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[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]__NOTOC__{{Frontpage|author=Matthew Tree|title=We'll Never Know|rating=4.5|genre=Literary fictionFiction|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.|isbn=B0CVFXPGP8__NOTOC__}}{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Alison WongB0C47LV1PC|title=As the Earth Turns SilverFragility|author=Mosby Woods

|summary=This lyrical novel Can you make a ''Yo birthing person'' joke? And if you could, is set in Wellingtonthe question should you make it? Or is the question if you did, New Zealand just over a hundred years agowould it land? The catch is that the answer for both could well be.... no. In this country  ''Fragility'' is set as the city of then recent immigrantsPortland, there was a racial hierarchyOregon, with those of British origin considering themselves superior cautiously begins to others, and an active Anti-Chinese League.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330465155</amazonuk>emerge from the restrictions imposed during the covid pandemic

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Irene NemirovskyMosby Woods|title=The Dogs and the WolvesA Whirly Man Loses His Turn|rating=54

|summary=Ada The West isn't the dominant force it once was part of the Sinner family. They lived Nobody in the sort West is quite sure how to mend this or even if mending it is the best course of Ukrainian city which was rigorously divided by wealth and statusaction. Governments are flailing. At the bottom of the hill lived the people who scratched A war here, a living; at the top were the wealthy whose businesses provided most of the livings and push for climate action there. A feeling that nobody is in between were those who struggled for a better existenceactual charge. Ada's mother died when she Imagine then, there was a child and her father did his best, but he was frequently hampered by having to take Ada man with him as he workedprecognition. The arrival Imagine the strategic advantage in this asset; a man who can tell you what will happen given any set of Ada's widowed aunt and two young children circumstances. That man would be valuable, right? Perhaps the most valuable asset in the household meant three more mouths to feedhistory. Imagine then, but there was at least some care for the motherless childthat this man loses this ability.What would governments do to get it back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099507781</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Tom McCarthy0571379559|title=CThe House of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams

|summary=''CThe House of Broken Bricks'' follows is the life story of Serge Carrefaxfour people. Set Tess Hembry's roots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, but instead, she lives in the early part of house on the twentieth centuryriverbank, the reader encounters Serge at various key moments in his life and each built of these is quite fascinating and engrossingly relatedbroken bricks. It Insubstantial as it might look, it's one of those books that is like Dr Who's Tardis - so much happens that when he recalls an earlier part stood the passage of time, storms and floods. Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his lifevegetables, I found myself thinking 'oh yes, that was to complete the delivery rounds - and to bring in this book toosufficient money. They have twin boys - Sonny and Max, wasnthe rainbow twins. Sonny't it?s colouring reflects his mother' The book has been described as post-structuralist but s Jamaican heritage. Max takes after his father. People don't let believe that literary labelling put you off. Yesthey're related, itmuch less twins and there's a complex book an assumption when Max is out with his mother that can be read at many levels, (and one which I know I'll come back to), but itshe's completely readable and not at all 'difficult'his nanny.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224090208</amazonuk>

{{newreview|author=Lorcan Roche|title=The Companion|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Closeted away in follow-up to the excellent ''Ithaca'' picks up a few months after where we left off. In the opulence palace of his parents' Madison Avenue apartmentOdysseus, Edwith delicate care Queen Penelope continues to rule without her husband, bound who sailed to a wheel-chair because muscular dystrophy has laid claim to his body, spends his days veiled from war at Troy and then by divine intervention never returned home. As ever she remains surrounded by suitors vying for the throne of the outside worldWestern Isles. EdHaving survived – politically and physical – the chaotic storm that Clytemnestra brought to Ithaca's sadness manifests itself in curious waysshores, though largelyQueen Penelope is on the brink of a fragile peace. One that shatters however with the return of Orestes, via spectacularKing of Mycenae, spoiled-brattish outbursts designed to get the parental attention he craves but that is palpably absent from and his confined life. Then he meets Trevorsister Elektra, seeking refuge.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1933372842</amazonuk>0356516075

