Anna and her father have moved from London to the southern seaside town of Winter. A quaint and old-fashioned community replete with salty seadogs, meddling mums, picturesque harbour, wobbling sea defences and an ancient castle. Anna not only has to struggle with settling in at a new school far away from her friends, but within days of arrival she has accidentally discovered her latent powers and enchanted the school heartthrob, Seth.

Her chaotic, sometimes accidental, spell weaving draws the attention of the friendly local coven and the more sinister witching authorities who have spies everywhere. The scene is swiftly set for a tumultuous struggle between the different witch factions that will bring chaos to Winter and test Anna's love for Seth.

A Witch in Winter is one of those YA (young adult) books that are seen by many to be the saviour of the publishing industry. As observers will know, magic, vampires and the like are the crucial elements of these books in a post-Twilight world. And whilst Warburton's book has witches and magic galore, it is also intelligent enough to examine the nature of love and attraction in a perfectly sophisticated way for a YA book. Let us not disillusion the poor lambs before we have to.

Warburton's skill as a storyteller is where she excels and here she also transcends genre. I hope she'll write something for grown ups in due course. With panache and relative economy, she reveals the town and people of Winter, and presents a 3D community and a plausible arena, with sympathetic warriors for and against, ready for the violent denouement.

The near total lack of any modern technology did strike me as odd. A Witch in Winter has a delightfully gothic-lite vibe about it and bar a text message or two, some phone usage and a throw away comment about Google, the book is entirely technology free. I wonder if younger readers might reject that or even embrace it? I don't know. But the absence of Facebook and the like felt incongruous. For this crumbling reader it felt like a lost opportunity to further explore witchcraft and the manifold legends of Winter further.

But I quibble. This is an accomplished book, fizzing with plot and promise. I do care about Anna Winterson and worry about Seth. If a storyteller should be graded on anything it's whether they spark curiosity in the reader about what happens next. And I'm not just curious, but anxious and expectant. Bring on A Witch in Love!

Disclosure: Ruth Warburton has been a friend of mine since went to school together in Lewes.. which bears a striking resemblance to Winter in the book, now I think of it...

At first the title irked. It felt like a glib Richmal Crompton reference, promising a jolly jape guide to Boris Johnson and all those larks people seem to love him for, whilst offering nothing solid. How wrong. Just Boris is a very clever title for a book offering reams of evidence and which doesn't shy away from the boot and putting it in. And yet, despite Sonia Purnell's considerable craft and skill, she admits herself as author that Boris remains strangely out of reach.

Just Boris. He's usually called just Boris. No surname. It's just Boris: a usual shrug forgiving his latest gaffe or infidelity. Just Boris: he's a bit of a loner, without a political gang or indeed ally outside his family. Or, perhaps most damning from Sonia Purnell, just Boris may be the man's political philosophy. His political career is just for him. He does apparently harbour the ambition, indeed the destiny, that just Boris will be primus inter pares.

The simple fact is that Boris Johnson simply isn't who he seems. He ruffles his hair before the camera rolls or shuts. His first name is Alexander, and his family and wife call him Al. The chimera Boris emerged at Eton and was honed at Oxford. He is hardly that posh or aristocratic, his family are neither devastatingly rich by any Etonian standard and he is also not necessarily as clever as many people assume, despite the constant classical references. His particular skill seems to be provocation.

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was born in New York, had a peripatetic childhood and his parents divorced when they lived in Belgium. His mother is American, there is a strong Turkish vibe in his lineage and his wife is half Indian. His father claims to be “dogged” by good luck. The question that Purnell keeps asking is right: Who the hell is this man and what does he want?

The books swings elegantly through his time with the Times (he got sacked for faking a quote), the Telegraph (where he was famed for tardiness) and through to his tenure as editor of the Spectator.

His time as an MP for Henley and campaign for the Mayoralty are examined forensically. In fact, maybe too much. This is a big book. His affairs and misbehaviours are manifold and major. But yet Boris just bounces back again and again and became the most powerful Conservative in Britain, for a while.

The most damning criticism is levelled at Mayor Boris. That he just really isn't very good at the job ought to stick. His achievements are sparse. And yet it seems likely he will be re-elected, whilst still harbouring none too secret ambitions to lead the Tories and be PM.

Just Boris is an addictive book that stirs nothing but disquiet. How has he slipped through the net? He gets away with everything and seems to suffer little scrutiny. There is no “just” about Boris.

Who is Charlie Conti?

So he sets out to find it, only to gradually realise that his own naivety, isolation and wealth make him the perfect victim for identity theft.

