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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]__NOTOC__{{Frontpage|author=Jeremy Cooper|title=Discord|rating= 3.5|genre=Literary fictionFiction|summary=Discord: a lack of agreement or harmony (as between persons, things, or ideas) The principal example of discord within the novel, as with most instances of discord, is easily located. The two protagonists of the novel, Rebekah Rosen and Evie Bennet, are as different as they come. Rebekah is an uptight, traditional and no-nonsense composer close to retirement, while Evie is a force of nature, bounding onto the musical scene as a precocious saxophonist, oozing with talent and charm. The two, predictably, don't always see eye to eye, their approaches different and Evie's progressive views at odds with Rebekah's conservative leaning. However, something connects them beyond just their musical project: a sort of fragile alliance formed within the clamour.|isbn=1804272264__NOTOC__}}{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Kate Cole-AdamsPolly Barton|title=Walking What Am I, A Deer?|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Polly Barton's debut novel is an intellectually playful yet emotionally exposed work that uses translation as both subject and governing metaphor. The narrator, newly relocated from London to Berlin, works translating video games into Japanese through the process of localisation, rewriting language until it feels comfortably familiar to a new audience. Barton treats this as a paradoxical act: arguably, in striving for universality, language is endlessly repackaged, its originality at risk of disappearing altogether. From this, the Moonnovel opens out into a wider, resonant question: to what extent do we translate ourselves in order to be understood, accepted, or loved?|isbn=1804272175}}{{Frontpage|author=Maria Stepanova and Sasha Dugdale (Translator)|title=The Disappearing Act
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=We meet the main character JessicaDespite her anonymisation of place names and people, or Jess as she is usually called, deep Stepanova's message in an emotional black hole. She can see no light at the end this short work of the tunnelautofiction is unmistakable. And right A novelist named M travels from B (ostensibly Berlin) to the start, right from page one, we have town of F for a literary festival she is to be a sense of the beautiful and poetic language of Cole-Adamsguest speaker at. 'Time Detoured by erratic train schedules and I have nudged by forces beyond her control, her journey slowly bends toward a new arrangementtraveling circus. We leave each other alone.' And indeed time is not important Swept up in this novelseries of events, M eventually offers to step in for a circus performer who has unexpectedly left the show. We have all The train functions as a motif of transience and impermanence, while the time in circus embodies the world would probably be reshaping of identity and a retreat into fantasy, an impulse that lies at the motto very heart of the medical staff - if they had onenovel form itself. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1849161348</amazonuk>1804272329
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Ru Freeman295967572X|title=A Disobedient GirlPale Pieces|author=G M Stevens
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=CatharineOur unnamed narrator is about to begin a train journey with his companion Django. Where they's husband Tom is away on business in Birmingham, re going and so Catharine awakes alone for what the first time in their little cottage at the end purpose of their lane. They moved there a few months previously, and since then Catharine has spent her days quietly awaiting her husband's return from work. She this journey is sure that she will figure out, some day, what her purpose in life isuncertain. She thought it might be to have a baby, but they have been trying for some time and it hasnDjango found the tickets '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 pianofloor somewhere''s presence and overhas persuaded our narrator to accompany him. Why not? Not much else is clear either -thinking every second of but we are probably in the day. She worries away at who she is, and what her life is, past as her loneliness the pair travel to the station by coach and the day itself unravel around hertrain is a steam locomotive.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224090232</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Joe MenoMakenna Goodman|title=The Great PerhapsHelen of Nowhere
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Jonathan Casper faints when he sees clouds. His wife Madeline worries about everything, not least It could be argued that the way the pigeons pervading theme of this book is malaise - a hard-to-place feeling that she something in your life is studying are murdering each othernot quite right. Their seventeen year old daughter Amelia wants to overthrow The protagonist, a disgraced professor on the evil empire brink of capitalism losing both his career and his relationship, embodies this feeling. However, Goodman counteracts his discomfort with a force which is making her own bombseductive, while fourteen year old Thisbe radical and unnerving: Helen. The connection between Helen and the protagonist is looking for God and praying to himindirect yet intimate. JonathanAs the former owner of the countryside house he's fatherconsidering, seventy six year old HenryHelen represents a volta in his life, is planning her past tied to his disappearancepotential fresh start. Jonathan The realtor who shows the protagonist around the house shares stories about Helen, and Madeline may be on describes her as ''an entity that is pure consciousness, beyond form''. Although she lives in an assisted living facility now, Helen has powers beyond comprehension which the verge of splitting up, to reader gets the dismay of both daughterssense are not altogether innocuous.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0330512471</amazonuk>1804272205
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Elizabeth KostovaOlga Tokarczuk|title=The Swan ThievesHouse of Day, House of Night|rating=25
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=1999 – A renowned painter, Robert Oliver, goes mad, attacking a painting with a knife. He''What's arrested, and sent to the good of a psychiatrist who is also an artist. The psychiatrist, Andrew Marlowe, world that keeps changing like that? How canone go on calmly living in it?''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.
