The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

I've been going through a 'thriller' phase recently and have read a wide range, from very good to 'how did this get published'. Stieg Larsson's book belongs in the 'intelligent and un-put-downable' category. It held me captive for several days, reading into the early hours through bloodshot eyes, as I peeled back yet another layer of the plot.

Set in Sweden, Larsson's main characters are quirky and human: Blomkvist, a famous financial journalist, (and crusader against the high level of what he believes is lazy and sycopantic journalism practiced by many of his peers), is handed a lead for a sensational story. He painstakingly researches it, following up each thread only to find that once it is published, all evidence unravels and he is unable to substantiate. With his reputation and career in ruins, he is sued for slander and receives a prison sentence. His magazine, the previously reputable Millennium which he runs with his on-again, off-again lover Erika, is fast losing advertising - and therefore revenue - and is facing ruin, in what is believed to be an organised campaign against Blomkvist.

We are introduced to one of the books most complex characters, Lisbeth Salander, - a gifted 'researcher' - when she is assigned to prepare a dossier on Blomkvist. Salander has her own problems, which given her intelligence, I found hard to believe that she couldn't sort out in less dramatic ways. However, her social ineptitude would make Cathy Reich's 'Temperence Brennan' look like a diplomat.

Enter the Vanger family: 40 years ago, 16 year old Harriet Vanger vanishes from Hedeby Island. Her grandfather is obsessed with finding the girl and lures Blomkvist to Hedeby with an intriguing proposal. Blomkvist and Salander become an unlikely 'batman and robin-like' duo in pursuit of an answer to the girl's fate.

There are many references to the meals eaten throughout the book which are very reflective of the individual characters. Also, Blomkvist enjoys a good thriller himself and through him, there appears to be a veiled swipe, by Larsson, at a fellow thriller writer who has drawn fire in the media for gratuitous violence in her books. In Larsson's own narrative, there are a couple of shocking scenes, but I don't believe the violence was unnecessarily gross or beyond the bare bones of what was required to portray the story or characters.

If I have one gripe about this page-turner, it is that sometimes a bit of back-story is slotted in just in time. For instance, we find out that one of the characters was in infantry school in Kiruna, just as they find themselves on the wrong end of a sniper's sights and it happens that the skills learned in infantry school are crucial to survival at this moment. Hmmmm! However, this is a minor complaint.

Throughout the book, I got the feeling that some of the characters had more life in them than just one book. It turns out that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first of a trilogy. I will rush out and buy Stieg Larsson's The Girl who Played with Fire and, once it has been released, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (unconfirmed working title due for release in Autumn 2009). Sadly, that's all there'll be from this gifted writer. According to a note on the back of the book, "Crusading liberal journalist and author Stieg Larsson died suddenly, shortly after delivering his three novels to his Swedish publisher. Tragically, he did not live to see the phenomenon that his work has become."

© Hester Casey

Hooked (A book about writing technique) by Les Edgerton

Some words of advice from Les Edgerton...

A simple opening is good. Eg. When I was a hairdresser...etc.(or even a cabbage grower).

When going to a flashback, use a space break – also good for a new character introduction.

Start off by interupting a stable situtation with an inciting incident - then struggle to solve instablity – then new stability etc.

Start opening scene with the protagonist's point of view (not antagonist)

Gives examples of bad openings ... 'the day I walked in and found my husband dead changed my whole life.'

The setup: don't open directly with (this makes it extremely difficult for the reader, who hasn't yet been introduced to any of the characters).

The setup should contain some detail of trouble (save the rest)

Backstory: dole out bit by bit.

Chekhov said if a gun appears on the credenza in act 1, it needs to be fired by act 3.

The problem faced by the protagonist needs to be a psychological one, e.g. Loss of job and personal ... sense of self tied to it ... test of faith.

An Act . Is a series of sequences that peak in a climactic scene which cause a major revesal of values, more powerful in impact than any previous scene.

