Newest Literary Fiction Reviews
Literary fiction
The Elephant's Journey by Jose Saramago and Margaret Jull Costa
This novel is inspired by a real event – the marriage gift of an elephant from Dom João III of Portugal to his cousin Maximilian, the Hapsburg Archduke of Austria. When the gift was accepted, the elephant Solomon, his mahout Subhro and numerous soldiers, oxen and porters, walked from Lisbon to Vienna to deliver the present, arriving in 1552. This is the story of that journey. Full review...
Waterline by Ross Raisin
Raisin has an enviable portfolio for one so young, having been named Sunday Times Young Writer Of The Year 2009 and his previous novel receiving fulsome praise. No pressure then with this book. The story opens with all members of the Little family paying their respects to Cathy. Some have travelled further than others as they all squeeze into Mick's modest house, somewhere in Glasgow. A less-than-posh part. Mick is obviously numb with the shock of it all (even although his wife's death was not sudden - she had been ill for some time). It's clear that some of the family, distant members, feel uncomfortable and don't quite know how to act. Full review...
The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad
"In the tangle of crumbling, weather-beaten and broken hills, where the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan meet, is a military outpost…" Thus begins the tale of Tor Baz, the Black Falcon. To this desolate place come two wanderers, a man and a woman seeking refuge.
Refuge is denied them, since it places duties that the fort commander cannot accept, but instead he offers them shelter from the wind of a hundred and twenty days. For as long as they want it. Shelter, and food. Full review...
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Clockwork Orange comes under the heading of "books you feel you ought to have read by now". Mostly these are books that you don't necessarily want to read, but are considered such classics that an inability to pass any kind of comment upon them suggests a gaping hole in your education. Full review...
Breaking Away by Anna Gavalda
Garance is on her way to a family wedding. In the car with her brother and his wife she thinks about all her siblings, what's happened in their lives and who they have all become. Throughout the journey she finds herself bickering constantly with her sister-in-law who always rubs her up the wrong way, and for the first time Garance senses some tension from her brother too who is usually calm and collected at all times. Is everything okay in his life or is his wife finally beginning to wear his patience thin? They take a detour en route to pick up another sibling, much to Carine's annoyance, and then on reaching the wedding there's a surprise in store for all of them as the four siblings find themselves on an unplanned escape, together once again, rediscovering their youthful selves in a fun, brief break from their real lives. Full review...
Vaclav and Lena by Haley Tanner
Vaclav and Lena are both children of Russian immigrants, growing up in Brooklyn. Vaclav dreams of becoming a fantastic magician, with his friend Lena as his assistant, and as children they practise their routine together, making lists of the things they'll need, the costumes they will wear and the tricks they will perform. Vaclav is confident and happy, but Lena is quiet, withdrawn and struggles with speaking English. Yet Vaclav believes, always, that they are destined to be together. Even when Lena disappears one day and is gone from his life for many years still he hopes that, somehow, he will find her again. Full review...
Mistaken by Neil Jordan
The front cover photograph and the blurb on the back cover give this book a misty, floaty, ethereal feel. The story starts at the end, if you get my drift. The adult Kevin attends a local funeral but he's careful to remain low-key, hidden almost. Why is that? And whose funeral is it anyway? As early as page 6, Jordan's poetic and atmospheric style is apparent in lines such as ' ... close to the line of yew trees, were the massed umbrellas of the mourners, retreating, like so many mushrooms come alive in a fairy-tale forest.' Full review...
The Reinvention of Love by Helen Humphreys
'The Reinvention of Love' is one of those stories that is so bizarre and strange that it could only be based on factual events. Essentially it is a good, old-fashioned love triangle set mostly in Paris in the period from the 1830s to the 1860s; a world where fighting duels is a commonplace event. The triangle features the great French literary writer Victor Hugo, his wife Adèle and the altogether strange critic Charles Saint-Beuve who narrates much of this story, with brief breaks for Adèle's side of events and some letters written by the Hugo's youngest daughter, also called Adèle (but let's call her, as she was known to her family, Dédé to avoid confusion). Full review...
Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer by Wesley Stace
"Nothing in recent fiction prepared me for the power and the polish of this subtle tale of English music in the making, a chiller wrapped in an enigma [New Statesman]"
"His handling of dry comic dialogue and cynical affectation is reminiscent of P G Wodehouse… an intelligent, fun and thoughtful piece of fiction [Independent on Sunday]"
Just two of the previous reviews that adorn the back cover of 'Charles Jessold…' Full review...
Child Wonder by Roy Jacobsen, Don Bartlett (translator) and Don Shaw (translator)
1961 was a year of change, a time, as Jacobsen puts it, when men became boys and housewives women. At the outset Finn and his mother are leading a quiet, rather timorous life in a working class Oslo suburb. Then change overwhelms them, not through world events, but in the form of a mysterious child who is Finn's half sister. Linda is not like other children and Finn's attempt to deal with her impact on his family is the central thread in this quintessential story of growing up. Full review...
Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie
Back in 1990, Salman Rushdie followed up his controversial 'Satanic Verses' with a book dedicated to his then nine year old son, Zafar, called 'Haroun and the Sea of Stories'. Now, his second son, Milan, finally gets a book of his own, although he had to wait until he was 13 for his father to get around to it. 'Luka and the Fire of Life' is very much a follow up to 'Haroun' and it is certainly helpful, although not necessary, if you have read that book as many of the events in the first book are referred to here. Full review...
The Wrong Blood by Manuel de Lope and John Cullen (Translator)
Although de Lope has written over a dozen novels, this is the first to be translated into English. The cover is as pretty as a picture and screams 'Spanish.' So far, so good. But I have to admit that on the whole most of the European novels I've read over the last year or so, have fallen short of the mark for me. Will this one prove to be different? Full review...
Last Man In Tower by Aravind Adiga
Following a Man Booker winning book like The White Tiger is always going to be a daunting challenge for any writer, let alone one when that book was the author's first novel. In 'Last Man in Tower' Adiga perhaps sensibly turns to a proven structure that allows his story-telling skills to flourish. Gone are clever structural ideas, like 'The White Tiger's' letter format and instead we get a straightforward engaging story set in modern day Mumbai where a rich builder is seeking to force residents of an old apartment block to sell their flats to enable redevelopment. Full review...
Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas
Ari is just nineteen, of Greek descent but living in Melbourne with his family. He's gay, unemployed and not in education. He wants to get away from the traditional Greek life of his parents and their friends but has no idea how to do it. He falls back on the only life that he knows: clubs, parties, anonymous sex, a cocktail of drugs and alcohol. But will even this be enough to dull the pain? Told vividly in the first person and sexually explicit it's a short book – a novella – which grabs you and has no intention of letting you go until it spits you out at the other end. Full review...
Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou
The protagonist of this novel is an ordinary Congolese porcupine until Papa Kibandi performs an ancient ritual involving a hallucinogenic cocktail called mayamvumbi, and transforms him into his son's harmful double. The insecure younger Kibandi becomes more and more embittered as his life goes on, and sends his porcupine to 'eat' anybody he feels the least bit threatened by, a process whereby that person's life essence is sucked out, killing them instantly. Over one hundred victims later and following his master's death at the hands of a vengeful baby, our narrator retires to the hollow of a baobab tree where he writes this confessional. Full review...
Then by Julie Myerson
The front cover is graphic and telling. A frozen London with its skyscrapers emitting black smoke and random fires across a desolate landscape. As early as the second paragraph we see that something is wrong, something cataclysmic has happened with the lines People are eating the birds ... fighting over a handful of scorched sparrows. The story is told in the first person by the central character which gives it immediacy and draws the reader straight in. Full review...
Whatever by Michel Houellebecq
Interviewed by BBC film critic Mark Kermode shortly before his 60th birthday, Woody Allen gave the bequiffed one this somewhat startling piece of advice, You get to my age, you realise that when you die you're really not losing that much. Those words sprang to mind while reading Whatever, first novel by Michel Houellebecq. The main protagonist in Whatever may be only half the age of the film director, but the outlook on life shared by both men seems strikingly similar. Full review...
Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead wanted to write something personal for his fourth book, so he chose an autobiographical novel, based on his experiences as a vacationing youngster. Sag Harbor really does exist - at the far end of Long Island and next to the up-market Hamptons. It has a history of whaling and an association with John Steinbeck. Within easy reach of New York, in 1985 it was an affluent black enclave within a large, white middle-class holiday area. Full review...