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=William GibsonKay Chronister|title=Zero HistoryDesert Creatures|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary=It's almost obligatory when writing anything about William Gibson to recall With a world that in is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, post-apocalyptic fiction can become an earlier short story, he invented the term 'cyberspace'almost masochistic thrill. Gibson remains at the cutting edge of what Whether it is 'cool'. Like most a robotic takeover, a world devoid of his bookswater or a nuclear holocaust, Zero History this genre is a thriller, but at its core are issues surrounding technology, how we interact with it, branding and marketingway for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. It would be easy to criticise much of his content as being too shallow and concerned with 'nothing' Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a new work of post- but then apocalyptic fiction that's part aligns many of his pointthe fears that exist for humanity today. It is a shocking novel that still manages to find hope.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0670919527</amazonuk>1803364998

 {{newreviewfrontpage|isbn=1803363002|author=John BuchanEric LaRocca|title=The Island of Sheep (John Hannay)Trees Grew Because I Bled There|rating=3.5|genre=General FictionHorror|summary=Richard Hannay Horror taps into something primeval within us. It is feeling old. He looks at himself used as a way to reflect our darkest emotions and his contemporaries how we as humans react and sees process them. Most horror fiction feature a ''Big Bad'', whether that is a home invader, a monster or a spread ghost, it usually something tangible and, by the end of complacencythe story, beatable. Luckily - or perhaps very unluckily - an old pledge will come to haunt himEric LaRocca's ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. His earlier career in Africa saw Hannay and his friends swear to protect a man from others - and now It is a second generation collection of animosity is ripe for Hannay to step short stories more interested in the horrors of illness, grief and be a protective detectivehumiliation. Add in a supposed treasure hoard, Horrors that linger and who knows where his last journey might end up?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184697156X</amazonuk>are harder to defeat than any ''Big Bad''.

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Elizabeth JolleyMadelaine Lucas|title=The Vera Wright TrilogyThirst for Salt

|summary=''The Vera Wright Trilogy'' contains three novels – ''My Father's Moon'Love, I'd read, ''Cabin Fever'' was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity''The Georges' Wife'' - in one beautifully presented edition. First published about 20 years ago, they are apparently partly autobiographical, telling the story of a woman's life from the 1940s onwards – work, children, parents, romantic and sexual relationships and friendships.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0892553529</amazonuk>}}

{{newreview|author=David Grossman|title=To Told from a retrospective view, a young woman unravels the year-long relationship that once defined her. Overlaid with later wisdom, the End of narrator relives the Land|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=This is affair with a sweeping narrative about one Jewish family and how man twenty years her senior from its inception – the various members deal with summer after finishing university – to its sorrowful end the ongoing Arab-Israeli warsummer after. The mother, Ora, is Set against the lynch-pin backdrop of an isolated Australian coastal town ''Thirst for Salt'' details the family24-year-old narrator's deepening relationship with her older lover, depicting its all-consuming nature, but how it changed her resolve is tested to the limit when perspective on both romantic and familial relationships and how it altered her younger son is about to be released from his stint in the armyirrevocably.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0224089994</amazonuk>0861546490

 {{newreview|author=Jon Kalman Stefansson|title=Heaven and Hell|rating=3.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Iceland, somewhen about a century ago. Five men and a young lad set out in their tiny oar- and sail-powered fishing boat, for cod. On board are people with the strength to take part in a solid twelve-hour shift - rowing four hours to the fishing banks, staying there stably for the lines, then hauling them in and rowing home. And that's not to factor in any temperament of the weather. Unfortunately it's not only knowledge of fishing these people have taken on board, for Icelandic men still like to dream of love, gaze nightly at the moon at the same time as their belles, and read stories of gods, romance and legend. It's a pity then these distractions will be fatal for one of the boy's five companions...|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906694532</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Christos TsiolkasMichael Grothaus|title=The SlapBeautiful Shining People

|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Slapping your own child is bad''But fearing something and having it come to pass are two different things. Slapping someone elseAnd I's child is worse. This is the event at the heart m willing to bet most of Christos Tsiolkas' Man Booker-nominated novelwhat we fear will never happen, set in Melbourne, Australia, when at a barbeque for friends and family, the hostor we can take steps to change it.'s cousin slaps the child of the best friend of the host's wife.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848873557</amazonuk>}}