At the end of chapter, leave character in trouble (good for page turner)

© Joan Thorpe

What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn

In Catherine O'Flynn's debut novel, What Was Lost, everything, it seems, is lost. The story opens with Kate Meaney, orphan, only child, and an outsider among her peers, who is lost in a world where she fails to fit in. Although Kate vanishes at an early stage in the narrative, her disappearance dominates the plot, which swiftly moves through a maze of twists and turns like the concrete corridors in the Green Oaks shopping centre.

The garish setting is also lost and unable to blend in with its urban, post-industrial British landscape. When it first opened in 1984, Green Oaks provided a playground for ten-year old Kate, where she could escape from her troubled home and engage in surveillance as an imaginary sleuth. Along with her toy monkey, Mickey, Kate secretly monitors the actions of various shoppers and staff members whom she imagines to be involved in crime. She immerses herself in this fantasy world - shared only with Adrian who works in the local shop and plays along with her wild imaginings - which she records in her journal. What Was Lost captures both the charm and ugliness of childhood with Kate's cheerful diary entries exposing a consumer-driven society choking on its own loneliness.

Shiny and colourful on the outside, with a hidden interior of service corridors, stockrooms, offices, and security systems, a shopping centre provides the perfect setting for a mystery. This landscape presents the author with a ready-made cast of characters: customers, thieves, drifters, lunatics and a particular gem - the mystery shopper, all of whom are skilfully portrayed in this novel. After Kate's disappearance, the narrative jumps two decades and exposes 21st century Britain evermore consumer-driven in all its sadness and absurdity. The shopping centre has become a Mecca for lost souls looking to fill the void in their own empty lives.

The lonely voyeur still dominates the story: in the guise of security guard, Kurt, who watches the world through his CCTV cameras; and disenchanted store manager, Lisa, whose job it is to continuously observe her colleagues and customers. As their after-hours friendship grows in intensity it brings new loss and new longing to light. For all the characters in What Was Lost, the shopping centre is more than a place to shop - it has seized their lives, and the hidden corridors can sometimes provide a welcome relief from the gaudy surface of their existence.

One night a little girl lost appears on the CCTV screen with her notebook and toy monkey. After an extensive search by security staff, however, she cannot be found. Although Kate disappeared twenty years earlier, and has been largely forgotten, she starts to haunt the memories of those few people who remember seeing her during the last days prior to her disappearance. But, for all their expertise in scrutiny they still cannot see what is right in front of them; they still cannot find what is lost. Eventually Kate's fate is revealed, just as the destinies of the other Green Oaks citizens are determined.

I would recommend this book because of its skilfully drawn characters, its keen insights into modern life and its heartbreaking personal narrative. This tale of mystery and intrigue, interwoven through a dull and ordinary backdrop, rips the wrapping off contemporary society and captures its sad, strange silliness and its frightening lack of substance. The inhabitants of What was Lost flock to a shopping centre for emotional sustenance. Even the staff find solace there from their otherwise dull and uneventful lives. Yet, Catherine O'Flynn's poignant eloquence attributes them with a kind of nobility and succeeds in presenting to the reader not only a page-turning ghost story, but also an assessment of incredible loss. It was a worthy winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 2007, and is published by Tindal Street Press.

© Frances Browner

Sulphuric Acid by Amélie Nothomb

(translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside)

This is a short book - a mere 127 pages - so no space for wasted words. By the middle of page 1, Pannonique has been snatched from her stroll in the Jardin des Plantes and packed into a lorry by the "Organisers". Re-labelled CKZ 114, she is just one of the latest - and perilously disposable - batch to feed the ultimate reality TV show, Concentration.

The show targets a viewing audience jaded by reality TV and thirsty for blood. Based on the idea of a Nazi concentration camp, the prisoners are controlled by a team of brutal young recruits - kapos. For the first time in her twenty years, Kapo Zdena has purpose and direction. She loves the military styling of her title and relishes the 500 seconds of undiluted fame her introduction to the programme gives her and uses it to maximise her appeal to an audience - who react with contempt.

