What books really make the British best sller lists? One reporter reads the top ten to see if he had discern a common thread. “The idea, if I remember it rightly – it seems so very long ago – was really two ideas. First, why these particular books, these particular, very big books, out of the thousand or so new novels available, have risen to the top of the pile. And, second, what it might say about the great British reading public that these are the fictions we most want to escape into in the middle of July 2003. One of the things about reading many different books sequentially, many long and different books, is that they all come to seem a little like chapters in the same story.”