|summary=Tom Finn had been a builder, but bankruptcy intervened and taxi driving provided some sort of living for him, his wife, Tess and twins Rory and Keeva. And so it might have continued but for two burglars in his home. Tom 'confronted' them - and nearly went to jail, but his conviction mean that taxi driving was no longer an option. Then a chance encounter brought him the offer of another driving job - but this one was in Phuket in Thailand - and included accommodation. There's a saying that if something seems too good to be true then it probably is, but when you're as close to the bottom as Tom Finn there comes a time when you've got to take a chance and hope that this is your lucky day.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007327811</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Camilla Macpherson
|title=Pictures at an Exhibition
|rating=3
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=A story designed around the display of individual paintings at the National Gallery during World War Two held immediate appeal for me. Alas, Claire and Rob, the central characters in the novel, did not. Claire’s extreme irrationality is jarring even within the context of the ordeal she has endured. Rob seems inconsiderate, clearly due to the barrage of irrationality he is having to live with on a daily basis. But while that is understandable, I did worry that I might be reading a novel that contained no likeable characters.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099560445</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=EL James
|title=Fifty Shades Darker
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Not a lot of time has passed since the [[Fifty Shades Of Grey by EL James|first instalment]] of Ana’s adventures with the man she calls Fifty Shades. Perhaps unusually for a follow up it’s not months or years later, in fact just a few days have gone by. Lots of things have changed, though. Successful businessman Christian is still our tortured hero and Ana, now in her first proper job, remains our befuddled heroine but they’re not Christian-and-Ana any more having parted ways at the end of book one. At the same time, a lot has stayed the same. They’re not having quite as much dirty sex as they were but the tensions are still there. He’s still incapable of letting her get on with things without interfering (you’ve got to love a guy who buys the company you work at, just to keep an eye on things). And he still has, let’s say, particular preferences when it comes to his bedroom antics. So, it seems, does Ana. With what were increasingly becoming her regular nocturnal activities now off limits, she’s started craving them. Craving things she didn’t know were possible a month or so ago. Craving things she’s aware nice girls wouldn’t…unless it’s all one big unspoken secret in the sisterhood. Craving things that, let’s be honest, a massive number of readers probably quite fancy themselves after the literary foreplay that was book 1.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099579928</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Roland Vernon
|title=The Good Wife's Castle
|rating=5
|genre=Crime
|summary=We start with a father's suicide, a child watching as he steps of the chair in the milking room with the noose around his neck. A father who died for shame.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0552775533</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Toni Morrison
|title=Home
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Toni Morrison's ''Home'' is simply a beautifully crafted novella. Set in post Korean war America, it features some familiar Morrison characteristics. Veteran Frank is suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, but is released from service with no treatment as so many were, especially if they were black no doubt. But at least he has survived unlike his two friends whom he grew up with. Frank is troubled and has his flaws, but also has dignity. He finds himself returning to the Georgia home, Lotus, he longed to escape from as a child, another typical Morrison settlement with nothing going for it apart from the goodness and dignity of the people who live there. What draws him back is the news that his younger sister, Cee, is suffering from the aftermath of some medical experimentation. It sounds grim stuff, but while life is hard, it's not a traumatically difficult read.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701186070</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Angela S Choi
|title=Hello Kitty Must Die
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=It all started with a missing hymen. If you think that’s an odd way to start a review, bear in mind that’s exactly how this book starts. Very first line in fact. Fiona Wu is a 28 year old lawyer living in San Francisco. Successful, self assured but still living at home thanks to her Chinese roots and her over protective parents. She’d rather hang out with her pet parakeet than nice Asian boys, but since her parents are desperate to get her married off to one of the latter, she doesn’t always get her own way. An appointment at a doctor’s office with a view to sorting out the aforementioned missing hymen leads to a chance reunion with a criminally-minded old school friend (last seen setting another pupil on fire), and then the fun really begins.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099570491</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Madeleine Tobert
|title=The Sea On Our Skin
