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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]==Literary fiction==__NOTOC__{{newreviewFrontpage|author=John BurnsideMatthew Tree|title=The Summer of DrowningWe'll Never Know|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The story is narrated in the first person by the daughter a decade or so after the tragedy. SoTimothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, she has a healthy dose drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of hindsight which shows itself time his artistic passions all failed miserably and time again with sentiments such as who had endless crises of self confidence... if only I'd have known back then ... and ...I thought it was a bit strange at the time ... if you get my drift. Burnside takes So Tim applied himself to his time to set the scene (spartan) and studies, cultivated his characters (a mere handful). His chosen location is the arresting emptiness of somewhere deep in the Arctic Circle so straight away he's caught my imagination - with abilities rather than hisdaydreams and set himself high but achievable ambitions.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>022406178X</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Edward St AubynB0C47LV1PC|title=At LastFragility|author=Mosby Woods
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In Can you make a ''At LastYo birthing person''joke? And if you could, Edward St Aubyn returns to is the Melrose family, question should you make it? Or is the subject of both ''Some Hope'' and of his Booker-shortlisted [[Mother's Milk by Edward St Aubyn|Mother's Milk]]. I confess that I have still not got around to reading the first of the trilogyquestion if you did, but loved ''Mother's Milk'' and found would it land? The catch is that I wasn't greatly disadvantaged by not having read the previous book. ''At Last'' answer for both could also well be read as a stand-alone book, but I wouldn't advise this approach. You will miss out on so much that if you are planning on reading it, you really should read at least ''Mother's Milk'' first. This isn't much of an inconvenience as it's a terrific book.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330435906</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Deborah Kay Davies|title=True Things About Me|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Take one benefit office worker; bored, listless, a walking study in destructive human behaviour. Add a recently released, jobless ex-con with a glint in his eye and taste for masochism. Throw all caution to the wind and collide these two ingredients by means of visceral, brutal and almost wordless sex in an underground car park and you have the opening chapters of Deborah Kay Davies's debut novelno.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847678319</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=David LodgeMosby Woods|title=Ginger, You're BarmyA Whirly Man Loses His Turn|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Jonathan is a few days away from completing his National ServiceThe West isn't the dominant force it once was. Within Nobody in the week he will dash off West is quite sure how to Majorca with his girlfriend, and who knows, he might mend this or even do more than chastely cup her breast under her clothingif mending it is the best course of action. Governments are flailing. But it's A war here, a bittersweet week push for Jonathanclimate action there. A feeling that nobody is in actual charge. Imagine then, as he looks back on there was a man with precognition. Imagine the beginnings strategic advantage in this asset; a man who can tell you what will happen given any set of his two years spent circumstances. That man would be valuable, right? Perhaps the most reluctantly valuable asset in the army, and especially the time spent with his best companion, and his girlfriend's exhistory. Imagine then, Mikethat this man loses this ability.What would governments do to get it back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099554135</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=David Lodge0571379559|title=A Man The House of PartsBroken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''The man House of parts in question here Broken Bricks'' is HG Wells the story of four people. Tess Hembry's roots are in this fictionalised biography. He was indeed a man of many talents and interestsJamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, but instead, although she lives in the parts that most exercise house on the interest riverbank, built of David Lodge are the great authorbroken bricks. Insubstantial as it might look, it's private partsstood the passage of time, storms and floods. You see Her husband, not only was HG a prolific writer of fiction that incorporated a staggering amount of visionary ideas (tanksRichard, airborne warfare and atomic bombs) - although admittedly some of struggles to grow his ideas have yet vegetables, to come complete the delivery rounds - and to pass such as time machines and Martian invasion bring in sufficient money. They have twin boys - but he was also something of a political philosopher Sonny and idealistMax, being a central figure for a while in the Fabian movementrainbow 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 ardent practitioner of the concept of free loveassumption when Max is out with his mother that she's his nanny.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846554969</amazonuk>
