I'm very much enjoying your reviews of The Holiday (and also the mass-flounce from the R2 book club group), SOL 
.
I'm continuing with my backlog of reviews:
13. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara
Gosh, this broke my heart 
. It’s set in a basti (slum village) where children have been mysteriously disappearing. 9-year old Jai and his friends Pari and Faiz decide to investigate, inspired by the cheesy cop shows that Jai loves to watch on TV. The story is narrated from Jai’s point of view, and we have to read between the lines of his naïve discoveries to work out what is really going on.
The author used to be a journalist in India, and she based this book on some of the real-life cases that she had reported on. This research and real-life experience is reflected in the setting, which really brings to life the bustling but precarious life in the basti: the huge network of honorary aunts and uncles who surround the children, the threats from corrupt policemen and neglect by lazy, self-serving politicians, drunken fathers, domestic violence, mothers working their fingers to the bone to clean the swanky flats owned by “hifi” ladies, girls forced to live constrained and stifling lives, primary-aged children working on tea stalls to get money for their families, the overcrowded school where underpaid teachers struggle to manage 50 children per class, sectarian tensions, the way in which the children’s lives are both unimaginably free (they roam the city at will) but also horribly limited… there’s a lot of noise and confusion and smells and colours and dozens of Hindi and Indian English words thrown in as well! Above all, I got the sense of a country in tension – a city where there are huge extremes of wealth and poverty, and where cutting-edge technology sits uncomfortably side-by-side with superstition and a belief in djinns and magic.
The novel did drag a bit in the middle as it settled into a pattern of child-goes-missing-the-children-investigate-but-the-police-don’t-believe-them. I also found the chirpy and faux-naive narrative a bit unsettling, as it made the book sound more like a children's book than the subject matter would suggest. However, it took a much darker turn near the end, and all of a sudden Jai’s make-believe investigations stopped being fun (I don’t want to say too much about the ending because of spoilers, but it managed to be both harrowing and yet also potentially hopeful). It’s quite an upsetting read as a novel, but Deepa Anappara has done a great job of giving a voice to the invisible people who live in these basti slums (apparently nearly 200 children go missing each day in India ).
14. Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing by Bob Mortimer
I picked this up on Borrowbox – goodness why, as I have never watched the TV programme that it’s based on, nor do I have any interest in fishing. Anyway, it’s a delightful book! The audiobook is narrated by the authors, and their affection for each other is palpable. It starts with their medical stories – Bob Mortimer needed an emergency quadruple heart bypass in 2015 and Paul Whitehouse had a near-fatal colon abscess about 5 years before that – and the two of them compete over who had the biggest health scare, while also managing to discuss more serious topics (what it’s like to be forced to confront your own mortality, the reluctance of middle-aged men to take their health seriously, the feelings of depression and vulnerability that follow a major operation) by stealth. They are both touchingly candid about their experiences, especially Bob, who had sunk very low after his heart op: he cut himself off from friends and colleagues for a year afterwards, and was only persuaded to start “living” again when Paul dragged him on fishing expeditions.
The second part of the book is about these expeditions (which they managed to pitch to BBC2 as a series), and there’s a lot of stuff (some of it surprisingly interesting) about different fish and rivers and tackle, as well as more meditative parts about why fishing is good for the soul (if not the sole 
). I was particularly gripped by the chapter about fly fishing, and about the Victorian craze for making ever more elaborate artificial flies (often from endangered exotic birds) – this culminated with a frankly mad-sounding story about an American flautist who carried out a heist on a Natural History Museum outpost in Tring, stealing $1 million of rare bird specimens to sell to fly-tying obsessives on the “feather underground” because he wanted to buy himself a golden flute, and escaping a custodial sentence because he'd been diagnosed with Asperger's by Borat's cousin. (Everything about that sentence sounds unbelievable but is true!). During their rambling chats, Paul and Bob fall easily into their roles: Paul is the grumpy and more acerbic one, Bob is the loveable fool, Paul (who is clearly an extremely experienced and accomplished angler) is the grizzled elder guiding the neophyte Bob in the ways of fish and fishing.
The book ends with some of Bob’s riverside recipes (which are designed to be both heart-healthy and also achievable on a camping stove); obviously, these didn’t work very well on audio (or appeal to me personally), but it seemed to keep him happy. Anyway, I thought this was a lovely book, which managed to keep me entertained and amused for 5 hours while also smuggling in some more serious points about men’s health, companionship, mortality (and angling).