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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]==Literary fiction==__NOTOC__{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Barbara TrapidoMatthew Tree|title=Sex and StravinskyWe'll Never Know
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Josh Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, a drunk and Caroline chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of his artistic passions all failed miserably and their daughter Zoe live on an old red bus in Oxford, even though both have quite well paid jobs as an academic and headteacher. Caroline has spent her adult life deferring her plans for the future in order to support her widowed mother who lives in a house nearbyhad endless crises of self confidence. Josh’s job in the drama department of Bristol University does offer him some opportunities So Tim applied himself to escape abroad thoughhis studies, this time to a conference in cultivated his abilities rather than his native South Africadaydreams and set himself high but achievable ambitions.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1408802325</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Samantha HuntB0C47LV1PC|title=The SeasFragility|author=Mosby Woods
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Can you make a ''The SeasYo birthing person'' follows joke? And if you could, is the story of a nameless nineteen-year old girl who question should you make it? Or is lonely and adrift in a cruel coastal town so far to the north of the USA question if you did, would it land? The catch is that the roads only run southanswer for both could well be. She misses her father, an absent alcoholic sailor, while her silence-loving mother, who grew up on an isolated island with deaf parents, worries deeply about her. Early on in the story we get the distinct impression that our narrator is not deemed .. no. ''Fragility'normal' by her peersis set as the city of Portland, who call her all sorts of unflattering things. With nothing to do in her small townOregon, and no one cautiously begins to do it with, she spends her time pining for a local alcoholic called Jude who is fifteen years her senior, and who refuses her amorous advances on the grounds that it would be wrong. As emerge from the story unfolds, Jude and restrictions imposed during the girl's relationship grows and changes, sometimes in unexpected ways.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849013934</amazonuk>covid pandemic
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Lionel ShriverMosby Woods|title=We Need To Talk About KevinA Whirly Man Loses His Turn|rating=54
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Politicians continue to argue that The West isn't the dominant force it once was. Nobody in the solution West is quite sure how to social issues lies with the family, so mend this or even if mending it is timely that at the heart best course of Lionel Shriver's 2005 Orange Prize winning novel action. Governments are flailing. A war here, a push for climate action there. A feeling that nobody is in actual charge. Imagine then, there was a man with precognition. Imagine the issue strategic advantage in this asset; a man who can tell you what will happen given any set of nature vs nurture - what makes a person like he or she iscircumstances. That man would be valuable, right? Is Perhaps the eponymous Kevin born evil or is he influenced by his mother's coldness towards himmost valuable asset in history. There are no clear answers and Imagine then, that's what gives this brave book, which tackles the taboos that some mothers don't bond with their children, such powerman loses this ability.What would governments do to get it back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1846687349</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Ben Okri0571379559|title=Tales The House of FreedomBroken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Tales ''The House of Freedom Broken Bricks'' is a book the story of two halvesfour people. Tess Hembry's roots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, with a short story entitled Comic Destiny taking up but instead, she lives in the house on the riverbank, built of broken bricks. Insubstantial as it might look, it's stood the majority passage of time, storms and floods. Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the bookdelivery rounds - and to bring in sufficient money. Comic Destiny They have twin boys - Sonny and 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 made up of a series of short pieces out with his mother that follow on from each other and are probably best described as being closer to prose poetry than anything elseshe's his nanny.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846041597</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Fernando PessoaClaire North|title=The Book House of DisquietOdysseus
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=If you try to read 'The Book of Disquiet' from cover to cover, it is almost oppressively melancholic. Nothing much happens, and what we have is a collection of reveries and thoughts - almost a diary, but not quite - of existential musings about life, loneliness and the human condition. ItWhat could matter more than love?'s so introspective that after a while the monotony of the writer's mundane existence starts to wear on the reader. '''But''' I would urge you not to read this book like that. Rather, dip into it at random and you will find a work of undeniable genius. It's quite simply a masterpiece of modernist writing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687357</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Carsten JensenKay Chronister|title=We, the DrownedDesert Creatures|rating=54|genre=Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary=In 1848With a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, Laurids Madsen and other men post-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Whether it is a robotic takeover, a world devoid of the smalltown of Marstal go to war to fight the Germanswater or a nuclear holocaust, and an explosionflings him up this genre is a way for humans to heaven, as far as anyone can tellcathartically experience their most existential fears. But Lauridsreturns, claiming his sea boots were too heavy ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a new work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the fears that exist for him to stay upthere – only to be lost to Marstal anyway, as he abandons his familyhumanity today. It is a shocking novel that still manages to sail the high seasfind hope.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1846550963</amazonuk>1803364998
