Sharp blades thrusting, spear blades killing

As Aethelred Lord of Slaughter slaughtered thousands

Swelling the river with blood, sword-fed river

The Burning Land, the fifth in Bernard Cornwell’s series of novels about Alfred the Great’s struggle to defend the kingdom of Wessex against the marauding Danish armies, may not have the poetic cadences of an early English epic except for a few lines like these quoted above.

A discontented middle-aged writer has a passionate affair with an attractive woman he meets at the Venice Art Festival. A discontented middle-aged writer goes to Varanasi to write a travel piece and surrenders to the mystical power of the city.

This précis just about sums up the two stories in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, but like the book itself it opens up far more questions than it answers. Is the main character in the first story in the book the same person as the one in the second story? We think so, but can’t be absolutely sure. And what is the connection between Venice and Varanasi in any case, apart from the fact that their names begin with the letter “v”?

I have to admit I was more than a little skeptical when I saw critics hailing Paolo Bacigalupi as a worthy successor to William Gibson. But it only took a few pages of The Windup Girl for me to forget the old master as I was hurled into a chillingly realistic new world of chronic energy and food shortages, rampant plagues and environmental disasters, and an evil cartel of Midwestern seed companies brutally imposing their biotech IP monopoly throughout the globe.

Add in a small but hardy band of gene rippers fighting to resist this monopoly, a corrupt but independent Thai bureaucracy determined to protect its sovereignty, and a supporting cast of genetically modified elephants and cats, and you have all the elements of a brilliant story.

Writing a second novel is a tough enough challenge, but how do you approach your twentieth one – especially if it is part of the same series?

Do you risk the ire of your readers by revealing an unexpected side of your main characters or do you keep steering them along the same familiar path with only incremental changes to their personalities?

In her first novel, Who Moved My BlackBerry?, the FT’s popular management columnist Lucy Kellaway did a brilliant job of satirizing the absurdities of modern-day corporate life with her hilarious account of Martin Lukes’ frantic attempts to save his family and career. No management cliché is left unturned as Lukes spews out his “learnings” in a raging torrent of emails and messages laced with new age gibberish.

In her latest novel In Office Hours Kellaway delves even deeper into the corporate hothouse, this time exploring the murky world of office affairs. Set in the London HQ of a global oil major called Atlantic Energy, the book recounts the exploits of exploits of two female protagonists at opposite ends of the career pole as they unwisely throw themselves into liaisons with totally unsuitable colleagues.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of writing a great first novel is leaving enough gas in your tank to produce an even better one the second time around if only to meet the increased hype and expectations that inevitably surround it.

Unfortunately, Aravind Adiga isn’t quite up to this task with Between the Assassinations, his follow up to the groundbreaking The White Tiger. Don’t get me wrong: Between the Assassinations is a very good book with some quite beautiful writing as well as some acute and at times acerbic descriptions of the frustrations of life in small-town southern India. But it sorely lacks the brim and brio of the author’s first novel and leaves you horribly deflated at the sheer helplessness of the lives of the characters it depicts.

When I was in India I picked up a copy of William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives, the first travel book he has written in ten years and a welcome return to form.

In Nine Lives, Dalrymple explores the impact that India’s rapid modernization has had on the country’s multi-faceted spiritual life through “a collection of non-fiction short stories,” with each life “intended to act as a keyhole onto the way that each specific religious vocation has been caught and transformed in the vortex of India’s metamorphosis during this rapid period of transition."

How do you compete in a world that is being transformed by Asia, Automation, and Abundance, in which “we are moving from an economy and society built on the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathetic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age”?

This is the question that Daniel Pink tries to address in his book “A Whole New Mind”, and his answer is that we need to develop a “different form of thinking and a new approach to life” that takes advantage of our “high concept” and “high touch” right brain qualities of “inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness, and meaning.

With only the pleasures of CCTV to enjoy in the evening while I was in Beijing last December, I ventured out to a nearby bookstore and picked up a copy of the Chinese classic novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms from its rather limited selection of English language titles, wondering to myself whether I would ever find the time or the energy to read this 1,000+ page doorstopper.

So far, I’ve only read the first volume, but after a rocky start through the first couple of hundred pages I’ve found myself becoming increasingly entranced by this 14^th century account of the turbulent events that took place towards the end of the Han Dynasty when the legendary figures Cao Cao, Sun Ce, and Liu Bei battled it out for supremacy.