This book starts lyrically, in the days when Afghanistan still had a monarchy, and the skies were blue on summer days. Small boys took their pleasures climbing trees and flying kites. The narrator, Amir, is a privileged kid, because of his father's money and influence, while his loyal friend, Hassan, is from a despised ethnic group (the Hezara), and not only acts as Amir's servant and (often abused) playmate, but does not even get an opportunity to go to school.

However, there are skeletons in this family's cupboard, and, Baba, the man you thought was upright and decent seems not to be so, and the humblest person in the whole narrative, Hassan's dad, turns out to be the noblest of the whole lot of them. So, there is guilt and betrayal, and the war which disrupts the old order, and people who were land owners and persons of influence become refugees and stateless. And slowly, you get the increasingly strong feeling that you are not reading a novel at all, that this is autobiographical, in the worst type of "confessional" vein.

A book that started so promisingly ends with a litany of mundane details about a young Afghani refugee in the United States trying to court a suitable wife from another exiled Afghani family, and that bit is really quite boring. I found it irritating, like I was cheated... I had been led to believe that this would continue in the style that it began, and I felt quite let down.

And I have to say, there is another thing I feel uncomfortable with. There is one character who is a Taliban member, who is the epitome of evil, no silver lining redeems his wickedness, he is a cruel man, with an opiate habit and an unhealthy interest in small boys.... and it seems that this is the image of the Taliban that modern America wants us to have. In other words, is this book being awarded prizes because the political message is the one that the Bush administration wants us to hear and believe? Or am I being too cynical here?

There's a new exclusive interview with David McCullough that give's an inside look into his thoughts on the Revolutionary War. Check it out here.

Here is the book run-down:

In 1776, David McCullough's bestselling account of a pivotal year in our nation's struggle, readers learned of the greatest defeats, providential fortune, and courageous triumphs of George Washington and his bedraggled army. Now, in 1776: The Illustrated Edition, the efforts of the Continental Army are made even more personal, as an excerpted version of the original book is paired with letters, maps, and seminal artwork. More than three dozen source documents -- including a personal letter George Washington penned to Martha about his commission, a note informing the mother of a Continental soldier that her son has been taken prisoner, and a petition signed by Loyalists pledging their allegiance to the King -- are re-created in uniquely designed envelopes throughout the book and secured with the congressional seal.

There is a word all modern-day politicians love to bandy about and though any occasion is perfect for the word’s use there is one particular one where it rings dramatically true and peculiarly appropriate: this occasion is when politicians seek to stir our patriotic hearts by underlining the difference between us (good, hard working, progressive, psychologically and technologically very advanced, spiritually star-touching) and them (bad, lazy, retrograde, psychologically and technologically in a medieval backwater, spiritually corrupt and Oh! Oh! Oh! woman-bashing!). The word is democracy, and it is something we have (because we deserve it) “they” don’t (because they aren’t the brightest pennies in the purse and have a slave mentality).

Who/what are “they”/”them”? Uniquely in history this isn’t a fixed category and can mutate within days if not minutes subject to whether “they” decide to like/obey us (one should specify here that though the liking part may be simply convincingly pretended, the obeying part must be sincerely followed through, down to the last comma, and no joking).

However, our politicians don’t want to hog all democracy for themselves (and consequently for us) – not at all. They want to cast the seeds of this wonderful concept all over the world and are prepared to do this with any means available whether these should be chocolates and chewing gum, or napalm, depleted uranium, nightly fire-bombing, daily surgical bombing, localised electric personal persuasion (we do not torture), etc. etc. etc.

Seeing that the spirit of democracy-spreading is purportedly genuine (hehehe) let me introduce you to “All the Shah’s Men”.

The book will take you back to the fifties and what we liked to call Persia, and “they” preferred to call Iran. The story goes like this: the Iranians have oil which is their only exportable commodity. The Brits want the oil at a price favourable to the Brits as this would notably boost the British post-war economy. The Iranians don’t mind selling the oil but think (the utter cheek of the people!) that Iranian oil should primarily boost the Iranian economy. The main thinker of these naughty thoughts is Mohammed Mossadegh who becomes Iran’s (and the entire Middle East’s) first democratically (yes, there’s that “D” word!) elected Prime Minister. While Mossadegh tries to safe-guard the Iranian economy and lead the country towards modernisation, the Brits manage to get the US on their side and together block the exports, tinker with Iranian internal matters until Mossadegh is discredited and the Shah of Persia is reinstated as supreme (puppet) ruler - Peacock Court and all.

As a result of this Iran is eventually dragged back to the Middle Ages and the rest of us towards the Gulf Wars.

This is a “must read” for all those who are wondering what is going on in the Middle East today, and why.

