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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=Patricia DunckerPolly Barton|title=The Strange Case of the Composer and His JudgeWhat Am I, A Deer?
|rating=4
|genre=General Literary Fiction|summary=ItPolly Barton's rural France, debut novel is an intellectually playful yet emotionally exposed work that uses translation as both subject and 2000 is barely begungoverning metaphor. The narrator, when hunters come across a spread of human corpses in the mountains. Several familiesnewly relocated from London to Berlin, all in works translating video games into Japanese through the same cultprocess of localisation, seem rewriting language until it feels comfortably familiar to have killed themselves on their path to wherevera new audience. If so, Barton treats this is as a problemparadoxical act: arguably, in striving for the last time it happeneduniversality, in Switzerland a few years previouslanguage is endlessly repackaged, nobody could work out why – and who was there to dispose of some its originality at risk of disappearing altogether. From this, the evidence. This isn't novel opens out into a problem for the policeman involvedwider, as he fell desperately resonant question: to what extent do we translate ourselves in love with the investigative judge in collaborating on the initial case. Combining againorder to be understood, they see a link with everybody involved in both casesaccepted, a famous conductor /composer.or loved?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1408807041</amazonuk>1804272175
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Marilyn ChinMaria Stepanova and Sasha Dugdale (Translator)|title=Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen: A Manifesto in 41 Tales The Disappearing Act|rating=54
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Revenge Despite her anonymisation of the Mooncake Vixen place names and people, Stepanova's message in this short work of autofiction is unmistakable. A novelist named M travels from B (oh, how I love that title!ostensibly Berlin) will almost certainly not to the town of F for a literary festival she is to be to everyone's tastea guest speaker at. Detoured by erratic train schedules and nudged by forces beyond her control, but I confess that I loved its originalityher journey slowly bends toward a traveling circus. Swept up in this series of events, boldnessM eventually offers to step in for a circus performer who has unexpectedly left the show. The train functions as a motif of transience and impermanence, sassy style while the circus embodies the reshaping of identity and a retreat into fantasy, an impulse that lies at the humour very heart of itthe novel form itself.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0241144612</amazonuk>1804272329
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Paolo Giordano295967572X|title=The Solitude of Prime NumbersPale Pieces|author=G M Stevens|rating=45
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Our unnamed narrator is about to begin a train journey with his companion Django. Where they''The Solitude re going and what the purpose of Prime Numbersthis journey is, is uncertain. Django found the tickets '' follows on the lives of Alice floor somewhere'' and Mattia from childhood has persuaded our narrator to middle ageaccompany him. Alice Why not? Not much else is a wilful anorexic, scarred by a childhood skiing accident and an overbearing father. Mattia is an reclusive selfclear either -harmer trying but we are probably in the past as the pair travel to live with the guilt of having been responsible for his disabled twin sister's death. Their paths cross at a school friend's party during a painful adolescence station by coach and their lives are destined to intertwine throughout the coming years, despite the chronic awkwardness of their courtshiptrain is a steam locomotive.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0552775983</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Juli ZehMakenna Goodman|title=Dark MatterHelen of Nowhere
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''Dark Matter'' It could be argued that the pervading theme of this book is translated from German and nothing has been 'lost malaise - a hard-to-place feeling that something in translation' hereyour life is not quite right. The lives protagonist, a disgraced professor on the brink of two very bright academics are interwoven throughoutlosing both his career and his relationship, embodies this feeling. However, Goodman counteracts his discomfort with a force which is seductive, radical and unnerving: Helen. Students Sebastian The connection between Helen and Oskar are the very best protagonist is indirect yet intimate. As the former owner of friends; itthe countryside house he's almost as if they share the same heartbeat. Howeverconsidering, as they grow into adulthood real Helen represents a volta in his life comes along and tends , her past tied to get in his potential fresh start. The realtor who shows the protagonist around the wayhouse shares stories about Helen, and describes her as ''an entity that is pure consciousness, beyond form''. Sebastian settles for domestic bliss. Their friendship cools offAlthough she lives in an assisted living facility now, becomes a little tense and strainedHelen has powers beyond comprehension which the reader gets the sense are not altogether innocuous.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1846552087</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=Kathryn StockettThea Lenarduzzi|title=The HelpTower
|rating=5
