Newest General Fiction Reviews

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Chance Developments: Unexpected Love Stories by Alexander McCall Smith

5star.jpg General Fiction

Sometimes, if I'm in a cafe by myself, I like to watch the people around me and imagine stories about their lives. Just a single sentence, overheard, can lead to wonderous tales of mystery and intrigue whilst I sip my cappuccino! So I was delighted to sit down to read the latest offering from AMS, not only because he wrote it, but because he wrote it after looking at 5 different black and white photographs, and then imagining the stories behind them. Who are all these people, and what are their stories? Each story is unique, and yet they all have one abiding link...love. Full review...

This Should be Written in the Present Tense by Helle Helle and Martin Aitken (translator)

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This is the first novel of Helle Helle's, an award winning Danish author, to be translated into English. It is easy to see from this novel why she is gaining accolades in her Danish homeland. The rhythmic, natural flow of the narrative is mesmerising and appears to lull you through the book. It has some lovely, spare sentences of description: There were run-down cottages with open doors and news on the radio. Gulls flocked around an early harvester in the late sun. But mostly, it is written in a modernist, almost stream of consciousness style, which I found refreshing. Full review...

Carrying Albert Home: The Somewhat True Story of a Man, His Wife and Her Alligator by Homer Hickam

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Elsie and Homer Hickam were West Virginians and knew how to make their tales as tall as the hills that surrounded them on all sides. There is a Hickam family legend that has been told and retold so many times over the years that the lines between myth and reality have become well and truly blurred. Carrying Albert Home is the story of a man and his wife, a sweet pet alligator and a very lucky rooster who decide to take a road trip to Florida in 1935; the year of the Great Depression. What follows next is all completely true, well, except for the parts that are made up... Full review...

Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs by Lina Wolff and Frank Perry (translator)

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Upstairs, a flat where mother and daughter struggle from pay cheque to pay cheque; downstairs, the love nest of a dying writer and her last of many conquests. Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs is a multilayered testimonial to the writer, the eccentric Alba Cambó, gathered by Araceli, the teenager upstairs. Through Araceli's bird's-eye view, anecdotes unfold as told by lovers, business acquaintances (often both – for with Alba Cambó you can never know), and the short stories of Cambó herself. Full review...

Always There by John Van der Kiste

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When Dave left Plymouth to go to college in Uxbridge he met Lisa. They sort of palled around together for a little while with no thought of anything more, well, not on Dave's part at least. The he met Jo and for a long time they were really good friends and it would be a couple of years before they were anything more. Lisa didn't see it that way though: she reckoned that if Jo hadn't come along she and Dave would have stuck together and made a go of it. Dave and Jo's couple of years at college were marked, if not marred, by Lisa's regular outbursts. Full review...

The Soldier's Wife by Pamela Hart

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...none of it was real, until the last moment when his hand, the tips of his fingers, left the tips of hers and he was gone.

Turned into just another soldier.

Ruby and Jimmy are newly-weds full of big dreams and plans for the future, but all of that will have to wait. It is 1915 and the world is in the grip Great War, sweeping Jimmy away to fight battles in far-off Gallipoli. Ruby feels like she's in limbo; no longer an innocent child but not quite a fully-fledged married lady. Not wanting to return home, she decides to stay in Sydney, to keep herself occupied as she waits out the war, longing for the return of her beloved husband. She rents a room from a local landlady and finds a job as a bookkeeper at a Timber Merchant. Although she initially takes the job to keep herself occupied and earn a little money, she soon falls into a comfortable routine and starts to enjoy her new-found independence and responsibility. Full review...

The Book Collector by Alice Thompson

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Meet Violet. Swept off her feet by a disarming encounter with a landed gentleman and bookshop owner at a coffee shop, she immediately falls in love with him, and is quickly married, and almost as quickly with child. When the boy is born, however, fairly understandable doubts creep in. Is her husband hiding anything behind his assuredness – especially when she wakes in the middle of the night alone? What ghost is left by the fact he lost his first wife and baby in childbirth? What should she understand from her own opinions about her new life, her new life's life, and the idea of a nanny looking after it? Just what is going on in her new country pile? Full review...

Bright Stars by Sophie Duffy

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I fell into this novel from the first short chapter, set in 1983, at Lancaster University – perhaps because I grew up in the 1980's. The central character and first person narrator, Cameron Spark, comes across as vulnerable, shy and unassuming, and at first, likeable. As the novel progressed, however, I did find him less plausible and a bit wet and annoying. He falls in mad love with Bex right at the beginning of the book, who is a much more interesting character, being a feisty, feminist, fox-hunting activist and saboteur. Cameron is clearly besotted and therefore biased in his affection for Bex, and you can sense that this is going to get him into deep trouble from the start. Full review...

In Fidelity by Jack Wilson

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Dick and Christine Blodgett were only 22 when they got married in 1955. As the novel opens in 1974, it's clear their relationship is now precarious. A brief allegorical prologue, echoing Heraclitus, warns that a crisis will change the course of the marriage irrevocably: 'one day there was a storm…and the stream never returned to the [channel] it had known before.' The title of Chapter 1, 'A Premonition of Danger', reinforces that sense of foreboding. Driving on dark, icy roads, Dick and Christine fret about her health: a dental procedure revealed a serious problem with her gums for which she will soon need a biopsy. Full review...

