Difference between revisions of "Newest Literary Fiction Reviews"

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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
 
[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]
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[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]__NOTOC__
==Literary fiction==
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{{Frontpage
__NOTOC__
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|author=Matthew Tree
{{newreview
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|title=We'll Never Know
|author=Lionel Shriver
 
|title=We Need To Talk About Kevin
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=Politicians continue to argue that the solution to social issues lies with the family, so it is timely that at the heart of Lionel Shriver's 2005 Orange Prize winning novel is the issue of nature vs nurture - what makes a person like he or she is? Is the eponymous Kevin born evil or is he influenced by his mother's coldness towards him. There are no clear answers and that'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>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Ben Okri
 
|title=Tales of Freedom
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=Tales of Freedom is a book of two halves, with a short story entitled Comic Destiny taking up the majority of the book. Comic Destiny is made up of a series of short pieces that follow on from each other and are probably best described as being closer to prose poetry than anything else.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846041597</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Fernando Pessoa
 
|title=The Book of Disquiet
 
|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. It'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>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Jeanne Peterson
 
|title=Falling to Heaven
 
 
|rating=4.5
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Emma and Gerald Kittredge are either very brave or very naive.  They've made the long journey from America to Tibet.  Hardly on the tourist trail and they're not missionaries, so why are they there?  This novel is a serious and sweeping narrative trying to answer that very question - and many more.
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|summary= Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, a drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of his artistic passions all failed miserably and who had endless crises of self confidence. So Tim applied himself to his studies, cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and set himself high but achievable ambitions.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>185168736X</amazonuk>
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|isbn= B0CVFXPGP8
 
}}
 
}}
 
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{{Frontpage
{{newreview
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|isbn=B0C47LV1PC
|author=Carsten Jensen
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|title=Fragility
|title=We, the Drowned
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|author=Mosby Woods
|rating=5
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|rating=4
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In 1848, Laurids Madsen and other men of the small
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|summary= Can you make a ''Yo birthing person'' joke? And if you could, is the question should you make it? Or is the question if you did, would it land? The catch is that the answer for both could well be.... no.
town of Marstal go to war to fight the Germans, and an explosion
 
flings him up to heaven, as far as anyone can tell. But Laurids
 
returns, claiming his sea boots were too heavy for him to stay up
 
there – only to be lost to Marstal anyway, as he abandons his family
 
to sail the high seas.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846550963</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
  
{{newreview
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''Fragility'' is set as the city of Portland, Oregon, cautiously begins to emerge from the restrictions imposed during the covid pandemic
|author=Matthew Hooton
 
|title=Deloume Road
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=A tiny, rural community with a handful of characters is at the heart of this novel.  And the thing that binds them all together is Deloume Road.  Hooton gives over every chapter (and some are very short) to one of his characters - Irene, Andy, the butcher.  Each is very different from the other.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224087657</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
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{{Frontpage
{{newreview
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|author=Mosby Woods
|author=Trevor Byrne
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|title=A Whirly Man Loses His Turn
|title=Ghosts and Lightning
 
 
|rating=4
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Denny comes home to Dublin from Wales after his mum dies suddenly, and hangs around drinking and taking drugs with his sister, her girlfriend and some of their mates, while he wonders what to do with himself. There are some practical matters to sort out too, such as the nasty older brother who owns their house and wants his siblings out.
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|summary= The 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 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 strategic advantage in this asset; a man who can tell you what will happen given any set of circumstances. That man would be valuable, right? Perhaps the most valuable asset in history. Imagine then, that this man loses this ability. What would governments do to get it back?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847673309</amazonuk>
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|isbn=B0C9SNG8R1
 
}}
 
}}
 
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{{Frontpage
{{newreview
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|isbn=0571379559
|author=Helen Dunmore
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|title=The House of Broken Bricks
|title=The Betrayal
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|author=Fiona Williams
 
|rating=5
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|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, a fellow physician, 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 to pursue 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 and her young adolescent brother, Kolya.
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|summary=''The House of Broken Bricks'' is the story of four people. Tess Hembry's roots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, but instead, she lives in the house on the riverbank, built of broken bricks. Insubstantial as it might look, it's stood the passage of time, storms and floods. Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the delivery rounds - and to bring 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>1905490593</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
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{{Frontpage
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|author=Claire North
 +
|title=House of Odysseus
 +
|rating=5
 +
|genre= Literary Fiction
 +
|summary= ''What could matter more than love?''
  
