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[[Category:General Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|General Fiction]]==General fiction==__NOTOC__{{newreview|author=Jenn Ashworth|title=Cold Light|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=''Cold Light'' is the story of three teenage girls who become involved in a predatory adult world. As the story opens we're looking back on what happened from a decade later and we know that one of the girls, Chloë, died in a Valentine's Day suicide pact. The town council has finally decided on a memorial to Chloë – it's to be a summerhouse at the side of the pond where she drowned, although it's difficult to understand quite why anyone would want to sit there. The ground-breaking ceremony is being televised when it becomes obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. But Lola, our narrator, knows that they've found a body. She also knows who it is.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444721445</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Kristina McMorrisJenny Lecoat|title=Letters From HomeBeyond Summerland
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Liz Stephens accompanies a couple Jean lives on Jersey with her mother where they are celebrating the end of friends to a GI social occasionthe occupation. SheDuring the war, Jean's content father was arrested for listening to a banned radio and already 'spoken for' so she wouldn't normally be here where essentially most people are foot-loose soldiers took him away one night, leaving Jean and fancy-free. But she's promised her good friend Betty to come alongmother waiting for years for news of him. As the evening progresses with lots of singing British finally free the Channel islands from the Nazis, and dancingthe war is finally over, things become both interesting and just a little dangeroustheir hopes rise that they will finally learn what became of him. But for whomwill the truth come as a relief, or will it raise further questions around what else happened during the war? Who are we talking was the informer who told the Nazis about herethe radio? Liz bumps into one of And what other secrets have been kept throughout the many GIs present. His name's Morgan. An instant spark is there - or so someone believes. But they both end the evening on a less-than-satisfactory note. Liz returns to her life with her soon-to-be-fiance and Morgan goes off to war.occupation?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1847562418</amazonuk>1846976537
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Steve HelyOnyi Nwabineli|title=How I Became a Famous NovelistAllow Me to Introduce Myself|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=With an uncompromising title like Anuri spent her childhood on display to the world, thanks to her step-mother Ophelia'How I Became a Famous Novelists increasingly popular presence on social media, where she posted every step of Anuri's childhood for sponsorships and influencer deals and, basically, monetary gain. Now Anuri is in her twenties and she is slowly trying to regain her confidence and to get her life back, this clearly isn't intended suing her step-mother to be a subtle book. So I can hardly complain when a cynical look at take down the writing industry swings raw punches in every directioncontent about her. It just isn't my sort of humour Anuri is battling alcoholism, failing to start her PhD, but equallyundergoing therapy and secretly abusing people online and receiving money from them for doing so. Most importantly, if you rave she is desperately worried about her little sister, who is the new focus of Ophelia'The Office' you will likely enjoy this book far more than I have dones online empire. Can she save her sister, and perhaps herself and her relationship with her father at the same time?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1849015724</amazonuk>0861546873
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Paul Bress1529153298|title=The Dysfunctional FamilyList of Suspicious Things|author=Jennie Godfrey|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Societies are constantly changing It's 1979 and sociology students are presented with theories to help them to comprehend Margaret Thatcher is Prime Minister. (A woman? I mean, honestly...) She's not what's happeningworrying Miv's family, though. Here we Women have a different approach: a family has been paid a small amount of money disappearing. Well, they've been murdered, but to have 'disappeared' doesn't sound quite so frightening. Miv's upset because she's overheard that her father wants to write diaries which they would keep secret from other members of move the family and which would be available for publication'Down South'. This book When you're from Yorkshire, Down South is the result and we follow Phil and Sue Brown and their two sonsa frightening, foreign place, Jack and Theo though a traumatic period which lasts for just over two monthsbest avoided. The entries in For Miv, the diaries are made daily move would mean leaving her best friend, Sharon, and we read what has happened she'll do anything to each member of prevent that. She's not worried about the dangers or that her Mum'dysfunctional family's stopped talking - to anyone.