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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]] __NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=By Night The Mountain BurnsMatthew Tree|authortitle=Juan Tomas Avila LaurelWe'll Never Know|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Sometimes Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, a novel will startle because it tackles a topic totally unknown to us or tells us drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of his artistic passions all failed miserably and who had endless crises of lives previously un-imaginedself confidence. This is the case with By Night the Mountain Burns. However, what is most remarkable about Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel’s novel is how easy it is So Tim applied himself to slip into the story of a child growing up on an isolated island in Equatorial Guinea. We are not reading about mysterious 'others'. We’re reading about people like ourselveshis studies, who live in a different place which has its own constraints – namely poverty cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and isolationset himself high but achievable ambitions.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1908276401</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|isbn=B0C47LV1PC|title=AsunderFragility|author=Chloe AridjisMosby Woods
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Marie, the narrator of Chloe Aridjis's second novel, Can you make a ''AsunderYo birthing person''joke? And if you could, is a guard at the National Gallery in London. It question should you make it? Or is a simple, subdued life she leads in this 'tiny kingdom', but it suits her: 'I had always sought quiet in the world and there were few movements quieter, I realisedquestion if you did, than paint cracking over time.' Most would find her work tedious, but over her nine years at the museum she has adjusted to the routine; 'unlike some of the new guards, I do not suffer from boredom or listlessness.'|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099572753</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Neel Mukherjee|title=it land? The Lives of Others|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary= '''SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014'''Many generations of catch is that the Ghosh family live together in a single house in 1960's Calcutta, albeit a very big single houseanswer for both could well be. Life may be materially comfortable but not easy. Jealousy, in-fighting, the struggle to keep the family business going (and, for the younger family members, the struggle to lead the life they'd like) causes more than the odd sleepless night. Son Supratik has succeeded in choosing a different path though. He's tired of the endless consumption and acquisition and leaves home to follow his Marxist beliefs, exchanging family living for discomfort and dangerno.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701186291</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=Clara's DaughterMosby Woods|authortitle=Meike ZiervogelA Whirly Man Loses His Turn
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The West isn''Clara’s Daughter'', t the dominant force it once was. Nobody in the short space West is quite sure how to mend this or even if mending it is the best course of 144 pagesaction. Governments are flailing. A war here, a push for climate action there. A feeling that nobody is in actual charge. Imagine then, paints there was a man with precognition. Imagine the portrait 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 relationships threatening to destroy a family unitmost valuable asset in history. The intensity is conveyed with sharp stabs from Ziervogel’s spare sentencesImagine then, that this man loses this ability.What would governments do to get it back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1907773797</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Ali Smith0571379559|title=How to be BothThe House of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=There''The House of Broken Bricks'' is the story of four people. Tess Hembry's something which you need to know about this bookroots are in Jamaica: if you decide to read ittemperamentally she might be happier there, but instead, she lives in the book you read might not be house on the same riverbank, built of broken bricks. Insubstantial as it might look, it's stood the one which I've read passage of time, storms and am about to reviewfloods. There areHer husband, you seeRichard, two stories in each copy and half the books published will have the story of Francescho Del Cossa who worked in and around Ferrara in the fifteenth centurystruggles to grow his vegetables, followed by to complete the story of George - really Georgia delivery rounds - a teenager who lives with her father and younger brother to bring in twentieth century Cambridgesufficient money. The other books will They have twin boys - Sonny and Max, the stories in reverse orderrainbow twins. Sonny's colouring reflects his mother's Jamaican heritage. Max takes after his father. The stories are the samePeople don't believe that they're related, but the experiences of the readers will be quite differentmuch less twins and there's an assumption when Max is out with his mother that she's his nanny.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>024114521X</amazonuk>
}}
{{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}}{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=WreakingKay Chronister|authortitle=James ScudamoreDesert Creatures|rating=4|genre=Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary=A derelict mental hospitalWith a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, gloomy railway archespost-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Whether it is a robotic takeover, the bleak countryside a world devoid of the English coastwater or a nuclear holocaust, this genre is a way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. It all comes at us in grey flashes. If ''WreakingDesert Creatures'' was by Kay Chronister is a film, it would saturated with cool tonesnew work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the fears that exist for humanity today. It’s an easy It is a shocking novel that still manages to visualise: Scudamore’s spare, elegant style creates an almost palpable atmospherefind hope.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>009952385X</amazonuk>1803364998
}}
