Smash hit

Largely reviewed as an acid attack on the couple who vacated 10 Downing Street earlier this year, Harris’s latest unputdownable thriller is far more than that: a sizzling suspense tale about doubleness and duplicity. Around a ghostwriter who has stepped into a dead man’s shoes to complete a retired prime minister’s memoirs coils a plot that has more gripping twists than an anaconda. Astringently funny, cynical, shrewd and taut, the story – with its seedy hack on the run, CIA chicanery and out-of-season setting (Martha’sVineyard in bleak mid-winter) – has a sardonic bravura reminiscent of one of Graham Greene’s “entertainments”.

THE DIG by John Preston
Viking £16.99

Delving back into the events that surrounded the discovery of the Anglo-Saxon burial ship at Sutton Hoo in 1939, Preston produces a little masterpiece of fictional archeology. Social, professional and sexual tensions quiver around the excited unearthing of the marvellous find beneath a grassy mound on a Suffolk estate. Portraying amateurs and experts racing against time (the outbreak of war is imminent) to preserve a remarkable survivor of the ravages of time, the novel is funny, humane and engrossing.

THEN WE CAME TO THE END by Joshua Ferris
Viking £14.99

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With the dotcom bubble burst, employees in a Chicago advertising agency anxiously eye the exit door through which one after another of them will be propelled into redundancy. Ferris’s often hilarious but also sometimes sombre debut novel is an engaging mini-epic of workplace woes, rivalries and alliances, wittily documented down to the last personalised coffee mug and mouse mat.

END GAMES by Michael Dibdin
Faber £12.99

Sadly, Dibdin’s last novel. Happily, one of his best. As Aurelio Zen investigates a gruesome murder mystery in the deep south of Italy, this maestro of crime writing, deploying all his powers of caustic intelligence, grisly inventiveness and blisteringly entertaining evocation of place, goes out in coruscating style.

TWO CARAVANS by Marina Lewycka
Fig Tree £12.99

Following the fortunes and misfortunes of an assortment of immigrant workers (Polish, Ukrainian, Moldovan, Chinese, Malawian) who share quarters while strawberry picking in Kent, this is an immensely likable comedy about resilience and resourcefulness. Darker concerns aren’t kept out of the picture: the characters have escaped from backgrounds of violence and underprivilege and are threatened by pitfalls of exploitation. But the novel brings a wealth of brio and winningly perceptive wit to its zestful attacks on prejudice and injustice.

BESTSELLERS

1 The Quest by Wilbur Smith
(Macmillan) 164,360

2 Crystalby Katie Price
(Century) 155,355

3 Making Money by Terry Pratchett
(Doubleday) 144,790

4 On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
(Cape) 135,585

5 Shopaholic and Baby by Sophie Kinsella
(Bantam) 124,935

Bestsellers list prepared by The Bookseller using data supplied by and copyright to Nielsen BookScan taken from the TCM 02/01/07-10/11/07

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