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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]==Literary fiction==__NOTOC__{{newreviewFrontpage|author=John BuchanMatthew Tree|title=Sick Heart RiverWe'll Never Know
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Literary Fiction|summary=This was a surprise for me. It’s rare for a book to come Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to my attention be different from the reviewing gods that’s his father, a rerelease drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of a 1930s novel, his artistic passions all failed miserably and one that surfaced a couple who had endless crises of years ago nowself confidence. But when it strikes me as startlingly Conradian, updated for the timesSo Tim applied himself to his studies, cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and perfectly able to stand alongside one of literature’s greats, then it’s just a sign those reviewing gods are on the ballset himself high but achievable ambitions.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>184697030X</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Jim CraceB0C47LV1PC|title=All That FollowsFragility|author=Mosby Woods|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Leonard Lessing Can you make a ''Yo birthing person'' joke? And if you could, is a sofa socialist. He avoids corporate brands both in food and in clothes. He abides by all the right-on boycotts. He signs petitions. He does free gigs at benefit concerts. He gives donations - question should you know make it? Or is the kind of thingquestion if you did, would it land? The catch is that the answer for both could well be. Once, eighteen long years ago in Texas in 2006, he came very close to some real direct action. But he bottled it. And now, the frozen-shouldered jazzman-on-sabbatical finds his less-than-glorious radical past catching up with him right there in his living room, on the TV. Maxie Lermon, he of Austin 2006 and no stranger to violent agitprop, is in the UK, just up the road from Leonard, and he's taken a family hostage as a protest against the upcoming Reconciliation Summit. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330445642</amazonuk>}}
{{newreview|author=Ed Hillyer|title=The Clay Dreaming|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Hillyer has taken several historical facts and seamlessly blended in a big dollop of fiction to create a complex and riveting story. The title ''Fragility'' is suitably enigmatic, set as is King Cole (or Brippoki). He and his fellow cricketers (who also have been given rather unkind nicknames) have sailed from the bottom city of the worldPortland, Oregon, cautiously begins to emerge from the bustling metropolis of London. Talk about extremes. And although they have all been diligently 'schooled' in all things English, nevertheless, they are the talk of the town. The novel has barely started and already restrictions imposed during the mind boggles.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956251501</amazonuk>covid pandemic
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Wendy Law-YoneMosby Woods|title=The Road to WantingA Whirly Man Loses His Turn|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=We first meet Na Ga in her hotel room in Wanting, on the Chinese side of the border with Na GaThe West isn's native Burma (or Myanmar for t the more geographically pedantic, although Burma is used throughout this book)dominant force it once was. She Nobody in the West is attempting quite sure how to commit suicide, but mend this or even if mending it is interrupted by news from the hotel receptionist who tells her best course of action. Governments are flailing. A war here, a push for climate action there. A feeling that her guide across the bordernobody is in actual charge. Imagine then, Mr Jiang, has just committed suicide himselfthere was a man with precognition. You might by now have Imagine the impression that strategic advantage in this is not asset; a cheery kind man who can tell you what will happen given any set of bookcircumstances. That man would be valuable, and you'd be right up to a point? Perhaps the most valuable asset in history. Imagine then, although it's certainly not without its light touchesthat this man loses this ability. In fact What would governments do to get it's often quite beautiful, which makes the exposure of the seedier side so much more shocking.back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701184086</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Roddy Doyle0571379559|title=The Dead RepublicHouse of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Henry left ''The House of Broken Bricks'' is the story of four people. Tess Hembry's roots are in 1922Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, but instead, after she lives in the house on the Irish Civil War. It is now 1951. After his long exileriverbank, nothing is as he expectedbuilt of broken bricks. He revisits an old home to find no trace that a house ever stood there. The project that has brought him back is not Insubstantial as he expected. The Quiet Man will be a hugely successful film for John Fordit might look, but the life portrayed in it is not Henry Smart's lifestood the passage of time, storms and floods. Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the portrait of Irish politics delivery rounds - and everyday life to bring in sufficient money. They have twin boys - Sonny and Max, the film is not one he recognisesrainbow twins. Sonny's colouring reflects his mother's Jamaican heritage. In Max takes after his late 40sfather. People don't believe that they're related, he feels he much less twins and there's an assumption when Max is an old man already, alone out with his memories of the wife and family he lostmother that she's his nanny.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224090097</amazonuk>