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary='Amalie Matete woke up alone on the first day of her life as a married woman…her battered body…the bruises on her thighs'. Amalie had scarcely been prepared for this. Only sixteen, she'd spent all of her time in the village and was marrying a stranger, a man who had seen her only once. But she was lucky. With no father to give her away, she was lucky to be being married at all, her mother tried to tell her. On her wedding day Amalie had been frightened by the storm. It was a bad omen she said. Just a storm, her mother said.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444734113</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=EL James
|title=Fifty Shades Of Grey
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=When college student Ana steps in at the last minute to cover an interview of a local tycoon for the uni paper, she never imagines how what is supposed to be a one off meeting will change her life completely over the months to come. She has no plans or expectations to see him again, but Christian Grey knows what he wants and takes great pains to get it, so with Ana now next on his list of target acquisitions, she has very little hope of escaping unscathed. Swiftly realising that he is not your average wealthy bachelor, Ana falls head first into a foreign and confusing new world she has no clue how to navigate. With pressure on to sign on the dotted line or leave and never return, Ana has to decide how far she’s willing to go to follow her heart, and when she should listen to the screaming voices in her head instead.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099579936</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Irving
|title=In One Person
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=''In One Person'' is a sensitive story of sexual identity, narrated by a bisexual writer who is now in his later years, recalling not only his own coming to terms with his sexuality and attraction to men, women and transgenders while at school in a New England school, but also his later years and the devastating impact of the AIDS virus in 1980s America. At times the content is quite graphic, but John Irving captures the outsider's feelings beautifully in this tale of secrecy in a confusing world of identity.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857520962</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Wiley Cash
|title=A Land More Kind Than Home
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=In a small town in western North Carolina there was a storefront church with newspapers across the windows so that no one could see in. Adelaide Lyle remembered to days when it was a store, as well as the days when she used to attend the church regularly, but after a woman died in a 'healing' ritual which involved a snake and her body was left in her garden she decided that she couldn't attend and nor could she allow the town's children to run the risk. For a while this separation worked reasonably well until a series of incidents, many quite small in themselves, provoked a tragedy.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857520806</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Andrew Nicoll
|title=If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The story at the heart of Andrew Nicoll's ''If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead'' is bizarre but not entirely of Nicoll's own creation. It is narrated by German-born Otto Witte, who is rapidly recording a strange time in his life while Allied bombs are falling in World War Two Germany, although the events that he relates go back to 1913 when Otto was an acrobat working in a travelling circus currently in Buda, or perhaps Pest - he's not quite sure. In addition to his acrobatic skills, he is also blessed with an impressive set of whiskers which make him the dead ringer for the newly appointed Turkish King of Albania. If only he can get there before the claimant to the crown, perhaps he can steal the country and complete an unlikely rise in status. In the company of his pal, Max, a strongman, a blind mind-reader and his beautiful daughter, an exotic dancer and a purloined camel, what could possibly go wrong?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857384937</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Asko Sahlberg
|title=The Brothers
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=We're in the family home of Erik, in Finland, in 1809. It's large enough to have been the most impressive farmstead when his mother was taken there as a young bride, and she still lives there, with an elderly retainer, Erik, Erik's untrusting wife and some other servants. One night the brother of the family, Henrik, returns, and all the bad blood gets spilled. Not just about a neighbour's horse and hotheaded plans for it, not just over a marriage, and not even about the fact that when Sweden and Russia fought over Finland and the territory changed hands, the brothers were on opposing sides.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>095628406X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jennifer Egan
|title=The Invisible Circus
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Set in 1978, 18-year old Phoebe is living with her mother in San Francisco. Her father died some years ago, before her elder sister, Faith, a charismatic idealist and true child of the 1960s left for Europe where she died in 1970. Faith was always her father's favourite, While Phoebe's older brother, Barry, is now a computer millionaire, on leaving high school Phoebe decides on a whim to follow her sister's path to Europe in the hope of finding what happened in Italy and to finally understand her beloved sister's actions.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780331223</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kirsten Tranter