{{newreview|author=Jacqueline Yallop|title=Kissing Alice|rating=3|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Arthur Claythorne, a decorator by trade finds himself out of work and back home in Plymouth as the First World War begins, along with a stolen copy of William Blake's 'Beautiful Shining People''Songs revolves around the question of Innocence identity and Experience'', a book full of powerful imageryacceptance. After being injured in the war Arthur returns home Of what it means to his wife Queenie May be human. Of what is real and two daughters, Florrie and Alice, a changed manwhat is artificial, deeply affected by his experiences in the trenches and desperate to find religion. Despite Florrie's interest in following her father into Catholicism, it is Alice who suddenly finds herself whether the object development of her father's unusual and inappropriate attentiontechnology is exciting or frightening.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1848870345</amazonuk>191458564X

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Emma DonoghueJennifer Saint|title=RoomAtalanta

|summary=It's the morning 'I was as worthy as any one of Jack's fifth birthdaythem. I would get on board that ship, but Jack is no ordinary boy. He and his Ma have been imprisoned by the character known only as 'Old Nick' in a single room for all Jack's lifeI vowed. True he has a televisionI would take my place, but his mother has convinced him that those people are not real. The room is all Jack has ever known - and just in it he has developed his own attachment to things like Bed, Rug, Table, Skylight and Wardrobe where he sleepsthe name of the goddess. The first victim It was for the sake of incarcerationmy name, it seems, is the definite articletoo.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330519018</amazonuk>}}Atalanta''

{{newreview|author=Andrey Kurkov and Andrew Bromfield|title=The Good Angel of Death|rating=3Princess.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Kolya cannot possibly expect what the act of moving flat, and finding a book among what the old folks who move out leave behind, might lead toWarrior. I can hint that it involves a trip of several hundreds of miles, involves a couple of pieces of anatomy the average man does not fancy leaving behind, a chameleon, Kolya being given as a husband-cum-present to a lovely young lady, and a lot moreLover. The find involves Ukraine's national author, Taras Shevchenko, and a hunt for something he might have left behind in a desert abutting the Caspian SeaHero.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099513498</amazonuk>}}

{{newreview|author=Geoff Dyer|title=Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi|rating=3|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Meet Jeff. He's Abandoned at birth for being born a daughter rather than a journalist living in Londonson, with a fine line in delaying his work effort Atalanta is raised under the protective eye of the goddess Athemis and fashioned into a keen eye formidable huntress, one who longs for detailadventure. He can see how When the world is made better by a smile from a random shopkeeper - yet seems too grumpy opportunity comes – to try it himself. Instead he suspects his habit of walking roundjoin the Argonauts, mouthing or speaking out his own inner thoughts is making him seem a scary old man. He can partly address thisfierce band of warriors, by dying his hair. And he can stop walking round London when he gets commissions to report back descendent from the modern arts Biennale Gods themselves – Atalanta seizes the chance to fight in Artemis' name and carve out her own legendary place in Venicehistory. SoonWhat follows is a whirlwind of challenges and discovery and through it, howeverAtalanta must remember Artemis' fatal warning: that if she marries, the only work of art he's at all worried about goes by the name of Laura..it will be her undoing.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>184767271X</amazonuk>1472292154

