I’ve been approaching my reading of the Booker longlist titles in much the same way I approached my dinner as a child: get through the vegetables first and then you have the meat to look forward to. So for the second of the longlist titles I hadn’t read, I chose Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (it would have been A.N. Wilson’s Winnie & Wolf, but it hasn’t arrived yet). Great! Another boring book about India. It doesn’t even look like a novel: the cover design resembles an exotic form of misery memoir, perhaps an account of life stunted by the Union Carbide chemical disaster in Bhopal in the 1980s.

Well: more fool me. In fact, mea maxima culpa, because like Nikita Lalwani’s Gifted, Animal’s People has shaken off my preconceptions. And unlike Gifted, it has shot straight to the upper levels of the seven Booker longlisted titles I’ve read so far, and is one of my finest - and coarsest - reads of the year.

It doesn’t take long to see that Indra Sinha has given us something special in Animal’s People: even on page one, his crippled narrator’s boisterous voice is fully developed and alive:

I used to walk upright, that’s what Ma Franci says, why would she lie? It’s not like the news is a comfort to me. Is it kind to remind a blind man he once could see? The priests who whisper magic in the ears of corpses, they’re not saying, ‘Cheer up, you used to be alive.’ No one leans down and tenderly reassures the turd lying in the dust, ‘You still resemble the kebab you once were…’

Our storyteller is Animal, a nineteen year old boy who, ever since ‘That Night’ in his home town of Khaufpur (a fictionalised Bhopal), when ‘the Kampani’s’ factory leaked poisonous chemicals all over the soil, water and air, has been unable to walk upright and instead must get along on all fours. “The pain gripped my neck and forced it down.”

Animal (”I used to be a human once”) is telling his story into the ‘tape mashin’ left behind by a foreign reporter (’Jarnaliss’), and his vigorous, foul-mouthed style makes him one of the most memorable narrators I’ve read in ages, and a vividly painted tragicomic freak almost of the scale of Owen Meany. He has a twisted syntax (”I wake with head’s singing. Still dark it’s but can’t sleep”) which fortunately doesn’t too often come out like Yoda, and doesn’t interfere with the flow of his story.

He lives among a community of the sub-poor, and what keeps many of them going beyond the day-to-day is the hope of seeing justice through the courts against the Kampani for the poison which has crippled and killed thousands of their people. At the same time they are “terrified that one night the factory will rise from the dead and come striding like a blood-dripping demon to snatch them off.” Animal sometimes manages to do the right thing even though his motives are usually selfish, not least involving his ‘lund’ which is one part of his body which still works:

it has become huge and hard, reared up it’s, feels like a log, with each beat of the heart it’s battering my belly.

It’s this desire to satisfy his “heavy monster” which leads him to covert spying missions on both his childhood sweetheart and the pretty ‘Amrikan doctress’ who has come to open a free clinic to treat the ill townspeople (”I’ve been seeing a lot of Elli and Nisha, albeit without them knowing”). Yet despite his crudity, selfishness and doubtful trustworthiness, I found it impossible not to warm to Animal: it’s all, I suppose, in the language.

Chunaram says I should be a Hindu because of all I’ve suffered in this life, I’m sure to get a better deal next time round, more than likely be a prince or politician or something. Trouble with that way of looking at things is by the same logic my situation is the result of evil things I did in my past lives, some people do look at me as if they’re wondering how many children I murdered last time round.

Sinha’s achievements don’t end with this expert ventriloquism. He has an ability too to deal with large subjects - from poverty to ideology - head-on without giving us an ear-bashing, and to make his story invoke sympathy without sentimentality. The only disappointment is what seems like a slight failure of narrative nerve toward the end.

It was with some amazement that I discovered not a single national newspaper in the UK reviewed Animal’s People when it was published earlier this year. No doubt (like me) they’ll all now be playing catch-up, but in the meantime we have to give thanks to the Booker judges for alerting us to this meaty, joyful, feast of a novel, filled with violence, energy and humour, which should without doubt reach the shortlist and must stand a very good chance of winning. And I managed to write a review of it without once using the word colourful. Almost.

This is the first of my Booker longlist titles, and there’s no point in my pretending I would have read it anyway. With this dreary cover, equal parts chicklit and ethnilit, not to mention the uninspiring title, there’s not a chance I would even have picked it up. So the question is, can the listing of a book by a prize jury bring reading enjoyment where none is expected?

The answer is yes. Gifted is Nikita Lalwani’s debut, and while it may owe a little to other prominent debuts of recent years - Brick Lane and White Teeth seem lightly imprinted in its pages - it’s an achievement in itself.

