Closed Doors by Lisa O'Donnell
Did you listen at doors when you were little? Did you hang from the banisters, trying to hear what was going on in the grown up world when you'd been banished to your room? In this story, eleven year old Michael finds out most of his information by listening. He's adept at creeping around and learning snippets of information, local gossip and tidbits of family dynamics. But one night, when his mum comes home screaming and covered in blood the secrets that Michael becomes privvy too are far more disturbing than what Tricia down the road has been getting up to. Full review...
Turning Forty by Mike Gayle
I made the mistake of reading Mike Gayle's Turning Thirty in the weeks before I did so. Despite it being a story of a man whose life fell apart just before his 30th birthday, he still seemed to be doing better than I was, which made it a readable but depressing experience. Fortunately, Turning Forty is being published about 15 months before I reach that milestone and my life is in a different place which, hopefully, will combine to make it a more enjoyable read. Full review...
Remember to Breathe by Simon Pont
We meet Sam Grant on his 27th birthday, but he's not out celebrating. He's got flu and just to add to his problems he's got a boil in his groin - or on his thigh - depending on which side of the doctor's desk you're sitting. Sam's not been looking after himself since his girlfriend dumped him just over three months ago and when you work in adland the opportunities for not looking after yourself are many and varied. The millenium hasn't quite arrived, 'austerity' hasn't even been thought about and living an out-of-control life has never been easier. What we get is Sam's diary, but it's not in chronological order, with some of it going back to before he met Sarah - the girl he didn't really want, but struggles to get over. Full review...
The Professor of Poetry by Grace McCleen
Grace McCleen's The Professor of Poetry is Elizabeth Stone, a 52 year old aged professor at a London University. When the book opens she has just discovered that a cancer scare is now in remission, but forced by her illness to take a sabbatical, she sets about researching her latest book based on some papers of TS Eliot. This takes her back to Oxford, to her alma mater and raises the prospect of seeing her former professor there, a man convinced of the young Miss Stone's potential at an early age, but whose last meeting was somewhat awkward. McCleen looks at the issues raised by generations of poets, namely time, death and love. For Professor Stone, the first has passed, the second come uncomfortably close and the third remains unknown to her. What's more, her academic focus is on the music of love poetry which is somewhat ironic in that she avoids human relationships perhaps due to the death of her mother at an early age and an unhappy foster experience, while also having a peculiar aversion to music. Perhaps though this is what allows her a detached ability to write academic studies. Full review...
Perfect by Rachel Joyce
In 1972 two seconds were added to the year. 11 year old Byron Hemmings heard about it from his friend James and felt it wouldn't be a good thing. In fact at the moment Bryon's watch's second hand reversed something happened that would mean neither his or James' lives would ever be the same again. Full review...
419 by Will Ferguson
Anyone who has ever opened an E-Mail which proves to be a plea for assistance in getting large amounts of money ahead of the authorities will recognise the theme. Laura Curtis' father had such an E-Mail and having tried to help and spent all his money, he has driven his car off a bridge. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, a pregnant young woman walks through the dust, trying to escape her family and find something that ever she doesn't know what she is looking for. In the Niger Delta, meanwhile, the oil companies are moving in and a whole way of life is changing in the fishing villages there. Full review...
Down The Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos
Down The Rabbit Hole is a fictional tale of a young boy’s life as the son of a Mexican drug lord. Tochtli narrates the story and gives us a child’s view of the sordid world that his father rules. We are shown the positives and negatives of this kind of lifestyle as Tochtli sees things, from presents galore to having to call his father by his first name. This book is a strange blend of childlike wonder within a violent world. Full review...
The Bad Mother by Isabelle Grey
When we first meet Tessa Parker she has a major problem on her hands. Her seventeen-year-old son has been missing since the previous day. The police are involved and Tessa is beside herself with worry. She's told the police quite a bit - however you can't help but feel that there's a lot more going on that she's not telling. To find out the full story we go back four months... Full review...
The Misunderstanding by Irene Nemirovsky and Sandra Smith (translator)
After the Great War Yves Harteloup was a disappointed young man when he returned to the resort where he had spent idyllic childhood summers. It wasn't long before he became infatuated by the beautiful Denise - mother of a young child, wife of an older man who was away on business and bored. In the heat of the summer the relationship is intoxicating and Denise falls passionately in love with Yves. When they return to Paris Denise envisages a little flat which they will furnish to their taste for afternoons of leisure and pleasure but the truth is that Yves must return to his mundane office job and try to make every franc stretch as far as it can. In the drab autumn of Paris Denise is driven mad with desire for Yves and their love disintegrates under the burden of misunderstanding. Full review...
