This is a book about Cornwall, but it's not a conventional history or geography. It's a very personal book about the human response to a particular place. The author chronicles Neolithic rituals, Arthurian traditions, uncovers archival material about topographers, antiquarians, poets and painters, describes the technique of manufacturing China from clay, and explains why layers of meaning accumulate over time around certain features in the landscape.

Teju Cole wrote the very highly acclaimed Open City (which I have not read); this is actually an earlier novel, only published previously in Nigeria. Although it's described as fiction, it doesn't have a plot as such, it's really a vehicle for the author to offer a polemical portrait of contemporary Nigeria. He is particularly disturbed by the corruption and hopelessness he finds there. At around 160 pages, and including photographs by the author, it's a brief work, but the writing is economical and precise; I read it in a single sitting. Cole is a writer to watch.

A tremendous, and long-awaited novel, from a masterful and versatile writer. This is not quite like anything else he has written, but he does tend not to repeat himself. Set in the years immediately after the death of King Arthur, we're in mythological territory; there are demons and supernatural beasts, Sir Gawain and other knights, there are monks whose activities are suspicious, and there is a quest. There is also a cloud obscuring the peoples memories. It is an epic novel, despite being only a little over 300 pages in length.

This is a semi-fictional journalist's account of the 2014 election campaign, written in a pastiche of the styles of the great US journalists like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer. It's very funny, and despite the fictional elements, it is as true an account of the madness which surrounded the election as you'd read anywhere. In a strange way, it's a companion to Nicky Hager's Dirty Politics, as that book hung heavy over the election campaign; Braunias responds to that madness without taking sides. The book is not exactly neutral, but it's also not partisan. It is, however, a must-read.

To be honest, I had reservations about the appearance of this book. I'd believed that The Lay of the Land in 2006 was the last book in the Frank Bascombe trilogy, and yet here we have a fourth book, and it's short stories, and only 238 pages of widely spaced type. Hmm..how wrong I was! The 4 linked stories in this book, which almost constitute a novel, pack a very real punch. Each of them relate, in some detail, a very specific incident over a few days in the lead up to the Christmas following Hurricane Sandy's devastation of New Jersey.

I've really enjoyed all of the Andrew O'Hagan books that I've read, but this is quite a departure from the others. It's more ambitious in structure, and more powerful emotionally, which is not to say the others haven't been powerful, just that this novel carries quite a punch. There are two overlapping stories here. Anna Quirk, elderly and in the early stages of dementia, was once a pioneer of British documentary photography. Her grandson Luke is serving in Afghanistan where something terrible happens, which causes him to return to Scotland.