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[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]__NOTOC__
{{Frontpage
|author= Tahi SaihateMatthew Tree|title= Astral SeasonWe'll Never Know|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary= Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, a drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of his artistic passions all failed miserably and who had endless crises of self confidence. So Tim applied himself to his studies, cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and set himself high but achievable ambitions.|isbn= B0CVFXPGP8}}{{Frontpage|isbn=B0C47LV1PC|title=Fragility|author=Mosby Woods|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary= Can you make a ''Yo birthing person'' joke? And if you could, is the question should you make it? Or is the question if you did, would it land? The catch is that the answer for both could well be.... no. ''Fragility'' is set as the city of Portland, Oregon, Beastly Seasoncautiously begins to emerge from the restrictions imposed during the covid pandemic}}{{Frontpage|author=Mosby Woods|title=A Whirly Man Loses His Turn|rating= 34|genre=Literary Fiction|summary= The West isn't the dominant force it once was. Nobody in the West is quite sure how to mend this or even if mending it is the best course of action.Governments are flailing. A war here, a push for climate action there. A feeling that nobody is in actual charge. Imagine then, there was a man with precognition. Imagine the strategic advantage in this asset; a man who can tell you what will happen given any set of circumstances. That man would be valuable, right? Perhaps the most valuable asset in history. Imagine then, that this man loses this ability. What would governments do to get it back?|isbn=B0C9SNG8R1}}{{Frontpage|isbn=0571379559|title=The House of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=''The House of Broken Bricks'' is the story of four people. Tess Hembry's 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's stood the passage of time, storms and floods. Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the delivery rounds - and to bring in sufficient money. They have twin boys - Sonny and Max, the rainbow twins. Sonny's colouring reflects his mother's Jamaican heritage. Max takes after his father. People don't believe that they're related, much less twins and there's an assumption when Max is out with his mother that she's his nanny.}}{{Frontpage|author=Claire North|title=House of Odysseus|rating=5|genre= Literary Fiction |summary= ''What could matter more than love?'' The follow-up to the excellent ''Ithaca'' picks up a few months after where we left off. In the palace of Odysseus, with delicate care Queen Penelope continues to rule without her husband, who sailed to war at Troy and then by divine intervention never returned home. As ever she remains surrounded by suitors vying for the throne of the Western Isles. Having survived – politically and physical – the chaotic storm that Clytemnestra brought to Ithaca's shores, Queen Penelope is on the brink of a fragile peace. One that shatters however with the return of Orestes, King of Mycenae, and his sister Elektra, seeking refuge.|isbn=0356516075}}{{Frontpage|author= Kay Chronister|title= Desert Creatures|rating= 4|genre= Dystopian Fiction|summary= With a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, post-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Whether it is a robotic takeover, a world devoid of water or a nuclear holocaust, this genre is a way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a new work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the fears that exist for humanity today. It is a shocking novel that still manages to find hope.|isbn=1803364998}}{{frontpage|isbn=1803363002|author= Eric LaRocca|title= The Trees Grew Because I Bled There|rating= 5|genre= Horror|summary= Horror 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'', whether that is a home invader, a monster or a ghost, it usually something tangible and, by the end of the story, beatable. Eric LaRocca's ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. It is a collection of short stories more interested in the horrors of illness, grief and humiliation. Horrors that linger and are harder to defeat than any ''Big Bad''.}}{{Frontpage|author=Madelaine Lucas|title=Thirst for Salt|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary= ''Love, I'd read, was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity'' Told from a retrospective view, a young woman unravels the year-long relationship that once defined her. Overlaid with later wisdom, the narrator relives the affair with a man twenty years her senior from its inception – the summer after finishing university – to its sorrowful end the summer after. Set against the backdrop of an isolated Australian coastal town ''Thirst for Salt'' details the 24-year-old narrator's deepening relationship with her older lover, depicting its all-consuming nature, how it changed her perspective on both romantic and familial relationships and how it altered her irrevocably.|isbn=0861546490}}{{Frontpage|author= Michael Grothaus|title=Beautiful Shining People|rating=4
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= We long for our past even though ''But fearing something and having it is a place come to pass are two different things. And I'm willing to which bet most of what we fear will never happen, or we can never returntake steps to change it. Tahi Saihate, in her debut novel ''Astral Season, Beastly Season ''Beautiful Shining People'' illustrates how these rose-tinted glasses often lierevolves around the question of identity and acceptance. Of what it means to be human. Her novel Of what is real and what is a meditation on youth artificial, and how whether the things we do as a teenager can seem intensely important and often life-alteringdevelopment of technology is exciting or frightening.|isbn= 1916277101191458564X
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Jennifer Saint
|title=Atalanta
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''I was as worthy as any one of them. I would get on board that ship, I vowed. I would take my place, not just in the name of the goddess. It was for the sake of my name, too. Atalanta''
Princess. Warrior. Lover. Hero.
