Mario Menti

Recommended by my daughter who moved to the Lake District earlier this year, I absolutely loved this book. It talks about issues that I believe most of us are more or less aware of, but makes them a lot more tangible and personal.

It's a book in three parts - in the first part, Rebanks talks about his childhood helping out on his grandfather's fell farm in the Lake District, which his grandfather is farming in the old, “traditional” way.

The second part, and perhaps the most powerful one to me, describes the modernisation of farming over the last few decades, with the availability of new technology, pesticides and chemical fertilisers, and the pressure for efficiency and productivity forcing farmers into ever more intensive farming practices in order to survive. Rebanks becomes increasingly disillusioned with this trend, seeing the impact it has both on nature and on the farmers themselves.

The final part is all about Rebanks inheriting his grandfather's farm after his father's death, and trying to farm it in a as-sustainable-as-possible way. This is the most hopeful and almost romantic part, although he is at pains to point out that this type of farming barely pays the bills and he has to work off the farm to make ends meet.

Unless our food system, with its emphasis on cheap prices (especially for meat) and the major supermarkets driving a race to the bottom, is completely changed, then sustainable farming will forever be an unrealistic option for the vast majority of farmers.

I absolutely loved this collection of short stories (her first book written in English). The stories and their settings are incredibly varied - my two favourite stories were one about meeting someone in the cinema, adding them on Facebook, only for them to kill themselves the same day, leading to a rumination on whether you could fall in love with someone simply through their online presence, and the other a tour de force on the politics of succession in Confucian times.

I really liked the first collection of Izumi Suzuki's short stories that came out in English a couple of years ago (Terminal Boredom). Hit Parade of Tears, the second collection, is just as good.

Suzuki, who died in 1986 at the age of just 37, was a pioneer of Japanese “punky” science fiction. Most of these stories are simultaneously quite sad and very funny, and despite being steeped in Seventies Japanese counterculture, somehow still feel very fresh today.

Really enjoyed this - a very twisty, clever crime drama involving a vigilante serial killer, set in Chengdu. I came across it by chance in a charity shop, and as it's the first of a trilogy, I've already bought the second book (not sure the third one has been translated into English yet).

I loved this (I read his later book The Stolen Bicycle first, which made me pick up this one).

It might be one of the saddest, and yet most beautiful books I've read. A mixture of magical realism, environmental concerns, and Taiwanese indigenous culture, it was written over 10 years ago, and the environmental issues it predicts have only gotten worse and more hopeless since. In the end it's down to a small black and white rescue cat to give the main protagonist a reason to keep living, which seems apt.