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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]{{adsense2}}__NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Alexander MaksikJeremy Cooper|title=A Marker to Measure DriftDiscord|rating=3.5|genre=CrimeLiterary Fiction|summary=Jacqueline roams the beaches Discord: a lack of the Greek islands offering massages for money to ward off starvation. It helps but hunger is always with heragreement or harmony (as between persons, lurking alongside the memory of a former life in Liberia and the mind's ear voice of her mother. Jacqueline is at least alive and existingthings, but at what cost?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848548052</amazonuk>}}or ideas)
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{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=The Sorrow of AngelsPolly Barton|authortitle=Jon Kalman StefanssonWhat Am I, A Deer?|rating=3.54
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Our decidedly unheroic main character has been at the café for three weeks now, so we are following on very closely from [[Heaven and Hell by Jon Kalman Stefansson|Heaven Polly Barton's debut novel is an intellectually playful yet emotionally exposed work that uses translation as both subject and Hell]]governing metaphor. After the tragedy and soul-searching of that first bookThe narrator, he seems settled in the ridiculous family that has formed around him there, finding employmentnewly relocated from London to Berlin, enjoying works translating video games into Japanese through the literatureprocess of localisation, yet being very intrigued by the female bodyrewriting language until it feels comfortably familiar to a new audience. The man who is still young enough to be known only Barton treats this as ''the boy'' might have latched on to stability a paradoxical act: arguably, in striving for onceuniversality, language is endlessly repackaged, and replaced the family and best friend he had lostits originality at risk of disappearing altogether. But everything is restless in From this environment, and once again he might just the novel opens out into a wider, resonant question: to what extent do we translate ourselves in order to be tempted to go on a journeyunderstood, with another male companionaccepted, despite the harshness of the surrounds.or loved?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0857051652</amazonuk>1804272175
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=Heaven Maria Stepanova and HellSasha Dugdale (Translator)|authortitle=Jon Kalman StefanssonThe Disappearing Act
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=IcelandDespite her anonymisation of place names and people, a hundred years agoStepanova's message in this short work of autofiction is unmistakable. From a place that is A novelist named M travels from B (ostensibly Berlin) to the very definition town of rural and remote, F for a small fishing boat leaves for four hours' hard row literary festival she is to be a profitable bankguest speaker at. It carries six men on the way outDetoured by erratic train schedules and nudged by forces beyond her control, and five on the way backher journey slowly bends toward a traveling circus. The deceased is the best friend – or perhaps only friend – Swept up in this series of the main characterevents, M eventually offers to step in for a circus performer who is still young enough to merely be known has unexpectedly left the show. The train functions as ''boy''. When he returns to port he enters an almost Camus-like semi-existence, wondering just how much life is an answera motif of transience and impermanence, while the circus embodies the reshaping of identity and for whata retreat into fantasy, after an impulse that lies at the tragedy he has witnessedvery heart of the novel form itself.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1849164061</amazonuk>1804272329
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|isbn=295967572X|title=The SonPale Pieces|author=Philipp MeyerG M Stevens|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary= Our unnamed narrator is about to begin a train journey with his companion Django. Where they're going and what the purpose of this journey is, is uncertain. Django found the tickets ''on the floor somewhere'' and has persuaded our narrator to accompany him. Why not? Not much else is clear either - but we are probably in the past as the pair travel to the station by coach and the train is a steam locomotive.}}{{Frontpage|author=Makenna Goodman|title=Helen of Nowhere
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Philipp Meyer's second novelIt could be argued that the pervading theme of this book is malaise - a hard-to-place feeling that something in your life is not quite right. The protagonist, a disgraced professor on the brink of losing both his career and his relationship, ''The Sonembodies this feeling. However,'' Goodman counteracts his discomfort with a force which is an epicseductive, multi-generational saga of Texas liferadical and unnerving: Helen. Tracing The connection between Helen and the McCullough family from protagonist is indirect yet intimate. As the middle former owner of the nineteenth century to the present day, Meyer joins those writing todaycountryside house he's masterpieces of American 'dirty realism': Ron Rashconsidering, Helen represents a volta in his life, [[:Category:David Vann|David Vann]]her past tied to his potential fresh start. The realtor who shows the protagonist around the house shares stories about Helen, Richard Ford and especially Cormac McCarthy. Like McCarthydescribes her as 's ''Blood Meridianan entity that is pure consciousness,beyond form'' ''The Son'' is a gory Western that transcends a simplistic cowboys-versus-Indians dichotomy to draw broader conclusions about . Although she lives in an assisted living facility now, Helen has powers beyond comprehension which the reader gets the universality of violence in a nihilistic worldsense are not altogether innocuous.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0857209426</amazonuk>1804272205
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Donal RyanOlga Tokarczuk|title=The Spinning HeartHouse of Day, House of Night|rating=45
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary='My father still lives back 'What's the road past the weir good of a world that keeps changing like that? How can one go on calmly living in the cottage I was reared in. I go there every day to see is he dead and every day he lets me down. He hasnit?'t yet missed a day of letting me down.'
