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Newest Literary Fiction Reviews (view source)

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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]__NOTOC__ {{Frontpage|author= Tahi Saihate|title= Astral Season, Beastly Season|rating= 3.5|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= We long for our past even though it is a place to which we can never return. Tahi Saihate, in her debut novel ''Astral Season, Beastly Season'' illustrates how these rose-tinted glasses often lie. Her novel is a meditation on youth and how the things we do as a teenager can seem intensely important and often life-altering.|isbn= 1916277101}}
{{Frontpage|author=Laura Imai Messina|title=The Phone Box at the End of the World|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary= In the northeast of Japan, in Inwate Prefecture a man installed a telephone box in his garden. ''Inside there is an old black, telephone, disconnected, that carries voices into the wind.'' It is a real place, a necessary place, and I am pleased to see the IMPORTANT NOTE that the author attaches to her story, that the place is not a tourist destination, it is a sacred place, a place that must be left to those who really need it.|isbn=178658039X}}{{Frontpage|author=Amin Maalouf|title=The Disoriented|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary= Adam has lived in Paris for years, speaks French more easily than his native Arabic. In fact he hasn't been back to his homeland for 25 years. An old friend is dying…or as Adam prefers to think of him a former-friend, perhaps not as harsh as an ex-friend, or maybe. The falling out was a long time ago, and Adam's partner has no idea what it was about, even so she urges him to go knowing that he'll regret not doing so. Not knowing whether he's going because he needs or wants to, or simply because he was asked, he's on the next plane. |isbn=B07ZQSK9CY}}{{Frontpage|author=Joanne M Harris|title=A Pocketful of Crows|rating=5|genre= Confident Readers|summary= I have always been of the mind that once you're above picture-book level and before you get to graphic sex & violence, there is no difference between books for children and books for adults. There are good books and poor ones. And Joanne Harris does not produce poor ones. ''A Pocketful of Crows'' is clearly aimed at the younger readers as witness the use of the middle initial in the author's name to differentiate from her adult offers. Ignore that if you have loved anything from ''Chocolat'' onwards you will know that Harris is mistress of the modern fairy tale. This is no different. It is an utter delight.|isbn=1473222184}}{{Frontpage|author=Frederic Beigbeder and Frank Wynne (translator)|title=A Life Without End|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=I looked at the calendar the other week, and disappointedly realised I have a birthday this year – I know, yet another one. It won't be one of the major numbers, but the time when I have the same number as Heinz varieties looms on the horizon. And then a few of the big 0-numbers, and if all goes well, I'll be an OBE. (Which of course stands for Over Bloody Eighty.) Now if that's the extent of my mid-life crisis, I guess I have to be happy. Our author here doesn't use that exact phrase, but he might be said to be living one. Determined to find out how to prolong life for as long as he wants – he would like to see 400 – he hops right into bed with the assistant to the first geneticist he interviews, and they end up with a child, which is at least a way of continuing the life of his genes, and a motive to keep on going. But how can he get to not flick the 'final way out' switch, especially when foie gras tastes so nice?|isbn=1642860670}}{{Frontpage|author= Maryse Condé|title= The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana|rating= 4.5|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= We live in a post- world: post-colonialism, post-modernism, post truth. The list goes on. There are numerous works that utilise the prefix post- in their categorisation, but perhaps none more so than Maryse Condé. In her new novel, ''The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana'', Condé writes with fervour about the scars left by colonialism on the countries to which it latched itself. Ivan and Ivana are twins born in Guadeloupe, a French overseas department. They grow up with intense and passionate feelings for each other. As they grow up and move overseas, the ravages of a post-colonial society drive them apart with tragic consequences.|isbn=1642860697}}{{Frontpage|author= Ukamaka Olisakwe|title= Ogadinma Or, Everything Will Be All Right|rating= 5|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= The new novel by Ukamaka Olisakwe is a look at the trauma and heartache of being a woman in 1980s Nigeria. The title is ''Ogadinma Or, Everything Will Be All Right''. Ogadinma is the eponymous heroine of the story.. We are with her in every scene and it is her narrative voice that leads the story, although Olisakwe writes in third person. This provides a sense of detachment for the reader and highlights the isolation of Ogadinma. She is exiled from her father's home and sent to Lagos where she is married to an older man named Tobe. Their marriage descends into violence and indignities and Ogadinma must utilise her resourcefulness to escape.