Book review: Trigger Mortis by Anthony Horowitz

Everyone knows who James Bond is, or at least they think they do. The James Bond I know is the James Bond of the films, particularly those featuring Pierce Brosnan or Daniel Craig as the man with a license to kill.

But that James Bond - suave, smooth, likeable if a little angsty and high maintenance - is not necessarily the James Bond of Ian Fleming's novels. Granted, I've never read a Fleming novel, but by all accounts Anthony Horowitz's Trigger Mortis is a pretty faithful rendition of Fleming's character, and Horowitz seems the perfect person to write a Bond novel, having created a young spy, Alex Rider, who is kind of Bond junior.

In Trigger Mortis Bond is sent to Nurburgring to prevent SMERSH from killing a British racing driver. While there he becomes suspicious of a meeting between SMERSH and a Korean millionaire, Jai Seong Sin. Bond has to team up with the clever Jeopardy Lane to stop a plot that could destroy the western world.

Horowitz's Bond isn't a pleasant person. He treats women badly (including Pussy Galore, who is living with Bond at the beginning of the novel), and while Jeopardy Lane is a feisty, independent heroine, she's still treated largely like an object by Bond. We do see Bond show some humanity once, when he hesitates before killing someone, but if anything that moment doesn't do him any favours, instead it just feels out of character, even if that character is unpleasant.

Book review: Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell

Identity, memory, self-worth and desire - all are at the core of Maggie Mitchell's beguiling novel Pretty Is.

When Carly May and Lois were 12 years old they were kidnapped. Missing for two months, everyone presumed they were dead, until they were rescues. Now grown up, Carly May has changed her name and is pursuing an acting career, while Lois has written a book fictionalising what happened to the two girls during the time they were kidnapped. When Carly May is cast in the lead role of the film adaptation of Lois' book, the two women are brought back together again. What really happened to them when they were 12, how has it affected them, and is there still a threat to their lives?

In Carly May, known as Chloe in the present time, and Lois, Mitchell has created two complicated female characters who I spent the entire book trying to unpick, and who spent the two months they were kidnapped trying to unpick each other, and the years since then trying to both forget each other and make sense of each other. It's easy to think that it was just the kidnapping which affected Carly May and Lois so badly, impacting on the rest of their lives, but Mitchell shows through glimpses of their home life that the kidnapping only exacerbated the girls' feelings of otherness and exclusion, that feeling that maybe there was something special about them, and that's why they never fit in, and that's why they were chosen by their kidnapper.

Book review: The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett

Some love stories are meant to be told over and over again, and Laura Barnett takes that and twists it slightly for her debut novel The Versions of Us.

Eva and Jim meet at Cambridge in 1958 when she swerves on her bike to avoid a dog. That remains the same in each of their lives, but what happens afterwards changes in the three versions of their lives, together and apart, that Barnett tells. Through marriage, divorce, children, affairs, jobs and more, we follow Eva and Jim from that first meeting in 1958 through to the present day - in three different versions.

The Versions of Us is easily described as One Day meets Sliding Doors, but that would be simplifying how intricately plotted and told this novel is. Barnett almost (I have read a very early proof on which there is a tiny bit of work to be done) seamlessly weaves together three stories, connected by major milestones - birthdays, deaths etc - but otherwise completely different. Barnett takes the small things that make a life and uses them to create three rich worlds.

Book review: Summertime by Vanessa Lafaye

The mark of a really good book is how long it stays with you after you've finished reading it.

I first read Vanessa Lafaye's Summertime in March 2014, and when I shut my eyes I can still recall with perfect clarity one of its final, most brutal, upsetting scenes. But more on that in a moment.

Summertime is set in 1935, in a small town in Florida. The town is divided by race, while just outside the borders of the community is a settlement of veterans, heroes from the First World War who have been failed by their country on their return home. As tempers and tensions rise in the hot weather, a hurricane of devastating power approaches, intent on destroying everything in its path.

While the characters of Summertime are fictional, the hurricane it depicts, the racial tensions, and the fact that soldiers back from war were forced to live in prison-like camps, are all very, very real. Yet it's a period in American history that is largely hidden. Summertime exposes that period and its horrendous events - that the soldiers who fought in the war for America were then abandoned, and during this hurricane were left to die. Another mark of a great book is that it makes you want to learn, and Summertime makes you want to go away and learn more about this hurricane, these men, and this world.

Review: Storm by Tim Minchin, with DC Turner and Tracy King

Clever, lyrical and beautiful, Tim Minchin's beat poem Storm has been viewed millions of times on YouTube, and it's finally been turned into a book. So how does it fare?

Pretty well. Okay, that's an understatement. It's fares brilliantly. Minchin's poem about two dinner guests (Michin and the eponymous Storm) in a verbal battle over science and belief is lifted seamlessly from the screen to the page.

It all hinges on Minchin's poem itself, which is rhythmical and flows beautifully. The video of Storm, of course, has Minchin reading aloud, but reading the poem yourself the lyricism is still there. And that moment when Storm is first said works brilliantly - I could hear the thunder crackling and imagine ominous music playing as I read those first few pages and got to that opening.

And then it's backed up by absolutely gorgeous artwork. Storm on the page is slightly darker than Storm on the screen, but it's no less appealing for that. Each panel holds motion within it even though it's a still image, and the words flowing over the top create a movement from picture to picture.

Review: The Storms of War by Kate Williams

If Downton Abbey hasn't lived up to your expectations since the end of season one, then you need to pick up Kate Williams' The Storms of War, which is the novel that Downton would have been if it had more historical insight and research behind it and less of the over-the-top drama.

It is 1914, and Celia de Witt is a privileged 15-year-old living a charmed life with her English mother and German father. But when war breaks out, the family quickly falls apart - her brother Michael heads off to war, her sister Emmeline runs away to London, her father is betrayed by the country he has grown to consider his own, and her mother collapses in on herself. Celia is left to try and fend for and find herself in a world that is disintegrating around her by the minute.

From its brutal opening chapter, which recreates an image of the First World War we've all heard about and which never gets any less heartbreaking, to its surprise, shocking final pages, The Storms of War is a stunning novel recreating a time when Britain was turned upside down.

Williams is a historian and you can tell she knows her stuff, although she cleverly folds her research into the narrative of the book, never once taking the reader out of the story to inform them about a particular historical facet. Williams covers the class system (more on that in a bit), sexuality, women's rights, pacifism and industrial progress in a thorough and thoroughly absorbing way.

The characters within The Storms of War are all sympathetic and interesting, from the below-stairs household staff to the de Witts themselves. Celia is our eyes and ears into the pre-war world, as well as the horrors of France (along with Michael) and the changing face of London. As she travels from place to place, first just visiting her sister in the capital to then driving wounded soldiers to hospitals in France and then back to London and finally to her family's country estate, we see her change and grow.

But while change is afoot in many places in the novel, I found it fascinating that so much of the class system stayed in place during the First World War. Emmeline, who runs away from her family to London, is still snobbish at the thought of anyone of her class having a relationship with someone of the serving class, and even Michael, sweet, dear Michael, automatically snaps back into his role as someone of the upper class when he is afraid or uncertain. It is only Celia who wonders why class matters so much when the world is being destroyed around her, but as a reader, I could see that the class system was something that made sense to people when so many other things didn't.

The Storms of War is billed, on my proof at least, as Downton Abbey meets Atonement, which I thought was a tall order before I read it. I now firmly believe The Storms of War meets its billing, and have high hopes that its sequel will be equally absorbing, and told with the same respect for its time period and for its characters.

•The Storms of War is out on July 3, 2014.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Orion. This did not affect my review.