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Claire North
|title=House of Odysseus
|rating=5
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= ''What could matter more than love?''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Delphine de ViganKay Chronister|title=Underground TimeDesert Creatures|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary=Mathilde With a world that is unhappy at workbecoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, post-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. More than just unhappy actuallyWhether it is a robotic takeover, because after expressing an opinion different to her boss he has frozen her out a world devoid of the team and bullied her mentally and emotionally water or a nuclear holocaust, this genre is a way for monthshumans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. Mathilde ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a woman on the edge new work of breaking point, feeling increasingly browpost-beaten by both apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the demands of city life and her awful bossfears that exist for humanity today. Meanwhile Thibault It is an emergency on-call doctor, racing from one district to another through the nightmares of Parisian traffic, unhappy in his relationship and also struggling, mentally, a shocking novel that still manages to survivefind hope. Will today be the day that changes everything?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1408811111</amazonuk>1803364998
}}
{{newreviewfrontpage|isbn=1803363002|author=Siri HustvedtEric LaRocca|title=The Summer Without MenTrees Grew Because I Bled There|rating=4.5|genre=Literary FictionHorror|summary=Sometime after MiaHorror 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''s husband of thirty years, Boriswhether that is a home invader, suggests a marriage 'pause'monster or a ghost, Mia goes mad it usually something tangible and finds herself in a psychiatric hospital. Although this Brief Psychotic Disorder does not last long, she remains fragile and retreats to by the town in Minnesota where she was brought up and where her elderly mother still lives. While Boris cavorts with the Pause, she struggles through end of the summerstory, learning to live without himbeatable. She builds relationships with her motherEric LaRocca's friends, with her neighbours and with ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. It is a group collection of teenage girls who form her creative writing class. Written short stories more interested in the first personhorrors of illness, the book catalogues her progress using these friendships, her past, her reading grief and humiliation. Horrors that linger and her shrink, Dr Sare harder to defeat than any ''Big Bad''.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444710524</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Edward DocxMadelaine Lucas|title=The Devil's GardenThirst for Salt|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Set on a research station in an unnamed Amazonian country (although by the indigenous tribes mentioned, this is probably Peru)''Love, this first person narrative story is told by Dr Forle, who has come to the area to study ants - specifically the strange phenomenon of a type of ant that appear to destroy their own environment. ItI's sort of ants on the deck in the jungled read, if you like. However the scientific study is interrupted by the arrival of an army colonel and a judge, who at least on the surface of things is there was supposed to organize the registration of the local tribes. However when the doctor witnesses be a clear act of violence by the soldiers accompanying the colonel, he becomes more engaged with the local goings on.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330463500</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Mary Horlock|title=The Book of Lies|rating=3.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Catherine Rozier is fifteen years old light and she has a secret. Secrets are a big thing on Guernseyweightless feeling, the small Channel Isle that is only three miles across at one point with a population a little over 65,000 i.e. somewhat more than Hereford, considerably less than Lincoln, or about half that of Norwich or Preston. Unlike any of those towns, Guernsey is an island. It is self-contained. It isnbut I had always longed for gravity't just that everyone knows everyone else; they're almost certainly, quite closely, related.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847678858</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Yoko OgawaMichael Grothaus|title=Hotel IrisBeautiful Shining People
