Literary fiction
Kissing Alice by Jacqueline Yallop
Arthur Claythorne, a decorator by trade finds himself out of work and back home in Plymouth as the First World War begins, along with a stolen copy of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, a book full of powerful imagery. After being injured in the war Arthur returns home to his wife Queenie May and two daughters, Florrie and Alice, a changed man, deeply affected by his experiences in the trenches and desperate to find religion. Despite Florrie's interest in following her father into Catholicism, it is Alice who suddenly finds herself the object of her father's unusual and inappropriate attention. Full review...
Room by Emma Donoghue
It's the morning of Jack's fifth birthday, but Jack is no ordinary boy. He and his Ma have been imprisoned by the character known only as 'Old Nick' in a single room for all Jack's life. True he has a television, but his mother has convinced him that those people are not real. The room is all Jack has ever known - and in it he has developed his own attachment to things like Bed, Rug, Table, Skylight and Wardrobe where he sleeps. The first victim of incarceration, it seems, is the definite article. Full review...
The Good Angel of Death by Andrey Kurkov and Andrew Bromfield
Kolya cannot possibly expect what the act of moving flat, and finding a book among what the old folks who move out leave behind, might lead to. I can hint that it involves a trip of several hundreds of miles, involves a couple of pieces of anatomy the average man does not fancy leaving behind, a chameleon, Kolya being given as a husband-cum-present to a lovely young lady, and a lot more. The find involves Ukraine's national author, Taras Shevchenko, and a hunt for something he might have left behind in a desert abutting the Caspian Sea. Full review...
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
Meet Jeff. He's a journalist living in London, with a fine line in delaying his work effort and a keen eye for detail. He can see how the world is made better by a smile from a random shopkeeper - yet seems too grumpy to try it himself. Instead he suspects his habit of walking round, mouthing or speaking out his own inner thoughts is making him seem a scary old man. He can partly address this, by dying his hair. And he can stop walking round London when he gets commissions to report back from the modern arts Biennale in Venice. Soon, however, the only work of art he's at all worried about goes by the name of Laura... Full review...
Heart of Tango by Elia Barcelo and David Frye
Although less than 200 pages in length, this short novel encompasses a great deal, both in the storyline, and the development of the characters. The plot itself is simple. Young Natalia has been betrothed to the much older Berstein, a German sailor known for some time to Natalia’s father. He appears as a kindly character, and clearly in love/enamoured of Natalia. But the marriage is no love match, but one done instead for expediency, and although prepared to go through with it, Natalia is like any other young girl, and wishes she was marrying the love of her life. Her mother died when she was a baby so she has had a lonely childhood, yearning for female company and guidance - but the reality of the situation has meant that other than an elderly, kindly neighbour who has tried to help support and advise her, she is irrevocably alone - seeming to have very few friends even of her own age. Full review...
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Fifty years after its first release, readers are once again getting the chance to acquaint themselves with Harper Lee's classic tale of growing up in the Deep South during the depression. After five decades, To Kill a Mockingbird still hasn't lost its charm. Even new readers can expect a classic tale full of elements still relevant to this day. Full review...
A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks
It's Sunday, nine days before Christmas in 2007 and we meet a disparate group of people in London, who are doing what they normally do. There's a hedge fund manager who's trying to pull off the biggest trade of his career. A professional footballer from Poland has just arrived in the country and is disappointed with his small German car, but it will have to do until his large German car arrives. A barrister has far too little work and too much time on his hands. There's the student searching for something in which to believe who's led astray by the more extreme Islamic fundamentalists – and another student who's addicted to drugs and reality television. A devious book reviewer struggles to like anything written after the nineteenth century – and a chutney magnate from Havering-atte-Bower wants to learn how to discuss books with the Queen. Looping all these people together is a Tube driver on the Circle Line. Full review...
Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler
It's always a red letter day to sit down to an unread Anne Tyler. This is her eighteenth published novel. For any readers not already fans of her books, this American writer observes the ordinary in order to excel at 'making the familiar, strange'. Full review...
Elliot Allagash by Simon Rich
Meet thirteen year-old Seymor Herson, he's one of life's losers, the least popular boy at Glendale a second rate private school in New York. He has made a virtue of mediocrity and is happy to simply survive his time at Glendale rather than try and excel at anything.
