THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS
by John Connolly Hodder, £6.99 £6.64 (free p&p)

Connolly’s Gothic fable is firmly located in the children’s-fiction-for-adults genre made popular by Philip Pullman and others — although its influences are wider. As the author explains in a lengthy afterword, his childhood reading included fairytales, the Greek myths and poems such as Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, and references to all are found in the novel.

C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the most obvious influence — down to the Second World War setting, to say nothing of the magical creatures, half-human and half-animal, that populate the work. The clever but lonely 12-year-old hero, David, bears more than a passing resemblance to Kay Harker in John Masefield’s The Box of Delights.

Like his precursors in these works, David finds a portal into another world, in which the dilemmas of the real one are mirrored. Thus, the Woodman who helps David to fight off the fearsome “Loups”, half-men, half-wolves, reminds him of his father; while his stepmother Rose is transformed into a wicked sorceress. Other repulsive types include the Child-Catcher-like “Crooked Man”, the child-killing Huntress, and a man-eating female Beast. If the author’s reworking of myth and fairytale seems more Hammer Horror than Brothers Grimm, this is offset by the compelling pace of the narrative. The Book of Lost Things is next week’s choice for the Times Books group

BE NEAR ME
by Andrew O’Hagan Faber, £7.99 £7.59 (free p&p)

Longlisted for last year’s Man Booker prize, O’Hagan’s intelligent and finely crafted novel considers how individual lives are conditioned by the past, both in a personal sense and in the context of wider historical events. Thus, his narrator, David Anderton, a Catholic priest, is the prisoner of his own privileged upbringing.

Educated at Ampleforth and Oxford, he finds himself part of a self-consciously decadent set of aesthetes, whose mannered conversation and intellectual posturing is out of step with the egalitarian times. All this is seen in retrospect, as David, struggling with the bleak realities of life as a parish priest in a small Scottish seaside town, considers the events that shaped him. Most important is his relationship with Conor, a fellow undergraduate and would-be revolutionary. Long-buried memories of their love affair surface when David, now in his fifties, meets Mark, who is 15 and disturbingly attractive. Driven by a yearning to recapture lost youth, and by physical desire, David becomes inveigled into a dangerous situation, in which he is as much victim as predator.

O’Hagan skilfully captures the nuances of class and sexual power-play that make up this thoughtful and troubling work. Full of sharp social comment on contemporary issues ranging from the Iraq War to the moral outcry surrounding paedophilia, Be Near Me is as good as anything he has written.

LONDONSTANI
by Gautam Malkani HarperPerennial, £7.99 £7.59 (free p&p)

Malkani’s ingeniously structured first novel, given a youth-savvy repackaging, reads like The Catcher in the Rye with a hip young British-Asian accent. Its 19-year-old narrator Jas is as desperate for street credibility as J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield — but the streets in question are in present-day Hounslow, rather than in 1950s New York.

It is here that Jas, with his friends Hardjit, Ravi and Amit, make efforts to convince themselves and the rest of the neighbourhood how tough they are, by beating up stray goras — white boys — and by stealing mobile phones. As a result of a botched theft, they find themselves in the power of Sanjay, a shady businessman with a Cambridge degree, who intends to use them for his own ends. As the brightest of the foursome, Jas gets drawn in deepest, lured by Sanjay’s promises of fast cars and compliant women. In one of the novel’s funniest episodes, Sanjay even lends Jas his Porsche so that the youngster can impress Samira, the beautiful Muslim girl he fancies. For a while everything goes swimmingly, then Sanjay’s demands become harder to square with Jas’s lingering moral reservations. Suddenly, things start to look very nasty indeed — and Jas has to make some hard choices about exactly who he wants to be.

When this was published lin hardback last year, Rageh Omaar called it “razor-sharp”. Others were equally complimentary — and, for once, such praise seems entirely justified.

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