Red Clydeside, pre and post the First World War, when it looked like revolution was inevitable in the second city of the Empire. The Riot Act was read, tanks and militia were on the streets and leaders were incarcerated. The author, with obvious delight, recounts how the little people fought their own important battles as the well-known icons of the struggle, including John MacLean, John Maxton and Davie Kirkwood, headlined on the main stage.

This is a biography of Mark Oliver Everett, otherwise known as 'E', the sometimes troubled leader of Eels. It is a detailed examination of E's life mainly through his music, but with surprisingly little about his private life. E declined to be interviewed, but allowed his musical associates to be interviewed, so the book affords some fascinating glimpses of this unique artist. Ultimately, however, the book is frustrating because you never really get to fully understand what makes E tick. In the latter section of the book, the detailed exploration of the songs becomes repetitive, perhaps reflecting the slightly diminishing returns of some of the recent albums.

Bob Servant is a living legend in Broughty Ferry. He was coining it in during the Cheeseburger Van explosion of the 1980s and in the 90s had, arguably, the longest window cleaning round this side of Dundee (until his ladders were nicked by gypsies). Now he's staging a one man rear guard action against spam emails. Playing these Russian supermodels with terminally ill grandmothers and African bounty hunters at their own game, Bob tells them he'd really love to wire his money to them. But not until they've jumped through a few hoops first. Hilarity ensues. It really does.

A boy and a Bengal Tiger cross the Pacific Ocean.

The novel follows two characters: a female fitness instructor with a sideline in dispatching men who abuse women; and a male maths teacher struggling to find his voice as an author, who rewrites a compelling but badly written novella by a strange 17 year old girl. Looming over both stories is a secretive cult with its hidden and enigmatic leader. Much of this three volume novel reads like a thriller and the swapping between the two protagonists builds up the tension, but the strangeness of Murakami's world gradually grows with extra moons, comas and sexless pregnancies amongst others. Brilliantly, Murakami makes the illogical logical. Even better, he does not try to explain all the strangeness but leaves unanswered questions for the reader to explore - a fourth volume is a possibility. Thee are 1,000 pages, it feels like a lot less, the pace sweeps you along.

A comprehensive histor of the Second World War. As ever with Hastings, his work is meticulously researched and beautifully written. What makes this work stand out from the crowd is the use of contempraneous letters and diaries from those caught up in the conlict at all levels, which gave this reader some new insights into the grim realities of seven years of all out war.

The astonishing and exhausting life of the Stones engine room. Narrated through a ghost writer you sit and listen in as he gives his version of events. The readers eyebrows arch regularly at the sheer scale of excess and criminality he has engaged in while still functioning as a successful and at liberty musician. It's a draining experience for all involved. The busts, the court appearances, the blood, the firearms, the houses. And all equilibrium in his existence during the '70's depended on needles being available at the next hotel. He is a richly droll, mercurial and affectionate man. But, really, his life sounds like hell to me.

As a huge fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Bargepole approached this novel with trepidation. This was totally misplaced however, as this is a worthy addition to the series. A strange client, a mysterious assailant, a secret society - all wrapped up with a neat twist at the end. Well researched, well written and faithful to the original works. What more can you want!

The man responsible for filling the most dancefloors in the western world also took the most cocaine too and for neither of these does he make any apology. Quite right too. Many autobiographies have been written about fame and excess that are usually contrite at the end like some lesson has been learnt. All Nile knows is that excess has killed off many of his friends and family but he is still standing and he has nothing but thanks for it. A childhood that would have seen most incarcerated or dead by their twenties acted as a catalyst for his success and the drugs and danger that constantly surrounded him from day one seemed to have washed over this eternal optimist. His writing and production credits speak for themselves and he doesn't go into too much detail except to give a bit of insight into pop's more secretive personalities (Wacko, Madge, the Dame). He paints a masterful overview of a life that is all of it was documented would be 10 times as thick and still never dull.

