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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]==Literary fiction==__NOTOC__ {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Aatish TaseerJeremy Cooper|title=The Temple-GoersDiscord|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Aatish Taseer is probably best known for his journalism, publishing regularly in the Indian press, in Prospect, and perhaps most prolifically in Time magazine. He has won acclaim for his memoirDiscord: Stranger to History in which hea lack of agreement or harmony (as between persons, raised by his Indian Sikh motherthings, traces his absent Muslim father across the border in Pakistan – and also for his translations of the short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918504</amazonuk>}}or ideas)
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Mary Yukari WatersPolly Barton|title=The FavoritesWhat Am I, A Deer?|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This story Polly Barton's debut novel is set in Kyotoan intellectually playful yet emotionally exposed work that uses translation as both subject and governing metaphor. The narrator, Japannewly relocated from London to Berlin, starting in June 1978. Fourteen year old Sarah Rexford and her works translating video games into Japanese motherthrough the process of localisation, Yoko, have come back from the US rewriting language until it feels comfortably familiar to stay with family for a few weeksnew audience. Sarah was born and brought up Barton treats this as a paradoxical act: arguably, in Japan but has lived in the US with her mother and white American father striving for five years. She universality, language is very conscious endlessly repackaged, its originality at risk of the differences between life in Kyoto and in Fielder's Butte, Californiadisappearing altogether. Here in KyotoFrom this, the women, including Sarah and her mumnovel opens out into a wider, go shopping every day for food, and the food is very different – in an opening scene, Sarah is trying to explain resonant question: to her grandfather what she normally has for breakfast extent do we translate ourselves in the USorder to be understood, accepted, and becoming aware of the gulf between her life in Japan and in California.or loved?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1847392334</amazonuk>1804272175
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Rose TremainMaria Stepanova and Sasha Dugdale (Translator)|title=TrespassThe Disappearing Act
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Set Despite her anonymisation of place names and people, Stepanova's message in this short work of autofiction is unmistakable. A novelist named M travels from B (ostensibly Berlin) to the hills town of Southern France, Trespass F for a literary festival she is to be a novel about sibling love guest speaker at. Detoured by erratic train schedules and rivalrynudged by forces beyond her control, disputed territory and ultimately revengeher journey slowly bends toward a traveling circus. In the French corner are Aramon Lunel, resident Swept up in this series of the Mas Lunelevents, and his sister Audrun who lives M eventually offers to step in for a cottage in circus performer who has unexpectedly left the groundsshow. In the English corner are Victoria Verey, The train functions as a garden designer, motif of transience and her partnerimpermanence, an untalented watercolourist, Kitty. The catalyst that brings these together is while the circus embodies the arrival in France reshaping of Anthony Verey, Victoria's sister whose exclusive antiques business in London is failing identity and who decides to follow his sister in finding a new life in France. Aramon is tempted to sell his family Mas by retreat into fantasy, an impulse that lies at the lure very heart of 'foreign' money even if that means that his sister's house has to be destroyed to secure the dealnovel form itself.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701177942</amazonuk>1804272329
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Castle Freeman295967572X|title=All That I HavePale Pieces|author=G M Stevens|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Castle Freeman may sound like two thirds of Our unnamed narrator is about to begin a firm train journey with his companion Django. Where they're going and what the purpose of provincial solicitors but thankfully this Castle Freeman journey is a man very skilled in writing about the law rather than practicing it. In his latest novel Freeman tells an intriguing tale involving local Sheriff Lucian Wing and his practical yet low-key approach to maintaining order in rural Vermont, is uncertain. Not for Wing Django found the gung ho approach to fighting crime. He doesntickets ''t wear a uniform, he drives a battered old car rather than on the standard issue sherifffloor somewhere''s wagon and his gun, so ubiquitous in US law enforcement, has persuaded our narrator to accompany him. Why not? Not much else is safely tucked away in his bottom drawer. Everyone clear either - but we are probably in the area knows past as the sheriff and pair travel to the station by coach and large they respect him and his slightly unorthodox way of doing businessthe train is a steam locomotive.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0715639021</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Dan RhodesMakenna Goodman|title=Little Hands ClappingHelen of Nowhere
