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==Literary fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Francesco Pacifico
|title=The Story of My Purity
|rating=2.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In Francesco Pacifico's translated Italian novel 'The Story of My Purity', Piero Rosini is a 30 year old, ultraconservative Catholic working for a radical Catholic publishing house. His marriage is devoid of physical contact, and he yearns for his virginal sister-in-law. Largely to escape these longings, he heads for Paris, never the first choice of one seeking to preserve their purity, where he is further tempted by a slightly unlikely group of girls, and one in particular, which is further complicated for him by the fact that she is Jewish. Almost living a separate life in his head, he cannot escape either the intellectual or physical constraints of his old life in Rome.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241145058</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Philip Sington
|summary=Yan Lianke's 2004 novel, ''Lenin's Kisses'', newly and beautifully translated by Carlos Rojas, is a rare and fascinating example, not just of Chinese fiction from a writer living and working in China, but also a book that has won literary awards (the prestigious Chinese ''Lao She Literary Award''), now available in English. In many respects, the fact that this book won such a literary prize is somewhat surprising - not I hasten to add because of any lack of quality - but because Lianke, who has previously sailed too close to the political wind for Chinese censors, here presents a not altogether flattering view of Chinese politics. It's a book that is literary with a capital L, and while the core of the plot is relatively simple, what makes this book so interesting is the structure and way the story is told.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701188073</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Jan-Philipp Sendker
|title=The Art of Hearing Heartbeats
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Sendker is German-born (Hamburg 1960) and worked as American correspondent for ''Stern'' (1990 to 95) and then as its Asian correspondent from '95 to '99. He now lives in Berlin. This probably gives him enough global insight to write about a US-born high flyer with an Asian heritage heading off to Burma to find out the truth of her father's disappearance. It probably also gives him the language skills to do it in English without recourse to a translator.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184697240X</amazonuk>
}}