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Natasha SolomonsThea Lenarduzzi|title=The Gallery of Vanished HusbandsTower
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=On her thirtieth birthday Juliet Montague went out to buy a fridge for the princely sum of twenty-one guineas. She'd saved hard for it - and her parents had given her 'How unctuous are the final few pounds - but then Juliet did something impulsive. Instead fats of buying a fridge she commissioned a portrait of herself and so began her involvement in the post-war art scene. Juliet wasnanother't - by any stretch of the imagination - an artists life, but she had a startling ability to spot a ''good'how dizzying their sugars in our bloodstream' picture. It was simply something which she ''knew'', much as she had known for certain that her husband had left for good on the day he didn't return home as expected.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444736345</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=Unfaithfully YoursJon Fosse and Damion Searls (translator) |authortitle=Nigel WilliamsVaim
|rating=4
|genre=General Literary Fiction|summary=When Nigel Williams first really burst on to ''All was strange''... This haunting phrase encapsulates the best-seller list, a couple pervading sense of decades ago, it was with a book otherworldliness which permeates this story set in Wimbledon that really quite tickled Vaim, a younger me – and my mother. But then he produced two more fictional fishing village in the same series, and we soon decided he was a bit of a one-trick pony, and Norway which paradoxically could never be sure how much of the trilogy we'd read, or be too eager to read not feel more. Flash forward, real for Jatgeir and Williams has certainly branched out – his setting this time is Putney. Wimbledon Common is now Putney HeathEline, and so on. But here he provides an epistolatory novel – and if there's one kind of novel to make me prick up my ears it is one built from letters. It is the blatant two-and-fro timing of the narrative, and the succinctness that characters are formed with, that strike me as obvious benefits of such a book – and Unfaithfully Yours has those and many moreprotagonists caught in its melancholic current.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1472106741</amazonuk>1804271829
}}
{{newreview|title=Russian StoriesFrontpage|author=Francesc SeresClaire-Louise Bennett|rating=5|genre=Short Stories|summarytitle=This brilliant and varied collection of short stories is the product of a current academic interest in cross-cultural translation. Francisco Guillen Serés is a Catalan professor of Art History from Aragon. A Russophile, he has travelled widely to collect stories from those writing during the past hundred years of Russian history. These have been translated into Catalan and then into English. These unusual and delightful storiesBig Kiss, some twenty one of them written by five writers read fluently and engagingly. They form an informative tapestry of Soviet and postBye-Soviet life, moving back in time with the older, earlier writers like Bergchenko, who died in the siege of Stalingrad, at the end. Ranging over mythic and symbolic tales to realistic portrayals of personal relationships; love trysts in St Petersburg, ferocious bears in the deep heart of the Taiga to the perils of becoming lost in continuous orbit in space. All aspects are impressively recounted.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>085705158X</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|title=The Parrots|author=Filippo BolognaBye |rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=When confronted with the topic of parrotsEverything in this book, most people would describe them as tamed tropical birds that are taught to repeat simple phraseshowever sweet or seemingly innocent, having no particular intelligence to engender an originality of their ownis steeped in anguish and distortion. Filippo Bologna has not in fact written Even a book about birdskiss, but about writers - in fact, three writers. Just as the Neo-Pagans have usually a liking of the Triple Goddesses symbol of The Maiden, The Mother intimacy and The Cronecloseness, our three writers are similarly split into The Beginner, The Writer, and The Masterbecomes evidence of love lost. All three of these novelists are battling it When the narrator cries out for The Prizeinternally, a prestigious award that would revitalise the career of The Master''come over here and kiss me, legitimize the efforts of The Beginner and assure The Writer a place in the annals of history. The setting of Rome '' it is utilised to provide both less an invitation than a stunning backdrop and one that is sympathetic desperate attempt to the mood of our charactersconfirm her emotional numbness. The stories imagined recipient of our three protagonists are interwoven in a delightfully clear fashion; Bologna's prose this plea is delicate and descriptiveXavier, but not at the sacrifice of pacing. The stage is set; the characters have learned their lines. There is just one problem... out of the three writersher ex-partner, none of them deserves a ghost she conjures to win The Prizetest her detachment.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1908968192</amazonuk>1804271934
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=In The Dutch MountainsHelene Bessette and Kate Briggs (translator)|authortitle=Cees NooteboomLili is Crying
