The narrator of Anne Tyler’s The Beginner’s Goodbye, Aaron Woolcott, is crippled in his right arm and leg as the result of a childhood virus. He always tells everyone that he can get by just fine. Which he does. Unfortunately his real crippling lies deeper; a lifetime of fending off solicitous mothers, sisters, and sympathetic young women has left him, perhaps not surprisingly, isolated emotionally. With the sudden and unexpected death of his wife, Dr Dorothy Rosales, who is literally flattened when a huge tree comes crashing through the sunroom of the house, Aaron finds himself bereft. But of what he is bereft?

In typical Tyler fashion, this novel is filled with unusual individuals who are presented as run-of-the-mill. Dramatic action, even action as dramatic as trees crashing through houses, is muted. Interior thoughts and self-doubt predominate. And there is a gentle sprinkling of light humour and passing psychological insight.

Somewhat unusually, there is a ghost lurking in this novel. Not the much talked about visions of Dorothy that Aaron experiences periodically during the year following her death. Rather, it is the character of Dorothy herself. She is endlessly enigmatic and always just out of reach. Who is this woman? She is an Oncologist of Hispanic origin with a respected medical practice. She is curiously muffled emotionally and strangely unpractised in social interaction. Very curiously (but entirely unexplored in the novel) even after years of marriage, Aaron has never met Dorothy’s family. Aaron’s call to her brother with the news of her death is his first occasion of speaking to him. I wanted to learn a great deal more about this woman. Alas, this is Aaron’s story and he either doesn’t know anything more about his wife, or doesn’t want to know.

As ever, when you try to situate a new Anne Tyler work within the range of her (now 19) novels, you find that it fits somewhere in the middle. As do all of the others. Gently recommended (for lovers of Anne Tyler novels).

More than 50 years after its original publication, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is just as angular and opinionated as ever. It is a world filled with haints, hot steams, incantations and secret signs that Jean Louise—otherwise known as Scout—and her brother, Jem, must negotiate. But there are worse things in Maycomb than imaginary night frights. And better. On one side are formidable aunties, and equally formidable neighbours, though it takes Scout and Jem a fair bit of time to determine just which side those are on. By the time they are face to face with the worst of Maycomb (and possibly of mankind) they have learned a thing or two about the better as well. And at the top of the better column, undoubtedly, is their father, Atticus Finch.

Lee does such a good job painting a believable picture of Alabama in the 1930s that it begins to seem almost unbelievable that men like Atticus or children like Jem and Scout could emerge from such an environment. Where does their strength of character come from? How are they able to hold to their resolve come what may? And how does Atticus continue to place himself in other men’s shoes day after day and not end in self-loathing?

I suppose that To Kill A Mockingbird was intended for a child readership, but its content and themes are more than serious enough to give any adult pause. And if you missed out on this classic and are coming to it late in the game, as I have, then you may want to take a moment to imagine your younger self reading this novel. And you may also wonder whether that younger you would have developed more strength of character, more resolve, and more fellow feeling than you have as a result. Maybe.

Writing this novel has to be considered an achievement, or possibly a feat. The inspired choice of five year old Jack as the narrator presents innumerable challenges that Donoghue meets valiantly. It also has advantages. It allows her to treat of a situation so horrible that one rather wishes it were not even imaginable let alone possible. Through Jack’s naïve eyes we persevere, if only for his sake. But it is hard going, claustrophobic, and emotionally stifling.

The second half of the novel opens up new possibilities. Here things begin to lose direction, to meander, to go this way and that without a clear purpose. Maybe that is to be expected, but it may also have something to do with the downside of Jack’s narrative voice. Once his world expands the voice becomes much less persuasive, either too knowing, fey, or twee. It’s a risk for any writer, I think, though Donoghue does manage to present at least a few brilliant moments. I especially liked the utter incomprehension of what has occurred found in the voice of a woman commiserating with Jack’s grandmother: ‘”Well, I don’t know. I spent a week in a monastery in Scotland once…[and]…it was so peaceful.” I also liked Jack’s step-grandfather or ‘Steppa’ who seems to have a natural connection with Jack.

The ending is something of a disappointment, if only because the emotional and narrative closure it brings seems antithetical to the psychological scars the atrocities committed would have induced. Of course if closure is what you are looking for—the tidy settling of our exfoliated emotional skin like dust in an unused room—then Donoghue’s otherwise intriguing tale will fully satisfy. I just wish the focus of such a narrative feat truly were unimaginable.

Elizabeth (known as ‘Daisy’) is a teenager from Manhattan shipped off to her English country cousins in advance of the birth of her “evil” stepmother’s first child. She is cynical, world-weary, anorexic, and angry. And you might think she is about as marginalized and isolated as a young person can be. Until war breaks out in various countries including Britain and America and Daisy becomes even more cut off. Existentially cut off. Except that by then she has already bonded with her cousins who have become the family she never knew she missed. Indeed the bonds are so immediate and visceral that they seem to be able to share each other’s thoughts.

Meg Rosoff has created a thoroughly believable voice in her first-person narrator, Daisy. I loved her New York sensibility and her observations (never overdone) of some of the differences between life in America and life in England. Daisy journeys through an emotional as well as a physical landscape as she moves from cynicism to friendship to love, fear, desperation, horror and more. It is a fast-moving spectacle and all the reader can do is hold on with both hands. Recommended.

Some time before the Mysterious Benedict Society formed, there was just a small orphan boy with rather particular traits named Nicholas Benedict. In this prequel adventure, Nicholas’ narcolepsy is only periodically a hindrance. But it is something he would like kept under wraps as he joins a new orphanage known as ‘Child’s End. That doesn’t sound promising for Nicholas. Nor does the regime in which he will be locked in a windowless room at night so that his nightmares do not disturb the other children.

Fortunately Nicholas is blessed with an eidetic memory, a great drive to learn (mostly through rapidly reading and then recalling each and every book in the orphanage library), and a remarkably resourceful wit. Together his prodigious memory, abundant storehouse of information, and reasoning ability get him out of numerous scrapes and, not too surprisingly, into a few. But Nicholas is not all alone in his endeavours. He finds a friend in John, who bravely protects him from the Spider gang of bullies at the orphanage, and in Violet, who has a host of challenges of her own not least of which is deafness. The three embark on a quest for a treasure that might save them all from fates that look less than appealing.

It is a return to form for Trenton Lee Stewart. This book has all of the verve of the first in the series. By concentrating his attention on only three children, and only one extraordinary child, he is able to add dimensions to their characterisation. Plot holds the reins, naturally, but Nicholas’ education will be something he can’t learn (or memorize) from books. There are extraordinary people in the world, and here we get a glimpse, perhaps, of why Nicholas Benedict grows up to become one of them. If, like me, you feel compelled to persist with a series once you’ve started it, you will not be disappointed when you reach this volume of the Mysterious Benedict Society series. Enjoy!