}}
{{newreviewfrontpage|isbn=1803363002|author=Matthew HootonEric LaRocca|title=Deloume RoadThe Trees Grew Because I Bled There|rating=45|genre=Literary FictionHorror|summary=A tinyHorror 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, rural community with a handful monster or a ghost, it usually something tangible and, by the end of characters the story, beatable. Eric LaRocca's ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. It is at a collection of short stories more interested in the heart horrors of this novelillness, grief and humiliation. And the thing Horrors that binds them all together is Deloume Road. Hooton gives over every chapter (linger and some are very short) harder to one of his characters - Irene, Andy, the butcher. Each is very different from the otherdefeat than any ''Big Bad''.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224087657</amazonuk>
}}
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Andrei is a perceptive and deeply conscientious doctor, a young rheumatologist and paediatrician working in a Leningrad hospital just after the terrible siege, during the last days of Stalin’s dictatorship. He is as quick to notice symptoms in his colleagues as in his young patients. When he is approached by Russov''Love, a fellow physicianI'd read, he registers his confrere’s pervading smell of fear. This is all part of the pathology of the times; life as it is lived under a tyrannical dictatorship. A dictatorship determined was supposed to pursue be a purge – a vendetta directed against doctors, particularly Jewish doctors. The sweating Russov manages to inveigle Andrei Aleksayev into treating a very sick child, Gorya, the son of Volkhov, who is a tyrannical and high ranking secret police officer. Therapeutic failure, in all probability, could result in vengeance, arrest and devastating effects on Andrei’s loving wife Anna light and her young adolescent brotherweightless feeling, Kolya.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905490593</amazonuk>}}but I had always longed for gravity''
}}
{{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=Michelle LovricJennifer Saint|title=The Book of Human SkinAtalanta
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This is a sixth novel from best-selling Turkish author''I was as worthy as any one of them. I would get on board that ship, Elif ShafakI vowed. Set in twelfth century AnatoliaI would take my place, two famous characters from Islamic history meet not just in a gorgeously real worldthe name of the goddess. A delicate contemporary US love story is wrapped around It was for the richsake of my name, meaty historical fictiontoo. DonAtalanta''t be misled by the dodgy-sounding title!|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918733</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Eleanor CattonAmanthi Harris|title=The RehearsalBeautiful Place
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=If you are Padma, a young Sri Lankan, has returned to the Villa Hibiscus on the type southern coast of person who wants their novels her home country. This is a place she spent her formative years. It is not a place she was born into, but the one she thinks of as home. How she came to start be at the beginningVilla, how it became her home, build character and plot before coming to a satisfying the machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the ''score'they all lived happily ever after' ending, then avoid for this book at all costs. You will hate it. But I cannot remember when I last enjoyed a first time gentle and yet subtly violent novel as much as this one. It is ambitious, daring Padma's present fails to escape her past and complexmuch like the musical score of a film, and yet it works beautifullythat strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the Villa.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1847081398</amazonuk>1784631930
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Barbara Kingsolver178563335X|title=The LacunaSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ten years ago, Barbara KingsolverWhen we first meet Rachel Bird she's [[The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver|Poisonwood Bible]] revealed the grim politics a trainee vicar, sitting in on a PCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the Congochildren up. The Lacuna has Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-old Hannah and her elder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a similarly political themesobbing parishioner. Thelma's daughter-in-law won't let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, this time turning her focus on Mexico the Norfolk coast, is a lovely place, but Rachel is struggling to develop a real bond with the parish - and she's in awe of the USA in vicar, Gail, but then she's been doing the 1940s job for more than thirty years. Rachel and 1950sChristopher hoped that a walk on the beach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed. And then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>057125263X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=David Eagleman1398515388|title=Sum: Tales from The Boy and the AfterlivesDog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary General Fiction|summary=For some reason I find myself unable to start First of all, it was the earthquake, deep in the ocean floor, which created the tsunami and this review, in turn, caused the nuclear meltdown. So I'll mention this book starts with the end, The result was complete and see where we go from thereutter devastation. Of courseThe deaths were uncountable, that's and the key – this book does just loss of livelihoods was widespread. The fact that – starts with many pets were separated from their owners came far down the end of our human life here on Earth (or wherever you happen to be reading this) and posits forty possibilities list of what happens thereafter, in priorities but - six months after the hereaftertsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. ItHe wasn't a dog person but the convenience store owner's not so much 'Five People You Meet comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his car door and Tamon the dog jumped in Heaven' as 'Forty Heavens you Might Meet People In'.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847674283</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=M J Hyland0989715337|title=This Is HowPapa on the Moon|author=Marco North
