Newest General Fiction Reviews
Something Like Happy by John Burnside
How do you pick a name for a short story collection? It seems to me the ...and other stories add-on is like picking a favourite child, a promotion of one portion of the content above the rest. Category:John Burnside:John Burnside has got a title story here, but such is the mood of the book that he seems to have nailed the matter, and picked the most apposite name. Something Like Happy could in a way be the title for practically every piece here. Full review...
Brief Loves That Live Forever by Andrei Makine
Our unnamed narrator is inspired to think back through his life on the girls and women he has been in love with, partly because of a time spent with an associate – a time marked by a seemingly most unremarkable encounter with a further woman – whom he deemed had never been loved. The associate, you see, had spent half his adult life in Soviet camps for political instruction – our narrator himself was an orphan in the 1960s' Soviet Union. This snappy volume takes us through episodes in several lives at different points during and since the second half of communist rule – and finally explains the import of that unremarkable encounter… Full review...
A Single Breath by Lucy Clarke
Eva is blissfully content with life. She has a fulfilling career in her job as a midwife and a happy marriage to the man of her dreams who clearly adores her. Her contented existence is thrown into complete turmoil when, early one morning, her beloved husband Jackson is swept out to sea whilst fishing on the Dorset coast. It seems that in one fell swoop, all of her hopes and dreams have been washed away into the cold, white water. Full review...
Everland by Rebecca Hunt
There have been two expeditions to the Antarctic island of Everland a century apart. The ill-fated 1913 trip of Dinners, Napps and Millet-Bass is primitive by today's standards. The 2012 expedition is better equipped, better prepared and arrives at a better time of year so all bodes well for Decker, Brix and Jess. But despite the differences both expeditions have things in common. Both groups carry secrets, some become obvious but others remain behind waiting to become discovered. Full review...
Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li's Kinder Than Solitude opens with a death but the story goes back much further than that. When orphaned Ruyu arrives in Beijing to stay with a distant relation to go to school, she finds herself sharing a bedroom with the rebellious Shaoai and going to school with the serious Moran and her friend Boyang. Ruyu is not an easy character and her arrival seems to disrupt everyone's lives even though Moran and Boyang look after her. However an 'accident' changes everything. All four of them live with the consequences of what happened either physically or mentally. Moran and Ruyu both leave China and settle in the US, while Boyang and Shaoai stay in China. The book switches between the events of the past and the present. Full review...
The Collected Works of A J Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
A J Fikry is not having a good time. He's lost his wife to a car crash, and he's not making that much money. The book store he runs, stuck out on a limb on a quiet island community, is too remote to turn a profit year-round, and he has just dismissed the latest publisher's rep to turn up at his door, partly because her previous counterpart, an inconsequential part of A J's life when all is said and done, had died and he didn't know about it. But his bad time is about to get a lot worse, as the one thing he owns worth the most – a rare book, more valuable than his house, his business, anything – is about to vanish. Which bizarrely will cause several major changes to his one-person household… Full review...
A Love Like Blood by Marcus Sedgwick
One day towards the end of World War Two, Charles Jackson is dragged to a museum of antiquities just outside a newly liberated Paris by his commanding officer during their downtime. While the other looks at the unusual ancient artefacts, Jackson finds something much more horrific – a man in a wartime bunker in the grounds, squatting over a female figure, blood on his lips that could only have come from her neckline. Years later, Jackson returns to Paris for reasons to do with his medical career, and finds the same man in the company of someone who, were he only aware of the fact, is to become the first and possibly only love of his life. But that's not the only time the paths of Jackson and the mysterious male are destined to cross – the prologue was set in the late 1960s… Full review...
The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon: The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
Although the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency belongs to Mma Ramotswe, I often feel that Grace Makutsi really shares equally in these stories and, in this particular episode, she has reached a truly lovely high point in her life. We saw her arrive to work for Mma Ramotswe, initially standing upon the laurels of her unheard-of 97% in her secretarial exams, and throughout the series she has developed, both as a character and as a person. She grew her role from secretary to associate detective (with great determination at times!), she bought new shoes and sometimes conversed with them, and then we rejoiced with her when she married Phuti and began to build a home with him. This time around Mma Makutsi is pregnant, but the question on everyone's mind is will she ever speak to Mma Ramotswe about the baby before it arrives? Full review...
Little Egypt by Lesley Glaister
Twins Isis and Osiris are now in their 90s, living together in Little Egypt, the English manor house where they were born and brought up. Their names are a clue to their parents' near fetish for everything Egyptian. In fact this near fetish leads their parents to Egypt itself, in search of a big discovery back in the 1920s, demonstrating more enthusiasm than savvy. Having left the twins in the care of the housekeeper, they never return. Isis and Osiris are now bound to the house, tied not by love or memories but dark secrets that won't let go. Full review...
