UK Book Club discussion

My seemingless endless TBR needs a 3rd A-Z for clearance purposes, so I've adopted Sue's idea of a main character A-Z.

Amir in The Kite Runner
Bridget in Bridget Jones's Diary
Christopher in When We Were Orphans
Daniel in Follow You Home
Estella in Song at Dawn: 1150 in Provence
Horza in Consider Phlebas
Jordan in The Black Parade
Kana in Star Guard
Louise in When Will There Be Good News?
Morse in Last Bus to Woodstock
Poirot in Hercule Poirot's Christmas
Q in Q
Rachel in The Girl on the Train
Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird
Tumara in Children of the Sun
Verloc in The Secret Agent
Werner in All the Light We Cannot See
Ye Wenjie in The Three-Body Problem

Possible future reads
Finn McCool in Finn McCool Rises
Gareth and Gwen The Good Knight
Isandor in Fire & Ice
Nefertiti in House of Rejoicing
O
U
Xavier in St. Griswold College for Abandoned Boys
Zirkos in The Pattern Ship

Welcome!

H is for Horza
Horza is the main character who holds together Iain M Banks' rather disjointed science fiction novel Consider Phlebas. He is a mercenary from a dying humanoid species known as Changers, who can alter their appearance into a perfect replica of another humanoid. This skill earns them hatred and Horza is one of many Changers who fight for the non-humanoid Idirans in their war with the humanoid utopian civilization known as The Culture. Ironically the Culture go on to become the main topic rather than being the enemy in what was Banks' main series which lasted for 25 years and involved ten novels.

Full review https://merciamcmahon.com/considerphl...

S is for Scout Finch
Scout Finch is the 6-8 year old protagonist of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird which is often lauded as a civil rights novel, but instead depicts a young girl raised a racist. A re-read after the publication of the intended novel Go Set a Watchman makes this a difficult book to read. It is not an anti-racist novel, although the original novel was. It is a very white southern American story about being a tomboy in a middle class family that expects you to be a lady in waiting. The key morality tale is not about an African American accused of rape, but about how Scout should treat the young white recluse who lives in her street and who is the subject of local tall tales.
Full review https://merciamcmahon.com/tokillamock...

W is for Werner Pfennig
Werner is an orphan is a German mining town who is talent spotted as a wizard in radio repair and sent off to a specialist Nazi school. He ends up as a radio operator in Saint Malo on the eve of the American destruction of that city. Most of the novel is about how that scene set up in the opening novel came about in terms of both him and the novel's co-protagonist (and real hero) Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind teenage resident of Saint Malo. The novel is spoilt by what amounts to a rape apology scene, although it involves neither main character and added nothing to the narrative flow (not that that is any excuse for such scenes).
Full review https://merciamcmahon.com/allthelight...

If you're stuck for a main character beginning with X, Mercia, Hide in Time (time travel romance) has one - Xandra. It's reduced to 99p until Wednesday.

Declaration - it's my book. Hide in Time

I just thought your 'character' list was so different that I was enticed to read your post!

R is for Rachel Watson
Rachel is the eponymous Girl on the Train in a wonderful thriller. Ignore the hype comparing this to Gone Girl or Rear Window the story has nothing to do with either. The story is set in a small village to the north of London, intially via a train window, but then in the village itself. Rachel is a mentally troubled and alcoholic dependant woman whose fantasies of an idyllic couple she sees each day from the train are smashed when the woman disappears and suspicion is cast on the man. Rachel knows that she was in the village that night, but due to being drunk and her memory problems she does not remember anything that could help the police.
Full review https://merciamcmahon.com/girlonthetrain

C is for Christopher Banks
Kazuo Ishiguro writes a parody of a upper class British detective novel starring and narrated by Christopher Banks. He grew up in Shanghai, but was moved to England when his parents were both kidnapped in quick succession. The key point of the novel is that after becoming a celebrated detective he returns to Shanghai to solve his parents' case, but that only occurs in the closing chapters. This is a languid novel that feels like an attempt to parody both the detective genre and the British in Asia. Banks spends most of the novel as a diffident uninspiring person (who is apparently a great detective) and in the closing section is revealed as an arrogant Westerner with dubious attitudes about the Asians he grew up among.
Full review: https://merciamcmahon.com/whenwewereo...

A is for Amir
Amir is the main character of Khlaed Hosseini's The Kite Runner which explores the prejudices and violence of Afghanistan's history in recent decades through the lens of Amir's regrets about letting down a childhood friend Hassan and having the opportunity to return from exile in California and set matters to rest. I feel that it does this much less effectively than the better written follow-up novel A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Full review https://merciamcmahon.com/kiterunner

D is for Daniel
Daniel Sullivan is a London-based app designer on a backpacking trip with his girlfriend Laura, who get thrown off a train in rural Transylvania for losing their tickets and then get spooked out by a house in the woods and the odd behaviour of the local police. They return to London and the action slows down a lot, but then picks up to become a decent novel with multiple twists and turns. For those who persevere though the sagging middle Daniel's story is a worthwhile read.

