134,729
edits
Changes
no edit summary
[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]__NOTOC__<!-- Remove --> {{newreviewFrontpage|isbn=295967572X|title=HarvestPale Pieces|author=Jim CraceG M Stevens|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=As harvest comes in, Our unnamed narrator is about to begin a village finds itself under threattrain journey with his companion Django. Invaded by a series Where they're going and what the purpose of unfamiliar visitorsthis journey is, it will find itself utterly transformed over a short but apocalyptic seven daysis uncertain. We watch through Django found the eyes of Walter Thirsk as three vagabonds escaping tickets ''on the enclosure of their fields floor somewhere'' and has persuaded our narrator to accompany him. Why not? Not much else is clear either - but we are blamed for probably in the trangressions of others, past as the chartmaker Mr Quill enumerates pair travel to the common land, station by coach and as Master Kent's benevolent rule the train is overtaken by a new owner, who comes with enforcers in the name of ''profit, progress and enterprise'' - or sheep farming as Walter quickly realisessteam locomotive.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330445669</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Meg WolitzerMakenna Goodman|title=The InterestingsHelen of Nowhere|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Back It could be argued that the pervading theme of this book is malaise - a hard-to-place feeling that something in 1974 six teenagers met at summer camp and did all those things which you get to do when your parents are life is not around to stop youquite right. The protagonist, a disgraced professor on the brink of losing both his career and his relationship, embodies this feeling. They smoked potHowever, Goodman counteracts his discomfort with a force which is seductive, drank vodka radical and Tangs - unnerving: Helen. The connection between Helen and talked way into the night about anything and everythingprotagonist is indirect yet intimate. Plays were put onAs the former owner of the countryside house he's considering, animations were perfected, but most importantly friendships were made that would last for years - for some it would be Helen represents a lifetime. Back volta in 1974his life, as Nixon left her past tied to his potential fresh start. The realtor who shows the protagonist around the White House under a particularly heavy cloudhouse shares stories about Helen, and describes her as 'The Interestings'an entity that is pure consciousness, as one of their number called them, knew that they could achieve anything they set their minds tobeyond form''. For three summers they returned to Spirit-Although she lives in-an assisted living facility now, Helen has powers beyond comprehension which the-Woods and then they faced reader gets the real worldsense are not altogether innocuous.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701188278</amazonuk>1804272205
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Charlotte MendelsonOlga Tokarczuk|title=Almost English|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=In the late nineteen eighties sixteen year old Marina is a border at Combe schoolHouse of Day, destined - as she and all about her know - for Cambridge and the medical profession. After her first term she's wonders if she's made a mistake as it's definitely not like it was at Ealing Girls. There, a girl whose mother is emotionally fragile doesn't stand out, even if the mother gets to sleep on the sofa in her in-laws' flat because their son - her husband - upped and left her and their daughter. You would still fit in even if the family you're living with is Hungarian and hasn't entirely left the ways House of the old country behind. At Combe there's too much about Marina that she could be mocked for - or could get her a cruel nickname. Marina simply doesn't fit in, but the family have sacrificed everything so that she can go there.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>144721997X</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|title=1Q84: The Complete Trilogy|author=Haruki MurakamiNight
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The ''1Q84What'' trilogy is, without doubt, an impressive book. In many ways, the trilogy almost has to be read in this way as s the three component books make little sense on their own. The first book in the series in particular is almost completely baffling if taken in isolation. It does, though, demand a degree of dedication, and if the prospect good of a 1300 page novel world that keeps changing like that? How can one go on calmly living in which not a huge amount happens in terms of plot and in which there is a significant level of repetition leaves you cold, then this might not be the best entry point into the wonderful world of Haruki Murakami. As often with Murakami though, it?'s possible to read this book at a number of levels. On the surface it's a love story set in a slightly fantastical setting with a little bit of crime thrown in. At a deeper level, he explores the thin lines between imagination and reality, life and death and what you might call yin and yang. It's a novel where balance and vacuums play a big part. It seems counter-intuitive to call a book of this magnitude 'delicate', but that's just how the story appears.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099578077</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Alexander MaksikThea Lenarduzzi|title=A Marker to Measure DriftThe Tower
|rating=5
