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[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]] __NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Yann MartelMatthew Tree|title=The High Mountains We'll Never Know|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary= Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, a drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of his artistic passions all failed miserably and who had endless crises of Portugalself confidence. So Tim applied himself to his studies, cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and set himself high but achievable ambitions.|isbn= B0CVFXPGP8}}{{Frontpage|isbn=B0C47LV1PC|title=Fragility|author=Mosby Woods

|genre=General Literary Fiction|summary=Tomas Can you make a ''Yo birthing person'' joke? And if you could, is being thrust into the twentieth Century, and he doesn't like question should you make it. He has given himself ? Or is the job of seeking something out in the High Mountains of Portugalquestion if you did, based on an ancient religious diary he found working in an archive, and to do so he needs would it land? The catch is that the use of his uncle's brand new car to get him there and back in timeanswer for both could well be.... His jaw drops when he learns he will have to do the driving himself, for he cannot make head nor tail of what anything on the infernal machine does and whyno. It  ''Fragility'' is set as the city of course a certain kind of progressPortland, a looking forwardOregon, which has become quite anathema cautiously begins to him – for ever since he lost his beloved wife, beloved child and father, all in emerge from the restrictions imposed during the space of a week, he has walked everywhere backwards – shielding himself from what really is ahead with a padded behind, and never letting sight of what he has lost.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1782114696</amazonuk>covid pandemic

{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Antonio Moresco and Richard Dixon (translator)Mosby Woods|title=Distant LightA Whirly Man Loses His Turn|rating=4.5|genre=General Literary Fiction|summary=Our unnamed narrator might as well be The West isn't the only person alivedominant force it once was. He knows he's not – he still goes down to Nobody in the nearest inhabited village West is quite sure how to buy things to eat and other necessities, and he sees planes spreading their contrails over mend this or even if mending it is the remote area he lives in – but he might as well bebest course of action. Governments are flailing. A lot of his thoughts are about life, howeverwar here, a push for he has little to do except notice the nature around him, from the smell of lilies burgeoning with climate action there. A feeling that nobody else to see them is in this deserted villageactual charge. Imagine then, to the swallows darting across the ravines of the countrysidethere was a man with precognition. Life – and Imagine the nature of strategic advantage in this asset; a light that he sees spring into activity every night at man who can tell you what he thought was a totally lifelesswill happen given any set of circumstances. That man would be valuable, empty forest area on land separated from his lookout post right? Perhaps the most valuable asset in his history. Imagine then, that this man loses this ability. What would governments do to get it back garden by a deep, wooded gorge…?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0914671421</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1

{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Tania James0571379559|title=The Tusk That Did the DamageHouse of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams|rating=3.5

|summary=Tania James was a Fulbright Fellow in New Delhi in 2011–12. For this, her second novel after ''Atlas The House of UnknownsBroken Bricks'' (shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian literature) and is the story collection ''Aerogrammes'of four people. Tess Hembry's roots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, but instead, she clearly draws lives in the house on her personal knowledge the riverbank, built of India in all its contradictionsbroken bricks. Insubstantial as it might look, especially when it comes 's stood the passage of time, storms and floods. Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the delivery rounds - and to environmental policybring in sufficient money. The novel alternates between three perspectives: a third They have twin boys -person account of an elephant named Sonny and Max, the Gravedigger rainbow twins. Sonny's colouring reflects his mother's Jamaican heritage. Max takes after his father. People don't believe that they're related, much less twins and first-person narratives from a poacher and a documentary filmmakerthere's an assumption when Max is out with his mother that she's his nanny.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1784700584</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|author= Anakana SchofieldClaire North|title= Martin JohnHouse of Odysseus|rating=5|genre= Literary Fiction |summary= ''What could matter more than love?'' The follow-up to the excellent ''Ithaca'' picks up a few months after where we left off. In the palace of Odysseus, with delicate care Queen Penelope continues to rule without her husband, who sailed to war at Troy and then by divine intervention never returned home. As ever she remains surrounded by suitors vying for the throne of the Western Isles. Having survived – politically and physical – the chaotic storm that Clytemnestra brought to Ithaca's shores, Queen Penelope is on the brink of a fragile peace. One that shatters however with the return of Orestes, King of Mycenae, and his sister Elektra, seeking refuge.|isbn=0356516075}}{{Frontpage|author= Kay Chronister|title= Desert Creatures

