When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro. The story of a post-war detective who got into his career after the disappearence of his parents. A lot of the story is told in flashbacks, from the antagonist's childhood friend Akira to his return to Singapore to track down his parents. Very readable and more accessible than Remains of the Day, Kazuo's more famous novel.

and other Short Stories and Tall Tales - Groucho Marx. A collection of Groucho's letters and short columns written for industry rags during his long career. The Marx style of humour is rife throughout the book, although it doesn't translate so well into the written word. Worth reading if you're a fan of Marx brothers comedy. Plus there's quite a lot of back history on the brothers' careers.

American Gods - Neil Gaiman. Another borrowed book, this time from Jon. I've been a fan of Gaiman's work on Sandman for a long time and so had been looking forward to this novel. His novel with Terry Pratchett (Good Omens) was a great cross over, with their individual styles complementing each other extremely well. Gaiman's new book extends his particular theological approach from Sandman, although it is in no way directly affiliated to that series - the similarities are hard to miss though. The story is of a jailed criminal, Shadow, who gets out of jail to find himself taking up a job with a shady character called Wednesday who claims to be the god Odin. What follows is a journey round the dark under-psyche of America stopping off to visit various gods of the old world who arrived in the new country in the minds of immigrants. It's all very readable and you learn a lot about various old gods but, at the end of the book, I felt a bit cheated. There was no real meat to get your teeth into and a lot of the ideas are re-hashed, albeit well, from his earlier works. Finished it in a few hours - good holiday read.

The Life of Mahatma Gandhi - Louis Fisher. The story of Mahatma Gandhi, told against the backdrop of developing India seperation from the British empire. I picked this book up randomly one night when I couldn't sleep and started tidying out one of Stephen's cupboards. Gandhi is an amazing character by all accounts and this book describes his core beliefs extremely well. This belief system centres around the need to act on what you believe in, otherwise you obviously don't really believe in it. Pretty simple and it paid off well for Gandhi who throughout his life continued to question everything around him and never get stuck into safe, familiar patterns. The book starts of well and the first half is pretty easy going as Gandhi moves from being a well paid lawyer to fighter for civil rights. The second half becomes a lot harder going, with a lot more detail as to what Gandhi did and a lot of subtlety in who he interacted with. Overall an excellent read and fascinating to see strong self belief in action.