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[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]] __NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->{{newreviewFrontpage|author= Stephanie DanlerMatthew Tree|title= SweetbitterWe'll Never Know|rating= 4.5|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= Twenty –two year old Tess is a restless graduate Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from a broken family. With the intention of finally starting her lifehis father, she moves to New York City with no real plan but a need to do something. She manages to get a job at one of the most exclusive restaurants in town as a back-waiter drunk and Tess is thrown into the comforting commotion chronic underachiever whose dreams of New York life. It's being exceptional at her new job that she becomes fascinated by two people: Simone, a know-it-any of his artistic passions all server failed miserably and Jake, a handsome yet moody bartenderwho had endless crises of self confidence. While the restaurant becomes her home and her colleagues her new familySo Tim applied himself to his studies, ''Sweetbitter'' follows Tess through a year of her life as she grows cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and learns about the complexities of human relationshipsset himself high but achievable ambitions.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1780749155</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8

{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Rodrigo Hasbun and Sophie Hughes (translator)B0C47LV1PC|title=AffectionsFragility|author=Mosby Woods|rating=4.5|genre=General Literary Fiction|summary=If Can you thought your teenaged years were make a struggle to work out ''Yo birthing person'' joke? And if you could, is the question should you make it? Or is the worldquestion if you did, and yourself, consider would it land? The catch is that of Heidi Ertl. Or either of her sisters – this book serves as a sort of tribute to these three real-life women, and the lives that came out of their very disjointed youth, forced to answer for both could well be rarefied from the norm by their family uprooting. Father Hans was one of Leni Riefenstahl... no. ''Fragility''s key cameramen, and a Nazi military photographer, before taking the whole family into post-war exile in Bolivia. Their mother would have followed him to the ends of the earth – is set as in part would their daughters, the older two of which start the book by joining him on an expedition to discover a lost Incan city. Heidi finds young, instant love on the trek – but sees the dark side of such emotionsPortland, too. Older sister MonikaOregon, who might well be manic depressive, finds something else, while the baby of the family stays at home with a maudlin mother. So much here could be cautiously begins to emerge from the hook on which to hang a full novel, but if anything it's restrictions imposed during the reaction of them all to this unusual formative journey that inspires this book.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1782272135</amazonuk>covid pandemic

{{newreviewFrontpage|author= Sun-mi HwangMosby Woods|title= The Dog who Dared to DreamA Whirly Man Loses His Turn|rating= 4|genre= Literary Fiction|summary=From The West isn't the dominant force it once was. Nobody in the very beginning, Scraggly knows that she West is different quite sure how to her brothers and sistersmend this or even if mending it is the best course of action. Governments are flailing. Her siblings have shortA war here, glossy coats, but Scraggly's blue/black fur a push for climate action there. A feeling that nobody is long, wild and untamedin actual charge. She may be an outsiderImagine then, but she still enjoys life there was a man with her family precognition. Imagine the strategic advantage in Grandpa Screecher's sunny yard, even if it means putting up with the evil cat next door. Scraggly dreams that things this asset; a man who can stay this way forever, but fate has other planstell you what will happen given any set of circumstances. One tragic nightThat man would be valuable, everything she loves is cruelly ripped away from herright? Perhaps the most valuable asset in history. As she struggles to rebuild a new life and family for herselfImagine then, she comes to understand that sadness, betrayal and loss are an inevitable part of lifethis man loses this ability. Can Scraggly ever learn What would governments do to trust another human againget it back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0349142106</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1

