Newest General Fiction Reviews

File:ZIFFIT.png

---

Leave Me by Gayle Forman

General Fiction

When you've had a heart attack and frightened the hell out of not just yourself, but your husband, your children – if they had known - your mother and your best friend, you imagine that some long overdue TLC is about to come your way. You're thinking cards, flowers, being waited on hand, foot and finger and even though the imminent influx of culinary gifts are likely to be low fat, low sugar and taste like the box they came in, they're coming, right? And you'll probably get a couple of months off work and not even have to think about the laundry. Or the housework? Or taking the twins to school? Right? Right???? Full review...

Ink and Bone by Lisa Unger

General Fiction

Finlay Montgomery, like her grandmother Eloise before her is a very powerful and gifted psychic. Sensitive to the unseen, unheard and unknowable, she spends her days among the dead. Visited, bothered, harassed and sometimes taunted, Finlay does her best to manage the gifts that Mother Nature has sought to bestow. But life is not that simple and studying for your degree is testing with five other visitors in the room who are all trying to get your attention in the loudest and most distracting way possible. Full review...

Thirty Days by Annelies Verbeke

General Fiction

Thirty Days doesn’t seem to know what it is about. The novel follows Alphonse, a Senegalese painter decorator living in the Flanders region of Belgium with his girlfriend and childhood friend Cat, who is recovering from cancer. Verbeke puts a major emphasis on their intimate but often volatile and unsteady relationship, as they try to navigate a new lifestyle in a small town, away from the city. However, there are several other storylines which vie for our attention: Alphonse’s troubled clients who treat him as a sounding board and therapist, his experiences of racism as a black man in a rural area, Cat’s difficult, warring parents, the couple’s elderly neighbour Willem who is obsessed with war graves and has a knack for appearing at precisely the wrong moment, and an illegal refugee camp in field trenches a few miles away. Full review...

The Oldest Game by Sue Leger

General Fiction

Moving and eye-opening story of a Romanian woman trafficked into Amsterdam and forced to work as a prostitute. Sue Leger gives us all pause for thought here. Full review...

Men Like Air by Tom Connolly

General Fiction

One April in Manhattan, the destinies of four very different men are about to collide. Nineteen year old Finn has just arrived in the city along with his volatile girlfriend Dilly, determined to even the score with his older brother Jack for abandoning him in the UK in the aftermath of their parents' deaths. Across town, successful gallery owner Leo Emerson is haunted by loneliness, unsettled by the contrast between his life and that of his brother in law and oldest friend William, who is content in both his faith and his marriage. When Finn wanders in to Leo's gallery, a series of unexpected and interconnected events unfold, changing the lives of all four men together. Full review...

How I Became a Drifter by Christmas Philip

General Fiction

Fictionalised autobiography told in a stream-of-consciousness style. An unconventional voice speaking of the universal search for love and acceptance. Full review...

My Husband's Wife by Jane Corry

General Fiction

Autumn 2000. Newly married lawyer Lily and her artist husband Ed have a small apartment in London. Fresh from the honeymoon, they're still settling in to their new roles, and their neighbour Francesca and her 9 year old daughter Carla help to take the pressure off a little bit. Full review...

The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies

General Fiction

Clashes of cultures or cultural enrichment? Xenophobia or embracing diversity? Today's hot topics focus much on cultures meeting and notions of foreignness, especially in the context of migration. As such, Peter Ho Davies could not have chosen a more current and thought-provoking theme for The Fortunes: through four different stories, the novel documents some of the history of Chinese people in America over more than century. From railroad workers, laundry owners, and prostitutes to film stars and adoptive parents, The Fortunes tells tales of searching for identity on both national and personal levels. Full review...

The Art Teacher by Paul Read

Thrillers

Patrick Owen managed seven years at Highfields Secondary School without punching a pupil in the face. A mediocre teacher, stuck in a struggling school ruled by violent pupils, Patrick goes home every night to an empty flat, and an existence filled with reminders of his life as a faded rock star. When one pupil over steps the mark, a brief mistake plunges Patrick into a world of danger, violence, and the glare of the media. Full review...

The Bertie Project: A 44 Scotland Street Novel by Alexander McCall Smith

General Fiction

Catching up with old friends is a pleasure, and it's good to be back on Scotland Street, finding out what everyone is getting up to. Irene is back, of course, from her travels to the middle-east. Bruce has fallen in love, Matthew and Elspeth have triplet troubles, and somebody has an extremely unfortunate accident… Full review...

Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

General Fiction

This is the debut novel from Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, but you would never know it. It is an accomplished, unusual, poetically written story about a young Japanese girl, Yuki Oyama, who has lived most of her life in New York. As such, she feels an outsider: the American girls at school ignore her and she finds the rituals of her parents' home suffocating. Her father has hopes of her studying medicine, but the only thing Yuki enjoys is art. Full review...

