This year, during the Cultural Olympiad that will be going on in London, every single one of Shakespeare’s plays will be performed and each will be spoken in a different language. All over the planet, Shakespeare is acknowledged not only as the greatest playwright in English but also as someone whose work means something to the people of every country in the world. To say that he is ‘universal’ has become a cliché but like a lot of clichés, it’s no more than the truth.

We don’t know an enormous amount about him. Unlike Dickens, for instance, or Jane Austen, he did not leave behind letters or documents to help us. But certain facts are known. He married Anne Hathaway. He was an actor. His patron was the Earl of Southampton. He was a contemporary of Ben Jonson and Kit Marlowe. He was the son of a glovemaker. Jude Morgan’s supremely accomplished and original novel makes it clear also that he was an enigma; that even in his lifetime, no one quite understood how it was that he transcended so completely every single one of his peers and (did they but know it) every other playwright who would ever put pen to paper.

This book, which doesn’t appear in the shops till April 12th, is a revelation. The first thing to say is this: at no point do you feel wrenched out of the comfort zone of modern life and thrust into a fusty, musty, olde-worlde England where you’re not sure what’s going on and where everyone speaks oddly. There is no pish-tushery here. The novel follows young Will from Stratford, to London and also follows, in two more parallel narratives, Anne left behind in Stratford with the children and Ben Jonson, struggling to learn and write while apprenticed to his step-father as a bricklayer.

Morgan is adept at giving a shape and meaning to lives and talents we find it hard to grasp. His novel A Taste of Sorrow brought the Bronte family to life in an extraordinarily moving way and here, his great achievement is to have fleshed out the facts we know in such a way that we are there, with the protagonists, sharing their fortunes, their setbacks, their personal tragedies and above all, the separate stories of their relationships.

Chief among these is the tender and beautiful love story of Anne and Will. She is older than he is. When he leaves for London to follow the players, he promises her he’ll be faithful. She understands his need to leave but his need to write doesn’t become clear to her till she sees a performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Then, like the millions upon millions who’ve been enchanted by it since its first performance, she realizes that “ this was where Will had gone. This was where he had taken his self…….Oh, she could offer him truth, perhaps, beauty, love- but nothing, nothing compared with what he could make.”

Earlier in the book, when she wonders how he’ll manage in London, Anne thinks: “he must cherish some great recompense within him. It was as if somewhere there was another box in which he kept his contentment, unassailable and secure. Contentment or joy, she couldn’t tell.”

This is the best thing about the book: the fact that Will, though its hero, acts mostly as a mysterious centre of other people’s stories. There is scarcely any quotation from his work. There’s no trite scene where we see him chewing the end of his quill while struggling to find words. Only a few of the plays are alluded to. Rather Morgan has made the writing almost the ‘secret life’ of the title: something that happens, something he does, away from the main action of the novel. We are aware of it going on off-stage and our main focus is on Will’s personal life, his friendships, his heartaches, his love for his wife, through everything that happens to them both.

Will has always been aware of the power of what he can do. From childhood when he followed the players who came to perform in the town, he’s understood plays. He knows the repertoire backwards. He knows the parts by heart. And he realizes that it’s all done with words.

“And what those words must do: from the moment the play begins, they must make everything: the earth and sky and the people who move there. A soldier’s breastplate, a painted throne –these tawdry bits and pieces are the only aid the words can call on. First, words. First and last, words.

He wants to make it with words. He wants to try it. He doesn’t think it’s his destiny - it’s necessary to be clear about that. But still, there is a gathering. Droplets must gather to make a storm."

This is a beautifully structured, perfectly written book which is moving because it brings out the human story of an almost supernaturally gifted writer. Anyone who already loves Shakespeare will find it compelling and fascinating and for those who still have to discover him, this novel is an ideal way of approaching him. There’s a point in the book when Will is comparing himself with Marlowe and Jonson. This is what he thinks, and it sums up his genius exactly.

“He is like neither of them. No grand doer of deeds…..instead he has this, and to win he must take it up, light with a sharp sure tip to balance the world on: his pen.”

This is no more than the truth. Morgan puts it very well: the whole of the universe and everything in it is balanced on the end of William Shakespeare's pen.

This book was my first of 2012 and it's also outstanding. I've not read much Nicholson Baker. He's an American writer and some of his work (The Mezzanine, U &I) I've enjoyed and some I haven't been tempted to try. This is a very short book indeed but it is so packed with fascinating stuff that I think I'll have to read it again. The story is a simple one: a not-very-successful poet is under pressure to produce the introduction to an anthology of American poets. He is having domestic troubles. He is having doubts about his own abilities. He is awed, infuriated, amazed and entranced by the sheer numbers of poems, and poets he has to consider. Also, he wants to write something about how poetry itself works. The result is quite enchanting. You get a thorough and illuminating account of very many poets and poems and that in itself is marvellous but as well as that, the novel part of the book about Paul, the anthologist and how he fares and what happens to him, day to day, is also interesting, so in effect you are getting two books for the price of one and the whole thing in very few words. It's a marvel of economy and precision and most elegantly written. You end up knowing more at the beginning than you did before you started. It ought to be on the syllabus of every literature course in the country. If you're at all interested in poetry, do read it. Even if you aren't, I think you should give it a go. You'd be amazed to see where Paul finds poetry lurking...A lovely book.