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Literary Fiction|summary=The first character to mention in It could be argued that the pervading theme of this book is malaise - a moth. It's a human moth, drawn hard-to the flame -place feeling that something in your life is not quite right. The protagonist, a museum disgraced professor on the brink of suicide - a supposedly cautionarylosing both his career and his relationship, life-affirmingembodies this feeling. However, memento moriGoodman counteracts his discomfort with a force which is seductive, somewhere in Germanyradical and unnerving: Helen. Its curator The connection between Helen and the protagonist is an old hand at lonelyindirect yet intimate. As the former owner of the countryside house he's considering, unloved museumsHelen represents a volta in his life, her past tied to his potential fresh from an art gallery in an airport - it didn't take off - start. The realtor who notices shows the noise of protagonist around the latest suicide to happen in the museumhouse shares stories about Helen, and goes right back to sleepdescribes her as ''an entity that is pure consciousness, beyond form''. A spider crawls into his mouth and Although she lives in an assisted living facility now, Helen has powers beyond comprehension which the reader gets eatenthe sense are not altogether innocuous.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1847675298</amazonuk>1804272205
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Olga Tokarczuk
|title=House of Day, House of Night
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''What's the good of a world that keeps changing like that? How can one go on calmly living in it?''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Joshua Ferris Thea Lenarduzzi|title=The UnnamedTower
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Tim Farnsworth seemed to have it all''How unctuous are the fats of another's life, how dizzying their sugars in our bloodstream''. In this compelling novel, Thea Lenarduzzi assumes the identity of T, the protagonist of this tale. He loved his wife Jane and Just as T's story is being told, the story of a second protagonist is unveiled: Annie, the daughter Becka and his job as of a partner wealthy family in prestigious law firm was enjoyablethe 19th century, fulfilling and financially rewarding. The fly who died of tuberculosis after being locked in the ointment was that sometimes he was overtaken by a compulsion to walktower, captures T's imagination. The time of dayAnnie's fate is, above all, the weather or the occasion did not matter – when the compulsion came he had to walk until he was physically exhausted and fell asleep immediately after calling his wife an enticing story to come and collect himT. There seemed to be no medical explanation It is a story which she consumes avariciously, both in a quest for what was happening – truth and knowledge, and Tim in service of myth, fable and Jane had tried every source they could find – but Tim was still reluctant to accept that this was a mental rather than a physical illnessfantasy. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0670917702</amazonuk>1804271799
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Joe TreasureJon Fosse and Damion Searls (translator) |title=BesottedVaim
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It is late August 1982, the day when O level results come out. Michael Cartwright already knows he has failed his exams and is dreading his parents finding out. He, his twin brother Kieran (who has done very well) and their younger sisters are on the family holiday, staying with their mother's parents in Kilross, County Cork. To escape boredom and his parents' anger, he wanders round the village, where he meets Fergal Noonan, training to be a priest, and lively Peggy OAll was strange''Connor. He has his first kiss and a bit more with Peggy. The family soon goes home to Cheltenham, but their brief visit to Ireland will have far reaching significance.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330511726</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Laila Lalami |title=Secret Son|rating=3.5|genre=General Fiction|summary=''Secret Son'' is the story of Youssef El-Mekki, the slum-dwelling teenage son of single mother Rachida. Youssef has always been told that his father is dead, so when he finds out his mother has lied to conceal This haunting phrase encapsulates the fact that he was born out pervading sense of wedlockotherworldliness which permeates this story set in Vaim, he plunges headlong into an identity crisis. He tracks down his a fictional fishing village in Norway which paradoxically could not feel more real fatherfor Jatgeir and Eline, a wealthy businessman called Nabil Amrani who is surprisingly enthusiastic about his illegitimate son's arrival. Nabil has recently fallen out with his daughter and he seizes this opportunity to mould Youssef into two of the obedient son he has always wantedprotagonists caught in its melancholic current.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0670918296</amazonuk>1804271829
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Aravind AdigaClaire-Louise Bennett|title=The White TigerBig Kiss, Bye-Bye