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=When I read [[The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa|The Housekeeper and the Professor]] by Ogawa I fell completely in love with the book. It was gentle, and beautifully written. ''Hotel Iris'' is very, very different But fearing something and really ought having it come to have a warning label on the cover for those who simply recognise the authorpass are two different things. And I's name and pick it up hoping for more! This is the story m willing to bet most of a seventeen year old girl who is seduced by an old man in a sadisticwhat we fear will never happen, distressing manneror we can take steps to change it.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548992</amazonuk>}}''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Louise WelshJennifer Saint|title=Naming the BonesAtalanta|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Murray Watson is a Doctor ''I was as worthy as any one of English Literature embarking them. I would get on a year-long sabbatical to pursue his long-held dream of writing the definitive biography of Archie Lunan andboard that ship, as a specifically intended by-productI vowed. I would take my place, restore Lunan's poetry to its rightful place not just in the high canon name of the goddess. It was for the sake of Scots creativitymy name, too.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847672566</amazonuk>}}Atalanta''
}}
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The back cover blurb Padma, a young Sri Lankan, has praise for this debut novel from two returned to the Villa Hibiscus on the southern coast of my favourite authors: her home country. [[:Category:Joseph O'Connor|Joseph O'Connor]] and [[:Category:A L Kennedy|A L Kennedy]] so things were definitely off to This is a good startplace she spent her formative years. The front cover It is rather unsettling (not a place she was born into, but the one she thinks of as it's meant home. How she came to be) - some may say disturbing: at the Villa, how it's of an adolescentbecame her home, but neither male nor female but rather a fusion of and the two sexes. And machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the question is right up there before I've even opened the book - how would such an individual ('score'' for this gentle and family members and society as a whole) deal and interact with such a personyet subtly violent novel. It Padma's not an easy question present fails to answerescape her past and much like the musical score of a film, if I'm honestthat strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the Villa.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0224091271</amazonuk>1784631930
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Karen Russell178563335X|title=Swamplandia!Sea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ava Bigtree is When we first meet Rachel Bird she's a teenage alligator wrestler. Her older sister Ossie is trainee vicar, sitting in love with on a ghostPCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the children up. They have grown up on a Florida island theme park with their parents Her husband, Christopher, their grandfather collects six-year-old Hannah and their big her elder brother Kiwi, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Now though Thelma's daughter-in-law won't let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, on the Norfolk coast, all they have known is threatened. Their mother Hilola was the star attractiona lovely place, but Rachel is struggling to develop a real bond with the parish - and she died a few months before, not 's in the jaws of an alligator but awe of ovarian cancer. As well as being the glamorous figure on billboards who everyone came to seevicar, Gail, but then she ran 's been doing the show job for more than thirty years. Rachel and did all Christopher hoped that a walk on the jobs that beach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed to be done, and the family is lost without her.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>070118602X</amazonuk> And then Hannah went missing.
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Allen Ginsberg1398515388|title=Howl: A Graphic NovelThe Boy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)
|rating=4.5
|genre=Graphic NovelsGeneral Fiction|summary=I first came across Howl as a short film animating one First of Ginsberg's own recordings of it. If memory servesall, it was a scratchythe earthquake, jazzy piecedeep in the ocean floor, full of spikywhich created the tsunami and this, spunky shapes and movementsin turn, caused the nuclear meltdown. The result was complete and low on colourutter devastation. Now for 2011 The deaths were uncountable, and for Penguin Modern Classics' first ever 'graphic novel' comes a very different animationthe loss of livelihoods was widespread. OK, The fact that many pets were separated from their owners came far down the real moving animation is only to be seen in list of priorities but - six months after the movie Howl, tsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. He wasn't a dog person but to the convenience store owner's comment that he would call this merely an illustrated companion Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his car door and Tamon the film is to be very unflatteringdog jumped in.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141195703</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Tim Pears0989715337|title=Disputed Land|rating=3.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=In this engaging novel, Tim Pears tackles many challenging themes: sibling rivalry, time and change in the countryside, facing terminal illness, reflections Papa on the isolation of academic life and undertaking risky financial investment. This is not a portrayal of a rural idyll although much of the most lyrical writing concerns the colours of the Shropshire countryside and this is strengthened by reference to the layers of the archaic past that underlies this disputed borderland territory. In attempting such a multi-layered narrative in a relatively short novel, it is not surprising that for instance, the traumatic shocks in the epic tale are diminished by random, experimental shifts in the tone of the narrative.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0434020818</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewMoon|author=Denis Kehoe|title=Walking on Dry LandMarco North|rating=3.54
