The jacket cover says "how it took a comedy writer to expose Africa's secret war" and I guess that left me with high expectations. The civil war in Uganda isn't a secret. From my armchair in Cambridge I knew about it, but it's under-reported and Bussmann has an arresting theory that perhaps other people are not prepared to articulate, at least so boldly. She thinks the Ugandan government tips off the terrorist leader of a conscripted child army, hence his miraculous reputation for avoiding capture, ensuring the war continues and so does the flow of money from Western donors. Complacent aid workers come into it too.

But I was expecting the smoking gun, the tapes, or emails, or confessions proving collusion between hunter and hunted, transforming Bussmann from travel hack to investigative journalist and exposing President as a man who sanctions the kidnap, rape and torture of the children of the citizens of the country he governs. I was expecting more at least than the fact a company run by the president's daughter has supplied grain to the agencies running protected villages, that the colonel in charge of hunting down the rebels owns a hotel frequented by aid workers, and the glaring inability of the Ugandan army to protect its children and hunt down its nemesis.

By the end of the book Museveni is still ruling, Kony remains at large, and Bussmann has turned her circumstantial case into a comedy show.

As a comedy, it works, kind of. At times it's Frankie Boyle meets Catch 22 and at times it's like Romancing the Stone, although Michael Douglas is never there when you need him and Kathleen Turner has sweat patches and an infection in her mouth that makes her lisp. Bussmann is totally out of her depth, and puts herself into scary situations, and this can be funny and revealing. The interviews with some of the victims and perpetrators are heartbreaking. It's a sometimes funny, sometimes vulgar, often revealing travelogue, not an exposé.

If I'd bought it expecting to read a travelogue I might have given it 4*, but I judged the book by its cover.

I read A Little History with my eleven year old daughter, taking it in turns at bed time. We've taken an effortless journey down the river of history, a metaphor Gombrich uses, and arrived at its mouth: a final chapter written possibly fifty years after the rest of the book in which he corrects some mistakes, reflects on events since the Great War, makes a plea for tolerance and expresses hope for the future. As I read it my voice wavered with the emotion Gombrich must have felt as he wrote, reinterpreting history he, an Austrian Jew, had lived through.

British readers will be surprised at how little we feature in Gombrich's work, a European history with chapters on other civilizations, especially when they impact on European history. We were, as we are now, bit players in the great events on the continent.

Childhood's End is not a long novel but it's ambitious.

Alien spaceships park themselves over major cities and their leader imposes a benign dictatorship enforcing peace and prosperity. Mankind thrives as subjects of the Overlords, and there's no apparent cost in the form of tax and tribute. There are doubters, who resent their loss of freedom, even if that freedom would leave them worse off, but most people acquiesce readily. The big question is Why? Initially, why won't the aliens show themselves? And once that question is answered, why have they come?

Wanting to know the answers drives the reader towards an awesome conclusion, through some rather pedestrian story telling. It seems heretical to say it of a classic novel, but I found its episodic nature jarring. Three sets of characters are introduced and dispensed with, before their characters are realised. They exist to propel us to the Big Idea. Fortunately it is an idea worthy of capital letters, so we are not let down. But Childhood's end might well have ended anticlimactically.

I found myself vaguely annoyed by the middle part of the story, almost as if it were a barrier to finding out what happened. That's both a testament to the power of Clarke's ideas, and a criticism that he could have made more of the journey.

The novel is bracketed by a foreword that gives too much away (though probably no more than you've read in the reviews here on Amazon), and an afterword by Arthur C Clarke on his changing attitude to the paranormal, which is a major theme.

I was sceptical as I started reading Stardust. A charming young man from a charming village in a charming period of history seeks his fortune. He's propelled from scene to scene in hundred league boots or their equivalent, that magically keep him out of trouble. He's charmed, and, barring the sex and the easy and graceful writing, it felt like a story written by a child with this happening, and then that happening, and then this, but nothing really bad happening to any character you care about...

But a funny thing happened to me as I read. I settled into the rhythm as one magical event followed another, later ones making sense of earlier ones, and I found myself reading the last chapters in a hurry, when I should have been doing other things. Far from being bludgeoned by the procession of events, I couldn't wait for the next one in this world where shooting stars fall to earth and walk, or at least limp, away.

It's a bit lightweight, and while I wished various characters well, or ill, there was no emotional thunderbolt.

Stardust is, however, a satisfying and effortless read that took me to a wondrous, funny, unexpected and yes, charming, place. I'd go back there.

We is a the deranged diary of a man trying to choose between his devotion to a lover, a sharp-toothed revolutionary identified as I-330, and the indoctrination of 'The One State', a far future totalitarian society about to unleash the latest stage in its evolution, the surgical excision of imagination from the brains of its population.

Throughout the diary D-503 lurches one way then the other, accepting his awakening 'soul' and rejecting it, and a major strength of the book as well as a source of confusion is that we don't know which way he will go (or if he will just go mad) right up until the visceral last chapter.

I was going to give it four of five stars because the book is shocking and fabulous and winds up to a tremendous finale, but I also found it hard work at times. I often felt lost, and confused.

Perhaps it's not fair marking it down because it is manic - it is a diary after all and D-503 is suffering a kind of breakdown. But the confusion, and also the abstract description (people and objects are literally described in terms of ovals, ellipses, parabolas and so on which echo the mathematically determined rules of the 'One State') made some of the scenes and developments in the book hard to imagine, and follow.

I'm still puzzling over the role of U, who plays a bizarre but apparently significant cameo in one of the later diary entries.

Having read a book describing humanity robbed of imagination, I now doubt my own imagination is up to the job of getting the most from the story. Maybe that was part of Zamyatin's plan, but it left me yearning for the more accessible Brave New World in which Huxley did a bit more of the work, and gave the reader an easier ride!