Charlotte Bronte's Secret Love by Jolien Janzing

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This is the second novel by Jolien Janzing, a Dutch author who lives in Belgium. Originally published in Dutch as The Master in 2013, it is already being made into a film. The flawlessly translated story zeroes in on two momentous years in Charlotte Brontë's life, 1842–3, when she was a pupil and then a teacher at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels. I read this in tandem with Claire Harman's new biography of Charlotte Brontë; it was particularly fascinating to see that the two books open with the same climactic episode: lovesick Charlotte making a confession at a Catholic church, even though she was an Anglican parson's daughter. Full review...

After You by Jojo Moyes

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After writing the massively popular Me Before You, all of Jojo Moyes' readers were clamouring for more. Having been on the edge of our armchairs during the story, we all wanted to know what happened to Lou next. Would she be okay? Would she live her life with passion? Where would she go next? So the arrival of this story is a special treat, as it continues the tale of Lou, although perhaps not in the way we had imagined… Full review...

Trust by Mike Bullen

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Greg and Amanda are happy. Unmarried, but together thirteen years and with two young daughters, they are very much in love. Dan and Sarah aren't so fortunate. Their marriage is going through the motions, and they're staying together for the sake of their troubled teenage son. Following a business conference away from home, one bad decision sends a happy couple into turmoil, and turns an unhappy couple into love's young dream. As secrets and betrayals threaten to send both relationships out of control, there's only one thing that can keep everything from falling apart: Trust Full review...

The Dress Shop Of Dreams by Menna Van Praag

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Cambridge is a city of winding streets and cobbled alleyways and in such a street you will find A Stich In Time, a tiny dress shop filled to bursting with dresses that will take your breath away. Etta Sparks spends her days crafting gowns from jewel-coloured velvets and beaded silks that are unlike any dresses you have seen before; once you try one of Etta's creations on - and with a few stitches from her expert and rather magical needle - these incredible, amazing garments have the power to reach within your soul and extract your deepest desire and hidden-away dreams. Full review...

Dark Corners by Ruth Rendell

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Carl Martin was in the fortunate position of having just had his first novel published and inheriting his late father's house in Maida Vale. His father had accumulated a collection of homeopathic remedies which really should have been thrown out, but Carl had other things on his mind and never got round to it. There was his girlfriend Nicola, work to start on his second novel and he wanted to let the top floor of his house. Authors are not that well off, you see and he needed some ready money coming in. In addition to being a bit remiss about the contents of the medicine cabinet he should have been a bit more careful about who he took on as a tenant. Full review...

West by Julia Franck and Anthea Bell (translator)

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Put yourself in the shoes of a young mother to two children, who declares her intention to leave the Communist East Germany for West Berlin, and thus loses her scientist job. What would you expect on the other side – shops full of attainable products, pleasant neighbourhoods, nice neighbours, an active and busy new life, where things might feel alien but at least you speak the same language? Well, for Nelly Senff, this is hardly the case. Once past the depressing Eastern exit procedures she is confronted with more desultory interrogations from those 'welcoming' her to the West, beyond which she and her children (their father, whom she never married, is long assumed dead by the authorities, if nobody else) are practically left in a shared accommodation in a transit camp. The shops are full of what is still unobtainable, the children hate their new school – and people still look down on them as being foreign, even if they have only moved across a city. Full review...

The Golden Anklet by Beverley Hansford

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Jane Carroll is becoming more and more successful as a young journalist on a woman's magazine. Yet, although her future looks secure, Jane would like to discover more about her past. As an orphan she was raised in a children's home with no information regarding the identity of her parents apart from what was on her birth certificate. Therefore armed with this certificate and the help of her new boyfriend Bob, not to mention genealogist dabbling neighbour Gerald, the search begins. However nothing is as straightforward, or indeed as safe, as she thought it would be. Full review...

A Different Reflection by Jane L Gibson

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Eternal optimist Kat has always believed in fairytales and happy endings but can't help but wonder where her own life went wrong. Stuck in a dead-end relationship with dull workaholic John, it's hardly the happy-ever-after that she'd always hoped for. Things are about to change, however, when Kat discovers a mysterious house that has been cursed by an enchantment; a handsome Regency beau is trapped within the mirrors and only a declaration of true love can break the spell and release him... Full review...

The Glass Girl by Sandy Hogarth

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Sandy Hogarth's debut novel opens in 1975 with fifteen-year-old Ruth Bishop attending a party with her older sister, Alexis. 'They called me VL, Virgin Lips, because I'd never kissed a boy. Sex wasn't mentioned at home.' That all changes when Alexis tells Ruth to go outside – someone is waiting for her. It's one of Alexis's friends, a notorious bad boy, and he assaults Ruth right there, up against the house. Could Alexis really have intended for this to happen? Ruth soon learns she is pregnant and arranges to move to Australia and live with her friend Lucy's aunt in Melbourne until the birth. She gives her beloved daughter Clare up for adoption, but never stops thinking about her. No one but Lucy knows there ever was a baby. Full review...

