FANTASTIC FICTION – Escapes to other places and other times

The study of Darwinian theory has attracted many of the brightest minds and best writers during the past twenty years. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1996), Daniel Dennett http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettd.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett) attempts to integrate an enormously diverse range of research into a coherent but popularly understandable defense of neo-Darwinian thought. Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’ is clearly held forth […]

On first reading this at school in 1978, it took me a while to get fully involved in the narrative. By half way through I wondered if there could ever be a more subtle and penetrating novelist than Mary Ann Evans. 35 years later I’ve not read any fiction finer than that of George Eliot

This First World War novel of 1993 is a staple of reader’s group circuits up and down the country, and for good reason. Set in France before and during the conflict, it is the story of a young Englishman Stephen Wraysford who is propelled through a series of extreme experiences, including a traumatic love affair

This month’s Egghead Choice ‘The Botany of Desire’ (2002) is a radical challenge to the assumption that humans control plants for their own benefit. Perhaps plants co-operate with us (not consciously, of course) in pursuit of their own ends. One is minded of the domestic cat lounging by the fire. Its servant (you) is busy

If this single volume history (1996), at 1392 pages, was a product in McDonalds it would be a quadruple burger with layers of cheese, fries and onion rings on the side. The difference is that long after this meal one feels fully satisfied. Norman Davies has indeed cooked up a whopper of a history book.

Ralph Glasser (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1389641/Ralph-Glasser.html) was born of Jewish parents in Leeds but when only a few months old his family moved to a tenement flat in the Gorbals area of Glasgow that gained notoriety as a one of the biggest slums in Europe. His mother died when he was six and his two older sisters were decamped quickly leaving him

Based on the author’s youthful memories of his grandparents’ fruit farm in the Clyde Valley at Kirkfieldbank, these 24 finely observed stories (published 1995) bring vividly before us a generation now gone, and a heartening evocation of the world seen through the eyes of a small boy. It was a time without Smartphones or computer games.

In 1793, a canal digger named William Smith made a startling discovery. He found that by tracing the placement of fossils, which he uncovered in his excavations, one could follow layers of rocks as they dipped and rose and fell — clear across England and, indeed, clear across the world — making it possible, for

A worthy winner of the Booker of Bookers, Midnight’s Children (1981) is a fantastic achievement in fiction by British Indian Salman Rushdie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie and http://www.salman-rushdie.com/ and http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/18/specials/rushdie.html) and already deemed a classic. It is a sophisticated blend of magical realism and historical fiction setting before us the (un)reality of post-colonial India. Gloriously witty and irreverent prose delivers