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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]==Literary fiction==__NOTOC__{{newreview|author=Salman Rushdie|title=Luka and the Fire of Life|rating=4|genre=Confident Readers|summary=Back in 1990, Salman Rushdie followed up his controversial 'Satanic Verses' with a book dedicated to his then nine year old son, Zafar, called 'Haroun and the Sea of Stories'. Now, his second son, Milan, finally gets a book of his own, although he had to wait until he was 13 for his father to get around to it. 'Luka and the Fire of Life' is very much a follow up to 'Haroun' and it is certainly helpful, although not necessary, if you have read that book as many of the events in the first book are referred to here.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099555328</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Manuel de Lope and John Cullen (Translator)Matthew Tree|title=The Wrong Blood|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Although de Lope has written over a dozen novels, this is the first to be translated into English. The cover is as pretty as a picture and screams 'Spanish.We' So far, so good. But I have to admit that on the whole most of the European novels I've read over the last year or so, have fallen short of the mark for me. Will this one prove to be different?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099551853</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Aravind Adiga|title=Last Man In Towerll Never Know
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Following a Man Booker winning book like [[The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga|The White Tiger]] is always going Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, a daunting challenge for drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any writer, let alone one when that book was the author's first novelof his artistic passions all failed miserably and who had endless crises of self confidence. In 'Last Man in Tower' Adiga perhaps sensibly turns So Tim applied himself to a proven structure that allows his story-telling skills to flourish. Gone are clever structural ideasstudies, like 'The White Tiger's' letter format cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and instead we get a straightforward engaging story set in modern day Mumbai where a rich builder is seeking to force residents of an old apartment block to sell their flats to enable redevelopmenthimself high but achievable ambitions.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1848875169</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Christos TsiolkasB0C47LV1PC|title=LoadedFragility|author=Mosby Woods|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ari is just nineteen, of Greek descent but living in Melbourne with his family. HeCan you make a ''Yo birthing person''s gayjoke? And if you could, unemployed and not in education. He wants to get away from is the traditional Greek life of his parents and their friends but has no idea how to do question should you make it. He falls back on ? Or is the only life that he knows: clubsquestion if you did, parties, anonymous sex, a cocktail of drugs and alcohol. But will even this be enough to dull the painwould it land? Told vividly in The catch is that the first person and sexually explicit it's a short book – a novella – which grabs you and has answer for both could well be.... no intention of letting you go until it spits you out at the other end.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099757710</amazonuk>}}
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Julie MyersonMosby Woods|title=ThenA Whirly Man Loses His Turn
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The front cover West isn't the dominant force it once was. Nobody in the West is graphic and tellingquite sure how to mend this or even if mending it is the best course of action. Governments are flailing. A frozen London with its skyscrapers emitting black smoke and random fires across war here, a desolate landscapepush for climate action there. As early as the second paragraph we see A feeling that something nobody is wrongin actual charge. Imagine then, something cataclysmic has happened there was a man with precognition. Imagine the lines ''People are eating the birds ... fighting over strategic advantage in this asset; a handful man who can tell you what will happen given any set of scorched sparrowscircumstances.'' The story is told in the first person by the central character which gives it immediacy and draws That man would be valuable, right? Perhaps the reader straight most valuable asset inhistory.Imagine then, that this man loses this ability. What would governments do to get it back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0224093754</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|isbn=0571379559|title=WhateverThe House of Broken Bricks|author=Michel HouellebecqFiona Williams|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Interviewed by BBC film critic Mark Kermode shortly before his 60th birthday''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, Woody Allen gave she lives in the house on the bequiffed one this somewhat startling piece riverbank, built of advicebroken bricks. Insubstantial as it might look, it''You get s stood the passage of time, storms and floods. Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the delivery rounds - and to my agebring in sufficient money. They have twin boys - Sonny and Max, you realise that when you die you're really not losing that muchthe rainbow twins. Sonny's colouring reflects his mother' Those words sprang to mind while reading ''Whatevers Jamaican heritage. Max takes after his father. People don't believe that they're related, first novel by Michel Houellebecq. The main protagonist in much less twins and there's an assumption when Max is out with his mother that she'Whatever'' may be only half the age of the film director, but the outlook on life shared by both men seems strikingly similars his nanny. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687845</amazonuk>
