Newest General Fiction Reviews
From TheBookbag
General fiction
Blind Rage by Terri Persons
Bernadette Saint Claire or Cat as she is called for she has odd eyes, just like the Catahoula Leopard dogs that share the same trait, has a very special gift: not only can she converse and fully interact with the ghosts of the recently departed, she is also able to see through the eyes of the monsters she hunts. This ability, however, is no church picnic. Being immersed in the mind of a serial killer leaves Agent Saint Claire exhausted and increasingly attuned to the innermost thoughts, urges and feelings of her quarry. And that's not a nice place to be! Full review...
The Dirty Secrets Club by Meg Gardiner
I haven't read any of Meg Gardiner's books before, but The Dirty Secrets Club is her sixth. It sounded a good thriller, so I was looking forward to starting it. The cover is a dramatic red and it took a while before I noticed the apparently dead naked woman within the letters! Full review...
Dreams of Rivers and Seas by Tim Parks
John James is a research student based in London, working on ways to attack (or prevent) TB at the molecular level. This is the only way science can be done these days he insists. The sum of knowledge is too great for any one individual to understand. Teamwork and specialism is all.
He is in love, he thinks, maybe, with Elaine an aspiring actress. They are, obviously, penniless, reliant on the allowance from his parents.
Then his mother, Helen, phones from Delhi. Your father died this morning. And he finds himself on the first available flight, for a funeral to take place the day following his arrival. Full review...
Kane's Ladder by Carlos Alba
Steve Duff comes from a good home. It's not in the best part of Glasgow, but it's definitely separated from Govan by a railway line and the Duffs are buying their house with a mortgage. The family are well fed and clothed, but is Steve content with his lot? Of course he's not. He wants to be like his best mate, Wally, whose parents are drunkards and who isn't even missed if he doesn't go home at night. Be careful of what you wish for, Steve, for surely it might come true – and in the course of a year his father is made redundant and has a fling with a barmaid. His mother leaves home and then starts a psychology degree. Elder brother, Tony, gets a girl pregnant and his sister is arrested for demanding money with menaces. And all that's without the normal problems of being a boy on the cliff edge of puberty. Full review...
The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti
Ren is missing his left hand. Neither Ren nor any of the brothers at the orphanage know what happened. It had already gone when he was left at St Anthony's as a tiny baby. Father John says he'll never be adopted because of it. So when Benjamin Nab comes along and announces he is Ren's long-lost brother, Ren is sent along with him. Benjamin tells stories. He's a nineteenth century New England Del Boy. And he and his partner Tom introduce Ren to the art of the scam. From fake wonder cures to thieving, all the way up to body-snatching, light-fingered Ren gets closer to finding out what really happened to his hand. And as the truth closes in, he needs to decide... is he a good thief, or a bad one? Full review...
Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock
Welcome to Knockemstiff, a quiet little town in Ohio, USA. Wait, I take it back. You are not welcome. Strangers do not come to Knockemstiff. Unless you are lost of course, like that Californian photographer woman, who took random pictures and could not believe the town was for real: so poor, so lost, so abandoned. Come to think of it, the people of Knockemstiff would be more than happy to leave the place themselves. It is just that they never have the chance, or never quite make it. Full review...
West of the Wall by Marcia Preston
I love reading a book that makes me want to find out more about a time and a place – and this is such a book. It's a story of a city divided in two by the building of a wall that physically separated families and friends: an account of the suffering and despair of East Berliners under strict communist occupation and the desperate choices one woman had to make. Full review...
Full Moon by P G Wodehouse
I have only read one P.G. Wodehouse novel before – a Jeeves one some years ago – but was eager to try another. So after receiving a copy of Full Moon – a book from the series of Blandings novels – from Bookbag, I was looking forward to starting it. Full review...
Crime by Irvine Welsh
On the face of it, this novel appears to be what its terse title implies: a Welshian take on the genre novel. All the stereotypes are there. Its protagonist is a clever but disillusioned Edinburgh cop. A maverick, at odds with his less principled bosses, he's relieved of his duties after a mental collapse. Yet he finds himself drawn back into the underworld that has almost destroyed him. Full review...
