==General fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Alma Katsu
|title=The Taker
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=When Dr Luke Findley begins his nightshift at Aroostook County Hospital in St Andrews, Maine, things are quiet until Lanny McIlvrae is brought in by the police. Lanny is covered in blood and claims she has killed a man and left him in the woods. Desperate to escape, Lanny quickly asks for Luke's help, but he is not sure at first, so Lanny decides to tell Luke her life story, a story that begins in the early Puritan settlement of St Andrews in 1809 and spans nearly two hundred years, taking Lanny from her home to Boston and beyond. A story that is rich, imaginative and entirely authentic, filling the majority of the novel, and there wasn't a moment when I questioned her reliability as she tells Luke everything, chapter by chapter, as he helps her to escape, slowly drawing him and the reader into her world.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846058171</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Aimee Bender
|summary=The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives is one of those books that you read with a smile on your face. It's full of gloriously unsavoury characters caught in a terrible web of deceit. We are promised 'four women, one husband and a devastating secret' and it delivers on all three counts. Sure the secret is quite well signposted and Shoneyin doesn't really make much of an effort to divert the reader from putting two and two together, although it takes wife number four, Bolanle, an inordinate amount of time for the penny to drop, but it's not about discovering the deception - it's about the glorious journey of how things unfold.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687497</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Cornelius Medvei
|title=Caroline: A Mystery
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Meet Mr Shaw. He's an insurance worker who takes his wife and son off on their annual vacation one year, and finds himself indulging in a surprisingly platonic holiday romance. The subject of his infatuation, Caroline, has eyes, ears, hair and more that easily combine with Mr Shaw's fondness for classical Persian love poetry. At the end of the holiday he lets his wife and son depart while he takes a further week off to walk all the way home with Caroline. Who is, as it happens, a donkey.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846553881</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Steve Martin
|title=An Object of Beauty
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Leave aside the title of the book for a minute, the book itself is also 'an object of beauty' with its striking front cover and primary colours artfully arranged. And then I turned the book over and said to myself, oh, it's ''that'' Steve Martin. I knew he was - and is - a very funny actor but I didn't know that he was also a writer. So, before I'd even opened the book I was thinking - will he be as good a writer as he is an actor. I was about to find out ...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0297863290</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tom Campbell
|title=Fold
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Five men in Reading circulate their monthly poker evenings around their respective houses. None of them like all the others, none of them seem to completely like the game, but they're more-or-less happy with the habit. It's the way the five different personalities approach the evenings that we are concerned with, and enjoy principally, especially when the poorest player, Nick, decides to clash with his polar opposite, Doug. And what might happen if a non-playing character were to enter things, and make them even feistier?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408807602</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Francois Lelord
|title=Hector and the Secrets of Love
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Professor Cormorant has gone AWOL. Tasked with developing drugs to cure a lot of ills, by making us fall in love, he has fled with his secrets, his prototypes, and a few samples that may or may not be dangerous. It is down to Hector, a psychiatrist, to chase him down, work out where Cormorant is in his researches, and if possible help bring the trade secrets back to the company his girlfriend, and now himself, works for. With the exotic far East his destination, a partner left behind, and time on his hand to muse on the subject of love, will Hector find more than just a bunch of chemicals in a syringe?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906040338</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Edward Wright
|title=From Blood
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=While I'm not mad about the title, the book's cover is atmospherically good - it says to the reader 'please pick me up and read me.' So I did. The book opens in 1960s America with the Prologue. A bunch of radical thinkers are angry. They turn this pent-up anger into a well-oiled, well-ordered act of violence. Lives are lost. But the perpetrators are clever and most of them escape justice. They do what many around the world have done before them; they go underground. But several key members are still at large ...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0752891774</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Lindsley
|title=The Darkfall Switch
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The book opens on a sultry, hot summer's day in central London. Imagine the stifling heat is the subliminal message here, especially for those passengers on the underground - ' ... as if they were all joined in some macabre dance as the train rattled along the tunnel. Everybody pressed against others.' Suddenly there's a problem with the infrastructure. A big problem. As the experts frantically work behind the scenes to get London moving again - the unthinkable happens. People lose their lives in what appears to be a power cut.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>070909146X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alan Lorber
|title=Benny Allen Was A Star: A New York Music Story
|rating=3
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Alan Lorber has written a fictional and I suspect a semi autobiographical account of his years as a top music arranger in the 1950's and early 1960's, a period of huge change in the music industry culminating with the breakthrough of the Beatles in America. Rather than simply writing a factual narrative of his involvement during this period he decided to tell the story of the fictional Benny Allen, a classically trained musician who almost by accident gets involved in the music publishing business and then goes on to produce some hugely successful orchestrations on many of the top hit records of the time.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>B0041VXCTA</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Deborah Harkness
|title=A Discovery of Witches
|rating=4.5
|genre=Fantasy
|summary=The back cover is full of praise for this debut novel which has been involved in a publishing 'tussle', no less. Impressive. I was looking forward to reading what all the fuss was about. The title is terrific too. But was the book a terrific read?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755374029</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Elfriede Jelinek
|title=The Piano Teacher
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Erika is a single woman in her thirties, who, despite the best efforts of her mother, did not succeed as a concert musician, but instead works as a teacher at the Vienna Conservatory. I say best efforts, I mean outright pressure. Erika and her mother make for an unusual relationship - the older relying on the glory, company and complete obedience of the younger, the daughter sharing a bed with her mother even at this stage of her life. All this is until a young student at the school decides he will be a younger lover for Erika, and forces his will into the household. But who, should such a relationship actually form, is going to be the power-maker?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687373</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Maria Angels Anglada
|title=The Auschwitz Violin
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=In Poland in the early 1990s, a violin sings. The maestro who owns it produces such a music from it, people are forced to take note. They'd be even more amazed if she could bring herself to state exactly how the instrument came to be. For this was the work of Daniel, suffering in a subsidiary camp to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Stumbles, chances, half-lies, all conspire to allow Daniel to take time off his enforced labour and engage in his real-world career. But is there a price to pay in doing something you love, just for a man you can only hate?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849016437</amazonuk>
}}