|genre=CrimeLiterary Fiction|summary=Jacqueline roams ''How unctuous are the beaches fats of the Greek islands offering massages for money to ward off starvation. It helps but hunger is always with heranother's life, lurking alongside the memory of a former life how dizzying their sugars in Liberia and the mindour bloodstream''s ear voice of her mother. Jacqueline is at least alive and existing, but at what cost?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848548052</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=The Sorrow of AngelsJon Fosse and Damion Searls (translator) |authortitle=Jon Kalman StefanssonVaim|rating=3.54
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Our decidedly unheroic main character has been at the café for three weeks now, so we are following on very closely from [[Heaven and Hell by Jon Kalman Stefansson|Heaven and Hell]]. After the tragedy and soul-searching of that first book, he seems settled in the ridiculous family that has formed around him there, finding employment, enjoying the literature, yet being very intrigued by the female body. The man who is still young enough to be known only as ''the boyAll was strange'' might have latched on to stability for once, and replaced ... This haunting phrase encapsulates the family and best friend he had lost. But everything is restless pervading sense of otherworldliness which permeates this story set in this environmentVaim, a fictional fishing village in Norway which paradoxically could not feel more real for Jatgeir and once again he might just be tempted to go on a journey, with another male companionEline, despite the harshness two of the surroundsprotagonists caught in its melancholic current.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0857051652</amazonuk>1804271829
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=Heaven and HellClaire-Louise Bennett|authortitle=Jon Kalman StefanssonBig Kiss, Bye-Bye |rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=IcelandEverything in this book, however sweet or seemingly innocent, is steeped in anguish and distortion. Even a hundred years ago. From kiss, usually a place that is the very definition symbol of rural intimacy and remotecloseness, a small fishing boat leaves for four hours' hard row to a profitable bankbecomes evidence of love lost. It carries six men on When the way narrator cries outinternally, ''come over here and five on the way back. The deceased is the best friend – or perhaps only friend – of the main characterkiss me, who '' it is still young enough less an invitation than a desperate attempt to merely be known as ''boy''confirm her emotional numbness. When he returns to port he enters an almost Camus-like semi-existence, wondering just how much life The imagined recipient of this plea is an answerXavier, and for whather ex-partner, after the tragedy he has witnesseda ghost she conjures to test her detachment.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1849164061</amazonuk>1804271934
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=The SonHelene Bessette and Kate Briggs (translator)|authortitle=Philipp MeyerLili is Crying
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Philipp Meyer's second First published in 1953 in French, this novel, ''The Son,'' is an epic, multi-generational saga a timeless text which wrenches the hearts of Texas life. Tracing the McCullough family its readers just as Bessette wrenches words and sentences from their proper position on the middle of the nineteenth century to the present daypage and positions them elsewhere, Meyer joins those writing today's masterpieces of American 'dirty realism': Ron Rashdisjointed, [[:Category:David Vann|David Vann]], Richard Ford and especially Cormac McCarthytruncated. Like McCarthy's ''Blood Meridian,'' ''The Son'' is a gory Western that transcends a simplistic cowboys-versus-Indians dichotomy to draw broader conclusions about the universality lives of violence in a nihilistic worldher characters, they are often left tragically incomplete.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0857209426</amazonuk>1804271675
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Donal RyanJonathan Buckley|title=The Spinning HeartOne Boat
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary='My father still lives back 'One Boat'' is a deeply introspective novella that defies traditional narrative structure, drawing the road past the weir in the cottage I was reared in. I go there every day to see is he dead reader into a contemplative realm of philosophical musings and fragmented memories flowing from our narrator and every day he lets me downprotagonist, Teresa. He hasn't yet missed Set against the evocative backdrop of a day small coastal Greek town, this work masterfully captures the magic of letting me downits setting and its power to provoke profound introspection.' This is how we meet Bobby - Bobby Mahon, Teresa herself recognises these qualities as we'll learn - and he's brutally honest about his feelings for his father, who the reason she has deliberately drunk away visited it after the farm he inherited from ''his'' fatherdeath of both her parents. But Frank Mahon isn't Bobby's onlyPrompted by her mourning, or even mainher narrative voice is meditative and deeply self-aware, problem. He's been earning big money as Pokey Burke's foreman but inviting the financial crash has hit and Pokey has done a runnerreader into her labyrinthine cogitations. An investment in It is a fake island off Dubai finished him and now he's disappeared. On the estate book that not only requires but inspires depth of forty houses he was buildingthought, just two are occupied since its narrative structure is fragmentary and the rutted roads are nothing more than a racetrack ironically relies on analepsis for the joyridersits propulsion.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1781620067</amazonuk>1804271764