Meet thirteen year-old Elliot Allagash heir to one of the largest fortunes in America. Elliot who makes a habit of being thrown out of exclusive private schools has finally ended up at Glendale whose reliance on his family's funding means that he cannot be expelled despite his various misdemeanours. Expulsion not being an option Elliot embarks on an equally difficult project, to make Seymor into the most popular boy in school and beyond that to turn him into a young prodigy, the talk of the New York elite. Can he achieve this? And at what cost? Full review...
And The Land Lay Still by James Robertson
The novel starts ... at the end. We see the fictional character, photographer Mike Pendreich collating many, many photographs which his late father took with his trusty camera. His father is generally acknowledged as the better of the two at the craft; he simply had the knack. And what his son is now in charge of are black and white photographs charting a social history at that time. And we all know that a picture is worth a thousand words. Full review...
In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut
'In A Strange Room' follows the actions of one man as he travels across three different countries, with three sets of companions, playing three separate roles. Never settled in one place, narrator Damon continually hops from one country to another collecting more stamps in his passport than he does friends. Full review...
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker
Readers who know of Nicholson Baker don't go to his work expecting convoluted plot, fast-paced action or non-stop drama. His novels at their best, dissect, in minute detail, the most intimate thoughts and daily doings, usually of a single character. They are revealing and surprising, and revel in language itself, like poetry. In other ways they are unlike poetry, which deals in suggestion and compression. And Baker's novels generally deal in the opposite. Full review...
What Becomes by A L Kennedy
You're three stories into this collection and two people have cut their hands open preparing food - a man with love drooping away from his marriage, making soup, and another, a greengrocer, preparing stock and thinking about his own relationship. But there is no pattern to that. Four stories in and there have been two bursts of non-sequitur comedy. Why your fruit might be ruined by stray fingers, and the thoughts of a woman in a flotation tank, remembering Doctor Who, locked parental doors - and the urban myths of gerbils. But there's still no pattern - and that's the point of these combined stories. Life and all of its emotions does not live to rule. Full review...
The Escape by Adam Thirlwell
When we first meet seventy-eight year-old Raphael Haffner, he is hiding in a spa hotel closet watching a twenty-something year-old yoga instructor (who knows he's there) having sex with her boyfriend (who doesn't). Haffner is a British, Jewish former banker who is staying at the spa in Central Europe while on a mission to reclaim his dead wife's villa that was confiscated by the Nazis in the war. Thirlwell's narrator, some fifty years younger than Haffner (ie the age of the author), describes the aging libertine Haffner as lustful, selfish, vain - an entirely commonplace man. Charming. Full review...
The Old Romantic by Louise Dean
Ken is nearly eighty and he's obsessed with his death and planning his own funeral. He's even helping out on a volunteer basis in the local undertaker's, but what he'd really like is to be back with his family. The trouble is that they've rather moved on. His sister – who seems to have been the perfect woman in his life – is dead. He and his first wife are divorced and he's contemplating the same end to his second marriage. His elder son left home some twenty years ago as Gary and re-invented himself as Nick. At forty he's a solicitor, living with his girlfriend and her twelve-year old daughter and he's happy. He really doesn't want Ken to spoil things, but there are some things which you just cannot avoid. Ken is one of them. Full review...
The Innocent by David Szalay
This is a slim volume but it is tense, taut and has bite. The story see-saws between the 1970s and the late 1940s where much political activity occurs, (there's an understatement) but especially in Russia as far as this novel is concerned. And as we dip into the even earlier period of the 1930s, we get a glimpse of the main character, Aleksandr, as a young man brimming over with political ideology. Along with his fellow students he fervently believed that 'The making of Communism was something sacred to us.' Full review...
Purge by Sofi Oksanen
Estonia 1992. A year after her country has regained independence from the Soviet Union, Aliide Truu is in her remote cottage in the woods, canning tomatoes from a bumper harvest, swatting at ever-present flies, and trying not to think about the neighbourhood boys who persecute her remorselessly, throwing rocks at her windows, and even poisoning her dog. Looking out of the window, she sees a bedraggled girl lying outside. Zara is a sex-trafficked girl from Russia, on the run from her pimps. Full review...
After the Fire, A Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld
Frank has moved to his grandparents’ shack by the sea after a tough end to a difficult relationship, and is trying to settle down, get a job, and get to know his new neighbours. He seems to be doing well, until two girls disappear, with suspicion falling on him. Decades earlier, Leon is left to run his family’s cake shop as his father is sent to fight in Korea, before he in turn is conscripted to serve in Vietnam. Things happen to him, although very few of them are of any interest whatsoever. Is there a connection between Frank and Leon? Will either or both of them manage to find happiness? Can author Evie Wyld give us any reason to care? Full review...
Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker
When a bag of twenty seven undelivered letters was recovered from behind a hairdresser's in Skipton it fell to two local policemen to investigate what would become known as Burley Cross Post Box Theft, for it was in the village of Burley Cross, just before Christmas, that the Post Box was forced open and the mail stolen. P C Roger Topping, of the Ilkley force, took over the case from his old school friend Sargeant Laurence Everill without any great hope of success, but the village was in turmoil and something had to be done. Full review...
I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson
This novel is told in the first person by the main character, thirtysomething Arvid Jansen. He's at a painful part of his life when we meet him; he's separated from his wife and he's not coping at all well. As if that wasn't enough personal stress to contend with, he's discovered that his mother is seriously ill. How long has she got to live? How will she cope? And how will Arvid cope? Full review...
Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett
Doug Fanning appears to be a young man in a hurry. He feels he's done his bit for his country in seeing action in the Gulf War and it's now 'Doug' time. Almost overnight, he's found his vocation and become a banker - a very successful banker. Everything he touches turns to gold. And now he wants to show everyone how well he's done in life and requests that a casino of a house is built to his luxurious, over-the-top specifications. Nothing wrong with that you may say. The man's earned it, good and proper. Or has he? He's chosen to have his executive house built in an area of mature woodland and traditional homes. It's bound to stand out like the proverbial sore thumb. The property market is also extremely buoyant and if Doug chooses to sell he'll make a packet. Win, win situation all round. Or is it? Full review...
Travelling Light by Tove Jansson
In her home country of Finland – and no doubt throughout much of the rest of Europe which is not quite so sniffy about foreign literature as Britain tends to be – Jansson is generally recognised as an author of talent, skill, verve and wit that extended far beyond the Moomin Troll stories for which she is best known in this country. Those children's books were first published in England sixty years ago and have remained in print ever since (as well as being adapted for just about every other medium going), and a joy they are too, but it is only recently that we have been granted the pleasures of reading her fiction for adults. Full review...
Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen
This is a big book by anyone's standards. Think of your average blockbuster in terms of pages - then double it. Due to its sheer breadth of narrative I think it best if I break it down into manageable book-sized chunks (the novel itself is sub-divided into a trilogy generally known as The Watson Trilogy). First off, there's an explanatory author's note at the beginning to ease the reader in gently, perhaps. I took a deep breath and dived in ... Full review...
The Sickness by Alberto Barrera Tyszka
This literary novel is a slow burner. But the very first page gives an insight into the beautiful language used throughout such as 'Medical people rarely used adjectives. They don't need to.' And later on there's another lovely sentence loaded with meaning and originality - 'Blood is a terrible gossip, it tells everything, as any laboratory technician knows.' The opening chapter is located in a consulting room where a rather tense conversation is taking place. The answer is extremely important to one man. Full review...
Thief by Maureen Gibbon
It’s summer, and school teacher Suzanne is renting a cabin by a lake. Spending her days reading and swimming, she also finds time to engage in some old fashioned letter writing with a stranger who responded to a personal ad she placed. He’s currently an inmate at the state penitentiary, but Suzanne’s not one to judge, and agrees to give their correspondence a shot. Then she finds out what he’s in for – and it’s not pretty. Breville is a convicted thief and rapist, and Suzanne herself was raped as a teenager, by a friend’s brother. That should be the end of it: any sensible person would cut off all communication and turn their back on the situation. But Suzanne is different and though she’s acknowledges that it might not be the healthiest of relationships, she maintains the back and forth with Breville. Full review...
