Bones of the Hills by Conn Iggulden

HarperCollins €16
AVID fans of Conn Iggulden's work will love this. I wasn't that gone on it, to tell the gods' honest truth.
Genghis Khan, having galloped through two enormous books and across Asia and Europe already, is now taking on the Arabs and Persians and Afghanis.
He hasn't a lot of time for his most talented son, Jochi - partly because he's convinced that Jochi is not his but the child of rape.
Chief fomenter of this rumour is Jochi's pettish brother Chagetai, who's determined to cut Jochi out of the succession.
Iggulden uses this conflict as a loose structure to hold together some wonderful set-pieces on the real battles fought by the Mongols in their advance westwards.
He switches viewpoints frenetically - from Genghis to his wives Borte and Chakahai, his sons and generals and the judo champion who teaches the Mongols to wrestle.
The battles are described with the kind of immediacy that would make you suspect that Iggulden has a time machine stashed in his writing room.
He hasn't stuck to the legend - his Genghis is a black-haired Mongol, not the green-eyed redhead of the old stories - but he's stuck close to the records of conquest and cruelty.
For those who loved the first two of the Conqueror series, the third will complete the tale.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Paul Torday
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson €??)


FISHY stories are one thing, but this weird and wonderful first novel is a shaggy dog story too.

Quiet grey fisheries scientist Fred Jones is ordered to co-operate in a plan to bring salmon to the Yemen - to send the pride of the north Atlantic lepping up the wadis on the spring spate.

Naturally he says no. And in a trice, there he is, on the Scottish moors fishing with a saintly sheik and preparing to make a strange scientific breakthrough.

Torday's first book is an odd mixture: tender-hearted accounts of true love, acid satires of the British civil service, al-Qa'ida, big business, modern marriage and newspaper reporting.

It's really funny. Sometimes Torday parodies the style of small but rather self-important papers. A Scottish local paper reports that "the alleged would-be murderer was restrained... with a size 8 Ally Shrimp treble hook on a 15-pound line" and his captor "took less than five minutes to play him".

There are warming descriptions of character. Dr Jones's wife is a grasping woman with no pity except for herself. A colleague is engaged, to a nice boy just like dad, and their love, their considerate distance, is like a draught of clear water.

This is a book you can't put down easily. Torday has an easy command of the gripping twists that play readers through the streams of a story, and at the same time he's a master of character.

It's a roman a clef in a way - British politicians are snickeringly identifiable here. But it's more than that.

It has its faults - the ending is fairly obvious from two-thirds of the way in - but it's a tour de force even with those faults.