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Balram HalwaiEverything in this book, however sweet or seemingly innocent, is steeped in anguish and distortion. Even a Bangalore entrepreneur (kiss, usually a symbol of sorts) intimacy and a natural philosophercloseness, hears that there is a planned visit from the Chinese leader to India to learn the source becomes evidence of Indian entrepreneurial talentlove lost. Balram knows that When the story he will be told by the Indian leader will be a long way from the true story of modern Indian lifenarrator cries out internally, ''come over here and so resolveskiss me, over the course '' it is less an invitation than a desperate attempt to confirm her emotional numbness. The imagined recipient of seven nightsthis plea is Xavier, her ex-partner, to write to the Chinese premier with the story of his life and his own journey from a poor son of a rickshaw driver ghost she conjures to the head of his own businesstest her detachment.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1843547228</amazonuk>1804271934
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Matthew CondonHelene Bessette and Kate Briggs (translator)|title=The Trout OperaLili is Crying|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Judges Carrington and Thorpe recline First published in 1953 in leather armchairs on French, this novel is a timeless text which wrenches the verandah hearts of Buckley's Crossing hotel its readers just as Bessette wrenches words and watch in silence as a giant trout shuffles across sentences from their proper position on the bridge. The Judges, despite their initial prominence page and convincing back-story giving positions them a valid reason for being in Buckley's Crossingelsewhere, disjointed, will not really concern ustruncated. They are there to represent a type: a visitor to small town Australia, a fisherman from Like the citylives of her characters, a seeker after something in the Snowy that probably isn't fish. We shall, however, be concerned with the giant troutthey are often left tragically incomplete.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>038561506X</amazonuk>1804271675
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Clare MorrallJonathan Buckley|title=The Man Who DisappearedOne Boat
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I was drawn to this book straight away. Firstly''One Boat'' is a deeply introspective novella that defies traditional narrative structure, drawing the jacket cover is lovely. The subliminal message is read mereader into a contemplative realm of philosophical musings and fragmented memories flowing from our narrator and protagonist, please read meTeresa. We are introduced to Set against the Kendall family; motherevocative backdrop of a small coastal Greek town, father this work masterfully captures the magic of its setting and three childrenits power to provoke profound introspection. All leading unremarkable, rather ordinary livesTeresa herself recognises these qualities as the reason she has visited it after the death of both her parents. The fatherPrompted by her mourning, Felixher narrative voice is meditative and deeply self-aware, works hard to provide for his family. He loves them all dearly. They all love him backinviting the reader into her labyrinthine cogitations. It is a secure family unit. Until - completely out book that not only requires but inspires depth of the blue - he simply disappears. His family thought, since its narrative structure is distraught fragmentary and mystified. We all know that a person cannot simply disappear. But Felix Kendall has taken himself off the radarironically relies on analepsis for its propulsion. Why?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0340994274</amazonuk>1804271764
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Christopher IsherwoodEowyn Ivey|title=A Single ManBlack Woods Blue Sky|rating=43.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=If you've ever wanted to know what goes on inside someone's mind youBlack Woods Blue Sky''ll love this short noveltells the story of Birdie, the young mother of toddler Emaleen, first published back in 1964. We join George Falconer just at who longs for a life beyond the moment he awakes from sleep Alaskan lodge where she works as a bar waitress, a setting which enables her bad habits and witness his innermost thoughts her accidental neglect of Emaleen. Described as he goes about a typical ''wild card'', she feels stuck in her day. It all sounds pretty dull -to-day life, and yearns to cross the Wolverine river and monotonous but what makes this exciting is that George isn't just any old professor living live on the American DreamNorth Fork to fulfil her desires of a simple life surrounded by nature. When she meets Arthur Nielson, oh noa strange, taciturn and solitary man, who says hehas a cabin over there, she feels called to go - and bring Emaleen with her. Without realising it, this calling will transform hers and Emaleen's so detached from the banal normality of the world that he's almost outside of his own body at timeslives forever.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099548828</amazonuk>1472279042
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Angelica GarnettSally Rooney|title=The Unspoken TruthIntermezzo|rating=4.5|genre=Literary General Fiction|summary=I would not normally start a review with Sally Rooney has studied the biography chessboard of the author, but The Unspoken Truth life and is presented as autobiographical fiction by something of a child of the Bloomsbury Group – in fact the subtitle grandmaster at putting it into words. Her dialogue is 'A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories'gripping and so brilliantly frustrating, as her characters never quite say exactly what they feel. The blurb on Among the inside cover even identifies which character many relationships woven into this story, the central one for readers to unravel is based on the author fraternal connection—or lack thereof—between Ivan and Peter Koubek. Ivan, a socially awkward chess prodigy, contrasts sharply with his older brother Peter, a successful lawyer living in each of Dublin. Following their father's passing after a long battle with cancer, the four stories, just in case we are not surebrothers' already strained relationship faces new trials.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701184353</amazonuk>0571365469
