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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]__NOTOC__{{Frontpage|isbn=295967572X|title=Pale Pieces|author=G M Stevens|rating=5|genre=Literary fiction=Fiction|summary=Our unnamed narrator is about to begin a train journey with his companion Django. Where they're going and what the purpose of this journey is, is uncertain. Django found the tickets ''on the floor somewhere'' and has persuaded our narrator to accompany him. Why not? Not much else is clear either - but we are probably in the past as the pair travel to the station by coach and the train is a steam locomotive.__NOTOC__}}{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Helen DeWittMakenna Goodman|title=Lightning RodsHelen of Nowhere
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Joe It could be argued that the pervading theme of this book is malaise - a salesman hard-to-place feeling that something in your life is not quite right. The protagonist, a disgraced professor on the verge brink of giving uplosing both his career and his relationship, embodies this feeling. Having lost all confidence in However, Goodman counteracts his ability to sell vacuum cleaners to Middle Americadiscomfort with a force which is seductive, he creates radical and unnerving: Helen. The connection between Helen and elaborates on a fantasy just for funthe protagonist is indirect yet intimate. It includes As the former owner of the countryside house he's considering, Helen represents a woman being 'serviced' from behindvolta in his life, her partner obscured by a waist high wallpast tied to his potential fresh start. The only thing any over-realtor who shows the protagonist around the-wall voyeur sees house shares stories about Helen, and describes her as ''an entity that is an innocent activity e.gpure consciousness, beyond form''. Although she may manicure her nailslives in an assisted living facility now, Helen has powers beyond comprehension which the reader gets the sense are not altogether innocuous.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1908276118</amazonuk>1804272205
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Olga Tokarczuk
|title=House of Day, House of Night
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''What's the good of a world that keeps changing like that? How can one go on calmly living in it?''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Jose SaramagoThea Lenarduzzi|title=Raised from the GroundThe Tower|rating=45
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Domingos is a feckless man, a man often neglecting his family, and hitting his wife due to too much drinking, a man often leaving everyone behind as he chases work and flees his debts. He calls himself a shoemaker but really he''How unctuous are the fats of another's little different from those around him, who actually do have to move aboutlife, chasing what seasonal agricultural work is available. Certainly his children and how dizzying their children sugars in turn will mostly be bound to the land they sprang from - the our bloodstream'latifundio' – and the spirit of both all of them, and of it, throughout the Portuguese twentieth century, are the subjects of this early [[:Category:Jose Saramago|Jose Saramago]] novel, in English for the first time after a thirty-year wait.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846557062</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Kari Hotakainen Jon Fosse and Owen F Witesman Damion Searls (translator)|title=The Human PartVaim
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Salme Malmikunnas attends a literary fair with her daughter''All was strange''... This haunting phrase encapsulates the pervading sense of otherworldliness which permeates this story set in Vaim, Helena but before going inside, Salme meets an author who offers her a small fortune fictional fishing village in exchange Norway which paradoxically could not feel more real for her story. He seeks inspiration and feels that Salme's biography is it. Salme agrees only after a fee increase and so their regular meetings begin. The author gets a story and Salme unloads her past Jatgeir and present onto this stranger. MeanwhileEline, Salme's family continues speeding towards a devastating eventtwo of the protagonists caught in its melancholic current.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0857050656</amazonuk>1804271829
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Adolfo Garcia OrtegaClaire-Louise Bennett|title=Desolation IslandBig Kiss, Bye-Bye
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In MadeiraEverything in this book, however sweet or seemingly innocent, is steeped in the first months anguish and distortion. Even a kiss, usually a symbol of the new millenniumintimacy and closeness, a man named Oliver Griffin collars a total stranger to explain his lifetime’s obsession with a South American island called Desolationbecomes evidence of love lost. Griffin is a When the narrator as gabby as Melville’s Ishmael but twice as ramblingcries out internally, ''come over here and what he recounts kiss me,'' it is less a coherent story an invitation than a neverending cabinet of curiositiesdesperate attempt to confirm her emotional numbness. This magical realist take on the history The imagined recipient of a place involves forbidden lovethis plea is Xavier, sixteenthher ex-century automatonspartner, mysterious Balkan castles, war crimes, death at sea, Jewish folklore, the personal lives of French authors and the sexual conduct of famous Spanish explorers, each bizarre strand twisted together by the novel’s own weird internal logic into one astonishing and delightful patterna ghost she conjures to test her detachment.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099516934</amazonuk>1804271934