{{newreview
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The follow-up to the excellent ''Ithaca'' picks up a few months after where we left off. In the palace of Odysseus, with 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 throne of the Western Isles. Having survived – politically and physical – the chaotic storm that Clytemnestra brought to Ithaca's shores, Queen Penelope is on the brink of a fragile peace. One that shatters however with the return of Orestes, King of Mycenae, and his sister Elektra, seeking refuge.
|author=Mari Strachan
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|isbn=0356516075
|title=The Earth Hums in B Flat
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}}
|rating=5
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{{Frontpage
|genre=General Fiction
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|author= Kay Chronister
|summary=Choosing a child as the viewpoint character of a novel requires confidence and imagination.  To succeed is to convince the reader of events at two levels – the child's world within the adult world surrounding her. The very best novels about childhood, like say Harper Lee's classic, 'To Kill a Mockingbird', also reflect a wider cultural truth.  In 'The Earth Hums in B Flat', a claustrophobic Welsh village is both protection and straitjacket as the characters struggle to cope with their family secrets. If that sounds a bit tacky, fear not, because the viewpoint character, Gwenni, is all whippet and sharp corners.
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|title= Desert Creatures
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847673058</amazonuk>
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|rating= 4
 +
|genre= Dystopian Fiction
 +
|summary= With a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, post-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Whether it is a robotic takeover, a world devoid of water or a nuclear holocaust, this genre is a way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a new work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the fears that exist for humanity today. It is a shocking novel that still manages to find hope.
 +
|isbn=1803364998
 
}}
 
}}
 
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{{frontpage
{{newreview
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|isbn=1803363002
|author=Philip Sington
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|author= Eric LaRocca
|title=The Einstein Girl
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|title= The Trees Grew Because I Bled There
|rating=4.5
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|rating= 5
|genre=Literary Fiction
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|genre= Horror
|summary=The two central characters are (and we've come across it many times before) a psychiatrist (in this case Kirsch) and his patient (known as the Einstein Girl) and hence the novel's title.  The case of this girl is intriguing, not least because both doctor and patient had accidentally met prior to her admission to hospital. Kirsch appears immediately smitten - which may be a problem.  He's already spoken for.  In a nutshell, the Einstein Girl has lost her memory.  Kirsch finds more and more of his professional time given over to her recovery, back to mental well-being. It becomes a long and complicated journey, for both of them.
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|summary= Horror 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, a monster or a ghost, it usually something tangible and, by the end of the story, beatable. Eric LaRocca's ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. It is a collection of short stories more interested in the horrors of illness, grief and humiliation. Horrors that linger and are harder to defeat than any ''Big Bad''.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099535793</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
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{{Frontpage
{{newreview
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|author=Madelaine Lucas
|author=David Mitchell
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|title=Thirst for Salt
|title=The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
 
 
|rating=5
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary='The belly craves food, the tongue craves water, the heart craves love, and the mind craves stories.'  
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|summary= ''Love, I'd read, was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity''
  
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.  
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Told from a retrospective view, a young woman unravels the year-long relationship that 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 sorrowful 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, depicting its all-consuming nature, how it changed her perspective on both romantic and familial relationships and how it altered her irrevocably.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340921560</amazonuk>
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|isbn=0861546490
 
}}
 
}}
 +
{{Frontpage
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|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.''
  
{{newreview
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''Beautiful Shining People'' revolves around the question of identity and acceptance. Of what it means to be human. Of what is real and what is artificial, and whether the development of technology is exciting or frightening.
|author=Michelle Lovric
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|isbn=191458564X
|title=The Book of Human Skin
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}}
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{{Frontpage
 +
|author=Jennifer Saint
 +
|title=Atalanta
 
|rating=5
 
|rating=5
|genre=Historical Fiction
 
|summary=''Ye can't take the slither out ovva snake.''
 
