Breakfast at Tiffany's

Truman Capote

After the dog's dinner that was La Cucina it was a relief to come to a writer who knows his craft. Capote knows knows how to serve up a story. You only need to get a handful of pages into Breakfast at Tiffany's and you're snared by the story of the fun-loving, fragile heroine who is at the heart of the novel.

It's one of those novels in which an unremarkable narrator looks back to a time in his life when as a very young man he found himself drifting into the orbit of a much brighter star with a more extravagant story or lifestyle. Or both. Think The Great Gatsby or Sophie's Choice. There's probably a name for the formula.

In Breakfast at Tiffany's that star is Holly Golightly. Crazy beautiful name, crazy beautiful chick. As for our narrator, if he ever tells us his name then I've already forgotten it. Holly dubs him "Fred". We first glimpse Holly climbing in through a startled Fred's window to escape a lover. Minor actress, part girl-about-town and exuberant phony Holly is an exquisite character.

I'm not saying it goes straight to the top of my list of 2002 favourites. Just that it pushes all the buttons a novel should push. And if, like me, you feel like you've spent too much time on crap books this year that's reason enough to toast the author.