{{newreviewfrontpage|titleisbn=J1803363002|author=Howard JacobsonEric LaRocca|title= The Trees Grew Because I Bled There|rating=3.5|genre=Literary FictionHorror|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 ''JBig Bad'' marks an unusual turn for Howard Jacobson. Though it seems at times like , whether that is a home invader, a monster or a skewed folk taleghost, it also bears usually something tangible and, by the subtle signs end of a future dystopiathe story, beatable. Eric LaRocca's ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. It has some is a collection of Jacobson's trademark elements – odd names, humorous metaphorsshort stories more interested in the horrors of illness, grief and humiliation. Horrors that linger and Semitic references – but felt are harder to me like a strange departure after [[The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson|The Finkler Question]] and defeat than any ''Zoo TimeBig Bad''.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224102052</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=David MitchellMadelaine Lucas|title=The Bone ClocksThirst for Salt
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Holly Sykes is 15 ''Love, I'd read, was supposed to be a light and has found true love with an older man in his twenties weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity'' Told from a retrospective view, a young woman unravels the year- until she finds him in bed with long relationship that once defined her best mate. Upset and disorientatedOverlaid with later wisdom, she runs away from home. This may enable the narrator relives the affair with a man twenty years her to escape senior from its inception – the unfaithful Vinny and her overbearing family but not summer after finishing university – to its sorrowful end the weirdnesssummer after. SheSet against the backdrop of an isolated Australian coastal town ''Thirst for Salt'' details the 24-year-old narrator's not the only one though: Hugo the studentdeepening relationship with her older lover, depicting its all-consuming nature, conman how it changed her perspective on both romantic and lothario thought he was only doing someone a good turn when the weirdness started for him. There is a point to it though: eventually battle lines will be drawn familial relationships and how it's anyone's guess as to who will win, despite what the Anchorites may sayaltered her irrevocably. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0340921609</amazonuk>0861546490
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Karen Joy FowlerMichael Grothaus|title=We Are All Completely Beside OurselvesBeautiful Shining People
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Rosemary's childhood is blighted by the disappearance of her sister, Fern. Rosemary went to stay with her grandparents 'But fearing something and, on her return Fern was no longer there. Curiously enough, her mother and father don't speak of having itcome to pass are two different things. The knock on effect was the angry departure of RosemaryAnd I's older brother Lowell whom she also misses. As she grows m willing to adulthoodbet most of what we fear will never happen, Rosemary remembers trying or we can take steps to come to terms with this, the damage that being a daughter of a psychologist has wrought and the revealed secrets that will finally make sense of change it all.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184668966X</amazonuk>}}''
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Alison MooreJennifer Saint|title=He WantsAtalanta|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Lewis Sullivan is close to retirement, but elderly beyond his years and widowed. Edie's death seems to have had practical implications - he's not getting the food he used to enjoy - but beyond I was as worthy as any one of them. I would get on board that it's difficult to see quite what they had in common other than the library. He used it and she worked there - but they didn't even enjoy the same books. Lewis is an RE teacher at the same school where his father, Lawrenceship, used to teach - when they were both there at the same time it often confused the paperworkI vowed. Lewis is beginning to wonder if he chose the wrong careerI would take my place, if he lives not just in the wrong placename of the goddess. He used to be able to see It was for the house he grew up in from the bedroom window before it was demolished and replaced by a supermarket carpark, but he's always dreamed sake of living by the sea. His adult daughtermy name, Ruth visits him every day and brings him souptoo.Atalanta''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=The Country of Ice Cream StarAmanthi Harris|authortitle=Sandra NewmanBeautiful Place|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary='My name be Ice Cream Fifteen Star and this be Padma, a young Sri Lankan, has returned to the Villa Hibiscus on the tale southern coast of how I bring her home country. This is a place she spent her formative years. It is not a place she was born into, but the cure one she thinks of as home. How she came to all be at the Nighted StatesVilla, save every poory children, short for life. Is how a city die for selfish loveit became her home, and rise from this same smallness. Be how the new America begin, in wars against all hope - a country with no power in a world machinations that hate its have flowed through her life. So been ever since she first arrived there provide the faith I sworn, ''score'' for this gentle and it ainyet subtly violent novel. Padma't evils in no world nor cruelties in no red hell can change s present fails to escape her past and much like the vally heart musical score of Ice Cream Stara film, that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the Villa.'|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701186429</amazonuk>1784631930
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Bilal Tanweer|title=The Scatter Here is Too Great|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=When the bomb exploded at the Karachi railway station causing intended death and mayhem, an aging reactionary poet, his middle-aged son, a child, a writer and a woman who relates more to stories than reality, are in the midst of it. Each experiences the blast as differently as their experiences of life are from each other but each ''will'' be affected.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224099116</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Emily Mackie|title=In Search of Solace|rating=3.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Jacob Little is many things to many people as he goes through life, reinventing his personae and name. Who exactly is he? Perhaps he's unsure but the thing he's certain of is his love for a young woman he lived with for 2 years. It took her leaving and the next decade apart for him to realise he loves her but now he wants to make up for lost time. She said her name was Solace so now he's (all together now) in search of Solace.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340992522</amazonuk>}} {{newreview178563335X|title=The Sixteenth of JuneSea Defences|author=Maya LangHilary Taylor
