[[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|class-"wikitable" cellpaddingrating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary="15" 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- INSERT NEW REVIEWS BELOW HEREfriend, 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<!-- Kazan -->|author=Frederic Beigbeder and Frank Wynne (translator)|-title=A Life Without End| stylerating="width: 10%; vertical-align: top; text-align: center;"4|genre=Literary Fiction[[image:0749024801.jpg|linksummary=http://wwwI 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.amazon Our author here doesn't use that exact phrase, but he might be said to be living one.co 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.uk/dp/0749024801/ref But how can he get to not flick the 'final way out' switch, especially when foie gras tastes so nice?|isbn=nosim?tag1642860670}}{{Frontpage|author= Maryse Condé|title=thebookbag-21]]The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana|rating= 4.5|genre= Literary Fiction| stylesummary="verticalWe live in a post-alignworld: top; textpost-colonialism, post-align: 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 Phoenix 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 Florence by Philip Kazan]]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[[image:5star|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.jpg|linkisbn=Category:{1911545418}}{{Frontpage|author= Karina Sainz Borgo and Elizabeth Bryer (translator)|title= It Would Be Night in Caracas|rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:= 4|genre= Literary Fiction|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, [[:Category:Historical Fictionwho can you turn to? |Historical Fiction]]isbn=0062936867}}
Deep in the Tuscan countryside of fifteenth century Italy, Onoria survives a massacre that destroys her family and home. Alone in the forest, she meets a band of soldiers who, believing her to be a boy train and develop her – and the determined Onoria becomes a mercenary – desperate to avoid any situation in which she may feel vulnerable again. Along the way, she meets ex{|class-soldier Celavini, whose journey to Florence sees him investigating two brutal murders. As he digs further and uncovers links to his own family history, Celavini must revisit the past he shares with Onoria, in the hope that they can lay the ghosts of their shared history to rest, before it's too late... [[The Phoenix of Florence by Philip Kazan|Full Review]]"wikitable" cellpadding="15"<!-- Kennedy Caroline Scott -->
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===[[The Great Wide Open Photographer of the Lost by Douglas KennedyCaroline Scott]]===
[[image:4.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Historical Fiction|Historical Fiction]], [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]]
Douglas Kennedy's ''The Great Wide Open'' has been described as epic by just about everyone, and it often feels as though that was the intentionMay 1921. Though the novel often feels like Edie receives a pastiche of photograph through the great American novel – epic in scope, preoccupied post. There is no letter or note with matters of money and literature, fixated with New York – it often feels more like Kennedy . There is trying to reverse-engineer nothing written on the back of the concept altogetherphotograph. Initially It is a picture of her husband, the novel presents itself as an intimate study of family dramaFrancis. Francis has been missing for four years. Technically, in the latter half of the novel it smoothly turns to examining the turn of American society since the 70she has been "missing, and the rapid rise of the hyper-capitalist neoliberal values believed killed" but that is not something that have dominated the west since the election of Ronald Reagana young widow can believe. Though it takes place over a twenty-year period between She hangs on the 70s and the 90sword 'missing', it notably always keeps one an eye on disbelieving the present day (Trump, of course, makes an inevitable and slightly incongruous cameo) such that what happens links subtly into current affairs without ever explicitly referencing themword killed. [[The Great Wide Open Photographer of the Lost by Douglas KennedyCaroline Scott|Full Review]]
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===[[Deviation by Luce d'Eramo and Anne Milano Appel (translator)]]=== [[image:3.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]], [[:Category:Autobiography|Autobiography]], [[:Category:Historical Fiction|Historical Fiction]] For those of you who have read books of life in the Nazi camps – and of course, for those of you who have not – this can be considered a next step. It begins, after all, with someone escaping Dachau and fleeing her work assignment during a bombing raid, and you'd not blame her one minute, as her career was deemed to be cess-tank cleaner and sewage unblocker by the Germans. In Munich, she stumbles on help to get her to what seems to be a camp for non-native civilians to look for work, or company, or transport elsewhere, either official or otherwise. But then the next chapter sees her going back into the camp next to Dachau once more, and by then eyebrows are being raised. [[Deviation by Luce d'Eramo and Anne Milano Appel (translator)|Full Review]] <!