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==General fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Nikki Dudley
|title=Ellipsis
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Both the title and book cover are slick and glossy. Can the contents live up to this positive image? Straight away the reader is drawn into Daniel's life ... but the clock is ticking. He will soon be spoken about in the past tense. He dies and leaves many, many questions that his immediate family struggle to answer. But as the story progresses we discover that secrets have been kept for a long time. Why? Too disturbing to reveal?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907230106</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Austin Wright
|summary=It's rural France, and 2000 is barely begun, when hunters come across a spread of human corpses in the mountains. Several families, all in the same cult, seem to have killed themselves on their path to wherever. If so, this is a problem, for the last time it happened, in Switzerland a few years previous, nobody could work out why – and who was there to dispose of some of the evidence. This isn't a problem for the policeman involved, as he fell desperately in love with the investigative judge in collaborating on the initial case. Combining again, they see a link with everybody involved in both cases, a famous conductor /composer.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408807041</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Sylvie Nickels
|title=Long Shadows
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=We first met Minkie and Mike in [[Another Kind of Loving by Sylvie Nickels|Another Kind of Loving]] when Mike, a reporter in war-torn Sarajevo rescued Jasminka from an orphanage and brought her back to leafy Oxfordshire. He and his wife, Sara, fostered the girl, who was known as Minkie because few people could pronounce her real name. They gave her love, security and the opportunity to turn into a beautiful, confident young woman, but whose heart was torn between the family who had done so much for her and her native Sarajevo.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0951867024</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Paolo Giordano
|title=The Solitude of Prime Numbers
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''The Solitude of Prime Numbers'' follows the lives of Alice and Mattia from childhood to middle age. Alice is a wilful anorexic, scarred by a childhood skiing accident and an overbearing father. Mattia is an reclusive self-harmer trying to live with the guilt of having been responsible for his disabled twin sister's death. Their paths cross at a school friend's party during a painful adolescence and their lives are destined to intertwine throughout the coming years, despite the chronic awkwardness of their courtship.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0552775983</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Kathryn Stockett
|title=The Help
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Jackson, Mississippi: 1960. The talk at the bridge club and the tennis club is of what Jackie Kennedy is wearing. They're white women, of course and they're free to play because a coloured woman will be looking after the children, doing the shopping and cleaning the house. They're trusted to bring the children up, but they're not trusted to be honest about the silver. Aibileen is raising her seventeenth white child but something hardened in her heart when her son died whilst the white bosses looked the other way. They took his body to the coloureds' hospital and rolled it off the back of the truck and left.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141039280</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Lauren Oliver
|title=Before I Fall
|rating=5
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=Samantha 'Sam' Kingston is, in many ways, your typical American high schooler whose concerns are pretty predictable: boys, friends, fashion, weird parents, annoying little sisters. Today it's Cupid Day, a chance to show off just how ''In'' you are at school, as measured by the number of roses you're sent, but Sam's not too worried about that. She knows she's part of a group who, by most definitions, would be called popular, and though sometimes inside she might feel on the inside a little like an imposter, on the outside, well, she's the definition of ''in''.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340980893</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Olga Grushin
|title=The Concert Ticket
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=''The Concert Ticket'' follows the lives of a family in Soviet Russia who have grown desperately distant from one another. Sergei, the father, is a frustrated musician who longs to play the pre-revolutionary masterpieces of composers like Igor Selinsky but is forced to play the kind of patriotic ditties he despises. His schoolteacher wife, Anna, longs for his love, but is never quite able to get his attention with her shy gestures. Their shiftless son, Alexander, has quietly given up going to school and spends his days hanging around the park, consorting with undesirables. Also living in their house is Anna's silent, elderly mother.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918482</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Julie Cohen
|title=Nina Jones and the Temple of Gloom
|rating=4.5
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=A sign of a good book, for me, often relates to how easily I can put it down. And then how much I want to pick it back up again. Nina Jones was a particular challenge for me as after reading it for an hour whilst my toddler napped I kept my thumb in the page whilst getting her out of bed, snuck her downstairs still saving my page, put on Cbeebies, and then sat next to her on the sofa to carry on reading for at least another hour, if not a little bit more than that. I then kept it in the kitchen so I could sneak a few more pages in between stirring the spaghetti. And then once my daughter was in bed I went on to absently ignore my poor, tired, over-worked husband (who got bored and went for a bath) so that I could read on to the end of the story. I found myself mentally yelling at a fictional character (I hope it was mentally and I wasn't actually shouting out loud...we have very thin walls), I swooned over the hero, sniggered often and I even cried a little bit too. So, a book that induces such family neglect and an emotional roller coaster of emotions is definitely a good read!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755341414</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Elizabeth Speller
|title=The Return of Captain John Emmett
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Laurence Bartram has survived the war, but his life has changed dramatically. It will never be the same again. It's almost as if he doesn't recognize himself. Domestic life is now non-existent and he has no-one to please but himself. He is unsettled and edgy. War has obviously left its mark. He retreats graciously and wonders what he'll do with the rest of his life.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844086070</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Nick Hornby
|title=Juliet, Naked
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=A clever, comic delight, pitch-perfect, astutely observed, particularly insightful, must-read. Crumbs. Whatever else is there to say about Nick Hornby's latest book that isn't already plastered on this newly-published paperback edition? I can only report that ''Juliet,'' ''Naked'' bowled me over with yet another Hornby strike.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141020644</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Dan Rhodes
|title=Little Hands Clapping
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The first character to mention in this book is a moth. It's a human moth, drawn to the flame that is a museum of suicide - a supposedly cautionary, life-affirming, memento mori, somewhere in Germany. Its curator is an old hand at lonely, unloved museums, fresh from an art gallery in an airport - it didn't take off - who notices the noise of the latest suicide to happen in the museum, and goes right back to sleep. A spider crawls into his mouth and gets eaten.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847675298</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Robin Cook
|title=Intervention
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Although Robin Cook has written many books, ''Intervention'' is the first one that I have read - I'm a Robin Cook 'virgin.'
This is a big book in many respects. It's a classic, glossy 'coffee table' edition; it's a big, satisfying read and it's a multi-layered book in that it covers many current-day topics which have their roots in history. In fact, this book is so multi-dimensional that, you could argue, there are several books within this book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0230743633</amazonuk>
}}

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