But not Sue Barker off of Question of Sport and Wimbledon, just to keep the British novelist/celebrity confusion going.

Halfway isn't bad, don't think I made it even a quarter the way through this, and it isn't that long. I thought from the hype this was going to be something special, but never got pulled into the story and the prose wasn't good enough to keep the pages turning, quite a rare DNF for me. I don't think the second person narrative was the problem, it can work in the right context.

That's good news, I read this only last year and hadn't realised there'd been such a long wait for a sequel. At 14 years that surpasses the wait for The Winds of Winter, though I'm sure George will still manage to outdo that in the end.

I can highly recommend Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, which features the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. There is a film of the first book, which was also good and quite faithful.

The difference in tone also works in-universe, and with the framing device of the stories only being translated by Tolkien (from the Red Book of Westmarch). The Hobbit is Bilbo's story, written down half a century after the events, a period of time in which he has probably bored the whole of the Shire retelling the tale of his adventure, so the willing audience becomes those who haven't heard it yet, young children. The Lord of the Rings is Frodo's story, an account of struggle and war written in the immediate aftermath of the events by someone with PTSD.

This was on my Christmas list last year and it remains the best read I've had in the past 12 months. I'd previously read All The Light We Cannot See and I would recommend that too.

And The Wind Through The Keyhole.