|genre= Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary= I had heard much about this novel before I read it With a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for reviewhumanity, by which I mean I had heard post-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Whether it was profaneis a robotic takeover, strange and had a daring subject matter accompanied world devoid of water or a nuclear holocaust, this genre is a way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. ''Desert Creatures'' by elements Kay Chronister is a new work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of humourthe fears that exist for humanity today. It is a shocking novel that still manages to find hope.|isbn=1803364998}}{{frontpage|isbn=1803363002|author= Eric LaRocca|title= The Trees Grew Because I have Bled There|rating= 5|genre= Horror|summary= Horror taps into something primeval within us. It is used as a way to say reflect our darkest emotions and how we as humans react and process them. Most horror fiction feature a ''Big Bad'', whether that whilst I agree is a home invader, a monster or a ghost, it is certainly profane usually something tangible and strange and incredibly innovative, by the end of the story, beatable. Eric LaRocca's ''The Trees Grew Because I didnBled There''t find much humour is not like that. It is a collection of short stories more interested in it at allthe horrors of illness, grief and humiliation. Horrors that linger and are harder to defeat than any ''Big Bad''.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1908276665</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Jon Kalman Stefansson and Philip Roughton (translator)Madelaine Lucas|title=The Heart of ManThirst for Salt|rating=35

|summary=What could be better than an existentialist book from rural Iceland''Love, full of gnomic comments about how close life and death are, that has as its core a journey taken by, amongst othersI'd read, was supposed to be a naïve and hormonal teenaged lad light and a full coffin? Whyweightless feeling, but I hear you cryhad always longed for gravity'' Told from a retrospective view, a trilogy concerning young woman unravels the sameyear-long relationship that once defined her. YesOverlaid with later wisdom, it's the obvious answer, really narrator relives the affair with a man twenty years her senior from its inception – the summer after finishing university – why else would we come to this third part, where its sorrowful end the summer after. Set against the survivors backdrop of an isolated Australian coastal town ''Thirst for Salt'' details the expedition rest up24-year-old narrator's deepening relationship with her older lover, note the women giving them helpdepicting its all-consuming nature, how it changed her perspective on both romantic and familial relationships and see how eminently close the circle of life is to the figure of a snake swallowing its tail through, among other things, dogs rutting in a church below the coffin's bier?it altered her irrevocably.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>184866236X</amazonuk>0861546490

{{newreviewFrontpage|author= Joanna WalshMichael Grothaus|title= VertigoBeautiful Shining People|rating= 4

|summary= The short stories in Joanna Walsh's collection have the overall effect of disparate streams of consciousness of a woman laying bear her very soul, whilst often going about seemingly mundane activities of the ordinary 'But fearing something and every day. The narrative voice appeared having it come to me to be the same woman speaking throughout, playing pass are two different roles, though things. And I'm not sure this was meant willing to be the casebet most of what we fear will never happen, or we can take steps to change it. The style of '' ''Beautiful Shining People'' revolves around the stories is that question of short vignettes, mostly written in a modernist, stream of consciousness styleidentity and acceptance. Of what it means to be human. SometimesOf what is real and what is artificial, and whether the prose appears almost poeticdevelopment of technology is exciting or frightening. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1908276800</amazonuk>191458564X

{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Kristopher JansmaJennifer Saint|title=Why We Came to the CityAtalanta|rating=4.5

|summary='We came to 'I was as worthy as any one of them. I would get on board that ship, I vowed. I would take my place, not just in the name of the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach goddess. It was for only the least realistic sake of our desiresmy name, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teachtoo. Atalanta'' Princess. Warrior. Lover. Hero. Abandoned at birth for being born a daughter rather than a son, Atalanta is raised under the protective eye of the goddess Athemis and notfashioned into a formidable huntress, when we came one who longs for adventure. When the opportunity comes – to livejoin the Argonauts, a fierce band of warriors, discover that we had never died. We wanted descendent from the Gods themselves – Atalanta seizes the chance to dig deep fight in Artemis' name and suck carve out all the marrow her own legendary place in history. What follows is a whirlwind of lifechallenges and discovery and through it, Atalanta must remember Artemis' fatal warning: that if she marries, to it will be overworked and reduced to our last wither undoing.'|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0525426604</amazonuk>1472292154

