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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]==Literary fiction==__NOTOC__{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Amy WaldmanMatthew Tree|title=The SubmissionWe'll Never Know|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The front cover Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, a drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of the book that I received for review is subtle (as befitting the sensitive contents) being exceptional at any of his artistic passions all failed miserably and I can see the two twin towers (as was) depicted in grey in the title word submission. The back cover announces that this novel will be ''Published in time for the 10th anniversary who had endless crises of 9/11self confidence.'' No pressure then. I open the book with a certain amount of trepidationSo Tim applied himself to his studies, I have to admit cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and feel slightly as if I'm about to tread on (literary) eggshellsset himself high but achievable ambitions. Heavens - what if I don't like the book?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0434019321</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Bernard BeckettB0C47LV1PC|title=AugustFragility|author=Mosby Woods
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=When I read on the front cover that this book is described by the Sunday Times as ''A gripping, bittersweet love story'' it wasn't a particularly good statement for me to read. As Can you make a rule I don't generally 'do' love stories. If I happen to read one every once in a while then thatYo birthing person's fine by me but I don't encourage them! Butjoke? And if you could, both is the lovely title and question should you make it? Or is the front cover question if you did their job and pulled me in - just a little, would it land? The catch is that the answer for both could well be.... no.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>000739120X</amazonuk>}}
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Steven AmsterdamMosby Woods|title=Things We Didn't See ComingA Whirly Man Loses His Turn
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This book has gained praise from The West isn't the likes of dominant force it once was. Nobody in the Washington Post and the Financial times so I was really looking forward West is quite sure how to a good - mend this or even great read. But did I get if mending it? I think that opening on is the eve best course of the millennium (the most recent one) is pretty special in itself and should be a good 'hook' to draw the reader inaction. Governments are flailing. The narratorA war here, young, male (not named as yet) and his family are packing the family car a push for the journey aheadclimate action there. The poor car A feeling that nobody is full to burstingin actual charge. Dad is Imagine then, there was a sceptic and he's taking no chances man with this millennium situation and he's instructed his family to pack more than precognition. Imagine the usual festive presents strategic advantage in this timeasset; a man who can tell you what will happen given any set of circumstances. They've (wellThat man would be valuable, dad has) made right? Perhaps the decision to get as far away from London as they can - just most valuable asset in casehistory. Just in case of what exactly is never mentionedImagine then, only impliedthat this man loses this ability. So What would governments do to get it's New Year celebrations with the grandparents.back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>009954704X</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Alexander Maksik0571379559|title=You Deserve NothingThe House of Broken Bricks|author=Fiona Williams|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Does the world need another 'inspirational teacher lets down students' The House of Broken Bricks'' is the story? Itof four people. Tess Hembry's debatableroots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, but this one instead, she lives in the house on the riverbank, built of broken bricks. Insubstantial as it might look, it's stood the passage of time, storms and floods. Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the delivery rounds - and to bring in sufficient money. They have twin boys - Sonny and Max, the rainbow twins. Sonny's colouring reflects his mother's Jamaican heritage. Max takes after his father. People don't believe that they're related, much less twins and there's an assumption when Max is really rather goodout with his mother that she's his nanny.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848545703</amazonuk>
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{{Frontpage
|author=Claire North
|title=House of Odysseus
|rating=5
|genre= Literary Fiction
|summary= ''What could matter more than love?''
