Newest General Fiction Reviews
General fiction
Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman
According to the blurb for Boxer, Beetle, 'This is a novel for people with breeding… It is clever. It is distinctive. It is entertaining. We hope you are too.' I like about half of it, so does that mean I'm on the way to being those things? Full review...
Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey
The title and central character of this book, Jasper Jones is a no-user, a trouble-maker and has, for some reason in his hour of need, sought help from an unlikely source. Charlie Bucktin. Charlie is a rather bookish, quiet, unassuming teenager. And although both boys live in the town of Corrigan, until now, they haven't spoken a word to each other. They live in different worlds. Until now, that is. Full review...
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers by Thomas Mullen
The country is in deep recession. The economy has collapsed. The banks are hated and there's 'the next round of politicians, assuring us they were not afflicted by the same lack of vision as their predecessors'. Does this sound at all familiar? But just when you think you have strayed into the non-fiction aisle, it all becomes clear. This is 1930s America - full of gangsters, speakeasies, tommy guns, fedoras, beautiful heiresses, bumbling cops and the newly formed FBI, daring bank robberies and kidnaps. Yes, the gang is all here, but 'The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers' is a lot more than your average gangster book and it's a hugely fun story. Full review...
The Dog Who Came In From The Cold (Corduroy Mansions) by Alexander McCall Smith
Ah, bliss! To sit down once more to an Alexander McCall Smith story and wish only for someone thoughtful to come and serve me tea and biscuits whilst I read! We are back, once again, with the residents of Corduroy Mansions to earwig on their conversations, their private thoughts and, of course, to catch up with what every one's favourite dog, Freddie de la Hay, has been getting up to. Written once again in serial format for The Daily Telegraph each short chapter is a gem, and all the characters we met previously in Corduroy Mansions are back again to entertain us. Full review...
The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan
Choosing a child as the viewpoint character of a novel requires confidence and imagination. To succeed is to convince the reader of events at two levels – the child's world within the adult world surrounding her. The very best novels about childhood, like say Harper Lee's classic, 'To Kill a Mockingbird', also reflect a wider cultural truth. In 'The Earth Hums in B Flat', a claustrophobic Welsh village is both protection and straitjacket as the characters struggle to cope with their family secrets. If that sounds a bit tacky, fear not, because the viewpoint character, Gwenni, is all whippet and sharp corners. Full review...
The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall
Golden Richards bursts onto the printed page. He is the central character and let's be honest, without him there would be no wives, no children, no complicated domestic life - make that, domestic lives. Immediately I pictured Golden in my mind's eye, as a Homer Simpson type - but with lots more children. He's a bumbling, blustering, bear of a man. It's as if he's just 'turned up' for the conception of his children, just idly ambled along when they were born. Full review...
The Stopping Place by Helen Slavin
How often do you pick up a book with no idea at all where it is likely to lead? How often does such a book still have you wondering a hundred pages in? Not bemused, not lost, absolutely sure that it is going to lead somewhere, but still with no clue as to exactly where. How often do you get to the end of a book and think, simply, "Wow!"? Full review...
The Lessons by Naomi Alderman
James has been used to being very clever at school, and it is a shock for him when he goes to Oxford University to find there are lots of people who are more able than he is. He is already struggling when he falls and seriously hurts his knee, and he is also very lonely. Then he meets Jess, who invites him to a party at Mark’s house. Mark soon invites Jess, James and other friends to move in to his run down mansion. Full review...
A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible by Christy Lefteri
It is 20 July 1974 in the small coastal town of Kyrenia, Cyprus. The radio continues to report that the Turkish forces did not manage to invade, and that they were thrown back into the sea, even as the Greek Cypriot population realises that they have been invaded. The story of this novel is set over just eight days, and is told from the alternating viewpoints of three characters. Full review...
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W Durrow
Set in 1980s America, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky is a story built around a tragic event in a young girl’s childhood. The opening scene introduces you to Rachel, an elusive young girl, not black, not white but light skinned-ed as she is packed off to live with her grandma after a devastating family event. Immediately, Durrow highlights race and identity as the primary themes, and we follow blue-eyed Rachel as she struggles between two worlds – the white world of her Danish mother, and the other black world of her African-American G.I. father. Full review...
