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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]==Literary fiction==__NOTOC__{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Angelica Garnett295967572X|title=The Unspoken Truth|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=I would not normally start a review with the biography of the author, but The Unspoken Truth is presented as autobiographical fiction by a child of the Bloomsbury Group – in fact the subtitle is 'A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories'. The blurb on the inside cover even identifies which character is based on the author in each of the four stories, just in case we are not sure.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184353</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewPale Pieces|author=Amos Oz|title=Rhyming Life and DeathG M Stevens
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Rhyming Love and Death Our unnamed narrator is about to begin a kind train journey with his companion Django. Where they're going and what the purpose of philosophical love letter to literaturethis journey is, or perhaps more so is uncertain. Django found the tickets ''on the floor somewhere'' and has persuaded our narrator to fictionaccompany him. It Why not? Not much else is a book about how clear either - but we are probably in the past as the pair travel to write, about the compulsion to write, station by coach and about the strange world that the writer of fiction must live intrain is a steam locomotive.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099521024</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Paul MurrayMakenna Goodman|title=Skippy DiesHelen of Nowhere|rating=34.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Life in Seabrook College It could be argued that the pervading theme of this book is malaise - a mess. Some of the staff are young enough hard-to remember their own school days there, but many are certainly too old for -place feeling thatsomething in your life is not quite right. A lot of The protagonist, a disgraced professor on the boys are victims brink of ragging losing both his career and bullying for being too chunkyhis relationship, embodies this feeling. However, Goodman counteracts his discomfort with a force which is seductive, or too smart - but some are so chunky radical and unnerving: Helen. The connection between Helen and smart therethe protagonist is indirect yet intimate. As the former owner of the countryside house he's considering, Helen represents a certain kudos volta in his life, her past tied to themhis potential fresh start. The female of realtor who shows the protagonist around the species is a thing only spied from their own school next doorhouse shares stories about Helen, and only met by selling them ritalin describes her as a weight-control pill''an entity that is pure consciousness, beyond form''. Although she lives in an assisted living facility now, or meeting them at Helen has powers beyond comprehension which the very rare combined school discoreader gets the sense are not altogether innocuous.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0241141826</amazonuk>1804272205
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Tom WolfeOlga Tokarczuk|title=The Bonfire House of Day, House of the VanitiesNight
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In his own mind, bond trader Sherman McCoy is a 'Master of the Universe'. He has a pleasant wife, a beautiful mistress, and a sweet six year old daughter. Henry Lamb is a black student from the projects. Under normal circumstances, itWhat's clear the good of a world that keeps changing like that McCoy? How can one go on calmly living in it?'s world and Lamb's world would never overlap. But when McCoy and his mistress Maria Ruskin end up lost in the Bronx, and an accident leads to Lamb being hit by McCoy's Mercedes, a chain of events start which will lead to his downfall.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548798</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Ru FreemanThea Lenarduzzi|title=A Disobedient GirlThe Tower
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Catharine's husband Tom is away on business in Birmingham, and so Catharine awakes alone for the first time in their little cottage at 'How unctuous are the end fats of their lane. They moved there a few months previously, and since then Catharine has spent her days quietly awaiting her husbandanother's return from work. She is sure that she will figure outlife, some day, what her purpose how dizzying their sugars in life is. She thought it might be to have a baby, but they have been trying for some time and it hasnour bloodstream't happened as yet. Meanwhile she waits, and thinks, and waits. In the lounge stands her piano, a stark reminder of the life she didn't manage to realise because although she studied music she found, quite quickly, that in spite of being passionate she lacked any kind of talent for it whatsoever. So, on this day, alone at home, Catharine finds herself tormented by the piano's presence and over-thinking every second of the day. She worries away at who she is, and what her life is, as her loneliness and the day itself unravel around her.