Penguin and Orange

Last year's fashion for book clubs may be receding but as a forum for championing books – and making books popular – there are few current alternatives as successful. Books like The Lovely Bones, The Master and The Kite Runner have a universality that made them ideal club selections. You can picture the publisher's glee when they realise that a book they have is perfect for that market. Penguin have again joined forces with Orange to select the best readers' group – you may have seen reports of Nick Hornby, still promoting the dreary A Long Way Down, visiting the winners in a Surrey jail last week. Also involved was a vote of the most popular books read by the polled clubs. Among the usual suspects named was a surprise winner, Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible. A worthy, less obvious choice, it is the story of a missionary who takes his family to the Congolese jungle in the 1950s and was a selection in Oprah's book club. Kingsolver is more popular in the US than here and The Poisonwood Bible is a great introduction to her work.

Picking books based on their reviews is a dangerous pastime. Sometimes the quotes slathered on the rear bear little relation to reality, as evidenced in recent film reviews. However, when a book moves from the arts pages to the news columns you can sense something interesting about to occur. Currently receiving this attention is The Traveller, the techno-thriller from curiously named John Twelve Hawks which the New York Times deemed 'page-turningly swift'. The Observer covered the storm the book has created last week, concentrating on the fact that Hawks has been unwilling to promote what they termed 'a hugely successful debut'. They reported that not even his editors had met Twelve Hawks, trying to turn him into the Sallinger of thriller writing. The problem with the hyperbole is that this is not the reality in the US. Far from appearing prominently in the NYT bestseller list, USA Today reports that The Traveller has failed to crack the top 10 and that Doubleday have been very disappointed with its sales. Having an anonymous writer seems to have backfired, leaving publishers with unsold books and some UK papers with fabricated hype. Now released here, you can decide if the Matrix-like thriller is worthy of the hype.

John Irving's long anticipated new book, Until I Found You, finally arrived here over three weeks late without much fanfare and a dearth of reviews. Normally a book of this size by a major author would have been accompanied by blanket reviews and interviews. But this time all was disturbingly quiet. US reviews may explain this, from the Boston Globe's 'extraordinary banality' to Chicago Times' 'wonderful', they were at best mixed, almost all focussing on the book's length. While the San Francisco Chronicle wanted it to be twice as long, The New York Times found it 'unnecessarily protracted'. The Washington Post has been forced to apologise for its negative review, written by Salman Rushdie's ex-wife, Marianne Wiggins. In a fierce show of treachery, one of Irving's earlier books had been, unbeknownst to the Post, dedicated to her. Though no comment on the review was made by the Post, the implication may have been that Irving had sided with Rushdie when the marriage ended. Requests for a review copy from Village went unheeded and the reviews here have appeared over a period of six weeks, with some papers not bothering at all. Size may be part of the reason for this as the book is 824 pages and will be literally too heavy for most. Are the reviewers on this side of the water too lazy to struggle through a book this size in summer? Will Until I Found You survive the mauling it has received? We're still in the third chapter and so far, so Irving.