Some memories are like photos – snapshots – that hang in neat frames at the back of the mind. Sometimes they shake at night and rattle a train of images into our dreams.

The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore follows Thomas through a fractured path of memories as he tries to work out what on earth has happened to him. One moment he is waking from an Australian beach, the next he is landing at Heathrow Airport. He is a man adrift, trying to stay awake as he tumbles towards his lost love, Kate. Behind him and before him are his memories of his life in England and Australia; his wife Elin and his children. Slipping through his worlds he remembers his childhood, his fathers suicide:

The memory of my father as a person recedes. With it goes part of who I am – my link with who I’ve come from, my connection to our past.

And his finding and losing of Kate.

Where’s the Kate I’ve known? Where am I? We’ve both vanished.

Paul Burman, in this his debut novel, weaves a lyrical tale told with great love and tenderness that spins a magical tale of lost love dipped in sadness, snow and earth. The writing is wonderful:

The sea is the colour of granite and the sky is rusty-veined quartz, and between them they’re grinding the day smooth, clean, polished.

The air rasps against the back of my throat, condenses and becomes an icicle growing in my lungs.

The story heart wrenching and mysterious:

I’ve discovered a world without real dialogue.

Paul pitches the pace right, with the reader wanting to see what happens and at the same time wanting to linger looking at the world that he paints. There is a great love of the land and this is used powerfully in the book. And it’s almost as if Paul takes Thomas past live, his hurt and his love, and pours concrete over them, burying them in hard cold blocks that Thomas has built his new life in Australia on.

The connection between yesterday and today is getting too thin to trace.

During the book, like the flowers that break through the urban world covering his childhood landscape, the green shoots of Thomas’ past life break through the concrete of the past until towards the end they are coloured white in snow and burst forth in greenery as Thomas’ loves live again in him and become one with him.

If you love a tale well told, with wonder and intrigue; a tale with layers, a heart and a soul, then read this. It is wonderful.

"When you think they're all laughing at you, you're in serious trouble. Because either they are all laughing at you, or you're going mad."

Tyndale Corbett is a professional failure. Things have got to change and when he finds himself in Miami under an assumed identity he hatches his plan.

He will pretend to be a new man.

He will be God.

"Religion never has to deliver, it only has to promise to deliver."

Good to be God is a strange fish. I wanted to love it. I really did. It's a good book, but ... damn it, I'm going to take some advice from the book:

"Politeness is what happens when you're figuring out people's value."

Okay there is value to giving a glowing account of this book, it would stand my magazine in good stead with Alma Books. I like Alma Books they publish Tom McCarthy. But in the end the value of a honest review is higher. So I will switch of my polite filter and be honest. In a constructive way you understand.

"I think I was right; but I've noticed that being right doesn't do you much good. Being right doesn't improve the quality of your life."

There you go. There is an example of what is good with the book and what is bad. The book is stuffed full of witty clever asides. Here's another one:

"One of the great shortcomings of life is the lack of captions, that there is no punctuation, no musical sting to warn you when something important is happening."

But the problem is the story. It felt that the story was a bit embarrassed by itself - O let's get that bit over quickly shall we - and there is no literary prose to hide that. Just the clever - and they are very clever - comments on life. But that's not enough. There was no emotional involvement. I enjoyed reading it, but I didn't care. I'd rather have them condensed into a small book which I can leave in the loo for people to read.

So there we go - an author that has bucket loads of insights into human behaviour struggling to find a canvas to paint on.

You know what? I'm going to read his first novel, Under the Frog. I have a sneaking suspicion that I may adjust my view of Tibor after that.

"You're fire horses, twice over. Conceived and born under the sign. You're the end of the world, you two."

Fire Horses is a contemporary novel written in a poetic literary voice dealing with the hard grit of British life as experienced through Joe Noone. It's about consequences and how Joe has to travel a world that doesn't always make sense whilst his past and future rage against him.

"All the sublime magic of youth had been knocked out of me; I was still wandering, but all the wonder had gone."

Joe doesn't walk a track that commercial demographics would predict walking into Burtons and spending money. He walks off the beaten track. Sometimes invisible, sometimes walking into traps that destroy those around him. He embraces the drinking culture and is wired chemically for sex, yet is a hopeless romantic.

"Hours were lost, the sky darkened, alcohol began to coat my brain and eat away at all the layers of sophistication, culture and self-consciousness."

Blur's, Modern Life is Rubbish, sums up this book well. Yet despite this, or because of this, there is hope and redemption threaded throughout the book. Mark Piggott shows us the rubbish, but embraces it and produces art and a life for Joe that has beauty once Mark has shown you how to look.