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224090232</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Elizabeth Kostova|title=The Swan Thieves|rating=2|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=1999 – A renowned painter, Robert Oliver, goes mad, attacking a painting with a knife. He's arrested, and sent to a psychiatrist who is also an artist. The psychiatrist, Andrew Marlowe, can't get his patient to talk to him, but tries to investigate what drove him to this by talking to his wife and his girlfriend, and reading some letters Oliver seems obsessed with. 1879 – Beatrice de Clerval, aspiring artist, corresponds with her uncle-by-marriage Olivier Vignot, a more experienced painter. Their letters will be found by Robert Oliver, 120 years later, Jon Fosse and will lead to his loss of sanity.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847442404</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Atiq RahimiDamion Searls (translator) |title=The Patience StoneVaim|rating=54
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Set in Afghanistan, ''The Patience StoneAll was strange'' is a partly allegorical tale of a Muslim wife tending to her comatose soldier husband who has been shot in the neck. As she cares for him, for .. This haunting phrase encapsulates the first time ever she is able to speak to him without fear pervading sense of censorship and he becomesotherworldliness which permeates this story set in Vaim, a fictional fishing village in Norway which paradoxically could not feel more real for her, like the mythical Patience Stone to which you tell your troubles Jatgeir and when the stone finally burstsEline, you are free from your torments. But also this might mean two of the Apocalypseprotagonists caught in its melancholic current.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701184167</amazonuk>1804271829
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Joyce Carol OatesClaire-Louise Bennett|title=A Fair MaidenBig Kiss, Bye-Bye
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I've recently read Everything in this book, however sweet or seemingly innocent, is steeped in anguish and distortion. Even a kiss, usually a symbol of intimacy and closeness, becomes evidence of love lost. When the terrific short story collection narrator cries out internally, ''The Female Of The Speciescome over here and kiss me,'' also by Oates and couldn't wait it is less an invitation than a desperate attempt to start confirm her latest bookemotional numbness. I felt sure that I was in for a literary treat The imagined recipient of this plea is Xavier, her ex- and I was. Firstly, the book itselfpartner, a hardback with a beautifully nostalgic cover is a book lover's delightghost she conjures to test her detachment.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1847248586</amazonuk>1804271934
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Dai Sijie |title=Once on a Moonless Night|rating=3.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=A French female scholar, studying in China, finds herself caught up in the search for a lost, sacred text that was inscribed on an ancient scroll. The scroll was torn in two by Emperor Puyi years ago, Helene Bessette and was lost. After falling in love with a young grocer called Tumchooq the young woman becomes caught up in tales within tales, as she finds that Tumchooq's father found and translated half of the missing scroll and became obsessed with finding the other half, and soon Tumchooq too becomes embroiled in the search.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099521326</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Thomas Trofimuk Kate Briggs (translator)|title=Waiting for ColumbusLili is Crying
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I was hooked instantly by the title. OriginalFirst published in 1953 in French, thought-provoking, quirky. The book revolves around this novel is a youngish man who has been admitted to an insane asylum (these two timeless text which wrenches the hearts of its readers just as Bessette wrenches words alone make me want to shiver) in modern-day Spain. The staff have and sentences from their work cut out. He doesn't remember his name or anything at all about his pastproper position on the page and positions them elsewhere, disjointed, truncated. He's sporadically violent - and he says he is Christopher Columbus! As Like the Americans would saylives of her characters, go figurethey are often left tragically incomplete. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0330518844</amazonuk>1804271675
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Su TongJonathan Buckley|title=The One Boat to Redemption|rating=34