|title=A Common Loss
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=There were five friends - Dylan, Brian, Tallis, Cameron and Elliot - but then Dylan was killed in a road accident and the remaining four had to come to terms with how the dynamics of the group had changed. Dylan had always been the fixer, the solver and the mediator. He'd been the one the other four had gone to when they had problems because he'd always come up with something and it was usually an ingenious solution. It wasn't until after Dylan's death that the four friends realised that Dylan knew their dirtiest secrets - and that someone else had access to all the information.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857382756</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Paul Broderick
|title=The Bankruptcy Diaries
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=In 2000, Paul Livingson graduated from university and got his first proper grown up job. By 2007 he had filed for bankruptcy. With no failed businesses, unfortunate property depreciation or poor stock market investments in between you might be at a loss to see how he ended up there, until you read his diary of those years and it all becomes crystal clear.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956511937</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Francis Gilbert
|title=The Last Day of Term
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=It's the last day of term at the Gilda Ball Academy, and English teacher Martin can't wait for the holiday to start. Shaken by the death of his friend Jack in a riot at the school, he's failed to notice his marriage falling to pieces and his relationship with his son deteriorating. Just when he thinks things can't get any worse, an anonymous pupil accuses him of inappropriate sexual conduct.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906021511</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Evonne Wareham
|title=Never Coming Home
|rating=3.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Kaz Elmore has almost come to terms with her daughter's death. She died while on holiday in America with her father (Kaz's ex husband) and her ashes have been scattered on the river. As tragic as it is, Kaz has no alternative but to accept that her daughter is never coming back. However, one day she receives a visit from a man called Devlin, who witnessed the accident and was holding Jamie when she died. His sole intention is to provide some comfort for Kaz by telling her that her daughter was not alone but when he spots photographs of Jamie, he realises that she is not the child who died in his arms.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906931704</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Andrea Eames
|title=The Cry of the Go-Away Bird
|rating=3
|genre=General Fiction
|summary='The Cry of the Go-Away Bird' is the debut novel from Andrea Eames. It revolves around Elise, a white Zimbabwean girl living through her teens on the eve of the Mugabe-sponsored farm invasions at the beginning of this century. The author herself grew up in Zimbabwe before moving to New Zealand with her family at the age of seventeen and there is a strong sense of memoir and personal experience in the novel, which has both positive and negative effects on the narrative.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846553733</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alexander McCall Smith
|title=The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Alexander McCall Smith makes it look so easy, churning out book after delightful book that continue to delight and amuse his loyal readers. His writing seems effortless, and in this story, once again, the characters remain the wonderful friends we have always known and expected them to be, as if they really are alive and living these stories somewhere and AMS is simply transcribing them for our pleasure.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0349123136</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Rosie Dastgir
|title=A Small Fortune
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Harris Anwar is truly a man who is split between two worlds. He's a British Pakistani, proud of his Eastern roots, but when he came to the UK he changed his name from Haaris - with a long, flat vowel - to the more acceptable Harris and his clothing was that favoured by an English gentleman. He's proud and he would say many reasons to be proud. Some of the things of which he's proud are relatively small - the vacuum cleaner which he's had for twenty years might not work particularly well, but he's proud that he's hung on to it. He's proud of his car, the central heating which he installed himself and most of all he's proud of his daughter.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857383736</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Nicholls
|title=One Day
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=I knew within the first ten pages that I was going to love ''One Day''. It is the only book that has kept me up at night, distracted me throughout the day and woken me up early in the morning. I couldn't put it down, and didn't want to either. I have always found it difficult to settle on a favourite type of story, or even a specific genre that I like, but this novel made me realise that what I want in a book is realism. As Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley enjoyed their late night conversation in the opening moments of the book, Nicholls pulled me into his world.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340896981</amazonuk>
}}
