Truth about Neighbours star Troy Beckwith's death at age 48 as family announce there will be no funeral: 'He fought a tough battle. Set on a farm outside Pretoria, The Promise tells of a white South African family that has failed to keep a promise to the black woman who has worked for them her whole life.

There’s a similar marvel of ventriloquism in Adam Mars-Jones’s Batlava Lake (Fitzcarraldo), a story about war and soldiers delivered by the hopeless, weirdly endearing Barry, which builds to a blindsiding final paragraph. Elizabeth’s shorter accounts are set during her brief stay in a hospital; fully adult, she sees herself as “dying of boredom” and an “old nuisance” on the ward with limited tolerance for other patients. Even so, Clara still takes care of Moses, feeding him and spending time with him, when Liam is away from the house. Liam Kane, newly divorced, newly unemployed, newly arrived in this small northern town, moves into the house next door – a house left to him by an old woman he can barely remember — and within hours gets a visit from the police.Writing is everyday alchemy and fiction writing is maybe more so (though I’m a novelist and guilty of bias). Read alongside Jeremy Farrar’s more personal Spike: The Virus v The People (Profile) and Michael Lewis’s compelling The Premonition (Allen Lane), we see a disturbing common trait emerging in our country and others: the unwillingness to prioritise people’s lives over ideas and ingrained structures.

According to Jasanoff, the books are united by “their power to absorb the reader in an unusual story, and to do so in an artful, distinctive voice”.BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. The books world has long complained about the Booker’s decision to open its doors to American authors. Rose and her parents are not central characters, and the mystery of Rose’s disappearance is not allowed to take over the narrative. These formations are ancient; the Precambrian era is the earliest of the planet's geological eras, encompassing all of the time before the evolutionary development of complex life. Another read that stayed with me this year has been Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s fabulous Thin Places(Canongate).