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=OftenFirst published in 1953 in French, when asked if what I’m reading this novel is a good book I hesitate before answeringtimeless text which wrenches the hearts of its readers just as Bessette wrenches words and sentences from their proper position on the page and positions them elsewhere, disjointed, trying to decide what truncated. Like the asker really means. Do they mean is it exciting? Funny? Full lives of interesting her characters? Recently, someone asked me that and when I hesitated they gave me this as a clarifier: “Are you better off for having read it?”. In this instance, yes. I think I am. However, despite coming away from this book with a strong positive feeling about it, it’s also are often left me a little befuddledtragically incomplete.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1782067191</amazonuk>1804271675
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=Every PromiseJonathan Buckley|authortitle=Andrea BajaniOne Boat
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Italian writer, Andrea Bajani's ''Every PromiseOne Boat'' is narrated by Pietro. His partner, Sara, has left him due to their inability to have a babydeeply introspective novella that defies traditional narrative structure, but soon she finds herself pregnant after drawing the reader into a one night stand contemplative realm of philosophical musings and fragmented memories flowing from our narrator and reliant on Pietro's mother for adviceprotagonist, Teresa. Meanwhile Pietro meets Olmo, an elderly man who lives in their old family apartment, who reminds Pietro Set against the evocative backdrop of his own Grandfathera small coastal Greek town, Mario, who, like Olmo, served in Mussolini's ill-fated Russian campaign. Olmo persuades Pietro to go to Russia to visit this work masterfully captures the scenes of some magic of its setting and its power to provoke profound introspection. Teresa herself recognises these qualities as the photographs he reason she has to try to come to terms with visited it after the pastdeath of both her parents. It's a story about the pastPrompted by her mourning, the present and the future her narrative voice is meditative and deeply self-aware, inviting the struggle for one man to make sense of thisreader into her labyrinthine cogitations. It's packed with surpassingly detailed imagery and Bajani is at times breathtakingly unflinching in exposing the vulnerability a book that not only requires but inspires depth of his narrator. Howeverthought, it since its narrative structure is very much a slow burn of a book fragmentary and it's not always an easy book to readironically relies on analepsis for its propulsion.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0857051466</amazonuk>1804271764
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Andrew PorterEowyn Ivey|title=In Between DaysBlack Woods Blue Sky
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=After Chloe Harding is forced to leave ''Black Woods Blue Sky'' tells the story of Birdie, the young mother of toddler Emaleen, who longs for a life beyond the Alaskan lodge where she works as a bar waitress, a setting which enables her bad habits and her East Coast collegeaccidental neglect of Emaleen. Described as a ''wild card'', for reasons she refuses feels stuck in her day-to explain -day life, and yearns to cross the Wolverine river and live on the North Fork to fulfil her recently divorced parents or older brother Richarddesires of a simple life surrounded by nature. When she meets Arthur Nielson, a strange, taciturn and solitary man, who says he has a cabin over there, she feels called to go - and bring Emaleen with her family. Without realising it, this calling will transform hers and Emaleen's lives start to unravelforever. Will the rest of them ever find out what caused her fall from grace, and can they solve their own problems?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0224089838</amazonuk>1472279042
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Ivy PochodaSally Rooney|title=Visitation StreetIntermezzo|rating=4.5|genre=General Fiction |summary=Sally Rooney has studied the chessboard of life and is something of a grandmaster at putting it into words. Her dialogue is gripping and so brilliantly frustrating, as her characters never quite say exactly what they feel. Among the many relationships woven into this story, the central one for readers to unravel is the 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 Dublin. Following their father's passing after a long battle with cancer, the brothers' already strained relationship faces new trials.|isbn=0571365469}}{{Frontpage|author=Fyodor Dostoyevsky|title=White Nights|rating=5|genre=Short Stories|summary=As always in Dostoyevsky, the character work is sublime. One is never left wondering what a character is thinking or feeling because Dostoyevsky lays bare their innermost dispositions and temperaments with remarkable clarity.|isbn=0241619785}}{{Frontpage|author=James Baldwin|title=Giovanni's Room
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''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 a gay bar. While David is engaged to Hella, who is travelling in Spain, the real tension in the novel arises not from his infidelity but from the deeper conflict within himself. It is David's crippling shame and denial of his sexuality that ultimately dooms his relationship with Giovanni.
