The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas takes you on a journey with a nine-year-old boy called Bruno.

The blurb on the back cover tells you “this isn’t a book for nine-year-olds” but having read the book, I think the target audience should be that age and a little older.

The story is told through Bruno’s eyes – he is naive and can be selfish and is only interested in events that affect his small world. However, he is capable of kindness and finds friendship in the unlikeliest of circumstances.

I did find this book to be a reasonably good read, despite some of the childish language and ideas. The author encourages readers to start reading the book without knowing what it is about. But one look at the cover – which show the blue, striped pyjamas from the title – and I had images from a concentration camp in my head.

I could accept that Bruno could mispronounce/mishear ‘Out-With’ and ‘the Fury’, but I found it hard to believe that a nine-year-old living in Germany and the son of a camp commandant had not been indoctrinated in the ways of the Hitler Youth.

I would recommend this book for teenagers – as it is set during a time that young people should be made aware of. Perhaps it would be appropriate for the high school curriculum.

Thanks to books like Charlotte Gray and Birdsong and TV programmes like (I'm slightly ashamed to say) 'Allo 'Allo I've grown up with a belief in French patriotic solidarity - one for all and all for one against the invading Germans. That belief is now in tatters thanks to Suite Francaise.

This book is the first two sections of the five part epic that Nemirovsky had intended to write.

In the first section, A Storm in June, we experience the exodus from Paris through the eyes of around 6 families as the German army draws near. Most of the characters are wealthy, spoiled and self-centred. I found myself silently screaming at some of the worst offenders as they complained about their food and lodgings - be glad you're alive! Motivated by greed and fear, they are more concerned with their precious possessions that their fellow man - where was their much vaunted fraternity?

As the convoy of Parisians travels south, thoughts turn to the horrors of the war to come. This contrasts with Nemirovsky's loving descriptions of the French countryside.

The second section, Dolce, is a portrait of the small, rural town of Bussy, and looks at how life goes on under occupation. With a German soldier billeted in almost every home, Dolce touches on the local's relationships with the occupying troops. The almost impecable behaviour of the individual German officers contrasts greatly with the selfish upper classes.

As Nemirovsky wrote the book in 1941 she had little or no knowledge of the Nazi atrocities. It seems strange and remarkable that she humanised the monster that was soon to kill her and her husband.

The appendice gives an insight in the author's life and I found it more gripping than the novel itself.

Born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish banker, Irene fled Russia to France in 1918. She led a privileged life and became a critically-acclaimed writer. But all that changed in 1939 and she was forced to send her two daughters to the country, where she and her husband joined them two years later. By this time 'laws governing the status of Jews' had been pronounced by the collaborationist French government. Irene's husband Michel was barred from working in his bank, while she was dropped by the literary establishment.

Irene was arrested in 1942, days after finishing Dolce. She survived only 10 days in Auschwitz. Her husband's increasingly desperate letters and telegrams, trying to establish his wife's whereabouts, are printed in the appendice. He was arrested and deprted two months later.

Amazingly their daughters survived in hiding and in their possession a suitcase containing, among other things, their mother's manuscript.

We may prefer to remember that the French barely tolerated the Vichy government and resisted the Germans. Irene Nemirovsky saw something different.

If the letters 'QI' mean anything to you, chances are you've seen the Stephen Fry-hosted BBC panel game of the same name and you know they stand for 'Quite Interesting'.

John Lloyd is the man behind QI and one of this book's authors. The Boook of General Ignorance follows the format of the QI TV show, throwing light on a huge range of common misconceptions.

I started reading this book while in hospital - the 280 odd very short stories were perfect for my drug induced short attention span. I was sad when I realised that I had left the unfinished book behind in my rush to discharge myself. But thanks to a human chain of kind strangers, the book was eventually returned to me and I have now learned the truth about how many wives Henry VIII had, the name of the highest mountain on Earth and where diamonds come from.

This book is for the people who know they don't know very much. It contains hundreds of things that the average person doesn't know. And it's quite interesting.

When the National Security Agency's "invincible" code-breaking machine encounters a mysterious code it cannot break, the agency calls in its head cryptographer, Susan Fletcher, a brilliant, beautiful mathematician. What she uncovers send shock waved through the corridors of power. The NSA is being held hostage - not by guns or bombs, but by a code so complex that if released it would cripple US intelligence.

Caught in an accelerating tempest of secrecy and lies, Fletcher battles to save the agency she believes in. Betrayed on all sides she finds herself fighting not only for her country but for her life, and in the end, for the man she loves...

Well that's what the blurb on the cover says. Digital Fortress is more of the same from Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown - talk of codes and crytography with fast-paced action. Unfortunately the characters here are not as engaging as Da Vinci Code, but the book is enjoyable enough, easy reading with plenty of mentions of the main character's designer shoes to prove that not only is she a genius mathematician, but a fashionista to boot.