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=S J WatsonKay Chronister|title=Before I Go To SleepDesert Creatures|rating=54|genre=Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary=Rather ironicallyWith a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, 'Before I Go To Sleep' post-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Whether it is not a book that you will forget in robotic takeover, a hurry. Imagine, if you will, waking up every morning with no memory world devoid of who you arewater or a nuclear holocaust, where you are, or who the person lying next to you in bed this genre is. You can remember things during the day, but once you go a way for humans to sleep, your mind is effectively wiped cleancathartically experience their most existential fears. This ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is the slightly unusual form a new work of amnesia post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the narrator, Christine suffers from in Watson's first novel fears that exist for humanity today. It is a daring and gripping literary thrillershocking novel that still manages to find hope.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0857520172</amazonuk>1803364998
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{{newreviewfrontpage|isbn=1803363002|author=Amos OzEric LaRocca|title=My MichaelThe Trees Grew Because I Bled There|rating=45|genre=Literary FictionHorror|summary=The Introduction Horror taps into something primeval within us. It is used as a way to this book has reflect our darkest emotions and how we as humans react and process them. Most horror fiction feature a lovely sub-heading - 'Forty Years Later' where Oz admits freely Big Bad'', whether that nowis a home invader, a monster or a ghost, it usually something tangible and, todayby the end of the story, he wouldnbeatable. Eric LaRocca't attempt or ... s 'dare write an entire novel in a female voice.' But The Trees Grew Because I found his open telling of why and how he came to write the book in the first place interesting and rather enchanting and whetted my appetite to get on and read the bookBled There'' is not like that. For example, Oz wrote most It is a collection of the book short stories more interested in the cramped confines horrors of a toiletillness, would you believegrief and humiliation. But for me what caught my attention was the fact Horrors that he tells his readers that Hannah, the central character, was in his head linger and determined are harder to he heard. defeat than any ''Just shut up and writeBig Bad' she tells him. A Translator's Note follows before we get to the story proper.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>009952905X</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Jacqueline YallopMadelaine Lucas|title=ObedienceThirst for Salt|rating=45
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The story opens with a much younger Sister Bernard - no more than a girl really. The daily lives of the nuns is regulated''Love, with long hours for prayerI'd read, meditation and solitude. Everyone is housed, fed and watered adequately and that's as far as it goes. No little luxuries was supposed to speak of. Nothing to temper the harshness be a light and the silence. Visits from family members are forbidden also. Howeverweightless feeling, the young Sister Bernard appears to not only be coping very well with all of this but even embracing it. She doesnI had always longed for gravity''t grumble or complain about anything. However, even although she may appear saintly she is human, just like the rest of us and temptation does come along in the shape of a young man. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857891014</amazonuk>}}
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Louis B JonesMichael Grothaus|title=RadianceBeautiful Shining People
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Mark Perdue took his daughter, Carlotta – or Lotta, as she's known – on an indulgent fantasy weekend in Los Angeles. Lotta 'But fearing something and some other teenagers were going to live the celebrity lifestyle for a few days, with gigs, recordings and stretch limos having it come to ferry them aroundpass are two different things. MarkAnd I's got problems m willing to bet most of his own. He ''was'' an eminent physicist but illness has taken its toll. His wife is still suffering the emotional effects of a late-term abortion – the family called the foetus 'Noddy' – and Lotta what we fear will never happen, or we can't reconcile how she feels about the loss of her unborn sibling, even going as far as take steps to say that she would have given up the next ten years of her life to look after the child. And Mark? Well, on the tarmac at LAX change it dawns on him that a heart attack would be a convenient way out of everything.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>158243736X</amazonuk>}}''
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|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Raisin has an enviable portfolio for one so young, having been named ''Sunday Times Young Writer Of The Year 2009'' and his [[God's Own Country by Ross Raisin|previous novel]] receiving fulsome praiseI was as worthy as any one of them. No pressure then with this bookI would get on board that ship, I vowed. The story opens with all members of the Little family paying their respects to Cathy. Some have travelled further than others as they all squeeze into Mick's modest houseI would take my place, somewhere not just in Glasgow. A less-than-posh part. Mick is obviously numb with the shock name of it all (even although his wife's death the goddess. It was not sudden - she had been ill for some time)the sake of my name, too. ItAtalanta's clear that some of the family, distant members, feel uncomfortable and don't quite know how to act.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670917354</amazonuk>}}