Von Bohlen maintains an engaging pace, with a keenly crafted plot and a slow reveal, by drawing together vignettes from Conti's past to help us understand how he comes to be penniless in a Nevada diner waiting for an FBI agent. There is genuine tenderness and insight into Conti, even if we don't every really understand him. Ray Celador, the conman, is richly drawn, plausible and likeable.

The road trip aspects of the novel draw unabashedly from, and with direct reference to, Jack Kerouac's On the Road. But it's impossible not to draw comparisons with Catcher in the Rye and also, less directly, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And why not? The great American novel is a rich seam to mine. Conti is an outsider, bemused by the US, and the reader is encouraged to look at the American dream anew.

The book does have some flaws. The narrator's preppy, Holden Caulfieldesque voice slips here and there and von Bohlen's own english peeks through. The portraits of american landscapes and cities, coast too closely to caricature sometimes, even if they are richly drawn. The takes on LA, Mexico, the big country outside Vegas and New Orleans are enjoyable but lack grit. The book's about the descent from privilege to nobody, and yet there is sense that Charlie Conti may actually enjoy this rather too much.

The backcover calls Who is Charlie Conti? a “thriller with a literary twist.” A bit more thrill (a bit more) would have been welcome. It's gripping as is, but more bangs, perhaps even a denouement with the enigmatic Ray Celador, would have made the tale more compelling. But that is a quibble: there are twists and chicanes, and the ending is unexpected. It's tantalising that the book's title question does, essentially, remain unanswered.

Who is Charlie Conti? is a gripping read and perfect for the holidays (especially if you find yourself on the sands of the Mexican Gulf) and I'm looking forward already to reading von Bohlen's next novel: To Greet the Sun.

Disclaimer: Claus is a friend from school. So close in fact, that I haven't seen him since. :O)

One thing I find immensely frustrating about being an author is the almost complete lack of numbers that are available to the curious writer. I'm a bit of a metrics bore but I only get a sales update twice a year from my publishers. On a piece of paper. How unlike the digital world I inhabit!

So what's in the book? It's everything that's in paper edition of Make Serious Money on eBay UK:

• Get started as an eBay buyer. Don't get ripped off. Grab some bargains.
• Start selling. Learn the ropes of selling on eBay. Feedback and crafting a perfect listing explained.
• Ramp up your sales. Start an eBay business. Open an eBay Shop.
• Branch out from eBay, and sell on Amazon and other marketplaces.
• Build and market your own ecommerce website.

One thing, I think, that marks my book out from the many eBay handbooks out there is the no-nonsense approach. I don't hold much with hyperbole and I do recognise that building an eBay business is quite tricky and takes a lot of hard work. There are plenty of asides, case studies and few funnies. Natch.

I haven't spoken to anyone who has read my book on a Kindle, and I haven't seen it myself either. I imagine these things are much of a muchness. But if you have any feedback or suggestions on how Make Serious Money on eBay UK looks on a Kindle, drop me a line.

Needless to say, the book and the download are available on Amazon. :O)

Instinct, Ben Kay. Insects. Bloody big insects and bloody thousands of them. I grabbed this in December because I’d met the author at a party and promised to read it. It’s a thriller textbook that had me gripped for several days. American military scientists have developed genetically engineered insects to deal with the Taleban and other threats. It all goes wrong and our reluctant heroine, a British entomologist, is called in to sort the mess out and it’s grim. So many delicious and disgusting details and twists leave you (on occasion) recoiling in horror. This book is the product of a seriously sick mind and that Ben Kay seemed like such a nice man over champagne and canapés. And the ending is left open for a sequel…

The Dig, John Preston.This is a charming bit of fiction that really shouldn’t work. As the Second World War looms, the legendary Sutton Hoo archaeological dig commences. It’s delightful to be a reader knowing exactly what they will find and yet reading of the uncertainty of the protagonists as they excavate the mounds and scrape away the soil of one of Britain’s most significant historical sites. The clever device of telling the story from several different points of view brings the book alive. It’s so beautifully written, so gently told, that I challenge anyone not to adore it. It should be a film. And it would be better than The King’s Speech. The most tantalising aspect of the book are several loose ends untidily left hanging. Rather like archaeology, many questions are left unanswered.

The Adventure of English, Melvyn Bragg. In another life, I would have been a linguist. My response, when anyone asks me why I haven’t mastered a foreign language is, not entirely joking, that I haven’t finished learning English yet. I love the nature and history of language and this book is a surprisingly detailed (although not an academic text) survey of the English language. I rattled through it quickly and it left me hungry to know more. Bragg is right to treat the story of English as an adventure and he maintains a good pace in a subject that could easily be claggy. My only criticism would be the sometimes overly personal asides he makes and it is perhaps a little bit too long. But nonetheless, this is a highly readable survey and I can’t suggest a better alternative primer.