{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Ernst Haffner and Michael Hofmann (translator)Amanthi Harris|title=Blood BrothersBeautiful Place|rating=45

|summary=It's BerlinPadma, a young Sri Lankan, and has returned to the Nazis are Villa Hibiscus on their way to power, even if they will never cross these pages themselvesthe southern coast of her home country. This is a place she spent her formative years. The city – huge, glamorous, bustling, vicious in the way it can swallow people – It is home to not a countless hoard of teenagersplace she was born into, but we focus on just a few, most the one she thinks of whom have been in some corrective institution or other before nowas home. They call themselves How she came to be at the Blood BrothersVilla, even if all they share is the most unglamorous drudgery of going from one doss-house to anotherhow it became her home, balancing and the cost of a few cigarettes with machinations that of a warm room have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the ''score'' for a few hours or some stale rolls to eatthis gentle and yet subtly violent novel. But en route to them is another Padma'Borstal' escapee, Willi. Surely his fate is going s present fails to be nothing if not more escape her past and much like the musical score of a film, that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the same?Villa.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099594048</amazonuk>1784631930

{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Sara Taylor178563335X|title=The ShoreSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor|rating=4.5|genre=Short StoriesLiterary Fiction|summary=The When we first story we hear from meet Rachel Bird she's a trainee vicar, sitting in on a PCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the Shorechildren up. Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-old Hannah and her elder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a group of isolated islands off sobbing parishioner. Thelma's daughter-in-law won't let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, on the Norfolk coast of Virginia, is from Chloea lovely place, whobut Rachel is struggling to develop a real bond with the parish - and she's telling her sister about what she overheard in awe of the store. She'd been there buying chicken necks so that they could go crabbing. Normally they used bacon rindsvicar, Gail, but theythen she'd already eaten thoses been doing the job for more than thirty years. Cabel Bloxom had been murdered Rachel and ''Christopher hoped that a walk on the beach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they done cut his thang clean off''. The girls are motherless and Chloe is fiercely protective of her little sister Reneeneeded. She's the first of the strong women we'll encounter in these stories, which interlink to give a greater pictureAnd then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>009959188X</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Adam Baron1398515388|title=BlackheathThe Boy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)

|summary=Househusband James is happy First of all, it was the earthquake, deep in the ocean floor, which created the tsunami and this, in Blackheathturn, caused the nuclear meltdown. He's started doing stand-up again so that he too has an achievement in his life to balance wife Alice's award winning poetryThe result was complete and utter devastation. Children Ida The deaths were uncountable, and Dominic are doing well so all is greatthe loss of livelihoods was widespread. Elsewhere in The fact that many pets were separated from their owners came far down the list of priorities but - six months after the area Amelia is equally happy with her actor husband Richard, her own career and children Niamh and teenage Michaeltsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. Sometimes happiness isnHe wasn't enough though a dog person but the convenience store owner's comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his car door and, as Tamon the worlds of the two families start to mingle, things start changing for each of themdog jumped in.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1908434902</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Julian Barnes0989715337|title=The Noise of TimePapa on the Moon|author=Marco North|rating=3.54

|summary=Julian Barnes's first novel since he won 'Some frogs had gotten into the well.'' ''Walter stood waist-deep in the Booker Prize fragrant water, naked except for [[The Sense his beaten leather hat. Long strands of their eggs wove around him, sticky gray pearls with tadpoles inside them. Two of an Ending by Julian Barnes]] is a fictionalised biography the dogs leaned over the opening and barked down at the strange noise of Russian composer Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (1906–75)the buckets as he filled them. Knowing Barnes's penchant ' How is that for stylistic experimentation, though, an opening? The style of this was never going novel in the form of interconnected short stories goes from succinct and laconic to be wistful and musing, turning on a straightforward, chronological life storysixpence. Instead, as Barnes so often doesAnd author Marco North, he sets up a tripartite structure, focussing on three moments in Shostakovich's life when he who has a reckoning with Power (always capitalised here). The title phrase helpfully spells out what the book is all about: 'Art is the whisper most wonderful turn of historyphrase, heard above the noise of timestarts as he means to go on.'|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1910702609</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Danielle McLaughlinDaisy Hildyard|title=Dinosaurs on Other PlanetsEmergency|rating=4.5|genre=Short Stories |summary=Seeing as this book is clearly a talented author hitting the ground running, I will dispense with any major preamble. We start with a tale of a daughter affected by the emotions of her parents as they separate – and the influence of a certain school-teacher – from the mother's point of view. An ancient input shows how alien, and the modern day domesticity how regular, the isolation of a woman can feel, as events are peppered by minor acts of destruction. But men can be alienated too – especially one, a reluctant guest at a party for children hosted by someone he once had an affair with – he feels the new form of this influence in the light of another one he has had to try and abandon. 'All About Alice' – that's what the title character wants to say but has nobody to speak it to, but is it her – mid-40s and single, living with her father – that is most removed from her dreams or her old friend and now child factory, Marian? And we complete a lap of the calendar with the wintry tale of a man unable to tell his work superiors of the problems he faces at home – a new home, recently built like so many one sees while driving round Ireland.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1473613701</amazonuk>}}{{newreview|author=Anne Enright|title=The Green Road|rating=4.5