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Natasha Solomons|title=The Gallery of Vanished Husbands|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=On her thirtieth birthday Juliet Montague went out to buy a fridge for the princely sum of twenty-one guineas. She'd saved hard for it - and her parents had given her the final few pounds - but then Juliet did something impulsive. Instead of buying a fridge she commissioned a portrait of herself and so began her involvement in the post-war art scene. Juliet wasn't - by any stretch of the imagination - an artist, but she had a startling ability to spot a ''good'' picture. It was simply something which she ''knew'', much as she had known for certain that her husband had left for good on the day he didn't return home as expected.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444736345</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewEowyn Ivey|title=Indiscretion|author=Charles DubowBlack Woods Blue Sky
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Charles Dubow's debut novel promises 'Black Woods Blue Sky'' tells the story of Birdie, the young mother of toddler Emaleen, who longs for a life beyond the Alaskan lodge where she works as a bar waitress, a setting which enables her bad habits and her accidental neglect of Emaleen. Described as a ''wild card'', she feels stuck in her day-to-day life, and yearns to cross the Wolverine river and live on the North Fork to be fulfil her desires of a modern day Great Gatsbysimple life surrounded by nature. It too is set amongst the rich When she meets Arthur Nielson, a strange, taciturn and famous outside New Yorksolitary man, who says he has a cabin over there, she feels called to go - and bring Emaleen with her. Without realising it too is narrated by a character seemingly on the outside, Maddythis calling will transform hers and Emaleen's childhood friend Walterlives forever.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0007501307</amazonuk>1472279042
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=Unfaithfully YoursSally Rooney|authortitle=Nigel WilliamsIntermezzo|rating=4.5|genre=General Fiction|summary=When Nigel Williams first really burst on to Sally Rooney has studied the best-seller list, chessboard of life and is something of a couple of decades ago, grandmaster at putting it was with a book set in Wimbledon that really quite tickled a younger me – and my motherinto words. But then he produced two more in the same series, Her dialogue is gripping and we soon decided he was a bit of a one-trick ponyso brilliantly frustrating, and could as her characters never be sure how much of quite say exactly what they feel. Among the trilogy we'd readmany relationships woven into this story, or be too eager the central one for readers to read moreunravel is the fraternal connection—or lack thereof—between Ivan and Peter Koubek. Flash forwardIvan, a socially awkward chess prodigy, and Williams has certainly branched out – contrasts sharply with his setting this time is Putney. Wimbledon Common is now Putney Heatholder brother Peter, and so ona successful lawyer living in Dublin. But here he provides an epistolatory novel – and if thereFollowing their father's one kind of novel to make me prick up my ears it is one built from letters. It is the blatant two-and-fro timing of the narrativepassing after a long battle with cancer, and the succinctness that characters are formed with, that strike me as obvious benefits of such a book – and Unfaithfully Yours has those and many morebrothers' already strained relationship faces new trials.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1472106741</amazonuk>0571365469
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=Russian StoriesFyodor Dostoyevsky|authortitle=Francesc SeresWhite Nights
|rating=5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=This brilliant and varied collection of short stories As always in Dostoyevsky, the character work is the product of a current academic interest in cross-cultural translationsublime. Francisco Guillen Serés One is never left wondering what a Catalan professor of Art History from Aragoncharacter is thinking or feeling because Dostoyevsky lays bare their innermost dispositions and temperaments with remarkable clarity.|isbn=0241619785}}{{Frontpage|author=James Baldwin|title=Giovanni's Room|rating=4. A Russophile, he has travelled widely to collect stories from those writing during 5|genre=Literary Fiction |summary=''Giovanni's Room'' follows the past hundred years of Russian history. These have been translated into Catalan and then into English. These unusual and delightful storiesnarrator David, some twenty one of them written by five writers read fluently and engagingly. They form an informative tapestry of Soviet and post-Soviet lifeAmerican man living in Paris, moving back in time as he navigates his torturous affair with the olderGiovanni, earlier writers like Bergchenkoan Italian bartender he meets in a gay bar. While David is engaged to Hella, who died is travelling in the siege of StalingradSpain, at the end. Ranging over mythic and symbolic tales to realistic portrayals of personal relationships; love trysts in St Petersburg, ferocious bears real tension in the deep heart of novel arises not from his infidelity but from the Taiga to the perils deeper conflict within himself. It is David's crippling shame and denial of becoming lost in continuous orbit in space. All aspects are impressively recountedhis sexuality that ultimately dooms his relationship with Giovanni.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>085705158X</amazonuk>0141186356
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=The ParrotsAlba de Cespedes |authortitle=Filippo BolognaForbidden Notebook
