134,727
edits
Changes
From TheBookbag
Jump to navigationJump to searchno edit summary
[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]__NOTOC__ <!{{Frontpage|isbn=295967572X|title=Pale Pieces|author=G M Stevens|rating=5|genre=Literary 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.}}{{Frontpage|author=Makenna Goodman|title=Helen of Nowhere|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=It could be argued that the pervading theme of this book is malaise - Remove a hard-to->place feeling that something in your life is not quite right. The protagonist, a disgraced professor on the brink of losing both his career and his relationship, embodies this feeling. However, Goodman counteracts his discomfort with a force which is seductive, radical and unnerving: Helen. The connection between Helen and the protagonist is indirect yet intimate. As the former owner of the countryside house he's considering, Helen represents a volta in his life, her past tied to his potential fresh start. The realtor who shows the protagonist around the house shares stories about Helen, and 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 reader gets the sense are not altogether innocuous.|isbn=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?''
{{Frontpage
|author=Sally Rooney
|title=Intermezzo
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Sally Rooney has studied the chessboard of life and is something of a grandmaster at putting it into words. Her dialogue is gripping and so brilliantly frustrating, as her characters never quite say exactly what they feel. Among the many relationships woven into this story, the central one for readers to unravel is the fraternal connection—or lack thereof—between Ivan and Peter Koubek. Ivan, a socially awkward chess prodigy, contrasts sharply with his older 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.
|isbn=0571365469
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Fyodor Dostoyevsky
|title=White Nights
|rating=5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=As always in Dostoyevsky, the character work is sublime. One is never left wondering what a character is thinking or feeling because Dostoyevsky lays bare their innermost dispositions and temperaments with remarkable clarity.
|isbn=0241619785
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=James Baldwin
|title=Giovanni's Room
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''Giovanni's Room'' follows the narrator David, an American man living in Paris, as he navigates his torturous affair with Giovanni, an Italian bartender he meets in a gay bar. While David is engaged to Hella, who is travelling in Spain, the real tension in the novel arises not from his infidelity but from the deeper conflict within himself. It is David's crippling shame and denial of his sexuality that ultimately dooms his relationship with Giovanni.
|isbn=0141186356
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Alba de Cespedes
|title=Forbidden Notebook
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This Italian work of feminist fiction holds an air of suspense and tension from the moment our protagonist, Valeria Cossati, purchases her forbidden notebook, and learns about herself in the most intimate and revealing ways.
|isbn=1782278222
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Ottessa Moshfegh
|title=My Year of Rest and Relaxation
|rating=3
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=At best, this novel is a scathing critique of modern society and reveals the fragility of human relationships; at worst, it is the cynical, predictable and slightly trite tale of an unlikeable protagonist. This unlikely heroine, a slim, attractive and newly orphaned girl in her twenties is disillusioned with the world, but resolves not to lose sleep over it: in fact, her solution lies in her hibernation.
|isbn=1784707422
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Matthew Tree
|title=We'll Never Know
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary= Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, a drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of his artistic passions all failed miserably and who had endless crises of self confidence. So Tim applied himself to his studies, cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and set himself high but achievable ambitions.
|isbn= B0CVFXPGP8
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=B0C47LV1PC
|title=Fragility
|author=Mosby Woods
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary= Can you make a ''Yo birthing person'' joke? And if you could, is the question should you make it? Or is the question if you did, would it land? The catch is that the answer for both could well be.... no.
