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!

An eerie yet familiar ethereal quality infuses the three stories of Banana Yoshimoto’s Asleep. The first-person narrator of each is a border person, existing on the cusp between wakefulness and sleep, life and death, periodically crossing over and crossing back.

In “Night and Night’s Travelers” the death of Yoshihiro, the brother of the narrator, transfixes the lives of his sister, Shibami, his girlfriend at the time of his death, Mari, and the young American exchange student, Sarah, with whom he earlier fallen in love and later abandoned. Mari cannot sleep. Sarah cannot let go. Both have enduring mementos of their relationship with Yoshihiro. It is left to Shibami to serve as their medium, between each other and with the spirit of Yoshihiro.

In “Love Songs”, two women vying for the same man form a relationship so intense, yet unspoken, that it might be love. The death of the older woman, Haru, cements the bond somehow. The younger woman begins taking on some of Haru’s characteristics and is even visited by what she believes is Haru’s spirit. Her purposeful confrontation with the spirit is the necessary next step in her own transformation and broader understanding of love in its many forms.

Death also troubles “Asleep,” with the suicide of the former flat-mate of the narrator, Terako. Her death and the transitional state between life and death of the wife of the Terako’s boyfriend, trapped in a permanent coma, begin to sap the life force of Terako. She visibly loses her will to live, embracing exhaustion and sleeping for increasing numbers of hours, so deeply that she cannot even hear a telephone ring. Again, a visitation from the spirit realm triggers Terako’s rescue.

The themes of death, loss of will, and love permeate these stories. Tone is more important than action. Anxiety, perhaps about the transition to adulthood (most of the characters seem to exist in a state of perpetual late adolescence), dominates. Age or cultural distance may be a barrier to embracing the objects of Yoshimoto’s concern, but her writing itself is well worth reading.

The Routledge Thinking in Action series presents accessible but serious philosophical treatments of key live issues, concepts, or ideas. Like others in the series, Peter Goldie’s On Personality is more than an introductory text. He may be introducing the reader for the first time to philosophical disputes on the nature of character or the role of character traits and dispositions to act in specific ways. But he also is a philosopher of stature with firm views on which way the debate should proceed and thus argues forcefully for that stance. So, very much a case of thinking in action. And is there anything more exciting than that?

The initial chapters lay the groundwork of distinctions needed to discuss personality and character (they are different) sensibly. In the middle chapter, Goldie addressed head-on the apparent evidence from psychological research casting doubt on the notion of dispositional characters. He handily fends off the sceptics, I think, but acknowledges in turn the fragile nature of character and the conditions under which we are prone to misascribe character traits. Having secured our talk of character, he moves on to its vital role in our moral lives. On Goldie’s view we are responsible for many of our character traits and this suggests a rethinking of the ordering of praise and blame in particular cases. A proper understanding of character is thus a clear first step for philosophers working through the connections between agency, responsibility, and character.

Goldie concludes the book with a chapter on the role of narrative in the sense of the self. Although he is often described as having a narrativist position, it is clear that he differs significantly from others in the field. Since he accepts a distinction between narrative and what narratives are about, he sees no difficulty in discounting the view that our lives have a narrative structure; rather, he would say, our “lives, and parts of lives, unfold in a characteristic way which can be related in the form of a narrative (but which aren’t themselves narratives).” Narrative (i.e. self-narrative) is crucial for what he calls the ‘Augustinian inside view’. But it is equally important as an expressive indicator for others.

Things move quickly, I think, in this final chapter. You may reach the end rather wishing that there had been time to learn a great deal more about the philosophical treatment of character, personality, and the role of narrative in the idea of the self. But perhaps that is the best indicator of an excellent introductory text. Recommended.