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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]{{adsense2}}__NOTOC__{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Roland Watson-GrantMatthew Tree|title=SketcherWe'll Never Know|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary= Nine-year-old Skid Beaumont lives with Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his three brothersfather, father Alrick a drunk and mother Valerie in the swamps beyond the New Orleans city limits. Life is hard chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of his artistic passions all failed miserably and home is a rundown shack with no running water but they're only there temporarily; a 'temporarily' that is rather long-termwho had endless crises of self confidence. Alrick moved them from their nice home in New Orleans because the land was cheap and soon the city would build out So Tim applied himself to envelop them. Years later they're still waiting for that to happen. Life isn’t exactly mundane though; there are rumours that when Skid's brother Frico draws left-handedhis studies, strange things seem to happencultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and set himself high but achievable ambitions.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1846882427</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8
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{{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.
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Philip SingtonMosby Woods|title=The Valley of UnknowingA Whirly Man Loses His Turn
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In The West isn't the dominant force it once was. Nobody in the mid-West is quite sure how to-late eighties mend this or even if mending it is the German Democratic Republic looked like enduringbest course of action. Bolstered by Governments are flailing. A war here, a system of ''Mitarbeiter'' (''fellow workers'' push for climate action there. A feeling that nobody is in actual charge. Imagine then, there was a much more amenable term than ''informers'') man with precognition. Imagine the Stasi kept their populace strategic advantage in checkthis asset; a man who can tell you what will happen given any set of circumstances. Western media was easy to censor That man would be valuable, right? Perhaps the most valuable asset in those dayshistory. Border controls were brutalImagine then, that this man loses this ability. People were shot on a regular basis trying What would governments do to cross the no-man's-land into West Berlin and along the other inner German borders.get it back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099535823</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Robert Walser0571379559|title=The Walk and other storiesHouse of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''The publication House of this collection Broken Bricks'' is the story of around forty short stories affords four people. Tess Hembry's roots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, but instead, she lives in the English speaking public a unique opportunity; that house on the riverbank, built of reading Walserbroken bricks. Insubstantial as it might look, possibly it's stood the leading modernist writer passage of Swiss German 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 last centuryrainbow twins. Sonny's colouring reflects his mother's Jamaican heritage. He has received high praise in Max takes after his father. People don'A Place in the Countryt believe that they're related, W G Sebaldmuch less twins and there's recently published posthumous collection and he an assumption when Max is well-known as being a significant influence on Franz Kafka. His work here dates from 1907 to 1929 and along out with his poetry won him recognition with Berlinmother that she's avant garde. He combines lyrical delicacy with detailed observation; reflective melancholy with criticism of brash commercialism. The fine writing in this volume strives to achieve a hard won integrity together with an experimental capacity for reflection. It challenges the reader and provokes him to new insightshis nanny.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846689589</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Joydeep Roy-BhattacharyaClaire North|title=The WatchHouse of Odysseus
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction|summary= Nizam pushes a barrow up to a fortified US army base in Afghanistan. ''What is she doing therecould matter more than love? How will the soldiers react? What do they believe: their experience, their training, their gut reaction or a young girl amputee in the middle of the desert who may be the last thing they ever see?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099565773</amazonuk>}}''
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Jenni FaganKay Chronister|title=The PanopticonDesert Creatures|rating=54|genre=Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary=Imagine reading With a book set in world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, post-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Whether it is a Scottish children’s care home. It’s about robotic takeover, a violent and world devoid of water or a deeply disturbed fifteen year old drug addict whonuclear holocaust, when she was eleven, found her prostitute foster mother murdered in the bathtubthis genre is a way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. That’s the set-up of Jenni Fagan’s ''The PanopticonDesert Creatures'', and that’s what it’s about – but by Kay Chronister is a new work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the funny thing fears that exist for humanity today. It is a shocking novel that whatever you’re picturing in your head right now, and what I was imagining before I sat down to read it, bears absolutely no resemblance still manages to the book Fagan has actually writtenfind hope.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099558645</amazonuk>1803364998
