7 Books Like The Fairfax Redemption

I love this book because of the uniqueness of the characters and the outstanding plot. It’s a fast-paced comedic thriller. Paul Mulchrone is an endearing protagonist despite all his faults. For reasons beyond his control, he becomes a fugitive. But this isn’t a typical run-of-the-mill story about a man on the run. McDonnell has created inventive and entertaining adventures for his hero, and his colourful nurse companion enhances the drama. Add the whacky police officer into the mix, and the result is a great read.

What I love about a murder mystery is joining the dots, connecting all the different elements together.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is all about connections. Whether it is the aliens who’ve been secretly living on Earth for millions of years; or the ghost of the murder victim trying to leave a message on his sister’s phone; or Richard, the book’s hero, attempting, with the "help" of the ever-unreliable Dirk, to figure out what is going on here and why.

I was simply lost in the convolutions of a plot that also involves time travel and the highly vexing question of how a sofa came to be impossibly stuck on a landing. It’s ALL connected, and the solution makes sense of (nearly) everything.

This was among the first (and by far the best) of my parents’ books that I borrowed.

The premise is charming: after a long and careful study of British history, your memory will retain only a small quantity of garbled nonsense; so why not save time by just reading the garbled nonsense? At its best, it’s so freewheelingly, surreally silly that I still vividly remember crying with laughter. There were bits – like the names of the Wave of Pretenders – that made me laugh every time I read them.

It was a revelation to me that adults – and even adults from the past – could have brains that were just as silly, odd, and obscure as children’s.

I read this during a period of temping when I was at university, and it was like an enchanted escape capsule from my job.

It was written in the late nineteenth century, but it doesn’t have the kind of starchy, pious formality of a lot of writing from that time. It feels very free and very modern, rooted in the details of everyday life that probably stay quite constant throughout history – like cheeky kids, the failure of all forms of waterproofing, and how annoying our friends are when we’re confined with them for any length of time.

It’s based on Jerome’s honeymoon trip up the Thames, but with his wife diplomatically replaced by two imaginary friends and a dog.

This is the strangest of the books I’ve chosen. I found it by accident while looking for something else in the British Library, and loved it immediately. The writer was George VI’s doctor, and this is his only novel.

On the surface, it’s the story of a grotesquely unlikeable and hypocritical father and son. But I prefer to ignore that and just enjoy its completely unique voice. The whole book is like a PG Wodehouse sentence: somehow transcending its literal meaning to become almost magically pleasing. It’s definitely not for everyone, but if you enjoy the phrase ‘the aunt that had stood with my mother’s mother at the foot of the stairs’ then you’ll like it.

I’d never read any PG Wodehouse before I found this in a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. My edition is a huge and ancient green volume that looks like a book of magic – and it is.

It contains all the Jeeves and Wooster stories from the very beginning till the end of their golden age. And they’re in order, so you see the characters and style develop, and watch Bertie follow PG himself to America and back.

It came to me just when I needed it most: I had an absolutely horrible job at the time, the sort where you start dreading Monday morning around about lunchtime on Saturday. Being able to slip away into these stories was like owning a portal to a better world. They contain so many pleasures.

For one thing, PG can construct a sentence that somehow transcends its constituent words to become almost… show more.