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>B0048ELN32</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Anna Quindlen1035906708|title=Every Last OneDiva|author=Daisy Goodwin|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Mary Beth Latham is contemplating We tend to think of Maria Callas as Greek, but she was born to Greek parents in Manhattan, New York, in December 1923 and only moved to Athens when she was thirteen. Her original surname was Kalogeropoulos but her average, ordinary life where every day is father changed it to 'Callas' to make it more of less manageable in the sameStates. Would things be better if life were more exciting, varied, newsworthy? Is When she was back in Athens - supposedly so that she could get appropriate training for her voice - she was raised under the Nazi occupation by a legitimate thing to hope mother who mercilessly exploited her and made no secret of her preference for? They say to be careful what you wish for, and Mary Beth never comes right out and says this is what she wantsher elder sister, but there are hints to this effectJackie.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099537966</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=John LawtonAlexander McCall Smith|title=A Lily of the FieldThe Perfect Passion Company|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The book opens Perfect Passion Company is a dating agency in Edinburgh, run by Ness and operating as an alternative to all the early 1930s online apps in Vienna where we meet one of the main characters; ten year old Meretproviding a more personal, tailored service. She's gifted musically Ness has asked her younger cousin Katie if she could come and in particular in playing look after the cello. Even at this tender agebusiness, people are talking about her starry future on the world stage. She as Ness is the apple of her father's eye and soon she's being given extra musical tuition by planning to take a kind but much older man. He's old enough trip to Canada to be her grandfather but nevertheless they strike up get away for a rather unusual friendship with music being the common denominatorwhile. But some Katie is coming out of their conversations are serious and quite grown-a break up for with a young girlbad boyfriend, not yet into pubertyand so jumps at the chance to come home to Edinburgh. The tutorAnd so begins this new story from Alexander McCall Smith, Viktor Rosen is Jewish bringing us to an Edinburgh we already love, thanks to 44 Scotland Street and has already suffered at the hands of the GermansIsabel Dalhousie novels, but with some new characters who quickly begin to charm. Meret progresses at such Katie has no experience in running a pace that before you know itbusiness, or in match-making, but Ness has full confidence in her abilities, sheand there's performing in public. Her life appears always her very helpful (and rather handsome) neighbour, William, to be wonderful and full of future promise.lend a hand…|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1611856019</amazonuk>1846976596
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Kim NewmanDean Koontz|title=Anno DraculaThe Bad Weather Friend|rating=34.5|genre=HorrorParanormal|summary=The story begins in LondonBenny is having a terrifically bad day. He loses his job, he loses his fiancee, and his house gets trashed. It is 1888 Oh, and someone has delivered a really weird, disturbing coffin-sized object to his home, and Queen Victoria it's possible that whoever or whatever was inside is on the throne. thing that has trashed his house! She has recently remarriedThe thing is, taking as her husband Benny is the infamous vampire Count Draculavery last person to deserve all this bad luck. Dracula's influence He is all around London as more and more of its citizens turn willingly to vampirism, whilst others resist its temptationsa nice person. A distinct sense of social and political unrest is in the air as factions speak really nice person. So fortunately for Benny it turns out against that the race of vampiresdelivery to his house is a new friend, a bad weather friend called Spike, somehow spurred on by the serial killer at largewho has been sent to help him since Benny is clearly under attack from nefarious forces for being a good person. Known at first as the Silver KnifeSpike is going to take care of Benny, and will certainly take care of Benny's enemies, but later as Jack the Ripperif he, this killer targets young vampire women in WhitechapelBenny, prostitutes and Harper (a waitress slash Private Investigator who have recently turned to vampirism, known as new-bornsfinds herself roped into Benny's wild adventure) can figure out who exactly they are. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0857680838</amazonuk>1662500491
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Alexander BaronKatherine Howe|title=There's No HomeA True Account|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=It's the year 1943 and Sicily has Hannah Masury is living in Boston, having been invaded (along sent to live with other parts of Europe). The menfolk have gone (will they return?) and the womena family who run an inn, children and old people left behind are being made to work there from a sorry sightyoung age. Impoverished, ragged and with barely enough food When she hears there is to eat. A British company be a hanging of soldiers rolls into some pirates in the town ... , she decides to go and everything changeswatch. The men are foot-soreEnthralled and horrified in equal measure, exhausted and dirty. They are also glassy-eyed with Hannah finds herself embroiled in a young boy's death at the horrors hands of wartwo vicious pirates. And as if She hides away, so that were not enoughthey don't find and kill her too, and then to escape them completely she runs away to sea, dressing as a boy and joining the Sicilian sun beats down on them mercilesslynotorious Ned Low's pirate ship as a cabin boy. But She soon finds herself in the thick of things when there's some good news - they're here to rest is a mutiny on board, and recuperate for a whilefrom there we are caught up in her rip roaring tale of life on the ocean waves.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0956308600</amazonuk>0861547438
