Baudolino is an itinerant liar with leonine hair, a love of storytelling, a wry sense of humour and a big heart. The story is supposedly narrated by him. It is framed as a conversation between Baudolino and Niketas, which takes place amid the sack of Constantinople in the 13h century.

Baudolino describes his life, from his beginnings as an Italian peasant to his journey to the mythical kingdom of Prester John. Along the way he takes in war between the medieval Italian city-states, adoption by the Emperor Frederick 1, becomes the real author

of the correspondence between Abelard and Heloise, meets blemmys, skiapods and unicorns, and falls in love with a Gnostic nympth. The novel is a funny, absorbing and erudite rampage through medieval history, literature, mythology and theology, as told by a narrator whose word is all the more believable for being known to be unreliable.

What I liked

The erudition, vivid imagination and steady progression from apparent historical fiction into hallucinatory fable. The closer Baudolino gets to the kingdom of Prester John, the stranger the landscape becomes, and the closer we feel to the medieval imagination.

What I didn’t like

My grasp of medieval history isn’t really strong enough to pick up all the references. That’s more of a criticism of me, though.

Why you might read this on the train

It’s not as gripping as The Name Of The Rose, which balanced flawlessly between whodunnit and Eco’s more abstruse theoretical interests. But it’s bursting with life, and well worth it for the Rabelaisian vigour of Eco’s imagination, and humour of his games with text and intertext. Don’t bother with it if you’re hung over, though, as it’s not a fast-paced read and you’ll probably get bored.

This book concludes the series begin with Sabriel and Lirael. There’s another naughty necromancer trying to destroy the world, and various young folks have to join forces to stop them from doing so. It’s set about 20 years after Sabriel, and straight after Lirael, and stars Sabriel’s children and Lirael.

In the process Lirael discovers her true heritage, Sabriel’s son Sameth stops being a wuss, we finally find out what the Disreputable Dog really is and everyone spends a lot of time running away from zombies. It all ends satisfactorily, though not without some losses and a shed load of magic.

What I liked

After the rather drawn-out expository feeling of Lirael, this book gets back to the zippy ‘Oh shit, quick, run, there’s zombies coming’ feeling of Sabriel. The Ancelstierre boy Nick, who doesn’t believe in magic, is convincingly rendered as he struggles to stay in denial about the necromancer arch-baddy whose henchmen are all rotting zombies. There are more plotlines than in either of the preceding books, and the author skips nimbly between them, playing out various individual dramas before bringing everything together for an apocalyptic magical finale. It’s the most accomplished, nuanced and well-balanced book of the trilogy.

What I didn’t like

The quartet of Lirael, Sameth and their familiars start to grate after a bit, and some of the interplay between their familiars feels very laboured. Lirael’s parentage stretches ‘authorial convenience’ way beyond breaking point. The whole ‘who or what are Mogget and the Dog?’ mystery is stale by the time it’s revealed. But on the whole this is an enjoyable book.

Why you might want to read this on the train

You’ve read the other two and want to finish the series.

Teenage Lirael lives in a glacier-topped mountain with a sisterhood of seers called the Clayr. She’s a dark-haired, loneoy misfit in a society of smug, clairvoyant blondes, and gets progressively more miserable as her own clairvoyance stubbornly refuses to surface. So she gets a job in the library (a deeply magical place itself) and begins exploring. In the process she makes her way through a series of slightly Dungeons & Dragons-ish challenges, gains a mysterious magical dog friend, and begins to develop a sense of her own identity.

What I liked

Some decent monsters; a vividly-imagined underground world full of strange surprises and secret rooms; the moment where the Disreputable Dog grows octopus suckers on her paws to cross a wet stone bridge.

What I didn’t like

Of the whole trilogy, this was the book I liked least. It’s enjoyable enough, but for my taste it wasted too much time banging on about how alienated and sulky Lirael feels among the Clayr, and the whole ‘overlooked misfit begins to discover their true powers and heritage’ trope is all very well for YA readers but a bit dull for grownups. It’s also a bit thin on conflict, and overall doesn’t have the sense of urgency and broader emotional scope that gives Sabriel its zippy pace.

Why you might want to read this on the train

You’ve read Sabriel, fancy reading Abhorsen (it’s the best, I reckon) and want to have some idea of what’s going on when you do.

On one side of a kind of occult Berlin Wall is the Old Country, a kingdom run on standard fantasy-fiction feudal lines. In the Old Kingdom, magic works: the kingdom is founded on the Charter, a kind of magical pact that lets adepts use the source code of the universe to make things happen. And mages that don’t adhere to the Charter, but use Free Magic, are bad and naughty and forever raising the dead. So, to protect the world, one wizard is able to use both – the Abhorsen. It’s his or her job to chase zombies back to the land of the dead, stop necromancers from raising more, and generally keep the peace between life and death.