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Claire North
|title=House of Odysseus
|rating=5
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= ''What could matter more than love?''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Carlos AlbaKay Chronister|title=The Songs of Manolo EscobarDesert Creatures|rating=4|genre=Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary=Antonio With a world that is the secondbecoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, post-born son to Spanish parents, living in Glasgowapocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. He's embarrassed to be anything other than ScottishWhether it is a robotic takeover, and he tries everything to hide his family background from friends at schoola world devoid of water or a nuclear holocaust, refusing this genre is a way for humans to speak Spanish with his parents and struggling to forge his own identity in lifecathartically experience their most existential fears. In his middle age, he suddenly finds his life falling apart around him as his marriage begins to fail and his increasingly frail father becomes obsessed with ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a new work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the proper burial of his parents back in Spainfears that exist for humanity today. Antonio continues to play It is a rather emotionally distant part in his parents' lives, but then finds himself drawn further and further into the truth about his father's past which, ultimately, leads him shocking novel that still manages to question his own past and the path his future might takefind hope.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>184697173X</amazonuk>1803364998
}}
{{newreviewfrontpage|isbn=1803363002|author=Ann PatchettEric LaRocca|title=State of WonderThe Trees Grew Because I Bled There|rating=5|genre=Literary FictionHorror|summary=Anders Eckman Horror taps into something primeval within us. It is dead. The news has been delivered in the form an aerogram – remember those blue paper-cum-envelope things we used as a way to use to write to foreign pen-pals when the notion of befriending reflect our darkest emotions and how we as humans react and process them. Most horror fiction feature a person you'd never met in 'Big Bad'', whether that is a home invader, a monster or a foreign country still seemed exotic? This flimsy piece ghost, it usually something tangible and, by the end of paper was delivered to Eckmanthe story, beatable. Eric LaRocca's employers''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. After all it was them that had sent him down to It is a collection of short stories more interested in the Brazilian Amazon to find the enigmatic and evasive Dr Annik Swensonhorrors of illness, grief and more precisely find out exactly how she was getting on with developing the drug humiliation. Horrors that was costing the firm so much of their research budgetlinger and are harder to defeat than any ''Big Bad''.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408818590</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Jean RhysMadelaine Lucas|title=Wide Sargasso SeaThirst for Salt
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In the late eighteen thirties the father of an English gentleman conspires to marry him off to a landed Jamaican Creole as a means of giving his second son an estate and stopping him being a burden on the family. Written in the nineteen sixties, 'Wide Sargasso Sea' was inspired by Rochester's first wife in ''Jane Eyre''Love, and is an impressionistic, hallucinatory account of that womanI's alienation and subsequent descent into madness that can be d read as a prequel , was supposed to the Bronte novel. The book covers Antoinette's childhood in Jamaica and her honeymoon on be a small Caribbean island with her new husband light and their domestic servantsweightless feeling, and the point of view shifts between Antoinette and her husband.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241951550</amazonuk>}}but I had always longed for gravity''
}}
{{Frontpage
|author= Michael Grothaus
|title=Beautiful Shining People
|rating=4
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= ''But fearing something and having it come to pass are two different things. And I'm willing to bet most of what we fear will never happen, or we can take steps to change it.''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Jenn AshworthJennifer Saint|title=Cold LightAtalanta
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''Cold Light'' is the story I was as worthy as any one of three teenage girls who become involved in a predatory adult worldthem. As the story opens we're looking back I would get on what happened from a decade later and we know board that one of the girlsship, ChloëI vowed. I would take my place, died not just in a Valentine's Day suicide pactthe name of the goddess. The town council has finally decided on a memorial to Chloë – it's to be a summerhouse at It was for the side sake of the pond where she drownedmy name, although ittoo. Atalanta's difficult to understand quite why anyone would want to sit there. The ground-breaking ceremony is being televised when it becomes obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. But Lola, our narrator, knows that they've found a body. She also knows who it is.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444721445</amazonuk>}}
