I love time travel paradoxes in science fiction, and this is a terrific, and very exciting example. Em and her friend Finn are sent back in time from our near future in which America has become a police state at war with itself, to kill the inventor of time travel before he invents it. Unfortunately for Em, the inventor is James, the love of her (past) life. The person helping James to stop this from happening, is her past self. This sets up a great scenario for drama, action, paradoxes, romance, betrayal and conspiracy.

With the major Brad Pitt movie adaptation of this classic zombie novel approaching ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EC7P5WdUko ) I thought I'd see what the fuss was about. It's a much more serious, plausible and compelling book than I expected. It's presented as material deleted from the author's official report on events around The Zombie War, which has apparently taken place some 12 years before, and all but devastated the human race.

This is a short, enigmatic and beautifully packaged novel, in which an elderly, eminent literature professor arrives at a remote Orkney island, on his honeymoon with his ethereal, much younger wife, a former star pupil. He knows very little about this mysterious woman, but is physically and emotionally obsessed with her. She in turn is obsessed with the sea. They spend the nights drinking whisky, and telling each other stories, and she spends the days watching the wild sea. He watches her from the safety of their cottage, and wonders.

It's hard to know where to start in discussing this book - it's SO big, SO ambitious and SO extraordinary that anything I say will just seem trivial and insignificant. The only answer is for EVERYONE to just read the damn thing! It's set in Hokitika in the 1860s, during the gold rush, and concerns a large group of inter-connected characters. There is a murder, a disappearance, opium addiction, stolen gold, corruption, and much, much more.

Auster and Coetzee had apparently been fans of each others work for years, but only met in 2008. They then started a wide-ranging and intelligent correspondence through which they became great friends. The warmth and mutual respect they feel for each other is always apparent as they discuss everything from the financial crisis, fatherhood, sport, philosophy, politics, art and film, to the difficulties of promoting their work. It's a fascinating insight into the minds of two of the current generation of great writers.

Probably the best book I've read so far this year. McCann's previous novel "Let The Great World Spin" was a fantastic novel set in New York in 1974, on the day Philippe Petit walked a tightrope between the just-built Twin Towers. It won the National Book Award, and the Dublin IMPAC Prize. McCann has again taken real historical events and real characters, and woven imaginary events and characters into a highly dramatic narrative, with numerous interlinked strands.