132,610
edits
Changes
From TheBookbag
Jump to navigationJump to searchno edit summary
[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]==Literary fiction==__NOTOC__{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Ian MackenzieMatthew Tree|title=City of StrangersWe'll Never Know|rating=4|genre=Crime|summary=Paul Metzger – mid thirties, with a failed marriage, a broken relationship with his brother (who converted to Judaism), and a dying father (who is an ex-Nazi). Straight away there are obvious flaws with his family dynamic. As his writing career fails to take off he's left to churn out thousands of words for articles that have no meaning to him, the dregs of the publishing world. His life isn't quite as high flying as he hoped. But then Paul gets offered a lucrative book deal; the one thing he has wanted for years. The only catch is he has to write about his father.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099531852</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Matthew Yorke|title=Pictures of Lily|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=As soon as Georgia Myers turns eighteenTimothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, she is going to find her biological parents. And she has lots a drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of questions for them too; like where else might she have lived if she had not been given up and does she have being exceptional at any brothers of his artistic passions all failed miserably and sisters? Mostlywho had endless crises of self confidence. So Tim applied himself to his studies, however, Georgia just wants to ask ''why?''cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and set himself high but achievable ambitions. Why was she given up for adoption? Why her?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1849014124</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Joseph O'ConnorB0C47LV1PC|title=Ghost LightFragility|author=Mosby Woods|rating=54
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=An unknown voice introduces the reader to actress Molly. She doesnCan you make a 't know it but she will be dead fairly soon. It's almost as if sheYo birthing person's talking to herself throughout the introduction pages. The language is Irish vernacular so there's lots of good old Irish put-downsjoke? And if you could, classic descriptions and call-a-spade-a-shovel language. This richness and unmistakable lilt gives the reader a sense of place. Albeit, old Molly is almost living by her wits (which are varied and considerable) in the poorer areas of London. Her conversations with the local people, whether question should you make it's the inn-keeper or the local bobby on the beat are absolutely wonderful. She is one fine actress. I could not keep the smile from my face when reading these conversational gems. For example, Molly ? Or is trying to have a polite conversation with the inn-keeper Mr Ballantine when they are rudely interrupted 'Men barrel in and out with their swearing and gruffness ... Why can they never sit easyquestion if you did, must they always emit noises, and must the noises be deafening vowelswould it land?' Brilliant. The sheer beauty in all of this catch is that Molly, in her own private thoughts, in her own head, is giving off the most foul language of the lot of themanswer for both could well be.. These conversations are also bitter-sweet. O'Connor's descriptions - especially of people are superlative. He doesn't try too hard (which is a gift in itself) but gets his message over to the readerno.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0436205718</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Joanna KavennaMosby Woods|title=The Birth of LoveA Whirly Man Loses His Turn
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The Birth West isn't the dominant force it once was. Nobody in the West is quite sure how to mend this or even if mending it is the best course of Love has four interwoven storylines about characters action. Governments are flailing. A war here, a push for climate action there. A feeling that nobody is in different timesactual charge. Imagine then, pastthere was a man with precognition. Imagine the strategic advantage in this asset; a man who can tell you what will happen given any set of circumstances. That man would be valuable, present and futureright? Perhaps the most valuable asset in history. The common theme is birthImagine then, that this man loses this ability.What would governments do to get it back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>057124517X</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Tishani Doshi0571379559|title=The Pleasure SeekersHouse of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams|rating=45
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Essentially this ''The House of Broken Bricks'' is a love the story between two of four people - Babo from Madras and Sian from small-town Wales. You could argue that two more disparate cultures would Tess Hembry's roots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be hard to imagine. Factor happier there, but instead, she lives in that the novel opens in house on the headyriverbank, free love days built of broken bricks. Insubstantial as it might look, it's stood the 1960s passage of time, storms and floods. Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the delivery rounds - and a very entertaining story starts to unfoldbring in sufficient money. 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 out with his mother that she's his nanny. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0747590923</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Yasmina KhadraClaire North|title=What the Day Owes the NightHouse of Odysseus