Brighton Rock, Graham Greene. As a sort of prep for seeing the new film, I thought I’d dust off the original classic. It’s just brilliant. Not only is Brighton captured in such detail but we get a genuine sense of being here in her raffish thirties heyday. There isn’t much plot in a lot of ways but the characters are so rich and the suspense palpable.

Greene’s prose is surprisingly sparing, almost impressionistic at times. As Pinkie teeters at the edge of the cliff, about to fall to his doom, Greene doesn’t describe it in detail but he packs so much into a few paragraphs. I don’t want to call it bleak, because Ida Arnold is a shining beacon of hope, but it is dark. A classic Greene study into the nature of good and evil.

Goodbye to all that, Robert Graves. I’m appalled that I hadn’t read this book properly before. I’ve used chunks of it as evidence in various history studies over the years (including my degree) but never read the whole work. It’s a personal memoir of the impact that the First World War had on Graves and the world he grew up in and which was subsequently swept away. It suffers from stilted, noticeably old-fashioned prose at times but it’s an illuminating survey. His account of life in the trenches just reinforces the view that the war was utterly futile chaos. Graves does a good job, in particular, of drawing out the distance between the home and western fronts as well as highlighting the hypocrisy of the top brass and the politicians back home. Graves is sanguine but the war evidently scarred him. That’s worthy of remembrance in itself, especially because that generation has now left us.

That said, I did read The Communist Manifesto and Bagehot’s The English Constitution (to see what he said about hung parliaments) in spare moments between knocking on doors and writing leaflets and letters.(For the record, he doesn’t really say anything of note not least because the party system wasn’t rigid when he was writing.)

I want to blog about some the books I enjoyed, as an aide memoire more than anything else. And I do love a thriller, so I’ll start there. Graham Greene would more accurately call these ‘entertainments’ and I’ll adopt that as a preferable and less pejorative term. In part, I enjoy a rollicking romp of a read but I’m also doing some research. Yes, I’m writing a potboiler in my (copious, ahem) spare time. Proper books soon.

Nevil Shute, On the Beach Roll back five decades, civilisation in the northern hemisphere is destroyed by a nuclear holocaust. In Melbourne, Australia a sort of life continues with the knowledge that the toxic fallout is on its way and inevitable some time soon. It’s a sort of kitchen sink nuclear drama that follows a small cast towards death. Surprisingly, there’s not much on the morality or the ethics of nuclear weapons, and almost no geo-political context. But it’s compelling nonetheless if a little starchy at times. Shute is an intriguing writer because he is the first real Australian novelist. This is one of his classic works.

Peter James, Dead Simple A murder thriller set in Sussex and the first of James’s Detective Superintendent Roy Grace books. People have been raving about them for years but I have never picked one up. The deeply disturbed and macabre plot is delicious and James is good at spinning clever characters with sparse pen portraits of his cast. Funnily, the least interesting thing about this book is the local (for me) setting. He keeps a very sinister and twisty plot alive over the course of the book so well. To other writers, just one of his various plot strands would be enough but here he gives us so much action and I just love that. I’ll read some more soon, I hope.

Edward Rutherfurd, London I was travelling on trains a lot at the start of the year and they kept getting delayed by snow. So I picked up the biggest tome I could lay my hands on at Smith’s at Brighton station. This epic tale of family lives entwined over three millennia is a beautiful piece of historical fiction. Wry, profound and amusing, it’s a very readable bit of history. Rutherford does something clever by tracing family traits over the centuries and that works so well. It’s massive work of fiction that constantly informs and entertains.

Kyril Bonfiglioli, The Mortdecai Trilogy This volume has languished on my bookshelves for 15 years unread. I can’t believe I didn’t pick it up before because I loved it. Charlie Mortdecai is a disreputable London art dealer and the book follows his scrapes, with his delightfully violent butler Jock, through the world of London’s criminal underground, international espionage and a lot of food and drink. It’s funny as hell, unabashedly snobbish and written with such baroque delight in arcane language that I needed the dictionary to hand. The swirling anecdotes are such a thrill to swim with. If you like Wodehouse and James Bond, this will not disappoint you. It’s just a shame there isn’t more.

The only book in that I really couldn’t bear or finish was a terrible mystery Egyptian thriller called Sphinx by T.S. Learner. It is so florid and over-written, so slow moving and so utterly unimportant that I’m astonished it made it past the slush pile. I didn’t make it much past page 30.