I started reading With the Lightnings by established writer of military science fiction David Drake with low expectations, hoping to be surprised. Military science fiction, it seemed likely to me, is the sub-category of the genre most likely to exhibit its worst excesses: boys, their toys, and really dodgy science.

I hoped I was wrong because the friend who recommended David Drake is a skeptic, and unlikely to put up with the worst excesses of anything.

A gradual reconsideration followed. Big vapourising impeller guns aside, the book was more concerned to establish its two heroes, one a heroine with, presumably, breasts and thighs but of an undisclosed size, who plays a full part in the story rather than existing so the hero can save her. It also describes an exotic but not overblown universe.

There's relatively little fighting in With the Lightnings although I found it less convincing, relying too much on dressing up as the other side, faking foreign accents, and trussing the baddies and leaving them somewhere unpleasant.

Early on I lamented the absence of a Big Scientific Idea, a planet lit by so many suns insanity grips humanity whenever night falls or a scientific method of predicting the future, like the big Asimovian ideas that enthralled me when I read science fiction as a teenager.

But as I read on I was caught up in the adventure and something the hard SF I'm more accustomed to sometimes gives little attention: characters and how the extreme circumstances they're in changes them.

With the Lightnings is the story of a librarian and a low-ranking naval officer caught up in a coup d'état on a foreign planet. In different ways, both are disinherited, and have little to lose but plenty to gain by teaming up to overthrow the new regime. Adele, the librarian, is repressed by her past and Leary, the lieutenant, is liberated by his. Amidst all the action she loosens up, and he grows up.

I'd like to know what happens to them, and the good news is With The Lightnings, which I downloaded free and read on my Kindle, is the first book in a series.

Imagine a Y on its side, open end on the left. Or a South African flag. That's the outline of The Go Away Bird, a novel by Warren Fitzgerald.

Two damaged people, one a singing teacher in London who takes a knife to himself and the other a ten year old girl escaping genocide in Rwanda, meet in the middle of the book. As they share their secrets for the first time, they find salvation of sorts and form a new family to replace the one she lost and the one he never really had.

The telling of the story, particularly in London before the two characters meet, is occasionally ponderous; overly laden with details of the teacher Ashley's life. Because it's written in the first person, flitting between thought and action, sometimes it's difficult to tell whether Ashley is talking, or thinking aloud, or somebody else has interrupted him. He frequently interrupts himself!

When the two main characters come together though, the book comes together. The way Clementine fictionalises the most brutal episodes in her flight to London to make them bearable to recall, telling stories within the story, makes the rest of the novel more real. The characters are so appealing, Ashley's mates and Clementine, and who Ashley becomes, and the narrative is so compelling, technicalities don't matter much.

You can see the end coming, but that only increases its emotional impact.

Halfway through the book, I was slightly nervous. But I finished it in one long session, and wished I hadn't.

Roger Deakin's travelogue of Britain's pools, rivers, estuaries, tarns, caves, coves and canals is a work of passion borne of the utmost intimacy of swimming, its lore and its natural history. He crosses the country experiencing our waters, sometimes transcendental, sometimes palliative, and sometimes invigorating, and their hazards, pollution and pike, to name but two.

The most evocative sentence I've read in a long time concludes page 2: "In the night sea at Walberswick I have seen bodies fiery with phosphorescent plankton striking through the neon waves like dragons."

And Deakin continues for 335 pages with the clarity, rhythm and unstoppable grace of a swimmer in clear water, and plenty of humour too. You don't have to be keen on wild swimming to appreciate this book, it describes a completely original view of our country, a frog's eye view.

This book surprised me. It was a Christmas present and its taken this long for me to open it, but I'm very glad I did. I must admit before I read it I thought Ranulph Feinnes was a bit of a nutter. I still do. But there's more to him than that.

I think this book is about love, failure and doing and not thinking! He doesn't talk about his first wife, Ginny, much. He uses far more words describing how he wedged his hands in various crannies, or tried to get the blood flowing back through them once they were frozen. But he speaks so poignantly about her it's touching. More so because he doesn't wallow in sentimentality.

He failed a lot. There's a temptation to think about him as the bloke who trekked on his own to the North Pole or more recently did seven marathons in seven days on seven continents after a heart by-pass, but he failed more than he succeeded, and the matter-of-fact way he deals with failure is as inspirational as the success.

I also found the narrative of the challenges compelling and there are a few heart-stopping moments and very amusing anecdotes. Frankly, I don't know if he's a good adventurer or not, he seems reckless sometimes, and luck often played a part, but he's as hard as they come.

I don't even know if he's a good writer. If you lead a life as full of adventure, love and commitment as his, the books probably write themselves.

Writing a biography is one thing, getting inside Philip K Dick's mind quite another. In this novelisation of the science fiction writer's life the biographical facts are incidental, and reconstructing the amphetamine fuelled thoughts that drove him to write, divorce (four times?), attempt suicide (twice), and invent and inhabit his own fantastic and fear-filled worlds is M. Carrere's objective.

He succeeds brilliantly. It's astounding that in his paranoid delusional state Dick achieved so much, although paradoxically that's what drove him. It's a testament to M. Carrere's skill that his portrait is so lucid. His book could so easily have fallen apart, as Dick did.

If you've seen some of the films (Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly) or read some of the books (The Man in a High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubiq) reading this book will enhance your appreciation of them. You'll suddenly realise what Dick was getting at, where before you'd enjoyed the ride.

It left me wanting a 'proper' biography (which exists, it's by Lawrence Sutin). That's not a criticism, Dick's universe had little room for reality. He discards the bit players in his life when they cease to be relevant. Now I'd like to know about Dick, as they saw him. The 'real' Dick, perhaps.