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=On June 16thWhen we first meet Rachel Bird she's a trainee vicar, 1904sitting in on a PCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the children up. Her husband, James Joyce had his first date with his future wifeChristopher, Nora Barnacle – an occasion he commemorated by choosing it as the onecollects six-year-day setting for his old Hannah and her elder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Thelma's daughter-in-law won'magnum opus't let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, on the Norfolk coast, is a lovely place, but Rachel is struggling to develop a real bond with the parish - and she's in awe of the vicar, Gail, but then she''Ulysses''; main character Leopold Bloom gives his name to s been doing the annual Joyce celebration job for more than thirty years. Rachel and Christopher hoped that takes place around a walk on the world on June 16thbeach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed. And then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1476745749</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|isbn=1398515388|title=After BeforeThe Boy and the Dog|author=Jemma WayneSeishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary General Fiction|summary=Emily ''easier for English people to pronounce than Emilienne''First of all, it was the earthquake, deep in the ocean floor, which created the tsunami and this, lives in a council tower blockturn, barely furnishedcaused 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 still - for her six months after the tsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a place of safety, dog outside a convenience store. He wasn't a place of anonymity, which is dog person but the best way for her convenience store owner's comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to exist. She cleans commercial premises open his car door and relishes Tamon the workdog jumped in. She makes her small earnings go as far as possible, shopping locally, living frugally.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1909878847</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|isbn=0989715337|title=FireflyPapa on the Moon|author=Janette JenkinsMarco North
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I read ''Firefly'' wanting to be charmedSome frogs had gotten into the well. Sat at home, wishing I was in Jamaica, idly humming 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen'.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099575043</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=Lost LuggageDaisy Hildyard|authortitle=Jordi PuntiEmergency
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=There are lots The summary of things you wonder when you grow up with just one parent, but whether you also have a bunch of half-siblings, all this book doesn't come close to explaining what is done with the same name as you, all dotted around the continent, is not normally high on the list. Gabriel Delacruz has 4 boys by 4 different women in 4 parts of Europe. None of them know of the others’ existence but when Gabriel disappears, his incredulous life is uncovered and Christof, Christophe, Christopher and Cristofol meetpremise.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1780722133</amazonuk>1913097811}}
{{newreviewFrontpage |author=Sally Oliver |title=Wild WoodThe 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 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=Jan Needle and Willie RushtonNatalia Garcia Freire|title=This World Does Not Belong To Us|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Bank clerk Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 classic ''Wind in the Willows'', populated with lovable anthropomorphic charactersEarly comments on this debut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, started life as a bed time story for his son Alistairdelight. He fused these adventurous tales I will agree with later descriptive epistles for the first – tremendous is no understatement – but 'a holidaying Alistair to create a tale which was, as Grahame described delight' is perhaps using the expression in a letter way I'm not familiar with. I have to Teddy Roosevelt, ''an expression confess my ignorance of the very simplest joys of life as lived by the simplest beings''Spanish-language literary tradition so forgive my generalisation here. Indeed the four iconic protagonists - From the outrageous, irrepressible toad, the loyal and humble mole, the brave and paternalistic badger and the resourceful and determined rat little I have a fond place read (in many childhood memories but are they as valiant as they translation, I don't read Spanish) there does seem? What if they were suddenly recast as to be a tendency towards the villains of fantastical – the piece?mystical realism. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1899262210</amazonuk>0861541901
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=Beautiful FoolsJennifer Saint|authortitle=R Clifton SpargoElektra
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Famous writers' wives have had something Elektra' by Jennifer Saint tells the story of a literary revival three women who live in recent yearsthe heavily male dominated world of Ancient Greece. Paula McLain's ''The Paris Wife'' Cassandra, Clytemnestra, and Naomi Wood's ''Mrs Hemingway'' imagine Elektra are all bit players in the lives story of the various Hemingway Trojan War. Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that often the silent women, while have the vogue for flappers most compelling stories and [[The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald|The Great Gatsby]] has led to a spate of books about Zelda Fitzgerald. Fans of the Roaring Twenties have been spoiled for choice, what with [[Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler]], ''Call Me Zelda'' by Erika Robuck, and ''Guests on Earth'' by Lee Smithmost extreme furies.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1468308807</amazonuk>1472273915