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ku Dongliang and his father''One Boat'' is a deeply introspective novella that defies traditional narrative structure, Ku Wenxuan, are forced to live on drawing the reader into a barge on the river following Ku Wenxuan's fall contemplative realm of philosophical musings and fragmented memories flowing from graceour narrator and protagonist, Teresa. Originally believed to be Set against the son evocative backdrop of a revolutionary martyrsmall coastal Greek town, this work masterfully captures the magic of its setting and its power to provoke profound introspection. Teresa herself recognises these qualities as the reason she has visited it after the death of both her parents. Prompted by her mourning, her narrative voice is eventually proved that Mr Ku was not so meditative and deeply self- as a resultaware, his position in society takes a nose-diveinviting the reader into her labyrinthine cogitations. Dongliang suffers as It is a result book that not only requires but inspires depth of thisthought, finding it hard to make friends within the barge community since its narrative structure is fragmentary and ironically relies on shore. Then an orphaned girl moves onto the barges and finds a place in Dongliang's apparently cold heartanalepsis for its propulsion. Will she be able to take him out of himself? Or will she, too, turn her back on him?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>038561344X</amazonuk>1804271764
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Iain BanksEowyn Ivey|title=The Steep Approach to GarbadaleBlack Woods Blue Sky|rating=43.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It took me a while to realise that Iain Banks is''Black Woods Blue Sky'' tells the story of Birdie, most the young mother of alltoddler Emaleen, who longs for a teller of tales - I would call him life beyond the Alaskan lodge where she works as a story-teller had this term not became bar waitress, a compliment-cum-invective usually reserved for the Jeffrey Archers setting which enables her bad habits and Dan Browns her accidental neglect of the modern publishing worldEmaleen. This ability Described as a ''wild card'', she feels stuck in her day-to tell stories - not day life, and yearns to plot as much as cross the Wolverine river and live on the North Fork to weave fulfil her desires of a simple life surrounded by nature. When she meets Arthur Nielson, a yarn - combines with strange, taciturn and solitary man, who says he has a penchant for creating appealing contexts for Banks' narratives cabin over there, she feels called to unfold in (this gets magnificently realised in the world building of his [[:Category:Iain M Banks|Iain M. Banks]] altergo -ego) and populating them bring Emaleen with memorableher. Without realising it, larger than life but usually short of caricature, charactersthis calling will transform hers and Emaleen's lives forever.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0349119287</amazonuk>1472279042
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Mary McCarthy Sally Rooney|title=The GroupIntermezzo
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary General Fiction|summary='Given Sally Rooney has studied the attention paid to relations between the sexes, chessboard of life and is something of a grandmaster at putting it would be tempting to call The Group a forerunner of today's chick litinto words. It's notHer dialogue is gripping and so brilliantly frustrating, as her characters never quite say exactly what they feel.' So writes Candace BushnellAmong the many relationships woven into this story, the writer behind central one for readers to unravel is the TV series Sex fraternal connection—or lack thereof—between Ivan and the City, in the introduction to this new Virago Modern Classics edition of The Group by Mary McCarthyPeter Koubek. First published in 1963Ivan, this novel is about the lives of a group of young women after leaving college in 1933socially awkward chess prodigy, including careerscontrasts sharply with his older brother Peter, relationshipsa successful lawyer living in Dublin. Following their father's passing after a long battle with cancer, sex, babies, parents, and moneythe brothers' already strained relationship faces new trials. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1844085937</amazonuk>0571365469
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Janice GallowayFyodor Dostoyevsky|title=Collected StoriesWhite Nights
|rating=5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=In this collection, stories are taken from two previous volumesAs always in Dostoyevsky, Blood and Where You Find It. The forty-two snap shots of life are mainly of women and young girls, struggling with emotions, sometimes realized and sometimes not. In all, there seems to be an underlying link of isolation and truth. The settings are varied, from a visit to the dentist to the place known as home, to a walk in the eveningcharacter work is sublime. We have One is never left wondering what a peek into the deepest darkest corners of everyday relationships, character is thinking or feeling because Dostoyevsky lays bare their innermost dispositions and temperaments with lovers, partners and most of all ourselvesremarkable clarity.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099540398</amazonuk>0241619785
