Book reviews

Pakistan-born Roopa has followed up her Orange Prize-shortlisted debut, Bitter Sweets, with a heart-warming story about love and relationships.

One day, Aruna, still wearing her flimsy sleep clothes, decides to up sticks and leave her home in east London – booking a flight to her home country of Singapore.

The book is split into three points of view – Aruna, her childhood friend and ex-love Jazz and Jazz's estranged and dying father Hassan.

With each chapter, we learn more about each character, such as how Aruna met her adoring husband Patrick.

Half Life may well be a slow-burner of a book, but give it a go.

7/10

Review by Shereen Low

Sleepless by Charlie Huston is published by Orion Books, priced 12.99

After a series of vampire noir novels and revitalising Marvel Comics' brutal vigilante Moon Knight, Huston offers another new breed of urban nightmare.

Parker Haas is an undercover cop in the gloomy near-future LA. Predictions about gang warfare, fundamentalist terrorism and environmental collapse are all coming true, and increasingly life is conducted online. Plus there's an epidemic of ultimately-fatal insomnia.

Parker's supposedly investigating an illicit trade in the one drug that gives relief, but LA detective stories aren't that simple.

It takes a while to get to grips with the strands of Huston's narrative, but this is still a gripping thriller.

7/10 Review by Alex Sarll

Spooner by Pete Dexter is published by Atlantic Books, priced 12.99

American novelist Pete Dexter, writer of the award-winning Paris Trout, uses a lifetime of experience to colour his latest offering – part autobiographical, part memoir, part novel.

Retired naval officer Calmer Ottosson is thrust into Warren Spooner's world in this story examining the relationship between stepfather and son.

Spooner is a troubled child, perceived as an oddity. His twin brother Clifford was stillborn, a tragedy enhanced when his father dies soon after. However, his life and viewpoints are challenged upon the arrival of his stepfather.

Stability, a positive influence and much-needed love and support overshadow his childhood and adult scrapes – leading to an eventual change of perspective.

Spooner realises the need for self-improvement and responsibility – with even a potentially poignant ending maintaining the tone of imperfection.

8/10 Review by James Cleary

Contested Will – Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro is published by Faber and Faber, priced 20

The long-held minority view that William Shakespeare's plays were actually written by someone else is convincingly rejected in this book.

Although Columbia University Professor James Shapiro demolishes the alternative author theory, he does not contest that some of the later plays – mainly the less well-known ones such as Pericles – were co-authored. Shapiro points out that Shakespeare became a literary star in London during his own lifetime and if he had not written the plays it could not possibly have been kept a secret.

However, the popularity of conspiracy theories is so strong that neither Shapiro nor anyone else is likely to lay to rest entirely the claim that England's immortal playwright was actually someone else.

9/10 Review by Anthony Looch

Labour Pains by Peter Kilfoyle is published by Biteback, priced 12.99

As the general election drags on, any desperate Tories looking for inspiration when it comes to New Labour-bashing could do worse than reach for rebel MP Peter Kilfoyle's mini-memoir. The unreconstructed member for Liverpool, Walton savages just about every major Blairite and Brownite from the last 13 years.

There is fresh evidence of Blair's brazen double-dealing and economy with the truth, and several run-ins with Brown show the current PM to be hopelessly uncommunicative.

Kilfoyle – one of the few ministers to resign on a point of principle – is at his sharpest when railing against New Labour's "complacent self-satisfaction" about being in office.

This well-argued book is a very perceptive and enjoyable ramble through Kilfoyle's parliamentary life, but at 130 pages is all too brief.

8/10 Review by Matthew Dickinson

CHILDREN'S CHOICE

The Incredible Luck Of Alfie Pluck by Jamie Rix is published by Orion Children's Books, priced 5.99

As a baby, Alfie Pluck was abandoned at a bus stop and spent the next 11 years being brought up by his greedy, lazy aunts. His only friends are his three-legged dog and Red – manager of the local Chango's Chicken Shack and sister of local bully, Fox.

Alfie Pluck was one of the unluckiest boys alive. However, one day he ate a chicken containing the precious good-luck gene and things changed.

Now he is on the run from an unpopular Prime Minister, a mad scientist and an ambitious police inspector.

Along the way he also discovers that his aunts have hidden a secret about his mother.

My 10-year-old reader said it reminded her of Roald Dahl's James And The Giant Peach.

6/10 Review by Laura Wurzal