-- Chamberlain -->|-| style="width: 10%; vertical-align: top; text-align: center;"|[[image:1786076446.jpg|link=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1786076446/ref=nosim?tag=thebookbag-21]] | style="vertical-align: top; text-align: left;"|===[[The Hidden by Mary Chamberlain]]=== [[image:4.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]], [[:Category:Historical Fiction|Historical Fiction]] When Barbara Hummel arrives, determined to identify the mysterious woman whose photograph she has found among her mother's possessions, Dora and Joe find their worlds upended – and are swiftly forced to confront their pasts. Revisiting their time on the Channel Islands during World War II, Dora remembers a time when she concealed her Jewish identity, and Joe, a Catholic Priest, remembers a time when he hid something very different. In this story of love, loss and betrayal, it remains to be seen whether a speck of light can diffuse the darkest shadows of war… [[The Hidden by Mary Chamberlain|Full Review]] <!-- Clár Ní Chonghaile -->|-| style=''width: 10%; vertical-align: top; text-align: center;''|[[image:1787198146.jpg|link=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1787198146/ref=nosim?tag=thebookbag-21]] | style=''vertical-align: top; text-align: left;''|===[[The Reckoning Dutch House by Clar Ni ChonghaileAnn Patchett]]===
[[image:5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]]
As the blurb saysWhen we first meet Danny and his elder sister, Maeve Conroy, they're both living at The Dutch House with their parents and under the gaze of the portraits of the former owners whose oil paintings still hang on the walls. It'In s a cottage in Normandy, Lina Rose strange family dynamic: Cyril Conroy is writing distant and the closest Danny seems to come to the daughter she abandoned as a baby''…the whole of Chonghaile's second novel him is when he goes out with him on a series of letters addressed to DianeSaturday collecting rents from properties the family owns. Lina Elna Conroy is now in her seventies loving, but absent increasingly often until the point comes when the children are told that she will not be returning. In other circumstances this might have affected Maeve and Diane Danny deeply, but their primary relationship is a mother herself. They have met just once since Lina gave her up for adoptionwith each other. It was not 's a good meetingbond which only death will break. [[The Reckoning Dutch House by Clar Ni ChonghaileAnn Patchett|Full Review]]<!-- Abbs -->|-| style="width: 10%; vertical-align: top; text-align: center;"|[[image:1473691206.jpg|link=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1473691206/ref=nosim?tag=thebookbag-21]]
| style="vertical-align: top; text-align: left;"|===[[Frieda by Annabel Abbs]]=== [[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Historical Fiction|Historical Fiction]], [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]] Married to English Professor Ernest Weekley, aristocrat Frieda Von Richtofen finds herself stifled by the confines of married life. Visiting family in Munich, she becomes captivated by the ideas of revolution and free love. Meeting the penniless writer D.H. Lawrence, she finds herself drawn into a passionate affair and a tempestuous relationship, changing the course of both their lives, and unleashing a creative outpouring that will change the course of literature forever. [[Frieda by Annabel Abbs|Full Review]] <!-- Susan Fletcher Tove Jansson -->
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===[[House of Glass A Winter Book by Susan FletcherTove Jansson]]===
[[image:5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]], [[:Category:Historical FictionShort Stories|Historical FictionShort Stories]]
Clara suffered from Tove Jansson's worldwide fame lasts on the Moomin books, written in the 1940s and later becoming television characters of the simplicity, naivety and sheer 'Osteogenesis imperfectagoodness'': these days it that would probably be called brittle bone disease and whilst there is still no curelater produce flowerpot men or teletubbies. Simple drawings, simple stories, treatments have advancedsimple goodness. At the beginning What is often forgotten outside of the twentieth century it meant her native Finland is that Clara she was confined to her home, living life through a window and serious writer…that she wrote for adults as well as children…and that she had a feeling for the tales her mother, Charlotte, brought home. Both became far too knowledgeable about bones natural world and the sounds they made on breaking. Charlotte would ''list bones like continents''. Clara would simple life that not only escape the house after her mother's death informed those child- like trolls but went far beyond any fantasy of a tumour at how the age of thirty nine - and in her wanderings discovered Kew Gardens. Her growing knowledge of tropical plants led to the offer of a job stocking a newly-built glass house at Shadowbrook in Gloucestershireworld might be. [[House of Glass A Winter Book by Susan FletcherTove Jansson|Full Review]]
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===[[The Water Thief Summer Book by Claire HajajTove Jansson]]===
