OwnedLibrarian Male, 44, It's complicated. Birmingham, United Kingdom

Honestly folks, I am not big on self-help books, and despite all my reading around the Beats, Beatniks, Bohemians and other alternative cultures of the last two centuries, I am not that easily able to swallow the direct message of tuning in, turning on and dropping out; I observe this as history, but I generally don't participate.

Tolle has something though. If you get this book and you find it initially woolly, touchy-feely, obscure, superficial or trite - well, you may soon realize it's your ego trying its best to spit out the medicine it is being forced to imbibe.

Tolle will soon be landing rabbit punches to your ego, delivering them in velvet gloves. Your ego will probably not get up after the count but your essential self will happily throw in the towel as far as our idiotically dog-eat-dog world is concerned, step out of the arena we have forced ourselves to maul in, and go and do something much, much more enlightened instead.

I am new to Angus Wilson so I am feeling my way here. I almost stopped reading this book several times but something about it kept me going - it always felt at the very least like a genuine writers' novel, something that would excite fellow authors on account of its structure, language, deployment of characters, and so forth. I stuck with it, and am very glad I did.

The first two thirds of the work are a labyrinthine exploration of the office and wider politics of the running of the London Zoo; these delicate power relationships are played out against the incipient backdrop of yet another European war, and are translated for the reader by the central figure, Simon Carter, a standard middle-class figure whose guiding beacons of conduct are duty and responsibility amid the egotistical demands of those who head the Zoo's leadership, all ambitious men, who want to make a final mark on the Zoo at the tail-end of their careers.

Without going into spoiler territory, there are several aspects of this book which repay its full reading: the archness and circuitousness of Carter's evaluations of his superiors' personal and professional motives, and the careful portrayal of his beleaguered position - all of which conveys very well how the English of this class operate still; the sense of dutiful pity towards the non-classee social groups that Carter encounters, that softly shines through even the most macabre set-pieces, and the finale, the starkly horrendous, creeping usurping of power by a native quasi-fascist movement under the guise and aegis of a European invasion of the UK, as the anticipated war eventually breaks out.

But there's a lot of waiting for some of these finer elements; for the reader, it's a bit like being Carter, who poses also as a naturalist keen on British fauna, waiting patiently to spot his beloved badgers - keeping still and quiet by the sett: against the twilight susuration of background foliage emerges the still startling figure of the piebald beast.

This book is about the relationship between a female German and a male Jewish person, and their respective sense of how their family history and present character have been shaped by a sense of persecution: the male figure, on account of the Holocaust, the female since her mother and father were part of the largest - so it is claimed - movement of refugees in Europe, the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War.

This does not sound like a very engaging theme for a novel but this short work is on balance deceptively simple. On the one hand, the style (at least as translated here) is sparse, almost terse. The female protagonist feels just slightly fidgety as she enters middle-age, and does not seem to have the passion to overcome the mid-life crisis that is slowly enveloping a life that has been lived in ordinariness and banal orderliness. Everything changes however when she finds a bunch of letters written by someone who knew her mother, and who describes the fate of German women who were rounded up and set aside for reparations to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War.

It would be easy, very easy, for any author to handle this subject matter badly; the Holocaust is a naturaly highly sensitive matter but the expulsion of ethnic Germans even more so, since it has not readily been spoken of in Germany, and there has not been the working through of the issues, unlike the Holocaust, despite the very large numbers of Germans who can reach back into a simlar personal history; mostly such groups as seek justice for the expellees are sidelined politically, and as a result, largely pick up support from the right-wing, since very few people in the mainstream of German politics and society feel that it is a subject that can be treated neutrally.

But Zeller, in what is on one level the love story from the perspective of a plain German singleton, manages to encompass in a very unassuming, gentle way, the whole question of German cultural particularity, the topic of the incalculable human tragedy of the Holocaust, as well as portray the looming, hulking myth of 'The East' in the German mind.

