THE BOOKCASE

Anna Hope

An asylum on the Yorkshire Moors in the first decades of the 20th century is the setting for Anna Hope's magnificent second novel, The Ballroom, the follow-up to her impressive debut of last year, Wake. Segregation, discipline and restraint are the order of the day for residents at Sharston Asylum. In the women's building, newcomer Ella has to adjust to the strict confinement of daily life as she dreams of escape. But there are only three ways out: sanity, escape or death. Across the way, the men fare only slightly better, allowed outside to dig graves or work the land. But for John, it's a respite from his past.

Only on Fridays do the two halves meet for a dance in the institution's ballroom. Hope has proven once again that she is a luminary in historical fiction. Writing history from the margins, the personal stories behind the era, she delivers profound, poignant narratives that stir the emotions. Taut from the outset, Hope's narrative conjures the desperation and tension within the asylum as well as drawing three complicated and nuanced characters and weaving them together in a compelling and masterful way.

The Forgetting Time

Sharon Guskin

Ever since he could speak, Janie's son, Noah, has been asking for his other mother. Now four, Noah's imaginative leaps have become progressively worse. After the latest psychologist offers a discomforting diagnosis, Janie seeks out alternative help. Dr Jerome Anderson walked away from a prestigious university medical residency to turn his attentions to the phenomenon of reincarnation. Now fighting primary progressive aphasia, he decides to take up the baton for his life's work once more. Time is against him though, as is finding a relevant case study, until Janie gets in touch. Finding the truth about Noah's past could be both Anderson and Janie's salvation, but it does not come without pitfalls. Sharon Guskin's debut is an incredible Russian doll of a novel, beginning as a seemingly ordinary story of maternal struggle, it soon unfurls into a fascinating tour of reincarnation, a compelling murder mystery, and an examination of the familial bond. Like Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, at its core it really is just superb fiction.

When Breath Becomes Air

Paul Kalanithi

The line between life and death has never been explored quite so personally as in Paul Kalanithi's wrenching memoir. Its opening casts the shadow: Paul and wife Sue, clutching one another on a hospital bed following his diagnosis with terminal lung cancer at 36. In lucid prose, Paul explains his shift from English degree to neurosurgery - a conscious search for life's meaning, an irony not lost on him - and subsequent lessons learned either side of the doctor/patient divide. The life of a junior neurosurgeon is gripping and relentless: Paul struggles with the pastoral more than the procedural, gradually accepting his primary role of helping patients and families to acknowledge their circumstances; to face their own shadows. When his illness catches up with him, Paul explores his condition and altered self-definition with impossible grace - is he a doctor? husband? - probing until the last. The final pages, from Paul and then Sue, are moving, humble, and impossible to ignore.