, this is a tremendous novel.

This long and dense but always entertaining look at the period from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s chronicles a time of massive change in this country and the world. Hairstyles and fashion changed as drug use became widespread, music became more electric, the Viet Nam war raged, feminism was adopted, food and social culture evolved and communal living spread, and political culture struggled to keep up.