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt
'All intellectual and artistic endeavours…fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd knows that somewhere behind the great work or the great spoof it can locate a cock and a pair of balls.' Thus we are introduced to the unforgettable Harriet Burden – larger-than-life, six-foot-tall amazon artist – and to some of the novel's essential elements: musing on what makes intellectual products successful in a postmodern marketplace, feminist resentment of the overvaluing of male achievement, and an unapologetic, playful boldness with language. Full review...
The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld
Death Row, in a prison somewhere in the rural US. It's an old prison too, where the modern sensors and security will never be seen, and where those waiting years for their final, final appeals – or for the closing act in their life – remain underground, in dank cells that have no mod-cons, and can easily flood when the rains raise the water table too high. It's where a man called York is seeing out his days, and whereas a female investigator is trying her hardest to get evidence that might see his sentence quashed or changed, he is saying it should be carried out forthwith. While she tries to piece together what got him there and what made him take that terminal decision, shadows of her own dark background are forced to move into sight. All this is told us by the omniscient narration of another man on Death Row, thanks to two heinous crimes… Full review...
The Dead Wife's Handbook by Hannah Beckerman
Rachel wasn't ready to drop dead at thirty-five. It's been a year since - a year she's spent trapped in some sort of netherworld that allows her brief, tantalising glimpses of the lives of those she's left behind. There's no apparent rhyme or reason to the glimpses, and Rachel wishes they were more often and lasted longer. Full review...
Willow Trees Don't Weep by Fadia Faqir
Najwa has been raised by her mother and grandmother with only stories of how awful her father was. He can't answer for himself as he left the farm when Najwa was three years old. After her mother's death Najwa is encouraged by her grandmother to find him as her grandmother is too frail to protect her and a single woman with neither husband nor male guardian is considered loose and worthless in Amman. And so the journey begins, taking Najwa to Pakistan and the centre of Taliban training, to Afghanistan and eventually to a Europe which deigns itself more civilised but seems more alien. Full review...
And Then Came Paulette by Barbara Constantine
Ferdinand was a widower and he lived with his son, daughter-in-law and their two children on the family farm. Well, he did until the family moved away. Apparently Ferdinand was occasionally prone to swear and obviously children can never be allowed to hear such words. That left him on his own except for the children’s kitten to which their mother was allergic in a farmhouse which demanded a family. He was lonely and he began... well, let’s call it making mischief. Assault is such an ugly word, isn’t it? Then he met Marceline - or rather he encountered her dog and in returning it discovered the old woman is a room filled with gas and leaking rain water through the roof. Full review...
The Mouseproof Kitchen by Saira Shah
Anna (a chef) and her partner Tobias (a composer) have it all: a great relationship, dreams of moving to France so that Anna can open a well-respected restaurant and, to top it all off, they're expecting a beautiful baby. When Freya is born she is indeed beautiful; she's also profoundly disabled. However, Anna and Tobias decide to follow their dream anyway, not worrying about anything until the moment they have to. Once they've bought their ramshackle home in the Languedoc they realise that the moments they have to worry about come more quickly and frequently than they'd realised and their support system is eccentric to say the least. Full review...
Charm Offensive by William Thacker
When Joe, a retired politician is named in a tabloid slur he is faced with mending his reputation. Can he regenerate his life? William Thacker has chosen a heady combination for his first novel; politics and PR. A book like this has immediate appeal on the basis of being so contemporary and almost painfully pertinent to our times, so I was really looking forward to reading it. Full review...
The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh
The Lemon Grove is not the book I expected it to be. No better no worse, just not what I expected. Set in Mallorca, it is the tale of a summer in the sunshine, but though they’ve holidayed at this villa for years, this summer is a bit different for Jenn and Greg. There are lots of things in this book that are a bit quirky, and the holiday set up is just one of them: the couple are joined by Greg’s daughter (Jen’s step-daughter) and her boyfriend. It’s not wildly unconventional in the real world, but for one reason or another it’s the sort of chaotic set up many authors wouldn’t bother to create. And yet as you read this book you wonder why, because it adds a dynamic that is definitely different, and in a good way. Full review...
Family Likeness by Caitlin Davies
On a summer’s day in 1950, a smartly-dressed white woman brings her young mixed-race daughter, Muriel, to the branch children’s home Hoodfield House, where she will leave her and never return. Muriel is physically well cared for, but has persistent questions about her identity and place in the world. Full review...
The Atheist's Prayer by Amy R Biddle
I don’t shy away from a book with a little edge, in fact Chuck Palahniuk is one of my favourite authors and his books can be so sharp you can shave with them. On the surface The Atheist’s Prayer would seem to be courting controversy; why else have such a provocative title? But, is it really that shocking? Nope. This is a story about how people deal with the modern world and what happens when dangerous ideals infect a vulnerable group. Full review...
The Forever Girl by Alexander McCall Smith
I have loved Alexander McCall Smith's books since I first picked one up, and so I have been waiting for the release of this, a standalone novel, ever since I first heard about it. It pains me, therefore, that I'm unable to shout about how marvellous it is to you all or how you should rush out to buy it immediately because actually, I found it disappointing. Full review...
