Sandra Howard

Reviewers coming to this book, the second volume of Roddy Doyle’s The Last Roundup trilogy without having read the first, must be a frustration for the author. I had a struggle connecting with Doyle’s character, Henry Smart. The first volume might have endeared him to me and set him in context — it followed his hard hit-man life in his Irish homeland, his troubles with Republican paymasters — but a second volume should cater for newcomers. Pick up any random volume of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time and you care about the characters right away. It is 1924. Henry has taken flight and gone west to seek a new life and identity.

The Voyage Home is the third book I’ve read about Africa recently. Like the others it captures and distills the unique texture and smell of Africa, the touching sense of being a decade or two out of time. Both The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith, so wonderfully tender and funny, and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller — civil-war-torn Rhodesia seen through the eyes of the author’s childhood self — brilliantly evoked early chapters of my own life in that part of the world. I haven’t lived in Nigeria but I was still transported back five decades by Jane Rogers’s new novel — one more than the period she is writing about for part of the story.

Walter Moers has cleverly built a fantastical tale around 21 drawings from the work of the famous 19th-century illustrator, Gustave Doré. The woodcuts reproduced in the book are of gryphons and monsters, naked damsels and dragons and the faces of the moon; Moers has plenty to go on. He spellbinds and spooks it all up into a well-knitted super-scary flight of fancy that should appeal to sophisticated and naive children alike. Moers’ young hero is Doré himself as a 12-year-old child. We meet him when he is rather incredibly captaining a ship which is at threat from perilous twin storms, the spiralling Siamese Twins Tornado.