Hold the emails, I have some reading to do.

Decisions, decisions.

As the working year comes to a close, I’ve got a stash of books saved for the occasion. Not sure which one I’ll choose first. Here follows a brief summary of the seven distractions vying for my attention – a dazzling predicament indeed.

Love is BlindWilliam Boyd

A young Scottish writer, Brodie Moncur, finds himself in Paris. There’s a love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano. The blurb promises ‘a sweeping tale of love, revenge and music.’ I very much look forward to another book by William Boyd, having recently finished Sweet Caress and recalling a favourite from back in 2002, the wonderful Any Human Heart, a journey through the twentieth century.

The OverstoryRichard Powers

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this was the novel heavily backed to win – pipped at the post by Anna Burns’ Milkman. Nine Americans, their stories interwoven in a multi-narrative ecosystem, are brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe. A paean to the grandeur and wonder of trees. The Overstory explores the essential conflict on this planet: the one between humans and the natural world. This then is an epic novel making a last stand to save our planet. A timely read, then?

The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story Philip Hensher

A collection of short fiction from the last twenty years. V.S. Pritchett, Irvine Welsh, Neil Gaiman, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis and more. Philip Hensher, editor, describes the collection thus: ‘…both raucous and withdrawn, preposterous and precise, hilarious and sumptuous in sentiment, vulgar or correct to the last degree. It was hard not to conclude that British writing is addicted to the extremes.’ This is a book one can dip in and out of between longer format stories. Like a kind of literary sorbet between dishes.

In the Garden of the Fugitives Ceridwen Dovey

Hard not to be seduced, initially, by the beautiful cover – the floral arrangement woven delicately among the typography. ‘A novel of obsession, guilt, and the power of the past to possess the present.’ It’s a story of a revived friendship. Royce, one time benefactor to Vita, contacts her after a gap of some twenty years. The intervening years are shared via parallel narratives that travel through Boston, South Africa, Australia and Pompeii.

November Road Lou Berney

‘A great read, combining brutal action with a moving love story; gorgeous writing, too.’ So says one of the masters of crime writing, Ian Rankin. The assassination of JFK is the backdrop for this crime novel. Frank Guidry, mobster, knows too much about the president’s death, and, meanwhile, dead bodies are turning up around him. He’s worried he might be next and hits the road. We follow him as he travels across 1960’s America with his hunters hot on his trail.

Less Andrew Sean Greer

Winner of the 2108 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which puts him in the company of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. A failed novelist, Arthur Less, is about to turn fifty when he receives an invitation to the wedding of his former lover. He contrives a way to avoid the wedding by instead accepting invitations to a string of literary events around the globe. Hilarious. Playful. Sly. Observant. And a quote from the book: ‘Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.’

Snap Belinda Bauer

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Belinda Baur is twice winner of Crime Novelist of the Year. This is the story of a teenage boy’s hunt for the killer of his pregnant mother. Crime-genre novels don’t tend to be considered for the Man Booker. The judges justified its inclusion, describing it as ‘an acute, stylish, intelligent novel about how we survive trauma.’ Elsewhere, I heard it described as ‘dark, atmospheric and bleak…the darkest of fairytales.’