{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn= Sarah Perry0571379559|title= The Essex SerpentHouse of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams|rating= 4.5|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= I confess to a bias… when I came across a reference to Sarah Perry''The House of Broken Bricks'' is the story of four people. Tess Hembry's latest novel; I wanted to read roots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, but instead, she lives in the house on the riverbank, built of broken bricks. Insubstantial as it might look, it for two reasons only's stood the passage of time, storms and floods. She is a local writerHer husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the delivery rounds - and the book is set to bring in a place not too far away, but that I sufficient money. They have yet to explore twin boys - Sonny and which fascinates me: Max, the Blackwater estuary in Essexrainbow twins. ThatSonny's a place of the kind of wide open skies and mud creeks colouring reflects his mother's Jamaican heritage. Max takes after his father. People don't believe that you will find up they're related, much of the Norfolk less twins and Suffolk coast as well, and a landscape type there's an assumption when Max is out with his mother that probably only appeals to a certain type of personshe's his nanny.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>178125544X</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Susan BealeClaire North|title=The Good GuyHouse of Odysseus|rating=45|genre=Literary Fiction |summary=September 1964: an Indian summer in suburban Massachusetts''What could matter more than love?'' The follow-up to the excellent ''Ithaca'' picks up a few months after where we left off. Ted McDougall is a twenty-three-year-old Goodyear tyre salesman In the palace of Odysseus, with delicate care Queen Penelope continues to rule without her husband, who lives with his wife Abigail sailed to war at Troy and ten-month-old daughter Mindy in then by divine intervention never returned home. As ever she remains surrounded by suitors vying for the throne of the up-and-coming Elm Grove communityWestern Isles. Both Ted Having survived – politically and Abigail feel unappreciated in their roles. Ted knows his in-laws wanted him physical – the chaotic storm that Clytemnestra brought to become a lawyer and join AbigailIthaca's father's firmshores, but he's Queen Penelope is on the brink of a good salesman and wishes they wouldn't look down on him for itfragile peace. Meanwhile Abigail, an American history buff, can't master One that shatters however with the domestic arts return of cooking and cleaningOrestes, much as she triesKing of Mycenae, and longs to go back to schoolhis sister Elektra, seeking refuge.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1473630339</amazonuk>0356516075

{{newreviewFrontpage|author= Emma ClineKay Chronister|title= The GirlsDesert Creatures

|genre= Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary=California. Summer 1969With a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, post-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Fourteen year old Evie Boyd Whether it is a thoughtful yet bored teenager from robotic takeover, a broken home. The attention she craves is nowhere to be found in the form world devoid of her neglectful, serial dating mother, water or even in the friendship of her fickle best friend Connie. Abandoned by those around hera nuclear holocaust, Evie's path collides with Suzanne – this genre is a mysterious older girl who introduces Evie way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a strange yet thrilling new life, offering her work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the intimate relationship her life back home lacksfears that exist for humanity today. It is a shocking novel that still manages to find hope.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1784740446</amazonuk>1803364998

{{newreviewfrontpage|isbn=1803363002|author= Simon Van BooyEric LaRocca|title= Father's DayThe Trees Grew Because I Bled There

|genre= General FictionHorror|summary=When devastating news shatters the life of six year old HarveyHorror taps into something primeval within us. It is used as a way to reflect our darkest emotions and how we as humans react and process them. Most horror fiction feature a ''Big Bad'', she finds herself in the care of whether that is a veteran social workerhome invader, Wandaa monster or a ghost, it usually something tangible and alone in , by the end of the world save for one relative she has never met - a disabled ex-constory, haunted by a violent past he can't escapebeatable. Moving between past and present, FatherEric LaRocca's Day weaves together ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. It is a collection of short stories more interested in the story horrors of Harvey's childhood on Long Islandillness, grief and humiliation. Horrors that linger and her life as a young woman in Parisare harder to defeat than any ''Big Bad''.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780749694</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Thomas KeneallyMadelaine Lucas|title=Napoleon's Last IslandThirst for Salt|rating=4.5