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Raj Kumar1471180158|title=SharafMaybe Tomorrow|author=Penny Parkes
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=With its subtitle "Forbidden love Jamie Matson works in an upper-class grocery store, for a man who's a control freak with all the kingdom subtlety of faith a half brick. Jamie's son, Bo, 'has his problems'. He's asthmatic and honour"the more you read, I expected something entirely different from the more you'll suspect that he'Sharafs on the autistic spectrum. Sometimes Jamie needs to take time off at short notice - she's a frequent flier in the local A&E and sometimes Bo' s not fit enough to what it deliveredgo to school. For Missed shifts or the second need to be away on time to pick Bo up from school are occasions when Jamie can be controlled and put in as many weeks I had misjudged the wrong. It was going to come to a book by, if not its cover exactly, certainly by its setting and its blurbhead.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905802331</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Mark WatsonB0CKD1L5JL|title=ElevenRadio Free Olympia|author=Jeffrey Dunn
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The bookPetr is an orphan. Rescued by the strange, reclusive Bear, he is brought up far from bustling cities and busy human society, in the forests of Washington's title has been well thought outOlympic Peninsula. Xavier IrelandAfter Bear dies and a brief sojourn in human company, and armed with only a pirate radio transmitter, Petr goes on a journey through the main character has forest, broadcasting the number ''Eleven'' if you take his initials strange, wild and rarely heard voices he encounters.}}{{Frontpage|author=Sarah Marsh|title=A Sign of Her Own|rating=3.5|genre=General Fiction|summary=After a bout of scarlet fever as Roman numbers (XI) and there are eleven individuals who are involved in this chain reaction a child, Ellen Lark loses her hearing. Suddenly plunged into a world of eventssilence, everything about her life changes. When I read Living in a time when the blurb on the back cover, what caught my eye above all else use of sign language was the line 'whether the choices we don't make affect us just seen as powerfully as those we something only savages do, Ellen is sent to a school where she is taught to lip read, but physically restrained from signing.' And of courseFrom here, when we take no action about something she ends up in our livesanother school studying under Alexander Graham Bell who has been teaching the deaf and using a system called Visible Speech. At the same time, Bell is working on other inventions and ideas, it's and Ellen finds herself unwittingly caught up in a form complicated tangle of action in effectespionage.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>184983136X</amazonuk>1035401614
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Mavis CheekB0BC3YTCMR|title=The Lovers of Pound HillGood Girls Die|author=Ayura Ayira
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Archaeologist Molly Bonner had something about her. She definitely wasn't dressed 'This story is not for the country when she arrived in Lufferton Boney and she'd captured the heart of one young man before she'd even walked down the street. She captured another when she offered money to work on the Gnome of Pound Hill, but Miles Whittington was ruled by his wallet and he was keen to make money out of the Gnomeeveryone. The Gnome, you see, was what might euphemistically be called 'well endowed' and Miles had visions of charging visitors to make use of the, er, fertility rites. One thing was certain – none of the villagers of Lufferton Boney would be the same by the time that Molly Bonner (not only an archaeologist but also the archaeologist's granddaughter) had finished her work.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091931665</amazonuk>}}
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Geraint Anderson1472263936|title=Just BusinessThe Figurine|author=Victoria Hislop|rating=45
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The inside cover blurb tells us It was in 1968 that the author himself has worked in the square mile in London, so presumably he'll have Helena McCloud made her first-hand experience in the world of financetrip to Greece. The book is bang up-to-date, as it mentions the first whiff of the sub-prime disaster which seemed to start the whole collapse of the (up till then) safe and often extremely well-paid banking sector.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755381726</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Linda Gillard|title=House of Silence|rating=4.5|genre=Women's Fiction|summary=Gwen Rowland She was a sensiblealone: her mother, cautious kind of girlGreek by birth, but then had left the only family she'd ever known were all dead from a surfeit of unprotected sexhome and refused to return, drink but Mary and the sort of drugs Hamish (Helena's parents) felt that don't come in it would be a child-proof bottlepity if Helena grew up without knowing her grandparents or understanding her Greek heritage. So – her relationship with an actor was a little out of Her trip to the ordinary, but they seemed to be friends before they were lovers. The crunch came at Christmas when Alfie said that he was spending it with his family – which apartment in up-market Kolonaki would have left Gwen on her ownbe the first of several annual visits. She did ''slightly'' twist his arm grew to take love her with him grandmother and he the family's maid, Dina, but was obviously reluctant to complywary - and frightened - of her grandfather, retired general Stamatis Papagiannis. When they arrived at Creake Hall, home He was proud of author Rae Holbrook his close connections to the Junta and her daughters, Gwen sensed a change in Alfie, a lack of warmth towards expected his familyto uphold his values but saw no reason to accommodate them. Then there was the family photo which didnHis prejudices included Helena't fit the known facts s red hair and the complication of the gardener who said little but was a very good listenergreen eyes - inherited from her father's Scottish ancestors.