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{{newreviewfrontpage|isbn=1803363002|author=Jess RichardsEric LaRocca|title=Cooking with BonesThe Trees Grew Because I Bled There|rating=4.5|genre=Literary FictionHorror|summary= Sisters Amber Horror taps into something primeval within us. It is used as a way to reflect our darkest emotions and Maya run away from how we as humans react and process them. Most horror fiction feature a ''Big Bad'', whether that is a homeinvader, the city of Paradona monster or a ghost, it usually something tangible and arrive in a small village. Finding an old cottage, by the girls settle in comfortably, hidden from the locals' sight while joining in with their customs as Amber backs honey cakes each night from the ingredients left daily outside the cottage and the instructions end of the former occupantstory, beatable. Eric LaRocca's cookery books. Now they've moved away from their old life Amber tries to encourage Maya to stand on her own two feet which isn't easyThe Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. For Maya It is a formwanderercollection of short stories more interested in the horrors of illness, engineered grief and humiliation. Horrors that linger and are harder to reflect otherdefeat than any ''Big Bad's wants; a role in which it's difficult to exist normally, let alone while trying to adjust to change… and, indeed, unexpected death.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444738038</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Kate AtkinsonMadelaine Lucas|title=Life After LifeThirst for Salt
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Spanning the period from just before World War One to the end of World War Two, Kate Atkinson's ''Life After Life'' tells the story of Ursula Todd. Or more accuratelyLove, it tells the potential stories of Ursula Todd. If youI've seen the movie ''Sliding Doors'' then you will have some idea of the concept Atkinson explores; that of small changes in life leading to different outcomesd read, many of which lead to tragic endings but strangely the book manages was supposed to be a celebration of the spirit of Ursula light and is often quite uplifting. Itweightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity's a book that sounds like it is going to be much more confusing than it is though and the result is a very special book indeed. It's that rare thing of a book that has a strong literary style but which is also very readable.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0385618670</amazonuk>}}
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{{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.''
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Therese Anne FowlerJennifer Saint|title=Z: A Novel of Zelda FitzgeraldAtalanta
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=As Therese Anne Fowler points out in her acknowledgements, views on the relationship between F Scott Fitzgerald and his wife and muse, Zelda, tend to split into 'Team Scott' and 'Team Zelda'. The former believe that it I was Zelda's instability and possessiveness that limited Scott's creative output while the latter argue that it was Scott's debauched behaviour that led to Zelda's mental problemsas worthy as any one of them. ''Z'' takes a more balanced view - the truth of the matter is I would get on board that they needed each other but were tragicallyship, mutually destructiveI vowed. Getting the fact-based fiction tone right is always a challengeI would take my place, and this is exacerbated when not just in the author gives a writer name of the narrative voice, and Zelda goddess. It was a talented writer in her own right as well as a dancerfor the sake of my name, artist and general social phenomenontoo. However Fowler pulls it off with aplomb in what is a sensitive and engrossing story of Zelda - Atalanta'the First Flapper'.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444761404</amazonuk>}}
}}
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Kweku SaiPadma, fathera young Sri Lankan, husband and doctor, awakes early one morning and wanders outside into his Ghanaian gardenhas returned to the Villa Hibiscus on the southern coast of her home country. As he gazes back at his house, he suffers This is a fatal heart attack and, during his last moments reflects on his life and a family fragmentedplace she spent her formative years. On hearing It is not a place she was born into, but the one she thinks of his deathas home. How she came to be at the Villa, how it became her home, his children and the machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she first wife Folasade look back on what they were before arrived there provide the ''score'' for this gentle and, thanks in part to Folasadeyet subtly violent novel. Padma's present fails to escape her past and Kweku's actionsmuch like the musical score of a film, what they've becomethat strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the Villa.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0670919861</amazonuk>1784631930
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Michele Roberts178563335X|title=IgnoranceSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Michèle RobertsWhen we first meet Rachel Bird she's ''Ignorance'' is a beautifully writtentrainee vicar, lyrical story about life sitting in wartime Franceon a PCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the children up. Narrated mainly by two characters Her husband, Christopher, Jeanne and Mariecollects six-year-Angèle, it jumps back old Hannah and forward in time and is an enthralling mixture of guilther elder brother, faithJamie, and survival. The two girls could not be more differentwhilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Marie-Angèle is the grocer Thelma's daughter while Jeanne -in-law won't let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, on the Norfolk coast, is the daughter of a Jewish mother who washes clothes for lovely place, but Rachel is struggling to develop a living. The two girls together go to real bond with the village convent for their education but come from different ends parish - and she's in awe of the social spectrum. When the German occupation arrivesvicar, Gail, the two girls' experiences are very different but both are then she'ignorant' of each others plight and their judgements are repeatedly shown to be wide of s been doing the markjob for more than thirty years. In fact Rachel and Christopher hoped that a walk on the book could just as well have been titled 'Judgement'beach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed. Just when you think you know one through the eyes of the other, you get the opposite view of things And then Hannah went missing. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408831155</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Carrie Tiffany1398515388|title=Mateship with BirdsThe Boy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Edie Middlestein almost has First of all, it was the earthquake, deep in the American dream within her graspocean floor, which created the tsunami and this, in turn, caused the nuclear meltdown. She trained as a lawyerThe result was complete and utter devastation. The deaths were uncountable, has 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 husband, dog outside a daughter who followed her professional footsteps and a son married to an ambitious wife who provided him with two high-achieving childrenconvenience store. There are just two flies in He wasn't a dog person but the ointment preventing the dreamconvenience store owner's arrival: 1. Edie is so morbidly obese comment that she has he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to undergo surgery; open his car door and 2. this is Tamon the moment her husband chooses to leave herdog jumped in. Apart from that…|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846689325</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn= Mikhail Shishkin and Andrew Bromfield (translator)0989715337|title=The Light and Papa on the DarkMoon|author=Marco North|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary= Two lovers write letters to each other about their love, their dreams and their separate lives; lives that they hope will one day merge once again to become one. For Sasha life is the everyday grind with work and demanding loved ones along with ''Some frogs had gotten into the challenges they engenderwell. For Volodenka, it's life in the Russian army and his eventual posting to China. However their love is more complicated than most as more than geography and circumstance stands between them: they're also separated by the decades… many, many decades.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780871058</amazonuk>}}
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Andrea EamesDaisy Hildyard|title=The White ShadowEmergency|rating=54
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=
{{newreviewFrontpage |author=I J KaySally Oliver |title=Mountains 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 Moonbones 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=The story starts harshly, with a release Early comments on this debut novel from prison, a bail hostelEcuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, a refuge for people with mental health problems as a better-than-nothing-lied-to-be-obtained kind of a sanctuary and a slow easing back into societydelight. If you can call a housing association flat, I will agree with a decorating voucher and the first – tremendous is no furniture, only occasional power and annoying neighbours ''societyunderstatement – but 'a delight'. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099554739</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Jennie Rooney|title=Red Joan|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=It is very obvious where Jennie Rooney has taken perhaps using the idea for her novel expression in a way I''Red Joan'' fromm not familiar with. As she acknowledges fully, it has its origin in I have to confess my ignorance of the 1999 story of Melita Norwood whose espionage for Spanish-language literary tradition so forgive my generalisation here. From the Russians wasnlittle I have read (in translation, I don't discovered until she was in her late 80s, but while Norwood was a dyed in the wool communist, Rooney offers a more complex back story read Spanish) there does seem to her character, Joan. The result is be a very different type of spy novel than normal. Joan, a widowed grandmother, is going about her day to day life when MI5 come knocking on her door to ask about her past. The narrative switches between their questions to her and her recollections of her time at Cambridge in tendency towards the late 1930s where communist feelings were, by some, given a more sympathetic ear. When Joan falls for Leo, fantastical – the cousin of her Russian born friend Sonya, she gets dragged into a world that is dangerous and morally complexmystical realism.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701187573</amazonuk>0861541901
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Jason HinojosaJennifer Saint|title=The Conception of Zachary MuseElektra
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Evangeline Muse gives birth to Zachary alone 'Elektra' by Jennifer Saint tells the story of three women who live in her special lagoon… but that's starting at the endheavily male dominated world of Ancient Greece. In the beginningCassandra, Clytemnestra, Thomas Greene is a tutor and Will Archer a talented wood carver who both accept employment from Michael MuseElektra are all bit players in the story of the Trojan War. What they don't realise at Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that moment is, once they meet his beautiful daughter, Evangeline, nothing will ever be often the silent women have the most compelling stories and the same again for any of themmost extreme furies.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>9380905440</amazonuk>1472273915
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Andrew Cowan8409290103|title=Worthless MenIf Only|author=Matthew Tree