Before the Storm by Diane Chamberlain
We're first introduced to Laurel's son, Andy. He's a teenager with some sort of mental disorder. He's the pivotal character of the story and he's also the undisputed star. I recently read Henry's Sisters by Cathy Lamb and decided that every family should have a Henry. Now I'll enlarge on that by saying that every family should have a Henry - or an Andy. Both of these teenagers are 99% innocent and adorable - it's that other 1% that is worrying. Andy's descriptions of people, places and situations are truly unique. He has a language all of his own. So immediately, as a reader, I was drawn right into the world of Andy and therefore right into the heart of the story. Full review...
The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist
Dorrit inhabits a world where society is split into two camps. Not male or female, or young or old, but those who are Necessary and an asset to their communities versus those who are Dispensable and a drain on civilization. It’s not a birth right, nor a class firmly established from childhood, and everyone gets the chance to make a good go of it. But, if you’re a childless woman of 50, or a childless man of 60, and not working in a ‘needed’ industry your time is up, and you are quietly, and without any fuss, transported to a Second Reserve Bank Unit for Biological Material (‘the Unit’) where you will spend the rest of your days. Here you will participate in any number of psychological and physiological experiments, donate cells for research and give up your body parts one by one as Needed people require them, until the day of your final donation when you ultimately and rather ironically become a valuable member of society by losing your life. Full review...
Cinema Blue by Sue Rulliere
Frankie is a twenty nine year old woman living in Paris and working in a supermarket while she tries to put her life back together after a split from her husband. The split, and what led up to it, was clearly distressing, and exactly what happened is revealed through a series of flashbacks to the time when Frankie was Francesca, whose life was controlled by her husband, JP. The news that JP has had an accident throws Frankie into confusion, because it seems that he turned to drink after she left him and she blames herself. In the meantime, Frankie is entering into a relationship with the enigmatic Antoine, who appears to be doing something rather strange in the flat below hers. Will Frankie be able to retain her new identity? Will the relationship with Antoine go anywhere, or is he just as bad for her as JP was? Full review...
Love, Revenge and Buttered Scones by Bobbie Darbyshire
Three people are travelling on a train heading to Inverness. Their destination is the town's library where the book group meets on the last Friday of each month. They each have their own reasons for going but none of them realise that the weekend is going to have far reaching consequences for them all. Full review...
Last Train From Liguria by Christine Dwyer Hickey
The heroine in this novel is Bella. She's a rather unassuming young woman who has had a rather unassuming childhood - save for the fact that she was motherless at an early age and her relationship with the father is a little strained, to say the least. Bella needs to breathe. So she leaves the drizzle of England for the blue skies and heat of Italy. Her father has propelled her into gentle employment there. She's tentative about the whole thing but warms to it by degrees. Full review...
Sum: Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman
For some reason I find myself unable to start this review. So I'll mention this book starts with the end, and see where we go from there. Of course, that's the key – this book does just that – starts with the end of our human life here on Earth (or wherever you happen to be reading this) and posits forty possibilities of what happens thereafter, in the hereafter. It's not so much 'Five People You Meet in Heaven' as 'Forty Heavens you Might Meet People In'. Full review...
Sick Heart River by John Buchan
This was a surprise for me. It’s rare for a book to come to my attention from the reviewing gods that’s a rerelease of a 1930s novel, and one that surfaced a couple of years ago now. But when it strikes me as startlingly Conradian, updated for the times, and perfectly able to stand alongside one of literature’s greats, then it’s just a sign those reviewing gods are on the ball. Full review...
River of Judgement by David Sartof
Finn Jackson is an oilman, an engineer and he's developed a new way of extracting oil which doesn't ravage the countryside in the way of traditional methods. He's set up a company to take advantage of this along with his friend Aaron Philips, who's the money man. He's short of an operations manager – and has been for a while – after the tragic death of Shufang Su in a site accident. She was a geologist but had apparently flouted safety regulations and you know that there are going to be repercussions from her death. Full review...
The Noise of Strangers by Robert Dickinson
In a dystopian Brighton where the Council and the Amex company are the only major employers, and council departments have very different purposes to those they have in our own country today - notably the sinister Parks - four couples share dinner parties and discuss as little as possible, due to the problems they have trusting each other. When a Councillor is killed in a car crash, and one of the couples witness it, it triggers a by-election which leads to political manouevring which they're all caught up in. Full review...
Croc-Attack by Assaf Gavron
Eitan Enoch is known as Croc to his friends. There's a good reason but it's about to become rather more famous than Croc would like. It's begins on the morning that he takes his regular bus to work – the Little Number 5 – and a fellow passenger worries about the dark-skinned man with a suit bag who's sitting at the front. Just before Croc gets off at his stop he asks why people are so paranoid and wonders whether it's impossible for dark-skinned guys with suit bags to get on buses any more. Full review...