 
So says Gianni, valet in a wealthy eighteenth century Venetian household. The master, a merchant, divides his time between Italy and Peru, where he deals in silver. But the merchant isn't the serpent - his son Minguillo is. On the night an earthquake ripped through Peru and deposited fanatical nun Sor Loreta at the convent in Arequipa, Minguillo was born - a serpent in his family's midst. His own mother couldn't bear to nurse him and his father went into denial, making more and more frequent trips to a South American home free of sociopathic progeny.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>140880588X</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Elif Shafak
 
|title=The Forty Rules of Love
 
|rating=4.5
 
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This is a sixth novel from best-selling Turkish author, Elif Shafak. Set in twelfth century Anatolia, two famous characters from Islamic history meet in a gorgeously real world. A delicate contemporary US love story is wrapped around the rich, meaty historical fiction. Don't be misled by the dodgy-sounding title!
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|summary=''I was as worthy as any one of them. I would get on board that ship, I vowed. I would take my place, not just in the name of the goddess. It was for the sake of my name, too. Atalanta''
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918733</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
  
{{newreview
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Princess. Warrior. Lover. Hero.
|author=Rebecca Goldstein
 
|title=36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
 
|rating=2
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary='Atheist with a Soul' Cass Seltzer has achieved sudden celebrity thanks to his new bestselling book. This has led to a job offer from Harvard, and he waits for his girlfriend to return, while thinking back on past experiences. Most of these experiences involved his old mentor Professor Klapper, an ex-lover, Roz Margolis, and a six year old genius mathematician Azarya. The characters frustrate and amuse in roughly equal measure, while the plot meanders towards a sort-of-conclusion as Cass debates the existence of God with Nobel laureate Felix Fidley.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848871538</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
  
{{newreview
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Abandoned at birth for being born a daughter rather than a son, Atalanta is raised under the protective eye of the goddess Athemis and fashioned into a formidable huntress, one who longs for adventure. When the opportunity comes – to join the Argonauts, a fierce band of warriors, descendent from the Gods themselves – Atalanta seizes the chance to fight in Artemis' name and carve out her own legendary place in history. What follows is a whirlwind of challenges and discovery and through it, Atalanta must remember Artemis' fatal warning: that if she marries, it will be her undoing.
|author=Lorrie Moore
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|isbn=1472292154
|title=A Gate At The Stairs
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=Bass-playing, 20 year-old Tassie Keltjin is studying an eclectic range of subjects (Geology, British Literature, Sufism, Soundtracks 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 is adopting an African-American baby. A Gate at the Stairs is at times a very funny and at others a sad reflection of growing up in modern America.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>057119530X</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
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{{Frontpage
{{newreview
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|author=Amanthi Harris
|author=Eleanor Catton
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|title=Beautiful Place
|title=The Rehearsal
 
 
|rating=5
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=If you are the type of person who wants their novels to start at the beginning, build character and plot before coming to a satisfying 'they all lived happily ever after' ending, then avoid this book at all costs. You will hate it. But I cannot remember when I last enjoyed a first time novel as much as this one. It is ambitious, daring and complex, and yet it works beautifully.
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|summary= Padma, a young Sri Lankan, has returned to the Villa Hibiscus on the southern coast of 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 be at the Villa, how it became her home, and 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.   Padma's present fails to escape her past and much like the musical score of a film, that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the Villa.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847081398</amazonuk>
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|isbn=1784631930
 
}}
 
}}
 
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{{Frontpage
{{newreview
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|isbn=178563335X
|author=Barbara Kingsolver
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|title=Sea Defences
|title=The Lacuna
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|author=Hilary Taylor
 
|rating=5
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ten years ago, Barbara Kingsolver's [[The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver|Poisonwood Bible]] revealed the grim politics in the Congo. The Lacuna has a similarly political theme, this time turning her focus on Mexico and the USA in the 1940s and 1950s.
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|summary=When we first meet Rachel Bird she's a trainee vicar, sitting in on a PCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the children up. Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-old Hannah and her elder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner.  Thelma's daughter-in-law won't let her see her grandson.  Holthorpe, on 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 vicar, Gail, but then she's been doing the job for more than thirty years.  Rachel and Christopher 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>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
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{{Frontpage
{{newreview
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|isbn=1398515388
|author=David Eagleman
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|title=The Boy and the Dog
|title=Sum: Tales from the Afterlives
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|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)
 