|isbn=1911648160}}{{Frontpage|author=Elliot Reed|title=A Key to Treehouse Living|rating=4|genre=General Fiction|summary=This is the story of a young boy, William Tyce, who is being raised by his uncle after the death of his mother and his father's abandonment. However, it isn't told in the usual narrative way. Instead, the book is made up of glossary entries, written by William, as a way of describing certain events, situations and emotions. It runs alphabetically, starting with ABSENCE, then moving to ALPHABETICAL ORDER. As I began to read I did find myself thinking 'what on earth?!' but I soon grew used to the style, and was instead caught up in William's story.|isbn=1911545418}}{{Frontpage|author= Karina Sainz Borgo and Elizabeth Bryer (translator)|title= It Would Be Night in Caracas|rating= 4|genre= Literary Fiction |summary= ''It Would Be Night in Caracas'' illuminates the everyday horrors of modern day Venezuela. It begins with the death of Adelaida Falcon's mother and chronicles Adelaida's coming to terms with her new solitude in this world and her attempts to escape it. Danger stalks the shadows and, in a society where the establishment is crumbling, who can you turn to? |isbn=0062936867}}  {|class-"wikitable" cellpadding="15" <!-- INSERT NEW REVIEWS BELOW HERE--><!-- Vodolazkin Caroline Scott -->
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===[[The Aviator Photographer of the Lost by Eugene Vodolazkin and Lisa Hayden (Translator)Caroline Scott]]===
[[image:4star4.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Historical Fiction|Historical Fiction]], [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]]
Innokenty Petrovich Platonov wakes up in May 1921. Edie receives a hospital bed with photograph through the post. There is no recollection of who he is letter or how he got therenote with it. He There is tended by a single doctor, Doctor Geiger, who gives him a pencil and notebook and encourages him to write down his observations and memoriesnothing written on the back of the photograph. The notebook It is thick, like a novel. How can Innokenty fill it if he cannot remember anything? But slowly the memories start to return, memories picture of childhood holidays at the beachher husband, of life in the dacha, of the airfield and the aviatorsFrancis. Francis has been missing for four years..and the island...it seems like some memories may be better left buried. He remembers that Technically, he is the same age as the centuryhas been "missing, born in 1900. But if believed killed" but that is not something that a young widow can believe. She hangs on the caseword 'missing', how is he still a young man when disbelieving the pills by his bedside are dated 1999? word killed. [[The Aviator Photographer of the Lost by Eugene Vodolazkin and Lisa Hayden (Translator)Caroline Scott|Full Review]]
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===[[The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland Dutch House by Nicolai Houm and Anna Paterson (translator)Ann Patchett]]===
[[image:4.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]], [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]]
Jane Ashland is dying. ThatWhen we first meet Danny and his elder sister, Maeve Conroy, they's a description re both living at The Dutch House with their parents and under the gaze of a very early scene here – but also, the portraits of course, a platitude that can apply to all of usthe former owners whose oil paintings still hang on the walls. Jane It's life, if anything, a strange family dynamic: Cyril Conroy is going up distant and down in levels of pleasure, energy – sobriety – in these pagesthe closest Danny seems to come to him is when he goes out with him on a Saturday collecting rents from properties the family owns. Elna Conroy is loving, but we soon learn absent increasingly often until the point comes when the children are told that it recently found a very deeply dark down placeshe will not be returning. Here then, scattered through a timeline-bending narrative, we In other circumstances this might have her days finding a Lincolnesque lover as a student in New Yorkaffected Maeve and Danny deeply, glimpses of therapy, a drive to find her ancestors that takes her from rural America to Norway – and a trip there but their primary relationship is with each other. It's a new-found friend to watch the musk oxen, of all thingsbond which only death will break. And nowhere in sight is anything like a platitude… [[The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland Dutch House by Nicolai Houm and Anna Paterson (translator)Ann Patchett|Full Review]]
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===[[Black Sugar A Winter Book by Miguel Bonnefoy and Emily Boyce (translator)Tove Jansson]]===
[[image:4star5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]], [[:Category:Short Stories|Short Stories]]
