First in the queue today, a clearly smitten Andrew asks:

I have just finished reading The Time Traveller’s Wife and I loved it!

Doctor, I would like to read another romance/love story with a twist; what do you recommend?

A great book and a good question there. Wipe the tears from your eyes and consider these tomes:

• The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson is a love story that spans a considerable portion of history – because the two protagonists appear to be conducting a love affair crossing the centuries after our protagonist experiences the agony of terrible burns, is hospitalised and meets the otherworldly Marianne Engel.
• Madeleine Thien’s Certainty also spans time and generations – two parallel stories of intense love and loss become intertwined as men from two generations struggle to accept the uncertain nature of the past, as well as the future.
• Serena by Ron Rash is a love story but it’s far from a typical tale. The year is 1929, and newly-weds George and Serena Pemberton arrive from Boston in the North Carolina mountains to create a timber empire. Serena is new to the mountains – but she soon shows herself the equal of any worker, overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes, even saving her husband’s life in the wilderness. Yet she also learns that she will never bear a child. Serena’s discovery will set in motion a course of events that will change the lives of everyone in this remote community.
• If you need your mind expanding, you can always rely on Scarlett Thomas, so you could try The End of Mr. Y. When Ariel Manto uncovers a copy of The End of Mr. Y in a second-hand bookshop, she can’t believe her eyes. She knows enough about its author, the outlandish Victorian scientist Thomas Lumas, to know that copies are exceedingly rare. And, some say, cursed. With Mr. Y under her arm, Ariel finds herself thrust into a thrilling adventure of love, sex, death and time-travel.
• Few harder places to find love than war-torn Europe, but that’s what happens in Skeletons at the Feast, by Chris Bohjalian. In January 1945, in the waning months of World War II, a small group of people begin the longest journey of their lives: an attempt to cross the remnants of the Third Reich to reach the British and American lines. Among the group is 18-year-old Anna Emmerich, the daughter of Prussian aristocrats. There is her lover, Callum Finnella, a young Scottish prisoner of war who has been brought from the stalag to her family’s farm as forced labour. And there is the intriguing Wehrmacht corporal whom the pair know as Manfred – who is, in reality, Uri Singer, a Jew from Germany who managed a daring escape from a train bound for Auschwitz. Their flight will test both Anna’s and Callum’s love, as well as their friendship with Manfred – assuming any of them even survive.
• But for perhaps the most unusual love story of all, you need The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer. Max Tivoli is is nearly seventy years old, but he looks as if he is only seven – for Max is ageing backwards. The tragedy of his life is that he falls in love when he is seventeen with Alice, a girl his own age – but to her he looks like a middle-aged man, and when he makes advances, she is repulsed. But when he is thirty-five, he actually looks his age, so he has a second chance at love – but tragedy befalls this star-crossed couple and desperate measures are required.

Next, Joe shuffles in, wrapped in a scarf, clearly fresh from kicking the fallen leaves outside the surgery, and asks:

Doctor, as Autumn is upon us, can you suggest any titles to get me in the mood for the season of mists?

Autumn’s all about changes in the weather – and weather plays a big part in Giles Foden’s Turbulence; alternatively you could give some rain-soaked London crime like Adam Creed’s Suffer the Children a go.

Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go has a very autumnal feel to it too, as does One Moonlit Night by Caradog Prichard. This simple novel tells of one boy’s journey into the grown-up world. By the light of a full moon our narrator and his friends Huw and Moi witness a side to their Welsh village life that they had no idea existed, and their childish innocence is exchanged for a shocking introduction to the horrors of the adult world.

And lastly, Anna, clearly suffering from what we doctors refer to as ‘Danbrownarnchtasickofhimitis’, wonders about the alternatives to this year’s biggest seller:

Never mind Dan Brown – can you recommend something that’s both thrilling and well-written?

You don’t want much do you Anna? OK, here goes:

• For something a but grittier than Dan Brown, you could try Volk’s Game, by Brent Ghelfi. Two men are massacred in an expensive Moscow bar. But the bullets miss their target: Alexei Volkovoy – Volk for short. He’s a deadly, battle-hardened veteran of Russia’s brutal war in Chechnya, and he serves two masters: Maxim, a psychotic mafia kingpin; and a military man known only as the General. By his side is Valya, an exotic beauty and the most dangerous weapon in Volk’s arsenal. Together they are commissioned to steal a long-lost masterpiece from St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum. Volk must choose which powerful man he will betray in order to escape with the painting and with his life.
• For something darker and nastier, how about  The Last Child by John Hart, which recently won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award.. Thirteen-year-old Johnny Merrimon has to face things no boy his age should face. In the year since his twin sister’s abduction his world has fallen apart: his father has disappeared and his fragile mother is spiralling into ever deeper despair. Johnny keeps strong. Armed with a map, a bike and a flashlight, he stalks the bad men of Raven County.  The police might have given up on Alyssa; he never will. Someone, somewhere, knows something they re not telling. Only one person looks out for Johnny. Detective Clyde Hunt shares his obsession with the case. But when Johnny witnesses a hit-and-run and insists the victim was killed because he d found Alyssa, even Hunt thinks he s lost it. And then another young girl goes missing…
• Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith also features danger for the innocents. It’s set in the terror of 1950s Stalinist Russia, a brutal regime that executed anyone who disagreed with its dogma. It proclaimed to be a perfect society. So, when a series of brutal murders take place, no one is permitted to say that these are the work of a serial killer. In a perfect society there can be no crime. One man, Leo Demidov, a State security agent, a man who has spent his entire career arresting innocent men and women, decides to redeem himself by catching this killer. To do so, he must buck the system, risking his life and the life of everyone he loves.
• Lastly we come to Shadow by Karin Alvtegen. In a nondescript apartment block in Stockholm, most of the residents are elderly. Usually a death is a sad but straightforward event. But sometimes a resident will die and there are no friends or family to contact. This is when Marianne Folkesson arrives, employed by the state to close up a life with dignity and respect. Gerda Persson has lain dead in her apartment for three days before Marianne is called. When she arrives, she finds the apartment tidy and ordered. Gerda’s life seems to have been quite ordinary. Until Marianne opens the freezer and finds it full of books, neatly stacked and wrapped in clingfilm, a thick layer of ice covering them. They are all by Axel Ragnerfeldt, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, with handwritten dedications to Gerda from the author. What story do these books have to tell, about Gerda, and more importantly about Ragnerfeldt, a man whose fame is without precedent in the nation’s cultural life, but seldom gives interviews?

Hopefully that gives you a wide choice of murder, mayhem and the occasional car chase, without any Masons or other secret societies in sight!

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