A woman (unusual in Wallace) named Lenore, her family, her job - strange corporate types, receptionists, sales & marketing reps, and R&D people (basically your typical office environment)- religion, politics, sex, the act of writing and critiquing, Wittgenstein, a talking pet bird... How do you describe what ANY book by this man is actually about. And does it matter? It's not about the what; it's about the how.

Fans of Priest’s brilliant books will already be familiar with the Dream Archipelago, the chain of islands in which reality can behave however suits the author. Now Priest has written a gazetteer of those islands, and woven a fiendish set of stories about art and murder within the dry, alphabetical listing of information. For my tastes the information may be a little too dry; at his best CP plays brilliant games with the nature of fiction and the tricks that memory plays with narrators, but the shreds of connecting stories in The Islanders are a bit too diffuse for my taste. Favourite themes of unreliable memory and stage magic make appearances, and the thrymes will haunt my imagination for a long time, but I was left slightly unsatisfied, unsure what thread I had been meant to be pursuing. Newcomers to the Archipelago are advised to start with Priest’s masterpiece The Affirmation.

Weeks after Stan Barstow died, I struggled to find any of his novels - apart from A Kind Of Loving - even in towns near his Wakefield birthplace. I eventually came across A Raging Calm, which is set in 1965 but at first feels like 1865 - women are described as overwrought or firm-bodied and men wouldn't dream of making their own tea. The novel initially revolves around Tom Simpkins who is having an affair with a tenant, Norma Moffatt. But A Raging Calm comes alive with the introduction of Simpkins’s secretary, Andrea Warner - a far more sympathetic character - who is torn apart by her love for married teacher Philip Hart and her guilt for what she is doing. Barstow is excellent at describing the characters’ agonising dilemmas and recording a time when familiar places and attitudes are changing. After a moribund start, the novel hits its stride as the consequences of Simpkins and Andrea’s affairs reverberate.

It's about terrorism, money laundering, russian mobsters, chinese virus writers and MMR video games. It's a sprawling thing, multiple narratives in parallel where each chapter usually jumps you back a few hours to bring you up the fork in the story you just passed. A great read, some challenging stuff, which definitely doesn't pander and always assumes you can keep up. My only quibble would be one or two overly convenient and unlikely coincidences.

London’s lost rivers continue to evoke fascination. This sawn-off paperback, full of small colour photographs and explanatory text, focuses on what can still be seen above ground. The capital’s tertiary waterways have been covered more with human filth than with glory. Paul Talling eschews self-indulgent digressions into psychogeograpahy and presents the fascinating reality with pictures of upended supermarket trolleys and damp brooks funnelled between areas of human habitation. One photograph captioned “The source of the Effra?” depicts a square drain cover embedded in a grassy verge. Elsewhere a shoal of tadpoles are caught ignoring a No Swimming sign submerged in the shallow Moselle, whose waters Talling describes as “unpleasant-smelling green sludge.” Chroniclers of London’s rivers tend to lean heavily on historical documents. Talling has done the legwork and produced a contemporary account of the network of streams that flow unnoticed through the city.

Paul Kimmage is a sports journalist who's first book "Rough Ride" opened up the Tour de France's dark secrets of doping back in the early 90s. He currently writes for the Sunday Times, and it was a result of doing a 2 page spread on Hampson a couple of years ago, that this biography came about. What you get is a warts-and-all view of the person that was Matt Hampson, and the person he has become since a sports injury resulted in him being paralysed from the chin down. You get the support from his team, his family and friends, his carers, and how the establishemnt failed him in his predicament, paricularly the English RFU and the NHS. The title, to me anyway, has a double meaning. From the last word Hampson heard before the injury that crippled him, to his burning desire to create a new life that is a polar opposite to what he had before and mean something. Kimmage has written the book in a series of vignettes that I enjoyed, but some may feel is a little forced.