|isbn=0141186356
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Alba de Cespedes
|title=Forbidden Notebook
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Red Hook, Brooklyn and it is blisteringly hot. Two fifteen year old girls decide the best and most exciting way to cool off is to take a small inflatable raft on to the river. The next morning one This Italian work of the girls is found unconscious and washed ashore with no memory feminist fiction holds an air of what happened in the river suspense and tension from the other girl is nowhere to be found. This becomes a big local story moment our protagonist, Valeria Cossati, purchases her forbidden notebook, and learns about herself in the survivor, saviour most intimate and community have to deal with the loss in their different revealing ways.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1444778242</amazonuk>1782278222
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Marlen HaushoferOttessa Moshfegh|title=Nowhere Ending SkyMy Year of Rest and Relaxation|rating=4.53
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary= Little Meta At best, this novel is growing up in a childhood paradise with two parents who love her and a younger brother to tease scathing critique of modern society and train to do all reveals the things that Meta wants him to. However fragility of human relationships; at worst, it is the world outside Meta's paradise will soon change beyond all recognition as the Austria cynical, predictable and Germany slightly trite tale of the 1920s makes way for the Austria an unlikeable protagonist. This unlikely heroine, a slim, attractive and Germany of newly orphaned girl in her twenties is disillusioned with the 1930sworld, but resolves not to lose sleep over it: in fact, her solution lies in her hibernation.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0704373130</amazonuk>1784707422
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Lea CarpenterMatthew Tree|title=Eleven DaysWe'll Never Know
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Sara raised Jason alone; even when she was with his father it felt as if she was a lone parent. Jason's father always seemed Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be away doing something indefinable abroad; then he disappeared leaving her completely. Two years later Jason's different from his father was dead. However Jason is , a lad to be proud drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of, never giving Sara a moment's trouble his artistic passions all failed miserably and now a member who had endless crises of the elite US Navy SEALSself confidence. Now he's missing in action… Now she has So Tim applied himself to hang on his studies, cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and hopeset himself high but achievable ambitions.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1444776231</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=B0C47LV1PC
|title=Fragility
|author=Mosby Woods
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary= Can you make a ''Yo birthing person'' joke? And if you could, is the question should you make it? Or is the question if you did, would it land? The catch is that the answer for both could well be.... no.
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Manuel RivasMosby Woods|title=All Is SilenceA Whirly Man Loses His Turn|rating=3.54
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The small community of Noitía West isn't the dominant force it once was. Nobody in the West is quite sure how to mend this or even if mending it is a place where everyone knows each other and each other’s business, which considering most the best course of the adults action. Governments are involved in the one business, smugglingflailing. A war here, a push for climate action there. A feeling that nobody is potentially dangerous knowledgein actual charge. We follow Imagine then, there was a small group of three young friends growing up man with precognition. Imagine the strategic advantage in the area as they play and learn and even experience this asset; a little man who can tell you what will happen given any set of the black market dealingscircumstances. They stumble across a stash of smuggled whisky and are caught by the charismatic king pin responsible for the traffickingThat man would be valuable, who teaches them that silence is right? Perhaps the most important lesson to learn when growing up valuable asset in Noitíahistory.Imagine then, that this man loses this ability. What would governments do to get it back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>184655568X</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Ryu Murakami0571379559|title=From The Fatherland, With LoveHouse of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=From ''The FatherlandHouse of Broken Bricks'' is the story of four people. Tess Hembry's roots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, With Love is a 2005 Japanese novel set but instead, she lives in the then-near future house on the riverbank, built of 2011broken bricks. Fatherland ( Insubstantial as I will abbreviate it) explores might look, it's stood the passage of time, storms and floods. Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the social delivery rounds - and to bring in sufficient money. They have twin boys - Sonny and political ramifications of one speculative scenario: what if North Korea invaded Japan?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1908968451</amazonuk>Max, the rainbow twins. Sonny's colouring reflects his mother's Jamaican heritage. Max takes after his father. People don't believe that they're related, much less twins and there's an assumption when Max is out with his mother that she's his nanny.