In 1809 a night at theatre was the nightly pursuit of Londoners of every class and the stars of the day were the great actor John Kemble and his sister Sarah Siddons. Kemble was not just the talent, he was the impresario. Imagine that Simon Cowell could act: that’s Kemble. So, when Covent Garden theatre burnt down, not only did he lose his stage but he lost everything. And he didn’t have insurance. He was ruined.

Kemble did manage to rebuild the theatre, but the debts he incurred meant that the ticket prices had to go up. The theatregoers of London didn’t much care that they had the finest theatre in the world for their entertainment but they certainly begrudged that Kemble was pocketing an extra sixpence for their pleasure. For 66 consecutive nights they rioted and disturbed every performance.

Kemble’s Riot tells the story of the riots, and encourages you to join in too. But who wins? The people? Or profit?

The play speaks to the bankers and the bailouts and the nature of protest. It’s a really interesting new bit of theatre and the cast is great too. George Dillon plays Kemble. I saw a run through yesterday and it’s very, very good. Bag a ticket. It’s going to be a Fringe corker.

It's such a shame that it has a spray can squiggle on it. Not least because such artlessness seems totally at odds with Beardley's own work.

There used to be a rule about bands. If you liked them you’d say ‘I’ll buy the album’. I used to say that last century. Now it’s ratcheted down to ‘I’ll check them out on ‘MySpace’’. Even worse, now it’s: ‘meh, maybe spotify’.

Ocean Rooms! First venue. The Hoodlums from Southend gave lively fun. It’s always great to see a proper double bass on stage. Cursive were also amusing enough as we waited for thecocknbullkid and that’s who we were there for. The singer knows what’s she’s doing. Great frock and charisma. Channelling Aretha, she gives it lalldy***. But her band need to realise that loud isn’t best. Those three boys drowned out their diva in a tiny venue that needed a bit more subtlety. Thecocknbullkid isn’t just a bad name for this potential popular sensation, it’s a misconceived idea. The girl wins it. The chaps on guitar and drums shouldn’t look so bored. She’s way better than them. Ditch ‘em sistah and I’ll more than Spotify.

And so next to Komedia, and the Rumble Strips. These guys are an engaging six-piece. There’s a bit too much middle-of-the-road Kaiser Chiefs/Franz Ferdinand-ness for my taste. Not least because they do chirpy rock with a bit of Madness better. They’re clearly technically very good: when they harmonise vocally and chuck in a few crazy chords and stuff. Wow. The singer really gives it all live. On some songs you get a pair of keyboards and on others there’s trumpet and sax goodness. But what is totally remarkable about the sound? Alas, not much. Fellas: we agreed at the Waggon & Horses afterwards that you’re cleverer and better than what you do now. Break free. Competent but unrevolutionary.

I didn’t actually see Blue Roses at The Basement. I was there. I heard them from a corridor: prissy, pedantic staff didn’t much add to the ambiance. I reckon they’re probably quite good. But when a bottle of beer costs £3 and you’ve already had two before not being allowed in to the room where the music happens enthusiasm wanes. If I’m generous, I’ll blame that as the curse of The Great Escape.

Back to the Ocean Rooms. I’m listening to the Filthy Dukes**** on Spotify as I write this piece. It’s good stuff (if you need a Spotify invite I have some left). But what they do isn’t much enhanced by live performance. Apart from seeing two long haired chaps drinky drinky twiddling knobs, they may have just played their CD. They’re pretty good. They’re possibly very good maybe. I’m just not sure what the two great lumps of wood were for (they clunked them every now and again presumably to get a sample) but how much entertainment can you get from knob-twiddling?

I haven’t bought any records. Yet.

*So far I’m only professing personally to 2/3.
** The ‘un’ thing is an homage to the idea of an ‘un-conference’.
*** A Glaswegian term from way back, I believe. Lalldy: sang with real spirit and strength.
**** Update, Friday morning. On reflection, the chaps we saw may not have been the Filthy Dukes. Not sure who they were frankly and I spose it doesn't much matter. But it further reinforces my reputation as Britain's worst music reviewer.

I'm a little ashamed to admit that I've never read anything by the brilliant Terry Pratchett. I confessed to Sue Bailey some months ago that I just didn't know where to start.

She suggested these four volumes as a sound introduction:

Guards, Guards
Men at Arms
Feet of Clay
Jingo

On another tack someone else has suggested I might like the writing of Philip Kerr. Specifically, the Berlin Noir Trilogy starting with March Violets. Also, The One from the Other.

Other suggestions:

P.D. James, The Murder Room.

Anything else?