Mark Piggott obviously loves his characters. At one point Jo muses, "Only be a passenger if the driver has something to live for," and it could be said the same for Jo as a character in Mark's novel, "Only be the protagonist if Mark gives me something to live for." I can almost see Mark pitching the job to fictional Jo, "It will be bad, real bad. But you'll get to have lots of sex and I'll dangle the carrot of love before you. The money will be shit though."

As in life, where humour is born out of misery and gives reason, Mark's book is full of fun one liners. At one point Jo says, “It came as a relief when I reached my 34th birthday because then I knew for sure I wasn't Jesus."

As a debut novel it shines, both in the quality of the writing and the insights into mankind and modern history.

Now that's not bad.

Shiny stuff from rubbish - go buy it and see for yourself.

"I want to see you now. I want you to come to me."

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is a well crafted and constructed novel that gets inside the head of Adam Kellas as he is lead by an e-mail and a small memory of Astrid, a former girlfriend, that has "crossed into him."

James Meek paints the love story between Kellas & Astrid against the backdrop of Afghanistan, London and America. Similar in places to the style of George Orwell, James blurs the political into the human story to show floundering love and war, mixed up and acting upon each other.

He does this by cleverly showing us the modern vantage point of war, where F-18 pilots fly over Afghanistan and as they release their bombs, "perceive the human grain making up the fabric of the view," but never land - only reaching out and touching with destruction.

He then forces Kellas to crash land from his orbit as a war reporter in Afghanistan and to reach out and touch Astrid's life. Kellas has built up memories of her that he has fallen in love with and as he is eventually forced to fit the real woman into the fragments of her that live within him.

"You have to make your own lover before you can know her ... But you've got to leave space for the real woman to grow inside."

We then watch to see if his touch is destructive or one of love.

On his way Kellas, in trying to convey what the war in Afghanistan is like, reaches out to his friends in London and brings destruction.

"There was curiosity in that reach, and a kind of regret. In any act of hurting there remained the ghost of intimacy."

And unlike laser guided missiles, Kellas struggles to cope with his feelings, "Your own mind (is) a hard thing to manipulate: it had so many automatic processes."

At the end Meek pulls back out from our intimacy with Kellas and we are left watching him from afar. You feel as Meek has helped us to connect with his character and in doing so connect with the political arena that requires more from us of saying "we care" with no action, no feeling, no connection.

St Radegund is a college in Cambridge that needs help. Money actually. Tons of it. And they have just appointed a former BBC executive, James Rycarte, to their Head of House. An appointment that breaks one hundred and sixty years of tradition in college that only accepts woman students.

Let's pop inside Rycarte's mind with a quote from the book:

Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain ...

"Her imagination has been captured by the idea of studying abroad - and what better place for her than here at St Radegund's?"

... and saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.

Good eh?

And into this the author, Rosy Thornton, adds as if she were stirring in ingredients to her evening supper: Martha the Senior Tutor with her depressed daughter and crumbling marriage. And the Dean to the college, Darren, who the "Tigresses" have targeting for their "snog" initiation.

So is it any good?

Well in despite of the cover and title, yes. Surprisingly so. There is dry humour:

"What's the worst they can do to us?" asked one pragmatist. It was not a rhetorical question: she was reading Law.

And an insight into human behaviour that plays out against the formal setting.

And yet.

Yet ... some of the detail of the college politics could have been pruned back to allow the lives of Martha and Rycarte to take centre stage more. Even the Dean could probably go, especially as the book plays on Rycarte being a man in a woman only college.

It would have been better to just have stuck with Rycarte as the only man and Martha as the lead woman. When Rosy does she is brilliant. The book pulls you in and she has you.

Overall it is like reading an author who is finding her voice whilst the title and cover try to quiet her down with pink bikes and flowers.

I hope that Rosy throws the chick lit wrappings into the bin for her next book. I'd like to see what she can really do when let loose inside her characters heads with the setting an open stage instead of a closed curtain that they have to fight through.

"I may be dead by the time you are reading this sentence."

Julian Barnes gets all his thoughts on death down on paper before his doctor gets to him in the future to deliver the, Mr Barnes - I'm afraid it's not good news.

So the book is like a will drawn up in preparation for his inevitable death, by whatever form it takes. Although by all accounts Barnes is in good health and has many more years before him, he's written this book now as insurance against a rushed job as his draws his final breath.

So instead of a thinned narrative of a dying man, we get the literary genius of Barnes saying in full health ...

"Let's get this death thing straight."

And for us this is good news.

The book is thought provoking and demonstrates the ability of Barnes to intelligently consider a taboo subject. And far from being macabre, you feel like you are being invited to chat with Julian over an after dinner cigar. It's all very english:

"My fear of death is low-level, reasonable, practical."