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Jennifer EganAmanthi Harris|title=A Visit From the Goon SquadBeautiful Place
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Apparently there's a saying that 'time's Padma, a goon' - noyoung Sri Lankan, I'd never heard of it and has returned to be fair, neither had the first character to whom it is said in Jennifer Egan's 'A Visit from Villa Hibiscus on the Goon Squad', but together with a pair southern coast of epigraphs from Proust, it's clear that time her home country. This is very definitely what is being explored herea place she spent her formative years. Egan's subject area It is all loosely based around not a place she was born into, but the music worldone she thinks of as home. Her central character, if one can How she came to be said to existat the Villa, is Bennie Salazarhow it became her home, a music mogul who we encounter both directly and tangentially at various stages of his up and down career. the machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the ''score'Goon Squad'for this gentle and yet subtly violent novel. Padma' is also s present fails to escape her past and much like the title musical score of an Elvis Costello tracka film, continuing that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the music theme as Egan uses the music industry as a lens to examine timeVilla.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1849010331</amazonuk>1784631930
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Lauren Liebenberg178563335X|title=The West Rand Jive Cats Boxing ClubSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor|rating=45
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Best friends Tommy When we first meet Rachel Bird she's a trainee vicar, sitting in on a PCC meeting and Chris are 12 years wondering why they're held when you need to pick the children up. Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-oldHannah and her elder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Thelma's daughter-in-law won't let her see her grandson. It Holthorpe, on the Norfolk coast, is 1958 a lovely place, but Rachel is struggling to develop a real bond with the parish - and they are growing up she's in a small mining town near Johannesburgawe of the vicar, Gail, South Africabut then she's been doing the job for more than thirty years. They are learning to box Rachel and to dance to rock and roll musicChristopher hoped that a walk on the beach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed. And then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844084892</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=James Frey1398515388|title=The Final Testament of Boy and the Holy BibleDog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)|rating=34.5|genre=Literary General Fiction|summary=The Rabbis say that First of all , it was the earthquake, deep in the signs are there from ocean floor, which created the birth of Ben Zion Avrohom that he is tsunami and this, in turn, caused the Messiahnuclear meltdown. That's a lot of anyone to cope with The result was complete andutter devastation. The deaths were uncountable, like Jesus, there's much and the loss of Ben's early life that is untold herelivelihoods was widespread. When he is involved in an horrific accident on a building site The fact that he miraculously survives, albeit with terrible scaring, many pets were separated from their owners came far down the list of priorities but - six months after the prophecies appear to be truetsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. He develops wasn't a form of epilepsy during which dog person but the convenience store owner's comment that he appears would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to speak to God. He is fluent in ancient languages despite never learning them, knows all open his car door and Tamon the Holy books by heart and yet distains all forms of religion, instead spreading his message of love to all who meet him dog jumped in modern day New York.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848543174</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Mirza Waheed0989715337|title=The Collaborator|rating=3|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=The Collaborator of the title is our narrator, a sensitive bookish young man. He is Papa on the son of the headman of a small village in a side valley of the Kashmir. The heritage of the people is that of nomads. The village has been settled for less than a generation. Everything they have has been built by the sheer hard graft of the people themselves… including the recently completed mosque.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918954</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewMoon|author=Alan Warner|title=The Stars in the Bright SkyMarco North
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In 1999, Alan Warner introduced us to a wonderful set of characters in 'The Sopranos' when a school choir from a backwater town in Scotland went on a trip to Some frogs had gotten into the big city. Much debauchery ensuedwell. 'The Stars in the Bright Sky' once again reunites most of the original gang and there is no need to have read the first book to pick up on the diverse characters. Now though, they've grown up (or at least got older!) and are gathered at Gatwick Airport to set off on a girls' holiday.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>009946182X</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Elia Barcelo and David Frye (Translator)|title=The Goldsmith's Secret|rating=3.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary='The Goldsmith's Secret' has a wonderfully romantic beginning; alone on a snowy night in New York, the craftsman is puzzling over how to tell his story, and how to separate reality from the overwhelming memories in his mind.