At its heart, it is a plea, to my mind, to find value in Germany, and its subtle high culture, as well as an example by which Germans should learn to truly live with their responsibility, and accept themselves as a nation, not as one humbled, but with humility.

I am not really qualified yet to estimate the impact of his environment on the writing but Wyndham is expert at a detached, outwardly balanced prose that belies nearly always a growing intimation that things have slipped, and run awry; blind fate and human interventions in time and mind blend together as factors outstripping the ordinary mortal's ability to make sense of change and experience; on the surface perfect reflections of social respectability and convention people the stories that are, all the same, impelled by the physics of chaos and randomness.

Brian Aldiss I think it was who categorized this, and similar works, as 'cozy catastrophes' but there is nothing to my mind that is safe about this story. It's not just about the man-eating plants, or the panic one can easily imagine in any case if blindness came swiftly in a world that had begun to disintegrate, but the small spare descriptions of easy, random, futile death, as individuals fail to cope with their dramatically altered circumstances, and the easy callousness toward each other that Wyndham imagines in his fellow human beings were they faced with such disruption to what appears to be a surface civilization are bare and profound jolts, regardless of the collective causes of human terror portrayed.

As with 'Consider Her Ways', there is disorientation and an abiding angst from the outset, and, with the narrator never really sure that mankind deserved any better or showing that there is a wholesale wish to return to the certainties of former times, there is almost a feeling that the perfunctory sacrifice of so much human life is not even so much propitiatory as necessary, and that for the psychological relief simply of one man, Bill Masen, who had by the beginning of the story found that he already has no human ties.

This is not so much schlock-horror as pure-blooded existential blackness. Here is no Gothic capering, no heroic or romantic tragedy; it's a multi-car crash - no reason, and no rhyme.

The fierceness of this book beats down on me like the tropical sun that illuminates the life of the characters within it, and the emotional tenor feels like a hot sweat the memory of which is still salty sharp despite the coming of evening coolness as I weigh up its themes.

Stefan Zweig once wrote about the dangers of pity, and this novel by Greene is in reality almost a paean to that sensibility, to a love of failure, and how we are caught up in ideas of duty and steadfastness, and how betrayed we are by our weakness and guilt.

The novel starts off strongly, and is a regular page-turner but it does feel hollow at the end, inconsequential, just as consequences bite, and the main character, Scobie, comes to his own reckoning of things - with a writer of Greene's calibre, however, this feels to be a deliberate effect, rather than the story's losing strength. On the other hand, there is a journey ever inwards, from behaviour, to psyche, to soul, and the last monologues are abundantly theological.

The work is peppered with glorious one-liners, startlingly succinct phrases that hazard whole philosophies in a single sentence, lines that seem so right that you sit up and shake your head.

There's also something here for the non- native English speaker in terms of how Empire might have felt, and by extension how multiculturalism is still perhaps underpinned in modern British society by a certain history and sense of experienced mission on the part of the political class, which still haunts Whitehall.

I was really looking forward to this, having enjoyed Hamilton's return to form with Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained. Although some of it is enjoyable, the book is by turns turgid (I started to skip Inigo's dreams after the first two - such a long-winded meander up to any dramatic tension), puerile (the constant references to sex and relevant anatomical parts are very adolescent - Hamilton seems to look forward to some gilded future age where there will be no bodily consequences of any sort of hedonism, be this from booze, drugs or enhanced sexual experience - it's hardly the height of philosophical speculation as to where technology might lead us), and violent (the actions scenes are well done though: Hamilton should consider a career as a screen-writer).

Some of the new technology is interesting but it feels more and more that Hamilton is copying and pasting stuff from Scientific American or the New Scientist. The only interesting thing to come out of his pondering on this is the idea of Multiples, humans with single minds but many bodies.

In short, Hamilton has landed himself a fine contract to turn out another set of 'blockbusters', and good luck to the man: however, the verbiage is overpowering, there are too many characters (quite a few of them rehashed from the books previously mentioned), and the speculation thin.

This isn't space opera; it's space soap opera.