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=James KelmanClaire North|title=If it is Your Life|rating=3|genre=Short Stories|summary=''If This Is Your Life'' is not so much a collection of short stories as a collection of pieces of creative writing. Kelman doesn't really do 'stories'. In nineteen pieces of writing of varying length from just a single page to more lengthy pieces, such as the story that gives its title to this collection, Kelman writes (mostly) about people on the edge House of society. He addresses issues such as class, politics, gender, age and ill health.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241142423</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Yoko Ogawa|title=The Housekeeper and the Professor Odysseus
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=I never really got on with maths at school. Or sport. So a book that seems to deal with both baseball and mathematics ought to fly to the bottom of my 'to read' pile. However, this slim little Japanese novel slipped into my hands and into my heart as soon as I saw it. The premise is very simple - a young housekeeper is assigned to a job working for an elderly, brain damaged professor of mathematics. He has only eighty minutes of short-term memory, so he doesnWhat could matter more than love?''t remember her from one day to the next, but his memory pre-1975 remains intact and somehow he continues to function, living through his obsession with numbers. Each morning he greets her at the door asking for her birth date and her telephone number. He finds puzzles and equations in everything, including shoe sizes and baseball, and the housekeeper becomes fascinated as she and her son also begin to see the beauty and the poetry in numbers.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099521342</amazonuk>}}
{{newreview|author=Glen Duncan|title=A Day and a Night and a Day|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Augustus Rose was brought The follow-up in New York, but not in a des res, in an altogether grittier part of to the city. excellent ''Ithaca'' picks up a few months after where we left off... his childhood in East Harlem, darkness framing In the blistered stooppalace of Odysseus, the blinding asphaltwith 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 smell throne of garbage cans the Western Isles. Having survived – politically and urine.' Hephysical – the chaotic storm that Clytemnestra brought to Ithaca's had an unfortunate start in life. Mothershores, white, father (unknown) black so that makes Queen Penelope is on the young Augustus an in-between, brink of a not-sure, a neither-one-colour-nor-the-otherfragile peace. Today, in One that shatters however with the 21st centuryreturn of Orestes, no one would raise an eyebrowKing of Mycenae, bat an eyelid. But this novel is set in the 1960s where racial tensions abound. Yesand his sister Elektra, even in cosmopolitan cities such as New Yorkseeking refuge.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1847394175</amazonuk>0356516075
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Eleanor ThomKay Chronister|title=The Tin-KinDesert Creatures|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary=Dawn With a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, post-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Whether it is a single mother who has been avoiding robotic takeover, a lot world devoid of things for water or a long time. When her auntnuclear holocaust, who raised Dawn as this genre is a daughter, dies, Dawn finds the key way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a cupboard which she was forbidden to look into as a childnew work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the fears that exist for humanity today. Inside she finds clues to her family history, links to a Traveller Community, unearthing It is a journey shocking novel that sees her finding her roots. We also witness her struggle still manages to renew her complicated relationship with her family and her efforts to escape the ever-present memory of her abusive husbandfind hope.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0715639013</amazonuk>1803364998
}}
 {{newreviewfrontpage|isbn=1803363002|author=Patricia DunckerEric LaRocca|title=The Strange Case of the Composer and His JudgeTrees Grew Because I Bled There|rating=45|genre=General FictionHorror|summary=Horror taps into something primeval within us. It's rural France, and 2000 is barely begun, when hunters come across used as a spread of human corpses in the mountains. Several families, all in the same cult, seem way to have killed themselves on their path to whereverreflect our darkest emotions and how we as humans react and process them. If soMost horror fiction feature a ''Big Bad'', this whether that is a problemhome invader, for the last time it happened, in Switzerland a few years previousmonster or a ghost, nobody could work out why – it usually something tangible and who was there to dispose of some , by the end of the evidencestory, beatable. This isnEric LaRocca's 't 'The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. It is a problem for collection of short stories more interested in the policeman involvedhorrors of illness, as he fell desperately in love with the investigative judge in collaborating on the initial casegrief and humiliation. Combining again, they see a link with everybody involved in both cases, a famous conductor /composerHorrors that linger and are harder to defeat than any ''Big Bad''.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408807041</amazonuk>
