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Needless to say, Luther Blissett, the former Watford and AC Milan striker, did not write this book.  Rather it’s the work of four founders of the Luther Blissett Project, a mysterious Italian neo-Marxist group that, up until the turn of the millennium, encouraged artists and activists across Europe to perform subversive acts under the Blissett “multi-name”.

By rights, given its shared authorship and ideological baggage, Q should make for a lousy book. So it’s all the more remarkable that it should turn out to be one of the most thought-provoking and enjoyable novels of the decade.

Set during the extraordinary period of religious unrest triggered by Martin Luther in 1517, Q describes the moment when the Protestant struggle to liberate faith from Catholic doctrine exploded into a revolutionary attempt to realise the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

The plot tracks a 30-year cat-and-mouse game played out across Germany, the Netherlands and beyond by two men: our hero, a radical Anabaptist who travels under many names, and the eponymous Q, a shadowy Papal informer spying for the Inquisition.

Along the way we encounter a larger-than-life cast of religious zealots, apocalyptic visionaries and heretical free spirits. The book resurrects a number of historical figures from the proto-communist Anabaptist movement, notably Thomas Muntzer, the radical preacher who led the ill-fated Peasant War which Engels saw as a forerunner of revolutionary class conflict.

Thomas Muntzer as depicted in Werner Tubke’s painting Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany (1975-87)

But while Engels revisited the theological conflicts of the Reformation from the perspective of 19th century Marxism, Q unearths these half-buried histories in a spirit of post-modern mischief. As our battle-weary protagonist survives a series of doomed revolts, each more bloodily suppressed than the last, he gradually realises the primacy of word over sword as an instrument of resistance.

At this point the novel’s backdrop changes, besieged German city-states giving way to the whispering back-alleys of Venice, the Babel-like crossroads of the world (and thus an analog of the internet). Rabble-rousing in market squares is eschewed in favour of huddled rendezvous in bookshops and printing presses. Then as now, Q seems to suggest, the viral potential of ideas is what the powerful fear most.

Yet nowhere do these ideological subtexts obstruct Q’s effectiveness as a novel. Neither didactic nor over-simplifying, its dramas are human before they are political. The authors have a canny feel for the paradoxes and self-destructive impulses of revolutionary movements, and much of the book reflects on the fine line between utopian zeal and tyranny.

Stylistically, Q is a bold, refreshing and irreverent take on the historical novel, mixing erudite fact with action-packed fiction, and littering period vernacular with modern slang and swearwords. With a direct, sinewy prose, against the odds the four authors manage to sustain a consistent and convincing narrative voice.

Q exults in the sights, sounds and swarming humanity of the cities of the European Renaissance. It’s a giddying tour of pubs, brothels, slums and marketplaces, flitting between the high and low culture of the age, from brooding palaces to the bawdy, proletarian life of the streets. The descriptions of Venice in particular drip with atmosphere.

This is not to say that the novel is not flawed. In places it is self-indulgent, in others clunky and verbose, and at over 600 pages it’s seriously overlong. Q simply gets better the longer it goes on; if you can stick with it past the first 100 pages, chances are you’ll be gripped.

Part thriller, part picaresque historical fantasy, part heartfelt novel of ideas, Q is a unique and audacious achievement.

In this supremely assured debut collection, Wells Tower’s sentences roll across the page in the kind of unflappably authentic American vernacular that will be instantly familiar to admirers of JD Salinger, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff. With prose that is tough yet supple, supremely crafted but apparently effortless, his mastery of voice allows him to tell stories with astonishing economy of means.

Tower’s work is frequently dark and often extremely funny. The pathos with which he treats his key themes of failure and dysfunction is apparent from the opening story ‘The Brown Coast’, in which the washed-up central character experiences a moment of deep personal empathy with a sea slug that resembles a turd. Tower’s stories do not end with Joycean epiphanies, but he shares Carver and Wolff’s knack for delivering, almost by sleight-of-hand, flashes of psychological insight revealed in the ordinary.