 {{newreview|author=Elia Barcelo and David Frye|title=Heart of Tango|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Although less than 200 pages in length, this short novel encompasses a great deal, both in the storyline, and the development of the characters. The plot itself is simple. Young Natalia has been betrothed to the much older Berstein, a German sailor known for some time to Natalia’s father. He appears as a kindly character, and clearly in love/enamoured of Natalia. But the marriage is no love match, but one done instead for expediency, and although prepared to go through with it, Natalia is like any other young girl, and wishes she was marrying the love of her life. Her mother died when she was a baby so she has had a lonely childhood, yearning for female company and guidance - but the reality of the situation has meant that other than an elderly, kindly neighbour who has tried to help support and advise her, she is irrevocably alone - seeming to have very few friends even of her own age.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906694605</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Harper LeeAmanthi Harris|title=To Kill A MockingbirdBeautiful Place

|summary=Fifty 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 after its first release. It is not a place she was born into, readers are once again getting but the chance one she thinks of as home. How she came to acquaint themselves with Harper Lee's classic tale of growing up in be at the Villa, how it became her home, and the Deep South during machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the depression. After five decades, ''To Kill a Mockingbirdscore'' still hasnfor this gentle and yet subtly violent novel. Padma't lost s present fails to escape her past and much like the musical score of a film, that strand weaves its charm. Even new readers can expect a classic tale full of elements still relevant to this dayway through everything that happens at the Villa.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099549484</amazonuk>1784631930

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Sebastian Faulks178563335X|title=A Week in DecemberSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor

|summary=ItWhen we first meet Rachel Bird she's Sundaya trainee vicar, nine days before Christmas sitting in 2007 on a PCC meeting and we meet 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 disparate group of people in London, who are doing what they normally dosobbing parishioner. ThereThelma's a hedge fund manager whodaughter-in-law won's trying to pull off the biggest trade of his careert let her see her grandson. A professional footballer from Poland has just arrived in Holthorpe, on the country and Norfolk coast, is disappointed with his small German cara lovely place, but it will have Rachel is struggling to do until his large German car arrives. A barrister has far too little work develop a real bond with the parish - and too much time on his hands. Thereshe's in awe of the student searching for something in which to believe whovicar, Gail, but then she's led astray by been doing the job for more extreme Islamic fundamentalists – and another student who's addicted to drugs and reality televisionthan thirty years. A devious book reviewer struggles to like anything written after the nineteenth century – Rachel and Christopher hoped that a chutney magnate from Haveringwalk on the beach would do them some good -atte-Bower wants to learn how to discuss books with the Queenit was stormy but it was probably what they needed. Looping all these people together is a Tube driver on the Circle Line And then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099458284</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Anne Tyler1398515388|title=Noah's CompassThe Boy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)

|summary=It's always a red letter day to sit down to an unread Anne TylerFirst 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. This is her eighteenth published novel The deaths were uncountable, and the loss of livelihoods was widespread. For any readers not already fans The fact that many pets were separated from their owners came far down the list of her books, this American writer observes priorities but - six months after the ordinary in order to excel at tsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. He wasn'making t a dog person but the familiar, strangeconvenience 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>0099539586</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Simon Rich0989715337|title=Elliot Allagash|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Meet thirteen year-old Seymor Herson, he's one of life's losers, the least popular boy at Glendale a second rate private school in New York. He has made a virtue of mediocrity and is happy to simply survive his time at Glendale rather than try and excel at anything. Meet thirteen year-old Elliot Allagash heir to one of the largest fortunes in America. Elliot who makes a habit of being thrown out of exclusive private schools has finally ended up at Glendale whose reliance on his family's funding means that he cannot be expelled despite his various misdemeanours. Expulsion not being an option Elliot embarks Papa on an equally difficult project, to make Seymor into the most popular boy in school and beyond that to turn him into a young prodigy, the talk of the New York elite. Can he achieve this? And at what cost?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687543</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=James Robertson|title=And The Land Lay Still|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=The novel starts ... at the end. We see the fictional character, photographer Mike Pendreich collating many, many photographs which his late father took with his trusty camera. His father is generally acknowledged as the better of the two at the craft; he simply had the knack. And what his son is now in charge of are black and white photographs charting a social history at that time. And we all know that a picture is worth a thousand words.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>024114356X</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Damon Galgut|title=In a Strange Room|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary='In A Strange Room' follows the actions of one man as he travels across three different countries, with three sets of companions, playing three separate roles. Never settled in one place, narrator Damon continually hops from one country to another collecting more stamps in his passport than he does friends.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848873220</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewMoon|author=Nicholson Baker|title=The AnthologistMarco North