|rating=4.5
 
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
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|genre=General Fiction
|summary=For some reason I find myself unable to start this reviewSo I'll mention this book starts with the end, and see where we go from thereOf course, that's the key – this book does just that – starts with the end of our human life here on Earth (or wherever you happen to be reading this) and posits forty possibilities of what happens thereafter, in the hereafterIt's not so much 'Five People You Meet in Heaven' as 'Forty Heavens you Might Meet People In'.
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|summary=First of all, it was the earthquake, deep in the ocean floor, which created the tsunami and this, in turn, caused the nuclear meltdownThe result was complete and utter devastationThe deaths were uncountable, and the loss of livelihoods was widespread.  The fact that many pets were separated from their owners came far down the list of priorities but - six months after the tsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience storeHe wasn't a dog person but the convenience store owner's comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his car door and Tamon the dog jumped in.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847674283</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
  
{{newreview
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{{Frontpage
|author=M J Hyland
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|isbn=0989715337
|title=This Is How
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|title=Papa on the Moon
 +
|author=Marco North
 
|rating=4
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Things weren't going too badly for Patrick Oxtoby. He's intelligent and did 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.
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|summary=''Some frogs had gotten into the well.''
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184767383X</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
  
{{newreview
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''Walter stood waist-deep in the fragrant water, naked except for his beaten leather hat. Long strands of their eggs wove around him, sticky gray pearls with tadpoles inside them. Two of the dogs leaned over the opening and barked down at the strange noise of the buckets as he filled them.''
|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 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 the times, and perfectly able to stand alongside one of literature’s greats, then it’s just a sign those reviewing gods are on the ball.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184697030X</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
  
{{newreview
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How is that for an opening? The style of this novel in the form of interconnected short stories goes from succinct and laconic to wistful and musing, turning on a sixpence. And author Marco North, who has the most wonderful turn of phrase, starts as he means to go on.
|author=Jim Crace
 
|title=All That Follows
 
|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 by all the right-on boycotts. He signs petitions. He does free gigs at benefit concerts. He gives donations - you know the kind of thing. 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>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
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{{Frontpage
{{newreview
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|author=Daisy Hildyard
|author=Ed Hillyer
+
|title=Emergency
|title=The Clay Dreaming
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|rating=4
|rating=4.5
 
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|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 is suitably enigmatic, 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 have all been diligently 'schooled' in all things English, nevertheless, they are the talk of the town.  The novel has barely started and already the mind boggles.
+
|summary=
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956251501</amazonuk>
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The summary of this book doesn't come close to explaining what is done with the premise.
}}
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|isbn=1913097811
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}}  
  
{{newreview
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{{Frontpage
|author=Wendy Law-Yone
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|author=Sally Oliver
|title=The Road to Wanting
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|title=The Weight of Loss
|rating=4.5
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|rating=4  
|genre=Literary Fiction
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|genre=Literary Fiction  
|summary=We first meet Na Ga in her hotel room in Wanting, on the Chinese side 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 to commit suicide, but 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 the seedier side so much more shocking.
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|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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184086</amazonuk>
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|isbn= 086154112X
}}
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}}  
 
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{{Frontpage
{{newreview
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|author=Natalia Garcia Freire
|author=Roddy Doyle
+
|title=This World Does Not Belong To Us
|title=The Dead Republic
 
 
|rating=5
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Henry left in 1922, after the Irish Civil War. It is now 1951. After his long exile, nothing is as he expected. He revisits an old home to find no trace that a house ever stood there. The project that has brought him back is not as he expected. The Quiet Man will be a hugely successful film for John Ford, but the life portrayed in it is not Henry Smart's life, and the portrait of Irish politics and everyday life in the film is not one he recognises. In his late 40s, he feels he is an old man already, alone with his memories of the wife and family he lost.
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|summary= Early comments on this debut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, a delight.   I will agree with the first – tremendous is no understatement – but 'a delight' is perhaps using the expression in a way I'm not familiar with.  I have to confess my ignorance of the Spanish-language literary tradition so forgive my generalisation hereFrom the little I have read (in translation, I don't read Spanish) there does seem to be a tendency towards the fantastical – the mystical realism.  
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224090097</amazonuk>
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|isbn=0861541901
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=James Kelman
 