|summary=It's not usual 'Love, I'd read, was supposed to open be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity'' Told from a retrospective view, a review young woman unravels the year-long relationship that once defined her. Overlaid with later wisdom, the narrator relives the history of how affair with a man twenty years her senior from its inception – the book came summer after finishing university – to be written but with its sorrowful end the summer after. Set against the backdrop of an isolated Australian coastal town ''NapoleonThirst for Salt's Last Island'details the 24-year-old narrator' the story sheds an intriguing light s deepening relationship with her older lover, depicting its all-consuming nature, how it changed her perspective on the plotboth romantic and familial relationships and how it altered her irrevocably. In 2012 |isbn=0861546490}}{{Frontpage|author Thomas Keneally was given tickets to an exhibition of Napoleonic artefacts: uniforms, furniture, china, paintings, military decorations, snuff boxes and memorabilia as well as Napoleon= Michael Grothaus|title=Beautiful Shining People|rating=4|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= ''s death mask. He was intrigued as to how the exhibits But fearing something and particularly the mask came having it come to be in Australiapass are two different things. Some pieces in the exhibition had been bought in later but And I'm willing to bet most came from the descendants of the Balcombe familywhat we fear will never happen, who came or we can take steps to the colony in the first half of the nineteenth century, from St Helena via Englandchange it. The result of Keneally's research into the story is ' 'Napoleon's Last IslandBeautiful Shining People''revolves around the question of identity and acceptance. Of what it means to be human. Of what is real and what is artificial, and whether the development of technology is exciting or frightening.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1473625335</amazonuk>191458564X

{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=The Natural Way of ThingsJennifer Saint|authortitle=Charlotte WoodAtalanta

|summary=Yolanda and Verla wake up disorientated. They realise they've been drugged'I was as worthy as any one of them. Yolanda thinks I would get on board that perhaps they are ship, I vowed. I would take my place, not just in some kind the name of mental facility - She knew she the goddess. It was not madfor the sake of my name, but all lunatics thought thattoo. Atalanta'' Princess. Warrior. Lover. Hero. Verla just sits Abandoned at birth for being born a daughter rather than a son, still Atalanta is raised under the protective eye of the goddess Athemis and frozenfashioned into a formidable huntress, waitingone who longs for adventure. And soon enough, two men arrive When the opportunity comes – to reveal their fate. Yolanda and Verlajoin the Argonauts, along with eight other girlsa fierce band of warriors, have been brought descendent from the Gods themselves – Atalanta seizes the chance to a remote farmhouse surrounded by an electrified fence. Their heads are shaved. They are dressed fight in Artemis' name and carve out her own legendary place in uncomfortable, scratchy, Amish-style clotheshistory. They are tied together like What follows is a chain gang. Andwhirlwind of challenges and discovery and through it, like any chain gang, their days are marked with forced labour. Two menAtalanta must remember Artemis' fatal warning: that if she marries, one more cruel than the other, and a so-called nurse are their jailers, not their guardiansit will be her undoing.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1760291870</amazonuk>1472292154

{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Emma GeenAmanthi Harris|title=The Many Selves of Katherine NorthBeautiful Place|rating=3.5|genre=Science Literary Fiction|summary=As Padma, a Bristol-area 'phenomenaut'young Sri Lankan, nineteen-year-old Kit projects herself into has returned to the Villa Hibiscus on the lab-grown bodies southern coast of all sorts of creaturesher home country. She's recently This is a place she spent her formative years. It is not a lot place she was born into, but the one she thinks of time as a fox (appropriate given her nickname) and got particularly close with a vixen named Tomokohome. It's becoming much harder for her How she came to leave the animal world behind be at the end of her 'jumps'. Even after BuckleyVilla, how it became her neuroengineerhome, signals and the machinations that have flowed through her to life ever since she first arrived there provide the ''score'Come home' for this gentle and she resumes yet subtly violent novel. Padma's present fails to escape her original body, she has trouble giving up animal tendencies past and much like territorialismthe musical score of a film, toileting outdoors and raiding binsthat strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the Villa.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1408858436</amazonuk>1784631930