This was the last book I read in 2011 and it was a corker. I haven't tried Jane Harris before though I believe her first novel, THE OBSERVATIONS, was highly praised. The received wisdom in publishing is that the second novel someone writes is a often a problem and not as good as the first. If your debut is a success, critics are ready to pounce on your next effort. If you've used up all your material, or the best of it, then your second novel, so the legend goes, may turn out to be a poor, weak thing.

Nothing of the kind happened to Jane Harris. I will read her first novel now, of course, but I can't imagine it will top GILLESPIE AND I, which was one of my favourite books of the year: a pleasure from beginning to end.

This is the story of a spinster of some means, Harriet Baxter, who manages to entangle herself in the lives of Ned Gillespie, a promising Scottish artist of the 1880s, and his family. He is on the verge of becoming well-known. The First International Exhibition is on in Glasgow and the place is teeming with visitors, tourists, and residents, all enjoying the spectacle. At first everything goes well. Harriet helps the family in various ways and they seem to like her and accept her as a good friend. Then things begin to unravel.. Sybil, the older daughter, starts behaving very strangely. Kenneth, the brother, has to leave town for reasons the reader learns but the family does not. Or maybe does not... At a certain point, the younger daughter disappears. Harriet is the narrator of the novel and it is through her eyes we see every part of the action.

It would be a shame to reveal more because although this is not a thriller, it is a mystery and we don't know, till the very end, precisely what has happened and how. The Victorian action is framed by a narrative set in 1933. Harriet is now in her eighties and is writing down the events of long ago. What we see of her life as an old woman casts doubts over her account of the past and even the present isn't quite what it appears to be. This is a rich, fascinating, involving and fast-moving story, which races to its conclusion with the inexorable power of one of those old Victorian steam trains. There is also plenty to discuss with others and turn over in your mind when you reach the last page. Terrific stuff.

It's so long till this book is published that I don't even have a cover image but I like to write about something as soon as I've read it if I possibly can. When it is published, I'll put up an announcement and a picture on this bit of the website.

Sarah Moss wrote one of the best novels I read in 2011. Its name was NIGHT WAKING and it combined a wonderfully humorous but nevertheless uncomfortably truthful story about the hell of living with a child who doesn't sleep and a husband who doesn't really pull his weight with a mystery in the past and the depiction of one of the islands off the west coast of Scotland both now and in the nineteenth century. It was elegantly written and cleverly constructed and I loved every page of it. I looked about on the internet after I'd finished it to find out more about the writer and to my surprise I discovered that she was none other than the daughter of someone I used to know in Manchester back in the 1970s and 80s. She's about the same age as my elder daughter and her mother and I belonged to something called the National Housewives Register back in the days before Mumsnet when women gathered to have coffee at one another's houses and did reciprocal babysitting too. Having loved NIGHT WAKING I then read Sarah's first novel, COLD EARTH and found that that was great as well. I wrote about both books on my old website and that led to Granta sending me an early proof of this memoir, for which I'm most grateful.

No one at Granta can have known this, I don't think, but I am very interested in Iceland. Long before Steig Larsson swept all before him with his Lisbeth Salander novels, I was reading thrillers by a wonderful Icelandic writer called Arnaldur Indridasson.* In every one of his books he brings to life a country that is like ours in many ways and also quite unlike. Erlendur , a really beautiful creation, is a detective who has problems with his children, as well as a terrible tragedy in his past and he has to deal with crimes both current and historical. The first book I read, THE SILENCE OF THE GRAVE, went right back to a crime committed during the Second World War. Being an Indridasson fan, I went to see the movie JAR CITY and was struck by the strangeness of the landscape. I am, therefore, exactly the target audience for Moss's book.

But others will be fascinated too, to learn something about a place which not many people seems to have given much thought to, before the collapse of the Icelandic banks and the bad behaviour of a volcano. I am not going even to attempt a spelling but you know the one I mean: the one which held up all kinds of air traffic, including Sarah Moss's plane that was to take her to an interview for a job at a Singapore university. The fact that she now teaches in Cornwall instead is due in large measure to volcanic interference.

She tells us she's always been drawn to the Northern lands. When she was much younger, she and a friend visited Iceland as tourists during the summer. This would be different. She was going with her husband and two small children. She was going to teach English literature at the University. She'd be spending a whole year there, including long months in a land of almost total winter darkness.

The book is an account of that year and reading it is as exciting as reading a novel. You see the country through her eyes. You learn about the supermarkets and the scarily unstable ground under the whole country. You meet the students and the lecturers. You go where Moss goes. You hold your breath while Icelandic drivers do their terrifying thing. You discover that you take fresh fruit and vegetables for granted. The financial situation is only gradually revealed and this makes the book almost like a thriller in parts. It seems for instance that many people in the middle classes don't even know that true poverty exists till they see the evidence of it with their own eyes. Several things are contradictory. We're told that it's quite normal for children to be left lying outside shops, for instance, in their prams. It's also unheard of, apparently, for anyone to harm a child. That doesn't quite square what I read in Indridasson and later on in the book, Moss discovers that in fact the crime statistics are very similar to ours in the UK. and that Iceland does experience things like, for example, domestic violence, especially under the influence of drink.

