'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Ian Mackenzie
|title=City of Strangers
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Paul Metzger – mid thirties, with a failed marriage, a broken relationship with his brother (who converted to Judaism), and a dying father (who is an ex-Nazi). Straight away there are obvious flaws with his family dynamic. As his writing career fails to take off he's left to churn out thousands of words for articles that have no meaning to him, the dregs of the publishing world. His life isn't quite as high flying as he hoped. But then Paul gets offered a lucrative book deal; the one thing he has wanted for years. The only catch is he has to write about his father.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099531852</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Maggie O'Farrell
|summary=Take one traditional rhyme (''A was an apple pie, B bit it...''), mix it up a bit with new words, add a pinch of sweet girl and a dash of naughty dog, and you've got a recipe for... well, a unbelievably cliched first line in a review from me, but also a super book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408308010</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tony Ross
|title=Super Dooper Jezebel
|rating=4.5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=Jezebel is a good girl - so good, in fact, that everyone calls her Super Dooper Jezebel. She's neat and tidy, does her chores, is perfectly behaved, and is an inspiration to all. The Prime Minister sent her a special medal for being so good, and Jezebel gets her own TV show to show others how to behave. She won't even run, because it's against the rules. Sometimes, just sometimes, rules are meant to be broken...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849390169</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mark Sperring and Miriam Latimer
|title=The Sunflower Sword
|rating=3.5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=There's a little knight (who looks remarkably like a boy with a colander on his head) who wants to battle with dragons a sword, but his mum says he can't. He's desperate to whoosh and swoosh with a shining blade, so she gives him a sunflower instead, and off he goes to the top of a hill to do battle with not one but three imaginary dragons. There's a roar of fire and billowing smoke, and he finds himself face to face with a real dragon...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849390576</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tony Mitton and Sarah Warburton
|title=Sir Laughalot
|rating=4
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=Sir Laughalot is a brave knight. He's got all the gear and is desperate to smite a wicked foe, so off he sets on his travels. He meets a fearsome dragon and a whopping great big giant, but each time they end up laughing with one another. Will things change when he tries to rescue the fair damsel from the evil sorceress?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408302748</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Bernhard Schlink
|title=Guilt About the Past
|rating=4
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=Consider, if you will, guilt. You might have it tainting you, as 'beyond the perpetrators, every person who stands in solidarity with them and maintains solidarity after the fact becomes entangled'. The link might not strictly be a legal one, but concern 'norms of religion and morals, etiquette and custom as well as day-to-day communications and interactions'. Hence a collective guilt like no other - that witnessed in Germany. 'The assumption that membership to a people engenders solidarity is something Germans of my generation do not easily like to accept', we read. However difficult it might have been back then in its day, Germany had to physically renounce anything to do with Nazism, to actively 'opt-out' of connections to avoid the solidarity seen connecting the whole nation like a toxic spider web. And since then it's linked in all the children, in a ''bequeathal'' of guilt.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905636776</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Yasmina Khadra
|title=What the Day Owes the Night
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Nine year old Algerian Muslim Younes is devastated when his father's farm is destroyed and his family have to move to the slum of Jenane Jato. However, while the rest of his family struggle, this turns out to be something of a blessing in disguise for Younes,
who is rescued by his wealthy uncle, a pharmacist. Renamed Jonas, he moves to live with his uncle and aunt in the vibrant European district of Rio Salado. There, he meets new friends Jean-Christophe, Simon, and Fabrice. But what seems to be an unbreakable friendship is tested to its limits by the return to the area of the beautiful Emilie, and the boys' problems increase as Algeria fights for its independence from France. The book is narrated by Jonas at a much older age, looking
back at his life, although the epilogue brings us to the present day as he visits a grave.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0434019933</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Cara Black
|title=Murder in the Latin Quarter (Aimee Leduc)
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Aimée Leduc is back and this time she might just have found the sister she's always longed for. When a Haitian woman arrived in the offices of Leduc detective in central Paris and announced that she was Aimée's father's illegitimate daughter Aimée allowed enthusiasm to overrule logic as she'd been lonely since her mother's disappearance and her father's death. René, her partner in Leduc Detective, is wary but he can't dissuade Aimée. It's not long before she's involved in the murky world of Haitian politics and murder in Paris' bohemian Latin Quarter.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849013144</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Harvey
|title=A Darker Shade of Blue
|rating=4.5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=There are eighteen short stories covering the East Midlands, those parts of London you'd generally really rather avoid and rural East Anglia. You'll see broken families, revenge killings, prostitution and drugs. There's corruption – not unusual when you have an overstretched police force and underpaid men and women staffing it. And then there are the people who, in spite of everything, fight for justice.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548232</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Gladys Mitchell
|title=The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop
|rating=3
|genre=Crime
|summary=A body is found in a butcher's shop one morning in Wandles Parva. It has been expertly chopped up and hung just like a piece of pork, but because it is missing a head, identification is impossible. There are soon suggestions that it must be Rupert Sethleigh, a land-owner who had supposedly gone to the US. His cousin, Jim Redsey is the obvious suspect. The two men didn't like each other - in fact, nobody actually liked Rupert Sethleigh. The local vicar's daughter, Felicity, and Aubrey, related to Jim and Rupert, decide to play detective. Before long, they are joined by Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, an elderly woman who fancies herself a detective. Can they sort out the red herrings and find the killer?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>009954685X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Shane Jones
|title=Light Boxes
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=You will have to go a long way to find a more magical and quirky novella than ‘Light Boxes’. Set in a far off land, as all good fairy stories should be, the balloon-loving residents suffer a ban on all forms of flight. But the culprit is not some unpronounceable Icelandic volcano, but rather February. And this February - who takes both the form of a person and a season - has lasted for more than three hundred days. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he has also started making children disappear. One man, Thaddeus Lowe, is determined to do something about it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241144957</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ian Whybrow and Caroline Jayne Church
|title=Wobble Bear Gets Busy
|rating=4
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=Wobble is a very busy little bear who has just learned to walk and now, of course, wants to walk everywhere. We see him here walking in to wake up his parents, treading on the cat, dancing and falling over, walking on a wall, splashing in a puddle until, of course, by the end of the day he has worn himself out and is too tired to walk up the stairs to bed!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0192792628</amazonuk>
}}