|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 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
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=I never really got on with maths at schoolOr 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 doesn'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 numbersEach 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 up in New York, but not in a des res, in an altogether grittier part of the city.  ' ... his childhood in East Harlem, darkness framing the blistered stoop, the blinding asphalt, the smell of garbage cans and urine.'  He's had an unfortunate start in life.  Mother, white, father (unknown) black so that makes the young Augustus an in-between, a not-sure, a neither-one-colour-nor-the-other.  Today, in the 21st century, no one would raise an eyebrow, bat an eyelid.  But this novel is set in the 1960s where racial tensions abound.  Yes, even in cosmopolitan cities such as New York.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847394175</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|author=Jennifer Saint
|author=Eleanor Thom
+
|title=Elektra
|title=The Tin-Kin
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=Dawn is a single mother who has been avoiding a lot of things for a long time. When her aunt, who raised Dawn as a daughter, dies, Dawn finds the key to a cupboard which she was forbidden to look into as a child. Inside she finds clues to her family history, links to a Traveller Community, 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 the ever-present memory of her abusive husband.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0715639013</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Patricia Duncker
 
|title=The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge
 
 
|rating=4
 
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
 
|summary=It's rural France, and 2000 is barely begun, when hunters come across a spread of human corpses in the mountains.  Several families, all in the same cult, seem to have killed themselves on their path to wherever.  If so, this is a problem, for the last time it happened, in Switzerland a few years previous, nobody could work out why – and who was there to dispose of some of the evidence.  This isn't a problem for the policeman involved, as he fell desperately in love with the investigative judge in collaborating on the initial case.  Combining again, they see a link with everybody involved in both cases, a famous conductor /composer.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408807041</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Marilyn Chin
 
|title=Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen: A Manifesto in 41 Tales
 
|rating=5
 
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen (oh, how I love that title!) will almost certainly not be to everyone's taste, but I confess that I loved its originality, boldness, sassy style and the humour of it.
+
|summary='Elektra' by Jennifer Saint tells the story of three women who live in the heavily male dominated world of Ancient Greece. Cassandra, Clytemnestra, and Elektra are all bit players in the story of the Trojan War. Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that often the silent women have the most compelling stories and the most extreme furies.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241144612</amazonuk>
+
|isbn=1472273915
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|isbn=8409290103
|author=Paolo Giordano
+
|title=If Only
|title=The Solitude of Prime Numbers
+
|author=Matthew Tree
|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>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Juli Zeh
 
|title=Dark Matter
 
 
|rating=4.5
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''Dark Matter'' is translated from German and nothing has been 'lost in translation' hereThe 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 heartbeatHowever, 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.
+
|summary=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 monthly allowancePatrick sent the money regularly and a correspondence - of sorts - sprang up between the two although we hear more about what Lowry has to say than Patrick.   It wasn't that Lowry senior didn't 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 childrenThe alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to get the young man on his way.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846552087</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|author=Antoine Laurain, Le Sonneur and Jane Aitken (translator)
|author=Margaret Forster
+
|title=Red is My Heart
|title=Isa and May
+
|rating=3.5
|rating=4
+
|genre=Literary Fiction  
|genre=Literary Fiction
+
|summary=[[:Category:Antoine Laurain|Antoine Laurain]] books have always been black and white and read in my house. And so was this one, although I could have spelled that more accurately – this one was, and is, black and white and red. Yes, he has an artistic collaborator on this piece, and I think it's possible to say not one page lacks the influence of some striking visual ideas.
|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 the present needs of her grandmothers and the secrets about their pasts which rise to the surface when she least expects them. There's another complication too.  Isamay is in her thirties and has never wanted a child, but reconsiders, despite the fact that her partner, Ian, is adamant that he doesn't want children.  The more Isamay delves, the more she realises that there are secrets in Ian's past too.
+
|isbn=1913547183
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184663</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|isbn=B098FFFBH9
|author=Kathryn Stockett
+
|title=Snowcub
|title=The Help
+
|author=Graham Fulbright
|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
 
|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
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Aatish Taseer is probably best known for his journalism, publishing regularly in the Indian press, in Prospect, and perhaps most prolifically in Time magazine.  He has won acclaim 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 of the short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto.
+
|summary=Fourteen-year-old Rachel is 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 animal world.  She gets a great deal of support from her family: father Pip Harrison, a lecturer at Imperial College, London, mother Kate and her twin, Nick.  Kate runs the family business, a toy shop called Cornucopia in Putney, which is where we'll meet Rachel's main (if unsuspected) source of information: five soft toys.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918504</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|author=Yancey Williams
|author=Tom Connolly
+
|title=Crosshairs of the Devil
|title=The Spider Truces
 
