There are some authors you know are going to give you a good time. Sarah Waters is one of them. Her prose is so effortless, her narrative so captivating. She is often referred to as a storyteller, a term that suits her better than the slightly dry ‘author’. You can imagine this novel being read aloud, around a fire while it’s dark outside, the audience hanging off every word.

The Paying Guests is terrific. Its period setting is so well realised, summoning up a mix of melancholy romance, unease, and stiffling frustration. A time I would like to visit but am throughly relieved not to live in. Frances, the heroine, slowly reveals herself to be more than the unmarried daughter, condemned to a lifetime of pitying looks for not snaring a husband. Her pre-war zeal for change has been buried by tragedy and despondency, but her feelings are reawakened by the arrival of Leonard and Lilian Barber in her mother’s large south London house.

The relationships are beautifully crafted: between mother and daughter; husband and wife; friends and neighbours. Violence, sexual tension and doubt lurk everywhere. The action takes a dramatic turn but is always convincing. The way events tumble out of Frances’s control leave her uncertain over who to trust, and doubtful of the validity of her own feelings. She is caught in a paralysis of indecision, where even the decisions she does make don’t truly feel like her own.

Ultimately, there is a sense of passivity, which left me feeling a little bleak. Frances and Lillian seem to be in limbo, unsure of what to do and waiting for life to push them in a particular direction. This does, of course, match the national mood of the period – recovering from a devastating war with little sense of optimism or how to move forward – and reflects Waters’ great skill. Her characters are living, breathing and individual, yet very much shaped by their time.

I had rather a strange experience reading Engleby. About 50 pages in, it began to feel very familiar. At first I thought I was confusing Engleby’s memories of boarding school with Magnus Pym’s from A Perfect Spy (officially sanctioned sadistic bullying – a staple ingredient of public school life until fairly recently it would seem). But one line finally made me realise that I had read this book before, and clearly not that long ago as it was only published in 2007. Yet I could remember absolutely nothing about what happened; ironic considering the main thrust of the plot is the narrator’s complete loss of memory during significant events in his life. Has Sebastian Faulks pulled off an astonishing literary device, whereby the reader experiences the exact same mental blankness as his creation? I know my memory of books is not nearly as good as it was, but I can usually remember if I’ve read something before, even if I can’t recall much about the plot. And there is no reason to block it from my mind; on the contrary, I enjoyed it. Elegantly written, it really conjured up a sense of time and place as Engleby moved from school to university to Fleet Street. And he was an engaging narrator, even if he did turn out to be a (spoiler alert) raging psychopath.

So, the question is, has anyone else suffered from this form of temporary amnesia? Or am I just getting old?

Until last year, I had never read anything by John le Carré, and felt that I should. I tried to rectify the situation by reading Our Kind of Traitor, which was dire. I then realised it was published in 2010, quite some time after his most successful works. It seemed harsh to judge him on a novel written so long after the peak of his career, like assessing Lleyton Hewitt on his current performance rather than on his slam-winning heyday of over a decade ago. So I went for the big one: A Perfect Spy.

It was good: intelligent and atmospheric, with an air of authenticity surrounding the espionage shenanigans. The supporting cast of fellow British and American spies was great, full of backstabbing and power play. And there were some genuinely gripping scenes as they tried to close in on Pym and the truth slowly emerged around the wrong turns they took. The extensive autobiographical story of Pym himself was not so compelling, which was a shame as this takes up a large proportion of the novel. I also found it dated, full of a certain type of male superiority that went without question. I am a big fan of 19^th and early 20^th century fiction, so am perfectly comfortable with attitudes from a different time and place, but there was something about A Perfect Spy that made me think I probably won’t be rushing to read any more le Carré.

There wasn’t much to write home about in April – as you can tell from the date of this blog. Mad About the Boy was a rather sad conclusion to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones saga (I’m assuming there’s not going to be a fourth book). The funny bits weren’t very funny; there was lots of prose written as texts and tweets which was really irritating; and she jumped on the whole chaotic-mother-of-small-children bandwagon way too late. It felt old and tired, much like the heroine. I’ll always have a soft spot for Bridget though – one of my first dates with the man who is now my husband was to see the film at the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill, which was my local cinema at the time. How times have changed . . .

Blood Work by Michael Connelly was competent and should have been a gripping thriller, but I just couldn’t care about the characters. The Rosie Project was better – a fairly entertaining and absorbing read with a leading man who was one of those genius-with-no-social-skills autism sufferers that seem to have become something of a literary fad in recent years. Here’s hoping for a brighter May.

