The best novelists are generalists and omnivores, whose books consume lives, histories, worlds by the sphereful. Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (recently longlisted for the Booker Prize) casts a wide enough shadow across the colonial world and its people to genuinely impress.

Jack Pendarvis has a talent for titles. On the two separate occasions of coming across The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure (Macadam/Cage 2005) and now Your Body Is Changing (Macadam/Cage 2007), an insatiable urge to purchase and possess his books filled me, an unalloyed consumerist desire I haven’t felt since watching GI Joe cartoons in the mid 1980s.