A book is the promise of a journey, like a hot-air balloon ride. You start reading and sometimes get that awful feeling that nothing much is happening, as if the burners have ignited but you are not going anywhere, just bumping along in your basket over the grass, weighed down by unnecessary description and crashing through thickets of exposition until suddenly (if you are lucky) the story grabs you and you are aloft. Other books just never get off the ground.

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I tried Kate Morton’s Homecoming recently and found it very hard work. Way too long at 540 pages, it features an even drearier book within a book and a main character who seems to show all her emotion through her breath: “Jess let out a complicated sigh.”

I tried complicated sighing for a few minutes after reading that and discovered it is quite difficult when you are used to simple sighing. I left the book in the waiting room of a skin cancer clinic.

I read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and found it a huge disappointment; I had no interest in any of...