Though it reads like a thriller it has nothing to do with fiction and unlike any other thriller, will make you blush with shame, as you ponder about the word “democracy” and those for whom you/we voted and who bandy the word about too easily without any idea about its true meaning.

Although a short novel at 396 pages, Anti-Christ: A Satirical End of Days manages to pack in religious, secular and celestial corruption, the story of a downtrodden everyman who somehow becomes entangled in it all, and an amusing look into the secret life of angels, binding it all together with keen intelligence and gritty prose.

The novel starts with the painful portrait of a loser.

And Matthew Ford, the protagonist, is not even a likeable loser.

He is the kind of person you immediately become frustrated with, and I found myself muttering remonstrances like: "Three hours of being stood up! That's two and a half hours too long! Don't be a victim!", "The dog peed on your leg and you haven't got time to use the bathroom? Don't you have a hose?", and "Matthew, why is your mother doing your laundry? Empower yourself, man, for goodness' sake!"

(Note that becoming cross with a character is not necessarily a bad thing. It shows you are accepting his reality, and even empathising with him, to an extent. And it is definitely an improvement on being bored and indifferent because you can't relate to a character at all *cough*Cecilia Dart-Thornton*cough*.)

As the story progresses, Ford starts to show promise. The former loser displays a gutsiness and integrity that becomes more and more impressive as he defies the corrupt Messiah, is tempted by Satan, and, finally, guided by Buddha, takes on Armageddon with an army of zombies. By the end of the book I almost liked the guy.

I admit that I found Anti-Christ: A Satirical End of Days easy going. I like Moses's writing style.

Nevertheless, weighty narrative aside, the novel is founded on an unusual and clever premise that will hook you in and keep you wondering where and how the madness will end.

Anti-Christ: A Satirical End of Days is not so much anti-Christian as it is anti-establishment. It seems to say, Please, have a closer look. Don't just accept what you're told. If the government is really doing God's work on Earth, then God help us all.

As told in "Anti Christ: A Satirical End of Days", the world is in chaos – proving reality infuses fiction. Russia is eliminating democracy, returning to an authoritarian government. The US is fighting government corruption charges as a possible war between Pakistan and India formulates. Now China wants to rule Taiwan…the global issues never end.

On a civilian scale, Matthew Ford is an average college guy, suffering the usual issues. After waiting three hours, his internet date is a no show, the bookstore refuses to refund a book he just bought, and then his car gets a flat tire as it begins to snow. Arriving home, Matt’s horrendous day ends peacefully once he throws out the ghost, haunting him for the last time. Okay, so this act is not usual however, it garners the attention of Heaven now commercialized and a power hungry Hell, both warring against the other to gain Earth peoples’ majority support. As for his awareness of the previously mentioned world issues, Matt was busy watching professional wrestling; his priorities are quite clear.

Mr. Moses composes an engaging, humorous parody, drawing from timeless world events and American life. The U.S. President Lucas is a ditz, believing that Kashmir – in India - is a sweater company, and cannot understand why Pakistan wants that particular cloth. It’s not material they want, it’s all about the land. Russia’s President Romanov wants to return his country into greatness. He dissolves the Duma, their legislative body, assuming sole leadership. After President Lucas’ lengthy warning that the U.S. will defend democracy, Romanov, a taciturn man, replies with a barbed curse, “F--- America”. Now that is honest communication.

The true witticism shines as Matt begins an enlightened journey first to Heaven, followed by Hell, then to the mystic Buddhist temples, and then back again to Heaven. Instigating this trek are two cherubs who abduct Matt, claiming the “Boss” wants to meet. Once in Zion (Heaven), the cherubs loose Matt, who wanders into a place called “Gabriel’s”. God’s Archangels now congregate in a local tavern since Heaven and Hell signed a peace treaty two thousand years ago, outlawing wars. They drown their sorrows in unending chalices of holy water or engage in wrestling smack downs in the tavern’s backroom; releasing pent up hostilities. The crowning moment is when Matt finally meets Jesus demanding that he take back the ghost he threw out; Heaven is overcrowded since Christ took over management.

The slapstick continues with attacks on big business, worker’s unions, fad diets, immigration, military assistance in foreign countries, reincarnation…not even the Pope is exempt from this fast paced, captivating farce. Still, when Satan entices Matt into becoming the world’s elite guru of wisdom, the amusing dialog turns gloomy. They attend congressional sessions discussing stem cell research and lecture overweight people simply to stop eating; naming only a few topics that some readers may not find amusing, in any form.

Yet, "Anti Christ" is a satire, “a literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule”_ (definition from Dictionary.com)…hmmm, Mr. Moses has done his job well. His characters are well formed, genuine, aptly supporting this cabaret of imaginative intrigue. Even the typo, right at the beginning, “CwHyAPTER 1” only adds to this wacky novel. And yes, I roared with laughter throughout this distinctive book.

