November 1916, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Penguin, £10 in UK)

The second volume in Solzhenitsyn's novel sequence, The Big Wheel, sets the stage for revolution, at a time when Tsarist Russia's armies were nearing collapse in the field and Lenin's followers were biding their opportunity and maturing their plans. At exactly 1,000 pages long, excluding notes, it possibly intends to be a challenge to War and Peace, but it never really gets off the ground either in terms of human drama or socio-political reality. The novel, frankly, is unselective and overloaded, with little narrative spine, and the question should now be asked: is Solzhenitsyn really a novelist, or a polemicist, moralist and social commentator? Certainly there is very little in these dense pages which suggests the born, natural writer of fiction.