[[image:4star5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]], [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]]
Nick Tove Jansson's short novel about Summer is in several worlds away from the middle of wedding preparations when he decides to leave his fiancée behind in London Moomintrolls she is most famous for outside her native Scandinavia. Book yourself an afternoon this Summer, and take up a post in some un-named west African country providing engineering support for yourself and The Summer Book somewhere quiet, preferably within sight and sound of the building of a children's hospital. He has no idea what he is getting himself intosea, settle back and prepare to be transported. [[The Water Thief Summer Book by Claire HajajTove Jansson|Full Review]]
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===[[Aftershocks Snowflake, AZ by A N WilsonMarcus Sedgwick]]===
[[image:3.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]], [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]]
In This is a country very much like New Zealanddeep, but at 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 same time most avowedly notcuriously named town of Snowflake, two women will find loveArizona. Strong love tooThese people are sick, for our narrator will say that her first attraction for her partner was the only thing to make sense but it's not a sickness you've heard of all those exaggerated songs she. Instead, they'd heardre environmentally ill – affected by household chemicals and fabrics, pesticides, static electricity, and books radiation – and poems shetheir only ''cure'd read, and plays she'd acted is to stay in – works of art that had until then seemed sheer hyperbolethe town away from the real world. It was entirely unrequited love for quite some time, but Though it does burgeon, or so we're promised from the off, because of something quite drastic – s about a major earthquake very much like the one that hit Christchurchreal place, but at the same time most avowedly notpeople in it are fictional. This book then It really is a place apart, quite literally cut off from the combined exploration of the lovers and the story of the quakeoutside world – people are even required to decontaminate themselves thoroughly before becoming fully integrated. [[Aftershocks Snowflake, AZ by A N WilsonMarcus Sedgwick|Full Review]]
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===[[Tirzah and the Prince of Crows The Nightjar by Deborah Kay DaviesHewitt]]===
[[image:4.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Fantasy|Fantasy]], [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]]
This is a quiet but remarkable story, written in a style reminiscent of E. M. Forster, ''[Tirzah and the Prince of CrowsThe Nightjar'' has no great is an unusual and stirring action but rather small ripples that make a huge impactexciting story. Tirzah is Alice Wyndham lives a young girl of sixteen raised normal life in London until she finds a small Welsh town in the 1970s by highly religious parents as part of a strict religious communitybox on her doorstep 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 everything around her shifts, all that she knows, all that she thinks she knows, must change. The book follows Tirzah though a tumultuous year as Who can she trust? Who must she tries to decide who trust? Who will she wants to betrust? More importantly, and what can she wants to do with her life. even trust herself? [[Tirzah and the Prince of Crows The Nightjar by Deborah Kay DaviesHewitt|Full Review]]
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| style="''vertical-align: top; text-align: left;"''|===[[The Gilded Ones Train Man by Brooke FieldhouseAndrew Mulligan]]===
[[image:4star2.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:CrimeGeneral Fiction|CrimeGeneral Fiction]], [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]]
It was a hot day in 1984 and Pulse had two job interviews for the dayI came to this book thinking I knew just what to expect, but even though it is [[:Category:Andy Mulligan|the heat wasnauthor't the only reason why he wasn't feeling on top form. He'd had a disturbing dream the night before. He'd been following a Porsche on a difficult route, probably somewhere s]] debut in the Alps when adult novel market (hence the Porsche went off the road. The passenger, a man, was dead, but the woman was still alivemore mature name – he used to be an Andy). ''I'm Freia...''thought it simple to sum up, she said. ''It's spelled the German way.'' Of the two job interviews, the first was with an up-and-coming design studio in Brighton and it would almost certainly be good for Pulse's career. The second was with tale of a runmiddle-down practice based in an old London house and headed by Patrick Lloyd-Lewis, whose wife, Freia, had recently died in unexplained circumstances. The link with the dream of the night before was aged man who knows too much for Pulse to refuse about train travel having his life turned around in the offer of a jobmost pleasant way. He couldnI hadn't resist the lure of the mystery. opened it when I'd shelved it alongside [[:Category:Chris Cleave|Chris Cleave]], and [[The Gilded Ones by Brooke Fieldhouse:Category:David Nicholls|Full ReviewDavid Nicholls]]. I expected some whimsy, some warmth and some affirmative loveliness.