I remember reading another book by McEwan, called the Cement Garden, and being greatly impressed by it. The blurb on the back of Atonement said it was his best yet. I can't say, because I have not read the other nine, but this is a clever book.

It is set in England before we had had to start numbering World Wars, (i.e. after the first and before the second). The main protagonist, Briony, is a 13 year old girl, on the cusp of adult life, and anxious to leave her childhood behind. She lives a rather isolated life, being the only child in an upper middle-class family, as both her brother and sister are now adult. They live a life of ease in a large house with extensive grounds, and a couple of servants. The combination of a rare intelligence and loneliness lead young Briony to a precocious creative writing career.

McEwan then shares with us some ideas which must reflect his own experiences as a youth, teaching himself to write... some are technical, some more reflective and philosophical notions that Briony must overcome if she is to succeed. Consider this:

"Even writing out the 'she said' s , and the 'and then's, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable; the moment she described a character's weakness, the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have?"

Briony, resourceful kid that she is, has discovered a way around at least all the tiresome repetition. She writes a play. She has a trio of red-headed cousins, one a girl a bit older, and two twin boys a bit younger, who Briony has decided can constitute 75% pf the cast.

There is one section which I found funny, where Briony bewails the fact that the verisimilitude of the drama is jeopardized by two cast members being identical, and nearly all of them freckled.

However, the drawing room drama is not staged on time. Instead a real drama is unfolding and the children's play abandoned... Briony witnesses, at a distance, a curious scene which she is unable to interpret. She sees her sister in the grounds with Robbie, the (adult) son of the cleaning lady. They appear to be arguing, and suddenly Big Sis strips to her underwear, (dear me, in 1935!) and immerses herself in the water of an ornamental fountain, and then dresses quickly, still in front of this young man, and stomps back to the house...trailing water. At last, Briony has a real drama, a mystery, requiring narrative skill, empathy, background details... even as she watches, she is planning how she will later capture it on the inky page.

Late that night Briony, in her anxiety to live in a genuinely dramatic event, makes a terrible allegation about Robbie.

Anyway... I won't spoil the story for you. The first section is well done. It somehow captures the fussy middle-class family of slightly pompous people, with their faintly ridiculous sense of their "station" in life. The children speak as children do... they are not "sweet" children, they are just people, with real emotions and vocabularies.

However, when I got to the end of that bit, I was beginning to think that I did not really want to continue reading about this kid's histrionics in a hot summer in a big house. I looked to see how many more pages were left, and considered abandoning it. However, I was relieved to find that section 2 had an entirely different flavour which rekindled my interest.

The second section is set about 5 years later, when once again Britain and Germany are at war. Robbie survives the retreat from Dunkirk, which is described in great and ghastly detail.... while Briony and her elder sister both take up nursing. The tale unfolds, dealing largely with the relationships between these three. Briony has wronged both of them, and they can not forgive her. But worse than that, Briony is even now exploiting the circumstances of what happened on that fateful day to create powerful works of "fiction" which she writes in her spare time, with her feet aching from long duties on the wards, and her hands cracked and numb from scrubbing with cold water and carbolic.

And finally we meet Briony in her dotage. She is now a distinguished and recognised writer, who has just been diagnosed with a degenerative brain condition... she is aware that she is losing her mind. And still, as the 21st Century dawns, she can not escape the remorse she feels for the dreadful mistake she made in the hot summer of 1935. Some but not many of the characters we met in the first section, are still alive... and the architecture of the work comes together. In spite of old lady Briony's impending illness, the book ends on a happy note. She has atoned.

Did I enjoy it? Sure, I did. But not enough to email all my friends to exhort them to buy it.

Uplifting and sad at the same time. The TV series was pretty true to the book so if you've seen it you'll know what to expect. Of course the length of a written book coupled with you as the reader setting your own pace allows you to find more detail and consider moments at length which generally makes reading a book a much deeper experience.

It's the injustices that often stick with me and a couple of things really struck me: One being the practice of the Army Stores people to steal the best food and equipment for themselves leaving the men fighting at the front, the ones who really deserve to get whatever is available, short. The other mind boggling statement the book made was that the US factories stopped making war material to a large extent before the war was finished and the Allies ended up running short on some types of ammunition. Apparently the factories were keen to witch back to civilian production as soon as possible and people in the US thought the war was a done deal. Unfortunately for the men fighting in Europe, the Germans were still shooting back with everything they had.

As to the writing, I think Steven Ambrose has done a fine job of telling a true story with accuracy, compassion and atmosphere. It's not just a verbatim account of what happened, rather it's a story of men's lives that draws the reader in, brings history alive and makes one care about the individuals.

Lest we forget.