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Emma BeckerHelene Bessette and Kate Briggs (translator)|title=MonsieurLili is Crying|rating=34.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=She is a twenty-year old studentFirst published in 1953 in French, with an average cleavage and a big bum. He this novel is 45, a married cosmetic surgeon, timeless text which wrenches the hearts of its readers just as Bessette wrenches words and a friend of sentences from their proper position on the familypage and positions them elsewhere, disjointed, having worked with her uncle for yearstruncated. They might be an unlikely couple – at least outside Like the realms lives of erotic fiction her characters, they are – but as she puts it, she wants him to ''show me what a man was like, a real man, a man who could fill my body '''and''' my mind''. The consequences are in this noveloften left tragically incomplete.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1780334761</amazonuk>1804271675
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Thomas KeneallyJonathan Buckley|title=The Daughters of MarsOne Boat|rating=54
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Expectations ahead of Thomas Keneally's 'The Daughters One Boat'' is a deeply introspective novella that defies traditional narrative structure, drawing the reader into a contemplative realm of Mars' are understandably highphilosophical musings and fragmented memories flowing from our narrator and protagonist, Teresa. He regularly features on Set against the evocative backdrop of a small coastal Greek town, this work masterfully captures the Booker shortlist magic of its setting and its power to provoke profound introspection. Teresa herself recognises these qualities as the reason she has won visited it after the prize in the past with ''Shindler's Ark''death of both her parents. While his subject matter, World War IPrompted by her mourning, her narrative voice is hardly the most originalmeditative and deeply self-aware, his slant on inviting the story is, and this reader into her labyrinthine cogitations. It is a book that deserves to sit with the very best not only requires but inspires depth of the many books on that subjectthought, including ''All Quiet since its narrative structure is fragmentary and ironically relies on the Western Front'' and ''Birdsong''. It's that good and that powerfulanalepsis for its propulsion.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0340951877</amazonuk>1804271764
}}
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=American travel writer Julian Wells walks out ''Black Woods Blue Sky'' tells the story of Birdie, the house he shares with his sisteryoung mother of toddler Emaleen, wanders down to who longs for a life beyond the garden lakeAlaskan lodge where she works as a bar waitress, rows himself out to the centre a setting which enables her bad habits and slits his wristsher accidental neglect of Emaleen. He dies alone Described as he silently watches his a ''wild card'', she feels stuck in her day-to-day life drip into the water. Devastated, his friend and frequent travel companion Philip Anders, tries yearns to come to terms with cross the loss Wolverine river and live on the only way he can: North Fork to fulfil her desires of a simple life surrounded by attempting to understandnature. Julian dedicated When she meets Arthur Nielson, a book to Philipstrange, taciturn and solitary man, mentioning who says he has a 'crime' that Philip had witnessedcabin over there, she feels called to go - and bring Emaleen with her. Philip had always thought it to be a flip reference to his comment from years before that Without realising it would be a crime for Julian to waste time writing a certain piece, but, in the light of tragic events, is this actually the case? Is there a crime in the authorcalling will transform hers and Emaleen's past? As Philip retraces the essence of Julian through his words, the places they visited and people they encountered he slowly uncovers secrets and a dangerous obsessionlives forever.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1908800143</amazonuk>1472279042
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Diana McCaulaySally Rooney|title=HuracanIntermezzo
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary General Fiction|summary=1986 – 30-year-old Leigh McCaulay (''White gal!'') is returning to Jamaica, Sally Rooney has studied the land chessboard of her birth. Her mother is dead life and there is an estate to be settledsomething of a grandmaster at putting it into words. Her estranged father dialogue is somewhere on the islandgripping and so brilliantly frustrating, as her characters never quite say exactly what they feel. Her brother is in England. This isn't Among the closest of grieving families. Leigh doesn't even know how her mother died. Indeedmany relationships woven into this story, she's a bit surprised the central one for readers to find out she'd gone back to Jamaica. The residual family had left unravel is the island not long after the father's desertionfraternal connection—or lack thereof—between Ivan and Peter Koubek.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845231961</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Helene Gremillon and Alison Anderson (translator)|title=The Confidant|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=It's 1975 and CamilleIvan, having lost her father a while agosocially awkward chess prodigy, is now coming to terms contrasts sharply with the recent death of her mother. After plucking up courage and strengthhis older brother Peter, she goes through the condolence cards but there's one item a successful lawyer living in the correspondence pile that's out of placeDublin. It's addressed to her but from Louis (whom she doesn't know) about Annie (of whom she's never heard). As Louis pours out his story, reminiscing about his youth in wartime France, Camille is convinced itFollowing their father's passing after a mistake; she shouldn't have received it. However the envelope is definitely addressed to her andlong battle with cancer, what's more, this won't be the last instalment of Louisbrothers' sad memoir that comes through the postalready strained relationship faces new trials.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1908313293</amazonuk>0571365469