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Haley TannerAmanthi Harris|title=Vaclav and LenaBeautiful Place
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Vaclav and Lena are both children of Russian immigrantsPadma, growing up in Brooklyn. Vaclav dreams of becoming a fantastic magicianyoung Sri Lankan, with his friend Lena as his assistant, and as children they practise their routine together, making lists of has returned to the things they'll need, Villa Hibiscus on the costumes they will wear and the tricks they will performsouthern coast of her home country. Vaclav This is confident and happy, but Lena is quiet, withdrawn and struggles with speaking Englisha place she spent her formative years. Yet Vaclav believes, always, that they are destined to be together. Even when Lena disappears one day and It is gone from his life for many years still he hopes thatnot a place she was born into, somehow, he will find her again.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0434020443</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Neil Jordan|title=Mistaken|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=The front cover photograph and but the blurb on the back cover give this book a misty, floaty, ethereal feelone she thinks of as home. The story starts How she came to be at the endVilla, if you get my drift. The adult Kevin attends a local funeral but he's careful to remain low-key, hidden almost. Why is that? And whose funeral is how it anyway? As early as page 6became her home, Jordan's poetic and atmospheric style is apparent in lines such as ' ... close to the line of yew trees, were machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the massed umbrellas of the mourners, retreating, like so many mushrooms come alive in a fairy-tale forest.'|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848544197</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Helen Humphreys|title=The Reinvention of Love|rating=4|genre=Historical Fiction|summary='The Reinvention of Lovescore'' is one of those stories that is so bizarre for this gentle and strange that it could only be based on factual events. Essentially it is a good, old-fashioned love triangle set mostly in Paris in the period from the 1830s to the 1860s; a world where fighting duels is a commonplace eventyet subtly violent novel. The triangle features the great French literary writer Victor Hugo, his wife Adèle and the altogether strange critic Charles Saint-Beuve who narrates much of this story, with brief breaks for Adèle's side of events and some letters written by the Hugo's youngest daughter, also called Adèle (but let Padma's call her, as she was known present fails to escape her family, Dédé to avoid confusion).|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687985</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Wesley Stace|title=Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer|rating=3.5|genre=Crime|summary="Nothing in recent fiction prepared me for the power past and much like the polish of this subtle tale musical score of English music in the making, a chiller wrapped in an enigma [New Statesman]" "His handling of dry comic dialogue and cynical affectation is reminiscent of P G Wodehouse… an intelligentfilm, fun and thoughtful piece of fiction [Independent on Sunday]" Just two of the previous reviews that adorn strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the back cover of 'Charles Jessold…'Villa.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099546574</amazonuk>1784631930
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Roy Jacobsen, Don Bartlett (translator) and Don Shaw (translator)178563335X|title=Child WonderSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=1961 was When we first meet Rachel Bird she's a year of changetrainee vicar, sitting in on a timePCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the children up. Her husband, as Jacobsen puts itChristopher, ''when men became boys collects six-year-old Hannah and housewives womenher elder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Thelma's daughter-in-law won't let her see her grandson. At Holthorpe, on the outset Finn and his mother are leading Norfolk coast, is a quietlovely place, rather timorous life but Rachel is struggling to develop a real bond with the parish - and she's in a working class Oslo suburb. Then change overwhelms themawe of the vicar, not through world eventsGail, but in the form of a mysterious child who is Finnthen she's half sisterbeen doing the job for more than thirty years. Linda is not like other children Rachel and Finn's attempt to deal with her impact Christopher hoped that a walk on his family is the central thread in this quintessential story of growing upbeach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed. And then Hannah went missing.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857050184</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Salman Rushdie1398515388|title=Luka The Boy and the Fire of LifeDog|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)|rating=4.5|genre=Confident ReadersGeneral Fiction|summary=Back First of all, it was the earthquake, deep in 1990the ocean floor, Salman Rushdie followed up his controversial 'Satanic Verses' with a book dedicated to his then nine year old sonwhich created the tsunami and this, Zafarin turn, called 'Haroun caused the nuclear meltdown. The result was complete and the Sea of Stories'utter devastation. Now The deaths were uncountable, his second son, Milan, finally gets a book and the loss of his own, although he had to wait until he livelihoods was 13 for his father to get around to itwidespread. 'Luka and The fact that many pets were separated from their owners came far down the Fire list of Lifepriorities but - six months after the tsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. He wasn' is very much t a follow up dog person but the convenience store owner's comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to 'Haroun' open his car door and it is certainly helpful, although not necessary, if you have read that book as many of Tamon the events dog jumped in the first book are referred to here.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099555328</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Manuel de Lope and John Cullen (Translator)0989715337|title=The Wrong BloodPapa on the Moon|author=Marco North
