Twelve Bar Blues by Patrick Neate

Our reading group has been going for about a year now. We are a work-based group who meet once a month in the office canteen to discuss a book over lunch.

We had chosen Twelve Bar Blues because we had heard of the controversy surrounding its winning of the Whitbread Novel Award. Here was an unknown author who had beaten the likes of Ian McEwan and Helen Dunmore - we were intrigued. We often read novels that have won literary prizes or have been short-listed for prizes because we find that gives us something else to talk about beyond the book itself. This year we are reading the Booker short-list and we are going to choose our own winner.

From our experience the best discussions are about books that divide the group. Hotel World caused a split in the group because of Ali Smith's style (some members thought the book was merely an exercise in style whereas other members thought it was as beautifully and carefully written as poetry). Andrew Miller's Oxygen was another book that divided the group: half of us couldn't believe it had been short-listed for the Booker Prize while the other half thought it was a masterpiece.

Twelve Bar Blues had me worried because I knew in advance that everyone was enjoying the book. Enjoying is an understatement: everyone I had spoken to had raved about it and some members had even gone on to read Patrick Neate's other work. Surprisingly, though, when it came to our meeting we found there was more to say than simply 'I loved it.' There are many themes running through the novel and our discussion was based around these. Music, magic, myth, religion, fate, history and identity are just some of the themes covered so we had plenty to talk about.

We wondered if Patrick Neate as a white author could effectively write about what it is to be black. One reader told us that Patrick Neate had been criticized in the press for being an 'Ali G type' middle-class-white-boy who is more interested in black culture than his own. Many of us disagreed with this viewpoint. In fact, some us were surprised to find out that the author was white! Neate has traced black culture and music right back to its roots and the level of research and understanding he brings to this subject led to a lot of debate about what an author should be able to write about. We felt that he or she should be allowed to write about subjects beyond their own experience.

The book's structure was a topic of much discussion: it is based around the twelve bar blues pattern with stories playing a tonic, dominant or subdominant harmony. We thought this was a very ambitious structure but all agreed that it worked well and managed to pull seemingly disparate stories together effectively and give more resonance to his themes of history and identity. This led to a discussion of Jazz and music in general.

We were impressed by the author's ability to capture language. We thought his rendering of the speech of the black people of early 1900s Louisiana was brilliant and very believable.

We all agreed that we loved this book because of Neate's skill in storytelling. At the end of the meeting I asked the group to jot down some of their thoughts.

'I loved Twelve Bar Blues. Patrick Neate is that rarest of things: a born storyteller. And the stories he tells in this inventive, epic book are as old as the blues, and as brilliantly fresh as a new melody. Neate takes as his subject the human condition and all that jazz. Thus he writes of Africa and the American South, of the black experience and white man's folly, of colour and colour blindness, of magic and heartbreaking reality, and of all those timeless things: family, friends, love and loss. Times present and past collide and collude with one another. And each new line of each new story resonates with those that have gone before to create a book loud with meaning. And all the while, Neate displays a zest for improvisation, and an endlessly creative use of language perfectly pitched for his reader's enjoyment. Everyone in our book group loved it. And such consensus has never happened before! Grab yourself a copy now, and see what all the fuss is about!' Zelda

'Reading this book is as pleasurable as listening to your favourite Louis Armstrong record. Patrick Neate's writing, like music, conjures up the pathos and nostalgia of the blues without being overly sentimental and with not a small dose of black humour. It is a story that reaches out to us all: considering love, betrayal, choice and destiny, where the past, present and future becomes indistinguishable.' Helen

'Ranging from the tribes of modern-day Africa to Louisiana's sleazy jazz scene in the early twentieth century, Twelve Bar Blues is both superbly written and highly readable. The story of cornet player Lick Holden is deeply moving and even brutal in its unfolding, with glimpses into the darker side of Louisiana life. However, the young Musungu (white) Jim, his enigmatic travelling companion Sylvia, seeking out her past, and the permanently stoned witch doctor Musa help to lighten the atmosphere and infuse the book with humour and vibrancy.' Ellie

'I thought this was a real treat of a book mainly because I was never sure what was going to happen next! I was amazed that Patrick Neate managed to cover so many themes in such a subtle way: the book can be enjoyed on many levels - as a rollicking good read it comes highly recommended but if you want to look into the text further than that you will not be disappointed.' Julie