The book is absolutely crammed full of interesting experiences, and awe-inspiring sights, both natural and man made, but I liked best the chapter on knitting and the parts of the book where Moss meets women for whom elves are as real as human beings. She goes to talk to these women about the manifestations they are able to perceive in the landscape around them and her descriptions are enough to make you feel....well, a little uneasy, to say the least. The knitting chapter is completely fascinating and I am about to go onto Google to see if I can find a visual depiction of the Icelandic method of knitting which is apparently completely different from our own. In Iceland EVERYONE KNITS...at meetings,. busstops, everywhere possible. You just carry your wool and needles around with you wherever you go - a marvellous idea, I reckon.

You come away from this book with a dread of Icelandic spellings, a renewed interest in a tough, kind, practical and also very strange people with quite different ideas and priorities from ours but also a great deal in common. It's a real treat to have this account of Moss's year abroad. She and her family clearly loved their time there and she's managed to pass that magic on to us.

* I do rather wish Moss had met Indridasson. Everyone in Rejkavik does seem to know everyone else and it's an amazingly literary country so it might have happened....

This is a wonderful book but it's also almost impossible to write about. Every review I've read of it has said certain true things but none of them has conveyed properly the flavour of the novel and reading it will be the only way you're all going to experience a truly original and memorable work.

It's original in its extraordinary complexity but basically it's an exploration of every kind of love. It is sometimes realistic but it has a streak of magic running right through it. Several things will echo with those who've read widely. For instance, the first encounter of Amaryllis, the heroine, with Ezra, the hero is deliberately reminiscent of the first meeting of Pip and Estella in 'Great Expectations.' You'll find a villain here who comes straight from old movie melodramas, and references to various films scattered through the pages. And Ezra, as the writer herself has told us, is a tribute to the poet Ezra Pound who was so important to T.S. Eliot when he was writing The Waste Land.

The plot is complicated. It involves a millionaire who builds, somewhere in rural England, a glittering picture palace which is an enchanted time and memory machine. He creates it so that his beloved daughter's bad memories can be erased and so that she can live forever in a place where nothing difficult can trouble her. Of course his plan goes wrong and Amaryllis (together with other characters) gets stuck there, unable to escape. Enter Ezra, who, like Orpheus, goes into the Underworld to rescue the girl he adores. She is still seventeen because time has stopped for her. Ezra has grown up and is a boffin working for the delightful Sir Basil as a special agent charged with discovering the secrets of this astonishing place that keeps on appearing and reappearing much to everyone's consternation.

The War is on. The action of the novel starts in 1937, but it moves backwards and forwards in time. Ezra lives in a village with his mother and his father (shell-shocked during the First World War). A whole cast of other people, some alive, some presented in flashback, revolves around him and Amaryllis. There is war, and rape and desolation but glamour and beauty and love too, all whirling round in a kind of kaleidoscope of events and thoughts and memories and thrills. The characters are all brought vividly to life, from Tommy Treacle and his mouse to the hideous Everett Roach and the mysterious Vervaine Fox. Gardner is good at names. She's good at most things. She creates a world that both is and isn't our own. She makes magic seem plausible and at the same time as artificial and glamorous as a magic trick. The true meaning of 'glamour' is "deceptive or bewitching beauty or charm" and that's what this book has in spades. Towards the end of the story we're told "All is in disguise, nothing is what it appears." This is the most accurate summing up of all: Gardner is dealing in illusions and what happens when they're shattered.

But the novel also has a kind and generous heart and that's what makes it moving and true. The descriptions of the nation at war are superbly done and with great economy, too. Gardner doesn't hide anything but she describes horrors with a deft touch and they are more powerfully present in our minds because of it. Her style is light and sometimes humorous but always full of a kind of poetry, and I don't mean by that soppiness of any kind. There's an astringency and sharpness to the writing that means she avoids sentimentality and gush.

This novel is published by Orion on a new list called INDIGO which is for Young Adults. The designer of the volume deserves a mention because every detail of the book's appearance is exactly right: the font, the Art Deco vignettes that appear throughout the text, the cover image: it's typographical perfection and makes the novel an object of desire unmatchable by any ebook version. Adults would love it. Older teenagers would love it and perhaps even a few younger ones but it's a highly sophisticated novel and a complicated one. It will find its readers and they'll spread the word. My advice is: read the book before a movie is made of it. I will bet money on that happening quite soon and in the hands of the right director it'll be great. You will, however, lose a lot of the words and that's what makes this such an intriguing and fascinating book.

I've only mentioned The Wasteland (that's how it's written in this novel) in passing, but that's important. I've not told you about the white tiger. He's important, too. So are many other things I've left out. You are going to have to read the book for yourselves.

INDIGO

Hardback. £9.99

ISBN:9781780620121

pp. 384