The Weight of Silence by Heather Gudenkauf
On a hot August morning in the small town of Willow Creek, Iowa, Calli Clark and Petra Gregory are reported missing. They are both seven years old, live in the same street, and are the very best of friends. Calli has suffered from selective mutism from the age of four when she witnessed a traumatic event in her home. As a result Petra has become Calli’s voice, speaking for her and is even able to tell others what Calli is thinking. Full review...
The Body in the Basement by Katherine Hall Page
The central character with the unforgettable name of Pix is one of those 'apple pie' moms. The family is her life. Every summer, most members de-camp to the coast, to get away from it all, recharge the batteries. But this particular year, Pix notes, is going to be a summer of women. Pix is a middle-aged, middle-of-the-road, ordinary person ... until she makes some gruesome discoveries. Full review...
The Loss Adjustor by Aifric Campbell
Caro's job is to 'adjust' people's losses. Working for a large insurance company, she deals day to day with people grieving for their lost or stolen belongings. Digital cameras with priceless honeymoon photos, laptops with work files and engagement rings. It's Caro's responsibility to assess the case and decide on whether to financially reimburse or not. But Caro knows well that sometimes it's not about the money. Her job requires emotional sensitivity and the sort of manner that invites people to open up to you. Her years of experience have made her an expert in dealing with everyone else's loss. But not her own. Full review...
The Argentine Kidnapping by Bill Sheehy
Son Cardonsky is the type of guy that would make even the biggest of cowards want to take on the playground bully on their behalf. Which, funnily enough, is how Bernie Gould acquires Son Cardonsky as his 'best-friend-forever'; at least, that is, Son considers Bernie to be his best friend in the world, even if Bernie can't quite see it the same way. Full review...
The Upright Piano Player by David Abbott
The central character, one Mr Henry Cage (he'd approve of the courteous form of address) is white, middle-aged and middle-class. He appears to have a perfect, enviable life. Reaping the substantial rewards of a successful business, he's acquired along the way a lovely London home, a wife and a family. All boxes ticked, you'd think. Full review...
Freshers by Joanna Davies
Going to Uni is meant to be one of the best times of your life...that first taste of freedom from your family, learning independence, meeting new friends and discovering who you are. Oh, and a little studying of course! This book charts the first 'fresher' year of three students, Lois, Cerys and Hywel who are studying at Aberystwyth University during 1991/1992. I was interested because I did my first degree just a couple of years after this, and also I studied a post grad at Aberystwyth. Turns out this wasn't exactly a nice happy trip down memory lane however... Full review...
Ask Alice by D J Taylor
The central character Alice, has had a humble start in life but ' ... the silence of the Kansas flat ... and the distant murmur of the freight trains ' is not for her. She dreams of the bright lights of the big cities and although she is naive and unworldly, fancies herself as an actress. Painful and difficult decisions are made as she reaches for her goal. Her talent and resourcefulness see her through; give her a modest roof above her head in this precarious profession. Full review...
The Suicide Club by Rhys Thomas
Craig Bartlett-Taylor's third attempt at killing himself is nearly successful – except when he announces in class that he's taken a whole bottle of pills, new boy Frederick Spaulding-Carter steps in and saves his life. Freddy attains instant celebrity as a hero, and our narrator Richard Harper is as impressed as anyone else. Full review...
Wanting by Richard Flanagan
Read the blurb on the back of Flanagan's Wanting, and you'll think it's the usual post colonial tale of Britain as enemy number one, wanting to impose its rule on everyone else. In a way it is such a tale, but what makes it more interesting is the story of a little girl caught up in the wider historical events. Full review...
The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge by Patricia Duncker
It's rural France, and 2000 is barely begun, when hunters come across a spread of human corpses in the mountains. Several families, all in the same cult, seem to have killed themselves on their path to wherever. If so, this is a problem, for the last time it happened, in Switzerland a few years previous, nobody could work out why – and who was there to dispose of some of the evidence. This isn't a problem for the policeman involved, as he fell desperately in love with the investigative judge in collaborating on the initial case. Combining again, they see a link with everybody involved in both cases, a famous conductor /composer. Full review...
Long Shadows by Sylvie Nickels
We first met Minkie and Mike in Another Kind of Loving when Mike, a reporter in war-torn Sarajevo rescued Jasminka from an orphanage and brought her back to leafy Oxfordshire. He and his wife, Sara, fostered the girl, who was known as Minkie because few people could pronounce her real name. They gave her love, security and the opportunity to turn into a beautiful, confident young woman, but whose heart was torn between the family who had done so much for her and her native Sarajevo. Full review...