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Atiq RahimiThea Lenarduzzi|title=The Patience StoneTower
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Set ''How unctuous are the fats of another's life, how dizzying their sugars in Afghanistan, our bloodstream''The Patience Stone'. In this compelling novel, Thea Lenarduzzi assumes the identity of T, the protagonist of this tale. Just as T' s story is being told, the story of a partly allegorical tale second protagonist is unveiled: Annie, the daughter of a Muslim wife tending to her comatose soldier husband wealthy family in the 19th century, who has been shot died of tuberculosis after being locked in the necka tower, captures T's imagination. Annie's fate is, above all, an enticing story to T. As It is a story which she cares for himconsumes avariciously, both in a quest for the first time ever she is able to speak to him without fear of censorship truth and he becomesknowledge, for herand in service of myth, like the mythical Patience Stone to which you tell your troubles fable and when the stone finally bursts, you are free from your torments. But also this might mean the Apocalypsefantasy. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701184167</amazonuk>1804271799
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Joyce Carol OatesJon Fosse and Damion Searls (translator) |title=A Fair MaidenVaim|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I've recently read the terrific short story collection 'All was strange'The Female Of The Species'' also by Oates and couldn't wait to start her latest book. I felt sure that I was .. This haunting phrase encapsulates the pervading sense of otherworldliness which permeates this story set in Vaim, a fictional fishing village in Norway which paradoxically could not feel more real for a literary treat - Jatgeir and I was. FirstlyEline, two of the book itself, a hardback with a beautifully nostalgic cover is a book lover's delightprotagonists caught in its melancholic current.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1847248586</amazonuk>1804271829
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Dai Sijie Claire-Louise Bennett|title=Once on a Moonless NightBig Kiss, Bye-Bye |rating=34.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=A French female scholarEverything in this book, studying in Chinahowever sweet or seemingly innocent, finds herself caught up is steeped in the search for anguish and distortion. Even a lostkiss, sacred text that was inscribed on an ancient scroll. The scroll was torn in two by Emperor Puyi years agousually a symbol of intimacy and closeness, and was becomes evidence of love lost. After falling in love with a young grocer called Tumchooq When the young woman becomes caught up in tales within talesnarrator cries out internally, as she finds that Tumchooq's father found 'come over here and translated half kiss me,'' it is less an invitation than a desperate attempt to confirm her emotional numbness. The imagined recipient of the missing scroll and became obsessed with finding the other halfthis plea is Xavier, her ex-partner, and soon Tumchooq too becomes embroiled in the searcha ghost she conjures to test her detachment.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099521326</amazonuk>1804271934
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Thomas Trofimuk Helene Bessette and 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 is Padma, a place that we British tend not young Sri Lankan, has returned to give a great deal of thought to. Japan entered the war, we say, with the attack Villa Hibiscus on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, completely forgetting that Japan, like most of the rest southern coast of the world, was already her home country. This is a country at warplace she spent her formative years. She had been fighting in China since 1937 and It is not a place she was making in-roads born into European colonial territory in , but the area one she thinks of as wellhome.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340825154</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Sadie Jones |title=Small Wars|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction |summary=Even though our world is ostensibly How she came to be at peacethe Villa, hundreds of localizedhow it became her home, unwinnable conflicts continue to grumble on. Mostly, we only hear and care about the ones involving machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the ''our boysscore', as if war was some giant game of football' for this gentle and yet subtly violent novel. But it isn Padma't, s present fails to escape her past and ''Small Wars'' reflects on much like the casualties musical score 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 film, that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the public mood turns against the 'war on terror' in Afghanistan. It's certainly a prescient oneVilla.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701184558</amazonuk>1784631930
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Evelyn Waugh178563335X|title=A Handful of DustSea Defences|author=Hilary 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. ''
}}