More fool me. [[Train Man by Andrew Mulligan|Full Review]]
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===[[The Lost Letters of William Woolf A Perfect Explanation by Helen CullenEleanor Anstruther]]===
[[image:5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Literary Fiction|General Literary Fiction]], [[:Category:Literary Historical Fiction|Literary Historical Fiction]]
William Woolf is Enid Campbell was a letter detectivewoman who, working in on the Dead Letters Depot in East Londonface of it, had everything. He spends his days deciphering smudged addressesLeading the life of an aristocrat – full of inherited wealth and splendour, tracking down mysterious people glamourous locales and reading endless letters high expectations. Only Enid's life has been plagued by mental illness – undiagnosed, untreated and threatening both Enid and those close to her. After losing custody of loveher children, guiltEnid sells her son to her sister for £500 – but is this an act of greed, deathor an act of desperation? Exploring the true story of her own grandmother, hopeEleanor Anstruther has found the perfect subject for an explosive, moving and everyday lifebeautifully well written debut. [[The Lost Letters of William Woolf A Perfect Explanation by Helen CullenEleanor Anstruther|Full Review]]
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===[[Lala The Choke by Jacek Dehnel and Antonia Lloyd-Jones (translator)Sofie Laguna]]===
[[image:5star2star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]]
There''This is the mysterious nature s a dull, dispiriting pang of storytelling: the same start can also mean different endings, disappointment that comes when you try something everyone else loves and different starts can lead to the same finalefind out that you're really not into it. Coffee. Ice skating. It's all subordinate to the greater narrative, which starts somewhere in Kiev''A new Netflix series. This beautiful book is exactly Books are like that, the mysterious art of storytelling. The wayward meanderings of memory, of tangents and digressions, of side notes and elaborations, but above all that of affection; for both the story and the storyteller. What makes us who we are if not our culture and heritage and in this book our narrator re-lives and re-tells the story of his heritage told to him by his grandmotherdoubly so. [[Lala The Choke by Jacek Dehnel and Antonia Lloyd-Jones (translator)Sofie Laguna|Full Review]]
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===[[The Emperor of Shoes Equator by Spencer WiseAntonin Varenne and Sam Taylor (translator)]]===
[[image:3star3.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Historical Fiction|Historical Fiction]], [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]], [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]]
''The Emperor It strikes me that nobody can speak well of the Wild West outside the walls of a theme park. Our agent to see how bad it was here is Pete Ferguson, who bristles at the indignity of Shoeswhite man against Native 'Indian' is , who spends days being physically sick while indulging in a buffalo hunt, and who hates the story way man – and woman, of Alex Cohen, course – can turn against fellow man at the heir to a lucrative shoe factory based in southern Chinabat of an eyelid. More idealistic But this book is about so much more than his profit-obsessed fatherthe 1870s USA, and less motivated solely by the bottom lineattendant problems with gold rushes, hepioneer spirits and racial genocide. He finds himself trying to find this book's unsure version of himself: unsure whether he can continue his father's successUtopia, namely the Equator, where everything is upside down, people walk on their heads with rocks in their pockets to keep them on the ground to counter the anti-gravity, and where, who knows, things might actually be better. But complications arise when he starts to question how morally sound the business really that equator is, a long way away – and whether the workers are being given there's a fair deal. whole adventure full of Mexico and Latin America between him and it… [[The Emperor of Shoes Equator by Spencer WiseAntonin Varenne and Sam Taylor (translator)|Full Review]]
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===[[The Aviator Nights of the Creaking Bed by Eugene Vodolazkin and Lisa Hayden (Translator)Toni Kan]]=== [[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]] Innokenty Petrovich Platonov wakes up in a hospital bed with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. He is tended by a single doctor, Doctor Geiger, who gives him a pencil and notebook and encourages him to write down his observations and memories. The notebook is thick, like a novel. How can Innokenty fill it if he cannot remember anything? But slowly the memories start to return, memories of childhood holidays at the beach, of life in the dacha, of the airfield and the aviators...and the island...it seems like some memories may be better left buried. He remembers that he is the same age as the century, born in 1900. But if that is the case, how is he still a young man when the pills by his bedside are dated 1999? [[The Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin and Lisa Hayden (Translator)|Full Review]]
