Finished Jamrach's Menagerie. She very cleverly draws on our island/seafaring fantasies to scour out what is meant by character. The last section of the novel is patchier and less robustly worked than the first two sections: did she get tired? or is it something about the endgame of a novel that makes it always somehow troubling? It's a novel full of men, her female charactes are so scantily drawn as to be almost lacking in credibility, but this is more than compensated for by her main male characters. On the whole I loved it. Had it been on last year's list i think I would have wanted it to win - I certainly vastly preferred it to The Finkler Question, which I considered a very mealymouthed, self aggrandising novel.

And so on to the next in line...