Van Gogh's Bad Cafe by Frederic Tuten (Granta; #5.99)

Here is prose with presence and pzzazz to be gulped down greedily in a New Year oner. Frederic Tuten has been a mentor to - among others - Oscar Hijelos and Walter Mosley and, if he teaches like he writes, then lucky old them. Of his previous books, Tintin In The New World made the biggest splash. The Susan Sontags and the Jonathan Coes queue up to praise him. And so they jolly well should. He can fairly heft a sentence and his paragraphs swing in a very American way without any jazzy self-indulgence. Unlike some gifted stylists, he uses his imagination, too. We are in 1890 and Van Gogh's girlfriend, Ursula, a morphine-addicted photographer, is time-tripping to Manhattan's lower east side, a century later on. Their relationship begins at St Remy, where Van Gogh is undergoing psychiatric treatment and painting the Olive Groves and Alpilles of Provence. Thus the novel moves back and forth across

time, evoking crack-and-crime-ravaged alphabet city with the same panache as Tuten applies to Southern France. He has produced a marvellous psychology study of a popular icon about whom it might have been suspected there was little more imaginatively to say. Gaugin is there; and so is Hart Carne. Van Gogh does not simply get the star treatment he is posthumously used to. This Vincent only pretends to like other lesser artists out of envy. A great book about the end of two centuries, in two different but parallel milieux. And a great book about the creation of art and the posterity that protects or neglects it.

The Maias by Eca de Queiros (Penguin; #8.99)

I lit upon this satisfying novel only because of a passing, almost touristic, interest in Portugal. And what a pleasure it has been to see how Zola and, to a lesser degree, Dickens and Tolstoy, influenced this underrated novel, first published in 1888, as a tale of decline and degeneration through three generations of a prominent land-owning family. Political intrigue, mercantile rivalry, unwitting incest; Eca de Queiros plots a racy, if not pacy, saga. Always somewhat in thrall to Paris where he lived for many years, dying there in 1900, the Portuguese writer and was greatly indebted to Flaubert and the other French proponents of naturalist realism. Eight years in the writing, some of The Maias was germinated in Newcastle, where the well-born, well-educated and well-travelled de Queiros was consul between 1874 and 1878. Although he spent most of his life overseas, Portugal was always his

source and subject. There's nothing in the least provincial about his Lisbon. A moralist's seriousness of purpose and an ironist's sardonic plea underpin the intricacies of this dark and intricate narrative. Clearly an important nineteenth-century figure, Eca de Queiros would be better known had he written in English, French or Russian. One of the brightest and best of an extraordinary European generation, De Queiros deserves to be better known. Fans of Hugo and Balzac will get 1999 off to a splendid start if they curl up with Nigel Griffins's compelling translation of The Maias.

Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky by Patrick Hamilton (Vintage; #7.99)

''My boy, if ever it comes to war between England and Scotland, you and I will cross the border.'' This was Bernhard Hamilton, Patrick Hamilton's father, alighting drunk at Euston Station with yet another compensatory romantic fantasy for the little son he emotionally abused. ''A comedian equipped with a monocle, but no sense of humour'', as Michael Holroyd called him, he left his mark on the troubled, heavy-drinking, self-doubting author of Hangover Square, Rope and Gaslight. The three books which go under the title Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky, written fast in his 20s and published independently of each other, are heart-wrenchingly autobiographical and gruesomely graphic. Hamilton sr wrote awful historical novels and envied his son his deeper gifts. In The Midnight Bell, Hamilton provides a scarcely fictionalised account of his rebellious relationship with a West End prostitute.

The Siege of Pleasure ''follows a fallen woman'' down every seamy inch of the way down to the horrors of the streets. The first is Bob's book, the second Jenny's. Just before completing the middle volume in the trilogy, Hamilton was knocked down and severely injured, undergoing painful operations and plastic surgery. He had, ironically, found success with his plays and had married contentedly if not passionately after his infatuation with ''Lily'' and his drinking was under control. Descriptions of his injuries found their way into the Siege of Pleasure. The Plains of Cement, Ella's book, tells the story of the barmaid from the previous two books whose struggle upwards is never likely to succeed. Hamilton puts one in mind of J B Priestley who admired him. The Bohemian life of Fitzrovia was seldom better captured. I know of few writers who conjure so bleakly with the pains and pleasures of

drink. Happy New Year.