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Christina Hesselholdt and Paul Russell Garrett (translator)0571379559|title=CompanionsThe House of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams|rating=35
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''CompanionsThe House of Broken Bricks'' is written as a series the story of monologuesfour people. Tess Hembry's roots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, where six middle-aged friends take but instead, she lives in the house on the riverbank, built of broken bricks. Insubstantial as it in turns to narrate scenes from their livesmight look, charting it's stood the intimate details passage of their holidaystime, dinner partiesstorms and floods. Her husband, familiesRichard, marriagesstruggles to grow his vegetables, affairs to complete the delivery rounds - and work lives to bring in a style that mixes honesty sufficient money. They have twin boys - Sonny and openness with fantasy and evasionMax, the rainbow twins. Sonny's colouring reflects his mother's Jamaican heritage. Max takes after his father. The charm of the novel lies in the way the friends People don' voices bicker with one another among the pages, as we discover t believe that there are always several sides to the same story. We learn most about the characters not through what they say about themselves but through what the others say about them. Along the way're related, much less twins and there 's an assumption when Max is heartbreak and grief, but this is always offset by an abundance of humour and a writing style out with his mother that never fails to be refreshingly light-heartedshe's his nanny.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1910695335</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= David BergenKay Chronister|title= StrangerDesert Creatures
|rating= 4
|genre= Literary Dystopian Fiction |summary=''Stranger'' tells the story of Íso, With a young Guatemalan womanworld that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, and her affair with post-apocalyptic fiction can become an American doctoralmost masochistic thrill. When an accident forces him to return to the StatesWhether it is a robotic takeover, a world devoid of water or a nuclear holocaust, she this genre is left pregnant and lonelya way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. Her anguish becomes even more profound when her daughter ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is abducted, and taken to live with the doctor and his wife. What followed - tales of the journey Íso embarked upon in the hope a new work of finding her baby post- was an amazing story apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the lengths fears that exist for humanity today. It is a mother will go shocking novel that still manages to in order to save her childfind hope.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0715652419</amazonuk>1803364998
}}
{{newreviewfrontpage|isbn=1803363002|author= Clar Ni ChonghaileEric LaRocca|title= Rain Falls On EveryoneThe Trees Grew Because I Bled There
|rating= 5
|genre= Horror
|summary= 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 ''Big Bad'', whether that is a home invader, a monster or a ghost, it usually something tangible and, by the end of the story, beatable. Eric LaRocca's ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. It is a collection of short stories more interested in the horrors of illness, grief and humiliation. Horrors that linger and are harder to defeat than any ''Big Bad''.
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Madelaine Lucas
|title=Thirst for Salt
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary= ''Love, I'd read, was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity''
Told from a retrospective view, a young woman unravels the year-long relationship that once defined her. Overlaid with later wisdom, the narrator relives the affair with a man twenty years her senior from its inception – the summer after finishing university – to its sorrowful end the summer after. Set against the backdrop of an isolated Australian coastal town ''Thirst for Salt'' details the 24-year-old narrator's deepening relationship with her older lover, depicting its all-consuming nature, how it changed her perspective on both romantic and familial relationships and how it altered her irrevocably.
|isbn=0861546490
}}
{{Frontpage
|author= Michael Grothaus
|title=Beautiful Shining People
|rating=4
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= It's a cliché that the Irish have a picturesque turn 'But fearing something and having it come to pass are two different things. And I'm willing to bet most of phrasewhat we fear will never happen, but clichés only exist because they're trueor we can take steps to change it. Roddy Doyle put it differently in a recent interview with ''Writing '' magazine, when he said that 'Beautiful Shining People'With Irish, there's another language bubbling under revolves around the English''question of identity and acceptance. However you express Of what itmeans to be human. Of what is real and what is artificial, that art and whether the development of expression technology is woven into every other line of Clár's proseexciting or frightening. Pick a page at random and you|isbn=191458564X}}{{Frontpage|author=Jennifer Saint|title=Atalanta|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary='ll find something like ''the sickness I was as worthy as any one of them. I would get on board that had come to roost ship, I vowed. I would take my place, not just in her home like a cursed owlthe name of the goddess. It was for the sake of my name, too. Atalanta'' or ''like he was God Princess. Warrior. Lover. Hero. Abandoned at birth for being born a daughter rather than a son, Jesus Atalanta is raised under the protective eye of the goddess Athemis and Justin Timberlake rolled fashioned into a formidable huntress, one'' or ''who longs for adventure. When the opportunity comes – to join the Argonauts, a low sobbingfierce band of warriors, slow descendent from the Gods themselves – Atalanta seizes the chance to fight in Artemis' name and inevitable as rain on carve out her own legendary place in history. What follows is a Sunday'whirlwind of challenges and discovery and through it, Atalanta must remember Artemis'fatal warning: expressions that catch your smile unawaresif she marries, or tear at your heart in their mundane sadness. Or sometimes bothit will be her undoing.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1785079018</amazonuk>1472292154
