He reads Coleridge on deck as others are gripped by fear that the ship will be torpedoed. He's the master of nonchalance, the king of cool and a gentleman.Nagihan Haliloglu, Istanbul Arturo Bandini The star of John Fante's best-known novel, Ask the Dust, is just a fantasticcharacter whomanages to be both delightful and infuriating. Bandini's a kind of cross between Holden Caulfield, Basil Fawlty and Travis Bickle. He's a poet and he knows it, but he simmers with extreme emotion, and this is often his undoing. Fante's honest, lyrical and funny portrayal of this character makes a lot of recent writing look insipid.Leon Davey, Peterborough Bartimaeous This is without doubt the most distinctively new character in any book I've read for years.
Bartimaeous, in The Amulet of Samarkand by Michael Stroud, is excrutiatingly witty, engaging without being attractive, awesomely intelligent but lacking self-knowledge.Neil Howlett, Somerset Morvern Callar In the mid-Nineties, while the laddish media were in a lather over Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, Scotland's Alan Warner gave us an unforgettable heroine for our times, the title character in Morvern Callar. I have never fallen so helplessly in love with a fictional literary character as I did with this sublime creation. That Warner, a thirtysomething male, should so unerringly get under the skin of his protagonist and find such a unique voice for her clipped, sardonic world-view, remains at once erotic, eerie and superbly life-affirming.Kevin O'Donohoe, Hounslow Nigel Molesworth You can keep your Darcy, Heathcliff and Rochester types: in the words of my personal ideal, Nigel Molesworth, "they are weeds and wets and I diskard them". There's no one quite like Nigel (from the series by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle) to set my pulse racing, with his floppy fringe (eat your heart out, Hugh Grant) and disdainful smirk, and those smouldering eyes.
And his masterful handling of the peashooter is second to none, hem hem.Trezza Azzopardi (the author of 'Remember Me') Guido Brunetti With all literature to choose from and hot competition from Becky Sharp, Ubu and Mrs Malaprop, it seems perverse to choose a modern detective. I try to hit the ignore button, but, fumbling, answer it by accident It's my son "Can't speak, busy," I hiss "Dad, it's really important," he says "I can't talk here," I whisper "Where are you?" he demands. A funny thing - kind of - happened to me at Dachau concentration camp recently. There I was, in the extermination block, fighting back the tears, as was an American air-force officer, the only other person there. Then suddenly, there's a jarring, alien sound from my pocket Diddle er-derr, diddle-er-derr - the Nokia tune Damn, I forgot to turn the stupid thing off. Crouchback is a Catholic country gentleman who has no need to pull rank or put on airs, because to him it would seem ridiculous. The trilogy is slightly marred by Waugh's own snobbishness, but Crouchback himself is no snob.