Miguel BonnefoyTove Jansson's worldwide fame lasts on the Moomin books, written in the 1940s and later becoming television characters of the simplicity, naivety and sheer 'goodness'Black Sugar'' that would later produce flowerpot men or teletubbies. Simple drawings, simple stories, simple goodness. What is often forgotten outside of her native Finland is that she was a serious writer…that she wrote for adults as well as children…and that she had a sensual epic chronicling three generations of the Otero family. The tale begins with feeling for the disappearance of Captain Henry Morgan's treasure natural world and then illustrates the power this treasure holds over people. Multiple people become obsessed with finding this fabled treasure simple life that has become an urban legend in not only informed those child-like trolls but went far beyond any fantasy of how the town in which the story is setworld might be. [[Black Sugar A Winter Book by Miguel Bonnefoy and Emily Boyce (translator)Tove Jansson|Full Review]]
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===[[The Zero and the One Summer Book by Ryan RubyTove Jansson]]===
[[image:4star5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]]
Tove Jansson''The Zero and s short novel about Summer is several worlds away from the One'' Moomintrolls she is an incredibly well written and well crafted book. We meet our narrator, Owen, on the plane to New York most famous for the funeral of his best friendoutside her native Scandinavia. He is still reeling after recent eventsBook yourself an afternoon this Summer, a suicide pact in which his friend died but he livedand take yourself and The Summer Book somewhere quiet, preferably within sight and he is going through the motions sound of the funeral sea, settle back and consoling family whilst still trying prepare to get to grips with his own feelings of grief and guilt. So far, so simple. But this is where the talent of Ryan Ruby steps in and slowly, so slowly, he reveals little tantalising clues that all is not what it seems, a throw-away comment here, a mis-step there, and it becomes clear that Owen is not a reliable narratorbe transported. [[The Zero and the One Summer Book by Ryan RubyTove Jansson|Full Review]]
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===[[Anatomy of a Miracle Snowflake, AZ by Jonathan MilesMarcus Sedgwick]]===
[[image:3.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]]
Look closely at This is a deep, interesting read unlike any book I've read in quite some time. The novel's story follows a young man named Ash in the process of joining a community of sick people in the cover curiously named town of Jonathan MilesSnowflake, Arizona. These people are sick, but it's third novel and not a sickness you'll see the central drama depicted: white wheelchair tracks snake up from the bottom and stop three-quarters ve heard of the way from the top. Instead, where they are replaced 're environmentally ill – affected by footprints. On 23 August 2014household chemicals and fabrics, pesticides, static electricity, wheelchair-bound veteran Cameron Harris stands up and walks outside the Biz-E-Bee convenience store radiation – and their only ''cure'' is to stay in Biloxi, Mississippi. In the rest of the novel we find out how he got to this point and what others – ranging town away from his doctor to representatives of the Roman Catholic Church – will make of his recoveryreal world. Was Though it 's about a real place, the people in it are fictional. It really is a miracleplace apart, or an explainable medical phenomenon? quite literally cut off from the outside world – people are even required to decontaminate themselves thoroughly before becoming fully integrated. [[Anatomy of a Miracle Snowflake, AZ by Jonathan MilesMarcus Sedgwick|Full Review]]
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[[image:Mcneil Fire1509896465.jpg|left|link=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/17850789921509896465/ref=nosim?tag=thebookbag-21]]  | style="vertical-align: top; text-align: left;"|===[[Fire on the Mountain by Jean McNeil]]=== [[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]] This is an unusual book, in style it feels like a novel by E M Forster; with a deep study at the minutiae of life and thought, yet the plot and content is thoroughly modern. The bulk of the story is told through the perspective of Nick, and we see his point of view on life around him. The main characters of the book, however, are Pieter and Riaan, as it is these characters who fascinate Nick and are the focus of his contemplation and crisis. [[Fire on the Mountain by Jean McNeil|Full Review]]
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===[[The Last of the Greenwoods Nightjar by Clare MorrallDeborah Hewitt]]===
[[image:4star4.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Fantasy|Fantasy]], [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]]
Down in hidden railway carriages, deep behind foliage ''The Nightjar'' is an unusual and further down Long Meadow Road than most care to go, live the Greenwood Brothersexciting story. They haven't spoken to each other Alice Wyndham lives a normal life in years, but one morning London until she finds a letter arrives box on their her doorstep - a letter from a sister long thought dead.one morning and her life begins to unravel, fast.From that very moment, her life is flooded with magic, loss, expectation and particularly, betrayal.As the brothers are forced to confront painful memories of a past everything around her shifts, all that she knows, all that both tried to keep buriedshe thinks she knows, the post-woman who delivered the letter struggles with secrets of her own..must change. Who can she trust? Who must she trust? Who will she trust? More importantly, can she even trust herself? [[The Last of the Greenwoods Nightjar by Clare MorrallDeborah Hewitt|Full Review]]
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''The Baghdad Clock'' is a tale of two friends growing up during the first and second Iraqi war. Shahad Al Rawi uses magic realism to illustrate the displacement felt by a young girl and her neighbourhood. The novel introduces us to the various characters surrounding the protagonist. They are full of life and yet never seem to add anything to the central narrative. Rawi, it would seem, has a problem with telling a story. [[The Baghdad Clock by Shahad Al Rawi|Full Review]]
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[[image:2.5star.jpg| stylelink="vertical-alignCategory:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[: top; text-alignCategory: left;"General Fiction|===General Fiction]], [[The Coffin Path by Katherine Clements:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]]===
[[image:4.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] I came to this book thinking I knew just what to expect, even though it is [[:Category:Literary FictionAndy Mulligan|Literary Fictionthe author's]]debut in the adult novel market (hence the more mature name – he used to be an Andy). I thought it simple to sum up, the tale of a middle-aged man who knows too much about train travel having his life turned around in the most pleasant way. I hadn't opened it when I'd shelved it alongside [[:Category:HorrorChris Cleave|HorrorChris Cleave]], and [[:Category:Historical FictionDavid Nicholls|Historical FictionDavid Nicholls]]. I expected some whimsy, some warmth and some affirmative loveliness.
Maybe you've heard about Scarcross Hall? Hidden on the old coffin path that winds from the village to the moor top, the villagers only speak of it in hushed tones - of how it's a foreboding place filled with evilMore fool me. Mercy Booth has lived there since birth, and she's always loved the grand house and its isolation, but a recurrence of strange events begins to unsettle her. From objects disappearing through to a shadowy presence sensed in the house, mysteries come to light that can only be solved by Mercy unearthing long-buried secrets. And will a dark stranger help Mercy protect everything she has come to love or tear it from her grasp? [[The Coffin Path Train Man by Katherine ClementsAndrew Mulligan|Full Review]]
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[[image:Durrenmatt_Justice1784631647.jpg|left|link=httpshttp://www.amazon.co.uk/gpdp/product1784631647/1782273875ref=nosim?ie=UTF8&tag=thebookbag-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=1782273875]] | style="vertical-align: top; text-align: left;"|===[[The Execution of Justice by Friedrich Durrenmatt and John E Woods (translator)]]=== [[image:2.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Crime|Crime]] It's 1957, and we're somewhere in Switzerland, and there's just one case on everyone's lips – the simple fact that a politician has gone into the crowded room of one of those 'the place to go' restaurants, and point blank shot a professor everyone there must have known, and ferried a British companion to the airport in his chauffeur-driven Rolls before handing himself in to face the murder rap. Of course he's found guilty, even if the gun involved has managed to disappear. He's certainly of much interest, not only to our narrator, a young lawyer called Spaet – even if he rarely gets to frequent such establishments with such people, he is eager to know more, especially once he is actually tasked by the man in hand to look into things a second time. But what's this, where he opens his testimony about the affair with the conclusion, that he himself will need to turn killer to redress the balance? [[The Execution of Justice by Friedrich Durrenmatt and John E Woods (translator)|Full Review]]
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===[[The Impostor A Perfect Explanation by Javier Cercas and Frank Wynne (translator)Eleanor Anstruther]]===
[[image:5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]], [[:Category:Historical Fiction|Historical Fiction]]
Enric Marco is without doubt an extraordinary man. A veteran of the Spanish Civil WarEnid Campbell was a woman who, honoured for his bravery on the battlefieldface of it, had everything. A political prisoner Leading the life of two fascist regimes. A survivor an aristocrat – full of the Nazi concentration campsinherited wealth and splendour, glamourous locales and high expectations. A prominent figure in the clandestine resistance against FrancoOnly Enid's tyrannylife has been plagued by mental illness – undiagnosed, untreated and threatening both Enid and those close to her. A tireless warrior After losing custody of her children, Enid sells her son to her sister for social justice and the defence of human rights. A national hero. But the most extraordinary thing about Enric Marco £500 – but is this: that he is really none an act of these things. He is greed, or an impostor. And Javier Cercas sets out to tell his story – act of desperation? Exploring the true story of Spain's most notorious liarher own grandmother, Eleanor Anstruther has found the perfect subject for an explosive, moving and beautifully well written debut. [[The Impostor A Perfect Explanation by Javier Cercas and Frank Wynne (translator)Eleanor Anstruther|Full Review]]