The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide
Delia Bennet is dying of cancer. She's had the operations, done the treatments, and now, bald and sick of being meddled with, has decided enough is enough. As she grows accustomed to the nighness of her end, Delia, author of a national newspaper column and of the hugely successful Guide To series, embarks upon the idea of a the guide to end all Guides To. Following in the footsteps of her previous Guides, Home Maintenance, Kitchen, Garden and Laundry (No one had yet produced books that eroticised and poeticised such dull tasks as washing and I only did it by accident. One reviewer called it laundry-porn, intending to be unkind: sales of the book trebled in the following weeks.), Delia calls her publisher, Nancy, and hints that she might like to pen one last edition, rakishly suggesting the book be called The Household Guide to Dying. Far from being appalled, Nancy seizes upon the hole in the market for such a book and gives Delia the green light. Full review...
Season of the Witch by Natasha Mostert
Gabriel Blackstone is a computer hacker and information thief. He and his partner Isidore make an exceedingly comfortable living stealing corporate secrets and selling them on. It's earned Gabriel a London loft apartment and a classy car. And Gabriel likes the good things in life. Hardly a shrinking violet, Gabriel probably regards himself as one of the good things in life. Full review...
Typhoon by Charles Cumming
It is now almost 20 years since the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the KGB and the Stasi. Many of the bogeymen central to the old school spy novel no longer even exist. Historian Francis Fukuyama even went as far as to say that the fall of Soviet Communism marked 'the end of history'. Thankfully, in terms of literary espionage at least, Fukuyama was a little premature in his pronouncement of death. As John Le Carre's recent African adventures and now Charles Cumming's new Chinese based thriller show, the spy novel is still very much alive and kicking. Full review...
Obedience by Will Lavender
In Winchester University, Indiana, a reclusive philosophy lecturer sets his class a bizarre challenge. Presenting them with the details of a local girl who has disappeared, he tells them they have six weeks to work out who abducted her, or she'll be murdered. On this bizarre note, he leaves them to it, providing them with additional clues and information as the lessons go on during the six weeks before the end of the semester. Full review...
Joy in the Morning by P G Wodehouse
Joy in the Morning is another novel from P.G. Wodehouse's wonderful series of books about Bertram Wooster and Jeeves. Bertie is a young gentleman of inherited means and no present occupation. He is a good humoured and well-meant chap, however clearly not the smartest tool in the shed. Bertie seems to have a talent of getting himself into trouble but that is where Jeeves, his loyal, educated and painfully clever butler comes to his rescue. Jeeves is irreplaceable when it comes to saving Bertie from whatever creative, complicated and incredibly funny situations Wodehouse puts his characters through. Full review...
Thank You, Jeeves by P G Wodehouse
Bertie Wooster was once engaged to Pauline Stoker. It didn't last very long – about forty eight hours, most of which Bertie spent in bed with a bad cold, if his memory serves him correctly. It's still embarrassing when he meets Pauline and her father, particularly as it was the father who was responsible for breaking off the engagement. Rather than eat at the Savoy Grill where he spotted the Stokers, he goes home to his only consolation. Bertie plays the banjo. Unfortunately, he doesn't play it very well. Full review...
Personal Days by Ed Park
Right now I work for an organisation that everyone in the UK and many people beyond will have heard of. People who have never worked with me will still weigh in on what I do all day, whether it's necessary, whether it's a good use of tax payers' money. It's a subject everyone has an opinion on, and can therefore lead to some difficult as well as passionate dinner party conversations. Sometimes I wish I could work for an anonymous corporation that most people hadn't heard of and the ones that had had little knowledge of. Surely life would be easier in those sort of places? That's what I used to think, anyway, until now. Until I read this book. Full review...
The Mark by Jason Pinter
Henry Parker has always had to go one step further than most. One struggle more than the average young American, to escape his unappealing upbringing, and his near-rural home, leave university with a good start in a journalism career, and get a prestigious opening at the New York Gazette. There he is, 24, horrid apartment, girlfriend thinking of leaving for greener grass elsewhere, but intent on proving himself by going beyond the norm, and to try and instil a worthy reliance and trust in his career and his readership. Unfortunately, he's stuck writing in memoriams to start with. Full review...