If you were in need of more reasons to dislike bankers, read The Wolf of Wall Street. Just don’t buy it, or you’ll be adding to the already substantial coffers of this repellent individual. Jordan Belfort has got to be one of the least appealing narrators I have ever come across. In fact, everyone in the book is pretty odious, which prevents it from being a particularly engaging read.

Belfort made huge amounts of money from, well, breaking the law. He constantly refers to how brilliant and gifted he was, but it’s hard to understand exactly what he did that was so brilliant. It was just illegal. His explanation of the financial wizardry involved is not terribly clear. Nick Leeson’s Rogue Trader, for example, explains the futures market pretty well, even if it is just another ludicrous attempt to make money out of nothing. Leeson also creates real tension over the financial situation and the ups and downs of the stock market. In contrast, Belfort just keeps on making money and taking drugs. As noted in a previous blog, reading about people’s exploits on drugs, however extravagant, eventually gets boring.

Belfort’s narrative style is also quite irksome. The constant reference to ‘loamy loins’ began to make me feel ill. His British aunt’s use of the word ‘love’ at the beginning and end of every sentence was excruciating. He had clearly been influenced by The Bonfire of the Vanities and this came through in some of his observations, particularly relating to his family: his descriptions of his wife’s career aspirations; his references to his daughter; and the constant totting up of what his wife spent on interior décor. However, he is certainly no Wolfe of Wall Street.

I got to the point where I only carried on reading so that I could enjoy Belfort’s comeuppance. Sadly, this was very unsatisfying: a short stint in rehab (where, of course, he charmed everyone and easily conquered his drug addiction), and a paltry jail sentence in return for co-operating with the FBI. He claims he only co-operated to save his wife from being indicted, but I’m not sure I believe him. Throughout the book there’s a lot of macho nonsense from his partners in crime about loyalty and never giving anyone up; funnily enough, by the end they all roll over and wag their tails for the Feds.

What is quite breathtaking is Belfort’s complete lack of remorse or sense of personal responsibility for both his criminal and morally reprehensible behaviour. The blame is laid squarely at the door of his drug addiction, which in turn is blamed on his chronic back pain, and his ‘enablers’ – his wife, P.A. and housemaid who didn’t stop him taking drugs.

In conclusion, a top-dollar a$$hole.

The only thing I can remember about Donna Tartt’s last book, The Little Friend, was that it was too long. Her new novel, The Goldfinch, is very good. There is no denying her descriptive powers, which work just as well whether she is writing about furniture or a character’s mental state. You really do feel Theo’s loss; in losing his mother he loses all sense of purpose and direction – there is no one there to anchor him – and this loss haunts him throughout the book. But, but, but . . . I still found it too long. Parts dragged. There were too many nights spent on drugs, which, as in real life, is fairly tedious when you are not joining in. Even the opening description of the explosion grew tiresome; I was desperate for Theo to get out and get on with the story.

For me, the book’s strength lay in the establishment and development of Theo’s relationships with the other characters: his mother; the Barbours; his father and Xandra; Boris; and Hobie. Only later in the book did I realise how fond I was of Andy Barbour, and how, like Mrs Barbour, I wanted Theo to be a part of her family. Theo’s involvement with Lucius Reeve was unnerving; in contrast, the final showdown in Amsterdam with Boris and his cronies felt a bit ridiculous and lacked any real tension.

Minor gripes aside, The Goldfinch is a great book, weaving a thoughtful contemplation of art, morality and loss into an absorbing narrative.

For the past few months, Benedict Cumberbatch has been my bedside companion – on the cover of the BBC Books edition of Parade’s End. It has taken me an age to finish this most exasperating, impenetrable tetralogy. Ford Madox Ford writes with no compassion for his reader: if you can’t keep up, too bad; if you never catch on, so what? The point is not to understand every conversation the characters have, but to understand the characters. You do not need to grasp every detail about the front line to realise what a bloody, chaotic mess it all was.

Parade’s End is an example of an author flouting all the rules and pulling it off. Every page is riddled with exclamation marks and ellipses, which good sense dictates should be reserved for special occasions. Yet it works. Madox Ford also manages to dispense with all the usual rules of narrative structure: something major happens and is then ignored for several chapters; revelations are dropped casually into conversation and you are left to leaf back through the book in confusion, wondering if you missed something vital earlier on. His style, though, helps make the book so psychologically astute. He puts you right in the heads of his characters, and what a fascinating bunch they are. Sylvia Tietjens must rank as one of fiction’s greatest anti-heroines, obsessed with inflicting cruelty on a husband that she simultaneously desires and detests, while the long-suffering Christopher Tietjens elicits sympathy, frustration and admiration in equal measure.

You might be wondering whether it’s worth the effort. It is. Parade’s End is one of those rare books that can be justly called a masterpiece.

I have a blog. Expect to see me on Twitter around 2021.