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Claire North
|title=House of Odysseus
|rating=5
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= ''What could matter more than love?''
The follow-up to the excellent ''Ithaca'' picks up a few months after where we left off. In the palace of Odysseus, with delicate care Queen Penelope continues to rule without her husband, who sailed to war at Troy and then by divine intervention never returned home. As ever she remains surrounded by suitors vying for the throne of the Western Isles. Having survived – politically and physical – the chaotic storm that Clytemnestra brought to Ithaca's shores, Queen Penelope is on the brink of a fragile peace. One that shatters however with the return of Orestes, King of Mycenae, and his sister Elektra, seeking refuge.|isbn=0356516075}}{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Suzanne RindellKay Chronister|title= Desert Creatures|rating= 4|genre= Dystopian Fiction|summary= With a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, post-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Whether it is a robotic takeover, a world devoid of water or a nuclear holocaust, this genre is a way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a new work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the fears that exist for humanity today. It is a shocking novel that still manages to find hope.|isbn=1803364998}}{{frontpage|isbn=1803363002|author= Eric LaRocca|title=The Other TypistTrees Grew Because I Bled There|rating= 5|genre= Horror|summary= Horror taps into something primeval within us. It is used as a way to reflect our darkest emotions and how we as humans react and process them. Most horror fiction feature a ''Big Bad'', whether that is a home invader, a monster or a ghost, it usually something tangible and, by the end of the story, beatable. Eric LaRocca's ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. It is a collection of short stories more interested in the horrors of illness, grief and humiliation. Horrors that linger and are harder to defeat than any ''Big Bad''.}}{{Frontpage|author=Madelaine Lucas|title=Thirst for Salt
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The Other Typist is set in 1920s New York City''Love, I'd read, with Prohibition at its height was supposed to be a light and Rose Bakerweightless feeling, an orphaned but I had always longed for gravity'' Told from a retrospective view, a young womanunravels the year-long relationship that once defined her. Overlaid with later wisdom, working as the narrator relives the affair with a police typist. While she has no real friends, she's good at man twenty years her job and seems senior from its inception – the summer after finishing university – to have its sorrowful end the summer after. Set against the respect backdrop of an isolated Australian coastal town ''Thirst for Salt'' details the Sergeant, whom she admires and the Lieutenant Detective, whom she24-year-old narrator's less keen on. Then a perfect storm comes into their livesdeepening relationship with her older lover, in the shape of the enchanting Odaliedepicting its all-consuming nature, how it changed her perspective on both romantic and nothing will be the same againfamilial relationships and how it altered her irrevocably.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0241002885</amazonuk>0861546490
}}
{{Frontpage
|author= Michael Grothaus
|title=Beautiful Shining People
|rating=4
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= ''But fearing something and having it come to pass are two different things. And I'm willing to bet most of what we fear will never happen, or we can take steps to change it.''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Gabriel WestonJennifer Saint|title=Dirty WorkAtalanta
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=#There are two women ''I was as worthy as any one of them. I would get on board that ship, I vowed. I would take my place, not just in an operating theatre and when one starts bleeding heavily - fatally - the other freezesname of the goddess. It was for the sake of my name, unabletoo. Atalanta'' Princess. Warrior. Lover. Hero. Abandoned at birth for being born a daughter rather than a son, despite all her training Atalanta is raised under the protective eye of the goddess Athemis and undoubted skillsfashioned into a formidable huntress, to do anything at allone who longs for adventure. Whatever When the outcome it cannot pass unnoticed, unreported and surgeon Nancy Mullion is called opportunity comes – to appear before a tribunal appointed by join the General Medical Council. Over Argonauts, a period fierce band of weeks she's forced warriors, descendent from the Gods themselves – Atalanta seizes the chance to confront the effect of being a doctor who has killed as well as cured. Youfight in Artemis're probably making assumptions now name and nodding wiselycarve out her own legendary place in history. DonWhat follows is a whirlwind of challenges and discovery and through it, Atalanta must remember Artemis't - because you are almost certainly going to be wrong. This fatal warning: that if she marries, it will not be the story which you are expecting and it was certainly not the story which Nancy's hospital wanted to hearher undoing.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>022409128X</amazonuk>1472292154