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>B004USSPN2</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Annalena McAfeeDean Koontz|title=The SpoilerAfter Death
|rating=3
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Several things about this novel intrigued me. It is about two female journalists Michael Mace, Head of very different generations. AlsoSecurity, at a top secret biological research facility, it is set among 55 people who die when a virus is released in the recent past – 1997. While newspaper production had been computerised, it was just before internet access at home and work became affordable and accessible to far more people and so became mass media, and newspapers were almost entirely a print medium – newspaper websites were just around the cornerbio-hazard accident. Annalena McAfee has an insider's knowledge of the newspaper world as she was Finding himself in a journalist for many yearsmakeshift mortuary, and her career included founding the Guardian's review section covered in its current form.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846554357</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Megan Abbott|title=The End of Everything|rating=5|genre=Teens|summary=On the surface this book is about the disappearance of plastic, he has a thirteen-year-old girl. Her best friend and neighbour Lizzie relates how she searches for clues, how she discovers sense that a local man may be involvedsomething very, very bad has happened to him – and how Evie only him – as he sits up and Lizzie's families struggle to cope. But look again looks around at the titleshrouded bodies of his dead friends and former colleagues. What really unfolds here is the story of the effect a single incident has on three families, not two As he recovers his senses, how he realises that one event came there is something different about, and why nothing will ever be the same for everyone involvedhim; he can ''feel'' everything. ''Everything''. It is a book which is complex, deep and very, very intense Michael isn't ''Michael'' anymore.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0330535455</amazonuk>1662500467}} {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=C J BoxB0BVDC2VWH|title=Back of BeyondThe Grave Listeners|author=William Frank
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Connolly The village is isolated and [[Tell No One poor. It's surrounded by Harlan Coben|Harlan Coben]], both of whom I've read. So, it was off to a pretty good startWitching Forest. The front cover graphics And the villagers subsist largely by farming Uphegia plants - its bread-like fruit provides nutrition and large print scream out 'thriller'its blossom provides herbal medicines. We get The black wood of the essence of Cody early forest provides heat and warmth, roofs on. He's a man who likes to do his own thing homes, and doesn't take kindly to orders or red tapeeven gallows, if needed. All that red tape is shit, The fear of being buried alive is probably how Cody would describe it an existential superstition in his own colourful the village and down-to-earth fashion. He looks older than his years. Maybe that's down to a messy domestic life and also to is the hours he puts in on the job. He lives on his own and has a teenage son he doesn't see often enough. Ohreason Volushka, and he smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish. In shortdrunken, he's a mess. But somehow he stumbles through his police work self- with a lot indulgent, lazy lout of help and support from a long-suffering colleagueman is tolerated.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848872984</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Hans Werner Kettenbach and Anthea Bell (Translator)B0BYF82CXT|title=The Stronger SexSemi-Detached|author=Deborah Stone
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=After reading the various comments on the back cover''Bill and Amanda are living in a semi-detached house, I was looking forward to reading this book as I love a story with a psychological element. Young Alex is driven to the home of his latest client; stuck in a man called Klofft. The reader soon finds out that Klofft has plenty depressing rut of baggageboredom and disappointment, as well as plenty of money. He's elderly when Terry and Fiona – glamorous, successful and very ill and mobility is also an issue for himmuch in love – move in next door. SoDespite their different outlooks on life, while he may have set out to impress others with his large home the couples befriend each other and beautiful things, sadly he seems no longer to be able to enjoy life. His illness confines him appears to just a couple of rooms. It's apparent that Alex is rather taken with his wife, Cilly Klofft, who is still rather beautiful - improve for her age. The reader assumes she's in her late sixties or early seventiesboth pairs. But all is not what is it they say about age being only a number seems, and their increasingly interconnected relationships are fated for some of us? And age plays a big part, a very big part, in this noveltragedy.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904738672</amazonuk>''
