In between the celebrations, here’s a last chance to catch up with some of the fiction of 2005:

Broken Verses
By Kamila Shamsie

This can really be read as the third instalment of Shamsie’s Karachi series. It is set in a modern, 21st century Karachi that is bursting with state-of-the-art TV channels, but its subject matter is a few years older: the legacy of the Zia years. At so many points the novel appears a bit too pat, but taken together it is compellingly haunting.

Never Let Me Go
By Kazuo Ishiguro

It finally did not get the Booker Prize, but Ishiguro’s chilling take on human cloning asks that eternal question: what does it mean to be alive?

Saturday
By Ian McEwan

A Mrs Dalloway-ish take on a day in the life of a successful, happily married London neurosurgeon. That day, with a family reunion planned for the evening, is echoing with anti-war protests in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. That day will demand answers on how to build empathetic bonds within families, within societies, and across cultures.

Brooklyn Follies
By Paul Auster

Where does one rush off today, in this busy, connected world, for refuge and forgetting? Auster, in an uncommonly tender novel, takes his escapist characters to the heart of Brooklyn.

Tokyo Cancelled
By Rana Dasgupta

Travellers huddle together in an airport lounge and find new meaning in that eternal survival skill, storytelling.