|summary=Grace McCleen's debut novel, ''The Land of Decoration'' paints an original, unsettling, sometimes dark and generally rather wonderful picture. Narrated by ten year old Judith, raised by her father who is a fundamental religious follower of the end of the world is nigh variety, it looks at bullying, both at school and in more general society, faith and the possible rejection thereof and the strength of childhood imagination.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>070118681X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Marlene S Lewis
|title=Ruth
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The late 1950s saw a lot of changes in society but they were late in coming to Ruth's home in the Owen Stanley range in Papua New Guinea. Ruth, the only daughter of plantation owner John Madison, was still in her late teens and away at boarding school for much of the year, but when she returned home one of the first people she wanted to see was her great friend Tommy. They'd grown up together but there was no possibility of the relationship being taken any further as Tommy - despite being light skinned - was the son of one of the black plantation workers and certain 'standards' were expected of Ruth.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848766238</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Annabelle R Charbit
|title=A Life Lived Ridiculously
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Maxine is from a Jewish family who think that as her 20s are nearing their end, she should be married. Maxine, for her part, hasn't found anyone to interest her and is more concerned with combining her job and her studies and getting away from the yoke of her parents. She is also worried about her possessions and worries that she has too many and that they make her flat look untidy. She just can't get her flat organised the way she likes it, either, with the light not being quite right and never quite being able to decide which room her television should be in.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0984642862</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Henning Mankell
|title=The Troubled Man
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Hakan von Enke was a retired naval officer and a man of routine. Each morning he went for a long walk in the forest near his Stockholm home, but one day he failed to return. It's a long way from Ystad, Kurt Wallander's home town and the only reason he became involved in the case was the fact that von Enke's son Hans was the partner of Wallander's daughter Linda. Wallander became concerned about von Enke some months before when they had a long discussion at his seventy-fifth birthday party. He'd seemed worried and wary of a stranger in the street. Von Enke's disappearance hit the family hard - and then his wife disappeared as well.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548402</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sam Bourne
|title=Pantheon
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The year is 1940. Oxford don James Zennor wants to serve his country, but due to an injury sustained while fighting in the Spanish Civil War he's rejected as unfit. When his wife and young son disappear, though, the trail leads to America in a journey which will plunge him into a world of secret societies, clandestine deals, and the chance to play his part in the war effort after all. If he survives...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007413637</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Bethan Roberts
|title=My Policeman
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The story opens with two schoolfriends Sylvie and Marion doing what teenagers do best - talking and giggling about boys. Sylvie has a rather dishy and handsome older brother called Tom - and Marion has developed a bit of a crush on him. But it's nothing to worry about, she'll grow out of it. Except she doesn't. Even although, deep down, she has misgivings about this rather lukewarm romance. She's actually sizzling hot for some action, a bit of kissing, a bit of harmless snogging - but Tom's the one who is lukewarm. Why?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701185848</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Suzanne Bugler
|title=The Child Inside
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Rachel Morgan feels that she does not fit in anywhere. Certainly not with all of the other mums at her son Jono's posh school. Certainly not with all the happy jolly families on the beaches when they are on holiday. And most of all, she no longer feels that she fits in with her own little family. Nothing ever feels right and she continually feels isolated on the outside looking in. Of course, these feelings lead to an increasing sense of dissatisfaction which she can only deal with by dwelling on what she perceives as her happier past.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330510916</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jack Sheffield
|title=Educating Jack
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=September 1982 sees the beginning of Jack Sheffield's sixth year as head of Ragley-on-the-Forest village school and some of the village regulars are realising that this is going to be a year to remember too. Nora Pratt has been in the coffee shop for a quarter of a century now. Ronnie Smith decides that the world of employment might be for him after all - but is sacked from one job after a matter of seconds. At the cinema it's ET who's pulling in the crowds and Prince William comes into the world along with the 20p piece (well - not at ''exactly'' the same time), but it's Jack Sheffield who is going to face the biggest change.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0593065697</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tony Ross