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Herta MullerJames Baldwin|title=The PassportGiovanni's Room|rating=34.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Meet Windisch. A miller ''Giovanni's Room'' follows the narrator David, an American man living in a small villageParis, as he trudges through there, and through navigates his neighbourstorturous affair with Giovanni, and through his lifean Italian bartender he meets in a gay bar. While David is engaged to Hella, counting his days and hourswho is travelling in Spain, for reasons that are the real tension in the novel arises not initially clearfrom his infidelity but from the deeper conflict within himself. But he does want something - he It is waiting for a passport so he can leave for other climes. The perks David's crippling shame and denial of his job are the bags of flour he leaves by the mayor's house sexuality that ultimately dooms his relationship with regularity, as an open bribe, but there might be a bigger sacrifice to have to makeGiovanni.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1852421398</amazonuk>0141186356
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Jennifer JohnstonAlba de Cespedes |title=Truth or FictionForbidden Notebook
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Caroline Wallace is not a happy woman. She has waited ten years for her lover to propose to This Italian work of feminist fiction holds an air of suspense and tension from the moment our protagonist, Valeria Cossati, purchases herforbidden notebook, and now just as he finally does, she has to go to Dublin to interview faded literary star Desmond Fitzmaurice. Desmond promises his tale will be brimful of 'sex learns about herself in the most intimate and violence', but Caroline has no idea of the mystery that lies at the heart of his storyrevealing ways.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0755330544</amazonuk>1782278222
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Julian BarnesOttessa Moshfegh|title=Staring at the SunMy Year of Rest and Relaxation|rating=43
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Jean's first Incident involved Uncle LeslieAt best, hyacinths this novel is a scathing critique of modern society and golf tees. It's perhaps best forgottenreveals the fragility of human relationships; at worst, but Jean doesn't forget. Uncle Leslie figures large in her life - mostly on it is the golf course - until the War comes cynical, predictable and he runs away to Americaslightly trite tale of an unlikeable protagonist. He's replaced by Tommy ProsserThis unlikely heroine, a grounded pilot who once saw the sun rise twice in one day slim, attractive and excites as many questions newly orphaned girl in Jean as he ever answers. Tommy her twenties is replaced by Michaeldisillusioned with the world, a policemanbut resolves not to lose sleep over it: in fact, whom Jean eventually marries. He doesn't know why minks are excessively tenacious of life and he doesn't much care. But Jean does. She cares much less for the Dutch cap that Michael sent her off to obtain before the wedding and much less again for their rather disastrous adventures solution lies in the bedroomher hibernation. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099540096</amazonuk>1784707422
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Russell Celyn JonesMatthew Tree|title=The Ninth Wave (New Stories from the Mabinogion) We'll Never Know
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Pwyll rules a medieval-style fiefdom in a post-climate change Wales. Life is Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different in many ways - there's from his father, a new-but-old social order built on feudalism drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of his artistic passions all failed miserably and horsepower is the main means who had endless crises of transportself confidence. But in many ways it's much the same - people still fight one anotherSo Tim applied himself to his studies, towns still have sink estates, rich boys still have too much time on their hands cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and precious little meaning in their livesset himself high but achievable ambitions. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1854115146</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Owen SheersB0C47LV1PC|title=White Ravens (New Stories from the Mabinogion)Fragility|author=Mosby Woods|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In the old taleCan you make a ''Yo birthing person'' joke? And if you could, Branwen is the sister of Bendigeidfran - question should you make it? Or is the giant King of Britain. She marries question if you did, would it land? The catch is that the King of Ireland, who doesn't treat her answer for both could wellbe.... She manages to send Bendigeidfran a message via a tamed starling and war and killings ensueno.
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Shirley JacksonMosby Woods|title=We Have Always Lived In The CastleA Whirly Man Loses His Turn|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Mary Katherine Blackwood, also known as Merricat, is eighteen, and lives with her older sister Constance The West isn't the dominant force it once was. Nobody in the family home where 'Blackwoods had always lived'. Merricat quickly draws West is quite sure how to mend this or even if mending it is the reader into her world by a series best course of matter of fact but bizarre statements – her likes include her sister and death cap mushroomsaction. Governments are flailing. A war here, and everyone else a push for climate action there. A feeling that nobody is in her family is deadactual charge. The wealthy Blackwood family has always kept the house 'steady against the world'Imagine then, shutting out other people, and they live near there was a villageman with precognition. Merricat believes that 'The people Imagine the strategic advantage in this asset; a man who can tell you what will happen given any set of circumstances. That man would be valuable, right? Perhaps the village have always hated us'most valuable asset in history. Imagine then, and tells us that she hates them toothis man loses this ability.What would governments do to get it back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0141191457</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Deborah Gregory0571379559|title=Dancing With The DeadHouse of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams|rating=35
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I wanted to read ''Dancing with The House of Broken Bricks'' is the Dead'story of four people. Tess Hembry's roots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, but instead, because I'm interested she lives in family history. The blurb the house on the back riverbank, built of broken bricks. Insubstantial as it might look, it's stood the book also mentioned Gill – our heroine passage of the piece – was moving from Bristol (my current home) to Lincolnshire (where I was born time, storms and brought up)floods. I felt with all these links Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the novel could not fail delivery rounds - and to interest me – but this was not bring in sufficient money. They have twin boys - Sonny and Max, the caserainbow 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 there's an assumption when Max is out with his mother that she's his nanny.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904529305</amazonuk>
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Claire North
|title=House 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}}{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Elizabeth BainesKay Chronister|title=Too Many MagpiesDesert Creatures|rating=4|genre=Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary=Becoming a mother brings With a whole new world of fear into your life. Suddenly you see the danger in every situationthat is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, and fear and trepidation post-apocalyptic fiction can be become your constant companionsan almost masochistic thrill. In this novellaWhether it is a robotic takeover, we meet a young mother who world devoid of water or a nuclear holocaust, this genre is married to a logical scientist. They attempt way for humans to control cathartically experience their childrenmost existential fears. ''Desert Creatures''s futures on by Kay Chronister is a scientific basis, growing their own fruit and vegetables, giving their children nothing sugary, eating no eggs new work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the fears that exist for a whole year until any adverse affects from them were disprovedhumanity today. But after meeting with an enigmatic stranger our young mother begins to struggle as he introduces ideas of freedom into her world. She begins an affair with him, begins to let things slip at home and with the children, yet finds she It is a shocking novel that still continuously haunted by the sense of an ever-present dangermanages to find hope.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1844717216</amazonuk>1803364998
}}
{{newreviewfrontpage|isbn=1803363002|author=Katherine MayEric LaRocca|title=Burning OutThe Trees Grew Because I Bled There|rating=45|genre=Literary FictionHorror|summary=Violet has it all – Horror taps into something primeval within us. It is used as a well-paid job, and a luxurious apartment all way to herself. Everything is catered for; her meals, her clothes, reflect our darkest emotions and her health are all how she would like we as humans react and process them to be. But the life she Most horror fiction feature a ''Big Bad'', whether that is leading is beginning to take its toll. On the verge of snappinga home invader, a drained monster or a ghost, it usually something tangible and somewhat out-, by the end of-sorts Violetthe story, withdraws back to her home townbeatable. Eric LaRocca's ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There, she meets someone familiar, '' is not like that. It is a ghost reminding her collection of how she used to be ten years earlier – a young carefree girl, full short stories more interested in the horrors of life. Only this isn't a ghostillness, but a girl living the life Violet once lived – exactly the same. Haunted by the past Violet realizes history is repeating itself grief and is convinced events will happen againhumiliation. Events Horrors that will in turn haunt the girllinger and are harder to defeat than any ''Big Bad''.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906727392</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Tove JanssonMadelaine Lucas|title=The True DeceiverThirst for Salt
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Most people of my age will have come across Jansson's work unwittingly'Love, via the televised renditions of the Moomin tales. The readers amongst us would then have been entranced I'd read, was supposed to be a few years ago to discover that at last Thomas Teal light and weightless feeling, but I had set about the translation into English, first of The Summer Book and then of a collection of short stories which were published as always longed for gravity'A Winter Book'. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0954899571</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{Frontpage
|author= Michael Grothaus