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Although de Lope has written over a dozen novels, this is ''Some frogs had gotten into the first to be translated into English. The cover is as pretty as a picture and screams 'Spanishwell.' So far, so good. But I have to admit that on the whole most of the European novels I've read over the last year or so, have fallen short of the mark for me. Will this one prove to be different?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099551853</amazonuk>}}
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Alain MabanckouDaisy Hildyard|title=Memoirs of a PorcupineEmergency
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The protagonist summary of this novel is an ordinary Congolese porcupine until Papa Kibandi performs an ancient ritual involving a hallucinogenic cocktail called ''mayamvumbi'', and transforms him into his sonbook doesn's harmful double. The insecure younger Kibandi becomes more and more embittered as his life goes on, and sends his porcupine t come close to 'eat' anybody he feels the least bit threatened by, a process whereby that person's life essence explaining what is sucked out, killing them instantly. Over one hundred victims later and following his master's death at done with the hands of a vengeful baby, our narrator retires to the hollow of a baobab tree where he writes this confessionalpremise.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1846687675</amazonuk>1913097811}}
{{newreviewFrontpage |author=Julie MyersonSally Oliver |title=ThenThe Weight 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=The front cover is graphic and tellingEarly comments on this debut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, a delight. A frozen London I will agree with its skyscrapers emitting black smoke and random fires across a desolate landscape. As early as the second paragraph we see that something first – tremendous is wrong, something cataclysmic has happened with the lines no understatement – but 'a delight'People are eating is perhaps using the birds expression in a way I'm not familiar with... fighting over a handful I have to confess my ignorance of scorched sparrowsthe Spanish-language literary tradition so forgive my generalisation here.'' The story is told From the little I have read (in translation, I don't read Spanish) there does seem to be a tendency towards the first person by the central character which gives it immediacy and draws fantastical – the reader straight inmystical realism.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0224093754</amazonuk>0861541901
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{{newreview|title=WhateverFrontpage|author=Michel Houellebecq|rating=3.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Interviewed by BBC film critic Mark Kermode shortly before his 60th birthday, Woody Allen gave the bequiffed one this somewhat startling piece of advice, ''You get to my age, you realise that when you die you're really not losing that much.'' Those words sprang to mind while reading ''Whatever'', first novel by Michel Houellebecq. The main protagonist in ''Whatever'' may be only half the age of the film director, but the outlook on life shared by both men seems strikingly similar. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687845</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewJennifer Saint|title=Sag Harbor|author=Colson WhiteheadElektra
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Colson Whitehead wanted to write something personal for his fourth book'Elektra' by Jennifer Saint tells the story of three women who live in the heavily male dominated world of Ancient Greece. Cassandra, so he chose an autobiographical novelClytemnestra, based on his experiences as a vacationing youngster. Sag Harbor really does exist - at and Elektra are all bit players in the far end story of Long Island and next to the up-market HamptonsTrojan War. It has a history of whaling Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that often the silent women have the most compelling stories and an association with John Steinbeck. Within easy reach of New York, in 1985 it was an affluent black enclave within a large, white middle-class holiday areathe most extreme furies.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099531887</amazonuk>1472273915