|title=A Fairy Tale
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=In Balaclava Street Bessie was bored. Even her book wasn't helping. It was about fairies and she didn't believe in them, ''obviously''. And even if they did exist they'd have more sense than to live in the gloomy streets around the mill, wouldn't they? Playing with her ball in the back yard she encountered her next-door neighbour, Mrs Leaf and a strange friendship developed between the old woman and the young girl. It was difficult for Bessie to work out if Mrs Leaf actually believed in fairies, but it seemed strange that as Bessie got older, Mrs Leaf seemed to get younger. And who ''exactly'' was Mrs Leaf?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849393559</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jon McGregor
|title=This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The clue is in the Christopher Brookmyre-styled title. If the events, characters and circumstances in these stories are known to you, then you have my sympathies. A man causes an embarrassment trying to watch his daughter's first school nativity play. Another has a phobia of eggs containing an avian foetus when he puts knife and fork to them. There's a car crash here - and there, a drowning, some arson, some theft... and a lot of clues that point to some national disaster. Take all those clues as one and you eventually see this is more than just a collection of disparate short stories, but a very fractured, obfuscated novel.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408809265</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Wendy Jones
|title=The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=It's Spring 1924 in South Wales, and young undertaker Wilfred is going to learn the hard way how serious the trivial can be. Fascinated by a girl's dress - worn very seductively by Grace, who he has met but twice as an adult - he blurts out a marriage proposal. As much as wants to take it back, she won't let him. He tries to move on, leaving her disappointed, especially when he falls for the daughter of a man he buries, but... There are things dangerously spoken, dangerously left unsaid, and a complex web of divided loyalties and enforced connections, in this brilliant debut novel.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780330561</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Karen Harper
|title=Shakespeare's Mistress
|rating=2
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=
The conceit of ''Shakespeare's Mistress'' is that Shakespeare was married to Anne Whateley the day before he was married to Anne Hathaway, and Anne W remained the love of his life, with an affair (if you can have an affair with your 'wife') continued in London where the same Anne was also the famed ''dark lady'' of his sonnets. There is some basis for this theory in that the parish records do show a mysterious entry into the register for just such a contract the day before the Hathaway marriage but although the author claims this is 'faction', it's very much at the fiction end of that scale and is really a 'what if?' piece.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091940427</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sue Townsend
|title=The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The country might be at war over the Falklands but life is hardly straight-forward in the Mole household. Adrian's parents are back together after both had disastrous affairs and it's not long before Adrian is shocked to learn that his mother is pregnant. He's equally shocked to see his father helping Doreen (a.k.a. the 'stick insect') along a path which isn't particularly slippy, although he does notice that she seems to have put on quite a bit of weight. Pandora Braithwaite is as fickle, but adorable, as ever and Adrian's hormones are still playing hop-scotch with his brain. So, what's new?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141046430</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Susan Hill
|title=A Kind Man
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Meet Eve, and her husband, the title character, Tommy. She's at a bit of a sticky wicket in life, for however much they want a baby, her sister and his feckless husband churn out son after son after son, and go no lengths at all to love them. So when Eve and Tommy do at last have a child, it's a tragedy for it to die when only three years old. But in this plot, which you'll thank me for not going into further, there will be a lot more swings and roundabouts, of torment and ecstasy, doldrums and delights, hell and heaven, to come.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099555441</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Niven
|title=The Second Coming
|rating=4
|genre=Humour
|summary=God has come back from a holiday and has some catching up to do. What’s been happening on Earth for the last couple of hundred years? The realisation hits him hard... it makes him sick in fact. So what’s the answer? To quote the religious cliché, Jesus is. After a board meeting with the senior saints, God decides that his son must be torn away from jamming with Hendrix to go back to the streets of the world to remind the sinners of the way.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099535521</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=R J Palacio
|title=Wonder