Owl Song at Dawn by Emma Claire Sweeney

General Fiction

Maeve Maloney runs the Sea View Lodge guest house that her parents ran before her. The house has harboured many memories for Maeve over the past 80-years-plus, most of which she's managed to keep at bay. However, her suppression is endangered when Vincent comes to call. Far from being an ordinary guest, Vincent is a link to that past Maeve thought she'd outrun but now has to relive. Add that to trying to teach Steph and Len to fib effectively and life becomes very difficult indeed. Full review...

The Kept Woman by Karin Slaughter

General Fiction

Special Agent Will Trent is back. Collected by his partner, Faith, to attend the scene of a rather brutal murder, Trent queries why the GBI has been called in to what would usually be a standard homicide investigation for Atlanta PD. Arriving at the scene, their boss, Deputy Director Amanda Wagner is somewhat characteristically pacing and barking orders; the victim is none other than ex-cop and all round bad egg, Dale Harding. There is a lot of blood, presumably due to the door-knob and spindle sticking out of Harding's neck. Full review...

To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey

General Fiction

If you're going to go pioneering across unexplored lands, at least be prepared to accept what you seek – namely, what you've never seen before. That lesson seems quite obvious, but back in the time of 1885 Allen Forrester is a little too naïve to heed it. A career soldier, he is tasked with scouring the potential of the Wolverine River that threads south to the shores of Alaska, even though the Russians (who of course used to own the Territory) have had all manner of lethal encounters with those already living there, and even though a major stretch of the river has to be traversed in winter when entirely frozen over, as the cliffs either side are too impenetrable. Allen leaves a much younger, new bride behind – and right from the get-go his journals force him to pen words about strange happenings, strange encounters and things of legend coming to life. Like I say, what he's never seen before… Full review...

The First First Gentleman by Gerald Weaver

General Fiction

Anyone picking up The First First Gentleman might be forgiven for snorting with laughter and making a sarcastic comment about how timely and potentially satirical it sounds. In a way they’d be right – but probably for different reasons. Full review...

Wild Life by Liam Brown

General Fiction

Adam Britman goes from a man with it all to homeless in the sniff of a line. While looking for somewhere to sleep Adam comes across an alternative community in the local park. They've come together and created structure (including an unofficial allotment) out of the disorder that's normally equated with living on the streets. It seems perfect so Adam joins them, but perfection can sometimes be an illusion. As for walking away… that's not going to be easy. Full review...

Lie with Me by Sabine Durrant

General Fiction

Paul is lots of things. A writer. A famous name (or at least he was a few years ago). A bit of a snob. A cheapskate. A ladies' man. And a liar. Oh boy, is he a liar. He fibs, he exaggerates, he omits, he tells porkies. Not about the really big stuff, nothing that will hurt anyone, just a few mistruths to see him through. It's for keeping up appearances, really. Full review...

The Trouble with Henry and Zoe by Andy Jones

General Fiction

Stop for a moment and look down at your belly, in the centre you should have something that looks a little bit like a button. It may be an innie, or an outie, but just consider it for a few moments. Do you feel better? Nope, you shouldn't do as all that navel-gazing does is make you over think things. However, without the concept a million romantic books would never be written as without the human compulsion to destroy things around them, how can any tension arise? Full review...

The Republic of Love by Carol Shields

General Fiction

The Republic of Love is a mesh-like novel, peopled with a huge cast of characters interwoven in familial, friendly, neighbourly and romantic relationships. Winnipeg, the city in which virtually all the action in Shield's novel takes place, ties them together. The story follows two single, thirty-something characters, Fay and Tom, who live opposite each other and have a complicated array of mutual acquaintances but don't know each other. Shields alternates between their two points of view as they are slowly drawn together. This is a domestic novel in the best sense; there is a focus on the beauty and mundanity of ordinary people's unremarkable lives in an unexceptional city, from Fay's satisfaction in the pop sound and toasted crumb smell of her twin slice toaster, to Tom's ungainly Saturday morning jogs. Full review...

Out of Practice by Penny Parkes

General Fiction

In a last-ditch attempt to save her failing marriage, GP Holly Graham relocates to the charming village of Larkford with her family to work at the local practice. She finds life as a village doctor very different to her previous role in a busy city hospital, and falls in love with the close-knit community and its quirky residents. But just as Larkford is beginning to feel like home, Holly is hit by a bombshell that threatens to destroy everything she has worked so hard to achieve. Can she rise to the challenge and fight for what she loves? Maybe she will discover something about herself in the process. Full review...

Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley

General Fiction

Meet Ted Flask. A middle-aged, gay Los Angelino, he has the one love of his life. While the fall-out of relationships with men sends him to therapy, he can rely on Lily, the Dachshund. They've been together through thick and thin, ever since the little pup – the runt, no less – seemed to pick Ted out. Ted's sister's unusual marriage was almost marred by Lily being under the surgeon's knife, at great expense – but on the whole they have life sorted. He tries to write, but Friday night is board games, Saturday night is movie night, and Sunday night is pizza night. Oh, and yes, Lily talks to Ted, either in FULLY! CAPITALISED! EVER! EXCLAMATORY! BARKS! or in regular speech. Oh, and yes, Lily has an octopus on her head. Full review...

Falling by Julie Cohen

General Fiction

Here is the story of three women, from three generations within the same family. There is Jo, a forty year old single mother whose first husband died, and whose second husband ran off with their nanny. She is left caring for her older teenage daughter, Lydia, and her two little ones, Oscar and Iris, whilst harbouring a secret that she feels she cannot share with anyone. Her daughter Lydia is the second female character, and as well as the usual teenage angst she is also dealing with grief, still, over her father's death, anger with her mother for her second disastrous marriage, and her own very difficult secret that she is unable to talk to anyone about. Finally there's Honor who is Jo's mother in law, the mother of Jo's first husband, Stephen. Honor has a fall, breaks her hip, and is forced to move in with Jo for a time as she has no one else who can help her. She too is hiding a secret from the world, and as you read the story you begin to wonder if any of these characters actually know who the others are, and if any of them will ever start telling the truth. Full review...

Fell by Jenn Ashworth

General Fiction

Now her parents have died, Annette returns to sell her old childhood home but there's work to do on the decrepit building first. As she wanders around and tries to make some order of the overgrown shambles, she's watched by the ghost of her mother, Netty; a spirit with regrets. Netty reminisces about Annette's childhood and the turning point their lives reached when the mysterious healer Timothy Richardson came to stay. It was a time that promised so much but one for which Netty now needs to make amends, even if she is beyond the grave. Full review...

Act of God by Jill Ciment

General Fiction

Act of God is a story about two ageing twins who find a worrying mushroom growing in their cupboard, a landlady searching for the spotlight and a Russian immigrant whose greatest fear is insignificance. What the insurance company describes as an act of God brings their already overlapped, Brooklyn lives in to sharper focus. What do you do when disaster threatens? Is it survival of the fittest or should we love thy neighbour? Full review...

Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman

General Fiction

Brett-Marie has never met a kitchen she doesn't want to clean. In fact, permanently armed with bicarbonate of soda and window cleaner, she's always ready to clean anything. Her husband Kent is an entrepreneur, you know, with excellent taste and expensive clothes. Yet here she is, in Borg, a rundown small town, in search of her first job for 40 years. Life takes some odd turns sometimes. Full review...

Affections by Rodrigo Hasbun and Sophie Hughes (translator)

General Fiction

If you thought your teenaged years were a struggle to work out the world, and yourself, consider that of Heidi Ertl. Or either of her sisters – this book serves as a sort of tribute to these three real-life women, and the lives that came out of their very disjointed youth, forced to be rarefied from the norm by their family uprooting. Father Hans was one of Leni Riefenstahl's key cameramen, and a Nazi military photographer, before taking the whole family into post-war exile in Bolivia. Their mother would have followed him to the ends of the earth – as in part would their daughters, the older two of which start the book by joining him on an expedition to discover a lost Incan city. Heidi finds young, instant love on the trek – but sees the dark side of such emotions, too. Older sister Monika, who might well be manic depressive, finds something else, while the baby of the family stays at home with a maudlin mother. So much here could be the hook on which to hang a full novel, but if anything it's the reaction of them all to this unusual formative journey that inspires this book. Full review...

Chains of Sand by Jemma Wayne

General Fiction

Chains of Sand is a great read about family, faith, survival, and love. It follows the story of two young men: Udi a veteran of the Israeli army who longs for a new future in London, and Daniel, a London banker unsatisfied with his life and yearning for something more. The story focuses on their desires to change their lives by moving to different worlds and how this impacts their relationships with friends and family. As the story unfolds, the two protagonists' histories are slowly uncovered and they both have to overcome the difficulties in their new lives in order to achieve their dreams. Meanwhile, the fate of star-crossed love between a Jewish girl and an Arabic man in Jerusalem a decade earlier intertwines with Daniel's life, complicating all that he thinks has become clear. Full review...

Soft in the Head by Marie-Sabine Roger

General Fiction

This novel will make you smile. It's a feel-good story, unusual in its premise and original. Germaine is a 45 year old man who is illiterate. He has a group of drinking friends who frequently make him the butt of their jokes, a mother who calls him a 'half-wit', amongst other things, and a girlfriend whom he appears afraid of committing to. Germain spends many afternoons in the park, counting pigeons and writing his name among the dead of the war memorial. It is here that he meets Margueritte, a tiny 85 year old woman who tells him she also counts the pigeons. Full review...