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Rachel KushnerAmanthi Harris|title=The FlamethrowersBeautiful Place|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Set mainly in New York's art district in the late 1970sPadma, Rachel Kushner's ''The Flamethrowers'' tells the story of a young girlSri Lankan, known only has returned to the reader as Reno, after Villa Hibiscus on the city southern coast of her home country. This is a place she comes fromspent her formative years. She's It is not a girl who loves motorbikes and photographyplace she was born into, but struggles the one she thinks of as home. How she came to find be at the Villa, how it became her place in home, and the New York art scene. When machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she falls first arrived there provide the ''score'' for this gentle and yet subtly violent novel. Padma's present fails to escape her past and much like the estranged son, Sandromusical score of a film, of that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the Italian motorbike manufacturer Valero, himself an artist in New York, Reno finds herself in situations she cannot controlVilla.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1846557917</amazonuk>1784631930
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Roland Watson-Grant178563335X|title=SketcherSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary= NineWhen 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 Skid Beaumont lives with his three brothersHannah and her elder brother, Jamie, father Alrick and mother Valerie whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Thelma's daughter-in the swamps beyond the New Orleans city limits-law won't let her see her grandson. Life Holthorpe, on the Norfolk coast, is hard and home a lovely place, but Rachel is struggling to develop a rundown shack real bond with no running water the parish - and she's in awe of the vicar, Gail, but theythen she're only there temporarily; a 'temporarily' that is rather long-terms been doing the job for more than thirty years. Alrick moved them from their nice home in New Orleans because the land was cheap Rachel and soon Christopher hoped that a walk on the city beach would build out to envelop do them. Years later some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they're still waiting for that to happenneeded. Life isn’t exactly mundane though; there are rumours that when Skid's brother Frico draws left-handed, strange things seem to happenAnd then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846882427</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Francesco Pacifico1398515388|title=The Story of My PurityBoy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)|rating=24.5|genre=Literary General Fiction|summary=In Francesco Pacifico's translated Italian novel 'The Story First of My Purity'all, Piero Rosini is a 30 year oldit was the earthquake, ultraconservative Catholic working for a radical Catholic publishing house. His marriage is devoid of physical contactdeep in the ocean floor, which created the tsunami and he yearns for his virginal sister-this, in-lawturn, caused the nuclear meltdown. The result was complete and utter devastation. Largely to escape these longings The deaths were uncountable, he heads for Paris, never and the first choice loss of one seeking to preserve livelihoods was widespread. The fact that many pets were separated from their purity, where he is further tempted by a slightly unlikely group owners came far down the list of girls, and one in particular, which is further complicated for him by priorities but - six months after the fact that she is Jewishtsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. Almost living He wasn't a separate life in dog person but the convenience store owner's comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his head, he cannot escape either car door and Tamon the intellectual or physical constraints of his old life dog jumped in Rome.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241145058</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Philip Sington0989715337|title=The Valley of UnknowingPapa on the Moon|author=Marco North
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In the mid-to-late eighties ''Some frogs had gotten into the German Democratic Republic looked like enduringwell. Bolstered by a system of ''Mitarbeiter '' (''fellow workersWalter stood waist-deep in the fragrant water, naked except for his beaten leather hat. Long strands of their eggs wove around him, sticky gray pearls with tadpoles inside them. Two of the dogs leaned over the opening and barked down at the strange noise of the buckets as he filled them.'' How is a much more amenable term than ''informers'') that for an opening? The style of this novel in the Stasi kept their populace in check. Western media was easy form of interconnected short stories goes from succinct and laconic to censor in those days. Border controls were brutal. People were shot wistful and musing, turning on a regular basis trying sixpence. And author Marco North, who has the most wonderful turn of phrase, starts as he means to cross the no-man's-land into West Berlin and along the other inner German bordersgo on.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099535823</amazonuk>
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