|summary=''The Green Road'summary of this book doesn' t come close to explaining what is done with the story premise.|isbn=1913097811}}  {{Frontpage |author=Sally Oliver |title=The Weight of a familyLoss |rating=4 |genre=Literary Fiction |summary= Marianne is grieving. If Traumatised after the author was anyone other than Anne Enright it would be stereotypically Irishdeath of her sister, she awakes to find strange, with all thick black hairs sprouting from the appropriate characters bones of her spine which steadily increase in place: size and volume. Her GP, diagnosing the boy who goes off odd phenomenon as a physical reaction to be a priesther grief, the daughter who likes the bottle far too muchrecommends she go to stay at Nede, the son who does good works an experimental new treatment centre in Wales. Yet something strange is happening to Marianne and the woman who stays back where she was born and marries other patients at Nede: a local man, the dead husband who was perhaps just metamorphosis of a little bit beneath the wife who plays the ''grande dame'kind. As Marianne' s memories threaten to overwhelm her, Nede offers her release from this cycle of memory and is perfect pain—but only at being needy, whilst all the while maintaining a terrible price: that she needs nothing. But, of course, it ''is'' Anne Enrightidentity itself.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099539799</amazonuk>086154112X }}{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Kate AtkinsonNatalia Garcia Freire|title=A God in RuinsThis World Does Not Belong To Us

|summary=Teddy Todd never really expected to survive Early comments on this debut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, a delight. I will agree with the war. As first – tremendous is no understatement – but 'a bomber pilot it wasndelight't something which you could rely on and he certainly knew is perhaps using the statisticsexpression in a way I'm not familiar with. But I have to confess my ignorance of the Spanish- against all the odds, he came through it, albeit with some time spent as a prisoner of warlanguage literary tradition so forgive my generalisation here. On balance he had a good warFrom the little I have read (in translation, but time will see him married to Nancy, father to Viola and grandfather to Sunny and Bertie - and left with the feeling that itI don's more difficult t read Spanish) there does seem to have be a good peace than a good wartendency towards the fantastical – the mystical realism.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0552776645</amazonuk>0861541901

{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Chuck PalahniukJennifer Saint|title=Beautiful YouElektra

|summary= This is 'Elektra' by Jennifer Saint tells the first novel story of Helle Helle's, an award winning Danish author, to be translated into English. It is easy to see from this novel why she is gaining accolades three women who live in her Danish homelandthe heavily male dominated world of Ancient Greece. The rhythmicCassandra, Clytemnestra, natural flow of the narrative is mesmerising and appears to lull you through Elektra are all bit players in the book. It has some lovely, spare sentences story of description: ''There were run-down cottages with open doors and news on the radioTrojan War. Gulls flocked around an early harvester in Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that often the silent women have the most compelling stories and the late sun''. But mostly, it is written in a modernist, almost stream of consciousness style, which I found refreshingmost extreme furies.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099587475</amazonuk>1472273915

{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Alice Thompson8409290103|title=The Book Collector|rating=4|genre=General Fiction|summary=Meet Violet. Swept off her feet by a disarming encounter with a landed gentleman and bookshop owner at a coffee shop, she immediately falls in love with him, and is quickly married, and almost as quickly with child. When the boy is born, however, fairly understandable doubts creep in. Is her husband hiding anything behind his assuredness – especially when she wakes in the middle of the night alone? What ghost is left by the fact he lost his first wife and baby in childbirth? What should she understand from her own opinions about her new life, her new life's life, and the idea of a nanny looking after it? Just what is going on in her new country pile?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1784630438</amazonuk>}}{{newreviewIf Only|author=Sasa Stanisic and Anthea Bell (translator)|title=Before the Feast|rating=2.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary= Deep in the heart of Germany sits the village of Furstenfelde. It lies on a spit of land that, legend has it, a giant created, between two lakes – the Great Lake, and the Deep Lake. All around is forest. The village is enjoying summer, and we can see the inhabitants as they go about their lazy life on the last hot day and night before the seasons change, from the teenage lads fishing and crashing cars or preparing for a bell-ringing exam, to the girl who wants out, to the middle-aged man who made a pub out of a garage and some curtains, to the older man (a retired soldier) who is watching his last piece of titillating TV before going out to either fetch cigarettes or shoot himself, to the older still lady painting a portrait of the town ready to auction it off on the morrow. For the morrow is the annual fete, and all those people are, one way or another, reacting to its imminent arrival.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1782271295</amazonuk>}}{{newreview|author=Andre Alexis|title=Fifteen DogsMatthew Tree