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Andrew MillerDaisy Hildyard|title=PureEmergency
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I've read Miller's ''Oxygen'' and ''The Optimists'summary of this book doesn' so I was looking forward t come close to reading this novel. The story opens in the opulence of the Palace of Versailles. We are given vivid descriptions of both the scale of the palace and its grandeur. Jean-Baptiste Baratte, the young engineer, seems completely over-awed by the whole occasion. Even although he's not entirely sure explaining what is expected of him in Paris, he accepts. He needs to eat, after alldone with the premise.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1444724258</amazonuk>1913097811}}
{{newreviewFrontpage |author=Anne EnrightSally Oliver |title=The Forgotten WaltzWeight 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 a 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=Literary Fiction
|summary=Anne Enright's 2007 Booker prize winning [[The Gathering by Anne Enright|The Gathering]] addressed the gloomy subjects of the three D's; deathEarly comments on this debut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, depression and dysfunctional familiesa delight. Her latest book, I will agree with the first – tremendous is no understatement – but 'a delight'The Forgotten Waltz'', set is perhaps using the expression in Dublin in 2009, sees her turning her attentions to a love affairway I'm not familiar with. A more uplifting subject you might think. Well only up to a point. The affair in question you see is that of her narrator, Gina, who is already married I have to the generally good, if undynamic, Connor, while on the other end, the subject confess my ignorance of the affair is Spanish-language literary tradition so forgive my generalisation here. From the older, Seánlittle I have read (in translation, also married and neighbour of Gina's sister. In case your moral compass isnI don't stretched quite enough by this, Seán and his wife Aileen, also have read Spanish) there does seem to be a young daughter who suffers from epilepsytendency towards the fantastical – the mystical realism.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>022408903X</amazonuk>0861541901
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Leila AboulelaJennifer Saint|title=Lyrics AlleyElektra
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The front cover photograph is eye-catching and lovely and has the appeal of saying to potential readers - read me. The book's title is both poetic and enigmatic. I was keen to get reading but before I could, IElektra'm faced with a page listing by Jennifer Saint tells the ''Principal Characters'' and another page setting out story of three women who live in the Abuzeid family treeheavily male dominated world of Ancient Greece. It did put me off slightlyCassandra, I have to admit. I tend to think that with a modernClytemnestra, average-paged work and Elektra are all bit players in the story of fiction a list of characters is well, a list too farthe Trojan War. So, yes, for Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that often the silent women have the first couple of chapters I was constantly flicking back most compelling stories and forth to remind myself who everyone was. Not so good for those lazy readers out there, I'm thinkingthe most extreme furies.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0297860097</amazonuk>1472273915
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Shehan Karunatilaka8409290103|title=ChinamanIf Only|author=Matthew Tree|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=After the 1996 World CupTwenty-one-year-old Malcolm Lowry had been sent abroad by his father, cotton-broker AO Lowry: he asked his accountant, Mr Patrick, dying sports journalist WG Karunasena decides to ensure that the world needs 'young man got on board the boat and thereafter Patrick was to send him a half decent documentary on Sri Lankan cricket'monthly allowance. He sets out to make Patrick sent the said documentary, focusing on money regularly and a correspondence - of sorts - sprang up between the mysterious Pradeep Mathewtwo although we hear more about what Lowry has to say than Patrick. It wasn't that Lowry senior didn't care for his son, the 1980it was that he didn's spin bowler t care to have him in this country where he considers might be a danger to have been his country's greatest ever playerwife and other children. But Mathew disappeared some time ago and everywhere Karunasena turns he is faced with more complications as he tries The alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to find out more get the young man on what happened to him…|amazonuk=<amazonuk>022409145X</amazonuk>his way.