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Nine year old Algerian Muslim Younes is devastated when his father's farm is destroyed and his family have to move to the slum of Jenane Jato. However, while the rest of his family struggle, this turns out to be something of a blessing in disguise for Younes,who is rescued by his wealthy uncle, a pharmacist. Renamed Jonas, he moves to live with his uncle and aunt in the vibrant European district of Rio Salado. There, he meets new friends Jean-Christophe, Simon, and Fabrice. But what seems to be an unbreakable friendship is tested to its limits by the return to the area of the beautiful Emilie, and the boys' problems increase as Algeria fights for its independence from France. The book is narrated by Jonas at a much older age, lookingback at his life, although the epilogue brings us to the present day as he visits a grave.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0434019933</amazonuk>}}What could matter more than love?''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Samantha HuntKay Chronister|title=The SeasDesert Creatures|rating=4|genre=Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary=''The Seas'' follows the story of With a nameless nineteen-year old girl who world that is lonely and adrift in a cruel coastal town so far to the north of the USA that the roads only run south. She misses her fatherbecoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, an absent alcoholic sailor, while her silencepost-loving mother, who grew up on apocalyptic fiction can become an isolated island with deaf parents, worries deeply about heralmost masochistic thrill. Early on in the story we get the distinct impression that our narrator Whether it is not deemed 'normal' by her peersa robotic takeover, who call her all sorts a world devoid of unflattering things. With nothing to do in her small townwater or a nuclear holocaust, and no one this genre is a way for humans to do it with, she spends her time pining for cathartically experience their most existential fears. ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a local alcoholic called Jude who is fifteen years her senior, and who refuses her amorous advances on new work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the grounds fears that it would be wrongexist for humanity today. As the story unfolds, Jude and the girl's relationship grows and changes, sometimes in unexpected waysIt is a shocking novel that still manages to find hope.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1849013934</amazonuk>1803364998
}}
{{newreviewfrontpage|isbn=1803363002|author=Lionel ShriverEric LaRocca|title=We Need To Talk About KevinThe Trees Grew Because I Bled There|rating=5|genre=Literary FictionHorror|summary=Politicians continue Horror taps into something primeval within us. It is used as a way to argue reflect our darkest emotions and how we as humans react and process them. Most horror fiction feature a ''Big Bad'', whether that the solution to social issues lies with the familyis a home invader, a monster or a ghost, so it is timely that at usually something tangible and, by the heart end of Lionel Shriverthe story, beatable. Eric LaRocca's 2005 Orange Prize winning novel ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is the issue of nature vs nurture - what makes a person not like he or she that. It is? Is a collection of short stories more interested in the eponymous Kevin born evil or is he influenced by his mother's coldness towards himhorrors of illness, grief and humiliation. There Horrors that linger and are no clear answers and thatharder to defeat than any ''Big Bad's what gives this brave book, which tackles the taboos that some mothers don't bond with their children, such power.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687349</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Ben OkriMadelaine Lucas|title=Tales of FreedomThirst for Salt
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Tales of Freedom is a book of two halves''Love, I'd read, with a short story entitled Comic Destiny taking up the majority of the book. Comic Destiny is made up of was supposed to be a series of short pieces that follow on from each other light and are probably best described as being closer to prose poetry than anything else.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846041597</amazonuk>}}weightless feeling, 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=Carsten JensenJennifer Saint|title=We, the DrownedAtalanta
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In 1848''I was as worthy as any one of them. I would get on board that ship, Laurids Madsen and other men of I vowed. I would take my place, not just in the smalltown name of Marstal go to war to fight the Germans, and an explosionflings him up to heaven, as far as anyone can tellgoddess. But LauridsreturnsIt was for the sake of my name, claiming his sea boots were too heavy for him to stay upthere – only to be lost to Marstal anyway, as he abandons his familyto sail the high seas.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846550963</amazonuk>}}Atalanta''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Helen DunmoreAmanthi Harris|title=The BetrayalBeautiful Place