The Songs of Manolo Escobar by Carlos Alba
Antonio is the second-born son to Spanish parents, living in Glasgow. He's embarrassed to be anything other than Scottish, and he tries everything to hide his family background from friends at school, refusing to speak Spanish with his parents and struggling to forge his own identity in life. In his middle age, he suddenly finds his life falling apart around him as his marriage begins to fail and his increasingly frail father becomes obsessed with the proper burial of his parents back in Spain. Antonio continues to play a rather emotionally distant part in his parents' lives, but then finds himself drawn further and further into the truth about his father's past which, ultimately, leads him to question his own past and the path his future might take. Full review...
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
Anders Eckman is dead. The news has been delivered in the form an aerogram – remember those blue paper-cum-envelope things we used to use to write to foreign pen-pals when the notion of befriending a person you'd never met in a foreign country still seemed exotic?
This flimsy piece of paper was delivered to Eckman's employers. After all it was them that had sent him down to the Brazilian Amazon to find the enigmatic and evasive Dr Annik Swenson, and more precisely find out exactly how she was getting on with developing the drug that was costing the firm so much of their research budget. Full review...
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
In the late eighteen thirties the father of an English gentleman conspires to marry him off to a landed Jamaican Creole as a means of giving his second son an estate and stopping him being a burden on the family. Written in the nineteen sixties, 'Wide Sargasso Sea' was inspired by Rochester's first wife in Jane Eyre, and is an impressionistic, hallucinatory account of that woman's alienation and subsequent descent into madness that can be read as a prequel to the Bronte novel. The book covers Antoinette's childhood in Jamaica and her honeymoon on a small Caribbean island with her new husband and their domestic servants, and the point of view shifts between Antoinette and her husband. Full review...
The Moment by Douglas Kennedy
After I'd read the blurb on the back cover I gave a bit of a shrug as if to say, well, I've read quite a number of books recently where undying love has been found in war-torn Europe, so was this book going to be different, or better? Thomas Nesbitt, middle-aged, disillusioned with love and more than a tad world-weary is trying to move on in his life. His marriage of more than twenty years is dissolving before his very eyes. But rather than being upset, he's feeling as if a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. He and his wife were never really in love in the true sense of the phrase, despite having a daughter together. And there's a very good reason as to why Thomas is like this and the rest of the book tells us why, warts and all. Full review...
The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna
The setting for this story is a hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, soon after the government has declared an end to an 11 year civil war. How can people come to terms with the terrible things that have happened? Actually, can they come to terms with those things? Full review...
Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth
Cold Light is the story of three teenage girls who become involved in a predatory adult world. As the story opens we're looking back on what happened from a decade later and we know that one of the girls, Chloë, died in a Valentine's Day suicide pact. The town council has finally decided on a memorial to Chloë – it's to be a summerhouse at the side of the pond where she drowned, although it's difficult to understand quite why anyone would want to sit there. The ground-breaking ceremony is being televised when it becomes obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. But Lola, our narrator, knows that they've found a body. She also knows who it is. Full review...
Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou
In the Congolese bar of Credit Gone West, the owner Stubborn Snail wants a record of the lives of those who drink there. The man he chooses to write it? Disgraced schoolteacher Broken Glass, who fills up a notebook with the stories of the bar’s patrons – or at least their versions of those tales. Full review...
The Free World by David Bezmozgis
It's the late 1970's and a family of Latvian Jews, the Krasnanskys, are emigrating from the Soviet Union. They're made to stay in Rome whilst they apply to live in the States and they find themselves trapped in a strange migratory limbo, belonging nowhere and tied to no-one but each other. Full review...
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Apparently there's a saying that 'time's a goon' - no, I'd never heard of it and to be fair, neither had the first character to whom it is said in Jennifer Egan's 'A Visit from the Goon Squad', but together with a pair of epigraphs from Proust, it's clear that time is very definitely what is being explored here. Egan's subject area is all loosely based around the music world. Her central character, if one can be said to exist, is Bennie Salazar, a music mogul who we encounter both directly and tangentially at various stages of his up and down career. Goon Squad is also the title of an Elvis Costello track, continuing the music theme as Egan uses the music industry as a lens to examine time. Full review...
