Mr Norris Changes Trains: Christopher Isherwood (Vintage classics)

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As he spoke he touched his left temple delicately with his finger-tips, coughed, and suddenly smiled. Here is a man, oily, dishonest, deceitful, of not particularly pleasant appearance, always out to make some money, even if at the expense of others, including his friends, yet we cannot help but have a soft spot for him. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. In the middle of a crowded street a young man would be attacked, stripped, thrashed, and left bleeding on the pavement; in fifteen seconds it was all over and the assailants had disappeared. Some very light spotting to preliminaries, and soil spot to bottom edge, but pages otherwise clean and unmarked.

The reader quite falls, as Bradshaw does, under his dubious charm, and it is a strange experience to find oneself appreciating the strange moral ambiguity of someone who would undoubtedly sell his own grannie to the highest bidder, yet, somehow, even whilst grannie might even know that herself, he comes across as naughty, rather than vicious. The million copy bestseller, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and. Mr Norris graduated from Leeds University in 2000 having won the Tomlin Prize in Ophthalmology and the Newham Prize in Physiology. It is indeed tragic to see how, even in these days, a clever and unscrupulous liar can deceive millions.

The novel follows the movements of William Bradshaw, its narrator, who meets a nervous-looking man named Arthur Norris on a train going from the Netherlands to Germany. Bradshaw decides to have some fun with this awkward fellow Englishman to help pass the time on his journey and as a result becomes embroiled in his life and mysterious mercantile machinations.

It is the time of the rise of the Nazis and Norris introduces Bradshaw to Beyer and the Communist Party, who are opposing the Nazis.

Even though it’s abundantly clear that Mr Norris is something of a swindler, he is hugely likeable with it. In some ways though it seemed almost a little too elegant - there are times when it felt like there should be a greater sense of jeopardy, what with all those Nazis around.