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Things weren't going too badly for Patrick Oxtoby. He's intelligent and did Some frogs had gotten into the well at school. Then his Gran died. He started getting pains in his shoulder and things rapidly went downhill from there. He drops out of university to become a mechanic. By the time we meet him as a 23-year-old, he's become a loner who cannot communicate his feelings and who cannot seem to fit himself into society. Now his fiancee has left him (and you can see her point) and he finds himself in a seaside boarding house in an unnamed English town, hoping to start a new life. Then, one night he commits an act of violence (you can see it coming) and his life goes from bad to awful.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184767383X</amazonuk>}}'
}}
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=We first meet Na Ga in her hotel room in Wanting, on the Chinese side The summary of the border with Na Ga's native Burma (or Myanmar for the more geographically pedantic, although Burma is used throughout this book). She is attempting doesn't come close to commit suicide, but explaining what is interrupted by news from the hotel receptionist who tells her that her guide across the border, Mr Jiang, has just committed suicide himself. You might by now have the impression that this is not a cheery kind of book, and you'd be right up to a point, although it's certainly not without its light touches. In fact it's often quite beautiful, which makes the exposure of done with the seedier side so much more shockingpremise.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701184086</amazonuk>1913097811}}
{{newreviewFrontpage |author=Roddy DoyleSally Oliver |title=The Dead RepublicWeight of Loss |rating=4 |genre=Literary Fiction |summary= Marianne is grieving. Traumatised after the death of her sister, she awakes to find strange, thick black hairs sprouting from the bones of her spine which steadily increase in size and volume. Her GP, diagnosing the odd phenomenon as a physical reaction to her grief, recommends she go to stay at Nede, an experimental new treatment centre in Wales. Yet something strange is happening to Marianne and the other patients at Nede: a metamorphosis of a kind. As Marianne's memories threaten to overwhelm her, Nede offers her release from this cycle of memory and pain—but only at a terrible price: that of identity itself.|isbn= 086154112X }} {{Frontpage|author=Natalia Garcia Freire|title=This World Does Not Belong To Us
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Henry left in 1922Early comments on this debut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, after a delight. I will agree with the Irish Civil War. It is now 1951. After his long exile, nothing first – tremendous is as he expected. He revisits an old home to find no trace that understatement – but 'a house ever stood there. The project that has brought him back delight' is not as he expected. The Quiet Man will be a hugely successful film for John Ford, but perhaps using the life portrayed expression in it is not Henry Smarta way I's life, and the portrait of Irish politics and everyday life in the film is m not one he recognisesfamiliar with. In his late 40s, he feels he is an old man already, alone with his memories I have to confess my ignorance of the wife and family he lost.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224090097</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=James Kelman|title=If it is Your Life|rating=3|genre=Short Stories|summary=''If This Is Your Life'' is not Spanish-language literary tradition so much a collection of short stories as a collection of pieces of creative writingforgive my generalisation here. Kelman doesn From the little I have read (in translation, I don't really do 'stories'. In nineteen pieces of writing of varying length from just read Spanish) there does seem to be a single page to more lengthy pieces, such as tendency towards the story that gives its title to this collection, Kelman writes (mostly) about people on fantastical – the edge of society. He addresses issues such as class, politics, gender, age and ill healthmystical realism.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0241142423</amazonuk>0861541901
}}
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Revenge 'Elektra' by Jennifer Saint tells the story of three women who live in the Mooncake Vixen (ohheavily male dominated world of Ancient Greece. Cassandra, how I love that title!) will almost certainly not be to everyone's tasteClytemnestra, but I confess and Elektra are all bit players in the story of the Trojan War. Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that I loved its originality, boldness, sassy style often the silent women have the most compelling stories and the humour of itmost extreme furies.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0241144612</amazonuk>1472273915
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Paolo Giordano8409290103|title=The Solitude of Prime Numbers|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=''The Solitude of Prime Numbers'' follows the lives of Alice and Mattia from childhood to middle age. Alice is a wilful anorexic, scarred by a childhood skiing accident and an overbearing father. Mattia is an reclusive self-harmer trying to live with the guilt 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 to intertwine throughout the coming years, despite the chronic awkwardness of their courtship.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0552775983</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewIf Only|author=Juli Zeh|title=Dark MatterMatthew Tree