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=If you read Twenty-one-year-old Malcolm Lowry had been sent abroad by his father, cotton-broker AO Lowry: he asked his accountant, Mr Patrick, to ensure that the young man got on board the boat and thereafter Patrick was to send him a lot monthly allowance. Patrick sent the money regularly and a correspondence - of fiction sorts - sprang up between the two although we hear more about World War One, it's tempting what Lowry has to imagine pre-war England as an idyl of peace and innocencesay than Patrick. Andrew Cowan's ''Worthless Men It wasn't that Lowry senior didn' depicts a much more gritty and earthy England. Set in 1916 in an industrial and market townt care for his son, it weaves together several narratives was that combine he didn't care to depict have him in this country where he might be a hard life danger to his wife and other children. The alcohol problem was obvious even before the outbreak of war. In fact, its easier Patrick managed to imagine get the lure of adventure that the war initially offered as a change from the harsh realities of life at home, although by the time Cowan's novel begins, the grim reality of what is involved has dampened much of this enthusiasmyoung man on his way.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>144475940X</amazonuk>
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{{Frontpage|author=Antoine Laurain, Le Sonneur and Jane Aitken (translator)|title=Red is My Heart|rating=3.5|genre=Literary Fiction |summary=[[: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 piece, and I think it's possible to say not one page lacks the influence of some striking visual ideas.|isbn=1913547183}}{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Meike ZiervogelB098FFFBH9|title=MagdaSnowcub|author=Graham Fulbright|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Meet a woman who, despite praying to remain virginal, had seven children. Meet a woman whose mother thought Fourteen-year-old Rachel is her school''hoity-toity'', s animal rights project leader and spoilt, she and who thought she should go her friend are producing a competition entry to work highlight the way in a factory at school age to know her place betterwhich human beings exploit the animal world. Meet She gets a woman great deal of whom support from her oldest daughter would write 'I don't care what Mother says. Mother isn't always right. Nofamily: father Pip Harrison, she definitely isn't.' All three women area lecturer at Imperial College, of courseLondon, one mother Kate and her twin, Nick. Kate runs the samefamily business, and theya toy shop called Cornucopia in Putney, which is where we'll meet Rachel're Magda Goebbels, the woman who epitomised more than anyone the Nazi wifes main (if unsuspected) source of information: five soft toys.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907773401</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Shani BoianjiuYancey Williams|title=The People Crosshairs of Forever are not Afraidthe Devil|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=YaelAward-winning crime writer Eddie Jablonski is getting on in years and, Lea despite his strenuous objections and Avishag go through their final years at high school in a little Israeli town on the Lebanese border and then on thanks to the inevitable: the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Gender is immaterialhis daughter, all Israeli citizens must serve at least two years and for these girls the moment arrives after graduation. Yael's posting seems futile as she guards a training base against marauding ladsfinds himself living - or imprisoned, sneaking across the border to pinch perfume from pockets rather than pose any real security threat. LeaEddie's assignment on a border checkpoint searching point of view - in room 315 of the daily line Garden of immigrant workers is riddled Eden nursing home, with routineonly a trusty nursing aide, Jenkins, for palatable company. Avishag joins up with her own demonsNothing is going to keep Eddie from his stock-in-trade of writing though, so here, for his readers, her brother Dan having died after are his wanderings through his national service. She knows how it happened but continues to struggle with why; something she must handle alonelife's work. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1781090092</amazonuk>0986031658}} {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Barbara Pym0008421714|title=A Glass of BlessingsMrs March|author=Virginia Feito
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Wilmet Forsyth is a married woman, childless and living a life The problem began just after the publication of leisureGeorge March's most successful novel to date. She and Everyone but Mrs March (we know her friend Rowena met their husbands - both Majors - in Italy, where they served as Wrens during first name only on the war. Rowena now has three children and her husband David might just last page) seemed to either be developing a wandering eyereading it or had already done so. Wilmet's husbandEvery day Mrs March went to the local patisserie to buy olive bread but on that particular morning, Patricia asked, Rodneyas she was wrapping the bread, is still ''Noddybut isn'' to his mother with whom they live. Unburdened by children or domestic responsibility Wilmet lunches or shops and becomes involved in t this the social life of the local church, St Lukefirst time he's. But itbased a character on you?'s her relationship with Piers, Rowena's somewhat wayward brother She mentioned that Johanna, which might pose the biggest threat to principal character had 'her comfortable, if rather boring existence.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844085805</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Toni Jordan|title=Nine Days|rating=5|genre=General Fiction|summary=Christopher mannerisms'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 Perhaps this would not have mattered, except for the Hustings, caring for their horses. One day Mr Husting presents Kip with a shilling; their little secret. As its 1939, fact thatJohanna is the whore of Nantes - ''s a fair amount of money so Kip hides it awayweak, plain, detestable, pathetic, unloved, not realising how special that coin will become as the decades passunloveable wretch.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444763555</amazonuk>''
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