This is a hilarious memoir, written in the form of diary entries covering a year in the life of Scotland's biggest second-hand bookshop, in Wigtown. Shaun Bythell is the owner of the shop, a permanently grumpy misanthrope, who writes exceptionally well about his employees and his eccentric customers. A very charming book, a must read.

Oliver Loving is Stefan Merrill Block's third novel. His first, The Story of Forgetting was deservedly acclaimed. He's really hit his straps with this one. Oliver Loving has survived a school shooting, and is in a coma, non-responsive. Ten years have passed, his family and the small town where the shooting took place have never recovered, but no one knows the truth about what happened and why Oliver does, and the reader learns what happened, without knowing whether Oliver is still aware in his comatose body.

This is a very odd, quite unsettling novel. Mr Field, the narrator, is a concert pianist whose career has been ended by an accident, and on a whim he spends his compensation money on a reproduction of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, in Cape Town. He moves there with his wife, who soon leaves, and he becomes lethargic and disoriented, and as the house decays around him, he becomes obsessed with its former occupants. He is an elusive character, as he descends into madness, but the reader is drawn along with him, all the time with increasing anxiety.

I read this twisting turning Australian thriller pretty much in one sitting, which is the best way to keep track of the revelations! It's set in a small town in New South Wales. The local priests kills 5 local parishioners, so right from the beginning the reader knows what has happened, but not why. The journalist-with-a-past sent to the town to find out why finds a lot more than he bargained for. The plot twists and surprises come regularly, but all are convincing, plausible, and add massively to the tension. A superb thriller.

This is Sally Rooney's second novel (Conversations With Friends was published in 2017), and has been long listed for the Man Booker Prize. Sally Rooney was born in 1991.

In preparation for our recent trip to Namibia, this formed part of my preparatory reading. It's widely seen as a contender for the 'Great Namibian Novel', and deservedly so. It's set in the lead up to Namibia's independence from South Africa in 1990, and follows the experiences of Muronga, a rather naive young, newly married man living a traditional village life in rural Namibia. His life changes radically when the village is visited by commissioners from South Africa requiring villagers to pay taxes.