Abandoned at birth for being born a daughter rather than a son, Atalanta is raised under the protective eye of the goddess Athemis and fashioned into a formidable huntress, one who longs for adventure. When the opportunity comes – to join the Argonauts, a fierce band of warriors, descendent from the Gods themselves – Atalanta seizes the chance to fight in Artemis' name and carve out her own legendary place in history. What follows is a whirlwind of challenges and discovery and through it, Atalanta must remember Artemis' fatal warning: that if she marries, it will be her undoing.
|isbn=1472292154
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Amanthi Harris
|title=Beautiful Place
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary= Padma, a young Sri Lankan, has returned to the Villa Hibiscus on the southern coast of her home country. This is a place she spent her formative years. It is not a place she was born into, but the one she thinks of as home. How she came to be at the Villa, how it became her home, and the machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the ''score'' for this gentle and yet subtly violent novel. Padma's present fails to escape her past and much like the musical score of a film, that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the Villa.
|isbn=1784631930
}}
{{Frontpage
|authorisbn=Laura Imai Messina178563335X|title=The Phone Box at the End of the WorldSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary= In the northeast of JapanWhen we first meet Rachel Bird she's a trainee vicar, sitting in Inwate Prefecture on a man installed a telephone box in his gardenPCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the children up. ''Inside there is an Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-old blackHannah and her elder brother, telephoneJamie, disconnected, that carries voices into the windwhilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Thelma's daughter-in-law won' It t let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, on the Norfolk coast, is a real lovely place, but Rachel is struggling to develop a necessary place, real bond with the parish - and I am pleased to see she's in awe of the IMPORTANT NOTE that vicar, Gail, but then she's been doing the author attaches to her story, job for more than thirty years. Rachel and Christopher hoped that a walk on the place is not a tourist destination, beach would do them some good - it is a sacred place, a place that must be left to those who really need was stormy but itwas probably what they needed. And then Hannah went missing.|isbn=178658039X
}}
{{Frontpage
|authorisbn=Amin Maalouf1398515388|title=The DisorientedBoy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=First of all, it was the earthquake, deep in the ocean floor, which created the tsunami and this, in turn, caused the nuclear meltdown. The result was complete and utter devastation. The deaths were uncountable, and the loss of livelihoods was widespread. The fact that many pets were separated from their owners came far down the list of priorities but - six months after the tsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. He wasn't a dog person but the convenience store owner's comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his car door and Tamon the dog jumped in.
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{{Frontpage
|isbn=0989715337
|title=Papa on the Moon
|author=Marco North
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary= Adam has lived ''Some frogs had gotten into the well.'' ''Walter stood waist-deep in Paris the fragrant water, naked except for years, speaks French more easily than his native Arabic. In fact he hasn't been back to his homeland for 25 yearsbeaten leather hat. An old friend is dying…or as Adam prefers to think Long strands of their eggs wove around him a former-friend, perhaps not as harsh 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 he filled them.'' How is that for an ex-friendopening? The style of this novel in the form of interconnected short stories goes from succinct and laconic to wistful and musing, or maybeturning on a sixpence. The falling out was a long time agoAnd author Marco North, and Adam's partner who has no idea what it was aboutthe most wonderful turn of phrase, even so she urges him starts as he means 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
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{{Frontpage
|author=Joanne M HarrisDaisy Hildyard|title=A Pocketful Emergency|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=The summary of this book doesn't come close to explaining what is done with the 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, she awakes to find strange, thick black hairs sprouting from the bones of her spine which steadily increase in size and volume. Her GP, diagnosing the odd phenomenon as a physical reaction to her grief, recommends she go to stay at Nede, an experimental new treatment centre in Wales. Yet something strange is happening to Marianne and the other patients at Nede: a metamorphosis of Crowsa kind. As Marianne's memories threaten to overwhelm her, Nede offers her release from this cycle of memory and pain—but only at a terrible price: that of identity itself.|isbn= 086154112X }} {{Frontpage|author=Natalia Garcia Freire|title=This World Does Not Belong To Us
|rating=5
|genre= Confident ReadersLiterary Fiction|summary= Early comments on this debut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, a delight. I have always been of will agree with the mind that once you're above picture-book level and before you get to graphic sex & violence, there first – tremendous 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 Crowsunderstatement – but 'a delight' is clearly aimed at the younger readers as witness the use of perhaps using the middle initial expression in the authora way I's name to differentiate from her adult offersm not familiar with. Ignore that if you I have loved anything from ''Chocolat'' onwards you will know that Harris is mistress to confess my ignorance of the modern fairy taleSpanish-language literary tradition so forgive my generalisation here. This is no different. It is an utter delightFrom the little I have read (in translation, I don't read Spanish) there does seem to be a tendency towards the fantastical – the mystical realism.|isbn=14732221840861541901
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{{Frontpage
|author=Frederic Beigbeder and Frank Wynne (translator)Jennifer Saint|title=A Life Without EndElektra