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Marilyn ChinMadelaine Lucas|title=Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen: A Manifesto in 41 Tales Thirst for Salt
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen (oh''Love, how I love that title!) will almost certainly not 'd read, was supposed to be to everyone's tastea light and weightless feeling, but I confess had always longed for gravity'' Told from a retrospective view, a young woman unravels the year-long relationship that I loved once defined her. Overlaid with later wisdom, the narrator relives the affair with a man twenty years her senior from its inception – the summer after finishing university – to its originalitysorrowful end the summer after. Set against the backdrop of an isolated Australian coastal town ''Thirst for Salt'' details the 24-year-old narrator's deepening relationship with her older lover, boldnessdepicting its all-consuming nature, sassy style how it changed her perspective on both romantic and the humour of familial relationships and how italtered her irrevocably.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0241144612</amazonuk>0861546490
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Paolo GiordanoMichael Grothaus|title=The Solitude of Prime NumbersBeautiful Shining People
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=''The Solitude of Prime Numbers'' follows the lives of Alice But fearing something and Mattia from childhood having it come to middle agepass are two different things. Alice is a wilful anorexic, scarred by a childhood skiing accident and an overbearing father. Mattia is an reclusive self-harmer trying And I'm willing to live with the guilt bet most of having been responsible for his disabled twin sister's death. Their paths cross at a school friend's party during a painful adolescence and their lives are destined what we fear will never happen, or we can take steps to intertwine throughout the coming years, despite the chronic awkwardness of their courtshipchange it.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0552775983</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Juli Zeh|title=Dark Matter|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=''Dark Matter'' is translated from German and nothing has been 'lost in translation' here. The lives of two very bright academics are interwoven throughout. Students Sebastian and Oskar are the very best of friends; it's almost as if they share the same heartbeat. However, as they grow into adulthood real life comes along and tends to get in the way. Sebastian settles for domestic bliss. Their friendship cools off, becomes a little tense and strained.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846552087</amazonuk>}}
{{newreview|author=Margaret Forster|title=Isa and May|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Isamay is a would-be academic and she's writing a thesis about grandmothers in history, inspired, one suspects, by her own grandmothers, Isa and May. Her efforts are constantly diverted by 'Beautiful Shining People'' revolves around the present needs question of her grandmothers identity and the secrets about their pasts which rise acceptance. Of what it means to the surface when she least expects them. There's another complication toobe human. Isamay Of what is in her thirties real and has never wanted a childwhat is artificial, but reconsiders, despite and whether the fact that her partner, Ian, development of technology is adamant that he doesn't want children. The more Isamay delves, the more she realises that there are secrets in Ian's past tooexciting or frightening.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701184663</amazonuk>191458564X
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Kathryn StockettJennifer Saint|title=The HelpAtalanta
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Jackson, Mississippi: 1960. The talk at the bridge club and the tennis club is of what Jackie Kennedy is wearing. They're white women, of course and they're free to play because a coloured woman will be looking after the children, doing the shopping and cleaning the house. They're trusted to bring the children up, but they're not trusted to be honest about the silver. Aibileen is raising her seventeenth white child but something hardened in her heart when her son died whilst the white bosses looked the other way. They took his body to the coloureds' hospital and rolled it off the back of the truck and left.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141039280</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Olga Grushin
|title=The Concert Ticket