|title=Beautiful Shining People
|rating=4
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= ''But fearing something and having it come to pass are two different things. And I'm willing to bet most of what we fear will never happen, or we can take steps to change it.''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=David Malouf Jennifer Saint|title=RansomAtalanta
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Taking his theme from a small part of Homer's Iliad, Malouf tells the story of the king of Troy, Priam's grief-stricken voyage into the Greek camp to ransom Troy's wealth for the body I was as worthy as any one of his fallen sonthem. I would get on board that ship, HectorI vowed. I would take my place, killed by the equally grief-stricken Achilles whose great friend Hector had killed not just in battle before Achilles took his cruel revenge. Malouf tells the story in sparse, yet lyrical and poetic fashion suggesting the personal stories behind name of the epic themes that Homer relatedgoddess. It is an exquisitely written piece managing to be both deeply moving as well as a great piece was for the sake of story tellingmy name, too.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184159</amazonuk>}}Atalanta''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Andrew Miller Amanthi Harris|title=One Morning Like A BirdBeautiful Place|rating=45
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Tokyo in 1940 Padma, a young Sri Lankan, has returned to the Villa Hibiscus on the southern coast of her home country. This is a place that we British tend she spent her formative years. It is not to give a great deal place she was born into, but the one she thinks of thought as home. How she came to. Japan entered be at the warVilla, we sayhow it became her home, with and the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, completely forgetting machinations that Japan, have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the ''score'' for this gentle and yet subtly violent novel. Padma's present fails to escape her past and much like most of the rest musical score of the worlda film, was already a country that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at war. She had been fighting in China since 1937 and was making in-roads into European colonial territory in the area as wellVilla.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0340825154</amazonuk>1784631930
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Sadie Jones 178563335X|title=Small Wars|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction |summary=Even though our world is ostensibly at peace, hundreds of localized, unwinnable conflicts continue to grumble on. Mostly, we only hear and care about the ones involving 'our boys', as if war was some giant game of football. But it isn't, and ''Small Wars'' reflects on the casualties of war in a story set in Cyprus in the Two-Way Family Favourites era of the nineteen-fifties. It may turn out to be an important book as the public mood turns against the 'war on terror' in Afghanistan. It's certainly a prescient one.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184558</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewSea Defences|author=Evelyn Waugh|title=A Handful of DustHilary Taylor
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=A complex class society which evolved into When we first meet Rachel Bird she's a highly sophisticated culture is invariably trainee vicar, sitting in on a fertile ground for development of social satirePCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the children up. Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-old Hannah and British literature would have been hugely depleted if all novels that can be regarded as such were suddenly to disappearher elder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Thelma's daughter-in-law won't let her see her grandson. Evelyn Waugh made Holthorpe, on the genre his ownNorfolk coast, is a lovely place, but Rachel is struggling to develop a real bond with the parish - and she''A Handful s in awe of Dustthe vicar, Gail, but then she'' is s been doing the job for more than thirty years. Rachel and Christopher hoped that a sublime example of his mastery of walk on the beach would do them some good - it was stormy but itwas probably what they needed. And then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141183969</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=William Trevor 1398515388|title=Love The Boy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and SummerAlison Watts (translator)
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary General Fiction|summary=''Love First of all, it was the earthquake, deep in the ocean floor, which created the tsunami and Summer'' is set this, in turn, caused the nuclear meltdown. The result was complete and utter devastation. The deaths were uncountable, and the small town loss of Rathmoye in a rural Ireland 'some years after livelihoods was widespread. The fact that many pets were separated from their owners came far down the middle list of priorities but - six months after the last centurytsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. He wasn'. The novel charts t a dog person but the doomed love affair between Ellie, a young farmerconvenience store owner's wife, comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his car door and Florian, the Irish-Italian son of two artists, but it as much about Tamon the place and time dog jumped in which it is set.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918245</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Bryony Doran 0989715337|title=The China BirdPapa on the Moon|author=Marco North
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Edward is a sad and solitary figure. Late middle-aged, twisted-spined and hump-backed, a loner who works in the archive basement of ''Some frogs had gotten into the library, lodges with Mrs Ingrams who makes his tea and ruins his laundry, and hoards letters from his motherwell. Like many an unmarried man with an aging, widowed mother, Edward finds his relationship with her somewhat strained. Unlike many of those men, his relationship was always that way. She is rude and demanding, and he either doesn't have the strength or the inclination to force the issue with her. Apart from an occasion half-hearted reprimand, he stands back, ignores, makes excuses.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>095556302X</amazonuk>}}'
}}