Summer of '76 by Isabel Ashdown
1976 was a blisteringly hot summer. People celebrated when it eventually did rain and at one point it was so hot that Big Ben stopped working. It would be the summer that Luke Wolff turned eighteen and he planned on leaving the Isle of White and going to poly in Brighton. He had a job at the holiday camp, which was hard work but there was a great social life too and even the possibility of romance. His parents were happy to let him have his independence - after all, he was a sensible, well-balanced young man - and they were rather preoccupied with their own problems. Looking in, you'd have thought that the Wolffs were the ideal family: from the inside there were obviously one or two cracks. Full review...
Rituals by Cees Nooteboom
Rituals introduces us to Amsterdam, and to Inni, firstly in 1960, then in 1950, and then in the 1970s. When we first meet Inni, it is when he is a middle-aged man in 1960. Far from responsible and hard-working, we see him as someone who is impulsive and reckless, even to the point of cruelty to his wife - who formulates plans to leave him. It is only after this frankly miserable first impression that we meet the younger Inni, and we see how a chance meeting with a man called Arnold Taads had changed the course of his life. Taads is a man obsessed with matriculating his life down to the last second, letting time dictate what he can do, with whom he can do it with, and, most importantly, when. In Part three, in another chance meeting, the now ageing Inni meets Taads' son, Phillip. Phillip, though having never met his father, curiously lives a life that is an echo of his father's; though as Arnold isolated himself in the mountains, Phillip isolates himself in meditation and the methodology of the tea ceremony. Full review...
The Streets by Anthony Quinn
Anthony Quinn's The Streets is set in London in the early 1880s in the area known as Somers Town, which to those not familiar with London geography is the area around Euston, St Pancras and King's Cross stations. Today, much of this falls under the trendy Camden area, but in the 1880s, was the site of some of the worst slum tenements in the capital. Some 50 years' earlier, Charles Dickens lived in this part of London and although he had died by the time this is set, the depiction of the poverty is not far from what we would term Dickensian. The book is narrated by David Wildeblood, who is a principled but naive young man who finds employment as an 'investigator' for the charismatic Mr Marchmont's The Labouring Classes of London - a strange mix of social geography and journalism publishing regular stories of the poor who reside in the slums of London. Full review...
The Home Corner by Ruth Thomas
When you finish your Highers, you’re supposed to go on to university, especially if you’re a girl like Luisa. But she’s failed hers, so for now higher education is out, and working is unfortunately in. So, she finds a job working as a classroom assistant in a primary school. It’s not something she ever wanted to do, and she finds herself in a weird sort of limbo, at a life stage somewhere between the children in her class, and her proper grown-up adult colleagues. Full review...
The Trader of Saigon by Lucy Cruickshanks
In the Saigon of the 1980s the Vietnam War is over but the traces remain. Alexander has deserted from the US army and makes a comfortable living selling girls to local business men. Phuc used to be a business man, complete with mansion and the means to keep his wife and three children in affluence. Now his family live in a shanty hut, afraid of the ruling government that spies through the eyes of children. At last he finds a way out, his luck just needs to hold. Hanh also lives in poverty, desperately trying to help her sick mother with the pittance she earns from cleaning one of the city's many open latrines. Then one day she meets someone who offers so much more. His name is Alexander. Full review...
Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty by Alain Mabanckou
Michel is as carefree as any child can be during that difficult process called 'growing up'. Here in Congo Brazzaville he has his best friend Lounes, a crush on Caroline (his best friend's sister), the hassles of school and a family consisting of two mothers in two houses which seems perfectly normal. He's also being educated about the world by his father; a world that changes daily as it's 1979. Never mind, he can always marry Caroline as long as he meets her conditions: she requires children, a red 5-seater car and a white dog. Full review...
Lessons In French by Hilary Reyl
American graduate Kate leaves the States for a job in Paris, working for a The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger style boss, world famous photo-journalist Lydia Schell. She’s lived in France before, so she thinks she knows what she’s letting herself in for. She doesn’t. So while the title doesn’t refer to the language itself (she is beautifully fluent even before she arrives), there are many lessons for her to learn, from how to act as a go-between for Lydia and her husband Clarence (and his graduate students), to how to handle the handsome Olivier and the bon chic bon genre boys, to where to source the lavish ingredients her employer needs for dinner or how to make a proper timeline. The Berlin Wall is about to fall, the continent is buzzing, and Kate is a part of it, for better or worse. Full review...