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Robert Jackson BennettShalini Boland|title=The Company ManSilent Bride|rating=43
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=''The Times'' says on the front cover that Bennett is 'clearly Alice and Seth are a writer to watch' so I had high hopes for this novelmatch made in heaven. We meet two of the central charactersHe is everything she has been searching for; handsome, accomplished, clever, American policeman Garvey funny; total and Englishman Hayesutter husband-material. Garvey's working cv She is straightforward enough - all he carries out police workcould possibly want in a wife; beautiful, successful, some of which confident… and so the inevitable proposal is eagerly accepted by Alice and the wedding is pretty grislyplanned and set. But what about Hayes? He appears to be all things to all men but at When the much-anticipated day arrives, Alice is walked down the end of aisle by her father, beaming with pride and excitement as she surveys the congregation – their friends assembled to celebrate this joyful day welland when Seth turns to face his approaching bride, heAlice's 'The Company Man' which gives world implodes because she has absolutely no idea who the man at the book its title. And so a complex scenario starts altar is, who is waiting for her to unravel ..become his wife.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1841497924</amazonuk>1662507089
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Justine Kilkerr1787636003|title=Advice for StraysThe Girls of Summer|author=Katie Bishop|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=If you have ever fancied a grown up version of [[The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr|The Tiger who came to Tea]], It was the cover of this Vintage edition should hook you into reading Justine Kilkerr's first novel. Here sits a sad summer when Rachel Evans turned eighteen that she and patient-looking lion, Caroline went backpacking around Greece and arrived on the female figure beside himisland. Rachel wasn't exactly innocent but she was, perhaps, naive, hidden by so when thirty-four-year-old Alistair Wright started to take an umbrellainterest in her, has that same vulnerable look she was flattered rather than wary. It was quite a while before he made any sort of mother physical approach to her and child in Judith Kerr's classic children's picture bookby that time she was obsessed by him. At first this seems like a ridiculous connection Alistair worked for Henry Taylor, but thinking about it later I'm struck with looking after his interests on the island and in particular in the analogy, not to mention bar where all the similarity in authors' namesgirls either worked or partied. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099535262</amazonuk>
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{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Heather GudenkaufAmanda Craig|title=These Things HiddenThree Graces
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Golden girl Allison Glenn was living Few styles of contemporary fiction interest me like the state-of-the perfect teenage life until she was imprisoned for a monstrous crime-nation novel. Now sheThere's twenty-one something so utterly compelling about any writer who can catch hold of the atmosphere of the day and has been released from prison to live in a halfway house. Allison is keen to put the past behind hercapture it, but when she returns to her home town crafting an image of Linden Falls she soon discovers that no the country as it stands in one has forgotten her crime, least of all her parents and her little sister, Brynnparticular moment.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>077830437X</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Meg Wolitzer|title=The Uncoupling|rating=4|genre=General Fiction|summary=Dory and Robby Lang had one of those marriages To say that everyone envies. They're not just lovers, they're best friends too and they never seem to tire of each other. They're both popular teachers Amanda Craig is skilled at Eleanor Roosevelt High School ('Elro' to those who know it well) where their daughter is a student. Itdoing this would be embarrassingly inadequate: she's sometimes difficult to have your parent teaching practically synonymous with the genre of contemporary social fiction at your school, but everything seems to rub along reasonably well and Dory was delighted when daughter Willa got a part in the school playthis point. It's ''Lysistrata'' and whilst the drama teacher She has to tone it down such a little it still gift for weaving the ongoing issues of the play about day into the women who refuse to have sex lives of her characters in a way that feels natural and lived-in, never making them ciphers for social commentary but instead fully realised people, grappling with their men until they call a halt to the war they're fightingissues far larger than themselves.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701186216</amazonuk>140871468X
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Natasha Solomons152915118X|title=The Novel in the ViolaPineapple Street|author=Jenny Jackson