 
|rating=4.5
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The title of this debut novel by Tom Connolly is enigmatic, mysterious.  It draws the reader in - just like a fly to a spider's web.  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 spiders.
+
|summary=Award-winning crime writer Eddie Jablonski is getting on in years and, despite his strenuous objections and thanks to his daughter, finds himself living - or imprisoned, from Eddie's point of view - in room 315 of the Garden of Eden nursing home, with only a trusty nursing aide, Jenkins, for palatable company. Nothing is going to keep Eddie from his stock-in-trade of writing though, so here, for his readers, are his wanderings through his life's work.
+
|isbn=0986031658
... 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>
+
{{Frontpage
}}
+
|isbn=0008421714
 
+
|title=Mrs March
{{newreview
+
|author=Virginia Feito
|author=Mary Yukari Waters
 
|title=The Favorites
 
 
|rating=4.5
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This story is set in Kyoto, Japan, starting in June 1978. Fourteen year old Sarah Rexford and her Japanese mother, Yoko, have come back from the US to stay with family for a few weeks. Sarah was born and brought up in Japan but has lived in the US with her mother and white American father for five years. She is very conscious of the differences between life in Kyoto and in Fielder's Butte, California. Here in Kyoto, the women, including Sarah and her mum, 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 she normally has for breakfast in the US, and becoming aware of the gulf between her life in Japan and in California.
+
|summary=The problem began just after the publication of George March's most successful novel to date. Everyone but Mrs March (we know her first name only on the last page) seemed to either be reading it or had already done so. Every day Mrs March went to the local patisserie to buy olive bread but on that particular morning, Patricia asked, as she was wrapping the bread, ''but isn't this the first time he's based a character on you?''  She mentioned that Johanna, the principal character had 'her mannerisms''. Perhaps this would not have mattered, except for the fact that Johanna is the whore of Nantes - ''a weak, plain, detestable, pathetic, unloved, unloveable wretch.''
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847392334</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Rose Tremain
 
|title=Trespass
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=Set in the hills of Southern France, Trespass is a novel about sibling love and rivalry, disputed territory and ultimately revenge. In the French corner are Aramon Lunel, resident of the Mas Lunel, and his sister Audrun who lives in a cottage in the grounds. In the English corner are Victoria Verey, a garden designer, and her partner, an untalented watercolourist, Kitty. The catalyst that brings these together is the arrival in France of Anthony Verey, Victoria's sister whose exclusive antiques business in London is failing and who decides to follow his sister in finding a new life in France. Aramon is tempted to sell his family Mas by the lure of 'foreign' money even if that means that his sister's house has to be destroyed to secure the deal.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701177942</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
  
{{newreview
+
Move on to [[Newest Paranormal Reviews]]
|author=Castle Freeman
 
|title=All That I Have
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=Castle Freeman may sound like two thirds of a firm of provincial solicitors but thankfully this Castle Freeman is a man very skilled in writing about the law rather than practicing it. In his latest novel Freeman tells an intriguing tale involving local Sheriff Lucian Wing and his practical yet low-key approach to maintaining order in rural Vermont. Not for Wing the gung ho approach to fighting crime. He doesn't wear a uniform, he drives a battered old car rather than the standard issue sheriff's wagon and his gun, so ubiquitous in US law enforcement, is safely tucked away in his bottom drawer. Everyone in the area knows the sheriff and by and large they respect him and his slightly unorthodox way of doing business.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0715639021</amazonuk>
 
}}
 

Revision as of 09:09, 19 February 2024

B0CVFXPGP8.jpg

Review of

We'll Never Know by Matthew Tree

4.5star.jpg Literary Fiction

Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, a drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of his artistic passions all failed miserably and who had endless crises of self confidence. So Tim applied himself to his studies, cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and set himself high but achievable ambitions. Full Review

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Review of

Fragility by Mosby Woods

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

Can you make a Yo birthing person joke? And if you could, is the question should you make it? Or is the question if you did, would it land? The catch is that the answer for both could well be.... no.