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Elizabeth HayFyodor Dostoyevsky|title=Alone In The ClassroomWhite Nights
|rating=5
|genre=Literary FictionShort Stories|summary='Other children were out picking that morning, but she passed them by in her light-blue dress and sandals... she had an empty kettle As always in each hand and was aloneDostoyevsky, despite having three sistersthe character work is sublime.' Coming back to Hay's writing One is like never left wondering what a kind of homecoming. She has such a soft way of words: a gentleness that gathers you up like a story-time school teacher asking if you're sitting comfortablycharacter is thinking or feeling because Dostoyevsky lays bare their innermost dispositions and temperaments with remarkable clarity. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0857051253</amazonuk>0241619785
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Peter TerrinJames Baldwin|title=The GuardGiovanni's Room
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Harry and Michel are very good at their job''Giovanni's Room'' follows the narrator David, even if we might think their job is not that great. They and they alone are responsible for protecting the building they live an American man living in. Designed Paris, as he navigates his torturous affair with Giovanni, an impregnable fortress containing many immense, palatial apartments inhabited by the ultra-rich, the only way Italian bartender he meets in a gay bar. While David is through the basement carparkengaged to Hella, where they reside who is travelling in their own small patch of territory. They are certainly diligent – inspecting their stash of munitions twice a daySpain, even if nothing could possibly interfere with their supply of bullets, and navigating around the large expanse of space where each of real tension in the novel arises not from his infidelity but from the forty floors above them has space for three supercarsdeeper conflict within himself. But while one seems to be dreaming of things he might not get to witness – promotion to guarding villas in Elysian fields with becoming ownerIt is David's wives, the other seems to be hearing things crippling shame and denial of his sexuality that might not actually be there to be heard…ultimately dooms his relationship with Giovanni.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0857050877</amazonuk>0141186356
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Richard FordAlba de Cespedes |title=CanadaForbidden Notebook|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Richard Ford's ''Canada'' opens with one This Italian work of feminist fiction holds an air of suspense and tension from the best opening lines that I've read in a long time: 'Firstmoment our protagonist, Valeria Cossati, purchases her forbidden notebook, I'll tell and learns about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is herself in the most important part'intimate and revealing ways.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0747598606</amazonuk>1782278222
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Kevin PowersOttessa Moshfegh|title=The Yellow BirdsMy Year of Rest and Relaxation|rating=53
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Daniel Murphy ('Murph') At best, this novel is 18a scathing critique of modern society and reveals the fragility of human relationships; at worst, in it is the American army cynical, predictable and about to embark on his first tour slightly trite tale of duty in Iraqan unlikeable protagonist. By his side is John BartleThis unlikely heroine, a slim, three years older attractive and more experienced newly orphaned girl in her twenties is disillusioned with the army. However neither of them has any notion of the sort of life or job they will face when they get there. The fighting is dirtyworld, unpredictable and but resolves not set out to lose sleep over it: in any text book. Their commanding officerfact, Sergeant Sterling, is sadistic and without any apparent humanity. But everything will be alright: Bartle has made a promise to Murph's mother, a promise that will ricochet from the US to Iraq and back againher solution lies in her hibernation.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1444756125</amazonuk>1784707422
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Ian McEwanMatthew Tree|title=Sweet ToothWe'll Never Know
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ian McEwan's ''Sweet Tooth'' is part spy novel but Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more a love story and a tale of deception and half truths. It's also, more subtlythan to be different from his father, a book about the power, role drunk and importance chronic underachiever whose dreams of fiction. Set in the 1970s, with frequent musical and political references to the UK being exceptional at that time, Serena Frome is a beautiful, Cambridge-educated daughter any of an Anglican bishop with a taste for unsuitable romances. From an early affair with a man his artistic passions all failed miserably and who turns out to be homosexual, to an affair with an older lecturer she moves on to a surprise job at MI5 where she had a crush on one endless crises of her bosses, again and awkward, repressed and unattractive individual before encountering talented author Tom Haley as part of her job with whom she once again falls in loveself confidence. Few of these men are what they seemSo Tim applied himself to his studies, cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and neither for that matter is Serena when she has to hide her job from Haleyset himself high but achievable ambitions.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0224097377</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Jeet ThayilB0C47LV1PC|title=NarcopolisFragility|author=Mosby Woods