Terms and Conditions by Robert Glancy
This is a slow bowl with a wicked curl! The hero, Franklyn wakes up in hospital; he discovers that he has had a car accident, but he can’t remember anything. Alice, Franklyn’s wife, and Oscar, his brother, are full of loving concern and his work colleagues are solicitous, but Franklyn soon senses a lack of authenticity in his family members and starts to sniff round to discover why. Full review...
Gretel and the Dark by Eliza Granville
Josef Breuer has never had a case such as this. For a doctor in fin-de-siecle Vienna, spurned by his ex-colleague Sigmund, and with some dark happenings in his marriage and his past, he gets as a patient a young, damaged girl, found naked and battered outside an asylum. She claims she has never come from there, however, and that she is of no father or mother besides a purpose. She says she is a machine, an automaton, a beautiful kind of golem, with the task of going to Linz and killing a monster. She has an unusual number design at her wrist. This story alternates with that of another young girl, a very impetuous and belligerent child, now that her favourite nanny-come-nurse-come-cook-come-storyteller has been drummed out, and living alone with her father, again a doctor, outside a zoo. But a zoo that doesn't strictly hold animals, nor allows for their conservation… Full review...
Still Life With Breadcrumbs by Anna Quindlen
I was going to say that Rebecca Winter is a well-known photographer, but that's not quite how Rebecca sees it. She had major success with Still Life With Breadcrumbs and became a household name - almost a feminist icon - but the success has faded into the past. People who think about it guess that she's well-off, if not wealthy but the truth is different. When we meet Rebecca she's woken in the middle of the night by what sounds very like a gunshot - but she's not in her New York apartment. She's a couple of hours drive away in a rented cottage. It's the finances, you see. If she lets her New York property and rents somewhere cheaper the difference allows her to pay her mother's nursing home fees, a contribution to her father's rent, some assistance to her son - and all the other obligations we accumulate as we get older. Full review...
It Felt Like A Kiss by Sarra Manning
Ellie Cohen lives with two of her best friends, works in an exclusive gallery, and sees her loving Jewish grandparents every first Friday of the month. Her single mother, Ari, has always been the epitome of cool and is Ellie’s best friend and confidante. The only thing they don’t talk about is Billy Kay, Ellie’s biological father. That doesn’t stop him being one of the nation’s favourites, recently knighted, and talked about by pretty much everyone else. But Billy is a non-issue for Ellie. She doesn’t need him, she has Chester, her mum’s best friend, who has always been enough of a dad if she needed. Her only real trouble is her penchant for lame ducks, or fixer-uppers. Full review...
Cairo by Chris Womersley
Tom Button has had enough of small-town Australian life, and wants to grasp the nettle at the earliest opportunity and escape for more exotic places as soon as he's free of school and he and a friend can afford it. Until the friend kills that pipe-dream. Plan B for Tom soon becomes the life of a university student in Melbourne, with the chance to live in the apartment his aunt left behind when she died – at least it's in an exotically named development building, called Cairo. But Plan C soon forms for Tom, when he falls in awkwardly with some bohemian neighbours – who still, despite being ten years older, have plans of their own for making their own way to a better life – just not the way Tom ever suspected… Full review...
First Novel by Nicholas Royle
Paul Kinder lectures in first novels at a Manchester university and, coincidentally, he's also published a novel. Yes, just the one. When not working he enjoys various pursuits, including sex in car parks when offered the opportunity (i.e. not very often at all). (If the car park is on a flight path, all the better.) He personally doesn't see it as a problem, although not all his life has been problem free. No, indeed it hasn't! Full review...
Respect by Mandasue Heller
Growing up is difficult in the best of circumstances. The council estate where Chantelle has grown up in isn't decaying - it is dead and rotten. It has become a holding place for those who are condemned to a life of crime, at least when they aren't serving time. It is the type of place that saps ambition and hope from its unlucky inhabitants. But Chantelle is determined to break out. She has avoided all the pitfalls waiting for children in her situation, avoiding drugs, alcohol, crime and dead end relationships. Full review...
Buddhaland Brooklyn by Richard C Morais
Seido Oda has lived all of his life in the shadow of the Head Temple of the Clearwater Sect of Mahayana Buddhism. His family home was an inn which catered to the pilgrims who flocked to the temple, and his mother a devout member of the sect. He seemed marked for the priesthood from an early age, and at age 11 was handed over to the guardianship of the priests to begin his apprenticeship. Seido's young life is blighted by tragedy, and a promise he could not keep, and although a devout follower of the Buddha, he seemed unable to achieve true peace, even in the beautiful tranquil surroundings of Mount Nagata. He was unable to relate to other humans and sought solace in poetry, art, 'the prayers' of the river and the beauty of his rural home. At age 42, he has spent almost all of his life in or near the temple, and expects to spend the remainder of it there when a very unwelcome appointment to America is offered to him. Seido accepts with a heavy heart, but only on the agreement that it must be temporary. Full review...