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Elise Landau arrived in England in 1938''Pineapple Street'' is the story of three women: Sasha, a refugee from Vienna where she Darley and Georgiana. Darley and George are sisters and her family had had a good lifestyleSasha is married to their brother Cord. In England sheThey're Stocktons, only Sasha isn's destined for Tyneford in Dorset where t a Stockton by birth so sheisn'll be a parlour maid at t readily accepted into the big housetribe. SheThe problem's not exactly looking forward to itexacerbated when the clan matriarch, Tilda, but sheasks Cord and Sasha if they's escaped Vienna with some of her mother's jewels sewn d like to move into the seams of her dresses Pineapple Street property. Tilda and Chip have renovated and her fatherdownsized to another property, a street or so away, which they own. They won's latest novelt need any of the furniture from Pineapple Street, so Sasha and Cord can move straight in manuscript. Nominally, is hidden in they had a choice but that wasn't the body of her violareality. Her sister is leaving for the USA Darley and her parents hope Georgiana start to followcall Sasha 'the gold digger'. Surely Elise will be able to join them before too long? She knows 's living in ''their'' family home. They use it so often that she wonthey abbreviate it to 'the GD't like England.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>034099567X</amazonuk>
}}
|rating=4
|genre=General FictionCrime|summary=Britain. 1986. The country became 84 year old Edie has lived in the same small town for almost her whole life, but now she is facing a theocracy during the 1950s move as her son wants to move to another house and since then outbreaks of secular terrorism have been dealt bring Edie to live with his family, as Edie is starting to lose her memory. However, Edie is tormented by exile. The atheists have been sent to the Island where they can burn churches as they please. Aside from a weekly boat bringing donated suppliesmemory of her childhood friend, Lucy, who went missing over 60 years ago, and the exiled must shift as best they can on worry that there was a remote snippet secret she was keeping for Lucy that somehow might be the thing that reveals the truth of land what happened all that time ago. After 'seeing' Lucy in the North Seahigh street, just as she was the last time she saw her, she starts to find pockets of memories coming back to her. And yet as she remembers the past, she is forgetting more and more in her day to day life. Will she uncover the truth about Lucy's disappearance before her move, and before her memories are gone forever?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0330530127</amazonuk>1804181250
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=James Patterson and Neil McMahonMadelaine Lucas|title=Toys|rating=4|genre=General Fiction|summary=The novel has a very glamorous opening. We're at President Jacklin's inauguration party and the easy flow of narration gets me seamlessly and effortlessly into the story. There are plenty of comments and observations pertaining to the super-duper hi-tech times of the story, so as early as page 10 Hays and his beautiful wife Lizbeth, who are invitees, are attended to by a well-trained and well-programmed ''iJeeves butler.'' I loved that phrase. It made me smile. The Bakers are an impressive and influential couple. As part of the 'elite' society they expect a flawless, ordered life Thirst for themselves and their family. And Patterson then informs us that mere human beings have been relegated to menial work and most of them live pitiful lives and serves them right, apparently. They're despised but their labour is necessary to oil the wheels of the important daily lives of the elites. But the elites have extremely ambitious plans. Can they pull them off?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846057701</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Louise Welsh|title=Naming the BonesSalt|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Murray Watson is a Doctor of English Literature embarking on ''Love, I'd read, was supposed to be a year-long sabbatical to pursue his long-held dream of writing the definitive biography of Archie Lunan light andweightless feeling, as a specifically intended by-product, restore Lunanbut I had always longed for gravity''s poetry to its rightful place in the high canon of Scots creativity.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847672566</amazonuk>}}
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{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Manu Joseph0008506337|title=Serious MenThe Garnett Girls|author=Georgina Moore|rating=45
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Ayyan Mani is a DalitThe love affair between Margo Garnett and poet Richard O'Leary was all-consuming, apparently on both sides. Margo was just sixteen when they fell in love. Richard was twenty-one and described by Margo's mother as 'an untouchable, stuck in a flat in Mumbaiolder man'. Her parents worried that Richard's slums but hoping, somehow, for influence would take her away from what they felt she could achieve - going to Oxford and having a better future for his songlittering career. Working at In the event, they eloped and Richard took her away from the Insitute Isle of Theory Wight. Margo did go to Oxford and Research he uses all his cunning went on to become a well-respected journalist. The couple had three children: Rachel, Imogen and Sasha. Life was lived in London and wiles to stay ahead of holidays were spent at Sandcove, the game amongst family home on the Brahmin scientistsIsle of Wight. Does he have Even then the intelligence, and nerves, doubts about Richard's drinking were never far from Margo's mind: ''she would never be able to convince everyone that his son, against all odds, is a genius?|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848543085</amazonuk>}}leave him in charge''.