In this companion to The Goose Girl, we once again enter the kingdom of Bayern, but this time through the eyes of Enna, once an animal laborer with the now Princess Isi. No longer a worker for the castle, Enna had returned home to her mother, who was ailing, but has now passed on, leaving on Enna and her brother. Life in the forest now seems to Enna too quiet, and she longs for something else, though she doesn't know what. Then one night her brother returns home changed, and his behavior becomes more and more erratic. Somewhere in his travels he has stumbled across a paper that taught him to create fire, and the knew knowledge has left him restless and angry. With nowhere to displace his feelings, he grows a hatred for his own country, going so far as to burn Enna for trying to dissuade him. But then news comes of impending war, and suddenly there is a new focus for the anger, as the children head off to the city.

In the first battle with neighboring Tira, Enna loses her brother to his fire, which he uses to destroy as many of the enemy as they can. Feeling she has failed him, she retrieves the vellum that gave him his skill from his body, before leaving it with the others to burn, and vows to somehow make up for her failure. Soon she too has read the fiery words and harnessed the skill to create flame, control heat, and every day she is conscious of the fact the she must not lose herself to this mysterious gift, as Leifer did.

But as war grows more imminent, Enna feels the same restlessness, and powerlessness, and will not stand by to see her country fall. When her best friend Finn joins in the augury to decide Bayern's fate, Enna intercedes to keep him from being slayed, and therefore feels a responsibility to be part of the war. So while a truce has been declared for the winter months, she sneaks off in the night to wage her own battles, eventually falling into the hands of an enemy captain, who almost succeeds in turning her against her own.

The fortuitous arrival of a friend she thought lost turns Enna's course, she breaks free, saves her friends, wins the war, and nearly loses herself in the process. Through great struggle and pain, and with the aid of strong relationships, Enna finds herself, finds her way, and finds a way to heal, while also healing her dear Isi. While the men of Tira view the women of Bayern weak, the stories of The Goose Girl and Enna Burning tell us differently, for these are amazing girls indeed.

How many war books do you read that make you think 'That makes Catch-22 look rubbish'?

That's how I felt at the end of this polychromatic, fractured, architectonic, sly, bleak and uproarious book. Seriously, it's a blast - in so many ways - but I can't recommend it to those who haven't firmed up their reading liver with less toxic material. It's aircraft carrier massive, it flits around locations, viewpoints and realities in the same chapter, and often the same paragraph, and it's reputed to contain about 400 characters, if you believe Wikipedia.

What's it about, you ask? Set in the twilight year of WWII and after, Gravity's Rainbow fires shards of events in all directions around the picaresque story of our nominal protagonist Slothrop, a likeable schmo whose casual seductions seem to match exactly where the deadly V-2 rocket will land. He ends up wandering through the post-war, post-everything Zone of middle europe, where the collapse of the war machine has led to a bizarre, anything-goes anarchy that's sexy and scary in equal measure. Meanwhile, the satanic warmongers use the alchemy of modern science to bring about ever more beautiful and deadly bombs, zooming across the continent in gravity's rainbow, the arc of the rocket. Like a bizarro Lord of the Rings, this is a futile quest for a device of ultimate power across a Germanic landscape, and somehow it captures moments of that epic's lonesome grandeur, as if seen in a fun-show mirror. (Not deliberately, of course. At least, I don't think so. But never assume They haven't been planning it all along!)

But Slothrop is just one thread of a narrative about a world in love with war, death and money. It's some kind of insane gazetteer of the post-war world, combining inch-perfect reconstructions of 40s events with freakshow surrealism and above all, paranoia. We've got a man disappearing down a toilet (the prototype for the Trainspotting sequence), a custard pie fight between people in an air balloon and a plane, endless showtunes, talking dogs, an immortal sentient lightbulb and black nazis. To scratch the bare surface.

The surrealism isn't just dropped in to spice up a dull moment, though. Every page is dripping with lust, madness, fragmentation and a kind of grim joy, until it feels like the world's best ghost train and rollercoaster ride. It's laugh-out-loud funny, intensely obscene and heartbreakingly cruel. And Thomas Pynchon can write a sentence like nobody else - a sentence whose meaning can rotate and flip around before you get to the end of it, a sentence which often does its best to rewire your brain in the reading.

It's also the complete template for Neal Stephenson's jawdropping Baroque Cycle - read this to find out where he gets his inspiration from and almost every page will have you pointing and nodding in an annoying, knowing way. Stephenson wears Pynchon's influence on his sleeve, so seeing some of the same locations and situations was illuminating.

In many ways, Gravity's Rainbow is the ultimate modern novel. It seems utterly annoying and contigent at first; but somewhere in the Zone you realise that someone - They or the author - is manipulating every arbitrary word, scene, transition and dream-state with virtuoso precision. And for an effect - an effect on you, the reader.

Go on, give it a go. Like all good Wonderlands, you'll come out a different person than you went in. And that's got to be a good thing... right?