|genre=General Literary Fiction|summary=Jackson, Mississippi: 1960. The talk at the bridge club and the tennis club is of what Jackie Kennedy is wearing. They're white women, of course and they're free to play because a coloured woman will be looking after How unctuous are the children, doing the shopping and cleaning the house. Theyfats of another're trusted to bring the children ups life, but theyhow dizzying their sugars in our bloodstream're not trusted to be honest about the silver. Aibileen is raising her seventeenth white child but something hardened in her heart when her son died whilst the white bosses looked the other way. They took his body to the coloureds' hospital and rolled it off the back of the truck and left.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141039280</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Aatish TaseerJon Fosse and Damion Searls (translator) |title=The Temple-GoersVaim|rating=34
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Aatish Taseer is probably best known for his journalism, publishing regularly in ''All was strange''... This haunting phrase encapsulates the Indian press, pervading sense of otherworldliness which permeates this story set in ProspectVaim, and perhaps most prolifically a fictional fishing village in Time magazine. He has won acclaim Norway which paradoxically could not feel more real for his memoir: Stranger to History in which heJatgeir and Eline, raised by his Indian Sikh mother, traces his absent Muslim father across two of the border protagonists caught in Pakistan – and also for his translations of the short stories of Saadat Hasan Mantoits melancholic current.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0670918504</amazonuk>1804271829
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Tom ConnollyClaire-Louise Bennett|title=The Spider TrucesBig Kiss, Bye-Bye
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The title of Everything in this debut novel by Tom Connolly book, however sweet or seemingly innocent, is enigmaticsteeped in anguish and distortion. Even a kiss, mysterioususually a symbol of intimacy and closeness, becomes evidence of love lost. It draws When the reader in - just like a fly to a spidernarrator cries out internally, ''s web. And in fairness come over here and kiss me,'The Spider Truces' does exactly what it say on the tin as the main character, Ellis, is obsessed and terrified in equal measure, less an invitation than a desperate attempt to confirm her emotional numbness. The imagined recipient of spiders. ... and when you live in an old housethis plea is Xavier, as the O'Rourke family doesher ex-partner, there are plenty of spiders and other creepy crawlies abouta ghost she conjures to test her detachment.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0956251528</amazonuk>1804271934
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Mary Yukari WatersHelene Bessette and Kate Briggs (translator)|title=The FavoritesLili is Crying
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This story is set First published in Kyoto, Japan, starting 1953 in June 1978. Fourteen year old Sarah Rexford and her Japanese motherFrench, Yoko, have come back from the US to stay with family for this novel is a few weeks. Sarah was born and brought up in Japan but has lived in timeless text which wrenches the US with her mother and white American father for five years. She is very conscious hearts of the differences between life in Kyoto its readers just as Bessette wrenches words and in Fielder's Butte, California. Here in Kyoto, sentences from their proper position on the women, including Sarah page and her mumpositions them elsewhere, go shopping every day for fooddisjointed, and truncated. Like the food is very different – in an opening scene, Sarah is trying to explain to lives of her grandfather what she normally has for breakfast in the UScharacters, and becoming aware of the gulf between her life in Japan and in Californiathey are often left tragically incomplete.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1847392334</amazonuk>1804271675
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Rose TremainJonathan Buckley|title=TrespassOne Boat
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Set in the hills of Southern France, Trespass ''One Boat'' is a novel about sibling love and rivalrydeeply introspective novella that defies traditional narrative structure, disputed territory and ultimately revenge. In drawing the French corner are Aramon Lunel, resident reader into a contemplative realm of the Mas Lunelphilosophical musings and fragmented memories flowing from our narrator and protagonist, and his sister Audrun who lives in a cottage in the groundsTeresa. In Set against the English corner are Victoria Verey, evocative backdrop of a garden designersmall coastal Greek town, this work masterfully captures the magic of its setting and her partner, an untalented watercolourist, Kittyits power to provoke profound introspection. The catalyst that brings Teresa herself recognises these together is qualities as the reason she has visited it after the arrival in France death of Anthony Vereyboth her parents. Prompted by her mourning, Victoria's sister whose exclusive antiques business in London her narrative voice is failing meditative and who decides to follow his sister in finding a new life in Francedeeply self-aware, inviting the reader into her labyrinthine cogitations. Aramon It is tempted to sell his family Mas by the lure a book that not only requires but inspires depth of 'foreign' money even if that means that his sister's house has to be destroyed to secure the dealthought, since its narrative structure is fragmentary and ironically relies on analepsis for its propulsion.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701177942</amazonuk>1804271764