Immediately conscious of the dangers of appealing to the cameras, CKZ 114 resolves to avoid doing anything that makes her telegenic. However the camera quickly hones in on the qualities of stillness, beauty and dignity that glow from prisoner CKZ 114, despite the near-starvation and degradation she experiences along with the other prisoners. Everybody wants to know her name: the viewers; the other prisoners; and - dangerously - Kapo Zdena. It becomes one of the few bargaining chips CKZ 114 possesses.

The book has resonances with Celebrity Big Brother's Jade Goody versus Shilpa Shetty - camera-fodder, sacrificed for programme ratings: Shetty to racist bullying; Goody to the scorn of British middle-class.

There is a sense of voyeurism as a reader turning page after page; a sense of being the appalled observer in the same way as the viewers who cannot resist tuning in to Concentration, whether delighted or disgusted by the programme as we wait to see (or actively vote for) the next prisoner executed.

Of course this would never happen in the real world, would it? However, with reality TV ratings dropping off all over the world, who knows…

© Hester Casey

Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce

Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce was recommended at a recent Irish Pen evening that focussed on children's writing. Since he is the top Children's Book Critic in Ireland, when Robert Dunbar made this his top recommendation for anyone wondering what book to buy for a child, I knew I just had to read it. Assuming I had already read all the kids' classics, I imagined that this was a new work. I was therefore surprised to discover that it was actually written in 1958 and won the Carnegie Medal that year. Apparently Tom's Midnight Garden is now considered a classic work of English literature and in 2007 was named one of the top ten children's books of the last 70 years. How on earth did I miss out on it until now?

Since reading this little gem, I have passed the book on to several other readers, young and old. All of them enjoyed it and agreed that it is not just suitable for children. There is an air of something special about this book from page one. The hero of the story is a young boy, but his innocent adventures are tinged with adult interest. His interactions with his aunt and uncle are so skilfully written that the reader can appreciate the vastly different minds working behind each sentence spoken. When the child is trying to ask a simple question about the passage of time, the adult repeatedly tries to turn the conversation into a complex scientific discussion - 'Imagine this is Point A and this is Point B…'

The simple sentence construction makes this book very readable, as does the little hook at the end of each chapter. But there's nothing new about those tricks. I was completely taken up with this boy's midnight adventures and was as eager as he was to solve the unfolding mystery. All the while, however, I kept wondering - what has made this writing so good? Is it the 'high concept' of the idea behind the book? I don't think so, because I was wrapped up in the adventure long before the 'high concept' revealed itself. I think it must be the writing itself. The voice of the writer - at once innocent and all-knowing.

I loved this book. If you haven't already read it - then do rush out and get a copy today. Its magic will enrich your life - I promise.

© Fiona Price

Final Demand by Deborah Moggach

Natalie is bright, beautiful, and thirty-two. "The next big thing in her life should be happening but though time was speeding up, the days whisking past, a breathlessness to them now, Natalie's life remained doggedly the same." Leapfrogging from wild weekend to wild weekend, she ignores the unpleasantness of life in between, life that delivers a stack of bills and other disagreeable post which she stashes - unopened - behind her toaster. A series of low-paid dead-end jobs sees her end up in the Accounts Department of NuLine Telecommunications - NT, it's your call.

The story opens where love, money and her car are about to let Natalie down. Natalie comes into possession of a cheque that could make a difference - if only her initials were N.T. Natalie takes the company's slogan to heart (It's your call) and sets out to acquire a surname that fits with her scheme, a chance to change her life. It's the perfect crime and no-one gets hurt...

But naive Colin Taylor - Stumpy to his friends - gets hurt. He calls from the Gas Board to cut off Natalie's supply and finds himself married to her. Natalie is assured of her gas supply and now has the means to supplement her income courtesy of a loophole in NuLine's systems.

Colin isn't the only victim. Natalie slips up and as her scheme runs its course, the lives of several people are irrevocably changed, with tragic consequences.

The four-part structure breaks the flow of the story (for me) and an internal monologue by one of the characters in Part 4 seems oddly out of place with the rest of the book. It's an unusual story though, and well told - as you'd expect from such an accomplished author. (Final Demand was adapted as a two-part tele-play.)