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Hesene Mete Amanthi Harris|title=Sinful WordsBeautiful Place|rating=45
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=When we meet himPadma, Behram is a student at young Sri Lankan, has returned to the Villa Hibiscus on the school southern coast of theologyher home country. He loves God with This is a passion and has place she spent her formative years. It is not a determination place she was born into, but the one she thinks of as home. How she came to live a be at the Villa, how it became her home, and the machinations that have flowed through her life dedicated ever since she first arrived there provide the ''toscore'' God for this gentle and to live by His rulesyet subtly violent novel. He rents a property from Lulu Khan and his wife, Lady Geshtina and Khan invites Behram to his own home for a visit. It Padma's a delightful place present fails to escape her past and much like the wealth musical score of the couple is obvious as is their standing within the local community: Lady Geshtina's late father is buried in what amounts to a mausoleumfilm, but it's not all this which enchants Behram. The couple have twin children and Behram is taken, enthralled by that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the daughter, NaginaVilla.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1524682527</amazonuk>1784631930
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn= Juan-Tomas Avila Laurel178563335X|title= The Gurugu PledgeSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor|rating= 5|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= Juan Tomas Avila Laurel, one of Equatorial GuineaWhen we first meet Rachel Bird she's best-known dissident writersa trainee vicar, is an author who deserves sitting in on a PCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to be read pick the world overchildren up. With The Gurugu Pledge Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-old Hannah and her elder brother, Jamie, hewhilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Thelma's captured daughter-in-law won't let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, on the Norfolk coast, is a an angry and incredibly urgent slice of the migrant experience – lovely place, but Rachel is struggling to develop a snapshot of real bond with the dangers faced by those crossing the African continent parish - and she's in search awe of the barbed wire fences at Melilla- vicar, Gail, but then she's been doing the Spanish enclave job for more than thirty years. Rachel and Christopher hoped that a walk on the North Eastern tip of Moroccobeach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed. And then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1908276940</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn= Matthew Smith1398515388|title= The WakingBoy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)|rating= 4.5|genre= Literary General Fiction|summary=Isabel SykesFirst of all, 23it was the earthquake, recounts deep in the recent attempt she made to come to terms with ocean floor, which created the loss of her mothertsunami and this, in turn, caused the acclaimed but psychologically disturbed novelist Marianne Sykesnuclear meltdown. Marianne died in an unexplained house fire when Isabel The result was tencomplete and utter devastation. Inspired by the appearance of Imogen Taylor The deaths were uncountable, an enchanting young woman who wants to write a PhD on her mother's work, Isabel plunges into and the depths loss of her past and an intense new friendshiplivelihoods was widespread. After discovering The fact that Imogen is not who she seems to be, Isabel must face many pets were separated from their owners came far down the list of priorities but - six months after the darkest moments from her childhood in order to protect her family from more tragedytsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. She receives unexpected help from beyond He wasn't a dog person but the grave: in the strange, glittering fragments of her motherconvenience store owner's last, unfinished work, 'Midnightsong'comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his car door and Tamon the dog jumped in.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0995654158</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn= Ali Smith0989715337|title= AutumnPapa on the Moon|author=Marco North|rating= 54|genre= Literary Fiction|summary= The first part in Ali Smith's four part 'SeasonalSome frogs had gotten into the well.'' '' seriesWalter stood waist-deep in the fragrant water, Autumn is the story naked except for his beaten leather hat. Long strands of Daniel Gluck and Elisabeth Demandtheir eggs wove around him, unexpected friends who used to be neighbours when Elisabeth was a little girlsticky gray pearls with tadpoles inside them. In a series Two of memories the dogs leaned over the opening and dreams, we discover their friendship from Daniel babysitting Elisabeth through to her visits with him now that barked down at the strange noise of the buckets as he filled them.'' How is that for an opening? The style of this novel in a home and drawing towards the end form of his extremely long interconnected short stories goes from succinct and laconic to wistful and fascinating life. Along the waymusing, we get turning on a wonderfully written insight into timesixpence. And author Marco North, memories, and who has the fleeting nature most wonderful turn of life itselfphrase, starts as he means to go on. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241973317</amazonuk>
}}
Move on to [[Newest Paranormal Reviews]]