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=''The Concert Ticket'' follows the lives of a family in Soviet Russia who have grown desperately distant from one another. Sergei, the father, is a frustrated musician who longs to play the pre-revolutionary masterpieces of composers like Igor Selinsky but is forced to play the kind of patriotic ditties he despises. His schoolteacher wife, Anna, longs for his love, but is never quite able to get his attention with her shy gestures. Their shiftless son, Alexander, has quietly given up going to school and spends his days hanging around the park, consorting with undesirables. Also living in their house is Anna's silent, elderly mother.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918482</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Aatish Taseer
|title=The Temple-Goers
|rating=3
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Aatish Taseer is probably best known for his journalism''I was as worthy as any one of them. I would get on board that ship, I vowed. I would take my place, publishing regularly not just in the Indian press, in Prospect, and perhaps most prolifically in Time magazinename of the goddess. He has won acclaim It was for his memoir: Stranger to History in which he, raised by his Indian Sikh mother, traces his absent Muslim father across the border in Pakistan – and also for his translations sake of the short stories of Saadat Hasan Mantomy name, too.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918504</amazonuk>}}Atalanta''
{{newreview|author=Tom Connolly|title=The Spider Truces|rating=4Princess.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=The title of this debut novel by Tom Connolly is enigmatic, mysteriousWarrior. It draws the reader in - just like a fly to a spider's webLover. And in fairness 'The Spider Truces' does exactly what it say on the tin as the main character, Ellis, is obsessed and terrified in equal measure, of spidersHero. ... and when you live in an old house, as the O'Rourke family does, there are plenty of spiders and other creepy crawlies about.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956251528</amazonuk>}}
{{newreview|author=Mary Yukari Waters|title=The Favorites|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=This story Abandoned at birth for being born a daughter rather than a son, Atalanta is set in Kyotoraised under the protective eye of the goddess Athemis and fashioned into a formidable huntress, Japan, starting in June 1978one who longs for adventure. Fourteen year old Sarah Rexford and her Japanese motherWhen the opportunity comes – to join the Argonauts, Yokoa fierce band of warriors, have come back descendent from the US Gods themselves – Atalanta seizes the chance to stay with family for a few weeks. Sarah was born fight in Artemis' name and brought up carve out her own legendary place in Japan but has lived in the US with her mother and white American father for five yearshistory. She What follows is very conscious a whirlwind of the differences between life in Kyoto challenges and in Fielder's Butte, California. Here in Kyoto, the women, including Sarah discovery and her mumthrough it, go shopping every day for food, and the food is very different – in an opening scene, Sarah is trying to explain to her grandfather what Atalanta must remember Artemis' fatal warning: that if she normally has for breakfast in the USmarries, and becoming aware of the gulf between it will be her life in Japan and in Californiaundoing.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1847392334</amazonuk>1472292154
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Rose TremainAmanthi Harris|title=TrespassBeautiful Place|rating=45
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Set in Padma, a young Sri Lankan, has returned to the Villa Hibiscus on the hills southern coast of Southern France, Trespass her home country. This is a place she spent her formative years. It is not a novel about sibling love and rivalryplace she was born into, disputed territory and ultimately revenge. In but the French corner are Aramon Lunel, resident one she thinks of the Mas Lunel, and his sister Audrun who lives in a cottage in the groundsas home. In How she came to be at the English corner are Victoria VereyVilla, a garden designerhow it became her home, and the machinations that have flowed through her partner, an untalented watercolourist, Kitty. The catalyst that brings these together is life ever since she first arrived there provide the arrival in France of Anthony Verey, Victoria's sister whose exclusive antiques business in London is failing 'score'' for this gentle and who decides to follow his sister in finding a new life in Franceyet subtly violent novel. Aramon is tempted Padma's present fails to sell his family Mas by escape her past and much like the lure musical score of 'foreign' money even if a film, that means strand weaves its way through everything that his sister's house has to be destroyed to secure happens at the dealVilla.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701177942</amazonuk>1784631930