It details the childhood and youth of Rumi, an Indian girl growing up in Cardiff in the 1980s. Her parents had an arranged marriage: father Mahesh is an academic, determined to ensure that Rumi makes her mark in British society, while mother Shreene feels a conflict between her birth and adopted homes, reflecting on small differences in culture (such as the tendency for Western men to have less hair on their faces, and Western women to have less hair elsewhere).

The language sometimes has that identikit colour and richness we associate with Indian literature, but there is a lightness and humour too, such as when ten-year-old Rumi reflects on telling her schoolfriends that she’s going to visit India:

She’d get up and say, ‘Yes, I have an announcement. I’m moving to a country where people laugh and have fun and aren’t cruel and rude and don’t make a joke of you, and where they are more intelligent than people here, especially at maths like me. And I’m never coming back. And also, by the way, my mum and dad say the British people stole all these stones from people in India, the rubies and diamonds in the precious buildings, before they stopped ruling it, and that represents how they stole the sparkle out of Indian people’s lives. So it doesn’t make much sense of me to live here, to be honest, because I don’t agree with it. I’m going back to where I came from.’

She knew that she would have to make sure she was in a place where she could look at Simon Bridgeman and Christopher Palmer during this last bit, to give them a signal so they didn’t take it personally. Or maybe she’d warn them in advance, so that she shock of what she was about to reveal, about their own history as British people, didn’t upset them too much.

Lalwani has an ability to touch on otherwise hackneyed issues like this very gracefully, and does it again, for example, in a scene where Rumi’s father and his friend discuss the film Gandhi, and which in its own low-key way, added to my understanding of Indian partition almost as much as Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown did.

But Gifted is clearly a debut and not always so assured. The story arc - of Rumi’s development as a ‘gifted child’ from maths and chess prodigy through to early Oxford entrance - occasionally feels too pre-planned, not coming through a real understanding of the character, and the ending seems rushed, reminiscent of Hari Kunzru’s Transmission.  I would have liked to know more of Mahesh and Shreene, who seemed to me more interesting than Rumi.  Lalwani also has a weakness for 1980s pop culture references, presumably to remind us of when all this is happening.  Although they were well attuned to my own childhood in that period, they were a little cloying, and I can imagine people much younger or older finding them distracting.  Still, if it’s good enough for David Mitchell…

Penguin have decided to build on the success of their Great Ideas and Great Journeys series - beautifully designed little paperbacks that put classic works into contemporary, and more importantly, short packaging - and have recently launched Great Loves.  My habit with the previous series was to buy the lot and never get around to reading them.  This time I decided instead just to buy the ones I actually wanted to read.  And do you know, it’s worked.

Ivan Turgenev’s First Love (1860) is one of just half a dozen of the twenty Great Loves which is a complete work in itself, which I think is much more satisfying than the extracts or selections of stories which make up the others.  And he’s one of those old Russians I’ve never managed to read before now (I tried, and failed, with Fathers and Sons a couple of years ago).

First Love is a much better - and at 100 pocket-sized pages, less daunting - introduction.  It is the remembered story of Vladimir, a young man who at sixteen falls in love with the girl next door, who proceeds to torture him with the uncertainty of her response.  He lies awake at night, storms raging without and within (”I rose, went to the window, and stood there till morning … the lightning did not cease for an instant.  This silent lightning, this controlled light, seemed to answer to the mute and secret fires which were blazing within me”).

Vladimir is also teased and belittled by the girl, Zinaida’s, other suitors.  The social limitations and controls of 19th century Moscow are alien to us, but all the more compelling for that.

I would sit and gaze and listen, and would be filled with a nameless sensation which had everything in it: sorrow and joy, a premonition of the future, and desire, and fear of life.  At the time, I understood none of this, and could not have given a name to any of the feelings which seethed within me; or else I would have called it all by one name - the name of Zinaida.

I easily predicted what the outcome of all this torture was going to be, and didn’t mind anyway, as books that are 150 years old are entitled to be somewhat foreseeable.  And then as I read on, I realised I had predicted it completely wrongly and was surprised by the conclusion after all.  So that’s why they call them classics.

First Love, as well as the social and romantic story, contains a fascinating portrait of the relationship between Vladimir and his father.  Sons and fathers must be a strength of Turgenev’s.  I’d better get back to that unfinished one then.

We all know the importance of cover design in making a browser become a buyer.  But what of the other elements that crowd our senses in the first ten seconds?  None of these individually made me buy Blood Kin, but they all helped it stay in my hand for longer until I made the decision.  A quote from Coetzee can’t be dismissed easily.  A bold, colourful jacket piques the curiosity.  And the unusual name makes you flick to the About the Author photo inside the back cover.  Ceridwen Dovey: sounds like an anagram, looks like a - … well, like a lovely young woman.