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Amos OzFyodor Dostoyevsky|title=Rhyming Life and DeathWhite Nights
|rating=5
|genre=Literary FictionShort Stories|summary=Rhyming Love and Death As always in Dostoyevsky, the character work is a kind of philosophical love letter to literature, or perhaps more so to fictionsublime. It One is never left wondering what a book about how to write, about the compulsion to write, character is thinking or feeling because Dostoyevsky lays bare their innermost dispositions and about the strange world that the writer of fiction must live intemperaments with remarkable clarity.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099521024</amazonuk>0241619785
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Paul MurrayJames Baldwin|title=Skippy DiesGiovanni's Room|rating=34.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Life ''Giovanni's Room'' follows the narrator David, an American man living in Paris, as he navigates his torturous affair with Giovanni, an Italian bartender he meets in Seabrook College is a messgay bar. Some of the staff are young enough While David is engaged to remember their own school days thereHella, who is travelling in Spain, the real tension in the novel arises not from his infidelity but many are certainly too old for thatfrom the deeper conflict within himself. A lot of the boys are victims of ragging and bullying for being too chunky, or too smart - but some are so chunky and smart thereIt is David's a certain kudos to them. The female crippling shame and denial of the species is a thing only spied from their own school next door, and only met by selling them ritalin as a weight-control pill, or meeting them at the very rare combined school discohis sexuality that ultimately dooms his relationship with Giovanni.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0241141826</amazonuk>0141186356
}}
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=We meet the main character Jessica, or Jess as she is usually called, deep in This Italian work of feminist fiction holds an emotional black hole. She can see no light at the end air of the tunnel. And right suspense and tension from the startmoment our protagonist, Valeria Cossati, right from page onepurchases her forbidden notebook, we have a sense of the beautiful and poetic language of Cole-Adams. 'Time and I have a new arrangement. We leave each other alone.' And indeed time is not important learns about herself in this novel. We have all the time in the world would probably be the motto of the medical staff - if they had onemost intimate and revealing ways. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1849161348</amazonuk>1782278222
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Ru FreemanOttessa Moshfegh|title=A Disobedient Girl|rating=5|genre=General Fiction|summary=''A Disobedient Girl'' follows two women struggling to retain control My Year of their lives in the face of servitude. Latha is a servant girl to the affluent Vithanage family, whose daughter, Thara, is Latha's age. As children, the girls are the best of friends, but they are destined to be separated by class, which is made painfully obvious when boys come into the picture. Meanwhile, Biso serves a cruel Rest and drunken husband who beats her and terrorises her children, one of whom is another man's love child. Biso's husband murdered her lover in a hateful rage when he uncovered her affair and she realises that she must escape his house if she and her children are to live. Latha too seeks escape, but she finds it in the arms of Thara's boyfriend and this sets off a chain of events that will echo far into her future.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670917958</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Simon Robson|title=CatchRelaxation|rating=43
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Catharine's husband Tom At best, this novel is away on business in Birmingham, a scathing critique of modern society and so Catharine awakes alone for reveals the first time in their little cottage fragility of human relationships; at worst, it is the end cynical, predictable and slightly trite tale of their lanean unlikeable protagonist. They moved there This unlikely heroine, a few months previouslyslim, attractive and since then Catharine has spent her days quietly awaiting newly orphaned girl in her husband's return from work. She twenties is sure that she will figure outdisillusioned with the world, some day, what her purpose in life is. She thought it might be but resolves not to have a baby, but they have been trying for some time and lose sleep over it hasn't happened as yet. Meanwhile she waits, and thinks: in fact, and waits. In the lounge stands her piano, a stark reminder of the life she didn't manage to realise because although she studied music she found, quite quickly, that solution lies in spite of being passionate she lacked any kind of talent for it whatsoever. So, on this day, alone at home, Catharine finds herself tormented by the piano's presence and over-thinking every second of the day. She worries away at who she is, and what her life is, as her loneliness and the day itself unravel around herhibernation.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0224090232</amazonuk>1784707422