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''Dark Matter'' is translated from German 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 nothing has been 'lost in translation' herethereafter Patrick was to send him a monthly allowance. The lives Patrick sent the money regularly and a correspondence - of sorts - sprang up between the two very bright academics are interwoven throughoutalthough we hear more about what Lowry has to say than Patrick. Students Sebastian and Oskar are the very best of friends; It wasn't that Lowry senior didn't care for his son, itwas that he didn's almost as if they share the same heartbeatt care to have him in this country where he might be a danger to his wife and other children. However, as they grow into adulthood real life comes along and tends The alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to get in the young man on his way. Sebastian settles for domestic bliss. Their friendship cools off, becomes a little tense and strained.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846552087</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Margaret ForsterAntoine Laurain, Le Sonneur and Jane Aitken (translator)|title=Isa and MayRed is My Heart|rating=43.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Isamay is a would-be academic [[:Category:Antoine Laurain|Antoine Laurain]] books have always been black and white and she's writing a thesis about grandmothers read in history, inspiredmy house. And so was this one, although I could have spelled that more accurately – this one suspectswas, by her own grandmothersand is, Isa black and May. Her efforts are constantly diverted by the present needs of her grandmothers white and the secrets about their pasts which rise to the surface when she least expects them. There's another complication toored. Isamay is in her thirties and has never wanted a childYes, but reconsiders, despite the fact that her partner, Ian, is adamant that he doesn't want children. The more Isamay delveshas an artistic collaborator on this piece, the more she realises that there are secrets in Ianand I think it's past too.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184663</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Kathryn Stockett|title=The Help|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 possible to bring the children up, but they're say 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 one page lacks the back influence of the truck and leftsome striking visual ideas.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0141039280</amazonuk>1913547183
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Olga GrushinB098FFFBH9|title=The Concert TicketSnowcub|author=Graham Fulbright
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Aatish Taseer Fourteen-year-old Rachel is probably best known for his journalism, publishing regularly her school's animal rights project leader and she and her friend are producing a competition entry to highlight the way in which human beings exploit the Indian pressanimal world. She gets a great deal of support from her family: father Pip Harrison, in Prospecta lecturer at Imperial College, and perhaps most prolifically in Time magazine. He has won acclaim for his memoir: Stranger to History in which heLondon, raised by his Indian Sikh motherKate and her twin, traces his absent Muslim father across Nick. Kate runs the border family business, a toy shop called Cornucopia in Pakistan – and also for his translations Putney, which is where we'll meet Rachel's main (if unsuspected) source of the short stories of Saadat Hasan Mantoinformation: five soft toys.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918504</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Tom ConnollyYancey Williams|title=The Spider TrucesCrosshairs of the Devil
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The title of this debut novel by Tom Connolly Award-winning crime writer Eddie Jablonski is enigmaticgetting on in years and, despite his strenuous objections and thanks to his daughter, mysterious. It draws the reader in finds himself living - just like a fly to a spideror imprisoned, from Eddie's web. And point of view - in fairness 'The Spider Truces' does exactly what it say on room 315 of the tin as the main characterGarden of Eden nursing home, with only a trusty nursing aide, EllisJenkins, for palatable company. Nothing is obsessed and terrified going to keep Eddie from his stock-in equal measure-trade of writing though, of spiders. ... and when you live in an old houseso here, as the O'Rourke family doesfor his readers, there are plenty of spiders and other creepy crawlies abouthis wanderings through his life's work.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0956251528</amazonuk>0986031658}} {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Mary Yukari Waters0008421714|title=The FavoritesMrs March|author=Virginia Feito
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This story is set in Kyoto, Japan, starting in June 1978The problem began just after the publication of George March's most successful novel to date. Fourteen year old Sarah Rexford and Everyone but Mrs March (we know her Japanese mother, Yoko, have come back from first name only on the US last page) seemed to stay with family for a few weekseither be reading it or had already done so. Sarah Every day Mrs March went to the local patisserie to buy olive bread but on that particular morning, Patricia asked, as she was born and brought up in Japan wrapping the bread, ''but has lived in isn't this the US with her mother and white American father for five years. first time he's based a character on you?'' She is very conscious of mentioned that Johanna, the differences between life in Kyoto and in Fielderprincipal character had 'her mannerisms''s Butte, California. Here in Kyoto Perhaps this would not have mattered, except for the fact that Johanna is the womenwhore of Nantes - ''a weak, including Sarah and her mumplain, go shopping every day for fooddetestable, and the food is very different – in an opening scenepathetic, Sarah is trying to explain to her grandfather what she normally has for breakfast in the USunloved, and becoming aware of the gulf between her life in Japan and in Californiaunloveable wretch.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847392334</amazonuk>''
}}