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[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]==Literary fiction==__NOTOC__{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Jami AttenbergMatthew Tree|title=The MiddlesteinsWe'll Never Know|rating=4.5|genre=General Literary Fiction|summary=Edie Middlestein almost has the American dream within her grasp. She trained as a lawyerTimothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, has a husband, a daughter who followed her professional footsteps drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of his artistic passions all failed miserably and a son married to an ambitious wife who provided him with two high-achieving children. There are just two flies in the ointment preventing the dream's arrival: 1had endless crises of self confidence. Edie is so morbidly obese that she has So Tim applied himself to undergo surgery; his studies, cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and 2set himself high but achievable ambitions. this is the moment her husband chooses to leave her. Apart from that…|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1846689325</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8

''Fragility'' is set as the city of Portland, Oregon, cautiously begins to emerge from the restrictions imposed during the covid pandemic}}{{newreviewFrontpage|author= Mikhail Shishkin and Andrew Bromfield (translator)Mosby Woods|title=The Light and the DarkA Whirly Man Loses His Turn|rating=4.5

|summary= Two lovers write letters The West isn't the dominant force it once was. Nobody in the West is quite sure how to each other about their lovemend this or even if mending it is the best course of action. Governments are flailing. A war here, their dreams and their separate lives; lives a push for climate action there. A feeling that they hope will one day merge once again to become onenobody is in actual charge. For Sasha life is the everyday grind with work and demanding loved ones along Imagine then, there was a man with precognition. Imagine the challenges they engenderstrategic advantage in this asset; a man who can tell you what will happen given any set of circumstances. For VolodenkaThat man would be valuable, it's life right? Perhaps the most valuable asset in the Russian army and his eventual posting to Chinahistory. However their love is more complicated than most as more than geography and circumstance stands between them: they're also separated by the decades… manyImagine then, many decadesthat this man loses this ability.What would governments do to get it back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1780871058</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Maggie O'Farrell0571379559|title=Instructions for a HeatwaveThe House of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams

|summary=In London''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 July 1976 the house on the riverbank, built of broken bricks. Insubstantial as it might look, it hadn't rained for monthss stood the passage of time, storms and floods. Gardens Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the delivery rounds - if you could call them that any longer - were thick with aphids and what water there was, which was to be consumed or used for washing, came from a standpipebring in sufficient money. Robert Riordan told his wife, GrettaThey have twin boys - Sonny and Max, that he was going round the corner to buy a newspaperrainbow twins. This was what he did every morning, but this time he didnSonny's colouring reflects his mother't come backs Jamaican heritage. Max takes after his father. The police werenPeople don't interested as the closer believe that they looked the more it was obvious that 're related, much less twins and there was 's an intention to disappearassumption when Max is out with his mother that she's his nanny. Gretta turned to her three adult children for help. But how much help would they - could they - be?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755358783</amazonuk>

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}}{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Jude CookKay Chronister|title=Byron EasyDesert Creatures|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary=Byron Easy 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 30-year-old poet and product world devoid of water or a failed marriage whonuclear holocaust, in turn, has this genre is a way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a failed marriage new work of his ownpost-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the fears that exist for humanity today. He works in It is a shop whilst waiting shocking novel that still manages to be discovered 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 poetway to reflect our darkest emotions and how we as humans react and process them. How did his depression-tinted life reach this point? Once there was hopeMost horror fiction feature a ''Big Bad'', whether that is a home invader, a monster or a ghost, love and many good times it usually something tangible and, as he sits on a train travelling to his motherby the end of the story, beatable. Eric LaRocca's for Christmas with ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. It is a bag full collection of moneyshort stories more interested in the horrors of illness, he reflects grief and ponders while trying humiliation. Horrors that linger and are harder to escape something more tangible and dangerous defeat than the pastany ''Big Bad''.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0434021938</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Andrea EamesMadelaine Lucas|title=The White ShadowThirst for Salt

|summary=''Love, I'd read, was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity''As Told from a general principle I am retrospective view, a little tired of books young woman unravels the year-long relationship that start at 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 endthe summer after. I want to argue Set against the backdrop of an isolated Australian coastal town ''Thirst for a return to good Salt'' details the 24-year-old fashioned narrative where stories start at the beginningnarrator's deepening relationship with her older lover, depicting its all-consuming nature, go how it changed her perspective on until the end, both romantic and familial relationships and then stophow it altered her irrevocably. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099565420</amazonuk>0861546490

