THE DUD AVOCADO gained instant cult status on first publication and remains a timeless portrait of a woman hellbent on living. It is, as the GUARDIAN observes, ‘one of the best novels about growing up fast’. Sally Jay Gorce is a woman with a mission. It’s the 1950s, she’s young, and she’s in Paris. Having dyed her hair pink, she wears evening dresses in the daytime and vows to go native in a way not even the natives can manage. Embarking on an educational programme that includes an affair with a married man (which fizzles out when she realises he’s single and wants to marry her); nights in cabarets and jazz clubs in the company of assorted “citizens of the world” an entanglement with a charming psychopath; and a bit part in a film financed by a famous matador. But an education like this doesn’t come cheap. Will our heroine be forced back to the States to fulfill her destiny as a librarian, or can she keep up her whirlwind Parisian existence?

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The definitive cult, post-modern novel – a shocking blend of violence, transgression and eroticism. When Ballard, our narrator, smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, his sense of sexual possibilities in the world around him becomes detached. As he begins an affair with the dead man’s wife, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Then he encounters Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, who has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of auto-erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash – a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant and iconic celebrity. First published in 1973 Crash remains one of the most shocking novels of the second half of the twentieth century and was made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg. Ballard,s autobiography Miracles of Life was published in 2008 and Extreme Metaphors, a collection of interviews with the author, is due out in 2012.

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George Hall doesn’t understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. ‘The secret of contentment George felt lay in ignoring many things completely.’ Some things in life however cannot be ignored. At fifty-seven George is settling down to a comfortable retirement building a shed in his garden reading historical novels listening to a bit of light jazz. Then Katie his tempestuous daughter announces that she is getting remarried to Ray. Her family is not pleased – as her brother Jamie observes Ray has ‘strangler’s hands’. Katie can’t decide if she loves Ray or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband’s former colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover Tony to the dreaded nuptials. Unnoticed in the uproar George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip and quietly begins to lose his mind.The way these damaged people fall apart – and come together – as a family is the true subject of Mark Haddon’s disturbing yet very funny portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.

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For 15-year-old Michael Berg a chance meeting with an older woman leads to far more than he ever imagined. The woman in question is Hanna and before long they embark on a passionate clandestine love affair which leaves Michael both euphoric and confused. For Hanna is not all she seems. Years later as a law student observing a trial in Germany Michael is shocked to realize that the person in the dock is Hanna. The woman he had loved is a criminal. Much about her behaviour during the trial does not make sense. But then suddenly and terribly it does – Hanna is not only obliged to answer for a horrible crime she is also desperately concealing an even deeper secret. ‘A tender horrifying novel that shows blazingly well how the Holocaust should be dealt with in fiction. A thriller a love story and a deeply moving examination of a German conscience’ INDEPENDENT SATURDAY MAGAZINE

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