John: Stuart Littlemore turns the spotlight on the legal fraternity with the very entertaining Harry Curry: The Murder Book. Harry has the background and acumen to be a high flier at the Bar. He should be aspiring to ‘silk’ or looking to a future on the Bench. Harry, however, loves to buck the system which finds him being suspended from practising and finds him starting an unconventional relationship with a younger barrister. It’s great fun and I’m sure some in legal circles will have great fun imagining that a character was based maybe on…

Louise—Family Album by Penelope Lively: This is a completely absorbing book about family life, set in a loose frame of the story of a house—a Victorian mansion that has now seen better days. Of the 43,000 days the house has existed, this book deals with about 30 years of the house’s life, with the one family of three adults and six children. Like a lot of novels now, time is dealt with elastically, back and forth, with events told through the eyes of different family members. Completely unsentimental, and quite sparsely written, Penelope Lively has written a wonderful story about a fairly recognisable family group.

Anwyn—I’ve just spent the past six weeks reading Ulysses for the first time. I won’t pretend it was easy, but for the most part I found it hugely enjoyable. ‘Enjoyable’ really doesn’t do Joyce much justice (that’s like saying Shakespeare is ‘pretty good’), but I want to encourage anyone who feels intimated by the novel’s heavyweight reputation. Alternating chapters of Joyce with Harry Blamire’s concise, lucid New Bloomsday Book helped me to keep a grip on the plot, but I think the key is to let yourself become immersed in Joyce’s language, which is so beautifully vivid and inventive. In this way, reading Ulysses is somewhat like reading poetry: the materiality and the sensuousness of the language conveys meaning far in excess of any literal interpretation. And it’s funny, too! I laughed out loud many times. It helps to have read Portrait Of the Artist as a Young Man, and to have a working knowledge of Hamlet – and for the first time in my life, arcane knowledge of Catholic ritual (I had a priest in the family) actually came in handy. Will I be tackling Finnegan’s Wake next? I think my brain needs a rest first…

Viki—Black Skies by Arnaldur Indridason: Erlendur continues AWOL in Black Skies. In the last Indridason offering, Outrage, Elinborg took the investigative reins, and this latest sees the tightly buttoned, right-leaning Sigurdur Óli facing up to his failed marriage and damaged parental relations whilst uncovering a money-laundering operation in the heady financial environment of Iceland before the crash. Sigurdur is not an easy character to like, quick to judge with a lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the-key attitude to the repeat offenders he has to deal with. But the self-satisfaction of the get-rich-at-any-cost bankers he arrests, and the death of an alcoholic adult victim of child pornography starts to chip away at the black ice that encases him. It’s been great in these last two Indridasons to get inside two characters that have been little more than thorns in the depressive Erlendur’s paw—hardly less grim, their different takes on the Icelandic state of mind are an interesting way of broadening Indridason’s world.