#4 Enigma by Robert Harris

Robert Harris' most famous novel may be Fatherland, an alternative history in which the Nazis won the war, but Enigma comes a close second. Written in 1992 and adapted into a film in 2001 Enigma depicts the efforts of mathematicians trying to break the German Enigma code against the backdrop of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Harris is a political journalist and it shows in his writing. His prose is relaxed yet he has an eye for exact descriptions, a few telling details which bring a character or scene to life. Enigma is told through the eyes of Tom Jericho, a brilliant young crypto-analyst worked to exhaustion in the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. He returns to find the woman he loved is missing in suspicious circumstances and that the enigma code is still unbreakable. These two obsessions come together and escalate in dramatic circumstances.

Through Jericho's eyes the reader is also quietly shown the realities of wartime Britain - the food rationing, the ill-fitting clothes, the lack of toiletries and cosmetics, the dim and overcrowded trains and the grimness of a winter with little fuel. Although the main theme of the novel is the breaking of enigma, and the toll it took on the men who worked on it, it is the evocations of grim, austere wartime Britain that lingers afterwards.

Read On: Fatherland, Archangel and The Ghost - a political thriller now made into a film starring Ewan MacGregor - all by Robert Harris.

#3 The Truth by Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett writes madcap, farcical fantasy with his tongue firmly in cheek. The Discworld, a disc carried on the back of four elephants carried along on the back of a giant space turtle called Great A'Tuin is held up as a mirror to our own world and Pratchett spoofs everything from the genres of fantasy and science fiction to Australia, football, academia and Hollywood.

In The Truth, Pratchett turns his attention to journalism. William de Worde is a young man who, along with a eclectic cast of dwarfs, tramps and an obsessive-compulsive vampire, forms the Discworld's first newspaper. He simply finds things out and writes things down but this quickly leads to a whole pile of problems from humorous vegetables that aren't funny to people wanting to kill him.

The Truth is the twenty fifth in the Discworld series but, like all of Pratchett's novels, it is self-contained although established characters including Vetinari, Gaspode and the Watch make frequent cameos.Like all of Pratchett's fare it is bit of an acquired taste but for those who appreciate a good spoof novel then Pratchett is hard to beat.

Read on: There are over thirty Discworld books to choose from now but my particular favourites are Mort, Guards, Guards and The Colour of Magic.

Other farcical fantasies include; Another Fine Myth by Robert Asprin; Odds and Gods by Tom Holt; The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde and The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin.

#2 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This is one of those books that I suspect a lot of people mean to read but never quite get round to. Much like A Suitable Boy or 1984, a modern classic in other words. I started it on the train up to Aberdeen and the woman next to me confided, somewhat shamefully, that she had started it three times but had never managed to finish it. This did not fill me with optimism.

As Colonel Aureliano Buendia faces the firing squad, the history of his family is told in a series of wandering flashbacks where the Buendia dynasty proliferates like Japanese knotweed. The Buendias do not have a family tree as an unpruned shrubbery and the family relationships are more complicated even than those of the Dingle clan. I suspect I'm not the only one forced to scribble a family tree on a scrap of paper and even then my pen ran out. This is not helped by what I can only describe as Marquez's complete lack of imagination when it came to naming his characters. Three characters are named Arcadio (or some variation thereof) and, ridiculously, Aureliano himself has seventeen sons - all named Aureliano.

Despite these small, if irritating, niggles there is something enchanting about the way Marquez weaves his tale. Magic and realism coexist in a sort of rough-and-tumble Eden and fantastic tales of talking to ghosts and dabbling in alchemy are interwoven with more mundane life as the Buendias marry, cook, gossip and feud. Even though I couldn't always work out who a character was or how he related to the rest of the family I was carried away in Marquez's bewitching tale and deposited unwillingly, if slightly bemused, at the end.

Read On: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Similar tales of magical realism include: Shame by Salman Rushdie; Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes; The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa; and Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis.