Newest Literary Fiction Reviews

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The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James

Literary Fiction

Tania James was a Fulbright Fellow in New Delhi in 2011–12. For this, her second novel after Atlas of Unknowns (shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian literature) and the story collection Aerogrammes, she clearly draws on her personal knowledge of India in all its contradictions, especially when it comes to environmental policy. The novel alternates between three perspectives: a third-person account of an elephant named the Gravedigger and first-person narratives from a poacher and a documentary filmmaker. Full review...

Martin John by Anakana Schofield

Literary Fiction

I had heard much about this novel before I read it for review, by which I mean I had heard it was profane, strange and had a daring subject matter accompanied by elements of humour. I have to say that whilst I agree it is certainly profane and strange and incredibly innovative, I didn't find much humour in it at all. Full review...

The Heart of Man by Jon Kalman Stefansson and Philip Roughton (translator)

Literary Fiction

What could be better than an existentialist book from rural Iceland, full of gnomic comments about how close life and death are, that has as its core a journey taken by, amongst others, a naïve and hormonal teenaged lad and a full coffin? Why, I hear you cry, a trilogy concerning the same. Yes, it's the obvious answer, really – why else would we come to this third part, where the survivors of the expedition rest up, note the women giving them help, 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? Full review...

Vertigo by Joanna Walsh

Literary Fiction

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 and every day. The narrative voice appeared to me to be the same woman speaking throughout, playing different roles, though I'm not sure this was meant to be the case. The style of the stories is that of short vignettes, mostly written in a modernist, stream of consciousness style. Sometimes, the prose appears almost poetic. Full review...

Why We Came to the City by Kristopher Jansma

Literary Fiction

'We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit.' Full review...

Blood Brothers by Ernst Haffner and Michael Hofmann (translator)

Literary Fiction

It's Berlin, and the Nazis are on their way to power, even if they will never cross these pages themselves. The city – huge, glamorous, bustling, vicious in the way it can swallow people – is home to a countless hoard of teenagers, but we focus on just a few, most of whom have been in some corrective institution or other before now. They call themselves the Blood Brothers, even if all they share is the most unglamorous drudgery of going from one doss-house to another, balancing the cost of a few cigarettes with that of a warm room for a few hours or some stale rolls to eat. But en route to them is another 'Borstal' escapee, Willi. Surely his fate is going to be nothing if not more of the same? Full review...

The Shore by Sara Taylor

Short Stories

The first story we hear from the Shore, a group of isolated islands off the coast of Virginia, is from Chloe, who's telling her sister about what she overheard in the store. She'd been there buying chicken necks so that they could go crabbing. Normally they used bacon rinds, but they'd already eaten those. Cabel Bloxom had been murdered and they done cut his thang clean off. The girls are motherless and Chloe is fiercely protective of her little sister Renee. She's the first of the strong women we'll encounter in these stories, which interlink to give a greater picture. Full review...

Blackheath by Adam Baron

General Fiction

Househusband James is happy in Blackheath. He's started doing stand-up again so that he too has an achievement in his life to balance wife Alice's award winning poetry. Children Ida and Dominic are doing well so all is great. Elsewhere in the area Amelia is equally happy with her actor husband Richard, her own career and children Niamh and teenage Michael. Sometimes happiness isn't enough though and, as the worlds of the two families start to mingle, things start changing for each of them. Full review...

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes

Literary Fiction

Julian Barnes's first novel since he won the Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes is a fictionalised biography of Russian composer Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (1906–75). Knowing Barnes's penchant for stylistic experimentation, though, this was never going to be a straightforward, chronological life story. Instead, as Barnes so often does, he sets up a tripartite structure, focussing on three moments in Shostakovich's life when he has a reckoning with Power (always capitalised here). The title phrase helpfully spells out what the book is all about: 'Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.' Full review...

Dinosaurs on Other Planets by Danielle McLaughlin

Short Stories

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. Full review...

The Green Road by Anne Enright

Literary Fiction

The Green Road is the story of a family. If the author was anyone other than Anne Enright it would be stereotypically Irish, with all the appropriate characters in place: the boy who goes off to be a priest, the daughter who likes the bottle far too much, the son who does good works and the woman who stays back where she was born and marries a local man, the dead husband who was perhaps just a little bit beneath the wife who plays the grande dame and is perfect at being needy, whilst all the while maintaining that she needs nothing. But, of course, it is Anne Enright. Full review...

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

Literary Fiction

Teddy Todd never really expected to survive the war. As a bomber pilot it wasn't something which you could rely on and he certainly knew the statistics. But - against all the odds, he came through it, albeit with some time spent as a prisoner of war. On balance he had a good war, but time will see him married to Nancy, father to Viola and grandfather to Sunny and Bertie - and left with the feeling that it's more difficult to have a good peace than a good war. Full review...

Beautiful You by Chuck Palahniuk

General Fiction

Meet Penny Harrigan. And let's hope your introduction to her is more gentle than that we have on the first page of this book, where she is being raped in front of a full court house, who – male to the bone – sit back and say nothing, if not whip out their camera phone. Once people take her out on a gurney and recognise her, we can start from the beginning, where she is a lowly underling at a law firm, having failed too many exams to progress satisfactorily. The company is where the world's richest man is in legal negotiations having left the world's best and most beautiful actress, and lo and behold he just happens to pick Penny to replace her with, even if she doesn't think of herself as the most beautiful girl around. But what exactly is it she is wanted for, and can her apolitical style of feminism and aspirations be met? Full review...

This Should be Written in the Present Tense by Helle Helle and Martin Aitken (translator)

Literary Fiction

This is the first novel 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 in her Danish homeland. The rhythmic, natural flow of the narrative is mesmerising and appears to lull you through the book. It has some lovely, spare sentences of description: There were run-down cottages with open doors and news on the radio. Gulls flocked around an early harvester in the late sun. But mostly, it is written in a modernist, almost stream of consciousness style, which I found refreshing. Full review...

The Book Collector by Alice Thompson

General Fiction

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? Full review...

Before the Feast by Sasa Stanisic and Anthea Bell (translator)

Literary Fiction

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. Full review...

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis

Literary Fiction

Gods (and brothers) Hermes and Apollo were arguing in a bar about what would happen if animals had human intelligence and eventually a wager was agreed. Human intelligence would be granted to fifteen dogs staying overnight in a veterinary clinic and the wager, suggested by Apollo, was that Hermes would be his servant for a year if the dogs were not more unhappy than they would have been originally. But - if even one of the dogs was happy at the end of its life Hermes would win. Full review...

Fly Away Home by Marina Warner

Short Stories

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 stars, 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… Full review...

The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson

Literary Fiction

This is the inaugural volume of a new series of Shakespeare retellings from Hogarth Press. Still to come: Margaret Atwood on The Tempest, Howard Jacobson on The Merchant of Venice and Anne Tyler on The Taming of the Shrew, among others. How is this first book? It's pretty good as Winterson novels go, incorporating Shakespearean themes of time, deception and adoption and turning bears and statues into metaphors while remaining loyal to the essence of the plot. Yet two crucial elements of the play don't make sense in a modern setting, and in the end I felt this added nothing to my enjoyment of the original. Full review...

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

Crime

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. Full review...

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Literary Fiction

Willem, JB, Malcolm and Jude don't have a lot in common apart from their friendship. They gravitated together at college and remain close as they become successful in careers as different as the theatre and architecture. However even hopes for successful future can't erase the blight of the past for one of them. Jude is physically disabled from a cause that isn't genetic or congenital. In fact the cause isn't even something he'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 them. Full review...

West by Julia Franck and Anthea Bell (translator)

Literary Fiction

Put yourself in the shoes of a young mother to two children, who declares her intention to leave the Communist East Germany for West Berlin, and thus loses her scientist job. What would you expect on the other side – shops full of attainable products, pleasant neighbourhoods, nice neighbours, an active and busy new life, where things might feel alien but at least you speak the same language? Well, for Nelly Senff, this is hardly the case. Once past the depressing Eastern exit procedures she is confronted with more desultory interrogations 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 in a shared accommodation in a transit camp. The shops are full of what is still unobtainable, the children hate their new school – and people still look down on them as being foreign, even if they have only moved across a city. Full review...

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

Literary Fiction

Tediously captivating may not sound like the most compelling recommendation for a book you've ever heard. Yet it'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 pace. Full review...

The Genius and the Goddess by Aldous Huxley

Literary Fiction

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. Full review...

When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow by Dan Rhodes

General Fiction

Two people are on a train on their way to, of all things, a WI meeting where the ladies of All Bottoms will be lectured on the non-existence of God. One of the two people is Professor Richard Dawkins, rampant atheist, hectoring scientist chappie, and all-round devotee of Deal or No Deal. The other is Smee, his mono-named assistant, amanuensis or '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 destination, Upper Bottom. Instead the pair fetch up at the isolated yet friendly community of Market Horton, and the only option for accommodation is taken – yes, the died-in-the-wool non-believer has to be housed by a retired vicar and his wife. This clash of titanic opinions, peppered with social faux pas aplenty will provide for a particularly English kind of farcical comedy, but one with the legs to go as far as any other Good Books have reached in the past… Full review...

Time Must Have A Stop by Aldous Huxley

Literary Fiction

Sometimes we start reading "authors" as opposed to specific books, because we feel we should. 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. Full review...

Submission by Michel Houellebecq and Lorin Stein (translator)

Literary Fiction

What do you expect from Submission? It is after all from one of Europe's more blunt huge-sellers, one who is most forthright in his opinions, narratives and characters' sexual lives. It has become indelibly linked with a new Europe, after its reception and contents led to publicity on the cover of Charlie Hebdo, which resulted in something less savoury than literature, to say the least. Do you expect it to be about a France of the near future, where a Muslim political party provides the president? Well, don't go into this submissively following your expectations. Full review...

Whispers Through A Megaphone by Rachel Elliott

General Fiction

Miriam doesn’t speak. Well, that’s not strictly true. She does speak, but nothing above a whisper which makes it hard to have a conversation with her. Particularly as she hasn’t left her house in three years. But today is the day. She’s going to open that door and walk outside. She really is. Ralph has finally twigged (and with no small amount of surprise) that his wife Sadie doesn’t actually love him. And now he’s not sure if she ever really did. Having spent so much time regurgitating his every moment onto Social Media, Ralph hasn’t really had a chance to think about it. But now he has, it is so shockingly awful that he has decided to run away. And of all the places he could run away to, he has chosen the same woods that Miriam has picked to be the first place she will visit out-of-doors. And Sadie? Well, she’s had enough of reading Tweets and living vicariously through the posts of others. Sadie is going to have an adventure of her own. Full review...