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[[image:Badoe_Jigsaw191070962X.jpg|left|link=httpshttp://www.amazon.co.uk/gpdp/product191070962X/1786695480ref=nosim?ie=UTF8&tag=thebookbag-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=1786695480]] | style="vertical-align: top; text-align: left;"|===[[A Jigsaw of Fire and Stars by Yaba Badoe]]=== [[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]], [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]], [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]], [[:Category:Teens|Teens]] Sante was a baby when she was washed ashore in a sea-chest laden with treasure. It seems she is the sole survivor of the tragic sinking of a ship carrying migrants and refugees. Her people. Fourteen years on she's a member of Mama Rose's unique and dazzling circus. But, from their watery grave, the unquiet dead are calling Sante to avenge them. A bamboo flute. A golden bangle. A ripening mango which must not fall... if Sante is to tell their story and her own. [[A Jigsaw of Fire and Stars by Yaba Badoe|Full Review]]
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===[[The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao Choke by Martha Batalha and Eric M B Becker (translator)Sofie Laguna]]===
[[image:4.5star2star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]]
On the surface, young housewife Euridice Gusmao has it all. A nice-enough, parent-pleasing husband with a steady banking job, two young children upon whom to dote, an immaculate home complete with maid. ThatThere's all anyone could ever wanta dull, isndispiriting pang of disappointment that comes when you try something everyone else loves and find out that you't re really not into it? Not Euridice. She has an inexplicable ache inside her for something more, like many of usCoffee. Ice skating. A new Netflix series. Yet each of her pet projects, from a desire to publish a recipe book to starting a cottage sewing industry in her living room, Books are met with scorn from her stern husband Antenor. He wants a wife who doesn't draw attention to herselflike that, whose only domains are her house and her familybut doubly so. [[The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao Choke by Martha Batalha and Eric M B Becker (translator)Sofie Laguna|Full Review]]
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===[[The Dark-Blue Winter Overcoat and other stories from the North Equator by Sjon Hodgkinson Antonin Varenne and Ten Hodgkinson Sam Taylor (editorstranslator)]]===
[[image:3star3.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:AnthologiesHistorical Fiction|AnthologiesHistorical Fiction]], [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]], [[:Category:Short StoriesGeneral Fiction|Short StoriesGeneral Fiction]]
A compilation like this should be nigh on brilliant. It's not one author's best short works, it's strikes me that nobody can speak well of the Wild West outside the walls of a dozentheme park. It's not from one snapshot in time Our agent to see how bad it was here is Pete Ferguson, as some were written who bristles at the year indignity of publication and some in the 1960s. Itwhite man against Native 's not from one tiny patch of authorIndian's desk or one set of laptop keys, but from the entire Nordic world, whether that be urban Scandinaviawho spends days being physically sick while indulging in a buffalo hunt, and who hates the Faroes way man – and other island groupswoman, or Greenlandof course – can turn against fellow man at the bat of an eyelid. That But this book is a world that's changing – as about so much more than the Greenland-born author now living in Brooklyn1870s USA, and the Iraqi blood on these pagesattendant problems with gold rushes, testifypioneer spirits and racial genocide. It He finds himself trying to find this book's a world version of Utopia, namely the Equator, where new roads and new building works mean a family living everything is upside down, people walk on their heads with rocks in their pockets to keep them on the edge of ground to counter the forest at the beginning of the story are being surrounded by other life by the endanti-gravity, and with the influence of centuries of folklore featuredwhere, who knows, things might actually be better. But that equator is a lot more than that changes long way away – sometimes it seems to be even the charactersand there' species… s a whole adventure full of Mexico and Latin America between him and it… [[The Dark-Blue Winter Overcoat and other stories from the North Equator by Sjon Hodgkinson Antonin Varenne and Ten Hodgkinson Sam Taylor (editorstranslator)|Full Review]]