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Andrei is a perceptive and deeply conscientious doctorPadma, a young rheumatologist and paediatrician working in a Leningrad hospital just after Sri Lankan, has returned to the terrible siege, during Villa Hibiscus on the last days southern coast of Stalin’s dictatorshipher home country. He This is as quick to notice symptoms in his colleagues as in his young patientsa place she spent her formative years. When he It is approached by Russov, not a fellow physicianplace she was born into, he registers his confrere’s pervading smell of fear. This is all part of but the pathology one she thinks of the times; life as it is lived under a tyrannical dictatorshiphome. A dictatorship determined How she came to pursue a purge – a vendetta directed against doctorsbe at the Villa, how it became her home, particularly Jewish doctorsand the machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the ''score'' for this gentle and yet subtly violent novel. The sweating Russov manages Padma's present fails to inveigle Andrei Aleksayev into treating a very sick child, Gorya, escape her past and much like the son musical score of Volkhov, who is a tyrannical and high ranking secret police officer. Therapeutic failurefilm, in all probability, could result in vengeance, arrest and devastating effects on Andrei’s loving wife Anna and her young adolescent brother, Kolyathat strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the Villa.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1905490593</amazonuk>1784631930
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Mari Strachan178563335X|title=The Earth Hums in B FlatSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor
|rating=5
|genre=General Literary Fiction|summary=Choosing When we first meet Rachel Bird she's a child as the viewpoint character of trainee vicar, sitting in on a novel requires confidence PCC meeting and imagination. To succeed is wondering why they're held when you need to convince the reader of events at two levels – the child's world within pick the adult world surrounding herchildren up. The very best novels about childhoodHer husband, Christopher, like say Harper Lee's classiccollects six-year-old Hannah and her elder brother, 'To Kill a Mockingbird'Jamie, also reflect whilst Rachel holds a wider cultural truthsobbing parishioner. In Thelma'The Earth Hums s daughter-in B Flat-law won't let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, on the Norfolk coast, is a claustrophobic Welsh village lovely place, but Rachel is both protection struggling to develop a real bond with the parish - and straitjacket as she's in awe of the vicar, Gail, but then she's been doing the characters struggle to cope with their family secretsjob for more than thirty years. If Rachel and Christopher hoped that sounds a bit tacky, fear not, because walk on the viewpoint character, Gwenni, is all whippet and sharp cornersbeach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed. And then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847673058</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Philip Sington1398515388|title=The Einstein GirlBoy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary General Fiction|summary=The two central characters are (and we've come across First of all, it many times before) a psychiatrist (was the earthquake, deep in the ocean floor, which created the tsunami and this case Kirsch) and his patient (known as , in turn, caused the Einstein Girl) nuclear meltdown. The result was complete and hence the novel's titleutter devastation. The case of this girl is intriguingdeaths were uncountable, not least because both doctor and patient had accidentally met prior to her admission to hospitalthe loss of livelihoods was widespread. Kirsch appears immediately smitten The fact that many pets were separated from their owners came far down the list of priorities but - six months after the tsunami - which may be Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a problemconvenience store. Hewasn's already spoken for. In t a nutshell, dog person but the Einstein Girl has lost her memory. Kirsch finds more and more of convenience store owner's comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his professional time given over to her recovery, back to mental well-being. It becomes a long car door and complicated journey, for both of themTamon the dog jumped in.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099535793</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=David Mitchell0989715337|title=The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de ZoetPapa on the Moon|author=Marco North|rating=54
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary='The belly craves food, the tongue craves water, the heart craves love, and 'Some frogs had gotten into the mind craves storieswell.' This is the book to satisfy that last craving. It is rich in stories from the graphic opening chapter to the poignant closing lines. Everyone has a tale to tell and even minor characters are fleshed out with histories that amuse, horrify or enthral. Their stories made me think about how sometimes what at the time seems to be an insignificant choice can define the course of a life. Here the characters’ choices unleash a cascade of consequences. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340921560</amazonuk>}}'
