The second Kent Haruf novel I've read this year, and a bit more substantial than Our Souls at Night. Plainsong follows a number of separate characters whose lives intersect in a town called Holt, in the USA's Great Plains, roughly in the present day. Haruf's prose is very plain and unsentimental, but the lives he draws are mostly very sad. That's not to say the novel is entirely without humour, there's a laconic, rural humour here that New Zealanders will recognise. The characters are flawed and struggling, but mostly decent at heart, striving to do the right thing against all odds.

This is one of Margaret Atwood's dystopian novels. The US has collapsed economically and socially, but not completely, there are still 'the haves'. Stan and Charmaine live in their car, and are vulnerable to roving gangs. In desperation, they sign up to a community in the town of Consilience, and a project called Positron, which is essentially voluntary prison slave labour. All starts quite well, but soon ... The tone is quite wry, the tone light, but the subject material very dark.

I've been aware of Kent Haruf for a while now, but never read him until now. Sadly, he died last year, before this book was published.

I've been a fan of William Boyd for some years now, and especially like his epic novels, particularly Any Human Heart. Sweet Caress is in that territory, in fact, it could be seen as a female companion to that novel, in that it's a kind of cradle-to-grave telling of the story of the Twentieth Century through one woman's eyes, whereas Any Human Heart had a male protagonist.

I've read quite a few Oliver Sacks books, but never really knew much about the man himself, other than what he revealed in books which were, for the most part, about other people. He's always written with a great deal of humanity and compassion, curiosity and articulacy. I've now discovered that he was much more than his patients and the curious cases he has written about. He was a restless spirit, a man who never really fitted in anywhere, a shy man with particular obsessions - motorbikes, body building, swimming, the outdoors, and writing, always writing.

I, like many others, loved the first three books in Steig Larsson's Millennium Series, and I, like many others, was very sceptical about its continuation by a different author. When it started to get very good reviews, however, I decided to give it a go, and I'm very pleased I did. Although the prose is ever so slightly clunky in places, especially early in the book, this may be due to the use of a different translator to the earlier books. The characterisation and plotting are superb, at least as strong as in the originals.