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Ed Siegle1914585402|title=InvisiblesDashboard Elvis is Dead|author=David F Ross
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The closest Brighton usually gets to Brazil is in the pages of a dictionary, but in I reviewed David F Ross's book [[There'Invisibless Only One Danny Garvey by David F Ross|There'' the two are drawn together in the life s Only One Danny Garvey]] a couple of Joel Burns, years back and remember being absolutely floored by how powerful and affecting it was. It was a thirty-five year old dentist who lives in Brighton as does his mothergripping, Jackieemotionally wounding read, and partner Debbie from whom he is separated. When Joel sees a news clip rereading my review of a bus hijack in Rio de Janeiro, where Joel and Jackie lived until Joel it my main takeaway was ten, he is convinced that one of the bystanders is his Brazilian father. What makes this more unusual is that Jackie has always told Joel that his father is dead, although Joel has never quite bought into this story which is at least part of the cause of his problems with DebbieI might not have lavished enough praise on it. The solution? Head off to Rio and see if he can track down this person.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956559913</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Michael DhillonLucy Ashe|title=The Cuckoo Parchment Clara and the DykeOlivia|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Tristan Jarry The year is the world1933. The place? Sadler's most famous artist but he's rather moved on from selling his work for millions Wells. Ballerinas Clara and has just kidnapped Angelique BurrOlivia are sisters, twins no less. Identical on the step-daughter of the President of outside but not, we learn, on the United Statesinside. She's And not an innocent child but an abused and abusing womanon stage, now a journalist and at times well able to hold her own with Jarryeither. HeBecause there's got helpers though - and forward planning - and it's not long before Angelique finds herself involved in a trail of destruction and death as Jarry works towards his purposelot that builds a dancer. He intends Some things that can be taught or learnt – discipline, attention to resurrect Dadadetail – and some things, that ''je ne sais quoi'', that don't come from the iconic movement founded in 1916 in Zurich with the intention of protesting against the warclassroom. HeA stage presence, a charm, a ''joie de vivre''ll tell Angelique so much – but not what he finally intends to do. The difference between a hard-worker, and a star.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1849235104</amazonuk>0861544080
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Leo BenedictusHeather Fawcett|title=The Afterparty|rating=5|genre=General Fiction|summary=I opened the front cover and was confronted with the lines 'This book is different. YouEmily Wilde've really never read a book like this before.' Confident words, I thought but will the book live up to this lofty expectation I now had? And when I got round to reading the notes at the end of the novel, I was pleasantly surprised and also rather taken aback, I have to say. So, a refreshing take on the modern work of fiction, I thought, as I started on Chapter One.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>022409114X</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=David Baddiel|title=The Death s Encyclopaedia of Eli GoldFaeries
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Eli Gold is recognized as the 'the greatest living writer' - although his claim to this is slipping by by the day as he Emily Wilde is an expert academic scholar on his death bed. He's not a nice character - his attitudes to his five wives faerie lore, and his children are deplorable she has travelled extensively, and he has been bound up in his own 'genius'. Heresearched meticulously, to write her life's a bit like work, the best and the worst very first encyclopaedia of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth faeries. Whilst she is brilliant at research and Norman Mailer combined. Now dying in hospital in New Yorkspeaking to faeries, the book explores this event from the perceptive of four she is not so good with people in his life; his eight year old. So when she finds herself far, precocious daughter by his current wife; his first wife watching on the news from an old people's home far North in England; the angst-ridden son small village of his third marriageHrafvsnik, himself a pale imitation of having somehow offended the author that his father village matriarch, she is; not sure what she has done, nor how to redeem herself and a mysterious fourth character who appears to have a very different motive put her final investigations for seeing Gold snr her book back on the right track. Enter Wendell Bambleby, her dashingly handsome and insufferable rival who may be linked arrives unexpectedly, all charm and delight, much to GoldEmily's fourth wife who died in a mutual suicide pact with her then-husband, from which Eli survivedfrustration. (In fact his identity But why is he here? What does he want? And what exactly is revealed in the publisher's blurb going on with the jacket, but I'll let you decide if you want to know this or to let the story unfold as I did).faerie folk around Hravsnik?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0007270836</amazonuk>0356519120