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ana has grown up mostly in Portugal, but now lives in Dublin where she teaches film studies and is writing her PHD. However, she was born in Anglola (then a Portuguese colony), ''Some frogs had gotten into the result of an extra-marital relationship of her father, who then adopted her with his wifewell. When her adopted mother, Helena, dies, she decides to trace her birth mother in Angola, where her brother now lives, but has nothing much to go on but a photocopy of a photograph of two Angolan girls, one of which may, or may not, be her mother, and a name: Solange Mendes. We follow Ana as she attempts to trace her real mother while in alternating chapters exploring her parents' developing relationship and ultimately how her unusual past evolved.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687810</amazonuk>}}'
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Manuel RivasDaisy Hildyard|title=Books Burn BadlyEmergency
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I normally start with a brief The summary of the novel I’m reviewing, but Rivas’ sprawling epic is this book doesn't come close to impossible to do anything ‘brief’ explaining what is done with. While it starts in 1881, it’s the book burning witnessed by Hercules the boxer during the Spanish Civil War in 1936 which gives this novel its title and it floats through several other eras, eventually finishing more than a century after it started. Along the way, we meet a young washerwoman who sees souls in the river, Olinda the matchgirl, Gabriel the stammerer, and the Judge of Oklahoma, star of a series of Western novels Gabriel’s father readspremise.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099520338</amazonuk>1913097811}}
{{newreviewFrontpage |author=Edward HoganSally Oliver |title=The Hunger TraceWeight of Loss |rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction |summary= Marianne is grieving. Traumatised after the death of her sister, she awakes to find strange, thick black hairs sprouting from the bones of her spine which steadily increase in size and volume. Her GP, diagnosing the odd phenomenon as a physical reaction to her grief, recommends she go to stay at Nede, an experimental new treatment centre in Wales. Yet something strange is happening to Marianne and the other patients at Nede: a metamorphosis of a kind. As Marianne's memories threaten to overwhelm her, Nede offers her release from this cycle of memory and pain—but only at a terrible price: that of identity itself.|isbn= 086154112X }} {{Frontpage|author=Natalia Garcia Freire|title=This World Does Not Belong To Us|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=We're plunged into Early comments on this debut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, a crisis straight awaydelight. Some of I will agree with the animals from first – tremendous is no understatement – but 'a delight' is perhaps using the wildlife park have escaped and are now running amokexpression in a way I'm not familiar with. They are Maggie's responsibility and she has I have to try to round them up without danger to either human or themselves. It's a tough, physical duty confess my ignorance of the Spanish-language literary tradition so it's a good job she can rely on her neighbour Louisa as an extra pair of handsforgive my generalisation here. Christopher is unreliable to say From the leastlittle I have read (in translation, heI don's never t read Spanish) there when you need himdoes seem to be a tendency towards the fantastical – the mystical realism. But is Louisa any better?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1847371248</amazonuk>0861541901
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Stephen KelmanJennifer Saint|title=Pigeon EnglishElektra
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Eleven-year-old Harri is 'Elektra' by Jennifer Saint tells the fastest boy story of three women who live in Year 7. It's true. He won the race and everythingheavily male dominated world of Ancient Greece. Harri is quite new to London. HeCassandra, Clytemnestra, his mother and his big sister Lydia have come from Ghana to make a new life and live on Elektra are all bit players in the ninth floor story of a tower block on a sink estatethe Trojan War. Harri's father Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that often the silent women have the most compelling stories and little sister Agnes are still in Ghana, saving up the air fare, which is taking quite a long time. Agnes is beginning to talk alreadymost extreme furies. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1408810638</amazonuk>1472273915