|summary=Gods (and brothers) Hermes and Apollo were arguing in a bar about what would happen if animals Twenty-one-year-old Malcolm Lowry had human intelligence 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 eventually thereafter Patrick was to send him a wager was agreedmonthly allowance. Human intelligence would be granted to fifteen dogs staying overnight in Patrick sent the money regularly and a veterinary clinic and correspondence - of sorts - sprang up between the wager, suggested by Apollotwo although we hear more about what Lowry has to say than Patrick. It wasn't that Lowry senior didn't care for his son, it was that Hermes would he didn't care to have him in this country where he might be a danger to his servant for a year if the dogs were not more unhappy than they would have been originallywife and other children. But - if The alcohol problem was obvious even one of before Patrick managed to get the dogs was happy at the end of its life Hermes would winyoung man on his way.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>178125558X</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Marina Warner|title=Fly Away Home|rating=3|genre=Short Stories|summary=How would you subvert a fairy tale? You know enough of them and enough about them to do it, so think on it. Would you give a mermaid a smartphone? Would you pepper them with pop starsAntoine Laurain, Le Sonneur and perhaps let them be witness to the Schadenfreude caused by a cave that's sacred to native Canadians? Would you, in the light of their characters usually being routine, interchangeable tropes, give them a closely-observed personality – as seen here in a teacher's interior thoughts when faced with a piece of East Anglian lore? Would you take the exoticism of the east, and Egypt in particular, and see it in the light of a musical teacher on a zero-hours contract who ends up muttering to himself, directing traffic in the middle of the road, or from the remove of an elderly man with ''swollen feet in orthopaedic sandals'' with a message from the past? Certainly these two are not the standard Arabian Nights-styled pieces…|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1784630381</amazonuk>}}{{newreview|author=Jeanette WintersonJane Aitken (translator)|title=The Gap of TimeRed is My Heart

|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=This is the inaugural volume of a new series of Shakespeare retellings from Hogarth Press. Still to come[[:Category: Margaret Atwood on ''The Tempest'', Howard Jacobson on ''The Merchant of Venice'' Antoine Laurain|Antoine Laurain]] books have always been black and white and Anne Tyler on ''The Taming of the Shrew'', among othersread in my house. How is And so was this first book? It's pretty good as Winterson novels goone, incorporating Shakespearean themes of timealthough I could have spelled that more accurately – this one was, deception and adoption is, black and turning bears white and statues into metaphors while remaining loyal to the essence of the plotred. Yet two crucial elements of the play don't make sense in a modern settingYes, he has an artistic collaborator on this piece, and in the end I felt this added nothing think it's possible to my enjoyment say not one page lacks the influence of the originalsome striking visual ideas.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1781090297</amazonuk>1913547183

{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Marlon JamesB098FFFBH9|title=A Brief History of Seven Killings|rating=5|genre=Crime|summary=On December 3rd 1976 a group of armed men go to Bob Marley's Jamaican home in Hope Road on a mission to kill 'The Singer'. No one will be arrested for it but that doesn't mean their lives afterwards will be normal. This is a total fictionalisation of their story and therefore the story of the people of the Jamaican ghettoes: the politics, the unrest, the gang warfare and the death. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780746350</amazonuk>}}{{newreviewSnowcub|author= Hanya Yanagihara|title=A Little LifeGraham Fulbright|rating=34.5

|summary=Willem, JB, Malcolm and Jude donFourteen-year-old Rachel is her school't have a lot in common apart from their friendship. They gravitated together at college s animal rights project leader and remain close as they become successful in careers as different as the theatre she and architecture. However even hopes for successful future can't erase her friend are producing a competition entry to highlight the blight of way in which human beings exploit the past for one of themanimal world. Jude is physically disabled She gets a great deal of support from her family: father Pip Harrison, a cause that isn't genetic or congenitallecturer at Imperial College, London, mother Kate and her twin, Nick. In fact Kate runs the cause isnfamily business, a toy shop called Cornucopia in Putney, which is where we't even something hell meet Rachel's shared with the other three. The events around it stem back to his childhood and haunt each thought and action he takes as well as his ability to take themmain (if unsuspected) source of information: five soft toys.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1447294815</amazonuk>