Blood Kin is Dovey’s debut novel, and it lacks nothing in assurance.  The quotes on the cover refer to fable, myth, allegory, and this is what Dovey gives us.

We are in an unnamed country at an unnamed time, and a coup has just been carried out.  The President has been kidnapped, along with his barber, his chef and his portraitist.  They are held captive by the leader of the revolution, known only as The Commander.  What this leads us to is a tale of aspects of power, told in cycling chapters by the three assistants.  His Barber, the chapter is headed, but does it mean the President or the Commander?  If power inspires loyalty in those subject to it, what does it lead to in those exercising it?  And what of the power play in sexual relations between men and women?

Dovey’s choice of occupations for the narrators - dealing in food, art and the human body, and all interested in their own beauty or that of others - gives her plenty of scope for sensual detail:

I guide his head beneath the tap so that the water just catches his hairline and barely wets his skin.  The hair strands darken and clot with the water; he will feel the slight weight of them pulling away from his head, uncreasing his forehead, and the warmth with spread like a tide across his skull to the back of his brain.

Yet I found the narrators (there’s something I should add here but I think it might constitute a minor spoiler) spoke in the same poetic, aphoristic tone, with little stylistic variation, so that it was difficult to tell them apart other than as types.  I also felt that Dovey at times was reaching toward things that I could not grasp - though that could be a case for a more careful re-reading on my part.  But there’s no denying the care that has clearly been taken over every word here.

There are a couple of significant revelations toward the conclusion of the story, and a satisfying inevitability to the closing pages.  Not just a pretty face then.

The great thing about an unswerving, even slavish, devotion to a series of books is that even if not everything you read is to your tastes, you still encounter authors and titles you would never have considered otherwise. My fetish for Penguin Modern Classics this week led me to Vitaliano Brancati’s Beautiful Antonio (1949).

It’s easy to presume that a book labelled a Modern Classic, particularly in translation, is going to be obscure or forbidding. But Beautiful Antonio is accessible, playful and funny.

Antonio Magnano, from Catania in Sicily, is 26 years old when the story begins in 1932, and is already famous for being the most beautiful man anyone has seen. Female observers “sweetly burned” in his presence, “and went mad with a pleasure so intense as to make them think themselves possessed by some severe aberration which jumbled up pleasure and pain.” Even his male friends are in love with him. This is something to do with his “olive-skinned visage … athletic limbs” and “eyes [that] seemed to glint with tears that sat on the uppermost curve of the cheeks.” Furthermore:

photographs of him … would halt even middle-aged women in their tracks, though laden with shopping and dragging along toddlers in floods of tears with the very hand just used to box their ears.

So nobody is surprised when Antonio marries Barbara Puglisi, the daughter of a notable figure in the town, who is almost as beautiful as he is. Everyone is surprised, however - and shocked - when three years later, it turns out the marriage has not yet been consummated.

All this gives Brancati opportunity for comic expansiveness, in a tone that straddles a line somewhere between satire and farce, with plenty of salty dialogue. He explores the macho culture of Sicily, and the peculiar position of the Church where marriage without sex is as reprehensible as sex without marriage.

“Nothing but a flop for three years?”

“Nothing but a flop.”

“Every night a flop?”

“Every night a flop.”

“How on earth?”

“Go and ask Our Father which art in heaven, he’s the one who cooks up these things.”

“I could understand it once or twice, or three times… I’ll be generous - five times. Which of us hasn’t done a flop?”

“I tell you no lie, friend. I never have.”

“Never?”

“Never!”

“In a certain sense, in the sense of a complete and hopeless flop, neither have I.”

At the same time, the background of the rise of the Fascists in Italy in the 1930s, and the people’s simultaneous hatred of them and fear of the alternative, seems to parallel Antonio’s mixed feelings on sexuality. Antonio’s uncle expresses himself accordingly when rumours reach him that Mussolini doesn’t have cancer, but just a syphilitic ulcer:

“Hell and dammit, we’re ruined. Two injections and your syphilitic ulcer goes kaput… On the other hand what happens if he dies? Who seizes power? His bunch of cut-purse henchmen? They’d slit each other’s throats while they were carving up the spoils. So then, it’s the Communist gaolbirds? Worse than the Fascists! At least the Fascists are incompetent scoundrels, and whatever crimes come into their minds they make a hash of, whereas the other lot are stern and upstanding, and make a clean job of ‘em.”

Beautiful Antonio was previously published in the UK as Antonio: The Great Lover. Neither really rolls off the tongue, and I think The Beautiful Antonio would be a fuller translation of the title (the original is Il Bell’Antonio) and would just sound better. Tim Parks, who provides the introduction to this edition, clearly agrees, as he refers to the book as The Beautiful Antonio throughout.