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Castle FreemanEowyn Ivey|title=All That I HaveBlack Woods Blue Sky|rating=43.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Castle Freeman may sound like two thirds ''Black Woods Blue Sky'' tells the story of Birdie, the young mother of toddler Emaleen, who longs for a life beyond the Alaskan lodge where she works as a bar waitress, a firm setting which enables her bad habits and her accidental neglect of provincial solicitors but thankfully this Castle Freeman is Emaleen. Described as a man very skilled ''wild card'', she feels stuck in writing about her day-to-day life, and yearns to cross the law rather than practicing it. In his latest novel Freeman tells an intriguing tale involving local Sheriff Lucian Wing Wolverine river and his practical yet low-key approach to maintaining order in rural Vermont. Not for Wing live on the gung ho approach North Fork to fighting crimefulfil her desires of a simple life surrounded by nature. He doesn't wear When she meets Arthur Nielson, a uniformstrange, taciturn and solitary man, who says he drives has a battered old car rather than the standard issue sheriff's wagon cabin over there, she feels called to go - and his gunbring Emaleen with her. Without realising it, so ubiquitous in US law enforcement, is safely tucked away in his bottom drawer. Everyone in the area knows the sheriff this calling will transform hers and by and large they respect him and his slightly unorthodox way of doing businessEmaleen's lives forever.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0715639021</amazonuk>1472279042
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Dan RhodesSally Rooney|title=Little Hands ClappingIntermezzo
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction|summary=The first character to mention in this book is a moth. It's a human moth, drawn to Sally Rooney has studied the flame that chessboard of life and is a museum something of suicide - a supposedly cautionary, life-affirming, memento mori, somewhere in Germanygrandmaster at putting it into words. Its curator Her dialogue is an old hand at lonelygripping and so brilliantly frustrating, unloved museumsas her characters never quite say exactly what they feel. Among the many relationships woven into this story, fresh from an art gallery in an airport - it didn't take off - who notices the noise of the latest suicide central one for readers to happen in unravel is the museum, fraternal connection—or lack thereof—between Ivan and goes right back to sleepPeter Koubek. A spider crawls into Ivan, a socially awkward chess prodigy, contrasts sharply with his mouth and gets eatenolder brother Peter, a successful lawyer living in Dublin. Following their father's passing after a long battle with cancer, the brothers' already strained relationship faces new trials.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1847675298</amazonuk>0571365469
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Delphine de ViganFyodor Dostoyevsky|title=No and MeWhite Nights
|rating=5
|genre=TeensShort Stories|summary=Lou As always in Dostoyevsky, the character work is a clever, clever child with an IQ approaching 160sublime. She's thirteen, but she's been moved up two years at school and she compares her flat chested, nervous self somewhat unfavourably with her fifteen-year-old peer group. Funnily enough, her only real friend at school One is Lucas, who's seventeen and such never left wondering what a rebel that he's been moved down two years. Things at home aren't great for Lou. Her baby sister died a few years ago character is thinking or feeling because Dostoyevsky lays bare their innermost dispositions and her mother has been severely depressed ever since. She barely talks, seldom gets dressed. Her father is worn down to the bone temperaments with worry and Lou doesn't get a great deal of attention from him either, so distracted is heremarkable clarity. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1408807513</amazonuk>0241619785
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Joshua Ferris James Baldwin|title=The UnnamedGiovanni's Room|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Tim Farnsworth seemed to have it all. He loved ''Giovanni's Room'' follows the narrator David, an American man living in Paris, as he navigates his wife Jane and daughter Becka and his job as a partner in prestigious law firm was enjoyabletorturous affair with Giovanni, fulfilling and financially rewarding. The fly an Italian bartender he meets in the ointment was that sometimes he was overtaken by a compulsion gay bar. While David is engaged to walk. The time of dayHella, who is travelling in Spain, the weather or real tension in the occasion did novel arises not matter – when from his infidelity but from the compulsion came he had to walk until he was physically exhausted deeper conflict within himself. It is David's crippling shame and fell asleep immediately after calling denial of his wife to come and collect him. There seemed to be no medical explanation for what was happening – and Tim and Jane had tried every source they could find – but Tim was still reluctant to accept sexuality that this was a mental rather than a physical illnessultimately dooms his relationship with Giovanni.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0670917702</amazonuk>0141186356
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Joe TreasureAlba de Cespedes |title=BesottedForbidden Notebook
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It is late August 1982, This Italian work of feminist fiction holds an air of suspense and tension from the day when O level results come out. Michael Cartwright already knows he has failed his exams and is dreading his parents finding out. Hemoment our protagonist, his twin brother Kieran (who has done very well) and their younger sisters are on the family holidayValeria Cossati, staying with their mother's parents in Kilrosspurchases her forbidden notebook, County Cork. To escape boredom and his parents' anger, he wanders round learns about herself in the village, where he meets Fergal Noonan, training to be a priest, most intimate and lively Peggy O'Connor. He has his first kiss and a bit more with Peggy. The family soon goes home to Cheltenham, but their brief visit to Ireland will have far reaching significancerevealing ways.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0330511726</amazonuk>1782278222