''Beautiful 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.|isbn=191458564X}}{{newreviewFrontpage|author=I J KayJennifer Saint|title=Mountains of the MoonAtalanta

|summary=The story starts harshly''I was as worthy as any one of them. I would get on board that ship, with a release from prisonI vowed. I would take my place, a bail hostelnot just in the name of the goddess. It was for the sake of my name, a refuge too. Atalanta'' Princess. Warrior. Lover. Hero. Abandoned at birth for people with mental health problems as being born a better-daughter rather than-nothing-lied-to-be-obtained kind a son, Atalanta is raised under the protective eye of a sanctuary the goddess Athemis and fashioned into a slow easing back into societyformidable huntress, one who longs for adventure. If you can call When the opportunity comes – to join the Argonauts, a housing association flatfierce band of warriors, with 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 decorating voucher whirlwind of challenges and no furniturediscovery and through it, only occasional power and annoying neighbours ''society'Atalanta must remember Artemis'fatal warning: that if she marries, it will be her undoing. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099554739</amazonuk>1472292154

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Jennie RooneyAmanthi Harris|title=Red JoanBeautiful Place|rating=4.5

|summary=It is very obvious where Jennie Rooney Padma, a young Sri Lankan, has taken returned to the idea for Villa Hibiscus on the southern coast of her novel ''Red Joan'' fromhome country. As This is a place she acknowledges fully, it has its origin in the 1999 story of Melita Norwood whose espionage for the Russians wasn't discovered until spent her formative years. It is not a place she was in her late 80sborn into, but while Norwood was a dyed in the wool communist, Rooney offers a more complex back story to her character, Joan. The result is a very different type one she thinks of spy novel than normalas home. Joan How she came to be at the Villa, a widowed grandmotherhow it became her home, is going about and the machinations that have flowed through her day to day life when MI5 come knocking on her door ever since she first arrived there provide the ''score'' for this gentle and yet subtly violent novel. Padma's present fails to ask about escape her past. The narrative switches between their questions to her and her recollections much like the musical score of her time at Cambridge in the late 1930s where communist feelings were, by some, given a more sympathetic ear. When Joan falls for Leofilm, that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the cousin of her Russian born friend Sonya, she gets dragged into a world that is dangerous and morally complexVilla.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701187573</amazonuk>1784631930

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Jason Hinojosa178563335X|title=The Conception of Zachary MuseSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor|rating=45

|summary=Evangeline Muse gives birth to Zachary alone When we first meet Rachel Bird she's a trainee vicar, sitting in her special lagoon… but thaton a PCC meeting and wondering why they's starting at re held when you need to pick the endchildren up. In the beginningHer husband, Christopher, Thomas Greene is a tutor collects six-year-old Hannah and Will Archer her elder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a talented wood carver who both accept employment from Michael Musesobbing parishioner. What they donThelma's daughter-in-law won't realise at that moment let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, on the Norfolk coast, isa lovely place, once they meet his beautiful daughterbut Rachel is struggling to develop a real bond with the parish - and she's in awe of the vicar, EvangelineGail, nothing will ever be but then she's been doing the same again job for any of more than thirty years. Rachel and Christopher hoped that a walk on the beach would do themsome good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed. And then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>9380905440</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Andrew Cowan1398515388|title=Worthless MenThe Boy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)

|genre=Literary General Fiction|summary=If you read a lot First of fiction about World War Oneall, it's tempting to imagine pre-war England as an idyl of peace was the earthquake, deep in the ocean floor, which created the tsunami and innocencethis, in turn, caused the nuclear meltdown. Andrew Cowan's ''Worthless Men'' depicts a much more gritty The result was complete and earthy Englandutter devastation. Set in 1916 in an industrial The deaths were uncountable, and market town, it weaves together several narratives that combine to depict a hard life even before the outbreak loss of warlivelihoods was widespread. In The fact, its easier to imagine that many pets were separated from their owners came far down the lure list of adventure that priorities but - six months after the war initially offered as tsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a change from convenience store. He wasn't a dog person but the harsh realities of life at home, although by the time Cowanconvenience store owner's novel begins, comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his car door and Tamon the grim reality of what is involved has dampened much of this enthusiasmdog jumped in.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>144475940X</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Meike Ziervogel0989715337|title=MagdaPapa on the Moon|author=Marco North

|summary=Meet a woman who, despite praying to remain virginal, ''Some frogs had seven childrengotten into the well. Meet a woman whose mother thought her ''hoity-toity ''Walter stood waist-deep in the fragrant water, and spoiltnaked except for his beaten leather hat. Long strands of their eggs wove around him, sticky gray pearls with tadpoles inside them. Two of the dogs leaned over the opening and who thought she should go to work in a factory barked down at school age to know her place better. Meet a woman the strange noise of whom her oldest daughter would write 'I don't care what Mother saysthe buckets as he filled them. Mother isn't always right. No, she definitely isn't.' All three women are,  How is that for an opening? The style of this novel in the form of course, one interconnected short stories goes from succinct and laconic to wistful and the samemusing, and they're Magda Goebbelsturning on a sixpence. And author Marco North, the woman who epitomised more than anyone has the Nazi wifemost wonderful turn of phrase, starts as he means to go on.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907773401</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Shani BoianjiuDaisy Hildyard|title=The People of Forever are not AfraidEmergency

