Nightwalk: A Journey to the Heart of Nature by Chris Yates

Yates has used a simple and effective framework, a walk over one night on the North Downs. Although a well known fisherman and writer on the subject, once a year in summer he gets the urge to walk out under the stars and keep moving throughout the night. This book is a record of a single walk but also reflections on his childhood within nature, encounters both on the night and previously with wildlife and their habitats at night, and the differences in quality between night and day.

I was initially a little irritated with Yates' need to name rather than just be within his environment, but his lyrical prose and evocation of all the things that make me need to be in and around the natural environment had be utterly captivated by the end. To me, this is an important addition to the nature writing genre, many books have been written about walking but this is the first I've read about the unique qualities of our night time environment.

Only Human by Gareth Roberts

A good short read for an afternoon or a great book for kids, this Doctor Who story goes right back to series one and features Rose, Christopher Ecclestone's Doctor and Captain Jack.

We open with a strange diary entry from 7 year old Chantal in the year 438,533. Humans are obviously still around, but language has shifted. Chantal speaks of 'wrong-feelings' and genetically re-engineering her cat.

From this unsettling entry we are hurtled into far more familiar territory, the carnage of people in fancy dress in a present day nightclub, a brawl begun over one bloke looking at another's girlfriend the wrong way and the thug who bites off more than he can chew when he picks a fight with a caveman. Except this one really is a caveman, well, a Neanderthal to be precise, a long long way from his own time.

Cue the TARDIS, and Rose, the Doctor and Jack just about to go on holiday to Kegron Pluva when a flashing warning light indicates a temporal disturbance and, as usual, the holiday is derailed for high adventure in 2005AD and 29,185BC involving Neanderthals, Homo Sapiens, humans from the 437th century and some lethal genetic engineering. The very best of Doctor Who, excellent witty characterisation and great imagination.

Walker's idea is very interesting, but the execution less so. Julia is an ordinary Californian teenager, waking up with her friend Hanna from a sleepover to another sunny morning. But everything has changed, the spin of the earth is slowing. Hanna's Mormon family leave for Utah to receive guidance from their leaders and when she returns their friendship has shattered apart. Julia's loneliness and her longing for the boy next door, Seth, is set against a landscape of unfolding horrors. The days continue to lengthen, becoming lethally hot, the night temperatures dipping to below freezing. The magnetosphere falters and fails, unleashing radiation onto the Earth's surface, and flora and fauna begin to die.

This would have been excellent as an epic, but it feels slight and not worked out.  Walker's use of an ordinary teenage life with the horrors of high school, adolescene and the tensions of tensions within her own family and divided loyalties is a refreshing angle. It was a brilliant idea but so disappointing in the end, I wanted to know more!

I freely admit, when it comes to a book I like closure, real life isn't like that so I like books to be like that. 

12 year old Adam Ryan is found standing in a clearing with his shoes full of blood. The police have been searching for him and his friends Peter and Jamie, they are never found. Adam has no memory of what happened to him or his companions.

Twenty years on Adam is now known as Rob and heading up a murder investigation. An archaeological dig is taking place on the site of the woods his friends disappeared in. A little girl's body has been found on a ritualistic stone table, her name is Katy and she was a star ballerina about to go to the Royal School of Ballet. As Rob and his DI partner Cassie investigate their progress is slow and difficult, but there is clearly something wrong at the heart of Katy's family. Rob's life begins to unravel in the presence of the place where so much unknown horror unfolded in his own life and the tension is ratcheted up and up.

I understood the reasons for Rob's constant reflections along the lines of 'this is how it all went wrong' but it irritated me, as did the lack of resolutions. I like neat ends in books, so sue me!