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===[[Companions Nights of the Creaking Bed by Christina Hesselholdt and Paul Russell Garrett (translator)Toni Kan]]=== [[image:3star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]] ''Companions'' is written as a series of monologues, where six middle-aged friends take it in turns to narrate scenes from their lives, charting the intimate details of their holidays, dinner parties, families, marriages, affairs and work lives in a style that mixes honesty and openness with fantasy and evasion. The charm of the novel lies in the way the friends' voices bicker with one another among the pages, as we discover that there are always several sides to the same story. We learn most about the characters not through what they say about themselves but through what the others say about them. Along the way, there is heartbreak and grief, but this is always offset by an abundance of humour and a writing style that never fails to be refreshingly light-hearted. [[Companions by Christina Hesselholdt and Paul Russell Garrett (translator)|Full Review]]
<!-- BERGEN -->|-| style="width: 10%; vertical-align: top; text-align: center;"|[[image:Bergen_Stranger.jpg|link=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0715652419/ref=nosim?tag=thebookbag-21]]  | style="vertical-align: top; text-align: left;"|===[[Stranger by David Bergen]]=== [[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]] ''Stranger'' tells the story of Íso, a young Guatemalan woman, and her affair with an American doctor. When an accident forces him to return to the States, she is left pregnant and lonely. Her anguish becomes even more profound when her daughter is abducted, and taken to live with the doctor and his wife. What followed - tales of the journey Íso embarked upon in the hope of finding her baby - was an amazing story of the lengths a mother will go to in order to save her child. [[Stranger by David Bergen|Full Review]] <!-- Chonghaile -->|-| style="width: 10%; vertical-align: top; text-align: center;"|[[image:Chonghaile_Rain.jpg|link=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1785079018/ref=nosim?tag=thebookbag-21]]  | style="vertical-align: top; text-align: left;"|===[[Rain Falls On Everyone by Clar Ni Chonghaile]]=== [[image:5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary FictionShort Stories|Literary Fiction]] It's a cliché that the Irish have a picturesque turn of phrase, but clichés only exist because they're true. Roddy Doyle put it differently in a recent interview with ''Writing'' magazine, when he said that ''With Irish, there's another language bubbling under the English''. However you express it, that art of expression is woven into every other line of Clár's prose. Pick a page at random and you'll find something like ''the sickness that had come to roost in her home like a cursed owl'' or ''like he was God, Jesus and Justin Timberlake rolled into one'' or ''a low sobbing, slow and inevitable as rain on a Sunday'': expressions that catch your smile unawares, or tear at your heart in their mundane sadness. Or sometimes both. [[Rain Falls On Everyone by Clar Ni Chonghaile|Full Review]] <!-- Mete -->|-| style="width: 10%; vertical-align: top; text-align: center;"|[[image:Mete_Sinful.jpg|link=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1524682527/ref=nosim?tag=thebookbag-21]]  | style="vertical-align: top; text-align: left;"|===[[Sinful Words by Hesene Mete]]=== [[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]] When we meet him, Behram is a student at the school of theology. He loves God with a passion and has a determination to live a life dedicated to God and to live by His rules. He rents a property from Lulu Khan and his wife, Lady Geshtina and Khan invites Behram to his own home for a visit. It's a delightful place and the wealth of the couple is obvious as is their standing within the local community: Lady Geshtina's late father is buried in what amounts to a mausoleum, but it's not all this which enchants Behram. The couple have twin children and Behram is taken, enthralled by the daughter, Nagina. [[Sinful Words by Hesene Mete|Full Review]] <!-- Laurel -->|-| style="width: 10%; vertical-align: top; text-align: center;"|[[image:Laurel_Gurugu.jpg|link=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1908276940/ref=nosim?tag=thebookbag-21]]  | style="vertical-align: top; text-align: left;"|===[[The Gurugu Pledge by Juan-Tomas Avila Laurel]]=== [[image:5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary FictionShort Stories]]
Juan-Tomas Avila Laurel, one ''Nights of Equatorial Guineathe Creaking Bed''s best-known dissident writers, is an author who deserves to be read the world overa collection of short stories by Toni Kan. With The Gurugu Pledge, he's captured an angry series of stories tell of the lives and incredibly urgent slice lusts of the migrant experience – a snapshot an assortment of the dangers faced by those crossing the African continent characters living in and around Lagos, Nigeria. Nigeria, in search this collection, is imbued with its very own heart of darkness. Danger stalks the barbed wire fences at Melilla- the Spanish enclave on the North Eastern tip shadows and people are killed for nothing more than a wrong look. Kan writes with a vitality and passion that allows these cynical stories to achieve a glimmer of Moroccohope. [[The Gurugu Pledge Nights of the Creaking Bed by Juan-Tomas Avila LaurelToni Kan|Full Review]]
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