|summary=Yael, Lea and Avishag go through their final years at high school in a little Israeli town on the Lebanese border and then on to the inevitable: the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Gender is immaterial, all Israeli citizens must serve at least two years and for these girls the moment arrives after graduation. YaelThe summary of this book doesn's posting seems futile as she guards a training base against marauding lads, sneaking across the border t come close to pinch perfume from pockets rather than pose any real security threat. Lea's assignment on a border checkpoint searching the daily line of immigrant workers explaining what is riddled done with routine. Avishag joins up with her own demons, her brother Dan having died after his national service. She knows how it happened but continues to struggle with why; something she must handle alonethe premise. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1781090092</amazonuk>1913097811}}

{{newreviewFrontpage |author=Barbara PymSally Oliver |title=A Glass The Weight of BlessingsLoss |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

|summary=Wilmet Forsyth is a married womanEarly comments on this debut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, childless and living a life of leisuredelight. She and her friend Rowena met their husbands - both Majors - in Italy, where they served as Wrens during I will agree with the war. Rowena now has three children and her husband David might just be developing first – tremendous is no understatement – but 'a wandering eye. Wilmetdelight's husband, Rodney, is still ''Noddy'perhaps using the expression in a way I' to his mother m not familiar with whom they live. Unburdened by children or domestic responsibility Wilmet lunches or shops and becomes involved in the social life I have to confess my ignorance of the local church, St Luke'sSpanish-language literary tradition so forgive my generalisation here. But it's her relationship with PiersFrom the little I have read (in translation, RowenaI don's somewhat wayward brother, which might pose t read Spanish) there does seem to be a tendency towards the fantastical – the biggest threat to her comfortable, if rather boring existencemystical realism.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1844085805</amazonuk>0861541901

 {{newreview|author=Toni Jordan|title=Nine Days|rating=5|genre=General Fiction|summary=Christopher 'Kip' Westaway lives in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia with mother Jean, sister Connie and his twin, Francis. Kip's mother considers him a layabout who doesn't deserve the special privileges of his educationally elite brother and so he works at the big house next door for the Hustings, caring for their horses. One day Mr Husting presents Kip with a shilling; their little secret. As its 1939, that's a fair amount of money so Kip hides it away, not realising how special that coin will become as the decades pass.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444763555</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Sarah Butler|title=Ten Things I've Learnt About Love|rating=5|genre=General Fiction|summary=Alice returns home to spend time with her dying father. She's been travelling in Mongolia, finding temporary escape from the issues that had haunted her life in London but now, on her return, events bring the pain she thought was behind her into sharp focus. Meanwhile Daniel is an elderly vagrant who calls the streets of London home. He seeks his lost child, leaving a trail of random items across the city in the hope of reunion like someone occupying a verse of ''Eleanor Rigby''. Disparate lives, seeking love and acceptance in a world that seems to exclude it.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1447222490</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Yan LiankeJennifer Saint|title=Lenin's KissesElektra|rating=4.5

|summary=Yan Lianke's 2004 novel, ''Lenin's Kisses'Elektra', newly and beautifully translated by Carlos Rojas, is a rare and fascinating example, not just Jennifer Saint tells the story of Chinese fiction from a writer living and working three women who live in Chinathe heavily male dominated world of Ancient Greece. Cassandra, but also a book that has won literary awards (the prestigious Chinese ''Lao She Literary Award'')Clytemnestra, now available and Elektra are all bit players in English. In many respects, the fact that this book won such a literary prize is somewhat surprising - not I hasten to add because story of any lack of quality - but because Lianke, who has previously sailed too close to the political wind for Chinese censors, here presents a not altogether flattering view of Chinese politicsTrojan War. It's a book Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that is literary with a capital L, and while often the core of silent women have the plot is relatively simple, what makes this book so interesting is the structure most compelling stories and way the story is toldmost extreme furies.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701188073</amazonuk>1472273915