Fragility is set as the city of Portland, Oregon, cautiously begins to emerge from the restrictions imposed during the covid pandemic Full Review

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Review of

A Whirly Man Loses His Turn by Mosby Woods

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

The 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 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 strategic advantage in this asset; a man who can tell you what will happen given any set of circumstances. That man would be valuable, right? Perhaps the most valuable asset in history. Imagine then, that this man loses this ability. What would governments do to get it back? Full Review

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Review of

The House of Broken Bricks by Fiona Williams

5star.jpg Literary Fiction

The House of Broken Bricks is the story of four people. Tess Hembry's roots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, but instead, she lives in the house on the riverbank, built of broken bricks. Insubstantial as it might look, it's stood the passage of time, storms and floods. Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the delivery rounds - and to bring 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. Full Review

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Review of

House of Odysseus by Claire North

5star.jpg Literary Fiction

What could matter more than love?

The follow-up to the excellent Ithaca picks up a few months after where we left off. In the palace of Odysseus, with 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 throne of the Western Isles. Having survived – politically and physical – the chaotic storm that Clytemnestra brought to Ithaca's shores, Queen Penelope is on the brink of a fragile peace. One that shatters however with the return of Orestes, King of Mycenae, and his sister Elektra, seeking refuge. Full Review

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Review of

Desert Creatures by Kay Chronister

4star.jpg Dystopian Fiction

With a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, post-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Whether it is a robotic takeover, a world devoid of water or a nuclear holocaust, this genre is a way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. Desert Creatures by Kay Chronister is a new work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the fears that exist for humanity today. It is a shocking novel that still manages to find hope. Full Review

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Review of

The Trees Grew Because I Bled There by Eric LaRocca

5star.jpg Horror

Horror 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, a monster or a ghost, it usually something tangible and, by the end of the story, beatable. Eric LaRocca's The Trees Grew Because I Bled There is not like that. It is a collection of short stories more interested in the horrors of illness, grief and humiliation. Horrors that linger and are harder to defeat than any Big Bad. Full Review

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Review of

Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas

5star.jpg Literary Fiction

Love, I'd read, was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity

Told from a retrospective view, a young woman unravels the year-long relationship that 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 sorrowful 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, depicting its all-consuming nature, how it changed her perspective on both romantic and familial relationships and how it altered her irrevocably. Full Review

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Review of

Beautiful Shining People by Michael Grothaus

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

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.

Beautiful Shining People revolves around the question of identity and acceptance. Of what it means to be human. Of what is real and what is artificial, and whether the development of technology is exciting or frightening. Full Review

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Review of

Atalanta by Jennifer Saint

5star.jpg Literary Fiction

I was as worthy as any one of them. I would get on board that ship, I vowed. I would take my place, not just in the name of the goddess. It was for the sake of my name, too. Atalanta

Princess. Warrior. Lover. Hero.

Abandoned at birth for being born a daughter rather than a son, Atalanta is raised under the protective eye of the goddess Athemis and fashioned into a formidable huntress, one who longs for adventure. When the opportunity comes – to join the Argonauts, a fierce band of warriors, descendent from the Gods themselves – Atalanta seizes the chance to fight in Artemis' name and carve out her own legendary place in history. What follows is a whirlwind of challenges and discovery and through it, Atalanta must remember Artemis' fatal warning: that if she marries, it will be her undoing. Full Review

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Review of

Beautiful Place by Amanthi Harris

5star.jpg Literary Fiction

Padma, a young Sri Lankan, has returned to the Villa Hibiscus on the southern coast of 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 be at the Villa, how it became her home, and 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. Padma's present fails to escape her past and much like the musical score of a film, that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the Villa. Full Review

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Review of

Sea Defences by Hilary Taylor

5star.jpg Literary Fiction

When we first meet Rachel Bird she's a trainee vicar, sitting in on a PCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the children up. Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-old Hannah and her elder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Thelma's daughter-in-law won't let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, on 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 vicar, Gail, but then she's been doing the job for more than thirty years. Rachel and Christopher 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. Full Review

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Review of

The Boy and the Dog by Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)

4.5star.jpg General Fiction

First of all, it was the earthquake, deep in the ocean floor, which created the tsunami and this, in turn, caused the nuclear meltdown. The result was complete and utter devastation. The deaths were uncountable, and the loss of livelihoods was widespread. The fact that many pets were separated from their owners came far down the list of priorities but - six months after the tsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. He wasn't a dog person but the convenience store owner's comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his car door and Tamon the dog jumped in. Full Review

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Review of

Papa on the Moon by Marco North

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

Some frogs had gotten into the well.