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Joe MenoMatthew Tree|title=The Great PerhapsWe'll Never Know
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Jonathan Casper faints when he sees clouds. His wife Madeline worries about everything, not least the way the pigeons that she is studying are murdering each other. Their seventeen year old daughter Amelia Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to overthrow the evil empire be different from his father, a drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of capitalism being exceptional at any of his artistic passions all failed miserably and is making her own bomb, while fourteen year old Thisbe is looking for God and praying who had endless crises of self confidence. So Tim applied himself to him. Jonathan's fatherhis studies, seventy six year old Henry, is planning cultivated his abilities rather than his disappearance. Jonathan daydreams and Madeline may be on the verge of splitting up, to the dismay of both daughtersset himself high but achievable ambitions.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0330512471</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Elizabeth KostovaB0C47LV1PC|title=The Swan ThievesFragility|author=Mosby Woods|rating=24
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=1999 – A renowned painter, Robert Oliver, goes mad, attacking Can you make a painting with a knife. He's arrested'Yo birthing person'' joke? And if you could, is the question should you make it? Or is the question if you did, and sent to a psychiatrist who would it land? The catch is also an artistthat the answer for both could well be... The psychiatrist, Andrew Marlowe, can't get his patient to talk to him, but tries to investigate what drove him to this by talking to his wife and his girlfriend, and reading some letters Oliver seems obsessed with. no.
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Atiq RahimiMosby Woods|title=The Patience StoneA Whirly Man Loses His Turn|rating=54
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Set in Afghanistan, ''The Patience StoneWest isn'' is a partly allegorical tale of a Muslim wife tending to her comatose soldier husband who has been shot in t the neckdominant force it once was. As she cares for him, for Nobody in the first time ever she West is able quite sure how to speak to him without fear mend this or even if mending it is the best course of censorship and he becomesaction. Governments are flailing. A war here, a push for herclimate action there. A feeling that nobody is in actual charge. Imagine then, like there was a man with precognition. Imagine the mythical Patience Stone to which strategic advantage in this asset; a man who can tell you tell your troubles and when what will happen given any set of circumstances. That man would be valuable, right? Perhaps the stone finally burstsmost valuable asset in history. Imagine then, you are free from your torments. But also that this man loses this might mean the Apocalypseability.What would governments do to get it back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701184167</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Joyce Carol Oates0571379559|title=A Fair MaidenThe House of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I've recently read the terrific short story collection ''The Female Of The SpeciesHouse of Broken Bricks'' also by Oates and couldn't wait to start her latest bookis the story of four people. I felt sure that I was in for a literary treat - and I was. Firstly, the book itself, a hardback with a beautifully nostalgic cover is a book loverTess Hembry's delight.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847248586</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Dai Sijie |title=Once on a Moonless Night|rating=3.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=A French female scholarroots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, studying in Chinabut instead, finds herself caught up she lives in the search for a losthouse on the riverbank, sacred text that was inscribed on an ancient scrollbuilt of broken bricks. The scroll was torn in two by Emperor Puyi years agoInsubstantial as it might look, it's stood the passage of time, storms and was lostfloods. After falling in love with a young grocer called Tumchooq Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the young woman becomes caught up delivery rounds - and to bring in tales within talessufficient money. They have twin boys - Sonny and Max, as she finds that Tumchooqthe rainbow twins. Sonny's colouring reflects his mother's Jamaican heritage. Max takes after his father found . People don't believe that they're related, much less twins and translated half of the missing scroll and became obsessed there's an assumption when Max is out with finding the other half, and soon Tumchooq too becomes embroiled in the searchhis mother that she's his nanny.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099521326</amazonuk>
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Claire North
|title=House of Odysseus
|rating=5