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Castle Freeman178563335X|title=All That I HaveSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Castle Freeman may sound like two thirds of When we first meet Rachel Bird she's a firm of provincial solicitors but thankfully this Castle Freeman is trainee vicar, sitting in on a man very skilled in writing about PCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the law rather than practicing itchildren up. In his latest novel Freeman tells an intriguing tale involving local Sheriff Lucian Wing Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-old Hannah and his practical yet lowher elder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Thelma's daughter-key approach to maintaining order in rural Vermont-law won't let her see her grandson. Not for Wing Holthorpe, on the gung ho approach to fighting crime. He doesn't wear Norfolk coast, is a uniformlovely place, he drives but Rachel is struggling to develop a battered old car rather than real bond with the standard issue sheriffparish - and she's wagon and his gunin awe of the vicar, so ubiquitous in US law enforcementGail, is safely tucked away in his bottom drawerbut then she's been doing the job for more than thirty years. Everyone in Rachel and Christopher hoped that a walk on the area knows the sheriff and by and large beach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they respect him and his slightly unorthodox way of doing businessneeded. And then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0715639021</amazonuk>
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Dan Rhodes1398515388|title=Little Hands ClappingThe Boy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The first character to mention First of all, it was the earthquake, deep in the ocean floor, which created the tsunami and this book is a moth, in turn, caused the nuclear meltdown. The result was complete and utter devastation. It's a human mothThe deaths were uncountable, drawn to and the flame loss of livelihoods was widespread. The fact that is a museum many pets were separated from their owners came far down the list of suicide priorities but - six months after the tsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a supposedly cautionary, life-affirming, memento mori, somewhere in Germanyconvenience store. Its curator is an old hand at lonely, unloved museums, fresh from an art gallery in an airport - it didnHe wasn't take off - who notices a dog person but the noise of the latest suicide convenience store owner's comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to happen in the museum, and goes right back to sleep. A spider crawls into open his mouth car door and gets eatenTamon the dog jumped in.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847675298</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Delphine de Vigan0989715337|title=No and Me|rating=5|genre=Teens|summary=Lou is a clever, clever child with an IQ approaching 160. She's thirteen, but she's been moved up two years at school and she compares her flat chested, nervous self somewhat unfavourably with her fifteen-year-old peer group. Funnily enough, her only real friend at school is Lucas, who's seventeen and such a rebel that he's been moved down two years. Things at home aren't great for Lou. Her baby sister died a few years ago and her mother has been severely depressed ever since. She barely talks, seldom gets dressed. Her father is worn down to Papa on the bone with worry and Lou doesn't get a great deal of attention from him either, so distracted is he. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408807513</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewMoon|author=Joshua Ferris |title=The Unnamed|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Tim Farnsworth seemed to have it all. He loved his wife Jane and daughter Becka and his job as a partner in prestigious law firm was enjoyable, fulfilling and financially rewarding. The fly in the ointment was that sometimes he was overtaken by a compulsion to walk. The time of day, the weather or the occasion did not matter – when the compulsion came he had to walk until he was physically exhausted and fell asleep immediately after calling his wife to come and collect him. There seemed to be no medical explanation for what was happening – and Tim and Jane had tried every source they could find – but Tim was still reluctant to accept that this was a mental rather than a physical illness.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670917702</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Joe Treasure|title=BesottedMarco North
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It is late August 1982, ''Some frogs had gotten into the day when O level results come out. Michael Cartwright already knows he has failed his exams and is dreading his parents finding out. He, his twin brother Kieran (who has done very well) and their younger sisters are on the family holiday, staying with their mother's parents in Kilross, County Cork. To escape boredom and his parents' anger, he wanders round the village, where he meets Fergal Noonan, training to be a priest, and lively Peggy O'Connor. He has his first kiss and a bit more with Peggy. The family soon goes home to Cheltenham, but their brief visit to Ireland will have far reaching significance.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330511726</amazonuk>}}