A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby
Is it wrong to find other people's anguish so alluring? It is? Right, ahem, sorry. Shall we just say then, that despite the fact that disgraced television presenter Martin Sharp has, in his words “p*ssed his life away” and wants to end it all at the bottom of a tower block he is an oddly interesting, if misunderstood, chap. Ask his wife. Actually, don't ask his wife; she'd be only too pleased to see him jump. Full review...
The Next Accident by Lisa Gardner
Rainie Connor just got licenced to be a private investigator. An ex-cop with a violent and chequered past, Rainie knows it is time to move on, but detective work and more broadly, the law, are the only things she has ever known. Enter Special Agent Pierce Quincy, Rainie's one time lover and constant guiding light, he is a man deeply haunted by his elder daughter Amanda's death, the result, we are told, of a drink driving accident. Full review...
The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch
Miles O'Malley is thirteen. His preoccupations are like those of many another thirteen year old boy. He's small for his age and he'd like to grow. He's in love with his ex-baby sitter. His parents aren't getting along and he's afraid they'll separate. But this last, the threat to his home, connects to Miles's other preoccupation. And this one isn't common to most teenage boys. Miles lives on Puget Sound. He's an amateur naturalist and beachcomber and his heroine is Silent Spring's Rachel Carson. Miles spends all day and much of the night on the beach, searching out its beauty and life. Full review...
The Cairo Diary by Maxim Chattam
Modern day France. A woman, Marion, sees something she should have never laid eyes on, in her job as a secretary to the morgue. She is hidden away by the authorities under threat of danger, in the sanctuary of the religious community on Mont St Michel. There she is welcomed in differing ways by the 'natives', and by a coded message, and seemingly shadowy dealings, most of which she could do without. They might just be part of her paranoia playing on her mind, but before long she finds something else she perhaps ought not to have seen. Full review...
The Reapers by John Connolly
It can get a little confusing having novelists with similar names, especially when they're writing in the same genre. Having been a fan of Michael Connelly and his Harry Bosch character for some time, the chance to try John Connolly was one worth taking, especially as I'd heard good things about him. Full review...
My Brother is an Only Child by Antonio Pennacchi
It was a large family, partly because Mussolini gave a prize for every child born, and partly because Accio's father enjoyed producing children, so when Accio returned from the Seminary there wasn't a lot of space. He had to share with Otello and Manrico whilst the two youngest girls shared with their parents. Two older girls had already left home. What to do with Accio became, and would remain, a regular problem, but Accio had his own ideas and politics eventually came to dominate his life. Manrico takes a similar road, but unsurprisingly is usually at the other end of the political spectrum. Full review...
The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams
This is the intriguing story of two elderly sisters reunited after nearly fifty years apart. Ginny the elder sister is the narrator of the tale and still lives in the house where she and Vivi, the younger sister, both grew up. Whilst the story only covers a few days, through Ginny's memories and the sisters' conversations we start to piece together some of the past half century. We soon begin to realise that, as is often the way in life, appearances can be deceptive. Full review...
Lost and Found by Jacqueline Sheehan
Roxanne and Bob Pellegrino met through swimming. She pulled him off the bottom of the pool and he always joked that he'd married a woman who could save him. It was a phrase which was to haunt Roxanne after he collapsed on the bathroom floor. Despite applying CPR she couldn't save him. He was just forty two years old. Distraught with grief in the months afterwards she left her home, her job as a psychologist, her family and moved to Peaks Island off the coast of Maine where she took a job as an animal warden. On the basis that you don't have to say that you're a widow until you're ready, she invented a past which didn't include Bob and her failure to save him. Full review...
Whatever Makes You Happy by William Sutcliffe
I hadn't previously heard of William Sutcliffe before picking up his latest novel Whatever Makes You Happy. The blurb on the back sounded interesting and the front cover – a sofa with each side having a distinct his 'n' her feeling – drew me in further. I tend to prefer novels by female authors, but this reminded me of the 'lad lit' type books of Nick Hornby or some of Ben Elton's, so I looked forward to the read. Full review...
Empire of Sand by Robert Ryan
I've long thought that 'historical fiction' was a bit of a misnomer. After all, fiction by definition has to stop where real history begins. However, that doesn't mean that wrapping fiction around historical events or people can't lead to a decent story and that's what has happened here. Full review...