Much of this collection evokes a Middle America existing in an uneasy truce between civilisation and barbarity. Sublimated rage and desire lurk beneath its surface, with bad blood between sons and fathers a notable recurring theme. Several stories explore a sense of vulnerable, threatened masculinity: ‘Retreat’ is a backwoods male bonding tale about the love-hate relationship between two brothers, while in ‘Down Through The Valley’, a man endures a long, tense car drive with his estranged wife’s lover.

Yet Towers is nothing if not versatile, proving equally at home in the mind of a schoolboy or an 83-year-old war veteran. He excels when evoking the frustrated, yearning dream-world of adolescence, as in ‘Wild America’, the tale of an insecure teenage girl competing with her posher, prettier friend which, with its undercurrents of predatory sexual menace, echoes Joyce Carol Oates’ classic ‘Where Are You going Where Have You Been ?’

Despite his laconic, unflinching style,  Tower cares greatly about every one of his flawed, blind, struggling protagonists, whose predicaments are handled with tenderness and compassion.  His writing has wonderful natural rhythm and his eye for detail is breathtaking, showing a particular feel for the raw materials of the native landscape. He can slow down time, framing scenes  in the readers’ eye with cinematic clarity and intensity. So spare is the style that when Tower does allow himself a moment of terse poetry, he lights up the page with a line you want to read out loud.  Tower even lets his hair down with the final, eponymous story – an inspired, David Foster Wallace-style romp about ageing Vikings who are tiring of the rape-and-pillage circuit.

With Everything Ravaged, Wells Tower has distilled the achievements of a great literary and stylistic tradition and freshened it up with a post-modern glint in his eye. So addictive is his prose you will likely tear through this collection in a few short hours. This is a hugely enjoyable debut from an astounding young talent.

The very definition of a mixed bag – but this book contains a glittering jewel of contemporary short fiction

With Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell tests his readers’ patience to the limit and gets away with it - just.  Half way through five of the book’s six stories, Mitchell breaks off – sometimes on a cliffhanger, sometimes in mid-sentence – and embarks on the next. Only the sixth story is presented without interruption, an apple core around which the others begin and conclude in sequence. Depending on your point of view this is either an audacious narrative device, or a thin pretext for stringing together a bunch of short stories and calling it a novel.

Sure, there’s a sprinkling of cross-references, and interlinking themes such as imperialism, anthropology and Nietzchean philosophy; protagonists encounter one another’s stories as texts, and some even share mysterious birthmarks: “Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies,” one character tells us suggestively.

This vague air of quasi-mysticism is one of Cloud Atlas’s weaknesses. Another is the degree of pastiche evident throughout, particularly in the first three stories – a journal of a 19^th century sea voyage that riffs off Melville and Conrad; a string of confessional letters charting the misadventures of an amoral young aesthete in inter-war Belgium, which reads like John Banville; and a political conspiracy thriller which takes its cue from Watergate-era movies like The Parallax View and The China Syndrome. For another story, a blackly comic farce, Mitchell essentially relocates One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest to a retirement home in Hull.

Thankfully there are plenty of flashes of brilliance, and even at his most derivative Mitchell carries it off with enough verve to keep you turning the page.

But Cloud Atlas’s saving grace comes with the fifth story, ‘An Orison of Sonmi 451′, in which Mitchell delivers a glittering jewel of contemporary short fiction. It’s a slice of dystopian sci-fi set in the Korea of the far future – a totalitarian corpocracy presiding over a privileged class of passive consumers whose every whim is catered for by servile synthetic clones, or ‘fabricants’.  Sonmi is one such drone, her entire world circumscribed by the daily rituals of a fast food diner. The story of how she acquires self-knowledge, escapes her fate and becomes a talismanic figure in a secret resistance movement, is nothing short of scintillating.

Once again, Mitchell’s inspirations are less literary than filmic, paying tribute to the visions of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner and George Lucas’ THX 1138.  But ‘Orison’ transcends its familiar premise, as Mitchell creates an entire culture in meticulous, glowing detail, a world at once thrillingly alien yet uncomfortably close to home. It’s a cautionary parable of mythic proportions, whose themes continue to resonate in the story that follows, set in an even further-flung future in which humanity has regressed to the iron age.