<!-- Houm -->|-| style="width: 10%; vertical-align: top; text-align: center;"|[[image:1782273778.jpg|link=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1782273778/ref=nosim?tag=thebookbag-21]] | style="vertical-align: top; text-align: left;"|===[[The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland by Nicolai Houm and Anna Paterson (translator)]]=== [[image:4.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]], [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]] Jane Ashland is dying. That's a description of a very early scene here – but also, of course, a platitude that can apply to all of us. Jane's life, if anything, is going up and down in levels of pleasure, energy – sobriety – in these pages, but we soon learn that it recently found a very deeply dark down place. Here then, scattered through a timeline-bending narrative, we have her days finding a Lincolnesque lover as a student in New York, glimpses of therapy, a drive to find her ancestors that takes her from rural America to Norway – and a trip there with a new-found friend to watch the musk oxen, of all things. And nowhere in sight is anything like a platitude… [[The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland by Nicolai Houm and Anna Paterson (translator)|Full Review]] <!-- Bonnefoy -->|-| style="width: 10%; vertical-align: top; text-align: center;"|[[image:1910477524.jpg|link=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1910477524/ref=nosim?tag=thebookbag-21]] | style="vertical-align: top; text-align: left;"|===[[Black Sugar by Miguel Bonnefoy and Emily Boyce (translator)]]=== [[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]] Miguel Bonnefoy's ''Black Sugar'' is a sensual epic chronicling three generations of the Otero family. The tale begins with the disappearance of Captain Henry Morgan's treasure and then illustrates the power this treasure holds over people. Multiple people become obsessed with finding this fabled treasure that has become an urban legend in the town in which the story is set. [[Black Sugar by Miguel Bonnefoy and Emily Boyce (translator)|Full Review]] <!-- Ruby -->|-| style="width: 10%; vertical-align: top; text-align: center;"|[[image:1455565180.jpg|link=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1455565180/ref=nosim?tag=thebookbag-21]] | style="vertical-align: top; text-align: left;"|===[[The Zero and the One by Ryan Ruby]]=== [[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]] ''The Zero and the One'' is an incredibly well written and well crafted book. We meet our narrator, Owen, on the plane to New York for the funeral of his best friend. He is still reeling after recent events, a suicide pact in which his friend died but he lived, and he is going through the motions of the funeral and consoling family whilst still trying 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 narrator. [[The Zero and the One by Ryan Ruby|Full Review]] <!-- Miles -->|-| style="width: 10%; vertical-align: top; text-align: center;"|[[image:0553447580.jpg|link=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0553447580/ref=nosim?tag=thebookbag-21]] | style="vertical-align: top; text-align: left;"|===[[Anatomy of a Miracle by Jonathan Miles]]=== [[image:3.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Literary FictionShort Stories|Literary FictionShort Stories]]
Look closely at ''Nights of the cover of Jonathan MilesCreaking Bed's third novel and you'll see is a collection of short stories by Toni Kan. The series of stories tell of the central drama depicted: white wheelchair tracks snake up from the bottom lives and stop three-quarters lusts of the way from the topan assortment of characters living in and around Lagos, where they are replaced by footprintsNigeria. On 23 August 2014Nigeria, wheelchair-bound veteran Cameron Harris stands up and walks outside the Biz-E-Bee convenience store in Biloxithis collection, Mississippiis imbued with its very own heart of darkness. In Danger stalks the rest of the novel we find out how he got to this point shadows and people are killed for nothing more than a wrong look. Kan writes with a vitality and what others – ranging from his doctor passion that allows these cynical stories to representatives of the Roman Catholic Church – will make achieve a glimmer of his recoveryhope. Was it a miracle, or an explainable medical phenomenon? [[Anatomy Nights of a Miracle the Creaking Bed by Jonathan MilesToni Kan|Full Review]]
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