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Roopa Farooki8409290103|title=The Good Children|rating=5|genre=General Fiction|summary=The Saddeq family are an example of success for their friends and neighbours in Lahore. Mr Saddeq is a doctor with his own practice, sons Sully and Jakie are studying medicine in the US and UK respectively and daughters Mae and Lana have made good marriage matches. However the four 'good' children would view their success differently. Each reacts differently to the futures that their caring father and calculating mother have mapped out for them and plough their own furrows as far as they're permitted but the gravitational pull of home remains a constant through their lives and also, to some extent, for the generation that follows.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755383427</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewIf Only|author=Dinaw Mengestu |title=All Our DaysMatthew Tree
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Literary Fiction|summary=Isaac is a refugee from Ethiopia who finds a home in Uganda. At 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 university he's taken under young man got on board the wing of boat and thereafter Patrick was to send him a political activist also called Isaacmonthly allowance. The 1970s is Patrick sent the money regularly and a dangerous time to be in Uganda as their world is correspondence - of sorts - sprang up between the two although we hear more about what Lowry has to explodesay than Patrick. Years later Isaac the Ethiopian finds himself in America and lives under the It wasn't that Lowry senior didn't care of social worker Helen. Slowly they form a less than professional relationship and Helen realises for his son, it was that what little she knows of he didn't care to have him may not in this country where he might be the trutha danger to his wife and other children. Gradually his past is revealed as the guilt he carries comes The alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to get the surfaceyoung man on his way.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444793772</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=Never Any End to ParisAntoine Laurain, Le Sonneur and Jane Aitken (translator)|authortitle=Enrique Vila-MatasRed is My Heart|rating=43.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=There is never any end to Paris[[:Category:Antoine Laurain|Antoine Laurain]] books have always been black and white and read in my house. The sentence pops upAnd so was this one, hypnoticalthough I could have spelled that more accurately – this one was, through most of the bookand is, black and white and red. At times ironicYes, thoughtful or questioninghe has an artistic collaborator on this piece, and I think it is a quote from Hemingway’s novel, ''A Moveable Feast'', in which s possible to say not one page lacks the American author looked back at his days in Paris, where he was ‘very poor and very happy.’ The narrator influence of ''Never Any End to Paris'' tells us that when he lived in Paris, he was ‘very poor and very unhappysome striking visual ideas.’|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1846558042</amazonuk>1913547183
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Johanna LaneB098FFFBH9|title=Black LakeSnowcub|author=Graham Fulbright
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=JohnFourteen-year-old Rachel is her school's family have owned Dulagh (Black Lake), animal rights project leader and she and her friend are producing a competition entry to highlight the big mansion way in which human beings exploit the Irish countryside, for generationsanimal world. Unfortunately now no longer able to afford its upkeepShe gets a great deal of support from her family: father Pip Harrison, a lecturer at Imperial College, JohnLondon, his wife Marianne and children mother Kate and Philipher twin, move into a cottage on the estate insteadNick. They still own Kate runs the house but itfamily business, a toy shop called Cornucopia in Putney, which is where we'll be run by the government with revenue from opening it to the public. At the time it seems the perfect solution, but the future has plans other than perfectionmeet Rachel's main (if unsuspected) source of information: five soft toys.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755396294</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|titleauthor=Frances and BernardYancey Williams|authortitle=Carlene BauerCrosshairs of the Devil
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=ThereAward-winning crime writer Eddie Jablonski is getting on in years and, despite his strenuous objections and thanks to his daughter, finds himself living - or imprisoned, from Eddie's something very special about an epistolary novel. The format might seem unnatural to readers point of view - in this day room 315 of abbreviated text messages and e-mails, but the conceit Garden of Eden nursing home, with only a written exchange allows trusty nursing aide, Jenkins, for fully developed firstpalatable company. Nothing is going to keep Eddie from his stock-in-person voices and a confessional tone. Provided the author can bypass the subtle difficulties trade of plot-buildingwriting though, so here, for his readers, letters are also a handy indicator of the passage of time, and ably convey period vocabularyhis wanderings through his life's work.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099578603</amazonuk>0986031658}} {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Adrian Harvey0008421714|title=Being SomeoneMrs March|author=Virginia Feito
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The relationship between a mahout and his elephant is close: some have said that itproblem began just after the publication of George March's rather like a marriagemost successful novel to date. On Everyone but Mrs March (we know her first name only on the surface last page) seemed to either be reading it seems almost idyllic with an obvious affection between man and beast - "or had already done so. Every day Mrs March went to the local patisserie to buy olive bread but on that their spirits were water of the same pool"particular morning, Patricia asked, but all is not quite as it seems. Iravatha she was wrapping the magnificent elephant whobread, year in, year out, led ''but isn't this the Maharajahfirst time he's parade only this year there was based a dreadful accident and Annayya, his mahoutcharacter on you?'' She mentioned that Johanna, slipped beneath the elephantprincipal character had 'her mannerisms''s foot - and was killed. TheyPerhaps this would not have mattered, except for the fact that Johanna is the whore of Nantes - ''d been together for more than half a century and beautifulweak, plain, detestable, pathetic, unloved, intelligent Iravatha knew what this meantunloveable wretch.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1909273090</amazonuk>''
}}
