Magnus Mills, famously a bus driver, first came to notice when his first novel, the 1998 'The Restraint of Beasts', was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Since then, his reputation for eccentricity, for breaking all the rules of fiction, has grown, and he remains a kind of cult figure in British fiction. I'd been aware of him since his Booker shortlisting, but actually hadn't read him until now, so I'm not aware if this latest novel is typical of him, but I expect it is.

I have an abiding interest in the Outer Hebrides, so it's strange that I haven't come across this trilogy before. The Blackhouse is the first book in the acclaimed Lewis Trilogy, featuring DI Fin Macleod. It's followed by The Lewis Man, and concludes with The Chessmen. He's a quite prolific crime writer, and has written a number of other series, a few standalone novels, and also for television.

This novel was long-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. I think it should have won. It's impossible to describe how much I loved this novel, truly, everyone should read it.

Allen Ropper is one of America's leading neurologists, he has, in fact, been Michael J Fox's consultant. During his long career, he has worked on many strange and remarkable cases, many of the highlights are described here, in slightly technical, but still accessible language. He explains the deductive process used by neurologists, and how errors in the brain are revealed in the physical actions of the body, and how even in these days of MRIs, the bedside questions and observations using such things as reflex hammers and tuning forks, can still lead to accurate diagnoses.

I suspect that most readers will either love or hate this book, either that or read it with a sense of perplexity! I had the same response in reading this book as I have when watching Lena Dunham's 'Girls' on TV - and I guess it's no coincidence that the same Lena Dunham has written a very positive review of this book which appears on the back cover. It's worth quoting from that review: "By the time July tackles motherhood, the book has become a bible. Never has a novel spoken so deeply to my sexuality, my spirituality, my secret self. I know I am not alone."

Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel The God Of Small Things, then promptly gave up writing fiction for political activism and polemical books, including The Algebra of Infinite Justice, and Broken Republic. This latest book is in the same territory: it's a fierce attack on the current political state of India, where 100 people own assets worth a quarter of India's GDP, and hundreds of millions live on less than $2 a day.