}}
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Bass-playing, 20 year-old Tassie Keltjin is studying an eclectic range The summary of subjects (Geology, British Literature, Sufism, Soundtracks this book doesn't come close to War Movies and Wine Tasting) in post 9/11 USA when she lands a job as a child minder for chef, Sarah Bink who explaining what is adopting an African-American baby. A Gate at done with the Stairs is at times a very funny and at others a sad reflection of growing up in modern Americapremise.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>057119530X</amazonuk>1913097811}}
{{newreviewFrontpage |author=Eleanor CattonSally Oliver |title=The RehearsalWeight 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=If you are Early comments on this debut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, a delight. I will agree with the type of person who wants their novels to start at first – tremendous is no understatement – but 'a delight' is perhaps using the beginning, build character and plot before coming to expression in a satisfying way I'they all lived happily ever after' ending, then avoid this book at all costsm not familiar with. You will hate it I have to confess my ignorance of the Spanish-language literary tradition so forgive my generalisation here. But From the little I cannot remember when have read (in translation, I last enjoyed don't read Spanish) there does seem to be a first time novel as much as this one. It is ambitious, daring and complex, and yet it works beautifullytendency towards the fantastical – the mystical realism.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1847081398</amazonuk>0861541901
}}
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Things weren't going too badly for Patrick Oxtoby. HeElektra's intelligent and did well at school. Then his Gran died. He started getting pains by Jennifer Saint tells the story of three women who live in his shoulder and things rapidly went downhill from there. He drops out the heavily male dominated world of university to become a mechanicAncient Greece. By the time we meet him as a 23-year-oldCassandra, Clytemnestra, 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 Elektra are all bit players in a seaside boarding house in an unnamed English town, hoping to start a new life. Then, one night he commits an act the story of violence (you can see it coming) and his life goes from bad to awfulthe Trojan War.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184767383X</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=John Buchan|title=Sick Heart River|rating=4.5|genre=General Fiction|summary=This was a surprise for me. It’s rare for a book to come to my attention from Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that often the reviewing gods that’s a rerelease of a 1930s novel, and one that surfaced a couple of years ago now. But when it strikes me as startlingly Conradian, updated for silent women have the times, most compelling stories and perfectly able to stand alongside one of literature’s greats, then it’s just a sign those reviewing gods are on the ballmost extreme furies.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>184697030X</amazonuk>1472273915
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Jim Crace8409290103|title=All That FollowsIf Only|author=Matthew Tree
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Leonard Lessing is a sofa socialist. He avoids corporate brands both in food and in clothes. He abides Twenty-one-year-old Malcolm Lowry had been sent abroad by all his father, cotton-broker AO Lowry: he asked his accountant, Mr Patrick, to ensure that the right-young man got on boycotts. He signs petitions. He does free gigs at benefit concerts. He gives donations - you know board the kind of thing. Once, eighteen long years ago in Texas in 2006, he came very close boat and thereafter Patrick was to some real direct actionsend him a monthly allowance. But he bottled it. And now, Patrick sent the frozenmoney regularly and a correspondence -shouldered jazzman-on-sabbatical finds his less-thanof sorts -glorious radical past catching sprang up with him right there in his living room, on between the TVtwo although we hear more about what Lowry has to say than Patrick. Maxie Lermon It wasn't that Lowry senior didn't care for his son, it was that he of Austin 2006 and no stranger didn't care to violent agitprop, is have him in the UK, just up the road from Leonard, and this country where he's taken might be a family hostage as a protest against danger to his wife and other children. The alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to get the upcoming Reconciliation Summityoung man on his way. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330445642</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Ed HillyerAntoine Laurain, Le Sonneur and Jane Aitken (translator)|title=The Clay DreamingRed is My Heart|rating=43.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Hillyer has taken several historical facts [[:Category:Antoine Laurain|Antoine Laurain]] books have always been black and white and seamlessly blended read in a big dollop of fiction to create a complex and riveting storymy house. The title is suitably enigmaticAnd so was this one, as is King Cole (or Brippoki). He and his fellow cricketers (who also have been given rather unkind nicknames) have sailed from the bottom of the world, to the bustling metropolis of London. Talk about extremes. And although they I could have all been diligently 'schooled' in all things Englishspelled that more accurately – this one was, neverthelessand is, they are the talk of the townblack and white and red. The novel Yes, he has barely started an artistic collaborator on this piece, and already I think it's possible to say not one page lacks the mind bogglesinfluence of some striking visual ideas.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0956251501</amazonuk>1913547183
