Lesley McDowall

GILBERT Johnson, an Edinburgh man, is in British Columbia, or “New Caledonia” as he prefers to call it. He is a history-loving bookseller researching the story of his father and of his possible grandfather, James Lyle, who once lived in the region, but learns instead that what we think we own isn’t “ours” at all; that one man’s “story” is actually another woman’s “(his)tory”; and that origins aren’t necessarily as obscure as postmodernism would have us believe.

YOU tend to forget how long Lesley Glaister has been writing:

JOURNALIST Maggie Ritchie has delved into her own childhood background growing up in Zambia and produced the kind of historical romance that may prove to be this year’s perfect summer read, with a deliciously provocative mix of exotic locations, sexual scandal and the end of colonialism. The latter theme still mesmerises British audiences, and Ritchie doesn’t pull her punches on the part Scotland played in the Empire’s role in Africa. Add in a touch of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between and the novel’s mood of innocence destroyed — both of a country and of a woman — is sealed.