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By Mikhail Bulgakov (1925)

The Heart of a Dog is terrific fun. I was a bit hesitant because The Master and Margarita is so good, but it didn’t let me down (and continues the obsession with cats, dogs and devilry).

An updating of Frankenstein to Moscow life in the chaos of the 1920s USSR, it follows the misadventures of a dog rescued off the streets and patched up with various bits of fallen (human) comrades.

It’s a brutal satire of the attempts to create a “new socialist man”, but the effect is pretty timelessly funny, with the dog-creature ending up barking soviet propaganda and haphazardly swearing at everyone. Bulgakov saw it confiscated and banned in his lifetime; it’s a considerable mystery that that was the worst that happened to him.

The Many Lives of Amory Clay by William Boyd (2015)

Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay is rather standard Boyd – which is to say it contains patches of really excellent writing, particularly in the first and last “lives”, and spirals around a few themes which have maybe become a bit too familiar.

By Willem Elsschot (1933)

Cheese is just wonderful. A hapless clerk tries to make it big by becoming the exclusive Edam agent for the whole of Belgium (and the Grand Duchy). Problem is he hates cheese, and business too. Kafka is the obvious comparison, and I’m not sure the fact it’s so funny makes it less of a cheese-nightmare.

By Stella Gibbons (1932)

Cold Comfort Farm is a weird book. Immediately dated but seemingly timelessly funny, and with turns of phrase that are probably immortal now (“something nasty in the woodshed”), a sophisticated society girl takes out to save her romantically doom-laden rustic family in darkest Sussex.

My initial impressions (whoa, this is modernist, unreliable narrator) were somewhat deflated when it turns out that the protagonist basically telling them to buck up and start wearing fashionable clothes is in fact the unironic solution.

But reliably amusing and well-written.