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Novels about narcotic substances are notoriously hard to pull off. The challenge is to Can you make the induced events interesting and meaningful to the, presumably, non-induced reader. In ''Narcopolis'', Jeet Thayil pulls this off surprisingly well for me, although it's fair to say that it won't be everyone's taste. It's not a book that the Bombay/Mumbai tourist office will be keen to promote. A cover quotation links the book to a similar vein (OK, that's a poor choice of words in the circumstances) to ''Trainspotting'' and that's not far from the mark.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571275761</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Zadie Smith|title=NW|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Fans of Zadie Smith have had a seven year wait since her last book ''On Beauty''. In ''NWYo birthing person''joke? And if you could, Smith returns to more of is the issues addressed in her brilliant debut novel [[White Teeth by Zadie Smith|White Teeth]]. Set in parts of London that question should be obvious from you make it? Or is the titlequestion if you did, the book takes the lives of four people who grew up on a rough estate and looks at how they have moved on - or not. All four still live nearby the estate where they grew up. There's multi-cultural tension and the have and have nots of power and money and Smith looks at how much individuals are in control of their destiny and ability to rise out of their upbringing, and how chance encounters can bring you back to your past with a bump.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241144140</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Fuminori Nakamura|title=The Thief|rating=5|genre=Crime|summary=would it land? The Thief catch is content roaming that the streets of Tokyo, living on the contents of its wealthier citizens' pockets until, his original partner in crime (literally) introduces him to Kizaki, a local shady big shotanswer for both could well be.. Kizaki wants the Thief's help on a straightforward job. He will just be one of a team tasked with breaking into a rich speculator's home, scaring him a little, taking the contents of his safe and departing. No rough stuff and the financial settlement Kizaki offers will more than compensate the pickpocket for his timeno.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780339135</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Jake ArnottMosby Woods|title=The House of RumourA Whirly Man Loses His Turn
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Jake Arnott sees The West isn't the dominant force it once was. Nobody in the West is quite sure how to be one mend this or even if mending it is the best course of those authors - like [[:Category:Will Self|Will Self]] whom you'll love or loatheaction. Governments are flailing. OccasionallyA war here, you'll swing from one extreme to the other and I'll confess to being a little nervous when I opened the bookpush for climate action there. We really weren't ''A feeling that'' keen when we read [[The Devil's Paintbrush by Jake Arnott|The Devil's Paintbrush]]. Using the deck of Tarot cards as the structure of the book we look at the twentieth century through the life of Larry Zagorskinobody is in actual charge. Imagine history being gently folded together like then, there was a cake mixture man with episodes sliding against each other, flavouring that which they touchprecognition. Imagine the real - Aleister Crowley (reprising his appearance strategic advantage in ''The Devil's Paintbrush''), Rudolf Hess, Ian Fleming, Cyril Connolly, Jim Jones and L Ron Hubbard blended with this asset; a transexual prostituteman who can tell you what will happen given any set of circumstances. That man would be valuable, a British pop singer and Larryright? Perhaps the most valuable asset in history. Imagine then, who writes pulp science fictionthat this man loses this ability.What would governments do to get it back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0340922729</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Alison Moore0571379559|title=The LighthouseHouse of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=When we first meet Futh he's on a North Sea ferry on his way to a walking holiday in Germany'The House of Broken Bricks'' is the story of four people. ThereTess Hembry's no sense of enthusiasm or anticipationroots are in Jamaica: Futh's middle aged and recently separatedtemperamentally she might be happier there, but instead, seemingly without friends or family. He always wanted a dogshe lives in the house on the riverbank, but keeps stick insectsbuilt of broken bricks. The holiday seems to be something whichInsubstantial as it might look, when it is over's stood the passage of time, he will have done it storms and will then return floods. Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his new flatvegetables, to complete the delivery rounds - and to bring in sufficient money. It begins They have twin boys - Sonny and will end at HellhausMax, a guesthouse run by Bernard and the rainbow twins. Sonny's colouring reflects his wife Estermother's Jamaican heritage. He gets on well enough with Ester but is at a loss to understand a rather hostile encounter with BernardMax takes after his father. He sets out the following morning for a week of walkingPeople don't believe that they're related, thinking much less twins and remembering. Meanwhile Ester - untouched by her meeting there's an assumption when Max is out with Futh - continues her lonely life punctuated by the occasional casual sexual encounter which his mother that she barely hides from Bernard's his nanny.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907773177</amazonuk>
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Claire North
