Light Perpetual is on the 2021 Booker Prize Longlist, and is a dazzlingly original work by one of Britains most inventive contemporary writers. It reminded me of William Boyd's Any Human Heart, Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1, and Colum McCann's Let The Great World Spin. It's an epic novel, spanning 65 years from 1944 to 2009, following 5 characters from young children, and visiting them each for a day in 1949, 1964, 1979, 1994, and finally 2009. They interweave each others lives as they deal with the travails of the 20th Century.

A compelling and moving book in which Wendyl Nissen applies a journalistic rigour to an investigation of her family history, and uncovers some extraordinary secrets. From appalling parenting, sad adoptions, loss, grief, and generally poor behaviour! It's a remarkably effecting and honest look at family life and its impact, adoption and its legacy, dementia and its destructive power. It ends with an extremely useful Hints and Tips section, including advice on Advance Directives and Advance Values statements.

Paul Theroux returns to Africa 40 years after living in Uganda and Malawi and reports on current conditions there. He both loves and hates Africa, and has a lot to love and hate while travelling overland, mostly by train, through Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and finally South Africa, It's an epic journey, full of delays and complications, but Theroux is nothing if not a capable traveller, and he writes well about local characters, other travellers and the landscape.

Andrew Eames was under the spell of Joseph Conrad when he set out as a naive graduate to spend 2 years exploring Asia. He had many adventures in Thailand, Laos Malaysia, India, the Timor Sea and the Himalaya. Eames is an intelligent, observant and compassionate traveller, intrepid or foolhardy by turns, and the reader has a sense of his coming of age. The journey changes him, as all good journeys should, and he is honest about himself and other travellers, while also being amusing and thought provoking. Worth seeking out.

This densely informative, digressive, elegantly written travel book and history of the southern tip of Greece, the remote Peloponnese, is deservedly a classic, and typical of Patrick Leigh Fermor's oeuvre. Mani, and its companion Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece, have been described as 'two of the best ravel books of the century'.

Patricia Lockwood is a poet and memoirist, this is her first, remarkably original novel. It is written in a series of short, fragmentary, disconnected parts, which build to a narrative of sorts, and half way through, an unexpected event leads to a shift in the narrative and the focus of the main character. The internet and social media, called the portal in the novel, play a significant part in the first section.