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=August Pullman was born with a rare genetic defect that has caused extreme facial disfiguration. He has undergone 27 surgeries since he was born and has always been vulnerable to illness. In order to deal with his medical needs and to shield him from the staring and cruelty of the world, Auggie has been home-schooled by his parents for his entire life. But Auggie is stronger now and all of that is about to change. Auggie is about to enter school for the first time – and he’s petrified. ‘Wonder’ is the story of Auggie’s first year at Beecher Prep and his first journey alone into the outside world. But can he confront the challenges that wait for him there and convince his classmates, new friends, family and himself that, underneath his unusual appearance, he is just the same as everybody else?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0370332288</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kaui Hart Hemmings
|title=The Descendants
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=On the face of it Matt King is very lucky. He's descended from one of Hawaii's largest landowners and is a wealthy man as well as being an attorney. He's married to the flighty, flirtatious Joanie and has two daughters, teenager Alex, a model who might just have a bit of a drug problem and ten year old Scottie. She's feisty, clever and - for me - stole the book. Have you ever noticed that when luck changes it doesn't do it in baby steps? It does it in ''lumps''. Joanie is involved in a powerboat accident and sinks into an irreversible coma as a result of a head injury. But there's more piling up. Matt discovers that Joanie has been having an affair. Does the man who's been - er - enjoying his wife have the right to say his goodbyes too?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099570246</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chris Womersley
|title=Bereft
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Quinn Walker, a young Australian man fresh from fighting on the European front in World War One, returns to the very town he was drummed out of ten years before, after being accused of raping and killing his own younger sister. Two things have beaten him to the small settlement - one, the global flu pandemic; two a telegram saying he died bravely in action earlier in the war. And the less you know of what he meets and does back in Flint the better, the more to keep this fresh and brilliant book's many intrigues as secret as they were for me.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857386549</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Helen Schulman
|title=This Beautiful Life
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Richard and Liz are new in town which is always a bummer, except this town is Manhattan so really nothing else could ever compare. They’ve only moved from upstate New York but it seems a world away now. Liz has given up her post at the university to concentrate on kids Coco and Jake and is finding juggling their social lives a full time job in itself but is just about making a space for herself among the other mothers at the school gates. Things are going ok. And then, one day, their nice, comfortable world starts to crumble. Jake receives an explicit email from a classmate and in disbelief, forwards it straight on to a friend. Except rather than coming back to him with advice on what the heck to do next, the friend chooses to send it on to another friend, who does the same. Round and round it goes, round the school, round the city, round the online world. Everyone knows where it came from and soon Jake’s academic future, his father’s career and his whole family’s social standing are hanging in the balance.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857896237</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Courtney Sullivan
|title=Maine
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The Kellehers' beach-front holiday home in Maine was built on a plot of land won in a bar-room bet at the end of World War II. It's not in the same league as the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port but there are a couple of substantial properties on the plot and there's still room to spare. It's a place of indulgence, secrets and the sort of burning cruelty which you only get in families who care for each other - some of the time. ''Maine'' is essentially the story of a summer at the property - but the seeds of what happens were, of course, planted long ago.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>085789496X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chad Harbach
|title=The Art of Fielding
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=''The Art of Fielding'' is basically a US-style campus novel featuring baseball. There are similarities in style between this and many of John Irving's works, with baseball substituting for Irving's wrestling focus. This, to the UK-reader, raises the first potential barrier as we are, as a rule, largely ignorant of the US fixation with the intricacies of baseball. Certainly you don't need an in depth knowledge to appreciate this story - it is really a story of friendship, ambition and the sporting dreams of youth - but despite a loose understanding of the sport I felt that I would have benefitted from more knowledge particularly towards the end when there is a climactic baseball match. You kind of get the point, but I certainly felt that I was missing out on a little of the tension, in much the same way I'd expect a US reader to be perplexed if the story had been based on say, cricket. It's a minor flaw though and it would be a shame if potential readers dismissed it for this reason.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007374445</amazonuk>
}}