|summary=Readers who know of Nicholson Baker don't go to his work expecting convoluted plot, fast-paced action or non-stop drama. His novels at their best, dissect, in minute detail, the most intimate thoughts and daily doings, usually of a single character. They are revealing and surprising, and revel in language itself, like poetry. In other ways they are unlike poetry, which deals in suggestion and compression. And Baker's novels generally deal in the opposite.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847397824</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=A L Kennedy|title=What Becomes|rating=4|genre=Short Stories|summary=You're three stories Some frogs had gotten into this collection and two people have cut their hands open preparing food - a man with love drooping away from his marriage, making soup, and another, a greengrocer, preparing stock and thinking about his own relationship. But there is no pattern to that. Four stories in and there have been two bursts of non-sequitur comedy. Why your fruit might be ruined by stray fingers, and the thoughts of a woman in a flotation tank, remembering Doctor Who, locked parental doors - and the urban myths of gerbilswell. But there's still no pattern - and that's the point of these combined stories. Life and all of its emotions does not live to rule.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>009949406X</amazonuk>}}

{{newreview|author=Adam Thirlwell|title=The Escape|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=When we first meet seventy''Walter stood waist-eight year-old Raphael Haffnerdeep in the fragrant water, naked except for his beaten leather hat. Long strands of their eggs wove around him, he is hiding in a spa hotel closet watching a twenty-something year-old yoga instructor (who knows he's there) having sex sticky gray pearls with her boyfriend (who doesn't)tadpoles inside them. Haffner is a British, Jewish former banker who is staying at Two of the spa in Central Europe while on a mission to reclaim his dead wife's villa that was confiscated by dogs leaned over the Nazis in the war. Thirlwell's narrator, some fifty years younger than Haffner (ie opening and barked down at the age strange noise of the author), describes the aging libertine Haffner buckets as he filled them.''lustful, selfish, vain - an entirely commonplace man''. Charming.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099539837</amazonuk>}}

{{newreview|author=Louise Dean|title=How is that for an opening? The Old Romantic|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Ken is nearly eighty style of this novel in the form of interconnected short stories goes from succinct and he's obsessed with his death laconic to wistful and planning his own funeral. He's even helping out musing, turning on a volunteer basis in the local undertaker'ssixpence. And author Marco North, but what he'd really like is to be back with his family. The trouble is that they've rather moved on. His sister – who seems to have been has the perfect woman in his life – is dead. He and his first wife are divorced and he's contemplating the same end to his second marriage. His elder son left home some twenty years ago as Gary and re-invented himself most wonderful turn of phrase, starts as Nick. At forty he's a solicitor, living with his girlfriend and her twelve-year old daughter and he's happy. He really doesn't want Ken means to spoil things, but there are some things which you just cannot avoid. Ken is one of themgo on.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905490194</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=David SzalayDaisy Hildyard|title=The InnocentEmergency

|summary=This is a slim volume but it is tense, taut and has bite. The story see-saws between the 1970s and the late 1940s where much political activity occurs, (theresummary of this book doesn's an understatement) but especially in Russia as far as this novel t come close to explaining what is concerned. And as we dip into the even earlier period of the 1930s, we get a glimpse of done with the main character, Aleksandr, as a young man brimming over with political ideology. Along with his fellow students he fervently believed that 'The making of Communism was something sacred to uspremise.'|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099515881</amazonuk>1913097811}}