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= ''What could matter more than love?''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Su TongKay Chronister|title=The Boat to RedemptionDesert Creatures|rating=34|genre=Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary=Ku Dongliang and his fatherWith a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, Ku Wenxuanpost-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Whether it is a robotic takeover, are forced to live on a barge on the river following Ku Wenxuan's fall from grace. Originally believed to be the son world devoid of water or a revolutionary martyrnuclear holocaust, it this genre is eventually proved that Mr Ku was not so - as a result, his position in society takes way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a nosenew work of post-dive. Dongliang suffers as a result apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of this, finding it hard to make friends within the barge community and on shorefears that exist for humanity today. Then an orphaned girl moves onto the barges and finds It is a place in Dongliang's apparently cold heartshocking novel that still manages to find hope. Will she be able to take him out of himself? Or will she, too, turn her back on him?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>038561344X</amazonuk>1803364998
}}
{{newreviewfrontpage|isbn=1803363002|author=Iain BanksEric LaRocca|title=The Steep Approach to GarbadaleTrees Grew Because I Bled There|rating=45|genre=Literary FictionHorror|summary=Horror taps into something primeval within us. It took me is used as a while way to realise reflect our darkest emotions and how we as humans react and process them. Most horror fiction feature a ''Big Bad'', whether that Iain Banks isa home invader, most of all, a teller of tales - I would call him a story-teller had this term not became monster or a compliment-cum-invective ghost, it usually reserved for something tangible and, by the Jeffrey Archers and Dan Browns end of the modern publishing worldstory, beatable. This ability to tell stories - Eric LaRocca's ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not to plot as much as to weave like that. It is a yarn - combines with a penchant for creating appealing contexts for Banks' narratives to unfold in (this gets magnificently realised collection of short stories more interested in the world building horrors of his [[:Category:Iain M Banks|Iain Millness, grief and humiliation. Banks]] alter-ego) Horrors that linger and populating them with memorable, larger are harder to defeat than life but usually short of caricature, charactersany ''Big Bad''.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0349119287</amazonuk>
}}
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Meet Windisch. A miller in a small village''Love, he trudges through thereI'd read, was supposed to be a light and through his neighbours, and through his life, counting his days and hoursweightless feeling, but I had always longed for reasons that are not initially clear. But he does want something - he is waiting for a passport so he can leave for other climes. The perks of his job are the bags of flour he leaves by the mayorgravity''s house with regularity, as an open bribe, but there might be a bigger sacrifice to have to make.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1852421398</amazonuk>}}
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Julian BarnesMichael Grothaus|title=Staring at the SunBeautiful Shining People
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Jean's first Incident involved Uncle Leslie, hyacinths and golf tees. It's perhaps best forgotten, but Jean doesn't forget. Uncle Leslie figures large in her life - mostly on the golf course - until the War comes But fearing something and he runs away having it come to Americapass are two different things. HeAnd I's replaced by Tommy Prosserm willing to bet most of what we fear will never happen, a grounded pilot who once saw the sun rise twice in one day and excites as many questions in Jean as he ever answers. Tommy is replaced by Michael, a policeman, whom Jean eventually marriesor we can take steps to change it. He doesn't know why minks are excessively tenacious of life and he doesn't much care. But Jean does. She cares much less for the Dutch cap that Michael sent her off to obtain before the wedding and much less again for their rather disastrous adventures in the bedroom. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099540096</amazonuk>}}
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Owen SheersJennifer Saint|title=White Ravens (New Stories from the Mabinogion)Atalanta|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In the old tale, Branwen is the sister of Bendigeidfran - the giant King ''I was as worthy as any one of Britainthem. She marries the King of IrelandI would get on board that ship, who doesn't treat her wellI vowed. She manages to send Bendigeidfran a message via a tamed starling and war and killings ensue. In this new taleI would take my place, a young girl has not just walked away from her brothers who, in the wake name of the devastating foot and mouth outbreak, are despoiling their heritage by rustling and illegally slaughtering sheepgoddess. She meets an old man who tells her a story involving It was for the superstitions about the ravens in the Tower sake of London, propaganda work during World War IImy name, and an equally doomed love affairtoo. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1854115030</amazonuk>}}Atalanta''
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Elizabeth BainesAmanthi Harris|title=Too Many MagpiesBeautiful Place|rating=45