{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Sjon and Victoria Cribb (translator)178563335X|title=Moonstone: The Boy Who Never WasSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor

|summary=SixteenWhen we first meet Rachel Bird she's a trainee vicar, sitting in on a PCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the children up. Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-old Mani Stein Hannah and her elder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Thelma's daughter- Moonstone in translation - existed on the fringes of societylaw won't let her see her grandson. He lived in Reykjavik and in 1918 the night sky (and the day for that matter) was lit by the eruptions of Holthorpe, on the Katla volcano. The Great War was ragingNorfolk coast, or possibly grinding onis a lovely place, but life Rachel is struggling to develop a real bond with the parish - and she's in awe of the capital carried on much as usual. There were shortagesvicar, such as coalGail, but there was then she's been doing the new fashion and it was job for the movies that Mani lived, seeing every production he could, sometimes several timesmore than thirty years. He dreamed about Rachel and Christopher hoped that a walk on the films, changing beach would do them to suit his tastes, working his own life into the plotssome good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed. But there was another reason why Mani was a misfit: Mani was gay and frequently made a living as a sex workerAnd then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1473613132</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Conor O'Callaghan1398515388|title=Nothing on EarthThe Boy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)

|genre=Literary General Fiction|summary=On a sweltering night First of all, it was the earthquake, deep in what is a blisteringly hot summer a young girl hammers at a man's door the ocean floor, which created the tsunami and when let into this, in turn, caused the house tells him that her father has disappeared ''too''nuclear meltdown. The result was complete and utter devastation. Gradually her story emergesThe deaths were uncountable, of a home on one of those estates so common in Ireland after and the collapse loss of the Celtic Tiger with only the occasional house occupied and others only part builtlivelihoods was widespread. It could be any one of hundreds of Irish towns at The fact that time and its main feature is many pets were separated from their owners came far down the lack list of hope that it will never be any betterpriorities but - six months after the tsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. Our narrator tells her story, much, He wasn't a dog person but the convenience store owner's comment that he says, as it was told would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to him open his car door and we hear of a life on the edge of poverty, with strange noises in Tamon the night, words written dog jumped in the dust on the windows mirrored by those written in blue ink on her skin.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1781620342</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Per Olov Enquist and Deborah Bragan-Turner (translator)0989715337|title=The Parable BookPapa on the Moon|author=Marco North|rating=3.54

|summary=It's not only springtime when a man's fancies turn to thoughts of love – he can also do it Some frogs had gotten into the well.'' ''Walter stood waist-deep in the autumn fragrant water, naked except for his beaten leather hat. Long strands of his lifetheir eggs wove around him, sticky gray pearls with tadpoles inside them. Two of the dogs leaned over the opening and barked down at the strange noise of the buckets as does he filled them.'' How is that for an opening? The style of this novel in the man involved here. But being a well-known author, form of interconnected short stories goes from succinct and being beholden laconic to silencewistful and musing, can he really put his thoughts turning on paper? It happened a long time agosixpence. And author Marco North, and he only met who has the woman concerned a couple most wonderful turn of timesphrase, but with it being such a powerful event and such a slightly unusual circumstance, what should he do? It takes a notebook of his father's love poems to his mother, that starts as he finds both incomplete and scorched, to give him the green light – the voice from the past that says means to him, 'go for it'. And what we read here is a resulton.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857059912</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Maggie O'FarrellDaisy Hildyard|title=This Must Be the PlaceEmergency

|summary=Maggie OThe summary of this book doesn'Farrell's globe-trotting seventh novel opens in 2010 t come close to explaining what is done with Daniel Sullivanthe premise.|isbn=1913097811}}  {{Frontpage |author=Sally Oliver |title=The Weight of Loss |rating=4 |genre=Literary Fiction |summary= Marianne is grieving. Traumatised after the death of her sister, an American linguistics professor. He lives with his wife Claudetteshe awakes to find strange, a French actress who retreated thick black hairs sprouting from the limelightbones of her spine which steadily increase in size and volume. Her GP, and their two children in diagnosing the odd phenomenon as a remote home physical reaction to her grief, recommends she go to stay at Nede, an experimental new treatment centre in DonegalWales. It was 10 years ago that he first came here Yet something strange is happening to Marianne and met Claudette by chance when her van had the other patients at Nede: a flat tire; he struck up metamorphosis of a conversation with her son Ari and gave the boy tips for dealing with his stutterkind. Now, preparing to fly back to Brooklyn for his father's ninetieth birthday party, heAs Marianne's caught short by a long-lost voice he hears on the radio. It belongs memories threaten to Nicola Janksoverwhelm her, Nede offers her release from this cycle of memory and pain—but only at a former lover he last saw 24 years ago; when he learns terrible price: that she died soon after they were together, he determines to figure out whether he played a role, even if he doesn't like what he findsof identity itself.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0755358805</amazonuk>086154112X }}{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Joanne HarrisNatalia Garcia Freire|title=Different ClassThis World Does Not Belong To Us