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Laila Lalami Ottessa Moshfegh|title=Secret SonMy Year of Rest and Relaxation|rating=3.5|genre=General Literary Fiction|summary=''Secret Son'' At best, this novel is a scathing critique of modern society and reveals the story fragility of Youssef El-Mekkihuman relationships; at worst, it is the slum-dwelling teenage son of single mother Rachida. Youssef has always been told that his father is deadcynical, so when he finds out his mother has lied to conceal the fact that he was born out predictable and slightly trite tale of wedlock, he plunges headlong into an identity crisisunlikeable protagonist. He tracks down his real fatherThis unlikely heroine, a wealthy businessman called Nabil Amrani who slim, attractive and newly orphaned girl in her twenties is surprisingly enthusiastic about his illegitimate son's arrival. Nabil has recently fallen out disillusioned with his daughter and he seizes this opportunity the world, but resolves not to mould Youssef into the obedient son he has always wantedlose sleep over it: in fact, her solution lies in her hibernation.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0670918296</amazonuk>1784707422
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Aravind AdigaMatthew Tree|title=The White TigerWe'll Never Know
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Balram Halwai, a Bangalore entrepreneur (of sorts) and a natural philosopher, hears that there is a planned visit from the Chinese leader Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to India to learn the source of Indian entrepreneurial talent. Balram knows that the story he will be told by the Indian leader will be a long way different from the true story of modern Indian lifehis father, a drunk and so resolves, over the course chronic underachiever whose dreams of seven nights, to write to the Chinese premier with the story being exceptional at any of his life artistic passions all failed miserably and his own journey from a poor son who had endless crises of a rickshaw driver self confidence. So Tim applied himself to the head of his own businessstudies, cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and set himself high but achievable ambitions.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1843547228</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Matthew CondonB0C47LV1PC|title=The Trout OperaFragility|author=Mosby Woods
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Judges Carrington and Thorpe recline in leather armchairs on Can you make a ''Yo birthing person'' joke? And if you could, is the question should you make it? Or is the verandah of Buckley's Crossing hotel and watch in silence as a giant trout shuffles across question if you did, would it land? The catch is that the bridgeanswer for both could well be.... no.
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Clare MorrallMosby Woods|title=The A Whirly Man Who DisappearedLoses His Turn
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I The West isn't the dominant force it once was drawn to this book straight away. Firstly, Nobody in the jacket cover West is lovely. The subliminal message quite sure how to mend this or even if mending it is read me, please read methe best course of action. We Governments are introduced to the Kendall family; mother, father and three childrenflailing. All leading unremarkableA war here, rather ordinary lives. The father, Felix, works hard to provide a push for his familyclimate action there. He loves them all dearlyA feeling that nobody is in actual charge. They all love him backImagine then, there was a man with precognition. It is Imagine the strategic advantage in this asset; a secure family unitman who can tell you what will happen given any set of circumstances. Until - completely out of That man would be valuable, right? Perhaps the blue - he simply disappearsmost valuable asset in history. His family is distraught and mystified. We all know Imagine then, that a person cannot simply disappearthis man loses this ability. But Felix Kendall has taken himself off the radar. WhyWhat would governments do to get it back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0340994274</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Christopher Isherwood0571379559|title=A Single ManThe House of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams|rating=45
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=If you've ever wanted to know what goes on inside someone'The House of Broken Bricks'' is the story of four people. Tess Hembry's mind you'll love this short novelroots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, but instead, first published back she lives in 1964the house on the riverbank, built of broken bricks. We join George Falconer just at Insubstantial as it might look, it's stood the moment he awakes from sleep passage of time, storms and witness floods. Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his innermost thoughts as he goes about a typical dayvegetables, to complete the delivery rounds - and to bring in sufficient money. It all sounds pretty dull They have twin boys - Sonny and monotonous but what makes this exciting is Max, the rainbow twins. Sonny's colouring reflects his mother's Jamaican heritage. Max takes after his father. People don't believe that George isnthey't just any old professor living the American Dreamre related, oh no, hemuch less twins and there's so detached from the banal normality of the world an assumption when Max is out with his mother that heshe's almost outside of his own body at timesnanny.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548828</amazonuk>
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Claire North
|title=House of Odysseus
|rating=5