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Tessa HadleyAntoine Laurain, Le Sonneur and Jane Aitken (translator)|title=The London TrainRed is My Heart|rating=3.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Part one focuses on Paul - a rather self obsessed [[:Category:Antoine Laurain|Antoine Laurain]] books have always been black and white and aimless character, who is less than honest with his family, using various friends to cover up his movementsread in my house. He has several daughtersAnd so was this one, and on learning although I could have spelled that more accurately – this one was, and is having problems, goes to visit her in London - black and ends up staying with her, for several weeks, leaving both his (second) wife, white and the mother of this daughter (first wife), completely in the dark as to what is happeningred. Initially we feel that he is acting in a protective manner towards his daughter, who is struggling to come to terms with her pregnancy - but in fact his motives are far less altruisticYes, thereby alienating the reader from his tale. The squalor in which her daughter is living, would appal most parents - yet he seems to take it all in his stridehas an artistic collaborator on this piece, and attempts I think it's possible to join say not one page lacks the hippy-style commune - yet more irritation with this deeply flawed character therefore emergesinfluence of some striking visual ideas.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0224090976</amazonuk>1913547183
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Emma HendersonB098FFFBH9|title=Grace Williams Says it LoudSnowcub|author=Graham Fulbright|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Grace, aged eleven, Fourteen-year-old Rachel is sent her school's animal rights project leader and she and her friend are producing a competition entry to highlight the Briar Mental Institute as her parents can no longer cope with her careway in which human beings exploit the animal world. She is befriended there by gets a great deal of support from her family: father Pip Harrison, a young boylecturer at Imperial College, DanielLondon, who is epileptic mother Kate and also has no arms after a terrible accidenther twin, Nick. Together we see Kate runs the horrors of life family business, a toy shop called Cornucopia in the BriarPutney, and also their slowly growing love affair with each otherwhich is where we'll meet Rachel's main (if unsuspected) source of information: five soft toys.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>144470401X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Roma TearneYancey Williams|title=The SwimmerCrosshairs of the Devil|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=RiaAward-winning crime writer Eddie Jablonski is getting on in years and, solitarydespite his strenuous objections and thanks to his daughter, middlefinds himself living -aged poetor imprisoned, was idly watching the river one night when she saw a swimmer. It wasnfrom Eddie't just s point of view - in room 315 of the time Garden of day which was unusualEden nursing home, but the river was hardly clean – and then she heard with only a noise downstairstrusty nursing aide, Jenkins, for palatable company. In this remote part of Suffolk it wasn't unusual Nothing is going to leave doors unlocked and the following morning she realised that a loaf keep Eddie from his stock-in-trade of bread had been stolen. It was strange that she didn't really feel fearwriting though, so here, but when the visits and minor thefts continued she waited up to catch the swimmerfor his readers, who stole small amounts of food – and played the piano like an angelare his wanderings through his life's work.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0007301596</amazonuk>0986031658}} {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Tea Obreht0008421714|title=The Tiger's WifeMrs March|author=Virginia Feito
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Téa Obreht's 'The Tigerproblem began just after the publication of George March's Wife' comes with a fair degree of hype from most successful novel to date. Everyone but Mrs March (we know her first name only on the US, and largely it lives up last page) seemed to either be reading it, which is no small achievementor had already done so. The main story is set in Yugoslavia and explores a young doctor Every day Mrs March went to the local patisserie to buy olive bread but on that particular morning, NataliaPatricia asked, seeking for as she was wrapping the truth about her grandfatherbread, ''but isn's death, while on a mission to deliver much needed medical aid to an orphanage in the war-ravaged Balkans. But what sets t this book apart is the intricate weaving of reality with the myths and stories of the region. In particular there are two myths that represent a good chunk of the page count: the story of a tiger who has escaped from captivity after the World War two bombing of Belgrade and who has settled near a remote mountain village where Nataliafirst time he's grandfather is growing up, and who develops based a strange relationship with a deaf-mute girl who becomes known as character on you?'the tiger's wife'; and a mysterious story of She mentioned that Johanna, the principal character had 'Deathless Manher mannerisms' whom the grandfather encounters at various points in his life who appears to have the power to foresee others' death without being able to die himself.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0297859013</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Graham Swift|title=Wish You Were Here|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=I cannot tell you exactly how long after I finished Perhaps this book that I satwould not have mattered, holding it, in stunned silence except for - but it was light when I finished it and dark when I put it down. Some books can do the fact that to you. This Johanna is one the whore of themNantes - ''a weak, plain, detestable, pathetic, unloved, unloveable wretch.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330535838</amazonuk>''
}}