{{newreview|author=Laila Lalami |title=Secret Son|rating=3.5|genre=General Fiction|summary=''Secret Son'' is the story of Youssef ElWalter stood waist-Mekki, deep in the slum-dwelling teenage son of single mother Rachida. Youssef has always been told that his father is deadfragrant water, so when he finds out naked except for his mother has lied to conceal the fact that he was born out beaten leather hat. Long strands of wedlocktheir eggs wove around him, he plunges headlong into an identity crisissticky gray pearls with tadpoles inside them. He tracks Two of the dogs leaned over the opening and barked down his real father, a wealthy businessman called Nabil Amrani who is surprisingly enthusiastic about his illegitimate son's arrival. Nabil has recently fallen out with his daughter and he seizes this opportunity to mould Youssef into at the strange noise of the obedient son buckets as he has always wantedfilled them.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918296</amazonuk>}}''
{{newreview|author=Aravind Adiga|title=How is that for an opening? The White Tiger|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Balram Halwai, a Bangalore entrepreneur (style of this novel in the form of sorts) interconnected short stories goes from succinct and laconic to wistful and a natural philosophermusing, hears that there is turning on a planned visit from the Chinese leader to India to learn the source of Indian entrepreneurial talentsixpence. Balram knows that the story he will be told by the Indian leader will be a long way from the true story of modern Indian lifeAnd author Marco North, and so resolves, over who has the course most wonderful turn of seven nightsphrase, starts as he means to write to the Chinese premier with the story of his life and his own journey from a poor son of a rickshaw driver to the head of his own businessgo on.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1843547228</amazonuk>
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Matthew CondonDaisy Hildyard|title=The Trout OperaEmergency
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Judges Carrington and Thorpe recline in leather armchairs on the verandah The summary of Buckleythis book doesn's Crossing hotel and watch in silence as a giant trout shuffles across t come close to explaining what is done with the bridgepremise. |isbn=1913097811}}
{{Frontpage |author=Sally Oliver |title=The JudgesWeight of Loss |rating=4 |genre=Literary Fiction |summary= Marianne is grieving. Traumatised after the death of her sister, she awakes to find strange, despite their initial prominence thick black hairs sprouting from the bones of her spine which steadily increase in size and convincing back-story giving them volume. Her GP, diagnosing the odd phenomenon as a valid reason for being physical reaction to her grief, recommends she go to stay at Nede, an experimental new treatment centre in Buckley's Crossing, will not really concern usWales. They are there Yet something strange is happening to represent Marianne and the other patients at Nede: a type: metamorphosis of a visitor kind. As Marianne's memories threaten to small town Australiaoverwhelm her, a fisherman Nede offers her release from the city, this cycle of memory and pain—but only at a seeker after something in the Snowy terrible price: that probably isn't fish.  We shall, however, be concerned with the giant troutof identity itself.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>038561506X</amazonuk>086154112X }} {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Clare MorrallNatalia Garcia Freire|title=The Man Who DisappearedThis World Does Not Belong To Us|rating=45
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I was drawn to Early comments on this book straight awaydebut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, a delight. Firstly, I will agree with the jacket cover first – tremendous is lovely. The subliminal message no understatement – but 'a delight' is read me, please read meperhaps using the expression in a way I'm not familiar with. We are introduced I have to confess my ignorance of the Kendall family; mother, father and three childrenSpanish-language literary tradition so forgive my generalisation here. All leading unremarkableFrom the little I have read (in translation, rather ordinary lives. The father, Felix, works hard I don't read Spanish) there does seem to provide for his family. He loves them all dearly. They all love him back. It is be a secure family unit. Until - completely out of tendency towards the blue - he simply disappears. His family is distraught and mystified. We all know that a person cannot simply disappear. But Felix Kendall has taken himself off fantastical – the radarmystical realism. Why?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0340994274</amazonuk>0861541901
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Christopher IsherwoodJennifer Saint|title=A Single ManElektra
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=If you've ever wanted to know what goes on inside someoneElektra's mind you'll love this short novel, first published back by Jennifer Saint tells the story of three women who live in 1964. We join George Falconer just at the moment he awakes from sleep and witness his innermost thoughts as he goes about a typical dayheavily male dominated world of Ancient Greece. It all sounds pretty dull and monotonous but what makes this exciting is that George isn't just any old professor living the American DreamCassandra, oh noClytemnestra, he's so detached from and Elektra are all bit players in the banal normality story of the world Trojan War. Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that he's almost outside of his own body at timesoften the silent women have the most compelling stories and the most extreme furies.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099548828</amazonuk>1472273915