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I looked at 'Elektra' by Jennifer Saint tells the calendar story of three women who live in the other week, and disappointedly realised I have a birthday this year – I know, yet another oneheavily male dominated world of Ancient Greece. It won't be one of the major numbersCassandra, but the time when I have the same number as Heinz varieties looms on the horizon. And then a few of the big 0-numbersClytemnestra, and if Elektra are all goes well, I'll be an OBE. (Which bit players in the story of course stands for Over Bloody Eightythe Trojan War.) Now if Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that's often the extent of my mid-life crisis, I guess I silent women 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, most compelling stories 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 goingmost extreme furies. But how can he get to not flick the 'final way out' switch, especially when foie gras tastes so nice?|isbn=16428606701472273915
}}
{{Frontpage
|authorisbn= Maryse Condé8409290103|title= The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and IvanaIf Only|author=Matthew Tree|rating= 4.5|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= We live in a postTwenty-one- world: postyear-colonialismold Malcolm Lowry had been sent abroad by his father, postcotton-modernismbroker AO Lowry: he asked his accountant, Mr Patrick, post truth. The list goes to ensure that the young man got onboard the boat and thereafter Patrick was to send him a monthly allowance. There are numerous works that utilise Patrick sent the prefix postmoney regularly and a correspondence - in their categorisation, but perhaps none of sorts - sprang up between the two although we hear more so about what Lowry has to say than Maryse CondéPatrick. In her new novel, It wasn't that Lowry senior didn'The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivanat care for his son, it was that he didn'', Condé writes with fervour about the scars left by colonialism on the countries t care to which it latched itself. Ivan and Ivana are twins born have him in Guadeloupe, this country where he might be a French overseas department. They grow up with intense danger to his wife and passionate feelings for each otherchildren. As they grow up and move overseas, The alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to get the ravages of a post-colonial society drive them apart with tragic consequencesyoung man on his way.|isbn=1642860697
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{{Frontpage
|author= Ukamaka OlisakweAntoine Laurain, Le Sonneur and Jane Aitken (translator)|title= Ogadinma Or, Everything Will Be All RightRed is My Heart|rating= 3.5|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= The new novel by Ukamaka Olisakwe is a look at the trauma [[:Category:Antoine Laurain|Antoine Laurain]] books have always been black and white and heartache of being a woman read in 1980s Nigeriamy house. The title is ''Ogadinma OrAnd so was this one, although I could have spelled that more accurately – this one was, 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 personblack and white and red. This provides a sense of detachment for the reader Yes, he has an artistic collaborator on this piece, and highlights the isolation of Ogadinma. She is exiled from her fatherI think it's home and sent possible 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 escapesay not one page lacks the influence of some striking visual ideas.|isbn=19116481601913547183
}}
{{Frontpage
|authorisbn=Elliot ReedB098FFFBH9|title=A Key to Treehouse LivingSnowcub|author=Graham Fulbright|rating=4.5|genre=General Literary Fiction|summary=This Fourteen-year-old Rachel is the story of her school's animal rights project leader and she and her friend are producing a young boy, William Tyce, who is being raised by his uncle after competition entry to highlight the death of his mother and his father's abandonment. However, it isn't told way in which human beings exploit the usual narrative wayanimal world. Instead, the book is made up She gets a great deal of glossary entriessupport from her family: father Pip Harrison, written by Williama lecturer at Imperial College, as a way of describing certain eventsLondon, situations mother Kate and emotionsher twin, Nick. It Kate runs alphabeticallythe family business, starting with ABSENCEa toy shop called Cornucopia in Putney, then moving to ALPHABETICAL ORDER. As I began to read I did find myself thinking which is where we'what on earth?!' but I soon grew used to the style, and was instead caught up in Williamll meet Rachel's storymain (if unsuspected) source of information: five soft toys.|isbn=1911545418
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{{Frontpage
|author= Karina Sainz Borgo and Elizabeth Bryer (translator)Yancey Williams|title= It Would Be Night in CaracasCrosshairs of the Devil|rating= 4.5|genre= Literary Fiction |summary= ''It Would Be Night Award-winning crime writer Eddie Jablonski is getting on in Caracas'' illuminates the everyday horrors of modern day Venezuela. It begins with the death of Adelaida Falcon's mother years and, despite his strenuous objections and chronicles Adelaidathanks to his daughter, finds himself living - or imprisoned, from Eddie's coming to terms with her new solitude point of view - in this world and her attempts to escape it. Danger stalks room 315 of the shadows andGarden of Eden nursing home, in with only a society where the establishment trusty nursing aide, Jenkins, for palatable company. Nothing is crumblinggoing to keep Eddie from his stock-in-trade of writing though, who can you turn to? so here, for his readers, are his wanderings through his life's work.|isbn=00629368670986031658
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=0008421714
|title=Mrs March
|author=Virginia Feito
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The problem began just after the publication of George March's most successful novel to date. Everyone but Mrs March (we know her first name only on the last page) seemed to either be reading it or had already done so. Every day Mrs March went to the local patisserie to buy olive bread but on that particular morning, Patricia asked, as she was wrapping the bread, ''but isn't this the first time he's based a character on you?'' She mentioned that Johanna, the principal character had 'her mannerisms''. Perhaps this would not have mattered, except for the fact that Johanna is the whore of Nantes - ''a weak, plain, detestable, pathetic, unloved, unloveable wretch.''
}}