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Carlos Alba8409290103|title=The Songs of Manolo EscobarIf Only|author=Matthew Tree|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Antonio is the secondTwenty-one-year-born son to Spanish parentsold Malcolm Lowry had been sent abroad by his father, living in Glasgow. He's embarrassed to be anything other than Scottish, and cotton-broker AO Lowry: he tries everything to hide asked his family background from friends at schoolaccountant, Mr Patrick, refusing to speak Spanish with his parents ensure that the young man got on board the boat and struggling thereafter Patrick was to forge his own identity in lifesend him a monthly allowance. In his middle age, he suddenly finds his life falling apart around him as his marriage begins to fail Patrick sent the money regularly and his increasingly frail father becomes obsessed with a correspondence - of sorts - sprang up between the proper burial of his parents back in Spaintwo although we hear more about what Lowry has to say than Patrick. Antonio continues to play a rather emotionally distant part in It wasn't that Lowry senior didn't care for his parents' livesson, but then finds himself drawn further and further into the truth about his fatherit was that he didn's past which, ultimately, leads t care to have him in this country where he might be a danger to question his own past wife and other children. The alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to get the path young man on his future might takeway.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184697173X</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Ann PatchettAntoine Laurain, Le Sonneur and Jane Aitken (translator)|title=State of WonderRed is My Heart|rating=3.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Anders Eckman is dead. The news has [[:Category:Antoine Laurain|Antoine Laurain]] books have always been delivered in the form an aerogram – remember those blue paper-cum-envelope things we used to use to write to foreign pen-pals when the notion of befriending a person you'd never met black and white and read in a foreign country still seemed exotic? This flimsy piece of paper was delivered to Eckman's employersmy house. After all it And so was them this one, although I could have spelled that had sent him down to the Brazilian Amazon to find the enigmatic more accurately – this one was, and evasive Dr Annik Swensonis, black and more precisely find out exactly how she was getting white and red. Yes, he has an artistic collaborator on with developing this piece, and I think it's possible to say not one page lacks the drug that was costing the firm so much influence of their research budgetsome striking visual ideas.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1408818590</amazonuk>1913547183
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Jean RhysB098FFFBH9|title=Wide Sargasso SeaSnowcub|author=Graham Fulbright|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In 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 late eighteen thirties way in which human beings exploit the animal world. She gets a great deal of support from her family: father of an English gentleman conspires to marry him off to Pip Harrison, a landed Jamaican Creole as a means of giving his second son an estate lecturer at Imperial College, London, mother Kate and stopping him being a burden on her twin, Nick. Kate runs the family. Written in the nineteen sixtiesbusiness, 'Wide Sargasso Sea' was inspired by Rochester's first wife a toy shop called Cornucopia in ''Jane Eyre''Putney, and which is an impressionistic, hallucinatory account of that womanwhere we's alienation and subsequent descent into madness that can be read as a prequel to the Bronte novel. The book covers Antoinettell meet Rachel's childhood in Jamaica and her honeymoon on a small Caribbean island with her new husband and their domestic servants, and the point main (if unsuspected) source of view shifts between Antoinette and her husbandinformation: five soft toys.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241951550</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Douglas KennedyYancey Williams|title=The MomentCrosshairs of the Devil
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=After I'd read the blurb Award-winning crime writer Eddie Jablonski is getting on the back cover I gave a bit of a shrug as if to say, well, I've read quite a number of books recently where undying love has been found in war-torn Europeyears and, so was this book going despite his strenuous objections and thanks to be differenthis daughter, finds himself living - or better? Thomas Nesbittimprisoned, middlefrom Eddie's point of view -agedin room 315 of the Garden of Eden nursing home, disillusioned with love and more than only a tad world-weary trusty nursing aide, Jenkins, for palatable company. Nothing is trying going to move on keep Eddie from his stock-in his life. His marriage -trade of more than twenty years is dissolving before writing though, so here, for his very eyes. But rather than being upsetreaders, he's feeling as if a weight has been lifted from are his shoulders. He and wanderings through his wife were never really ''in love'' in the true sense of the phrase, despite having a daughter together. And therelife's a very good reason as to why Thomas is like this and the rest of the book tells us why, warts and allwork.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0091795842</amazonuk>0986031658}} {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Aminatta Forna0008421714|title=The Memory of LoveMrs March|author=Virginia Feito|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The setting for this story is a hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, soon problem began just after the government has declared an end publication of George March's most successful novel to an 11 year civil wardate. How can people come 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 terms with the terrible things local patisserie to buy olive bread but on that particular morning, Patricia asked, as she was wrapping the bread, ''but isn't this the first time he's based a character on you?'' She mentioned that Johanna, the principal character had 'her mannerisms''. Perhaps this would not have happened? Actuallymattered, except for the fact that Johanna is the whore of Nantes - ''a weak, plain, detestable, pathetic, unloved, can they come to terms with those things?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408809656</amazonuk>unloveable wretch.''
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