The Boy at the Top of the Mountain by John Boyne

4.5star.jpg Teens

Meet Pierrot. As a very young child in 1930s Paris he is going to have a very awkward journey through his young life. His father is a violent drunk, reacting badly to what he saw in WWI, and although married to a French woman, is still staunchly German. That woman, Emilie, is going to die, and leave Pierrot an orphan, which will leave him in a home where he is bullied. But from the reaches of Europe and from the black corners of his family comes an aunt, Beatrix, who will give him a home, of a kind, at a most unusual mountaintop building. It's not her home – she just works there and had to ask special permission from someone special. The place? The Berghof. Full review...

Tremarnock: The Lives, Loves and Secrets of a Cornish Village by Emma Burstall

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Welcome to Tremarnock; an idyllic Cornish fishing village with pastel-painted cottages and colourful fishing boats bobbing in the harbour. This picture-postcard setting is home to single-mum Liz and her disabled daughter, Rosie. Liz works hard to make ends meet and relies on the kindness of neighbours for childcare. Thankfully, the community are happy to rally round and provide friendship, support, a listening ear and a cup of tea for hard-working Liz. Soon she will need to rely on them more than ever, as her life takes an unexpected turn that threatens to destroy her happiness. Full review...

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

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In The Barrel, anything is possible for the right price, and no one knows this better than criminal mastermind, Kaz Brekker. When Kaz is offered a chance at a perilous mission that could turn his poverty-stricken life upside down, he is determined to see the task fulfilled - but he won't be able to do it alone. Full review...

When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow by Dan Rhodes

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Two people are on a train on their way to, of all things, a WI meeting where the ladies of All Bottoms will be lectured on the non-existence of God. One of the two people is Professor Richard Dawkins, rampant atheist, hectoring scientist chappie, and all-round devotee of Deal or No Deal. The other is Smee, his mono-named assistant, amanuensis or 'male secretary'. Smee will come to the fore when the weather sets in and the train journey has to be abandoned some way short of its ultimate destination, Upper Bottom. Instead the pair fetch up at the isolated yet friendly community of Market Horton, and the only option for accommodation is taken – yes, the died-in-the-wool non-believer has to be housed by a retired vicar and his wife. This clash of titanic opinions, peppered with social faux pas aplenty will provide for a particularly English kind of farcical comedy, but one with the legs to go as far as any other Good Books have reached in the past… Full review...

Please Don't Leave Me Here by Tania Chandler

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If you like unreliable narrators then this is the book for you. In Brigitte, the protagonist of Please Don't Leave Me Here, Tania Chandler has created an unforgettable troubled character whose fractured mental state leads to erratic thought processes, vivid and none too pleasant dreams and an inability, or unwillingness, to recover her memory of her former life. None of which is helped by her drink problem and, as the story progresses, an addiction to prescription medication. Full review...

The Sea Between Us by Emylia Hall

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To her parents, the move to Cornwall was an escape to a better way of life. For city-girl Robyn, it was wet, remote and miserable and she was counting down the days to University and her return to civilization. Desperate for something to do to entertain herself, Robyn takes a wetsuit and surfboard and makes her way to a secluded cove. An inexperienced surfer, she soon gets into difficulty, but is rescued from the sea by a young local man called Jago. From that moment on, the two lives are intertwined by an invisible bond; a bond that will be tested and stretched during the years that follow. Full review...

The Largest Baby in Ireland After The Famine by Anne Barnett

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She was all colour and sway, and as far away as imaginable from the local women. Pale, pale skin and strong dark auburn hair falling free to large wide hips. She wore a purple shawl. That night Felix, a bachelor, aged 43, living in the house he was born in, dreamt of purple. Purple in the shape of a woman. And just like that, things change. I love this passage. It shows how strong the human pull is. Even when men and women are surrounded by great events - war, political upheaval, famine, depression - individual human desires can change the picture in an instant. Full review...

The Hosts of Rebecca by Alexander Cordell

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At the end of Rape of the Fair Country Iestyn Mortymer had been sentenced to deportation for seven years because of the part he played in the Chartist rebellion and the Newport Rising of 1839. His mother, wife, Marie, younger brother, Jethro, sister, Morfydd and the two children of the family returned to the land, living on a farm owned by Marie's grandfather. The life was hard and not just for the Mortymers, with poverty breathing over their shoulders and it was made worse by the tollgates installed by landowners, effectively adding a levy to any produce which the farmers attempted to move. Full review...

The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine by Alexander McCall Smith

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Back to Botswana I go, having saved this newest outing in the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series for a delightful weekend read. I never tire of these characters, and I always look forward to seeing what is happening in their lives. This time around the story is about holidays, amongst other things, and the tricky plans to persuade Mma Ramostwe to take a holiday. But what is Mma Makutsi up to? Does she have plans to take over the agency entirely whilst Mma Ramotswe is away? Full review...