|summary= St Oswald's Grammar School For Boys is in crisis. A murdered schoolboyEarly comments on this debut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, a procession of new Head Masters, a(nother) new Head Master, a Crisis Intervention Team and a potential merger delight. I will agree with St Oswald's all female counterpart, Mulberry House. Roy Straitley the first – tremendous is not altogether dismayed at the prospect of delaying his retirement; St Oswaldno understatement – but 's has been his life, man and boy and a crisis delight' is perhaps using the expression in a crisis after all is said and done, isnway I't it? m not familiar with. It's probably his duty I have to stay and right confess my ignorance of the shipSpanish-language literary tradition so forgive my generalisation here. So when From the latest of the new Head Masters and his duo of crisis managers walk into the staff roomlittle I have read (in translation, Straitley canI don't quite believe his old eyes. The new Head is an ex-pupil of St Oswald's; read Spanish) there does seem to be a boy who, in his time at tendency towards the esteemed old School caused such an uproarious scandal that one of fantastical – the Masters ended up in prison! mystical realism. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0385619235</amazonuk>0861541901

{{newreviewFrontpage|author= Bill BeverlyJennifer Saint|title= DodgersElektra|rating= 5|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= Judging a book by its cover can mislead. It can especially mislead if you don't look closely at the cover and are just grabbed by the ''feel'' or ''style'' of the design of the thing. Being misled is not necessarily a bad thing. For reasons best left in the depths of my addled brain, the styling of Dodgers had me thinking 'noir'. I was expecting late fifties, early sixties. If I'd looked closer, I'd have seen that it is much more contemporary than that. Then again…|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1843448572</amazonuk>}}{{newreview|author=Alice Adams|title=Invincible Summer|rating=3.54

|summary=As Alice Adams's debut novel opens in the summer of 1995, four university friends are lounging on Bristol's Brandon Hill, drinking and contemplating what the future holds. ThereElektra's Eva Andrews, raised in Sussex by a single father; siblings Sylvie and Lucien Marchant, neglected by their alcoholic mother; and Benedict Waverley, a rich kid whose parents have a holiday home on Corfu. Eva has a crush on Lucien, while Benedict is besotted with Eva.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1509814701</amazonuk>}}{{newreview|author= Birgul Oguz|title= Hah|rating= 3|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= I was interested to receive this book for review as I knew it was written in a modern, interesting style, being effectively a collection of short stories, but appearing more in a novel structure. I was, however, rather disappointed with Jennifer Saint tells the book. Whilst it does have some very fine examples story of prose writing within the stories, I felt disconnected from the narrator, three women who is live in the daughter heavily male dominated world of a recently deceased man who was involved in a Turkish military coup in 1980. There is therefore a lot of examples of the narrator relating the conversations they had shared regarding ''revolution'', and the way this had affected the daughter's upbringing and childhoodAncient Greece. Another 'story' then delves into a seemingly disconnected wander through the townCassandra, whereby we see the narrator working at gutting fishClytemnestra, and talking about a man she finds repulsive, but who appears to be in love with her. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>9462380740</amazonuk>}}{{newreview|author=Chuck Palahniuk|title=Make Something Up|rating=5|genre=Short Stories |summary=What Elektra are we to make of that subtitle-seeming writing on the front cover – ''stories you can't unread''? Does that not apply to all good fiction? Clearly it is here due to the reputation of the author, and the baggage his name brings to the page. We'd expect a dramatic approach from anything Palahniuk writes, and an added frisson, an extra layer, from which we might be forced to shrink back. But a lot of the contents don't quite go that far. Yes, things are dramatic, when society starts attaching defibrillators to itself, to create the perfect, simple, care- (''The Price is Right''-, and Kardashian-) free happiness. A man buys a horse for his daughter – but boy is it the wrong horse to buy. A man falls bit players in love – yes, sometimes the plot summaries of these stories really are better off for being short (speaking of which, don't turn to the three-page entrant here as a taster, it'll put you off by dint of being, almost uniquely here, a nothing story). A call centre worker can't convince people he's on the level and even in their country – until someone starts riffing back to him. A housing estate report conveys bad regulation violations, but not as bad as the happenings at a 'Burning Man'-styled festival, in a very clever couple of tales. But many too are the instances where that extra step has been taken.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099587688</amazonuk>}}{{newreview|author= Aliya Whiteley|title= The Arrival of Missives|rating= 4.5|genre= Literary Fiction|summary=In the aftermath of the Great Trojan War, Shirley Fearn dreams of challenging the conventions of rural England, where life is as unchanging as the seasons. The scarred veteran Mr Tiller, left disfigured by an impossible accident on Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that often the battlefields of France, brings with him a message: part prophecy, part warning. As Shirley's village prepares for silent women have the annual May Day celebrations, where a new queen will be crowned most compelling stories and the future reborn, she must choose between change and renewal – will the missives Mr Tiller brings prevent her mastering her identity?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907389377</amazonuk>}}{{newreview|author= P K Lynch|title= Armadillos|rating= 4most extreme furies.5|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= Aggie is one of Texas' downtrodden. Dirt poor and abused. ''a 'sub' from a 'sub' family'' … ''Her father and brother enact that 'sub'-ness on her, week in, week out.'' ''She has only the vaguest notion that there is something wrong with the abuse she endures..''|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>178507959X</amazonuk>1472273915