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= ''What could matter more than love?''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Amos OzKay Chronister|title=Rhyming Life and DeathDesert Creatures|rating=54|genre=Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary=Rhyming Love and Death With a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, post-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Whether it is a kind robotic takeover, a world devoid of philosophical love letter to literaturewater or a nuclear holocaust, or perhaps more so this genre is a way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a new work of post-apocalyptic fictionthat aligns many of the fears that exist for humanity today. It is a book about how to write, about the compulsion shocking novel that still manages to write, and about the strange world that the writer of fiction must live infind hope.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099521024</amazonuk>1803364998
}}
{{newreviewfrontpage|isbn=1803363002|author=Paul MurrayEric LaRocca|title=Skippy DiesThe Trees Grew Because I Bled There|rating=3.5|genre=Literary FictionHorror|summary=Life in Seabrook College Horror taps into something primeval within us. It is used as a messway to reflect our darkest emotions and how we as humans react and process them. Some Most horror fiction feature a ''Big Bad'', whether that is a home invader, a monster or a ghost, it usually something tangible and, by the end of the staff are young enough to remember their own school days therestory, but many are certainly too old for beatable. Eric LaRocca's ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. A lot It is a collection of short stories more interested in the boys are victims horrors of ragging and bullying for being too chunkyillness, or too smart - but some are so chunky grief and smart there's a certain kudos to themhumiliation. The female of the species is a thing only spied from their own school next door, Horrors that linger and only met by selling them ritalin as a weight-control pill, or meeting them at the very rare combined school discoare harder to defeat than any ''Big Bad''.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241141826</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Tom WolfeMadelaine Lucas|title=The Bonfire of the VanitiesThirst for Salt
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In his own mind''Love, I'd read, bond trader Sherman McCoy is was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity'Master of the Universe'. He has Told from a pleasant wiferetrospective view, a beautiful mistress, and a sweet six young woman unravels the year old daughter-long relationship that once defined her. Henry Lamb is Overlaid with later wisdom, the narrator relives the affair with a black student man twenty years her senior from its inception – the summer after finishing university – to its sorrowful end the projectssummer after. Under normal circumstances, itSet against the backdrop of an isolated Australian coastal town ''s clear that McCoyThirst for Salt's world and Lamb's world would never overlap. But when McCoy and his mistress Maria Ruskin end up lost in details the Bronx, and an accident leads to Lamb being hit by McCoy24-year-old narrator's Mercedesdeepening relationship with her older lover, a chain of events start which will lead to his downfalldepicting its all-consuming nature, how it changed her perspective on both romantic and familial relationships and how it altered her irrevocably.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099548798</amazonuk>0861546490
}}
{{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=Ru FreemanJennifer Saint|title=A Disobedient GirlAtalanta
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Jonathan Casper faints when he sees clouds''I was as worthy as any one of them. His wife Madeline worries about everythingI would get on board that ship, I vowed. I would take my place, not least just in the way name of the pigeons that she is studying are murdering each othergoddess. Their seventeen year old daughter Amelia wants to overthrow It was for the evil empire sake of capitalism and is making her own bombmy name, while fourteen year old Thisbe is looking for God and praying to himtoo. JonathanAtalanta''s father, seventy six year old Henry, is planning his disappearance. Jonathan and Madeline may be on the verge of splitting up, to the dismay of both daughters.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330512471</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Atiq RahimiAmanthi Harris|title=The Patience StoneBeautiful Place
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Set in AfghanistanPadma, ''The Patience Stone'' is a partly allegorical tale young Sri Lankan, has returned to the Villa Hibiscus on the southern coast of her home country. This is a Muslim wife tending to place she spent her comatose soldier husband who has been shot in the neckformative years. As It is not a place she cares for himwas born into, for but the first time ever one she thinks of as home. How she is able came to speak to him without fear of censorship and he becomesbe at the Villa, for how it became herhome, like and the machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the mythical Patience Stone ''score'' for this gentle and yet subtly violent novel. Padma's present fails to which you tell your troubles escape her past and when much like the stone finally burstsmusical score of a film, you are free from your torments. But also this might mean that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the ApocalypseVilla.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701184167</amazonuk>1784631930
