THE HALF BROTHER
By Lars Saabye Christensen
Vintage, £7.99
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What is it about the family saga that makes it such an enduring literary staple, from Galsworthy through Mann to two of its most recent practitioners, Franzen and Eugenides? Perhaps it is the pleasure of seeing the cluttered, arbitrary mess that usually constitutes family life skilfully shaped into a comprehensible whole. True or not, Christensen’s tenth novel is a deliriously enjoyable, emotionally exhausting triumph. Related by Barnum Nilsen, the diminutive son of an Oslo housewife and a dubious carnival worker, the book spans four generations and the lion’s share of the 20th century. We first meet a middle-aged, dissolute Barnum, pockets clinking with miniatures, at the Berlin Film Festival, a screenwriter manqué haunted by a lifetime of ghosts presided over by that of his saturnine missing half-brother Fred. Christensen maintains an awesome momentum, enmeshing the precision of individual sections into a sweeping whole. Praise must also be heaped on Kenneth Stevens’s translation and Arcadia, who first put the book out in English last year. Buy one for yourself and more for everyone you know.

DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE
By Z. Z. Packer
Canongate, £9.99
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Illustrious names (Updike, Barth, Zadie Smith) have plastered accolades all over Z. Z. Packer’s debut story collection, so perhaps the disappointment of the book’s opening quartet, in which the author shows an accomplished storytelling technique without creating an emotional charge, can be put down to heightened expectation. The final four stories, however, particularly the wonderful Geese, banish these doubts and prove Packer worthy, in part, of the hype.

THE BRAINFEVER BIRD
By I. Allan Sealy
Picador, £7.99
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Lev, a scientist working in the field of germ warfare, travels from St Petersburg to Delhi to hawk his shadowy expertise. A stolen briefcase stymies his employment hopes and he becomes involved in an uneasy — and, for his part, adulterous — affair with Maya, a puppeteer who lives among the tangled passageways of old Delhi. Sealy makes tremendous work of his premise, summoning beautiful prose while subtly acknowledging the dreadful power he holds over his creations.

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW
By A. M. Homes
Granta, £6.99
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When writing sho
rt stories Homes is in possession of the full box of tricks. She manages consistently to have humour and horror tripping over one another’s heels without one countermanding the other. In Rockets Round the Moon, for example, a child’s deadpan account of his desultory summer holiday descends into a hell of accidental death and immolation before reaching a conclusion both miserable and optimistic. Lord knows how she does it, but, thankfully, she does.

A WILD RIDE THROUGH THE NIGHT
By Walter Moers
Vintage, £8.99
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I was attracted to this book by favourable reports of Moers’s The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear and a love for Gustave Doré’s illustrations. Moers’s fairytale of young Gustave, who must complete six tasks to escape the clutches of Death, is inspired by a selection of Doré line drawings handsomely reproduced here. But while the enterprise left my feelings for the dead Frenchman intact, I developed no love for the quick German.

Non-fiction: Iain Finlayson

HITCHHIKER: A BIOGRAPHY OF DOUGLAS ADAMS
By M. J. Simpson
Coronet, £8.99
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