{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Tarjei Vesaas, Torbjorn Stoverud and Michael Barnes (translators)8409290103|title=The BirdsIf Only|author=Matthew Tree

|genre=General Literary Fiction|summary=We're somewhere in rural ScandinaviaTwenty-one-year-old Malcolm Lowry had been sent abroad by his father, cotton-broker AO Lowry: he asked his accountant, Mr Patrick, on to ensure that the shores of a large lake, but in a community relying young man got on board the farmland that is scattered in amongst the woods. Our chief concerns are brother boat and sister – Mattis and Hegethereafter Patrick was to send him a monthly allowance. He, Mattis, is what Patrick sent the other villagers call 'simple' – sure, he knows money regularly and a few things correspondence - of sorts - sprang up between the two although we hear more about life, and what makes a clever person and what makes a well-turned phrase, and how to talk Lowry has to girls and when to not stare at them, but he is definitely not quite as the others would wishsay than Patrick. Those others include It wasn't that Lowry senior didn't care for his sisterson, who is seeing her life waste away it was that he didn't care to have him in listening this country where he might be a danger to his chatter, knitting jumpers to make ends meet, wife and regretting in her own small way what has got her to middle-age in this situationother children. But from this galling introduction, you should take away The alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to get the bigger picture – even if there is no young man on his way out, the life in this countryside is brilliantly conveyed, full of sun as well as shade, of labour and of idleness, and wit and charm as much as hardship. I defy you to read this and think this corner of Scandinavia bleak.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0914671200</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Nicola BarkerAntoine Laurain, Le Sonneur and Jane Aitken (translator)|title=The Cauliflower®Red is My Heart|rating=43.5

|summary=Nicola Barker teasingly refers to herself as [[:Category:Antoine Laurain|Antoine Laurain]] books have always been black and white and read in my house. And so was this one, although I could have spelled that more accurately – this one was, and is, black and white and red. Yes, he has an artistic collaborator on this bookpiece, and I think it's 'collagist', piecing together diverse documents possible to create a picture of Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886), a largely illiterate guru who attracted followers to his intense worship say not one page lacks the influence of the goddess Kalisome striking visual ideas. His life story is a sticky mass of contradictions:|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1785150669</amazonuk>1913547183