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Wendy Law-YoneB098FFFBH9|title=The Road to WantingSnowcub|author=Graham Fulbright
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=We first meet Na Ga in Fourteen-year-old Rachel is her hotel room in Wanting, on the Chinese side of the border with Na Gaschool's native Burma (or Myanmar for animal rights project leader and she and her friend are producing a competition entry to highlight the way in which human beings exploit the more geographically pedantic, although Burma is used throughout this book)animal world. She is attempting to commit suicide, but is interrupted by news gets a great deal of support from the hotel receptionist who tells her that family: father Pip Harrison, a lecturer at Imperial College, London, mother Kate and her guide across the bordertwin, Mr Jiang, has just committed suicide himselfNick. You might by now have Kate runs the impression that this is not a cheery kind of bookfamily business, and you'd be right up to a pointtoy shop called Cornucopia in Putney, although itwhich is where we's certainly not without its light touches. In fact itll meet Rachel's often quite beautiful, which makes the exposure main (if unsuspected) source of the seedier side so much more shockinginformation: five soft toys.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184086</amazonuk>
}}
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Augustus Rose was brought up Award-winning crime writer Eddie Jablonski is getting on in New Yorkyears and, but not in a des res, in an altogether grittier part of the city. ' ... despite his strenuous objections and thanks to his childhood in East Harlemdaughter, darkness framing the blistered stoopfinds himself living - or imprisoned, the blinding asphalt, the smell of garbage cans and urine.' Hefrom Eddie's had an unfortunate start point of view - in life. Mother, white, father (unknown) black so that makes room 315 of the young Augustus an in-betweenGarden of Eden nursing home, with only a not-suretrusty nursing aide, Jenkins, a neitherfor palatable company. Nothing is going to keep Eddie from his stock-onein-colour-nor-the-other. Todaytrade of writing though, in the 21st centuryso here, no one would raise an eyebrowfor his readers, bat an eyelid. But this novel is set in the 1960s where racial tensions abound. Yes, even in cosmopolitan cities such as New Yorkare his wanderings through his life's work.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1847394175</amazonuk>0986031658}} {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Eleanor Thom0008421714|title=The Tin-KinMrs March|author=Virginia Feito
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Dawn is a single mother who has been avoiding a lot The problem began just after the publication of things for a long timeGeorge March's most successful novel to date. When Everyone but Mrs March (we know her aunt, who raised Dawn as a daughter, dies, Dawn finds first name only on the key last page) seemed to a cupboard which she was forbidden either be reading it or had already done so. Every day Mrs March went to look into as a child. Inside she finds clues the local patisserie to her family historybuy olive bread but on that particular morning, links to a Traveller CommunityPatricia asked, unearthing a journey that sees her finding her roots. We also witness her struggle to renew her complicated relationship with her family and her efforts to escape as she was wrapping the ever-present memory of her abusive husband.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0715639013</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Patricia Duncker|title=The Strange Case of bread, ''but isn't this the Composer and His Judge|rating=4|genre=General Fiction|summary=Itfirst time he's rural France, and 2000 is barely begun, when hunters come across based a spread of human corpses in the mountains. character on you?'' Several familiesShe mentioned that Johanna, all in the same cult, seem to have killed themselves on their path to whereverprincipal character had 'her mannerisms''. If so, Perhaps this is a problemwould not have mattered, except for the last time it happened, in Switzerland a few years previous, nobody could work out why – and who was there to dispose fact that Johanna is the whore of some of the evidence. This isnNantes - ''t a problem for the policeman involvedweak, plain, detestable, as he fell desperately in love with the investigative judge in collaborating on the initial case. Combining againpathetic, they see a link with everybody involved in both casesunloved, a famous conductor /composerunloveable wretch.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408807041</amazonuk>''
}}