|title=House of Odysseus
|rating=5
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= ''What could matter more than love?''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Iain BroomeKay Chronister|title=A is for AngelicaDesert Creatures|rating=54|genre=General Dystopian Fiction|summary=Gordon and Georgina Kingdom spent years being like many other couples. They had jobs, friends, holidays, With a springer spaniel named Kipling and a life together. Then Georgina became ill and Gordon took early retirement to nurse her better. He treats retirement with the same methodical efficiency he employed at work. He records Georgina's careworld that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, her progress and shares her waking moments, feeding her and sitting with herpost-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. HoweverWhether it is a robotic takeover, as she spends a lot world devoid of time asleepwater or a nuclear holocaust, Gordon this genre is left a way for humans to entertain himself and so, the same man who led the local Neighbourhood Watch, watches his neighbours, noting points of interest and visible activities in alphabetically filed dossierscathartically experience their most existential fears. They're all there: Don across the road who borrows garden tools on 'Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a more permanent basis than Gordon would like, art award winner young Benny who paints with his eyes shut, the lady next door who throws footballs over the fence and the new woman across work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the road, Angelicafears that exist for humanity today. Except, when Angelica moves into the street, Gordon's interest becomes more focused than usualIt is a shocking novel that still manages to find hope.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>190877598X</amazonuk>1803364998
}}
{{newreviewfrontpage|isbn=1803363002|author=Will SelfEric LaRocca|title=UmbrellaThe Trees Grew Because I Bled There|rating=2.5|genre=Literary FictionHorror|summary=Will Self's Horror taps into something primeval within us. It is used as a way to reflect our darkest emotions and how we as humans react and process them. Most horror fiction feature a ''UmbrellaBig Bad'' spans a century taking three interwoven strands. One features Audrey Dearth, who in 1918 whether that is a munitions worker who falls ill with encephalitis lethargicahome invader, a brain disease that spread over Europe after the Great War rendering many of its victims speechless monster or a ghost, it usually something tangible and motionless. She is incarcerated in Friern hospital where, in by the early 1970s a psychiatrist, Zach Busner wakes her from her stupor using a new drug. In end of the final threadstory, in 2010 the asylum has closed and the now retired Busner travels across north London seeking the truth about his encounter with his former patientbeatable. While Eric LaRocca's ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that sounds like . It is a fascinating story collection of short stories more interested in its own rightthe horrors of illness, be warnedgrief and humiliation. SelfHorrors that linger and are harder to defeat than any ''Big Bad's approach is ambitiously modernistic making this a very heavy going tome even by Self's standards.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408820145</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=JR CrookMadelaine Lucas|title=Sleeping PatternsThirst for Salt|rating=45
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Anneli Strandli lives with insomniacally introverted Berry Walker''Love, among others but not in I'd read, was supposed to be a romantically co-habiting way. They all share student accommodation complete with attendant noise light and comings and goings. Berry isn’t the most forthcoming of people but Anneli discovers a manuscript in his desk and so, sneaking into his room to read itweightless feeling, she hopes to discover from his writings the essence of Berry that his private nature hides. Meanwhile Berry is falling in love but has difficulty communicating it to the person concerned.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1908775521</amazonuk>}}I had always longed for gravity''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Mette JakobsenMichael Grothaus|title=The Vanishing ActBeautiful Shining People
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Minou lives on a sparsely occupied, temperate island. In fact the only occupants apart from Minou ''But fearing something and her Papa having it come to pass are Priest (the Priest), Boxman (a maker of magical boxes) and a dog called No Nametwo different things. Minou’s mother used And I'm willing to live there too. She arrived on a boat with a bowl containing a peacock (a real live one called… yes… Peacock). But then one day Mama disappeared completely apart from one shoe. Minou misses her and the way that she encouraged Minou’s imaginationbet most of what we fear will never happen, completely at odds with her father’s logical philosophical outlook. Papa doesn’t believe that Mama will return and so has symbolically buried the shoe but Minou thinks differently: Mama will come backor we can take steps to change it.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099572478</amazonuk>}}''
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Jennifer Saint
|title=Atalanta
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''I was as worthy as any one of them. I would get on board that ship, I vowed. I would take my place, not just in the name of the goddess. It was for the sake of my name, too. Atalanta''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Naomi AldermanAmanthi Harris|title=The Liars' GospelBeautiful Place