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Linden MacIntyre8409290103|title=The Bishop's ManIf Only|author=Matthew Tree|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Duncan MacAskill (he eschews the title ''Father'' whenever he can get away with it) is ostensibly dean of a Catholic university in Nova Scotia. It's a job he enjoys. Approaching fifty years of ageTwenty-one-year-old Malcolm Lowry had been sent abroad by his father, cotton-broker AO Lowry: he isasked his accountant, in generalMr Patrick, happy with his life.But to ensure that the Catholic Church is strong young man got on history board the boat and MacAskill cannot escape his ownthereafter Patrick was to send him a monthly allowance. The son of a bastard father Patrick sent the money regularly and a foreign mothercorrespondence - of sorts - sprang up between the two although we hear more about what Lowry has to say than Patrick. It wasn't that Lowry senior didn't care for his son, it was that he was lucky even didn't care to have him in this country where he might be able a danger to follow his vocation wife and enter the church at allother children. For most of The alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to get the young man on his career he has been "The Bishop's Man"way. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224089722</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Aamer HusseinAntoine Laurain, Le Sonneur and Jane Aitken (translator)|title=The Cloud MessengerRed is My Heart
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=[[:Category:Antoine Laurain|Antoine Laurain]] books have always been black and white and read in my house. And so was this one, although I could have spelled that more accurately – this one was, and is, black and white and red. Yes, he has an artistic collaborator on this piece, and I think it's possible to say not one page lacks the influence of some striking visual ideas.
|isbn=1913547183
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=B098FFFBH9
|title=Snowcub
|author=Graham Fulbright
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Mehran, growing up Fourteen-year-old Rachel is her school's animal rights project leader and she and her friend are producing a competition entry to highlight the way in Karachi, hears his father and sister speaking about London all which human beings exploit the time, as if it were an exotic locationanimal world. He ends up living there as an adultShe gets a great deal of support from her family: father Pip Harrison, but in the rainya lecturer at Imperial College, London, dreary climate he turns back to the poetry of his homelandmother Kate and her twin, dreaming of other placesNick. As he travels between ItalyKate runs the family business, Indiaa toy shop called Cornucopia in Putney, Pakistan and London which is where we watch his relationships grow and die and wonder if he will ever truly find a place where he'll feel that he belongsmeet Rachel's main (if unsuspected) source of information: five soft toys.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846590892</amazonuk>
}}
{{Frontpage|author=Yancey Williams|title=Crosshairs of the Devil|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Award-winning crime writer Eddie Jablonski is getting on in years and, despite his strenuous objections and thanks to his daughter, finds himself living - or imprisoned, from Eddie's point of view - in room 315 of the Garden of Eden nursing home, with only a trusty nursing aide, Jenkins, for palatable company. Nothing is going to keep Eddie from his stock-in-trade of writing though, so here, for his readers, are his wanderings through his life's work.|isbn=0986031658}} {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=P G Wodehouse0008421714|title=The Crime Wave at BlandingsMrs March|author=Virginia Feito
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=ThereThe problem began just after the publication of George March's a crime wave at Blandings Castle and bumbling Lord Emsworth is right at its centremost successful novel to date. This is somewhat surprising as Emsworth Everyone but Mrs March (we know her first name only on the last page) seemed to either be reading it or had already done so. Every day Mrs March went to the local patisserie to buy olive bread but on that particular morning, Patricia asked, as she was wrapping the bread, 'Clarence!' to his sister Constance) is really only happy when but isn't this the first time he's reading his favourite bookbased a character on you?'' She mentioned that Johanna, Whifflethe principal character had 's her mannerisms'The Care of the Pig'. It frequently soothes where other restoratives fail. The problem began with an air rifle and an unwanted tutorPerhaps this would not have mattered, but before except for the afternoon was out most of fact that Johanna is the inhabitants whore of Blandings Castle seemed to have shotNantes - ''a weak, plain, detestable, pathetic, unloved, been shot at or leftunloveable wretch. If it hadn't been written by P G Wodehouse it would all be most confusing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141196289</amazonuk>'
}}
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