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Joyce Carol Oates178563335X|title=A Fair MaidenSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=IWhen we first meet Rachel Bird she've recently read s a trainee vicar, sitting in on a PCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the terrific short story collection ''The Female Of The Species'' children up. also by Oates Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-old Hannah and couldn't wait to start her latest bookelder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. I felt sure that I was Thelma's daughter-in for a literary treat - and I waslaw won't let her see her grandson. FirstlyHolthorpe, on the book itselfNorfolk coast, is a hardback with a beautifully nostalgic cover lovely place, but Rachel is struggling to develop a book loverreal bond with the parish - and she's in awe of the vicar, Gail, but then she's delightbeen doing the job for more than thirty years. Rachel and Christopher hoped that a walk on the beach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed. And then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847248586</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Dai Sijie 1398515388|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, 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 Boy and became obsessed with finding the other half, and soon Tumchooq too becomes embroiled in the search.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099521326</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewDog|author=Thomas Trofimuk |title=Waiting for ColumbusSeishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary General Fiction|summary=I First of all, it was hooked instantly by the titleearthquake, deep in the ocean floor, which created the tsunami and this, in turn, caused the nuclear meltdown. Original, thought-provoking, quirkyThe result was complete and utter devastation. The book revolves around a youngish man who has been admitted to an insane asylum (these two words alone make me want to shiver) in modern-day Spaindeaths were uncountable, and the loss of livelihoods was widespread. The staff have fact that many pets were separated from their work cut outowners came far down the list of priorities but - six months after the tsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. He doesnwasn't remember his name or anything at all about his past. Hea dog person but the convenience store owner's sporadically violent - comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his car door and he says he is Christopher Columbus! As Tamon the Americans would say, go figuredog jumped in. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330518844</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Su Tong0989715337|title=The Boat to Redemption|rating=3|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Ku Dongliang and his father, Ku Wenxuan, are forced to live on a barge on the river following Ku Wenxuan's fall from grace. Originally believed to be the son of a revolutionary martyr, it is eventually proved that Mr Ku was not so - as a result, his position in society takes a nose-dive. Dongliang suffers as a result of this, finding it hard to make friends within the barge community and Papa on shore. Then an orphaned girl moves onto the barges and finds a place in Dongliang's apparently cold heart. Will she be able to take him out of himself? Or will she, too, turn her back on him?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>038561344X</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewMoon|author=Iain Banks|title=The Steep Approach to GarbadaleMarco North
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It took me a while to realise that Iain Banks is, most of all, a teller of tales - I would call him a story-teller had this term not became a compliment-cum-invective usually reserved for the Jeffrey Archers and Dan Browns of the modern publishing world. This ability to tell stories - not to plot as much as to weave a yarn - combines with a penchant for creating appealing contexts for Banks' narratives to unfold in (this gets magnificently realised in the world building of his [[:Category:Iain M Banks|Iain M. Banks]] alter-ego) and populating them with memorable, larger than life but usually short of caricature, characters.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0349119287</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Mary McCarthy |title=The Group|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary='Given Some frogs had gotten into the attention paid to relations between the sexes, it would be tempting to call The Group a forerunner of today's chick litwell. It's not.' So writes Candace Bushnell, the writer behind the TV series Sex and the City, in the introduction to this new Virago Modern Classics edition of The Group by Mary McCarthy. First published in 1963, this novel is about the lives of a group of young women after leaving college in 1933, including careers, relationships, sex, babies, parents, and money. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844085937</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Janice Galloway|title=Collected Stories|rating=5|genre=Short Stories|summary=In this collection, stories are taken from two previous volumes, 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 evening. We have a peek into the deepest darkest corners of everyday relationships, with lovers, partners and most of all ourselves.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099540398</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Herta Muller|title=The Passport|rating=3|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Meet Windisch. A miller in a small village, he trudges through there, and through his neighbours, and through his life, counting his days and hours, for reasons that are not initially clear. But he does want something - he is waiting for a passport so he can leave for other climes. The perks of his job are the bags of flour he leaves by the mayor's house with regularity, as an open bribe, but there might be a bigger sacrifice to have to make.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1852421398</amazonuk>}}
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