Mitchell is as at home with the edge-of-your-seat action sequence as he is painting rich narrative vistas.  A capricious talent, he tends to falter when he attempts profundity, but the versatility and potency of his imagination frequently dazzle. A fearless stylist who can turn his hand to almost anything, David Mitchell loves to take risks without a safety net. If you’re willing to forgive the occasional wobble, it’s a high wire act not to be missed.

Durrell’s high art aesthetic makes no concessions to the reader, but the demands it makes are rewarded with writing which is superbly evocative of its ‘spirit of place’, Alexandria.  The city, a favourite haunt of the Greek modernist poet Cavafy whose unnamed presence pervades these novels, is conjured up in all its extravagant sensuality.

By comparison with the collection of dowdy sparrows that inhabit the work of his peers, Durrell’s characters are fabulous birds of paradise, brilliantly placed in this exotic setting. Alongside the central character/narrator Darley (who seems to represent Durrell), at least three other important figures in the Quartet are writers.

Of these, the most problematic is the novelist Pursewarden, the high priest of aestheticism, scattering aphorisms and philosophical and artistic pronouncements whenever he appears. His portrayal borders on caricature, and at times it is difficult to accept that his pretensions are meant to be taken seriously; nonetheless he, alongside the cross-dressing rogue Scobie, and the alluring Jewess Justine, remain wonderfully memorable characters.

Durrell himself was critical of his ornate style. In an interview with The Paris Review in 1959, he said of his prose: ‘It’s too juicy…I always feel I am overwriting. I am conscious of the fact that it is one of my major difficulties.”

These self-acknowledged weaknesses aside, at his best Durrell can be compared to such supreme modern prose stylists as Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike and John Banville.  Like them, Durrell may be criticised as favouring style over substance, or accused of being overly elitist and esoteric.

But to the appreciative reader, The Alexandria Quartet is the work of an artist using the full palette of his genius to create an intoxicating mixture of sensual imagery and unforgettable characters.

To read Jonathan Franzen is to know – like a Star Trek crew member facing off against some alien mind-entity – that you have encountered an intelligence indubitably greater than your own. In The Corrections there are times when Franzen’s voracious, omniscient imagination seems to have inventoried and articulated the multiplicity of the world in full.

In this he resembles other super-eclectic brainboxes of postwar American fiction – his obvious forbears Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, as well as contemporaries such as the late David Foster Wallace. But what marks Franzen out and gives this book its deep richness is his commitment to storytelling on a very human scale. Franzen uses his gifts to excavate human truths not only with unflinching clarity, but also with a touching and tender pathos. Time and again, his insights feel thrillingly, deliciously right.

The book tracks the trials and disappointments of the Lamberts, a middle class, midwestern family whose home town of St Jude is named after the patron saint of lost causes.  Alfred is the family’s crumbling patriarch – an austere, emotionally frozen disciplinarian from a backwards prairie town, who dedicates a life of service to the railroad only to see it gobbled up and asset-stripped by a firm of aggressive venture capitalists. In retirement, his dignity and self-reliance are similarly devoured by Parkinson’s, and his obsolescence underlined against the backdrop of a hi-tech, consumptive America that no longer has a use for his kind.

His youngest son Chip is a Foucaultian cultural studies lecturer who (in an episode reminiscent of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain) loses his job after an affair with a precocious student.  He finds his antithesis in his elder brother Gary, a senior portfolio manager in affluent midlife, depressed, paranoid and alienated from his wife and children. Meanwhile, middle chjld Denise is a bisexual workaholic control freak whose wild side erupts in a string of kamikaze love affairs.

Over these wayward children frets their hen-like mother, Enid – neurotic, status-anxious and self-deluding in her emotional need to believe in her family as a paradigm of success and respectability. As it becomes apparent that Alfred’s condition is deteriorating, she begs her children to return home for ‘one last Christmas’ in St Jude, thus providing the dénouement toward which the book’s multiple narrative threads inexorably move.

