This is the second memoir by a brain surgeon I've read recently. The first was 'Reaching Down The Rabbit Hole', by Allen Ropper. Whereas he came across as emotionally detached, seeing his cases as having problems that he had to solve, Marsh never loses sight of the fact that his patients are human, with lives, feelings, families. A bit like Oliver Sacks, he's able to communicate compassion and humanity. He's extremely honest about certain cases that have gone wrong, and how he manages to live with the consequences of his mistakes.

The Festival of Insignificance is the 86 year old Milan Kundera's first novel in around 15 years. In it he revisits some of the themes of his earlier novels - jokes in totalitarian states, Stalin, lightness, existence - and, in a way, summarises them in a novel barely over 100 pages in length. Strangely. His characters meet in a series of tableaus, have conversations, but don't really go anywhere. There is no plot. The author occasionally addresses the reader. I really enjoyed this book.

Matt Haig has, in the last few years, become a rather successful novelist. He has published five acclaimed adult novels, and a number of books for children and young adults. Before that, though, when he was 24, he had an experience with depression that almost killed him. This is a book partly about that, but it's also an exploration of how to live better. He says he wrote this book "because the oldest cliches remain the truest. Time heals. The bottom of the valley never provides the clearest view.

Ben Okri won the Booker Prize in 1991 for 'The Famished Road'. He was born in Nigeria, now lives in England, and has written 10 novels, two books of essays, and collections of poetry and short stories. He spent part of his childhood in England, and part in Nigeria, and his writing is influenced both by African storytelling traditions and myths, and by classical English and French writers like Shakespeare, Coleridge and de Montaigne.

Melissa Harrison wrote the highly acclaimed 'Clay' in 2013. This is her second novel. It's a pastoral novel, set in an English village, and it traces the lives of 4 main characters over a spring month. There is a tragic car accident in the prologue, but you don't know who is involved, or what the circumstances were - the lead up to that tragedy is the climax that the novel builds towards.

This memoir probably needs no introduction - it's been in the bestsellers list all over the world, and the author has been widely interviewed, and she appeared at the Auckland Writers festival earlier this year. It's a grief memoir - her father has just died - and she decides to train a goshawk. She becomes quite obsessed, and the book describes her 'untagging' as she attempts to deal with the parallel challenges of dealing with her grief, and training the hawk.