{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Julia Franck and Anthea Bell (translator)Yancey Williams|title=WestCrosshairs of the Devil|rating=34.5

|summary=Put yourself Award-winning crime writer Eddie Jablonski is getting on in the shoes of a young mother years and, despite his strenuous objections and thanks to two childrenhis daughter, who declares her intention to leave the Communist East Germany for West Berlinfinds himself living - or imprisoned, and thus loses her scientist job. What would you expect on from Eddie's point of view - in room 315 of the other side – shops full Garden of attainable productsEden nursing home, pleasant neighbourhoods, nice neighbours, an active and busy new lifewith only a trusty nursing aide, where things might feel alien but at least you speak the same language? WellJenkins, for Nelly Senff, this is hardly the casepalatable company. Once past the depressing Eastern exit procedures she Nothing is confronted with more desultory interrogations going to keep Eddie from those 'welcoming' her to the West, beyond which she and her children (their father, whom she never married, is long assumed dead by the authorities, if nobody else) are practically left his stock-in a shared accommodation in a transit camp. The shops are full -trade of what is still unobtainablewriting though, the children hate their new school – and people still look down on them as being foreignso here, even if they have only moved across a city.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099554321</amazonuk>}}{{newreview|author= Salman Rushdie|title= Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights|rating= 3.5|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= Tediously captivating may not sound like the most compelling recommendation for a book you've ever heard. Yet ithis readers, are his wanderings through his life's the nearest I can come to summing up the style of this novel, which features some of the most beautiful language and imagery I've ever read whilst telling a story which moves at a glacial pacework.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>191070203X</amazonuk>0986031658}}{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn= Aldous Huxley0008421714|title= The Genius and the Goddess|rating= 4|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= So, three books in, I've now got to grips with the idea that Huxley doesn't so much want to tell a story as expound his ideas. Once you know that, it makes it easier to choose whether to read him or not. On balance, I have come down on the side of not – I won't be dashing out to work my way through the rest of his output the way I want to with, say, Nevil Shute, or George Orwell.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1784870366</amazonuk>}}{{newreviewMrs March|author=Dan Rhodes|title=When the Professor Got Stuck in the SnowVirginia Feito

|genre=General Literary Fiction|summary= Two people are on a train on their way to, of all things, a WI meeting where The problem began just after the ladies publication of All Bottoms will be lectured George March's most successful novel to date. Everyone but Mrs March (we know her first name only on the non-existence of Godlast page) seemed to either be reading it or had already done so. One of Every day Mrs March went to the two people is Professor Richard Dawkinslocal patisserie to buy olive bread but on that particular morning, rampant atheistPatricia asked, hectoring scientist chappieas she was wrapping the bread, and all-round devotee of ''Deal or No Dealbut isn't this the first time he's based a character on you?''. The other is SmeeShe mentioned that Johanna, his mono-named assistant, amanuensis or the principal character had 'her mannerisms'male secretary'. Smee will come to the fore when the weather sets in and the train journey has to be abandoned some way short of its ultimate destinationPerhaps this would not have mattered, Upper Bottom. Instead except for the pair fetch up at fact that Johanna is the isolated yet friendly community whore of Market HortonNantes - ''a weak, and the only option for accommodation is taken – yesplain, the died-in-the-wool non-believer has to be housed by a retired vicar and his wife. This clash of titanic opinionsdetestable, peppered with social faux pas aplenty will provide for a particularly English kind of farcical comedypathetic, but one with the legs to go as far as any other Good Books have reached in the past…|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1910709018</amazonuk>}}{{newreview|author= Aldous Huxley|title= Time Must Have A Stop|rating= 3|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= Sometimes we start reading "authors" as opposed to specific booksunloved, because we feel we ''should''unloveable wretch. So it was with me and Huxley. I seem to remember reading and actually enjoying the classic ''Brave New World'' and so felt compelled to explore more of the oeuvre.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>178487034X</amazonuk>