{{newreviewFrontpage |author=Sofi OksanenSally Oliver |title=PurgeThe Weight 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

|summary=Estonia 1992. A year after her country has regained independence Early comments on this debut novel from the Soviet UnionEcuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, Aliide Truu is in her remote cottage in the woods, canning tomatoes from a bumper harvest, swatting at ever-present flies, and trying not to think about the neighbourhood boys who persecute her remorselessly, throwing rocks at her windows, and even poisoning her dogdelight. Looking out of I will agree with the window, she sees first – tremendous is no understatement – but 'a bedraggled girl lying outside. Zara delight' is a sex-trafficked girl from Russia, on perhaps using the run from her pimps. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848872119</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Evie Wyld|title=After the Fire, A Still Small Voice|rating=1|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Frank has moved to his grandparents’ shack by the sea after expression in a tough end to a difficult relationship, and is trying to settle down, get a job, and get to know his new neighbours. He seems to be doing well, until two girls disappear, way I'm not familiar with suspicion falling on him. Decades earlier, Leon is left to run his family’s cake shop as his father is sent to fight in Korea, before he in turn is conscripted to serve in Vietnam. Things happen to him, although very few of them are of any interest whatsoever. Is there a connection between Frank and Leon? Will either or both of them manage to find happiness? Can author Evie Wyld give us any reason to care?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099535831</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Nicola Barker|title=Burley Cross Postbox Theft|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=When a bag of twenty seven undelivered letters was recovered from behind a hairdresser's in Skipton it fell to two local policemen I have to investigate what would become known as Burley Cross Post Box Theft, for it was in the village confess my ignorance of Burley Cross, just before Christmas, that the Post Box was forced open and the mail stolenSpanish-language literary tradition so forgive my generalisation here. P C Roger Topping, of the Ilkley force, took over From the case from his old school friend Sargeant Laurence Everill without any great hope of success, but the village was in turmoil and something had to be done.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007355009</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Per Petterson|title=little I Curse the River of Time|rating=3.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=This novel is told have read (in the first person by the main charactertranslation, thirtysomething Arvid Jansen. He's at a painful part of his life when we meet him; he's separated from his wife and he's not coping at all well. As if that wasnI don't enough personal stress read Spanish) there does seem to contend with, he's discovered that his mother is seriously illbe a tendency towards the fantastical – the mystical realism. How long has she got to live? How will she cope? And how will Arvid cope?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1846553008</amazonuk>0861541901

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Adam HaslettJennifer Saint|title=Union AtlanticElektra

|summary=Doug Fanning appears to be a young man in a hurry. He feels he's done his bit for his country in seeing action Elektra' by Jennifer Saint tells the story of three women who live in the Gulf War and it's now 'Doug' timeheavily male dominated world of Ancient Greece. Almost overnightCassandra, Clytemnestra, he's found his vocation and become a banker - a very successful banker. Everything he touches turns to gold. And now he wants to show everyone how well he's done Elektra are all bit players in life and requests that a ''casino the story of a house'' is built to his luxurious, over-the-top specificationsTrojan War. Nothing wrong with Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that you may say. The man's earned it, good and proper. Or has he? He's chosen to often the silent women have his executive house built in an area of mature woodland and traditional homes. It's bound to stand out like the proverbial sore thumb. The property market is also extremely buoyant and if Doug chooses to sell he'll make a packet. Win, win situation all round. Or is it?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848874979</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Tove Jansson|title=Travelling Light|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=In her home country of Finland – and no doubt throughout much of the rest of Europe which is not quite so sniffy about foreign literature as Britain tends to be – Jansson is generally recognised as an author of talent, skill, verve and wit that extended far beyond the Moomin Troll most compelling stories for which she is best known in this country. Those children's books were first published in England sixty years ago and have remained in print ever since (as well as being adapted for just about every other medium going), and a joy they are too, but it is only recently that we have been granted the pleasures of reading her fiction for adultsmost extreme furies.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>095489958X</amazonuk>1472273915