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Angelica Garnett8409290103|title=The Unspoken TruthIf Only|author=Matthew Tree|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I would not normally start Twenty-one-year-old Malcolm Lowry had been sent abroad by his father, cotton-broker AO Lowry: he asked his accountant, Mr Patrick, to ensure that the young man got on board the boat and thereafter Patrick was to send him a review with the biography of monthly allowance. Patrick sent the author, but The Unspoken Truth is presented as autobiographical fiction by money regularly and a child correspondence - of sorts - sprang up between the Bloomsbury Group – in fact the subtitle is two although we hear more about what Lowry has to say than Patrick. It wasn't that Lowry senior didn'A Quartet of Bloomsbury Storiest care for his son, it was that he didn't care to have him in this country where he might be a danger to his wife and other children. The blurb on alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to get the inside cover even identifies which character is based young man on the author in each of the four stories, just in case we are not surehis way.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184353</amazonuk>
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Amos Oz|title=Rhyming Life and Death|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Rhyming Love and Death is a kind of philosophical love letter to literature, or perhaps more so to fiction. It is a book about how to write, about the compulsion to writeAntoine Laurain, Le Sonneur and about the strange world that the writer of fiction must live in.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099521024</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Paul MurrayJane Aitken (translator)|title=Skippy DiesRed is My Heart
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Life [[:Category:Antoine Laurain|Antoine Laurain]] books have always been black and white and read in Seabrook College is a messmy house. Some of the staff are young enough to remember their own school days thereAnd so was this one, but many are certainly too old for although I could have spelled thatmore accurately – this one was, and is, black and white and red. A lot of the boys are victims of ragging and bullying for being too chunkyYes, he has an artistic collaborator on this piece, or too smart - but some are so chunky and smart thereI think it's a certain kudos possible to them. The female say not one page lacks the influence of the species is a thing only spied from their own school next door, and only met by selling them ritalin as a weight-control pill, or meeting them at the very rare combined school discosome striking visual ideas.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0241141826</amazonuk>1913547183
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Tom WolfeB098FFFBH9|title=The Bonfire of the VanitiesSnowcub|author=Graham Fulbright|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In his own mind, bond trader Sherman McCoy Fourteen-year-old Rachel is her school's animal rights project leader and she and her friend are producing a 'Master of competition entry to highlight the way in which human beings exploit the Universe'animal world. He has She gets a pleasant wifegreat deal of support from her family: father Pip Harrison, a beautiful mistresslecturer at Imperial College, London, mother Kate and a sweet six year old daughterher twin, Nick. Henry Lamb is a black student from Kate runs the projects. Under normal circumstancesfamily business, it's clear that McCoy's world and Lamb's world would never overlap. But when McCoy and his mistress Maria Ruskin end up lost a toy shop called Cornucopia in the BronxPutney, and an accident leads to Lamb being hit by McCoywhich is where we'll meet Rachel's Mercedes, a chain main (if unsuspected) source of events start which will lead to his downfallinformation: five soft toys.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548798</amazonuk>
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Kate Cole-AdamsYancey Williams|title=Walking to Crosshairs of the MoonDevil|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=We meet the main character Jessica, or Jess as she is usually called, deep in an emotional black hole. She can see no light at the end of the tunnel. And right from the start, right from page one, we have a sense of the beautiful and poetic language of Cole-Adams. 'Time and I have a new arrangement. We leave each other alone.' And indeed time is not important in this novel. We have all the time in the world would probably be the motto of the medical staff - if they had one. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849161348</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Ru Freeman|title=A Disobedient Girl|rating=5|genre=General Fiction|summary=''A Disobedient Girl'' follows two women struggling to retain control of their lives in the face of servitude. Latha is a servant girl to the affluent Vithanage family, whose daughter, Thara, is Latha's age. As children, the girls are the best of friends, but they are destined to be separated by class, which is made painfully obvious when boys come into the picture. Meanwhile, Biso serves a cruel and drunken husband who beats her and terrorises her children, one of whom is another man's love child. Biso's husband murdered her lover in a hateful rage when he uncovered her affair and she realises that she must escape his house if she and her children are to live. Latha too seeks escape, but she finds it in the arms of Thara's boyfriend and this sets off a chain of events that will echo far into her future.