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In ''The Liars' Gospel''Padma, a young Sri Lankan, Naomi Alderman gives has returned to the perspective of four people Villa Hibiscus on the recent death southern coast of her home country. This is a Jewish man named Yehoshuah, who place she spent her formative years. It is more commonly known these days by the anglicized name of Jesus. These perspectives include Miryam (Mary)not a place she was born into, but the teacher's mother, Iehuda of Qeriot (Judas Iscariot), a one time follower she thinks of as home. How she came to be at the manVilla, Caiaphashow it became her home, and the High Priest of machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the great Temple in Jerusalem ''score'' for this gentle and finally Bar-Avo, Barabbas, a rebel who is determined yet subtly violent novel. Padma's present fails to bring down escape her past and much like the occupying Roman presence. What makes this such musical score of a remarkable book is the sheer visceral nature of the story telling. Each story is vividly toldfilm, and Alderman evokes the time and place to such a level that you half expect to have developed a sun tan while reading strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the bookVilla.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>067091990X</amazonuk>1784631930
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Pat Barker178563335X|title=Toby's RoomSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Elinor Brooke When we first meet Rachel Bird she's a trainee vicar, sitting in on a PCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the children up. Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-old Hannah and her elder brother Toby had always been close but one day their relationship became more intimate than is acceptable. The trick then, as Toby saidJamie, was to get back to how their relationship was beforewhilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Toby concentrated on calling her Thelma'siss daughter-in-law won't let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, whilst Elinor was never quite certain how they could turn on the clock back Norfolk coast, is a lovely place, but Rachel is struggling to develop a time when they were more innocent. But looking back, real bond with the summer parish - and she's in awe of 1912 would seem idyllic: in 1917 Toby was reported 'Missingthe vicar, Gail, Believed Killedbut then she's been doing the job for more than thirty years. Elinor was determined to find out how Toby died Rachel and her one route to this knowledge was Kit Neville who was Christopher hoped that a fellow student of hers at walk on the Slade School of Art and who beach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was in the fox hole when Toby met his fateprobably what they needed. And then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241144574</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Jeanette Winterson1398515388|title=The Daylight GateBoy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)
|rating=4.5
|genre=FantasyGeneral Fiction|summary=1610s LancashireFirst of all, and Alice Nutter is it was the best landowner you could wish for. Singleearthquake, rich and connected, she takes no sides deep in the religious schisms James I has inheritedocean floor, and takes no bull from those trying to oppress which created the poor, putting them up tsunami and feeding them when no-one else will. But those poor are seen as sinful by others - amoralthis, dirty in mindturn, body caused the nuclear meltdown. The result was complete and spiritutter devastation. The deaths were uncountable, and in league with the devilloss of livelihoods was widespread. And people are beginning to question Alice's attitudes, choice The fact that many pets were separated from their owners came far down the list of company priorities but - and ageless beautysix months after the tsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. This, then, is He wasn't a dog person but the based-on-truth story of how Alice Nutter got convenience store owner's comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to be one of open his car door and Tamon the accused dog jumped in the Pendle Witch trials.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099561859</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Tupelo Hassman0989715337|title=GirlchildPapa on the Moon|author=Marco North|rating=54
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Rory Dawn Hendrix (RD for short) lives with her mother in ''Some frogs had gotten into the ironically named Calle de las Flores or Street of Flowers; a pretty name masking a less than idyllic settingwell. For Calle is a trailer park for those living a life sentence of poverty, '' ''Walter stood waist-deep in the inhabitants being as upwardly mobile as their staticfragrant water, seedy homesnaked except for his beaten leather hat. RD has half brothers but they live with Long strands of their fathereggs wove around him, leaving RD to live alone sticky gray pearls with her mother and nearby grandmother, a father being a luxury that Rory Dawn has learnt to live withouttadpoles inside them. Rory Dawn is also a Girl Scout and has a handbook to prove it but she's in a troop Two of one, alone with the ideals of an organisation that she only glimpses through disadvantage dogs leaned over the opening and in barked down at the same way that she glimpses strange noise of the materialistic world beyond her meansbuckets as he filled them. However, her mother wants more '' How is that for her than an opening? The style of this novel in the teen pregnancies that seem form of interconnected short stories goes from succinct and laconic to have become their family heirloom wistful and there is hope musing, turning on a sixpence. And author Marco North, who has the most wonderful turn of phrase, starts as RD is highly intelligent; but can this be enough?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>178087104X</amazonuk>he means to go on.
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