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Peter Matthiessen8409290103|title=Shadow Country|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=This is a big book by anyone's standards. Think of your average blockbuster in terms of pages - then double it. Due to its sheer breadth of narrative I think it best if I break it down into manageable book-sized chunks (the novel itself is sub-divided into a trilogy generally known as The Watson Trilogy). First off, there's an explanatory author's note at the beginning to ease the reader in gently, perhaps. I took a deep breath and dived in ...|amazonuk=<amazonuk>085705015X</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewIf Only|author=Alberto Barrera Tyszka|title=The SicknessMatthew Tree

|summary=This literary novel is 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 slow burnermonthly allowance. But Patrick sent the very first page gives an insight into money regularly and a correspondence - of sorts - sprang up between the beautiful language used throughout such as 'Medical people rarely used adjectivestwo although we hear more about what Lowry has to say than Patrick. They don It wasn't need to.that Lowry senior didn' And later on there's another lovely sentence loaded with meaning and originality - 'Blood is a terrible gossipt care for his son, it tells everything, as any laboratory technician knows.was that he didn' The opening chapter is located t care to have him in a consulting room this country where he might be a rather tense conversation is taking placedanger to his wife and other children. The answer is extremely important alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to one get the young manon his way.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906694508</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Maureen GibbonAntoine Laurain, Le Sonneur and Jane Aitken (translator)|title=ThiefRed is My Heart|rating=43.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=It’s summer, [[:Category:Antoine Laurain|Antoine Laurain]] books have always been black and school teacher Suzanne is renting a cabin by a lake. Spending her days reading white and swimming, she also finds time to engage read in some old fashioned letter writing with a stranger who responded to a personal ad she placedmy house. He’s currently an inmate at the state penitentiaryAnd so was this one, but Suzanne’s not although I could have spelled that more accurately – this one to judgewas, and agrees to give their correspondence a shot. Then she finds out what he’s in for – and it’s not pretty. Breville is a convicted thief and rapist, black and Suzanne herself was raped as a teenager, by a friend’s brother. That should be the end of it: any sensible person would cut off all communication white and turn their back on the situationred. But Suzanne is different and though she’s acknowledges that it might not be the healthiest of relationshipsYes, she maintains the back and forth with Breville.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848871821</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Julia Franck|title=The Blind Side of the Heart|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=When I read ''the international bestseller'' he has an artistic collaborator on the front cover, as in this novelpiece, my expectations are raised a notch or two. So, would this book meet those expectations? Franck gives the reader a short prologue and we see Helene, the main character of the novel, living in her middle-years. We know she has a husband who is carrying out some very important and crucial work for his country; his beloved Germany. The book is set in 1945 and Germany is in chaos. And Helen's young son has seen sights no 7 year old should witness. ItI think it's possible to say not one page lacks the stuff influence of nightmares. Their lives are also in chaos not to mention extreme danger and as a single parent who's at her wit's end she makes a monumental decisionsome striking visual ideas.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099524236</amazonuk>1913547183

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Irene NemirovskyB098FFFBH9|title=JezebelSnowcub|author=Graham Fulbright

|summary=Gladys Eysenach stands 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 dock accused of murdering her young loveranimal world. She apparently took gets a gun great deal of support from her handbag family: father Pip Harrison, a lecturer at Imperial College, London, mother Kate and shot him in the early hours of Christmas Day in her own hometwin, Nick. What happened is clear – Gladys makes no attempt to deny it – but why it happened is less obviousKate runs the family business, and Gladys doesn't seem inclined to offer much a toy shop called Cornucopia in the way of explanation. But gradually, oh so teasinglyPutney, which is where we find out what really happened and why'll meet Rachel's main (if unsuspected) source of information: five soft toys.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099520389</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Louise DoughtyYancey Williams|title=Whatever You LoveCrosshairs of the Devil