Sex is Forbidden by Tim Parks
Tim Parks's Sex is Forbidden is narrated by twenty-something, Beth. She's working as a volunteer server at a Buddhist retreat called the Dasgupta Institute where she has been for the last nine months although the book covers one ten day cycle of retreat. The Dasgupta Institute imposes bans on attendees, although the conditions are slightly less onerous on the servers who, nevertheless are expected to join in the meditations. There's no talking, no writing, no mingling of the sexes and no physical or even eye contact. One day Beth, still a rebel at heart, wanders into the men's side where she discoverers an attendee is keeping a diary where he is contemplating his moment of crisis and she is hooked. The revealing of the past that has driven both Beth and the mysterious diary keeper to such an austere retreat is part of the intrigue of the book, but while there is an inevitable focus on introspection and new age thinking, Beth's tone is delightfully sceptical and feels very authentic. It's almost impossible not to feel for her plight and to admire her approach. Full review...
Flight by Adam Thorpe
The past is catching up with Bob Winrush. His marriage is over as a result of his inconsiderate arrival home early when weather cancelled one of his jobs as a cargo pilot to find his wife in bed with another man but when an investigative journalist starts to dig into some of the content of Bob's previous cargo trips, his life is quickly placed in grave danger. His problems stemmed from having walked away from a particularly morally dubious trip to transport arms to the Taliban some years ago, although it turns out that his moral line in the sand is somewhat blurred. He has knowingly transported guns and military personnel in his time. He's sort of the aeronautical equivalent of white van man. Full review...
Charlotte Street by Danny Wallace
In his early books, Danny Wallace was the new Tony Hawks, taking on silly challenges and recounting them in amusing ways. With Charlotte Street, his first entirely fictional work, he seems to be moving into territory inhabited by Mike Gayle, that of bloke-lit. It seems a decent fit, as his book Yes Man had elements of bloke-lit, despite being based on actual events. It may have suffered from a twee ending, but it offered enough to suggest that this is a field Danny Wallace could work well in. Full review...
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
This powerful narrative bears witness to the experience of economic migrants. Not just black Africans coming from Zimbabwe, like NoViolet Bulawayo, but more generally, those several generations of hardy, resourceful immigrants driven to the USA in search of a better future. Such people leave behind less courageous family members, but not their emotions towards those they have loved or their nation of birth. Full review...
My Life in Black and White by Kim Izzo
My Life in Black and White starts off in a police station in England. The film noir theme that permeates the novel begins immediately. Clara Bishop is dressed in a gold evening gown, and treats the police officer who is interviewing her just as a femme fatale would. This girl has sass. But when she begins to recount her tale, it is clear this is a new development. The old Clara describes her life as something from a screwball comedy, not a film noir. How does a screenwriter-slash-gossip-columnist from LA end up being interviewed about an assault in England? Full review...
Chaplin and Company by Mave Fellowes
In 'Chaplin & Company', Mave Fellowes takes a quirky look at life on London's canal boats. Yet, while her story is full of eccentric characters, not least the main human character of Odeline Milk, who moves to the boat that shares the title of the book after her mother passes away to pursue her dream of becoming a mime artist in the more culturally enlightened big city after a lonely life in provincial Arundel, the book is delightfully free of sentimentality. I say the main human character, because this is also the story of a boat with a remarkable history of owners, and also a story of the strange life on the canal which somehow exists beneath the city through which it flows. Full review...
The Deception Artist by Fayette Fox
This story is all about the characters. Plot-wise, it is set in 1980s suburban America. There are no explosions or even fairy tale adventures in this book. It’s just the simple adventure of life when you’re a child and learning new things every day. Ivy accounts her day-to-day life with an extreme attention to the strangest details, just like a child. As well as explaining what she has learnt in school, she describes her daydreams, her friends and her family. When her dad loses his job, her parents start arguing and she is worried they might have to get a divorce like sad Sara in her class. And not only that, they might have to return their new TV. Full review...
The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison
Ben hasn't worked for a while and so, deciding on a career change, trains to become a caregiver. His first client is Trev, a 20 year old Duchene Muscular Dystrophy sufferer who hasn't the sunniest of dispositions. In fact Trev is angry, self-centred and goes through caregivers like a knife through milk. However, Ben, needing a job, holds on tight and tries to encourage Trev to live a little. Eventually Trev complies and dictates a way forward: a road trip. A road trip with a housebound, ill, angry person is not what Ben had in mind at all. Meanwhile it gradually becomes clear to us that Trev isn't the only one who has to learn to live a little differently. Full review...