The West Rand Jive Cats Boxing Club by Lauren Liebenberg
Best friends Tommy and Chris are 12 years old. It is 1958 and they are growing up in a small mining town near Johannesburg, South Africa. They are learning to box and to dance to rock and roll music. Full review...
The Final Testament of the Holy Bible by James Frey
The Rabbis say that all the signs are there from the birth of Ben Zion Avrohom that he is the Messiah. That's a lot of anyone to cope with and, like Jesus, there's much of Ben's early life that is untold here. When he is involved in an horrific accident on a building site that he miraculously survives, albeit with terrible scaring, the prophecies appear to be true. He develops a form of epilepsy during which he appears to speak to God. He is fluent in ancient languages despite never learning them, knows all the Holy books by heart and yet distains all forms of religion, instead spreading his message of love to all who meet him in modern day New York. Full review...
The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed
The Collaborator of the title is our narrator, a sensitive bookish young man. He is the son of the headman of a small village in a side valley of the Kashmir. The heritage of the people is that of nomads. The village has been settled for less than a generation. Everything they have has been built by the sheer hard graft of the people themselves… including the recently completed mosque. Full review...
The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner
In 1999, Alan Warner introduced us to a wonderful set of characters in 'The Sopranos' when a school choir from a backwater town in Scotland went on a trip to the big city. Much debauchery ensued. 'The Stars in the Bright Sky' once again reunites most of the original gang and there is no need to have read the first book to pick up on the diverse characters. Now though, they've grown up (or at least got older!) and are gathered at Gatwick Airport to set off on a girls' holiday. Full review...
The Goldsmith's Secret by Elia Barcelo and David Frye (Translator)
'The Goldsmith's Secret' has a wonderfully romantic beginning; alone on a snowy night in New York, the craftsman is puzzling over how to tell his story, and how to separate reality from the overwhelming memories in his mind.
The romance continues as the story unfolds, with the goldsmith taking us back to the town and time of his youth, and the chance meeting that led him to find the love of his life. Telling the tale of romance from many perspectives, we learn the town of Villasanta has labelled his love, the mysterious Celia, as 'a marked woman' and the 'black widow'. Full review...
The Coffee Story by Peter Salmon
Teddy Everett, head of Everett and Sons Coffee is dying, slowly and painfully, of cancer. The Coffee Story is his story, told in his own (very descriptive) words. It goes from (although not necessarily in this order) his childhood in England, his adolescence in Ethiopia and then his life in the USA and Cuba. It's his time in Cuba which has put him where he is now – in prison. For his crimes he would normally have suffered the death penalty, but his sentence was commuted because of his illness and now the doctors try to save him. Or perhaps it's that they're trying to persuade Teddy that they're trying to save him – whether he wants to be saved or not. Full review...
Pure by Andrew Miller
I've read Miller's Oxygen and The Optimists so I was looking forward to reading this novel. The story opens in the opulence of the Palace of Versailles. We are given vivid descriptions of both the scale of the palace and its grandeur. Jean-Baptiste Baratte, the young engineer, seems completely over-awed by the whole occasion. Even although he's not entirely sure what is expected of him in Paris, he accepts. He needs to eat, after all. Full review...
The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright
Anne Enright's 2007 Booker prize winning The Gathering addressed the gloomy subjects of the three D's; death, depression and dysfunctional families. Her latest book, The Forgotten Waltz, set in Dublin in 2009, sees her turning her attentions to a love affair. A more uplifting subject you might think. Well only up to a point. The affair in question you see is that of her narrator, Gina, who is already married to the generally good, if undynamic, Connor, while on the other end, the subject of the affair is the older, Seán, also married and neighbour of Gina's sister. In case your moral compass isn't stretched quite enough by this, Seán and his wife Aileen, also have a young daughter who suffers from epilepsy. Full review...
Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela
The front cover photograph is eye-catching and lovely and has the appeal of saying to potential readers - read me. The book's title is both poetic and enigmatic. I was keen to get reading but before I could, I'm faced with a page listing the Principal Characters and another page setting out the Abuzeid family tree. It did put me off slightly, I have to admit. I tend to think that with a modern, average-paged work of fiction a list of characters is well, a list too far. So, yes, for the first couple of chapters I was constantly flicking back and forth to remind myself who everyone was. Not so good for those lazy readers out there, I'm thinking. Full review...
Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka
After the 1996 World Cup, dying sports journalist WG Karunasena decides that the world needs 'a half decent documentary on Sri Lankan cricket'. He sets out to make the said documentary, focusing on the mysterious Pradeep Mathew, the 1980's spin bowler he considers to have been his country's greatest ever player. But Mathew disappeared some time ago and everywhere Karunasena turns he is faced with more complications as he tries to find out more on what happened to him… Full review...
The London Train by Tessa Hadley
Part one focuses on Paul - a rather self obsessed and aimless character, who is less than honest with his family, using various friends to cover up his movements. He has several daughters, and on learning that one is having problems, goes to visit her in London - and ends up staying with her, for several weeks, leaving both his (second) wife, and the mother of this daughter (first wife), completely in the dark as to what is happening. Initially we feel that he is acting in a protective manner towards his daughter, who is struggling to come to terms with her pregnancy - but in fact his motives are far less altruistic, thereby alienating the reader from his tale. The squalor in which her daughter is living, would appal most parents - yet he seems to take it all in his stride, and attempts to join the hippy-style commune - yet more irritation with this deeply flawed character therefore emerges. Full review...
Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson
Grace, aged eleven, is sent to the Briar Mental Institute as her parents can no longer cope with her care. She is befriended there by a young boy, Daniel, who is epileptic and also has no arms after a terrible accident. Together we see the horrors of life in the Briar, and also their slowly growing love affair with each other. Full review...
The Swimmer by Roma Tearne
Ria, solitary, middle-aged poet, was idly watching the river one night when she saw a swimmer. It wasn't just the time of day which was unusual, but the river was hardly clean – and then she heard a noise downstairs. In this remote part of Suffolk it wasn't unusual to leave doors unlocked and the following morning she realised that a loaf of bread had been stolen. It was strange that she didn't really feel fear, but when the visits and minor thefts continued she waited up to catch the swimmer, who stole small amounts of food – and played the piano like an angel. Full review...
The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht
Téa Obreht's 'The Tiger's Wife' comes with a fair degree of hype from the US, and largely it lives up to it, which is no small achievement. The main story is set in Yugoslavia and explores a young doctor, Natalia, seeking for the truth about her grandfather's death, while on a mission to deliver much needed medical aid to an orphanage in the war-ravaged Balkans. But what sets this book apart is the intricate weaving of reality with the myths and stories of the region. In particular there are two myths that represent a good chunk of the page count: the story of a tiger who has escaped from captivity after the World War two bombing of Belgrade and who has settled near a remote mountain village where Natalia's grandfather is growing up, and who develops a strange relationship with a deaf-mute girl who becomes known as 'the tiger's wife'; and a mysterious story of the 'Deathless Man' whom the grandfather encounters at various points in his life who appears to have the power to foresee others' death without being able to die himself. Full review...
Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift
I cannot tell you exactly how long after I finished this book that I sat, holding it, in stunned silence for - but it was light when I finished it and dark when I put it down. Some books can do that to you. This is one of them. Full review...
The Summer of Drowning by John Burnside
The story is narrated in the first person by the daughter a decade or so after the tragedy. So, she has a healthy dose of hindsight which shows itself time and time again with sentiments such as ... if only I'd have known back then ... and ...I thought it was a bit strange at the time ... if you get my drift. Burnside takes his time to set the scene (spartan) and his characters (a mere handful). His chosen location is the arresting emptiness of somewhere deep in the Arctic Circle so straight away he's caught my imagination - with his. Full review...
At Last by Edward St Aubyn
In At Last, Edward St Aubyn returns to the Melrose family, the subject of both Some Hope and of his Booker-shortlisted Mother's Milk. I confess that I have still not got around to reading the first of the trilogy, but loved Mother's Milk and found that I wasn't greatly disadvantaged by not having read the previous book. At Last could also be read as a stand-alone book, but I wouldn't advise this approach. You will miss out on so much that if you are planning on reading it, you really should read at least Mother's Milk first. This isn't much of an inconvenience as it's a terrific book. Full review...