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Becoming Padma, a mother brings a whole new world young Sri Lankan, has returned to the Villa Hibiscus on the southern coast of fear into your lifeher home country. Suddenly you see the danger in every situation, and fear and trepidation can be become your constant companionsThis is a place she spent her formative years. In this novella, we meet a young mother who It is married to not a logical scientistplace she was born into, but the one she thinks of as home. They attempt How she came to control their children's futures on a scientific basisbe at the Villa, how it became her home, growing their own fruit and vegetables, giving their children nothing sugary, eating no eggs the machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the ''score'' for a whole year until any adverse affects from them were disprovedthis gentle and yet subtly violent novel. But after meeting with an enigmatic stranger our young mother begins Padma's present fails to struggle as he introduces ideas of freedom into escape her world. She begins an affair with him, begins to let things slip at home past and with much like the childrenmusical score of a film, yet finds she is still continuously haunted by that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the sense of an ever-present dangerVilla.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1844717216</amazonuk>1784631930
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Katherine May178563335X|title=Burning Out|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Violet has it all – a well-paid job, and a luxurious apartment all to herself. Everything is catered for; her meals, her clothes, and her health are all how she would like them to be. But the life she is leading is beginning to take its toll. On the verge of snapping, a drained and somewhat out-of-sorts Violet, withdraws back to her home town. There, she meets someone familiar, a ghost reminding her of how she used to be ten years earlier – a young carefree girl, full of life. Only this isn't a ghost, but a girl living the life Violet once lived – exactly the same. Haunted by the past Violet realizes history is repeating itself and is convinced events will happen again. Events that will in turn haunt the girl.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906727392</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewSea Defences|author=Tove Jansson|title=The True DeceiverHilary Taylor
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Most people of my age will have come across JanssonWhen we first meet Rachel Bird she's a trainee vicar, sitting in on a PCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the children up. Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-old Hannah and her elder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Thelma's work unwittinglydaughter-in-law won't let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, via on the televised renditions Norfolk coast, is a lovely place, but Rachel is struggling to develop a real bond with the parish - and she's in awe of the Moomin tales. The readers amongst us would vicar, Gail, but then have she's been entranced a few doing the job for more than thirty years ago to discover . Rachel and Christopher hoped that at last Thomas Teal had set about a walk on the translation into English, first of The Summer Book and beach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed. And then of a collection of short stories which were published as 'A Winter Book'Hannah went missing. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0954899571</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Daniel Kehlmann 1398515388|title=Me The Boy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and KaminskiAlison Watts (translator)
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary General Fiction|summary=After reviewing several long booksFirst of all, it's been refreshing to read such a fluent yet pared down story as 'Kaminski and Me'. In itwas the earthquake, Sebastian Zollnerdeep in the ocean floor, which created the obnoxious main charactertsunami and this, shoves himself forward in a desperate attempt to research a best seller which will re-ignite his career as an art critic. Kaminskiturn, caused the proposed subject, nuclear meltdown. The result was a fashionable painter long ago, but nowcomplete and utter devastation. The deaths were uncountable, ancient and chronically ill, has virtually slid into oblivionthe loss of livelihoods was widespread. So The fact that many pets were separated from their owners came far down the list of priorities but - six months after the secondtsunami -rate writer is on Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a loser unless dog outside a convenience store. He wasn't a dog person but the convenience store owner's comment that he can dig up some juicy details would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to hook open his car door and Tamon the art world and general publicdog jumped in.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847249892</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Hilary Dixon0989715337|title=When Rooks Speak of LovePapa on the Moon|author=Marco North
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Arthur Transcombe is a middle-aged, grey-haired, self-effacing poet''Some frogs had gotten into the well. Unremarkable really '' ''Walter stood waist- on deep in the outsidefragrant water, naked except for his beaten leather hat. He has, howeverLong strands of their eggs wove around him, managed to achieve some success sticky gray pearls with his poemstadpoles inside them. (Being a guest speaker Two of the dogs leaned over the opening and barked down at the Cheltenham Literary Festival is no mean feat)strange noise of the buckets as he filled them. He is also a babe magnet!|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904529429</amazonuk>}}''
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