Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

My first Wodehouse, but certainly not my last. It’s pretty much what I thought it would be, only much better. Where has he been all my life? Wodehouse’s writing style was clearly a major influence on Terry Pratchett, but it’s one of those rare occasions when you can accuse one author of being similar to another, while meaning nothing but praise for both of them. Fantastic stuff.

The narrative centres on 29-year-old Robert Forester who has recently moved to a small town in Pennsylvania to escape his former partner, Nickie, a woman who continues to give him a hard time on the phone, out of what seems sheer malice. Battling loneliness and depression, he has picked up the odd habit of watching an unknown young woman as she goes about her life at home. He isn’t a conventional Peeping Tom, there is nothing sexual about his behaviour, rather the tranquility he gets from her daily routine.

But rather like a Simenon romans durs, which I was often reminded of, we know Highsmith, and despite Forester’s apparent innocence, there is bleakness here, and it isn’t long until the story becomes much darker. Again like Simenon, there is that enthralling sense of destruction and despair as the story edges closer to its denouement. It’s a wonderful piece of dark and twisted fiction.

My, this is an angry novel, which portrays the injustices and humiliations heaped upon black Americans in the pre-civil rights era, wrapped up in a love story that is carried on in the worst imaginable circumstances. The writing is superb, the plot and characters all too believable, and the polemical style and frequently obscene language are wholly justified by the social context. Shocking and highly recommended.

I had read these all at once when home from college on Christmas break back in 1973, so my memory of the story pretty much runs together in my mind, but I am pleasantly surprised at how much I remember. The thing that stands out in my reread is the rich atmosphere created by the slow, ponderous pace of the storytelling  – blatantly out of step with my 21st-century sensibility. But Mervyn Peake sure does know how to tell a story – an old-fashioned master craftsman at work.

The novel demonstrates how women suffered during 20th-century Russia. It is taking a while, but each time I pick the book up, I am back with characters in whom I am deeply invested. What a writer Ms Haratischvili is ... There was an article a while back about toxic masculinity in literature, as if there were no grey. Well here you’ve got it black, white, grey, both sexes and you’ve got the context of time (Siberia, purges, mass exterminations, neighbour reporting neighbour) and yet the humanity is what stands out. Human beings striving to survive. But I’m preaching. The stories are connected, and it is like joining old friends when I pick up the book. And I love that.

This beautiful little book, with its horrible origins, is an inspiring addition to the shelf of prison literature.

I am delighted. It’s a tale about Oslo emerging from the constraints of the second world war. I have bought the book in print form for I wish to savour it slowly, armed with my magnifying glass, which has a built-in light, to help. I read the first pages and there was a description of Frogner Park with its regiment of statues gleaming white … We spent time there last year, wandering among those cool figures, marvelling at the feel of them and gazing at their sightless eyes looking into the distance. I loved Oslo. Recently I read a phrase something like, “Is this all I am, can I not transform myself into something else? I am limited only by myself.” Something like that. Could I transform myself into a citizen of that wonderful city? Maybe not, but I may lose myself in the book.