==General fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Susan Wiggs
|title=Just Breathe
|rating=4
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=Sarah may be struggling to make a living off it, but she does enjoy her job as a cartoonist. She's been through a lot recently, including her husband's battle with cancer, and her alter ego Shirl provides an outlet for a lot of the emotions and confusion she's feeling.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0778303543</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=A J Cronin
|summary=Arnold Trevellyan’s ordinary life as a charismatic auctioneer is about to change in ways he could never have imagined. Encouraged by his wife Flora to take a sabbatical, the two head to a remote region of France to indulge Arnold’s passion for mushrooms. Whilst out in the forest hunting for rare mushrooms Arnold stumbles across a secret hidden for centuries. This secret makes him abandon Flora and their life together for the island of Tuva in the South Pacific where he soon finds himself married to Lola, its queen.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330452517</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chuck Palahniuk
|title=Tell-All
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Meet Katherine Kenton. A movie star of great renown, she's always on TV as someone famous - or the wife of somebody who happens to be famous and male, whether they were actually ever wedded. She herself has had copious real-life marriages, making somebody out of a nobody on many an instance. Her shelves of 'best lifetime' awards are groaning, and their dusting is a job akin to painting the Forth bridge. The person who dusts them is narrator for this book, but she does more than that. She is everything to "Miss Kathie" - general housekeeper, housemate, and string-puller. But what might those strings be being pulled for? When Katherine meets a new toyboy, and our narrator seems to get in the way, to what purpose might this be?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224087150</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Caryl Phillips
|title=In the Falling Snow
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=We are introduced to the central character Keith right away and discover lots about him. His personal and professional CV is laid bare before us. He's one mixed up, middle-aged, not-quite-middle-class man. He appears to be rather weak-willed and almost seems to fall into situations, rather than choose to be part of them. When in his marital relationship (now on a downward spiral), his wife most definitely wore the trousers. I found Keith a very infuriating person. I wanted to take him by the scruff and give him a good old shake and then shout 'wake up and smell the coffee, before it's too late.'
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099539748</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mark Neilson
|title=The Valley of the Vines
|rating=3
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The reader discovers that Sophie, the central character is living in rural isolation. She's supposed to be living the dream. She's separated from her husband and her two daughters are at boarding school back in the UK. She's also now a one-woman organization. And she's failing practically and financially for many reasons. Apparently, according to Neilson, there's a very small window in which to carry out the vital work of harvesting the grapes for wine. We are also told at frequent intervals about the enigmatic 'Old Ones'. They are 'The timeless custodians of the vines.' I'm afraid I found their too-frequent references rather annoying.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0709090595</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Maggie O'Farrell
|title=The Hand That First Held Mine
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Lexie Sinclair was sent down from university for the crime of going through a door reserved for men. She could not graduate until she apologised and this she was not going to do. Home was not an option either but when she met the sophisticated Innes Kent she made up her mind to go to London and make her way there. It was the nineteen fifties and Lexie and Innes made a life for themselves in Soho.
In the present day Elina and Ted are struggling to recover from the difficult birth of their first child. Elina is an artist and she’s finding it difficult to come to terms with being a mother. Ted does his best to help but he is having to cope with disturbing visions and memories of his own childhood which don’t seem to agree with what he’s been told by his parents. The further he looks, the stranger are the links which he uncovers.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>075530845X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sue Peebles
|title=The Death of Lomond Friel
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Rosie was a successful radio presenter when her father, Lomond Friel, had a stroke. Whether or not Rosie was always reckless and impulsive isn't entirely clear, but once she heard about the stroke she took a break from work and began to build her life around making a future for herself and her father. There are two problems here: Rosie isn't really all that capable of looking after herself, never mind her father and Lomond is quietly plotting his own death. He might not be able to speak, to move very much, but he has plans.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184302</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Najat El-Hachmi
|title=The Last Patriarch
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Najat El-Hachmi's debut novel, The Last Patriarch is a difficult book - both in terms of content and style. It's a story of physical and sexual abuse in a patriarchal Moroccan family, an immigrant story, when first the father and then the family move to Catalonia, and ultimately a story of the narrator, the patriarch's daughter, breaking free of her past as she takes on different cultural values. Narrated entirely from the perspective of the patriarch, Mimoun Driouch's unnamed daughter, the story is also concerned with cultural and imagined histories, and the importance of origin stories.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687179</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sarah Blake
|title=The Postmistress
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The reader is in no doubt that a war is raging. 'And bombs were falling on Coventry, London and Kent. Sleek metal pellets shaped like the blunt tipped ends of pencils ...' The Americans however, are carrying on with their daily lives regardless. They are completely unfazed and uninvolved. Apart from one or two, namely radio reporter Frankie. She reports from London as it happens and she is gradually becoming more and more concerned that her fellow Americans will be called upon. But she seems to be a lone voice blowing in the wind. Also, as you may expect, there are plenty of raised eyebrows as to why a woman is doing a man's job. She should be at the kitchen sink or having babies, shouldn't she?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918687</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tess Callahan
|title=April and Oliver
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=After spending their childhoods together, April and Oliver haven't seen each other for many years. It is only after the death of April's little brother that they find their lives overlapping again. April is reckless, damaged, and struggling from one day to the next whereas Oliver is mature and sensible. He is now a law student, engaged to the sweet, gentle Bernadette who is the antithesis of April. Seeing April's life in tatters, Oliver tries to rescue her from herself, yet the more entangled he becomes the more his own seemingly perfect life starts to fall apart.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099537524</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=F G Cottam
|title=The Waiting Room
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=On the outskirts of ex rock star Martin Stride's country estate lies the disused Shale Point Station. Abandoned in the 1960s the railway line has been dug up and removed and all that remains is the crumbling platform and eerie waiting room. Martin is quick to employ Britain's top ghost hunter Julian Creed to investigate the strange and threatening occurrences of the waiting room that he and his children have witnessed – the sound and smell of a steam train, male voices singing a famous World War One song, and most frightening of all, the leering face of a soldier at the waiting room window.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444704214</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>
}}
