 | The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Buy new: £3.95 / Used from: £2.49 Swedish crime trilogy opener; a bit slow in places, but builds nicely.
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 | The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Buy new: £3.99 / Used from: £0.16 Modern India, warts and all. Vivid story, patchy writing. More fun than Rushdie, though.
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 | The Einstein Girl by Philip Sington
Buy new: £8.94 / Used from: £2.94 A dark and beautiful novel about love, madness, the frontiers of human knowledge and the coming of the Nazis.
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 | Slumdog Millionaire by Vikas Swarup
Buy new: £4.07 / Used from: £0.01 Excellent premise; disjointed and so-so execution. The film is, all told, rather better - which is rare.
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 | Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Buy new: £4.78 / Used from: £0.45 The American dream, expertly dissected. Has anything really changed (apart from the cocktails and the casual domestic violence)?
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 | Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
Buy new: £3.57 / Used from: £3.12 Not fiction, but well worth checking out: an intelligent and entertaining analysis of how science is so often misunderstood and misreported.
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 | The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff
Buy new: £4.80 / Used from: £0.01 Good subject, good concept, rather plodding execution. Shorter would have been better.
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 | The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
Buy new: £9.48 / Used from: £9.00 An upmarket literary 'Upstairs, Downstairs' - in a good way. But longer than it should be.
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 | The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
Buy new: £3.99 / Used from: £0.01 Promises much, delivers less. An easy reading mystery that won't convince everyone.
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 | Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Buy new: £8.99 / Used from: £8.53 Overlong and occasionally prolix, like much of Mantel's work. That said, a more accessible and readable Booker winner than most.
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 | The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
Buy new: £3.99 / Used from: £0.01 A digestible form of 20th century Irish history, centred on its brief civil war and lasting fall-out.
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 | A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks
Buy new: £9.49 / Used from: £9.01 Slightly heavyhanded social critique of fragmented London society.
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 | The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave
Buy new: £8.48 / Used from: £16.20 Mysonigistic and mostly dull portrait of a salesman and his devoted son.
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 | The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Buy new: £2.99 / Used from: £2.45 Powerful, simple tale of father and son in a post-apocalpytic world. An old subject given a new and very human lease of life.
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 | The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite by Beatrice Colin
Buy new: £4.76 / Used from: £0.05 Inter-war Germany is a fascinating setting, which sheds so much interesting light on our own confused times. That's what makes this book worth reading. The plot? Not so sure.
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 | The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
Buy new: £4.82 / Used from: £0.01 A weird mish-mash of themes make this either a delight or a bore. For me it started as the former and turned into the latter.
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 | Breaking Dawn (Twilight Saga) by Stephenie Meyer
Buy new: £7.49 / Used from: £6.10 Latest in a series (mainly for teens) that started well but has become (as H Potter did after book 3) bloated and prolix.
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 | The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne
Buy new: £4.23 / Used from: £0.88 Children's perspective on the Holocaust. Clever juxtaposition of innocence (theirs) and horrifying knowledge (ours). Quite a good movie too.
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 | A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré
Buy new: £3.99 / Used from: £0.01 Le Carre takes on the terrorists in another of his sideways looks at the less-than-glamorous world of modern espionage.
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 | The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
Buy new: £3.99 / Used from: £0.01 An interesting take on the motives and character of a female concentration camp guard. Believable, if a little slow.
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 | The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Buy new: £4.79 / Used from: £0.01 Loved the childhood in Afghanistan; found the guilt-ridden stuff later on a bit cloying.
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 | The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Buy new: £3.95 / Used from: £0.80 Another odd Holocaust book; this time narrated by Death. Clever, but I didn't finish it.
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 | The Outcast by Sadie Jones
Buy new: £4.93 / Used from: £0.01 The episodic, heavily engineered structure of this book undermines its credibility. I felt manipulated where I should have been moved.
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 | The Miracle at Speedy Motors: No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency 09 by Alexander McCall Smith
Buy new: £4.76 / Used from: £0.45 McCall Smith's gentle mysteries are enjoyable, easy to read, and thoroughly charming. That said, a couple of them is enough.
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 | Lustrum by Robert Harris
Buy new: £9.46 / Used from: £8.98 Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your nineteen quid... permanently. Wait for the paperback is my advice.
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