Some would run around screaming, "We are all going to die!" in the face of death. Julian in effect says, calm down stop running around like a headless chicken, or worse still sticking your head in the sand like an ostrich and let's talk about it calmly over port and cheese.

He brings death out into the light, where it is less frightening.

Leaving it in the dark, is never a good idea - it's far scary. Julian flicks the light on for us and attempts to dispel the lurking beast from under the bed.

Julian also brings a good dose of humour in to wash down the bitter pill.

"Sometimes (I) find life an overrated way of passing the time."

Into the mix then are thrown God, Barnes' brother, French writer Jules Renard and some Barnes family memoir ( although he says "this is not my autobiography." )

So, for example, we get Barnes giving account as to how he let go of a possibility of religion as an adolescent,

"hunched over some book or magazine in the family bathroom, I used to tell myself that God couldn't possibly exist because the notion that He might be watching me while I masturbated was absurd."

and

"I don't believe in God, but I miss him."

Hmm - so God was there in the bathroom, until Julian couldn't bear the thought and banished him?!

Barnes' stance now? An agnostic -

"How can we be sure that we know enough to know?"

One of Barnes' recent books was called The lemon Table - a collection of short stories - The lemon being the Chinese symbol for death.

What Barnes does in Nothing to be Frightened of, is invite us in around his own lemon table and opens the discussion.

It feels like he really hopes he won't have the last word.

"It was the fruit in the garden that turned, in the end, to ashes in my mouth."

Paul Torday's follow up to Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, shows him to be that rare author who can write literary prose that makes you want to stop and savour the flavours and yet can also weave a great story so that you end up wanting to glug back the book at the same time.

"I took a sip again and rolled the liquid around on my palate, to savour its complex flavours."

He also side-steps the pit that some other authors have recently fallen into with their "difficult" second book and delivered a cracking novel.

The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce introduces Wilberforce, an intelligent software developer who has built up his own business, enjoying a bottle of 1982 Chateau Petrus (£3000 a bottle!)

'The sommelier took a step back - "The Chateau Petrus? Monsieur is quite certain?"'

and then pulls back the veil to reveal a man with little emotional intelligence about to self destruct.

How has he got to the point of death?

What changed in his life from years of working late at the office building up his company?

The answer is friendship.

And the answer is explored as Paul takes you back in time to unfold the tragic fall.

"Poor Wilberforce," she said. "You've no idea how to be a human being at all, have you?"

It is a book that is clever and has a heart and a charm that reminded me of why I love reading so much. If you like the experience of reading a book that pushes away the world around you and lulls you into its embrace, with only the smell and rustle of paper to remind you of your surroundings, then buy this now and enjoy.

"Do you ever have that feeling? Have you had that absolute sense of conviction: that after all, life is going to turn out really well for you?"

Tom McCarthy's second novel, Men In Space, is a masterpiece. A painting on the white wall of a gallery that opens itself layer upon layer as you inspect it.

And there lies its greatest weakness. For it is a novel that by the very nature of reading spans days, weeks, months depending on the speed of the reader.

For whilst a painting can be observed in one glance and then explored whilst remembering the image as a whole, Tom's book fragments into separate satellites that orbit around each other obscuring the overall image.

The reader becomes lost, disorientated.

And as each satellite moves majestically through space following perfectly formed trajectories, under Tom's masterly use of words, the story stays elusive.

"It could be any space. It could be a hospital room, a lecture hall, a street or a sky beside a mountain, like where the saint is in that picture. There's no essential difference: you've got a space, and then a person in it."

Therefore I recommend you get shipwrecked or something and read this book in one go. (Tom helps you here with a clue as to how to read it: There are no chapters.)

I tried reading the last third of the book in a couple of sittings and was then able to see the beauty of the silent interlocking orbits of the satellites that Tom follows.

"-watching it mute gives it a quality it never had originally - a rich, alien feel, as though the characters were living in some kind of outer space."

So what are those satellites?

A stranded astronaut who has no country anymore to bring him home.

Anton Markov: A football referee with connections with Bulgarian gangsters.

Nicholas Boardaman: Anton's flatmate and an art critic

Ivan Manasek: An artist who has to copy a stolen painting

A disorientated Police Agent

Set in central Europe, Tom spins them around a stolen icon painting. And like in Remainder, his first novel, he seems to move them forward and then stops them and walks around them looking at them from different angles as they flay in the cold space of fallen

Communism.

"So now they're halted, slowed down by this weight she drags behind her like the moon drags all the oceans."

The manner in which Tom does this is astonishing.

Almost hypnotic.

If you like your books light and frothy, whilst drinking in Starbucks then stay away.

But if you like your literature to take you past the cake counter and cappuccinos and up through the ceiling in majestic arcs until you reach a space where fictional lives encircle you as you loose yourself to their silent rhythm, then pick it up and step through.