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670917958</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Simon Robson|title=Catch|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Catharine's husband Tom Award-winning crime writer Eddie Jablonski is away getting on business in Birminghamyears and, despite his strenuous objections and so Catharine awakes alone for the first time thanks to his daughter, finds himself living - or imprisoned, from Eddie's point of view - in their little cottage at room 315 of the end Garden of their lane. They moved there Eden nursing home, with only a few months previouslytrusty nursing aide, and since then Catharine has spent her days quietly awaiting her husband's return from work. She is sure that she will figure outJenkins, some day, what her purpose in life is. She thought it might be to have a baby, but they have been trying for some time and it hasn't happened as yetpalatable company. Meanwhile she waits, and thinks, and waits. In the lounge stands her piano, a stark reminder of the life she didn't manage Nothing is going to realise because although she studied music she found, quite quickly, that keep Eddie from his stock-in spite of being passionate she lacked any kind -trade of talent for it whatsoever. Sowriting though, on this dayso here, alone at homefor his readers, Catharine finds herself tormented by the pianoare his wanderings through his life's presence and over-thinking every second of the day. She worries away at who she is, and what her life is, as her loneliness and the day itself unravel around herwork.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0224090232</amazonuk>0986031658}} {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Joe Meno0008421714|title=The Great PerhapsMrs March|author=Virginia Feito
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Jonathan Casper faints when he sees clouds. His wife Madeline worries about everything, not least The problem began just after the way the pigeons that she is studying are murdering each other. Their seventeen year old daughter Amelia wants to overthrow the evil empire publication of capitalism and is making her own bomb, while fourteen year old Thisbe is looking for God and praying to him. JonathanGeorge March's father, seventy six year old Henry, is planning his disappearancemost successful novel to date. Jonathan and Madeline may be Everyone but Mrs March (we know her first name only on the verge of splitting up, last page) seemed to either be reading it or had already done so. Every day Mrs March went to the dismay of both daughters.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330512471</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Elizabeth Kostova|title=The Swan Thieves|rating=2|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=1999 – A renowned painterlocal patisserie to buy olive bread but on that particular morning, Robert OliverPatricia asked, goes madas she was wrapping the bread, attacking a painting with a knife. He's arrested, and sent to a psychiatrist who is also an artist. The psychiatrist, Andrew Marlowe, can'but isn't get his patient to talk to him, but tries to investigate what drove him to this by talking to his wife and his girlfriend, and reading some letters Oliver seems obsessed with. 1879 – Beatrice de Clerval, aspiring artist, corresponds with her uncle-by-marriage Olivier Vignot, the first time he's based a more experienced painter. Their letters will be found by Robert Oliver, 120 years later, and will lead to his loss of sanity.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847442404</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Atiq Rahimi|title=The Patience Stone|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Set in Afghanistancharacter on you?'' She mentioned that Johanna, the principal character had ''The Patience Stoneher mannerisms'' is a partly allegorical tale of a Muslim wife tending to her comatose soldier husband who has been shot in the neck. As she cares for him Perhaps this would not have mattered, except for the first time ever she fact that Johanna is able to speak to him without fear the whore of censorship and he becomesNantes - ''a weak, plain, detestable, for herpathetic, like the mythical Patience Stone to which you tell your troubles and when the stone finally burstsunloved, you are free from your tormentsunloveable wretch. But also this might mean the Apocalypse.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184167</amazonuk>''
}}
{{newreview|author=Joyce Carol Oates|title=A Fair Maiden|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=I've recently read the terrific short story collection ''The Female Of The Species'' also by Oates and couldn't wait Move on to start her latest book. I felt sure that I was in for a literary treat - and I was. Firstly, the book itself, a hardback with a beautifully nostalgic cover is a book lover's delight.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847248586</amazonuk>}}[[Newest Paranormal Reviews]]

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