A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby PENGUIN 7

It became a time to jettison past possessions: Hardings Wood, his 16-acre piece o orest had to be disposed o ; his parents' old urniture was heaped on to a bon ire. Nature Cure by Richard Mabey (PIMLICO ?9.99)A ter completing the best-selling lora Britannica, writer Richard Mabey sank into a deep depression: "My past, or lack o it, had caught up with me. I'd been bogged down in the same place too long, trapped by habits and memories... in the end I'd allen ill and run out o words." With the sickness came inancial problems and, a ter spending o er hal a century in the same house in the Chilterns, growing rom a child to a middle-aged man in the same place, he was orced to sell up and lee or the latlands o East Anglia. This is an easy, super icial, banal no el that says ery little about what it means to be ali e. The men are slightly more success ully drawn than the women, which isn't hard. Maureen, a Catholic, thinks open-plan lats are "unhygienic" and re ers to sex as "intercourse" despite immersing hersel in the teenage culture to which her son has no access Jess, being a teenager, says "like" a lot.

("I' e ne er met an American be ore, I don't think," says Maureen.)The characters remain predictable and sa e e en when they are being (relati ely speaking) surprising. So we meet Martin, an "orange- aced" ex-break ast T presenter who lost e erything a ter sleeping with a 15-year-old girl; Jess, a rebellious teenager who hates long words; Maureen, an "old lady" who goes to church but secretly wants to kill her disabled son; and JJ, a ailed rock musician whose whole personality can be summed up in one word: "American". Yes, it's the tired old siege plot where all the drama is wrung out o the implausible contrast between characters who themsel es warrant little more than a sentence o description (and i reducing a plot to a sentence shows a narrati e that usually works, characters who can be thus reduced are ne er more than stereotypes). On New Year's E e, our disparate characters go to the same tower block to kill themsel es and then decide not to and become riends instead It's a good premise, but spoiled by that word "disparate". A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby (PENGUIN ?7.99)A good plot can be summed up in a sentence, or so they say And that is certainly possible with this no el.

rank E ans, this country's only pro essional bull ighter, who used to practice in the park using a supermarket trolley itted with horns, comes rom Sal ord Absolutely wonder ul. In her memoirs, Bridget muses on whether orcing him to integrate with Li erpudlians might ha e made him beha e di erently. Adol Hitler spent the winter o 1912-13 in Li erpool with his aunt Bridget so he could a oid Austrian military ser ice. The title is a quote rom Balzac; the exiled Napoleon III, who in 1840 tried to mount a coup in rance by setting sail or Boulogne in a paddle steamer called the Edinburgh Castle with a tame ulture tethered to the mast (he hoped that it would, rom a distance, look like an imperial eagle), stayed in Southport.