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown
On the day that her husband's company went public and turned him into a multi-millionaire, Janice Miller was preparing a celebration dinner for that evening. She didn't really know what would be done with the money but she had a longing to buy some really good art, something like a Van Gogh (yes, they now had that sort of money) which might be loaned out to a museum. It was all shattered when a letter was delivered. Paul wanted out of the marriage and wouldn't be coming home. Full review...
Caravan Thieves by Gerard Woodward
Gerard Woodward is a much short-listed novelist & poet: the Whitbread First Novel Award (2001), Man Booker Prize (2004), T S Eliot Prize (2005). If it hasn't been already, I can well see this collection being equally short-listed for whatever the 'short-story' equivalent is. (Is there even a major prize for short stories?) Full review...
The Palace of Strange Girls by Sallie Day
Each year Jack Singleton books next year's holiday and pays the deposit before he leaves the hotel, so it's no surprise that Jack, his wife, Ruth and daughters Helen and Beth are back at The Belvedere again. Beth's seven years old and not long out of hospital after an operation to repair a hole in her heart. Ruth thinks that she can keep her safe by dressing her in warm clothes, despite the July heat, and enforcing an afternoon nap. Sixteen year old Helen is longing for some independence but that's not on Ruth's agenda either. As for Jack, well he's got a secret of his own and he's finding it increasingly hard to cope with Ruth's demands that they buy a new semi-detached house, which would mean a mortgage. Full review...
The Butt by Will Self
There's definitely some satire in Will Self's latest novel, The Butt. A tourist carelessly flicks away his final cigarette, and then finds himself charged with attempted murder after it hits his neighbour's head. The satire's target, however, is less clear. Is Self (a man pilloried for taking cocaine on a politican's plane, remember) simply having a dig at the absurdity of the smoking bans that are sweeping across the Western world? Or is this a more sophisticated examination of compensation culture? Moral relativity between different cultures? Post-colonialism? Or, as seems likely, all of the above? Full review...
The Alchemist's Secret by Scott Mariani
Ben Hope was a member of the SAS but now he spends his time rescuing children who have been kidnapped. When he's asked to find a manuscript which could provide a cure for a sick child he hesitates but decides that it's the right thing to do. The manuscript was written by Fulcanelli, the renowned alchemist, almost a hundred years ago and it's rumoured that it contains the formula for the elixir of life. What seems like a far-fetched quest becomes dangerous when Hope discovers that there are others in search of the manuscript. Full review...
Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult
From the very first page I was absorbed in Jodi Picoult's latest novel Change of Heart. It tells the story of Shay Bourne, who was convicted of the double murder of a police officer and his step daughter eleven years ago. He was sentenced to die by lethal injection and now that all appeals are used up and his death is imminent, he wants to be able to do one final thing in order to make some sense of his life. The wife and mother of the victims is June Nealon, and if she had not already witnessed enough tragedy in her life, her younger daughter Claire is seriously ill and will die unless a heart transplant takes place. Shay hears of her plight whilst watching a local news programme and offers his heart to Claire. This gesture provides the very clever title Change of Heart which in this case has more than one meaning. Full review...
Bone China by Roma Tearne
Bone China follows four generations of the de Silva family from the 1930's onwards.
The de Silvas are a Tamil family living in Ceylon, or Sri Lanka as it is now. Grace is the matriarch to a somewhat dysfunctional family and is the link that bonds all the characters in the book. She was born into a rich land-owning family but marries Aloysius for love and watches with great dignity as, over the years, he drinks and gambles away her family's fortune. Always trying to maintain the traditions and customs of her time, in a country ever increasingly torn apart by political and civil unrest, she brings up five children, each of whom has very different qualities and ambitions. Full review...
Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
6th March 2007 started off as just an ordinary day for Josie Cormier, Matt Royston, Lacy Houghton, Partick Ducharme, and Jordan McAfee. By mid morning one of them would be dead, alongside many other high school students, and the lives of all the others would be changed forever. Nineteen Minutes charts what happens the day one very unhappy and bullied schoolboy, Peter Houghton, decides that enough is enough and retaliates in the most drastic way imaginable. He bursts into his own school, wielding four guns and apparently shooting at random until ten people are dead and another nineteen are seriously wounded. This happens at the start of the book which then goes onto to look at the events in Peter's life leading up to that day, what happens in the immediate aftermath, and ultimately leads to the trial that follows. Full review...