Franzen exposes the follies, vanities and neuroses of each Lambert with such insight and compassion you get the feeling that, rather as Dostoyevsky did in The Brothers Karamazov, the author has split himself into three to bring this trio of siblings to life. Each of the Lambert children’s lives are shaped, consciously or subconsciously, by a series of reactions to their overbearing parents. Franzen brilliantly captures the sticky toxicity of family relationships, of how vainly we struggle, like flies in a web, to free ourselves from the threads that tie us to our past.

But perhaps the book’s greatest achievement is its heart-rendingly powerful and lucidly observed study of Alfred and the corrosive onset of Parkinson’s. Franzen drills into the deepest recesses of this proud, complex and initially unsympathetic figure, peeling away layer after layer until we see the vast, aching sadness at his centre.

Out of such pain Franzen fashions some of the blackest and most brilliantly sustained comic writing in contemporary literature.  The early chapters in particular vibrate with savage farce, and show that Franzen is at his most laugh-out-loud funny when he writes about men and masculinity.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the picaresque exploits of the hapless Chip Lambert. As the novel opens, we find the recently sacked academic in manic-depressive freefall, writing an ill-conceived attempt at a commercial Hollywood screenplay which opens with a six-page lecture on the anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama. Worse, having dispatched the manuscript to his agent Eden Procuro, he realizes that he has subconsciously littered the text with scores of repetitious and highly inappropriate references to his female protagonist’s breasts. In the first of many allusions to the book’s title, Chip is seized by the conviction that he can salvage both his career and his relationship with his girlfriend if only he can chase the document down and make the necessary corrections before Procuro reads it.

The novel’s title serves as an inexhaustible metaphor that weaves through the fabric of the story: it is referenced in the miracle Parkinsons drug Correcktall, to which the Lamberts are fighting to get Alfred access; it is a stockbroking term for the catastrophic plunge in the value of Gary’s shares in said drug; it is the political correctness that costs Chip his job, as well as the correctional facility being built on his college campus – and so on. But above all it alludes to a generalised sense of the desperate need to put things right – whether morally, spiritually, clinically or pharmaceutically – in a society obsessed with unattainable normalcy and terrified by the prospect of failure or dysfunction.

This is beautifully realized in the character of Gary, who having attained all the trappings of suburban comfort, begins to experience his home as a kind of panopticon, in which the concerned gazes of his family members become surveillance cameras. In a fit of paranoia he resorts to elaborate shows of positivity in order to disprove his wife Caroline’s accusation that he is clinically depressed, culminating in a blackly hilarious episode involving a deadly combination of vodka and hedge clippers.

Sadly, Franzen cannot sustain this level of inspiration. After producing prose of seemingly effortless fluency and verve for 300 of its 650 pages, The Corrections goes soft in the middle.  Part of the problem is that Franzen can’t resist expanding his canvas to take in the widescreen vistas of ‘meta-novelists’ like Robert Coover and William Gaddis. With varying degrees of success, he riffs off themes from the late 90s zeitgeist, including the economic and cultural appropriation of failing Eastern European states, the ascendancy of cultural theory in academe, the long boom of US economic growth and the accompanying banalities of postmodern mass consumption.

But having spent the first half of the novel constructing a compelling family saga, Franzen’s story ranges into places it does not need to visit. Arid plains of narrative open up as Franzen throws in sub-plots and back-stories involving inconsequential characters we never meet. In a series of sprawling information dumps, his prose style shifts from rich first-person detail to broad-brush exposition. A cartoon-like quality creeps in, as the author falls prey to the bad habits of some of his contemporaries, including a touch of satirical excess and some overly knowing hipster symbolism.

Happily, in due course Franzen finds his way back to the story he has so expertly made us care about, and the pay-off – the long anticipated Christmas reunion – is more than worth the readers’ perseverance.

Its flabby midsection notwithstanding, at its note-perfect best The Corrections beautifully balances its satirical elements with movingly observed human drama, evoking an utterly three-dimensional world.  An extraordinary feat of empathy and compassion, The Corrections can be ranked among the finest American novels of the past 30 years.