|summary=Two police officers knock on Laura's door. They break the news to her that her 9 year old daughter Betty has been run over and killed. Betty's friend Willow Award-winning crime writer Eddie Jablonski is in hospital. Immediately, I was drawn into this story of a mother's worst nightmare coming true.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571254756</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=DO Dodd|title=Jew|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=A man regains consciousness to find himself stifled. Pushing and pulling at the weight getting on top of him, he gradually realises the horrific truth. He's in a mass grave and he's covered with bodies. He has no memory of who he is or how he came to be there. He struggles out. He finds a uniform and he puts it on. He takes a gun and he buckles on its holster. He finds a man years and a woman, naked on a bed. He shoots the man. He gets into a car and he drives into town, where he's greeted as the man in charge. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1842433512</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Maria Edgeworth|title=Helen|rating=3.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Sweet-tempered Helen Stanley has been left penniless despite his strenuous objections and homeless after her uncle's death. Soon her best friend Cecilia writes thanks to encourage Helen to come and live with her and her new husbandhis daughter, General Clarendon at Clarendon Park. Helen soon finds herself settled in to Clarendon Park and reacquaints herself with Cecilia and more importantly with Cecilia's motherhimself living - or imprisoned, Lady Davenant, who considers Helen a daughter, and even prefers her to Cecilia.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956003893</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Zachary Mason|title=The Lost Books of the Odyssey|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Zachary Mason suggests that Homerfrom Eddie's ''Odyssey'' was merely one particular ordering point of the events view - in room 315 of Odysseus' return to Ithaca after the Trojan War. 'Echoes Garden of other Odysseys'Eden nursing home, with only a trusty nursing aide, he suggests existJenkins, including a forty fourfor palatable company. Nothing is going to keep Eddie from his stock-episode variation in a 'pre-Ptolomeic papyrus excavated from the desiccated rubbish mounds trade of Oxyrhnchus' and this is what is 'translated' writing though, so here. So we are presented with these forty four often very short stories that reconstruct elements of the Odyssey in a kind of alternate reality, asking 'what if it were slightly different'for his readers, and what emerges is a non-linear, mosaic of stories. If Homer had decided to present are his wanderings through his book in DVD format, these would be in the life'extras' of alternative 'takes' on things. The result is like a jazz riff on the original storiess work.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0224090224</amazonuk>0986031658}} {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Joseph Smith0008421714|title=Taurus|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=As the bull goes from paddock to stall in the searing heat of the farm, he feels strangely disembodied - and yet all he feels is his body: his huge bulk; the angles at which he must hold up his heavy head to see what he needs to see; the strange latency that fills him. He watches the skittish grey horse, transfixed and yet repulsed by its grace and fluidity. He observes his captors, the girl and boy siblings and their father, and he allows their goadings to gradually wake him from stuporous apathy. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224089978</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewMrs March|author=Juan Gabriel Vasquez|title=The Secret History of CostaguanaVirginia Feito

|summary=In 1904 Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad wrote his The problem began just after the publication of George March's most successful novel about a self-publicising Italian expatriate by 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 name of bread, ''but isn'Nostromot this the first time he's based a character on you?'' She mentioned that Johanna, set in the fictitious South American republic of Costaguanaprincipal character had 'her mannerisms''. Columbian writer Perhaps this would not have mattered, Juan Gabriel Vásquez imagines that except for the fictitious José Altamirano has assisted Conrad in his research by telling him his own story, only to find fact that the British novelist has subsequently inexcusably omitted him from his book. Now, he Johanna is seeking to set the record straight by telling the reader, who he imagines in the role whore of Nantes - ''a juryweak, as well as someone named Eloísa (who we later find out about) the same story to pass judgement on if this was fairplain, detestable, pathetic, unloved, unloveable wretch.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408800187</amazonuk>''

{{newreview|author=Kenzaburo Oe|title=The Changeling|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=The novel starts at the end. Therefore we know that one of the two principal characters, namely Goro, appears Move on to have committed suicide. The question is why. And the whole novel is an attempt to provide that elusive answer. Goro was an extremely successful film director of international repute. He was based in his native Japan but travelled extensively with his work. And you have to ask yourself why would a man such as this decide to end his life?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1843547341</amazonuk>}}[[Newest Paranormal Reviews]]