The White Hotel, by D.M. Thomas (Indigo, £5.99 in UK)

The critical success of this novel (it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1981, and has been praised by Salman Rushdie among others) has never quite convinced me of its value as a work of art, and I am not alone in this. It caught with exactitude the taste of the time, which was for the literary-pretentious, for inner monologues, slowed-down narrative, historical retrospect and cloudy depth-psychology. It also brings in Freud, the Holocaust, and intellectualised sex in plenty, with translated passages from Pushkin thrown in. The result still seems to me contrived, unreal and turgid, but there I may belong to a minority.