{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn= Toni Morrison B098FFFBH9|title= God Help the ChildSnowcub|author=Graham Fulbright|rating= 4.5|genre= Literary Fiction|summary=A truly complex Fourteen-year-old Rachel is her school's animal rights project leader and she and emotionally raw portrayal, that seeks her friend are producing a competition entry to cover issues highlight the way in which human beings exploit the animal world. She gets a great deal of racesupport from her family: father Pip Harrison, a lecturer at Imperial College, genderLondon, mother Kate and paedophiliaher twin, Nick. A slim volume Kate runs the family business, yesa toy shop called Cornucopia in Putney, but one that which is powerful in its punchwhere we'll meet Rachel's main (if unsuspected) source of information: five soft toys.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099555921</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Jesus Carrasco and Margaret Jull Costa (translator)Yancey Williams|title=Out Crosshairs of the Devil|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Award-winning crime writer Eddie Jablonski is getting on in years and, despite his strenuous objections and thanks to his daughter, finds himself living - or imprisoned, from Eddie's point of view - in room 315 of the OpenGarden of Eden nursing home, with only a trusty nursing aide, Jenkins, for palatable company. Nothing is going to keep Eddie from his stock-in-trade of writing though, so here, for his readers, are his wanderings through his life's work.|isbn=0986031658}} {{Frontpage|isbn=0008421714|title=Mrs March|author=Virginia Feito|rating=34.5

|summary=Meet The problem began just after the boypublication of George March's most successful novel to date. We never learn his name – in fact we learn very little in this book, such as where or when Everyone but Mrs March (we are, and why. What we do know is that he has left home. We get her first name only on the feeling his father is too handy with punishment, but that can't last page) seemed to either be the only reason for him first hiding out in an olive grove overnight, then fleeing across the plains surrounding his family's villagereading it or had already done so. Especially as he's chosen one of the most awkward, attritional times Every day Mrs March went to cross said plains – the land is in the middle of a horrendous drought. When he tries local patisserie to steal his first provisions from an aged goatherdbuy olive bread but on that particular morning, howeverPatricia asked, he finds some light and liquidas she was wrapping the bread, ''but is isn't this substitute father figure ever going to be enough to help the boy flee what first time he needs to?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>009958218X</amazonuk>}}{{newreview|author=Philip Dent|title=Mutable Passions: Charlotte Bronte: A Disquieting Affair|rating=3|genre=Historical Fiction |summary=As the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë's birth approaches, it is based a perfect time for reading about her. Philip Dentcharacter on you?''s second novel chooses a lesser known period of her life to dramatize. All her siblings are now dead; during a hard winter when she is unable to visit her best friend She mentioned that Johanna, Ellen Nussey, Charlotte spends her time finishing ''Villette'the principal character had ', her final novel. The family servant, Tabby, ribs Charlotte about her romantic prospects – including Patrick Brontëmannerisms's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. Charlotte responds with indignation: 'I could no more kiss the lips of a man with a beard as big as rooks' nests than I could yours, Tabby.'|amazonuk=<amazonuk>178589093X</amazonuk>}}{{newreview|author=Miroslav Penkov|title=Stork Mountain|rating=4|genre=General Fiction|summary=A young man, his grandfather and a stork with a broken wing are the ''company of rebels'' at the heart of Perhaps this lively tale set in Bulgaria's Strandja Mountains. The storks that return to the mountains each spring are migrantswould not have mattered, like so many of except for the people fact that have passed through the region over Johanna is the centuries. The young narrator is also in transit, born in Bulgaria, but raised and educated in America. The story opens with his return to Bulgaria in search whore of his grandfather who has broken off contact with his family in America. But the young manNantes - ''s motives are not as clear cut as first appears.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1473622182</amazonuk>}}{{newreview|author= Elisa Albert|title= After Birth|rating= 4|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= This book is definitely not for anyone who has a rosy picture of new motherhood. In factweak, I would probably avoid it if you are contemplating giving birth in the near future. For any woman who has ever struggled through the first few months of motherhoodplain, howeverdetestable, or a partner of somebody who is going through itpathetic, it is an astounding and revelatory read. Never before have I read a more searingunloved, honest and open discussion of the emotional upheaval a woman often goes through after giving birthunloveable wretch.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>009959014X</amazonuk>''