Tremain is always interesting about male homosexual behaviour.So this is an adventure story, full of the detail of colonial settlement, the paraphernalia of gold-quest, of natural wonders like a flash flood, and of memorable animals Yet, like many good novels, the main concerns are spiritual. For all its vividly researched backdrop, this is essentially a book about egotism, discontent and our longing for the marvellous. It shows how happiness and misery change into their opposites; how both imagination and love – notably, happy sexual love – alter what they touch as much as gold ever can.Harriet Blackstone is an engaging heroine. Resourceful, tough, wise, she wants to go beyond the bounds of the known, and has the brave curiosity and simple luck to encounter much that she seeks.

Joseph – her limited, selfish husband – is son to a Norfolk livestock auctioneer who died bizarrely. He emigrated after marriage to escape responsibility for a crime and, when his farm fails, seeks gold. Those with gold fever must be secretive, lest others discover and exhaust what they hope to plunder. But Joseph, in not trusting his own wife, fails to measure what she is made of, and ceases to deserve his good luck in finding her.One pleasure in reading Tremain is her freedom from know-all pessimism: the least of her characters is pleasure-loving, with a feeling for the poetry of things. Even Joseph’s crotchety mother wonders how the socially privileged effortlessly make us feel their superiority – “like a perfectly executed card-trick”. Those she favours have generous imaginings or daring visions.

She lends them her tender, quizzical sensibility, a romantic (in the best sense) feeling for seeing the world anew.Tremain is prodigal, inviting us into the shape-shifting world of a prescient Maori servant-girl. She loves a courageous English child who also welcomes what is different and surprising. Dying, he longs to reveal to his prosperous mother that “there was no end to what was possible in the world”.Henry James mocked traditional novel-endings that distributed “prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs and cheerful remarks”. Tremain’s endings are neither cheerful nor conventional, but rather abound, like good tragedy, in an extraordinary admixture of grief and joy This novel is no exception. It is a fabulous work, bravely imaginative, deeply moving, surprising, invigorating and satisfying.Peter J Conradi’s life of Iris Murdoch is published by HarperCollins. According to the press release, Andrew Wheatcroft spent 17 years researching Infidels The author himself suggests a more modest 10 years Either way, expectations are raised.

Wheatcroft is a capable historian – conscientious, with well-culled sources, and eschewing simple conclusions. I have benefited from his studies of the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, and he has twice collaborated with that doyen of military historians, John Keegan. Was this to be his defining opus?

According to the press release, Andrew Wheatcroft spent 17 years researching Infidels The author himself suggests a more modest 10 years Either way, expectations are raised. Was this to be his defining opus?
The field Wheatcroft has chosen is as rich as it is pressing. At odd moments during his odyssey, he seeks to secure his intellectual foundations by invoking such disparate figures as Jacques Lacan and Ivan Pavlov. But the heavyweight who means most to Wheatcroft is the critic Mikhail Bakhtin.