© Hester Casey

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

- (First published in 1929)

This is a difficult book to read chiefly because it employs the narrative device of a series of viewpoints to tell the same story. The blurb on the back describes the book as "Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family through four fractured narratives" and this is entirely accurate. Part one of the novel is delivered through the child-like eyes of a mentally disabled adult (Benjy). The style in this portion is a complex mix of phonetic speech and infantile visual analysis and it is unclear what the time-frame of the piece is. The subsequent two portions of the novel are more readily decipherable and the essential conflict in the story begins to emerge although from time to time the water is considerably muddied by the skipping back and forth between past and present. The second narrator is a college student at Harvard and we begin, through him, to get a sense of the desperate core of the relationships in the Coulson family. The story moves on a generation next to the struggle between an illegitimate daughter and her uncle as the central shameful theme of the whole work is finally explored.

The writing in this novel is consistently excellent. Once the undulations of the times and varying voices are navigated there is a wealth of fabulously constructed narrative to enjoy. The Sound and The Fury improves with every page until, in the final quarter, some of the most wonderful prose of all time lies in wait for the delectation and edification of the reader.

I feel that this descriptive passage alone, in the final portion of the book, made any earlier struggle with the text more than worthwhile: "The road rose again, to a scene like a painted backdrop. Notched into a cut of red clay crowned with oaks the road appeared to stop short off, like a cut ribbon. Beside it a weathered church lifted its crazy steeple like a painted church, and the whole scene was as flat and without perspective as a painted cardboard set upon the ultimate edge of the flat earth, against the windy sunlight of space and April and a midmorning filled with bells."

This is a difficult book to read and perhaps that is how literature should operate; rewarding struggles with sermons of such genius prose as to render the reader speechless. I did not realise how much I had enjoyed this wonderful novel until I stopped and admitted that easier does not always mean better and clarity may sometimes be wished for by readers when what is really required is patience. This is a classic.

© Conor Bowman

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

This is one of those books which forces you to nail your colours to the mast pretty early on. You will love this story or you will hate it - that is a given. The novel tells the unusual and engaging tale of the experiences of a boy in Barcelona, Daniel, beginning on the day his father brings him to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. This is a magical and beautiful place where - as the name suggests - books which would otherwise be lost for all time are kept.

"When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here." Daniel's father introduces him to a place in time and a moment in Daniel's own life when his destiny is inexorably shaped by his choice of a book - in the labyrinth and passageways and platforms - which he undertakes to adopt and keep alive. The choice of the ten-year-old is The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax.

Thereafter, the journey of this young man on his own life-path intersects with the life and writings of the mysterious Julian Carax. In his quest to discover what happened to his chosen author, Daniel's own life unwinds in an intrigue of experience which is as unexpected as it is engaging.

This is a tremendously well-written book which delivers almost exactly as much as it promises. It loses nothing in translation and is as original an idea as you might hope to find. You'll love it or...

© Conor Bowman

I’m Not Scared by Niccolo Ammaniti

(translated from Italian by Jonathan Hunt 2003)

Niccolo Ammaniti sucks you in on the first word and spits you out on the eighty-thousandth. I’m not Scared is a short, compulsive read, bringing a warning word from reviewer Michael Dibdin of the Guardian, Don’t start it on the way home from work unless the train terminates at your station. My advice is, however, do start it.

Ammaniti hurls you against the shattering veil of childhood innocence, bumping you down from time to time on the shifting ground of Michele Amitrano’s disappearing world, with no pause for breath.

With not much else to do during a relentlessly hot Italian summer, six children happen upon a deserted and dilapidated farmhouse in the wheat fields surrounding their remote village. Nine year old Michele Amitrano makes a discovery so momentous he is too scared to talk about it. Unable at first to differentiate between his childish beliefs in monsters and goblins, Michele soon discovers that his small, real world is filled with far more menacing powers than he could ever have imagined.

I highly recommend this sometimes harrowing, sometimes beautiful book as Michele struggles to understand the confusing changes around him. I had a slight premonition of the end, but still couldn’t wait to get there.

© Caroline Brady