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=When confronted with the topic This Italian work of parrots, most people would describe them as tamed tropical birds that are taught to repeat simple phrases, having no particular intelligence to engender feminist fiction holds an originality air of their own. Filippo Bologna has not in fact written a book about birds, but about writers - in fact, three writers. Just as suspense and tension from the Neo-Pagans have a liking of the Triple Goddesses of The Maiden, The Mother and The Crone, moment our three writers are similarly split into The Beginnerprotagonist, The WriterValeria Cossati, and The Master. All three of these novelists are battling it out for The Prize, a prestigious award that would revitalise the career of The Masterpurchases her forbidden notebook, legitimize the efforts of The Beginner and assure The Writer a place learns about herself in the annals of history. The setting of Rome is utilised to provide both a stunning backdrop and one that is sympathetic to the mood of our characters. The stories of our three protagonists are interwoven in a delightfully clear fashion; Bologna's prose is delicate most intimate and descriptive, but not at the sacrifice of pacing. The stage is set; the characters have learned their lines. There is just one problem... out of the three writers, none of them deserves to win The Prizerevealing ways.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1908968192</amazonuk>1782278222
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Ottessa Moshfegh|title=In The Dutch MountainsMy Year of Rest and Relaxation|rating=3|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=At best, this novel is a scathing critique of modern society and reveals the fragility of human relationships; at worst, it is the cynical, predictable and slightly trite tale of an unlikeable protagonist. This unlikely heroine, a slim, attractive and newly orphaned girl in her twenties is disillusioned with the world, but resolves not to lose sleep over it: in fact, her solution lies in her hibernation.|isbn=1784707422}}{{Frontpage|author=Cees NooteboomMatthew Tree|title=We'll Never Know
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=OftenTimothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, when asked if what I’m reading is a good book I hesitate before answering, trying to decide what the asker really means. Do they mean is it exciting? Funny? Full drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of interesting characters? Recently, someone asked me that his artistic passions all failed miserably and when I hesitated they gave me this as a clarifier: “Are you better off for having read it?”who had endless crises of self confidence. In this instanceSo Tim applied himself to his studies, yes. I think I am. However, despite coming away from this book with a strong positive feeling about it, it’s also left me a little befuddledcultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and set himself high but achievable ambitions.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1782067191</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=B0C47LV1PC
|title=Fragility
|author=Mosby Woods
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|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.
''Fragility'' is set as the city of Portland, Oregon, cautiously begins to emerge from the restrictions imposed during the covid pandemic}}{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=Every PromiseMosby Woods|authortitle=Andrea BajaniA Whirly Man Loses His Turn
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Italian writer, Andrea Bajani's ''Every Promise'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 narrated by Pietrothe best course of action. Governments are flailing. His partner, Sara, has left him due to their inability to have a babyA war here, but soon she finds herself pregnant after a one night stand and reliant on Pietro's mother push for adviceclimate action there. A feeling that nobody is in actual charge. Meanwhile Pietro meets OlmoImagine then, an elderly there was a man who lives with precognition. Imagine the strategic advantage in their old family apartment, this asset; a man who reminds Pietro can tell you what will happen given any set of his own Grandfathercircumstances. That man would be valuable, Mario, who, like Olmo, served right? Perhaps the most valuable asset in Mussolini's ill-fated Russian campaignhistory. Olmo persuades Pietro to go to Russia to visit the scenes of some of the photographs he has to try to come to terms with the past. It's a story about the pastImagine then, the present and the future and the struggle for one that this man to make sense of loses thisability. It's packed with surpassingly detailed imagery and Bajani is at times breathtakingly unflinching in exposing the vulnerability of his narrator. However, it is very much a slow burn of a book and What would governments do to get it's not always an easy book to read.back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0857051466</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Andrew Porter0571379559|title=In Between DaysThe House of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=After Chloe Harding ''The House of Broken Bricks'' is forced 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 leave her East Coast collegegrow his vegetables, for reasons she refuses to explain complete the delivery rounds - and to her recently divorced parents or older brother Richardbring in sufficient money. They have twin boys - Sonny and Max, her familythe rainbow twins. Sonny's colouring reflects his mother's lives start to unravelJamaican heritage. Max takes after his father. Will the rest of them ever find out what caused her fall from grace People don't believe that they're related, much less twins and can they solve their own problems?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224089838</amazonuk>there's an assumption when Max is out with his mother that she's his nanny.