The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano
The Solitude of Prime Numbers follows the lives of Alice and Mattia from childhood to middle age. Alice is a wilful anorexic, scarred by a childhood skiing accident and an overbearing father. Mattia is an reclusive self-harmer trying to live with the guilt of having been responsible for his disabled twin sister's death. Their paths cross at a school friend's party during a painful adolescence and their lives are destined to intertwine throughout the coming years, despite the chronic awkwardness of their courtship. Full review...
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Jackson, Mississippi: 1960. The talk at the bridge club and the tennis club is of what Jackie Kennedy is wearing. They're white women, of course and they're free to play because a coloured woman will be looking after the children, doing the shopping and cleaning the house. They're trusted to bring the children up, but they're not trusted to be honest about the silver. Aibileen is raising her seventeenth white child but something hardened in her heart when her son died whilst the white bosses looked the other way. They took his body to the coloureds' hospital and rolled it off the back of the truck and left. Full review...
Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver
Samantha 'Sam' Kingston is, in many ways, your typical American high schooler whose concerns are pretty predictable: boys, friends, fashion, weird parents, annoying little sisters. Today it's Cupid Day, a chance to show off just how In you are at school, as measured by the number of roses you're sent, but Sam's not too worried about that. She knows she's part of a group who, by most definitions, would be called popular, and though sometimes inside she might feel on the inside a little like an imposter, on the outside, well, she's the definition of in. Full review...
The Concert Ticket by Olga Grushin
The Concert Ticket follows the lives of a family in Soviet Russia who have grown desperately distant from one another. Sergei, the father, is a frustrated musician who longs to play the pre-revolutionary masterpieces of composers like Igor Selinsky but is forced to play the kind of patriotic ditties he despises. His schoolteacher wife, Anna, longs for his love, but is never quite able to get his attention with her shy gestures. Their shiftless son, Alexander, has quietly given up going to school and spends his days hanging around the park, consorting with undesirables. Also living in their house is Anna's silent, elderly mother. Full review...
Nina Jones and the Temple of Gloom by Julie Cohen
A sign of a good book, for me, often relates to how easily I can put it down. And then how much I want to pick it back up again. Nina Jones was a particular challenge for me as after reading it for an hour whilst my toddler napped I kept my thumb in the page whilst getting her out of bed, snuck her downstairs still saving my page, put on Cbeebies, and then sat next to her on the sofa to carry on reading for at least another hour, if not a little bit more than that. I then kept it in the kitchen so I could sneak a few more pages in between stirring the spaghetti. And then once my daughter was in bed I went on to absently ignore my poor, tired, over-worked husband (who got bored and went for a bath) so that I could read on to the end of the story. I found myself mentally yelling at a fictional character (I hope it was mentally and I wasn't actually shouting out loud...we have very thin walls), I swooned over the hero, sniggered often and I even cried a little bit too. So, a book that induces such family neglect and an emotional roller coaster of emotions is definitely a good read! Full review...
The Return of Captain John Emmett by Elizabeth Speller
Laurence Bartram has survived the war, but his life has changed dramatically. It will never be the same again. It's almost as if he doesn't recognize himself. Domestic life is now non-existent and he has no-one to please but himself. He is unsettled and edgy. War has obviously left its mark. He retreats graciously and wonders what he'll do with the rest of his life. Full review...
Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
A clever, comic delight, pitch-perfect, astutely observed, particularly insightful, must-read. Crumbs. Whatever else is there to say about Nick Hornby's latest book that isn't already plastered on this newly-published paperback edition? I can only report that Juliet, Naked bowled me over with yet another Hornby strike. Full review...
Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes
The first character to mention in this book is a moth. It's a human moth, drawn to the flame that is a museum of suicide - a supposedly cautionary, life-affirming, memento mori, somewhere in Germany. Its curator is an old hand at lonely, unloved museums, fresh from an art gallery in an airport - it didn't take off - who notices the noise of the latest suicide to happen in the museum, and goes right back to sleep. A spider crawls into his mouth and gets eaten. Full review...
Intervention by Robin Cook
Although Robin Cook has written many books, Intervention is the first one that I have read - I'm a Robin Cook 'virgin.'
This is a big book in many respects. It's a classic, glossy 'coffee table' edition; it's a big, satisfying read and it's a multi-layered book in that it covers many current-day topics which have their roots in history. In fact, this book is so multi-dimensional that, you could argue, there are several books within this book. Full review...