The Blind Side of the Heart by Julia Franck
When I read the international bestseller on the front cover, as in this novel, my expectations are raised a notch or two. So, would this book meet those expectations? Franck gives the reader a short prologue and we see Helene, the main character of the novel, living in her middle-years. We know she has a husband who is carrying out some very important and crucial work for his country; his beloved Germany. The book is set in 1945 and Germany is in chaos. And Helen's young son has seen sights no 7 year old should witness. It's the stuff of nightmares. Their lives are also in chaos not to mention extreme danger and as a single parent who's at her wit's end she makes a monumental decision. Full review...
Jezebel by Irene Nemirovsky
Gladys Eysenach stands in the dock accused of murdering her young lover. She apparently took a gun from her handbag and shot him in the early hours of Christmas Day in her own home. What happened is clear – Gladys makes no attempt to deny it – but why it happened is less obvious, and Gladys doesn't seem inclined to offer much in the way of explanation. But gradually, oh so teasingly, we find out what really happened and why. Full review...
Whatever You Love by Louise Doughty
Two police officers knock on Laura's door. They break the news to her that her 9 year old daughter Betty has been run over and killed. Betty's friend Willow is in hospital. Immediately, I was drawn into this story of a mother's worst nightmare coming true. Full review...
Jew by DO Dodd
A man regains consciousness to find himself stifled. Pushing and pulling at the weight on top of him, he gradually realises the horrific truth. He's in a mass grave and he's covered with bodies. He has no memory of who he is or how he came to be there. He struggles out. He finds a uniform and he puts it on. He takes a gun and he buckles on its holster. He finds a man and a woman, naked on a bed. He shoots the man. He gets into a car and he drives into town, where he's greeted as the man in charge. Full review...
Helen by Maria Edgeworth
Sweet-tempered Helen Stanley has been left penniless and homeless after her uncle's death. Soon her best friend Cecilia writes to encourage Helen to come and live with her and her new husband, General Clarendon at Clarendon Park. Helen soon finds herself settled in to Clarendon Park and reacquaints herself with Cecilia and more importantly with Cecilia's mother, Lady Davenant, who considers Helen a daughter, and even prefers her to Cecilia. Full review...
The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason
Zachary Mason suggests that Homer's Odyssey was merely one particular ordering of the events of Odysseus' return to Ithaca after the Trojan War. 'Echoes of other Odysseys', he suggests exist, including a forty four-episode variation in a 'pre-Ptolomeic papyrus excavated from the desiccated rubbish mounds of Oxyrhnchus' and this is what is 'translated' here. So we are presented with these forty four often very short stories that reconstruct elements of the Odyssey in a kind of alternate reality, asking 'what if it were slightly different', and what emerges is a non-linear, mosaic of stories. If Homer had decided to present his book in DVD format, these would be in the 'extras' of alternative 'takes' on things. The result is like a jazz riff on the original stories. Full review...
Taurus by Joseph Smith
As the bull goes from paddock to stall in the searing heat of the farm, he feels strangely disembodied - and yet all he feels is his body: his huge bulk; the angles at which he must hold up his heavy head to see what he needs to see; the strange latency that fills him. He watches the skittish grey horse, transfixed and yet repulsed by its grace and fluidity. He observes his captors, the girl and boy siblings and their father, and he allows their goadings to gradually wake him from stuporous apathy. Full review...
The Secret History of Costaguana by Juan Gabriel Vasquez
In 1904 Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad wrote his novel about a self-publicising Italian expatriate by the name of Nostromo, set in the fictitious South American republic of Costaguana. Columbian writer, Juan Gabriel Vásquez imagines that the fictitious José Altamirano has assisted Conrad in his research by telling him his own story, only to find that the British novelist has subsequently inexcusably omitted him from his book. Now, he is seeking to set the record straight by telling the reader, who he imagines in the role of a jury, as well as someone named Eloísa (who we later find out about) the same story to pass judgement on if this was fair. Full review...
The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe
The novel starts at the end. Therefore we know that one of the two principal characters, namely Goro, appears to have committed suicide. The question is why. And the whole novel is an attempt to provide that elusive answer. Goro was an extremely successful film director of international repute. He was based in his native Japan but travelled extensively with his work. And you have to ask yourself why would a man such as this decide to end his life? Full review...