On the other side of the wall lies Ancelstierre. The country feels rather like a version of 1940’s or ’50s Britain, with jolly hockey sticks public schools, primitive cars and telephones with actual operators. Enter teenage Sabriel, daughter of the Abhorsen. She’s been raised in Ancelstierre, doesn’t know that much about the Old Country, but has learned a bit of Abhorsen-ing from her dad while at boarding school. But now dad has disappeared, so she heads off to look for him. In the process she runs away from a lot of zombies, inherits a splendid castle on an island, gets jiggy with a chap who turns out to be the lost member of the royal family, and (naturally) ends up saving the world.

What I liked

It’s pacy and well-written. It’s a kids’ book really, aimed (at a guess) at 12-year-olds; but as the storyline is essentially one long chase scene the story gallops along, with poor Sabriel hounded along by one monster or another from beyond the grave. It’s not a challenging read, but it’s still enjoyable enough, and many of the landscapes and in-world mythology (especially the bells that are used to command the dead) are vividly imagined and stick in the mind.

What I didn’t like

Some of the characters are a bit one-dimensional, and I thought staging the showdown in a school was naff. But I’m not the intended teenage audience, so perhaps that’s unfair. Sometimes I found myself wishing that the moral line between goodies and baddies wasn’t quite so clear-cut, that there was a teeny bit more ambiguity in characters’ motivations.

Why you might want to read this on the train

You’re tired, hung over or overworked, and want an unchallenging but absorbing, pacy and well-imagined fantasy thriller with a happy ending to distract you from the horrifying fact that it’s Monday again.

What happens:

The story is set in the Fourlands, an alter-world with a climate a bit like northern Europe. It is narrated by Comet Jant Shira, a drug-addicted cross between two humanoid races and the only person in his world who can fly. He’s a member of the Castle Circle, an elite group of immortals whose job it is to protect ordinary humans from the depredations of giant, hostile insects that come from who knows where.

Jant’s narrative skips between battlefields, opulent manor houses, the weird landscape left behind by the insects, and a Naked Lunch-esque parallel world called the Shift, accessible only by nearly killing yourself through an overdose. Shira, as the immortals’ messenger, is used by them as go-between for vicious political infighting that eventually erupts into civil war.

The story differs from the bulk of fantasy, in that it’s less about personal heroism or cheesy wish-fulfilment than about politics. None of the heroes are very likeable, and all the immortals are bickering amongst themselves – so much so that the distraction of civil war among themselves nearly brings about total destruction of the Fourlands by those huge ant things.

What I liked:

It’s the strongest work of original fantasy I’ve read since Perdido Street Station.  The characters are credible, complex, savage and flawed. There are no Mary Sues, there is no epic quest for a magic stone, and absolutely no dragons. The battle scenes are grisly, with the gory detail of a Joe Abercrombie if not his computer-games-player-ish relish for spattering blood. It takes a rare depth of observation to create such a distinctive world vision – and then to set a story of group rivalries, lusts and intrigue in it, rather than the more usual prince-who-doesn’t-know-he’s-a-prince, or hidden-talent-that-will-save-the-nation-from-whatever-the-threat-is tropes.

What I didn’t like:

Having said I like the complexity and ambiguity of the characters, Jant Shira does get a bit irritating. And the flip side of such complex and flawed characters is that when one is killed there is little emotional resonance. It’s also tough to get into, as its fantasy world is radically different both from the generic sword-and-sorcery one and also from the real world. The first chapter sets up some important characters in the same breath as throwing us headlong into descriptions of an alien world, triggering a fairly high wtf-factor at least for the first few chapters.

Why it’s a good book to read on the train:

It’s a good book, but for some of the reasons above not the best for the train. I found the wtf-factor a tiny bit high for reading at 7 in the morning. It’s worth perservering, though, because this is one of the most original and inventive authors – in or beyond the fantasy genre – at the moment. I’m looking forward to the rest of her oeuvre.

Emo teenage girl moves from dappy mother in sunny place to rainy town in Washington. She thinks she’s different to everyone else, but everyone at school either wants to be her friend or fancies her. She falls over a lot, thinks pale but gorgeous boy in her class hates her, discovers that he’s actually a vampire and avoiding her because she smells delicious and he wants to bite her. Falls improbably in love with vampire, gets chased by other vampire, gets rescued from other vampire, is disappointed when doesn’t get turned into vampire at school prom.

What I liked:

Not much.

What I didn’t like:

This book reads like fan fiction or an adolescent sexual fantasy, and reminded me of being 13, which I did not appreciate. Vampires shouldn’t sparkle, play baseball, or refrain from biting in weird allegory of conservative abstinence programmes. To add insult to injury, it’s poorly edited, with adjectives and adverbs all over the place that feel like indiscriminate use of Microsoft Thesaurus. Twilight would’ve been better if they’d  dispensed with the first 200 or so pages of emo schoolyard crap in a couple of chapters and got straight to the chasing and biting.

Why you might read this on the train:

You’re a teenage girl.