J is for Jordan
Jordan is a former waitress who is a seer (she can see ghosts and things) who gets involved in a conflict between angels and demons. Too much mouthy protagonist and Biblical referencing for my liking. I suspect you need to be really into young female protagonist paranormal urban fantasy to enjoy this. Obviously I'm not in that category.

T is for Tumara
Tumara is a Polynesian seafarer who keeps getting captured and forced to take part in most of the major maritime battles and discoveries by Europeans from the Spanish visit his island (probably Niu in Tuvalu) through to the early years of the East India Company in the Spice Islands (Indonesia). A somewhat unlikely tale, but better than historical fiction that just adds some dialogue to established historical fact.

Y is for Ye Wenjie
I posted Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem to the Award Winner genre challenge and then forgot to post it here despite buying the book to get Y for this character challenge. Ye Wenjie is a scientist who sees her father killed in the early cultural revolution. The story shifts closer to our time and to another character before returning to her. I cannot say more as that would be a bit of a spoiler. The book won the 2014 Hugo for Best Novel, but is often weighed down by too much scientific detail, although it is ultimately very traditional science fiction.

B is for Bridget Jones
A bit of a movie tie-in and a friend tie-in too. I know the actors who played Mr Fitzherbet in the first movie and Darcy's mum in the second and third movies. This novel is more obviously Jane Austen fan fic than the movie, so after finished the Bridget trilogy I might go for E is for Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. Which will be a good excuse to watch the Colin Firth TV version again.

K is for Kana Karr
The first science fiction book I ever read was Andre Norton's The Last Planet, which led to me reading every book of her's in the library, so there is a fair chance that I read Star Guard previously at the age of about 7 as Last Planet is the sequel to it. In is set in the distance future but modeled on the Roman Empire. The empire is called Central Control and they treat humans as the Romans treated the Germanic nations as (pre) cannon fodder.

Kana Karr is a Malay descended trainee sent on his first mission as a Terran mercenary for Central Control. His first assignment goes awry. It is a boy's own type adventure, because in those days women like Norton weren't allowed to write grown up science fiction.

Just noticed that I've reached the halfway point. K may not be quite the middle of the alphabet, but it is the 13th of 26 letters for me.

P is for Poirot
Agatha Christie's paen to refugee labour Hercule Poirot has little to do with the first half of the novel in which he appears in the title: Hercule Poirot's Christmas. It is not one of the Queen of Crime's most regal products. In fact it reads like a play that she decided to do as a novel instead. I much preferred the script for the David Suchet TV version.
This was however the closing book of my 2016 Goodreads Challenge where I managed to read 100 books. It was a bit of a push at the end. I'm definitely setting a target of 50 in 2017.

M is for Morse
I adored the Morse TV detective series but the only novel I ever read was the last one The Remorseful Day. I've chosen to read the first in the series Last Bus to Woodstock, which appeared in the second TV series. This has a personal interest for me as a friend starred as one of the suspects, although her role was very different in the TV series from Dexter's novel. The book has several weaknesses that make it read very much like a first novel. But I'm very glad it made it to the TV screen and I much prefer what the producer made of Morse than Dexter's depiction in this disappointing first novel.

V is for Verloc
The TV adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent fascinated me because I live 15 minutes walk from Greenwich Park, where a terrorist incident takes place. The novel never visits Greenwich, but takes place almost entirely in Verloc's Soho shop and his flat above the shop. I think that Conrad is much overrated and similarly this book about espionage and anarchist violence does not deserve its praise. Unlike some of his other novels this was a short one and could have been improved by developing the ideas more fully.

L is for Louise
Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe is the main character in When Will There Be Good News? despite is being the third in Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series. Brodie is a background character in what reads like Atkinson trying to keep both her genre and literary fans happy. The end result is a bit of a mess, but YMMV.

E is for Estella
Song at dawn by Jean Gill is a well written action romance set in Narbonne (now part of France). Those who liked the historical sections of Kate Mosse's Labyrinth will find plenty of resonances here as the action takes place shortly before the Cathar Crusade depicted in the latter novel. Estella de Matin is a pseudonym adopted by a talented singer when she is found in a ditch by a queen's entourage. The name is taken from the song she sings: Song at Dawn.

Q is for Q
Q is the titular character rather than the main character for Evan Mandery'sQ. The unnamed narrator falls in love with Q, but his life goes awry when someone claiming to be him at age 60 (post invention of consumer time travel) convinces him to break up with Q. For much of the novel Q does not appear, but she is always there as a regret. The novel is written in a Woody Allen Jewish New Yorker voice, but like later Allen movies it only succeeds occasionally in being funny in his sendup of the complexities of time travel and love.