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Alma Katsu1398515388|title=The Taker|rating=5|genre=General Fiction|summary=When Dr Luke Findley begins his nightshift at Aroostook County Hospital in St Andrews, Maine, things are quiet until Lanny McIlvrae is brought in by the police. Lanny is covered in blood and claims she has killed a man and left him in the woods. Desperate to escape, Lanny quickly asks for Luke's help, but he is not sure at first, so Lanny decides to tell Luke her life story, a story that begins in the early Puritan settlement of St Andrews in 1809 and spans nearly two hundred years, taking Lanny from her home to Boston and beyond. A story that is rich, imaginative Boy and entirely authentic, filling the majority of the novel, and there wasn't a moment when I questioned her reliability as she tells Luke everything, chapter by chapter, as he helps her to escape, slowly drawing him and the reader into her world. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846058171</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewDog|author=Aimee Bender|title=The Particular Sadness of Lemon CakeSeishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The title First of this novel first caught my eye. How can food feel emotions? Actuallyall, it is Rose who discovers that when she is eating she can taste was the earthquake, deep in the feelings of ocean floor, which created the person who cooked or prepared tsunami and this, in turn, caused the foodnuclear meltdown. I The result was complete and utter devastation. The deaths were uncountable, and the loss of livelihoods was a bit worried widespread. The fact that this initial gimmick of the book many pets were separated from which their owners came far down the title is taken would become annoying, list of priorities but really this is another very well-written and readable novel about growing up in six months after the tsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a dysfunctional familyconvenience store. Rose is about to turn 9 at the beginning, and comes home to find her mother making her birthday cake. She can He wasn't resist tasting a dog person but the cake, convenience store owner's comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his car door and at first it is delicious: 'Warm citrus-baked batter lightness enfolded by cool deep dark swirled sugar'. But then she has 'Tamon the sensation of shrinking, of upset, tasting a distance I somehow knew was connected to my mother'dog jumped in.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>009953827X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Guillaume MussoChristopher Bowden|title=Where Would I Be Without You?Mr Magenta
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=I love the cover, which I think angles this book firmly towards women. With that old Beach Boys hit from the Sixties as the title, it encapsulates everything you need to know when choosing this book. ItChristopher Bowden's not really crime fiction, in that it lacks latest novel is a whodunnit aspect in favour patient untangling of following the protagonistsa seemingly ordinary woman's life, carried out by her nephew after she has died. The aunt who always provided a French cop safe harbour and a Scottish master criminal, through little bit of indulgence to a young nephew had had a romantic entanglement much more interesting life than that nephew Stephen had ever realised and into the jaws of death. The interest is in which of the two men will gain command of the other – and who is really driving the action – when both their attentions are focused on the same girlit seems to him an obligation to find it all out.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1906040346</amazonuk>B0B6Z9VJDW
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Mischa HillerJennifer Mason|title=Shake OffPartitions of Unity|rating=3.54
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=''Shake Off'' is the latest from the pen of Mischa HellerHere at Bookbag Towers, we first met Elizabeth Cromwell, dominatrix and unintentional detective in [[Preposterous: An Elizabeth Cromwell Mystery by Jennifer Mason|Preposterous]], when she investigated and unravelled a student series of the John Le Carre universe where the Spies had to Come disappearances. In From The Cold. Set in the 80s against a backdrop ''Partitions of daggers and cloaks, wests and easts and defectors and double agents, HellerUnity''s protagonist, Michel Khoury, hooked on pain killers and posing as a student, has been tasked with the unlikely mission of scouting for a Cambridge location in which she sets her mind to host secret talks between those Palestinians and Israelis who seek solving a 'secular democratic state for Jews, Christians and Muslims'murder...|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1846590884</amazonuk>B09LQR9FRF
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Sarah WinmanWill Carver|title=When God Was A RabbitThe Daves Next Door
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=When God Was Five strangers come together in one moment as a Rabbit is suicide bomber prepares to detonate his vest on a book that tugs at the emotions in a sweet but uncompromising wayLondon tube line. It's in no way a RomCom but if you are a fan of that genre of filmAs their fates overlap, I would suggest that you might too enjoy this book as it shares many of the traits if not the storyline. The analogy to a movie story is apposite too as first time author Sarah Winman's 'day job' is as an actor - she has appeared recently told in Holby Citybackwards order, for exampleleading up to the fateful moment.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0755379284</amazonuk>1914585186}} {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Sam MeekingsJennifer Mason|title=The Book of CrowsPreposterous: An Elizabeth Cromwell Mystery
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Having lived ''A struggling poetry zine, a mom-and-pop mobile diner in China the Northern California redwoods, a 400-meter hurdler who just missed the 2004 Olympics, a women's track coach with a yen for bullwhips, a billionaire with a substantial period state-of time-the-art S&M dungeon, Sam Meekings has clearly soaked up a great deal of the culture; something he has already put to great effect man serving a life sentence in his first bookAlabama, [[Under Fishbone Clouds by Sam Meekings|Under Fishbone Clouds]]. In The Book of Crowsan enigmatic signature, K(s, his third bookx), he continues to show his talent as on a non-Chinese raconteur of Chinese culturecheap oil painting, but goes one step further by telling an erotic art dealer in Georgia...'' This is just a story that spans several periods sample of the cast of Chinese historycharacters and settings in Preposterous. As you can see, thereby giving the reader a glimpse into different people's livessome keeping up will be required! The basic premise of this mystery story goes like this... |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1846971721</amazonuk>B09STS96HS
}}
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