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Claire North
|title=House of Odysseus
|rating=5
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= ''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.|isbn=0356516075}}{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Ivy PochodaKay Chronister|title=Visitation StreetDesert Creatures|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}}{{frontpage|isbn=1803363002|author= Eric LaRocca|title= The Trees Grew Because I Bled There|rating= 5|genre= Horror|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''.}}{{Frontpage|author=Madelaine Lucas|title=Thirst for Salt|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Red Hook''Love, Brooklyn I'd read, was supposed to be a light and it is blisteringly hotweightless 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. Two fifteen year old girls decide Overlaid with later wisdom, the narrator relives the best and most exciting way to cool off is to take affair with a small inflatable raft on man twenty years her senior from its inception – the summer after finishing university – to its sorrowful end the riversummer after. The next morning one Set against the backdrop of an isolated Australian coastal town ''Thirst for Salt'' details the girls is found unconscious and washed ashore 24-year-old narrator's deepening relationship with no memory of what happened in the river her older lover, depicting its all-consuming nature, how it changed her perspective on both romantic and the other girl is nowhere to be found. This becomes a big local story familial relationships and the survivor, saviour and community have to deal with the loss in their different wayshow it altered her irrevocably.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1444778242</amazonuk>0861546490
}}
{{Frontpage
|author= Michael Grothaus
|title=Beautiful Shining People
|rating=4
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= ''But fearing something and having it come to pass are two different things. And I'm willing to bet most of what we fear will never happen, or we can take steps to change it.''
''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.|isbn=191458564X}}{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Marlen HaushoferJennifer Saint|title=Nowhere Ending SkyAtalanta|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary= Little Meta is growing up ''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 childhood paradise with two parents who love her son, Atalanta is raised under the protective eye of the goddess Athemis and fashioned into a younger brother to tease and train to do all formidable huntress, one who longs for adventure. When the things that Meta wants him opportunity comes – to. However join the world outside Meta's paradise will soon change beyond all recognition as the Austria and Germany Argonauts, a fierce band of warriors, descendent from the 1920s makes way for Gods themselves – Atalanta seizes the Austria chance to fight in Artemis' name and Germany carve out her own legendary place in history. What follows is a whirlwind of the 1930schallenges and discovery and through it, Atalanta must remember Artemis' fatal warning: that if she marries, it will be her undoing.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0704373130</amazonuk>1472292154
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Lea CarpenterAmanthi Harris|title=Eleven DaysBeautiful Place|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Sara raised Jason alone; even when she was with his father it felt as if she was Padma, a lone parent. Jason's father always seemed young Sri Lankan, has returned to be away doing something indefinable abroad; then he disappeared leaving the Villa Hibiscus on the southern coast of her completelyhome country. Two This is a place she spent her formative years later Jason's father was dead. However Jason It is not a lad place she was born into, but the one she thinks of as home. How she came to be proud ofat the Villa, how it became her home, never giving Sara a momentand the machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the ''score''s trouble for this gentle and now a member of the elite US Navy SEALSyet subtly violent novel. Now he Padma's missing in action… Now she has present fails to hang on escape her past and hopemuch like the musical score of a film, that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the Villa.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1444776231</amazonuk>1784631930
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Lucy Cruickshanks178563335X|title=The Trader of SaigonSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The small community of Noitía is When we first meet Rachel Bird she's a trainee vicar, sitting in on a place where everyone knows each other 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 each other’s businessher elder brother, Jamie, which considering most of the adults are involved whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Thelma's daughter-in -law won't let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, on the one businessNorfolk coast, smugglingis a lovely place, but Rachel is potentially dangerous knowledge. We follow struggling to develop a small group of three young friends growing up in real bond with the area as they play parish - and learn and even experience a little she's in awe of the black market dealingsvicar, Gail, but then she's been doing the job for more than thirty years. They stumble across Rachel and Christopher hoped that a stash of smuggled whisky and are caught by the charismatic king pin responsible for walk on the trafficking, who teaches beach would do them that silence is the most important lesson to learn when growing up in Noitíasome good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed. And then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184655568X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Ryu Murakami1398515388|title=From The Fatherland, With LoveBoy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary General Fiction|summary=From 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 Fatherlandresult was complete and utter devastation. The deaths were uncountable, With Love is a 2005 Japanese novel set in 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 thentsunami -near future of 2011Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. Fatherland (as I will abbreviate it) explores He wasn't a dog person but the social convenience store owner's comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his car door and political ramifications of one speculative scenario: what if North Korea invaded Japan?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1908968451</amazonuk>Tamon the dog jumped in.
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Suzanne Rindell0989715337|title=The Other TypistPapa on the Moon|author=Marco North|rating=54
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The Other Typist is set in 1920s New York City, with Prohibition at its height and Rose Baker, an orphaned young woman, working as a police typist. While she has no real friends, she's good at her job and seems to have the respect of the Sergeant, whom she admires and the Lieutenant Detective, whom she's less keen on. Then a perfect storm comes Some frogs had gotten into their lives, in the shape of the enchanting Odalie, and nothing will be the same againwell.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241002885</amazonuk>}}''
}}