Mr Phillips, by John Lanchester

One warm July morning Mr Phillips climbs out of bed, leaving Mrs Phillips dozing. He prepares for his commute into the city – but this is no ordinary Wednesday. It is a day on which Mr Phillips will chat with a pornographer, stalk a tv mini-celebrity, have lunch with an aspiring record mogul, and get caught up in a bank robbery. It is, as Mr Phillips comes to realise, the first day of the rest of his life – whether he wants it to be or not. All this is both better and worse than being at work. So why is Mr Phillips, a cautious middle-aged accountant, not behind his desk calculating the financial consequences of redundancies or recommending the savings to be made from more responsible use of yellow sticky note pads?

The bus moves half-way across Chelsea Bridge and comes to a halt. A vista opens up towards Canary Wharf in the east and past Battersea Bridge towards Hammersmith in the other direction. There isn’t much traffic on the river today. There never is. Mr Phillips has lived in London his entire life and has never been afloat on the River Thames, not once. It is one of a collection of things he hasn’t done. He hasn’t been in a helicopter, met anyone famous, been to Wembley Stadium or the Royal Albert Hall or the House of Commons. He has never given anyone mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or made a citizen’s arrest. He had never seen a dead body until his father’s death in 1981. At the lying-in he was stiff and unforgettably cold to the touch.

Hav, by Jan Morris

When the world’s foremost travel writer describes the small city-state of Hav, it is unlike any of her other books. For Hav exists only in one special place – Jan Morris’s imagination.

Hav gives us Jan Morris at her most delightful and most suggestive. The city it describes is a magical place, but behind its arcane splendours are darker implications. The traditional Roof Race is peculiarly exciting, the waterfront is picturesque, the wistful call of a trumpeter from a distant rampart is wonderfully evocative, and every street corner is haunted by memories of illustrious visitors – Freud, Diaghilev, Marco Polo, Lawrence of Arabia and countless others. But Morris’s original visit to this prodigy, as recorded in the first part of this book, ends in flight when an unidentified enemy ravages the place.

When she returns some twenty years later, to write the second part of the book, she discovers a city-state that has rebuilt itself, transformed by new energies and now dominated by a totemic tower 2000 feet tall. But as the old Hav was in many ways an allegory of the last century, so the city in its new incarnation offers no less elusive hints, echoes and portents of our twenty-first century world. It remains a beguiling but disturbing enigma of the fancy…

‘What are you running away from?’ Magda asked me once. I said I wasn’t running away from anything. ‘Of course you are,’ she said. ‘In Hav we are all running.’ Perhaps we are, too, each of us finding our own escape in this narrow, sultry cul-de-sac. Like many another cage the peninsula of Hav, blazed all about by sun, trapped in dust and moulder, offers its prisoners a special kind of liberation. The harsher, the freer! When the sun goes down on these summer days I feel the city to be less than itself, and look forward impatiently to the hot blast of the morning.

Ghosts and Lightning, by Trevor Byrne

- Ma’s gone. Jesus Denny, yeh have to come home.

Happy or unhappy, all families are a mystery. None more than the Cullens. Having escaped their clutches and moved across the water, Denny is just beginning to make a life for himself when a call from his sister brings him back to Dublin, city of his birth. Back to square one. As if squabbling siblings and unhelpful childhood friends weren’t trouble enough, a ghost starts making appearances in the family home and Denny’s life starts to get a lot more complicated. Full of riotous laughter, wonderment and love found in the most unlikely places, Ghosts and Lightning is an exuberant tale of someone trying to do the right thing surrounded by the wrong choices. It is also a revealing chronicle of our times from an exceptional new Irish talent.

- Grand to be home, wha?

You nod, the bus shunting forward.

- Can’t beat it, says the young man. – Over the water were yeh? Obviously yeh. Fuckin ferry port, isn’t it? Swansea I was in. Dead little city. Small like but cool, yeh know? Great fuckin craic. And this mad bird I met, oof. Should o seen her, Welsh lass. Fucks sake. Off her trolley she was, pure mental.

The crumbling docklands pass by. Strange that so dilapidated a place can exist in this city, these odd dark shapes and leaning gates, these silent, haunted buildings. What was before, what’s left behind.

The Devil’s Paintbrush, by Jake Arnott

Paris, 1903. Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald, one of the greatest heroes of the British Empire, is facing ruin in a shocking homosexual scandal when he meets the notorious occultist, Aleister Crowley. As they set out into the night on a wild journey through the sinful city, the story of Macdonald’s tragedy begins to unfold – with startling revelations both for the General and the aspiring magician.

In a tale that ranges from the battlefields of Sudan to the backstreets of Edinburgh, Jake Arnott brings alive a fascinating, forgotten figure of history, and a world trembling on the brink of a brutal new era. Black magic, Baden-Powell and Islamic revolution are just some of the ingredients in this bold and exhilarating novel, which explores imperialism, sexuality and the very nature of belief with an immediacy that resonates into the present.

Macdonald found himself in Le Jardin des Tuilieres with Crowley, who had suggested a post-prandial stroll. Macdonald had agreed, he needed air. His head was fuzzed with champagne and the florid talk of his unexpected guest. But even in the open Crowley’s presence could have a stifling effect, like some hothouse creeper, oozing a sickly scent, choking all the life around him. Macdonald watched him gazing at the statue of a centaur, his wet mouth jutting salaciously.

‘Catherine de Médicis built a palace here,’ the Beast commented languidly as they strolled along the gravel path. ‘She was reputed to have been a sorceress, certainly a poisoner. It is said that she held black masses here.’

‘Is that so?’ Macdonald muttered low, not wanting to encourage him.

‘The occult has always been a feature of Parisian society. Satanism is terrbily fashionable here at the moment, you know.’

Paradise Lost, by Giles Milton

On Saturday 9th September, 1922, the victorious Turkish cavalry rode into Smyrna, the richest and most cosmopolitan city in the Ottoman Empire. What happened over the next two weeks must rank as one of the most compelling human dramas of the twentieth century. Almost two million people were caught up in a disaster of truly epic proportions.

Paradise Lost is told with the narrative verve that has made Giles Milton a bestselling historian. It unfolds through the memories of the survivors, many of them interviewed for the first time, and the eyewitness accounts of those who found themselves caught up in one of the greatest catastrophes of the modern age.

Sergeant Tchorbadjis’s colleague, Emmanuel Katsaros, had a similiar experience. He was dousing the Armenian Club with water in an effort to halt the advance of the flames when he saw two Turkish soldiers enter the building with drums of petroleum. He protested when he saw one of them sluicing petrol across the floor.

‘On the one hand we are trying to stop the fires and on the other you are setting them,’ he said.

‘You have your orders,’ replied the soldier, ‘and we have ours. This is Armenian property. Our orders are to set fire to it.’

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