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Jan-Philipp Sendker8409290103|title=The Art of Hearing HeartbeatsIf Only|author=Matthew Tree

|summary=Sendker is GermanTwenty-born (Hamburg 1960) and worked as American correspondent for ''Stern'' (1990 one-year-old Malcolm Lowry had been sent abroad by his father, cotton-broker AO Lowry: he asked his accountant, Mr Patrick, to 95) ensure that the young man got on board the boat and then as its Asian correspondent from '95 thereafter Patrick was to '99send him a monthly allowance. He now lives in Berlin. This probably gives him enough global insight to write about Patrick sent the money regularly and a UScorrespondence - of sorts -born high flyer with an Asian heritage heading off sprang up between the two although we hear more about what Lowry has to Burma to find out the truth of her father's disappearancesay than Patrick. It probably also gives wasn't that Lowry senior didn't care for his son, it was that he didn't care to have him the language skills in this country where he might be a danger to do it in English without recourse his wife and other children. The alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to a translatorget the young man on his way.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184697240X</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=George Bernard ShawAntoine Laurain, Le Sonneur and Jane Aitken (translator)|title=Cashel Byron's ProfessionRed is My Heart|rating=3.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=''Cashel Byron’s Profession'' is the fourth of five 'Novels of My Nonage',written by George Bernard Shaw [[:Category:Antoine Laurain|Antoine Laurain]] books have always been black and white and read in 1882my house. In the preface of the bookAnd so was this one, Shaw heavily criticises these early worksalthough I could have spelled that more accurately – this one was, which were rejected by the publishing houses of the timeand is, blaming his immaturity black and lack of experience in lifewhite and red. He was clearly unhappy about the way Yes, he had written some of his charactershas an artistic collaborator on this piece, stating that: and I think it'...he has s possible to say not in his nonage one page lacks the satisfaction influence of knowing that his guesses at life are truesome striking visual ideas.'|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1848547471</amazonuk>1913547183

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Chris WomersleyB098FFFBH9|title=The Low RoadSnowcub|author=Graham Fulbright|rating=4.5

|summary=Wild Fourteen-year-old Rachel is her school's animal rights project leader and she and her friend are producing a man on competition entry to highlight the way in which human beings exploit the runanimal world. In She gets a great deal of support from her family: father Pip Harrison, a slowlecturer at Imperial College, underhand and underwhelming way he is leaving behind dangerLondon, mistakes mother Kate and unhappiness in his pasther twin, and has fetched up in a nondescript motelNick. However this is only Kate runs the beginningfamily business, for he is quickly ordered to put his medical training to good use a toy shop called Cornucopia in the case of LeePutney, when the latter which is dumped into his care with a gunshot wound. Lee, too, is a man on the run - from danger, mistakes and unhappiness in his future. But this pairing are not the only people running in this pitch black thrillerwhere we'll meet Rachel's main (if unsuspected) source of information: five soft toys.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780870574</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Claudie GallayYancey Williams|title=In Crosshairs of the Gold of TimeDevil

|summary=A young father (I'm not sure we ever know his name) leaves Award-winning crime writer Eddie Jablonski is getting on in years and, despite his Montreuil apartment strenuous objections and takes thanks to his wife and their sevendaughter, finds himself living -yearor imprisoned, from Eddie's point of view -old twin daughters on in room 315 of the annual holiday to the coast. They have Garden of Eden nursing home, with only a housetrusty nursing aide, La TéméraireJenkins, overlooking the sea a few kilometres south for palatable company. Nothing is going to keep Eddie from his stock-in-trade of Dieppe. They'd bought the house just after the girls were born and go there every summerwriting though, so here, and maybe for a weekend or two in the Spring. Never in winterhis readers, are his wanderings through his life's work.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0857051261</amazonuk>0986031658}} {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Philippe Claudel0008421714|title=The InvestigationMrs March|author=Virginia Feito|rating=4.5

|summary=And you think you 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 it badalready done so. Our hero gets off a train at 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 right stationbread, ''but doesnisn't get collected by those this the first time he's working based a character on behalf of, canyou?''t have his order at the bar fulfilled She mentioned that Johanna, cannot get to the place of work on time, then cannot find the hotel almost opposite without a major trek through a snowy, unsavoury but completely empty cityprincipal character had 'her mannerisms''. And when he gets to Perhaps this would not have mattered, except for the hotel - well fact that and Johanna is the other people he meets there are a whole new category whore of odd. Is this how things are supposed to be Nantes - is this limbo''a weak, plain, detestable, pathetic, unloved, a nightmare or just a novel our hero is trapped in?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857051547</amazonuk>unloveable wretch.''

{{newreview|author=Jenn Ashworth|title=The Friday Gospels|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=There are five in the Leeke family. Martin is the father and he works in the mail sorting office. There's not a lot of ''pleasure'' in Martin's life, but if you were making a list you'd put Bovril at the top of it. She's a labrador and Martin's obsessed with her training. Well, he's partly obsessed with the training and the training is partly an excuse for his other obsession. Nina owns two labradors and Martin sees them (he and Nina, that is - not he and the labs) as having a future together. It would be easy Move on to be critical, but Martin's wife is in a wheelchair. Pauline's been unwell since the birth of their youngest child. She's not quite doubly incontinent, but accidents are frequent and embarrassing. She's also got a penchant for spending on home improvements - despite the fact that there ''really'' isn't the money for them.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444707728</amazonuk>}}[[Newest Paranormal Reviews]]