Walter stood waist-deep in the fragrant water, naked except for his beaten leather hat. Long strands of their eggs wove around him, sticky gray pearls with tadpoles inside them. Two of the dogs leaned over the opening and barked down at the strange noise of the buckets as he filled them.

How is that for an opening? The style of this novel in the form of interconnected short stories goes from succinct and laconic to wistful and musing, turning on a sixpence. And author Marco North, who has the most wonderful turn of phrase, starts as he means to go on. Full Review

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Review of

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

The summary of this book doesn't come close to explaining what is done with the premise. Full Review

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Review of

The Weight of Loss by Sally Oliver

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

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. Full Review

0861541901.jpg

Review of

This World Does Not Belong To Us by Natalia Garcia Freire

5star.jpg Literary Fiction

Early comments on this debut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, a delight. I will agree with the first – tremendous is no understatement – but 'a delight' is perhaps using the expression in a way I'm not familiar with. I have to confess my ignorance of the Spanish-language literary tradition so forgive my generalisation here. From the little I have read (in translation, I don't read Spanish) there does seem to be a tendency towards the fantastical – the mystical realism. Full Review

1472273915.jpg

Review of

Elektra by Jennifer Saint

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

'Elektra' by Jennifer Saint tells the story of three women who live in the heavily male dominated world of Ancient Greece. Cassandra, Clytemnestra, and Elektra are all bit players in the story of the Trojan War. Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that often the silent women have the most compelling stories and the most extreme furies. Full Review

8409290103.jpg

Review of

If Only by Matthew Tree

4.5star.jpg Literary Fiction

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 monthly allowance. Patrick sent the money regularly and a correspondence - of sorts - sprang up between the two although we hear more about what Lowry has to say than Patrick. It wasn't that Lowry senior didn't 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 alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to get the young man on his way. Full Review

1913547183.jpg

Review of

Red is My Heart by Antoine Laurain, Le Sonneur and Jane Aitken (translator)

3.5star.jpg Literary Fiction

Antoine Laurain books have always been black and white and read in my house. And so was this one, although I could have spelled that more accurately – this one was, and is, black and white and red. Yes, he has an artistic collaborator on this piece, and I think it's possible to say not one page lacks the influence of some striking visual ideas. Full Review

B098FFFBH9.jpg

Review of

Snowcub by Graham Fulbright

4.5star.jpg Literary Fiction

Fourteen-year-old Rachel is 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 animal world. She gets a great deal of support from her family: father Pip Harrison, a lecturer at Imperial College, London, mother Kate and her twin, Nick. Kate runs the family business, a toy shop called Cornucopia in Putney, which is where we'll meet Rachel's main (if unsuspected) source of information: five soft toys. Full Review

0986031658.jpg

Review of

Crosshairs of the Devil by Yancey Williams

4.5star.jpg Literary Fiction

Award-winning crime writer Eddie Jablonski is getting on in years and, despite his strenuous objections and thanks to his daughter, finds himself living - or imprisoned, from Eddie's point of view - in room 315 of the Garden of Eden nursing home, with only a trusty nursing aide, Jenkins, for palatable company. Nothing is going to keep Eddie from his stock-in-trade of writing though, so here, for his readers, are his wanderings through his life's work. Full Review

0008421714.jpg

Review of

Mrs March by Virginia Feito

4.5star.jpg Literary Fiction

The problem began just after the publication of George March's most successful novel to date. Everyone but Mrs March (we know her first name only on the last page) seemed to either be reading it or had already done so. Every day Mrs March went to the local patisserie to buy olive bread but on that particular morning, Patricia asked, as she was wrapping the bread, but isn't this the first time he's based a character on you? She mentioned that Johanna, the principal character had 'her mannerisms. Perhaps this would not have mattered, except for the fact that Johanna is the whore of Nantes - a weak, plain, detestable, pathetic, unloved, unloveable wretch. Full Review

Move on to Newest Paranormal Reviews