Literary fiction
Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman
American nurse Sunny Taylor needed to get away from home and everything familiar. She takes a gamble into the unknown and ends up in Finland. The language barrier seems to be the least of her problems. As a healthy, relatively young female she sees on a daily basis ailments, minor and major, imagined and otherwise. Suvanto (which gives the novel its title) is the name of the well-known and well-regarded hospital. It operates on a tier system - those who can pay well for medical care and those who are less well-off. And the accommodation, level of nursing and medical care and even the food also operate on this tiered system. Full review...
Things We Didn't See Coming by Steven Amsterdam
This book has gained praise from the likes of the Washington Post and the Financial times so I was really looking forward to a good - even great read. But did I get it? I think that opening on the eve of the millennium (the most recent one) is pretty special in itself and should be a good 'hook' to draw the reader in. The narrator, young, male (not named as yet) and his family are packing the family car for the journey ahead. The poor car is full to bursting. Dad is a sceptic and he's taking no chances with this millennium situation and he's instructed his family to pack more than the usual festive presents this time. They've (well, dad has) made the decision to get as far away from London as they can - just in case. Just in case of what exactly is never mentioned, only implied. So it's New Year celebrations with the grandparents. Full review...
You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik
Does the world need another 'inspirational teacher lets down students' story? It's debatable, but this one is really rather good. Full review...
Alice by Judith Hermann
Alice is a collection of five short stories, linked thematically since they all deal with the subject of death, but they are also linked because the central character, Alice, is the same in each story. So rather than feeling like short stories the book has a hint of the novel to it, yet the stories are never completed or fully told so it's a novel where you're not always sure what's going on. Full review...
Before I Go To Sleep by S J Watson
Rather ironically, 'Before I Go To Sleep' is not a book that you will forget in a hurry. Imagine, if you will, waking up every morning with no memory of who you are, where you are, or who the person lying next to you in bed is. You can remember things during the day, but once you go to sleep, your mind is effectively wiped clean. This is the slightly unusual form of amnesia that the narrator, Christine suffers from in Watson's first novel that is a daring and gripping literary thriller. Full review...
My Michael by Amos Oz
The Introduction to this book has a lovely sub-heading - 'Forty Years Later' where Oz admits freely that now, today, he wouldn't attempt or ... 'dare write an entire novel in a female voice.' But I found his open telling of why and how he came to write the book in the first place interesting and rather enchanting and whetted my appetite to get on and read the book. For example, Oz wrote most of the book in the cramped confines of a toilet, would you believe. But for me what caught my attention was the fact that he tells his readers that Hannah, the central character, was in his head and determined to he heard. 'Just shut up and write' she tells him. A Translator's Note follows before we get to the story proper. Full review...
Obedience by Jacqueline Yallop
The story opens with a much younger Sister Bernard - no more than a girl really. The daily lives of the nuns is regulated, with long hours for prayer, meditation and solitude. Everyone is housed, fed and watered adequately and that's as far as it goes. No little luxuries to speak of. Nothing to temper the harshness and the silence. Visits from family members are forbidden also. However, the young Sister Bernard appears to not only be coping very well with all of this but even embracing it. She doesn't grumble or complain about anything. However, even although she may appear saintly she is human, just like the rest of us and temptation does come along in the shape of a young man. Full review...
Noon by Aatish Taseer
'Noon' sits somewhere between a collection of related short stories and a full blown novel in that it tells four different episodes in Rehan Tabassum's life, spread over a couple of decades. It explores some large issues though. Full review...
Radiance by Louis B Jones
Mark Perdue took his daughter, Carlotta – or Lotta, as she's known – on an indulgent fantasy weekend in Los Angeles. Lotta and some other teenagers were going to live the celebrity lifestyle for a few days, with gigs, recordings and stretch limos to ferry them around. Mark's got problems of his own. He was an eminent physicist but illness has taken its toll. His wife is still suffering the emotional effects of a late-term abortion – the family called the foetus 'Noddy' – and Lotta can't reconcile how she feels about the loss of her unborn sibling, even going as far as to say that she would have given up the next ten years of her life to look after the child. And Mark? Well, on the tarmac at LAX it dawns on him that a heart attack would be a convenient way out of everything. Full review...
Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante
This is a beautifully-presented book with its eye-catching front cover and poetic title. Jennifer has had a busy and fulfilling professional life as a well-respected medical surgeon. Until now. She's gradually losing bits of her mind to Alzheimer's. Her family is supportive and keep popping in on a regular basis plus there's now a live-in carer, Magdalena, so that daily life and daily chores are just about covered. Full review...
The Elephant's Journey by Jose Saramago and Margaret Jull Costa
This novel is inspired by a real event – the marriage gift of an elephant from Dom João III of Portugal to his cousin Maximilian, the Hapsburg Archduke of Austria. When the gift was accepted, the elephant Solomon, his mahout Subhro and numerous soldiers, oxen and porters, walked from Lisbon to Vienna to deliver the present, arriving in 1552. This is the story of that journey. Full review...
Waterline by Ross Raisin
Raisin has an enviable portfolio for one so young, having been named Sunday Times Young Writer Of The Year 2009 and his previous novel receiving fulsome praise. No pressure then with this book. The story opens with all members of the Little family paying their respects to Cathy. Some have travelled further than others as they all squeeze into Mick's modest house, somewhere in Glasgow. A less-than-posh part. Mick is obviously numb with the shock of it all (even although his wife's death was not sudden - she had been ill for some time). It's clear that some of the family, distant members, feel uncomfortable and don't quite know how to act. Full review...
The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad
"In the tangle of crumbling, weather-beaten and broken hills, where the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan meet, is a military outpost…" Thus begins the tale of Tor Baz, the Black Falcon. To this desolate place come two wanderers, a man and a woman seeking refuge.
Refuge is denied them, since it places duties that the fort commander cannot accept, but instead he offers them shelter from the wind of a hundred and twenty days. For as long as they want it. Shelter, and food. Full review...
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Clockwork Orange comes under the heading of "books you feel you ought to have read by now". Mostly these are books that you don't necessarily want to read, but are considered such classics that an inability to pass any kind of comment upon them suggests a gaping hole in your education. Full review...
Breaking Away by Anna Gavalda
Garance is on her way to a family wedding. In the car with her brother and his wife she thinks about all her siblings, what's happened in their lives and who they have all become. Throughout the journey she finds herself bickering constantly with her sister-in-law who always rubs her up the wrong way, and for the first time Garance senses some tension from her brother too who is usually calm and collected at all times. Is everything okay in his life or is his wife finally beginning to wear his patience thin? They take a detour en route to pick up another sibling, much to Carine's annoyance, and then on reaching the wedding there's a surprise in store for all of them as the four siblings find themselves on an unplanned escape, together once again, rediscovering their youthful selves in a fun, brief break from their real lives. Full review...
Vaclav and Lena by Haley Tanner
Vaclav and Lena are both children of Russian immigrants, growing up in Brooklyn. Vaclav dreams of becoming a fantastic magician, with his friend Lena as his assistant, and as children they practise their routine together, making lists of the things they'll need, the costumes they will wear and the tricks they will perform. Vaclav is confident and happy, but Lena is quiet, withdrawn and struggles with speaking English. Yet Vaclav believes, always, that they are destined to be together. Even when Lena disappears one day and is gone from his life for many years still he hopes that, somehow, he will find her again. Full review...
Mistaken by Neil Jordan
The front cover photograph and the blurb on the back cover give this book a misty, floaty, ethereal feel. The story starts at the end, if you get my drift. The adult Kevin attends a local funeral but he's careful to remain low-key, hidden almost. Why is that? And whose funeral is it anyway? As early as page 6, Jordan's poetic and atmospheric style is apparent in lines such as ' ... close to the line of yew trees, were the massed umbrellas of the mourners, retreating, like so many mushrooms come alive in a fairy-tale forest.' Full review...
The Reinvention of Love by Helen Humphreys
'The Reinvention of Love' is one of those stories that is so bizarre and strange that it could only be based on factual events. Essentially it is a good, old-fashioned love triangle set mostly in Paris in the period from the 1830s to the 1860s; a world where fighting duels is a commonplace event. The triangle features the great French literary writer Victor Hugo, his wife Adèle and the altogether strange critic Charles Saint-Beuve who narrates much of this story, with brief breaks for Adèle's side of events and some letters written by the Hugo's youngest daughter, also called Adèle (but let's call her, as she was known to her family, Dédé to avoid confusion). Full review...
Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer by Wesley Stace
"Nothing in recent fiction prepared me for the power and the polish of this subtle tale of English music in the making, a chiller wrapped in an enigma [New Statesman]"
"His handling of dry comic dialogue and cynical affectation is reminiscent of P G Wodehouse… an intelligent, fun and thoughtful piece of fiction [Independent on Sunday]"
Just two of the previous reviews that adorn the back cover of 'Charles Jessold…' Full review...
Child Wonder by Roy Jacobsen, Don Bartlett (translator) and Don Shaw (translator)
1961 was a year of change, a time, as Jacobsen puts it, when men became boys and housewives women. At the outset Finn and his mother are leading a quiet, rather timorous life in a working class Oslo suburb. Then change overwhelms them, not through world events, but in the form of a mysterious child who is Finn's half sister. Linda is not like other children and Finn's attempt to deal with her impact on his family is the central thread in this quintessential story of growing up. Full review...
Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie
Back in 1990, Salman Rushdie followed up his controversial 'Satanic Verses' with a book dedicated to his then nine year old son, Zafar, called 'Haroun and the Sea of Stories'. Now, his second son, Milan, finally gets a book of his own, although he had to wait until he was 13 for his father to get around to it. 'Luka and the Fire of Life' is very much a follow up to 'Haroun' and it is certainly helpful, although not necessary, if you have read that book as many of the events in the first book are referred to here. Full review...
The Wrong Blood by Manuel de Lope and John Cullen (Translator)
Although de Lope has written over a dozen novels, this is the first to be translated into English. The cover is as pretty as a picture and screams 'Spanish.' So far, so good. But I have to admit that on the whole most of the European novels I've read over the last year or so, have fallen short of the mark for me. Will this one prove to be different? Full review...
Last Man In Tower by Aravind Adiga
Following a Man Booker winning book like The White Tiger is always going to be a daunting challenge for any writer, let alone one when that book was the author's first novel. In 'Last Man in Tower' Adiga perhaps sensibly turns to a proven structure that allows his story-telling skills to flourish. Gone are clever structural ideas, like 'The White Tiger's' letter format and instead we get a straightforward engaging story set in modern day Mumbai where a rich builder is seeking to force residents of an old apartment block to sell their flats to enable redevelopment. Full review...
Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas
Ari is just nineteen, of Greek descent but living in Melbourne with his family. He's gay, unemployed and not in education. He wants to get away from the traditional Greek life of his parents and their friends but has no idea how to do it. He falls back on the only life that he knows: clubs, parties, anonymous sex, a cocktail of drugs and alcohol. But will even this be enough to dull the pain? Told vividly in the first person and sexually explicit it's a short book – a novella – which grabs you and has no intention of letting you go until it spits you out at the other end. Full review...
Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou
The protagonist of this novel is an ordinary Congolese porcupine until Papa Kibandi performs an ancient ritual involving a hallucinogenic cocktail called mayamvumbi, and transforms him into his son's harmful double. The insecure younger Kibandi becomes more and more embittered as his life goes on, and sends his porcupine to 'eat' anybody he feels the least bit threatened by, a process whereby that person's life essence is sucked out, killing them instantly. Over one hundred victims later and following his master's death at the hands of a vengeful baby, our narrator retires to the hollow of a baobab tree where he writes this confessional. Full review...
Then by Julie Myerson
The front cover is graphic and telling. A frozen London with its skyscrapers emitting black smoke and random fires across a desolate landscape. As early as the second paragraph we see that something is wrong, something cataclysmic has happened with the lines People are eating the birds ... fighting over a handful of scorched sparrows. The story is told in the first person by the central character which gives it immediacy and draws the reader straight in. Full review...
Whatever by Michel Houellebecq
Interviewed by BBC film critic Mark Kermode shortly before his 60th birthday, Woody Allen gave the bequiffed one this somewhat startling piece of advice, You get to my age, you realise that when you die you're really not losing that much. Those words sprang to mind while reading Whatever, first novel by Michel Houellebecq. The main protagonist in Whatever may be only half the age of the film director, but the outlook on life shared by both men seems strikingly similar. Full review...
Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead wanted to write something personal for his fourth book, so he chose an autobiographical novel, based on his experiences as a vacationing youngster. Sag Harbor really does exist - at the far end of Long Island and next to the up-market Hamptons. It has a history of whaling and an association with John Steinbeck. Within easy reach of New York, in 1985 it was an affluent black enclave within a large, white middle-class holiday area. Full review...
The Songs of Manolo Escobar by Carlos Alba
Antonio is the second-born son to Spanish parents, living in Glasgow. He's embarrassed to be anything other than Scottish, and he tries everything to hide his family background from friends at school, refusing to speak Spanish with his parents and struggling to forge his own identity in life. In his middle age, he suddenly finds his life falling apart around him as his marriage begins to fail and his increasingly frail father becomes obsessed with the proper burial of his parents back in Spain. Antonio continues to play a rather emotionally distant part in his parents' lives, but then finds himself drawn further and further into the truth about his father's past which, ultimately, leads him to question his own past and the path his future might take. Full review...
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
Anders Eckman is dead. The news has been delivered in the form an aerogram – remember those blue paper-cum-envelope things we used to use to write to foreign pen-pals when the notion of befriending a person you'd never met in a foreign country still seemed exotic?
This flimsy piece of paper was delivered to Eckman's employers. After all it was them that had sent him down to the Brazilian Amazon to find the enigmatic and evasive Dr Annik Swenson, and more precisely find out exactly how she was getting on with developing the drug that was costing the firm so much of their research budget. Full review...
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
In the late eighteen thirties the father of an English gentleman conspires to marry him off to a landed Jamaican Creole as a means of giving his second son an estate and stopping him being a burden on the family. Written in the nineteen sixties, 'Wide Sargasso Sea' was inspired by Rochester's first wife in Jane Eyre, and is an impressionistic, hallucinatory account of that woman's alienation and subsequent descent into madness that can be read as a prequel to the Bronte novel. The book covers Antoinette's childhood in Jamaica and her honeymoon on a small Caribbean island with her new husband and their domestic servants, and the point of view shifts between Antoinette and her husband. Full review...
The Moment by Douglas Kennedy
After I'd read the blurb on the back cover I gave a bit of a shrug as if to say, well, I've read quite a number of books recently where undying love has been found in war-torn Europe, so was this book going to be different, or better? Thomas Nesbitt, middle-aged, disillusioned with love and more than a tad world-weary is trying to move on in his life. His marriage of more than twenty years is dissolving before his very eyes. But rather than being upset, he's feeling as if a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. He and his wife were never really in love in the true sense of the phrase, despite having a daughter together. And there's a very good reason as to why Thomas is like this and the rest of the book tells us why, warts and all. Full review...
The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna
The setting for this story is a hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, soon after the government has declared an end to an 11 year civil war. How can people come to terms with the terrible things that have happened? Actually, can they come to terms with those things? Full review...
Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth
Cold Light is the story of three teenage girls who become involved in a predatory adult world. As the story opens we're looking back on what happened from a decade later and we know that one of the girls, Chloë, died in a Valentine's Day suicide pact. The town council has finally decided on a memorial to Chloë – it's to be a summerhouse at the side of the pond where she drowned, although it's difficult to understand quite why anyone would want to sit there. The ground-breaking ceremony is being televised when it becomes obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. But Lola, our narrator, knows that they've found a body. She also knows who it is. Full review...
Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou
In the Congolese bar of Credit Gone West, the owner Stubborn Snail wants a record of the lives of those who drink there. The man he chooses to write it? Disgraced schoolteacher Broken Glass, who fills up a notebook with the stories of the bar’s patrons – or at least their versions of those tales. Full review...
The Free World by David Bezmozgis
It's the late 1970's and a family of Latvian Jews, the Krasnanskys, are emigrating from the Soviet Union. They're made to stay in Rome whilst they apply to live in the States and they find themselves trapped in a strange migratory limbo, belonging nowhere and tied to no-one but each other. Full review...
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Apparently there's a saying that 'time's a goon' - no, I'd never heard of it and to be fair, neither had the first character to whom it is said in Jennifer Egan's 'A Visit from the Goon Squad', but together with a pair of epigraphs from Proust, it's clear that time is very definitely what is being explored here. Egan's subject area is all loosely based around the music world. Her central character, if one can be said to exist, is Bennie Salazar, a music mogul who we encounter both directly and tangentially at various stages of his up and down career. Goon Squad is also the title of an Elvis Costello track, continuing the music theme as Egan uses the music industry as a lens to examine time. Full review...
The West Rand Jive Cats Boxing Club by Lauren Liebenberg
Best friends Tommy and Chris are 12 years old. It is 1958 and they are growing up in a small mining town near Johannesburg, South Africa. They are learning to box and to dance to rock and roll music. Full review...
The Final Testament of the Holy Bible by James Frey
The Rabbis say that all the signs are there from the birth of Ben Zion Avrohom that he is the Messiah. That's a lot of anyone to cope with and, like Jesus, there's much of Ben's early life that is untold here. When he is involved in an horrific accident on a building site that he miraculously survives, albeit with terrible scaring, the prophecies appear to be true. He develops a form of epilepsy during which he appears to speak to God. He is fluent in ancient languages despite never learning them, knows all the Holy books by heart and yet distains all forms of religion, instead spreading his message of love to all who meet him in modern day New York. Full review...
The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed
The Collaborator of the title is our narrator, a sensitive bookish young man. He is the son of the headman of a small village in a side valley of the Kashmir. The heritage of the people is that of nomads. The village has been settled for less than a generation. Everything they have has been built by the sheer hard graft of the people themselves… including the recently completed mosque. Full review...
The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner
In 1999, Alan Warner introduced us to a wonderful set of characters in 'The Sopranos' when a school choir from a backwater town in Scotland went on a trip to the big city. Much debauchery ensued. 'The Stars in the Bright Sky' once again reunites most of the original gang and there is no need to have read the first book to pick up on the diverse characters. Now though, they've grown up (or at least got older!) and are gathered at Gatwick Airport to set off on a girls' holiday. Full review...
The Goldsmith's Secret by Elia Barcelo and David Frye (Translator)
'The Goldsmith's Secret' has a wonderfully romantic beginning; alone on a snowy night in New York, the craftsman is puzzling over how to tell his story, and how to separate reality from the overwhelming memories in his mind.
The romance continues as the story unfolds, with the goldsmith taking us back to the town and time of his youth, and the chance meeting that led him to find the love of his life. Telling the tale of romance from many perspectives, we learn the town of Villasanta has labelled his love, the mysterious Celia, as 'a marked woman' and the 'black widow'. Full review...
The Coffee Story by Peter Salmon
Teddy Everett, head of Everett and Sons Coffee is dying, slowly and painfully, of cancer. The Coffee Story is his story, told in his own (very descriptive) words. It goes from (although not necessarily in this order) his childhood in England, his adolescence in Ethiopia and then his life in the USA and Cuba. It's his time in Cuba which has put him where he is now – in prison. For his crimes he would normally have suffered the death penalty, but his sentence was commuted because of his illness and now the doctors try to save him. Or perhaps it's that they're trying to persuade Teddy that they're trying to save him – whether he wants to be saved or not. Full review...
Pure by Andrew Miller
I've read Miller's Oxygen and The Optimists so I was looking forward to reading this novel. The story opens in the opulence of the Palace of Versailles. We are given vivid descriptions of both the scale of the palace and its grandeur. Jean-Baptiste Baratte, the young engineer, seems completely over-awed by the whole occasion. Even although he's not entirely sure what is expected of him in Paris, he accepts. He needs to eat, after all. Full review...