==Literary fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Waguih Ghali
|title=Beer in the Snooker Hall
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Waguih Ghali's only novel, first published in 1964, is set in 1950s Egypt where the English have just left and the country is in great social and political change, and is under Army rule. Ram is an English educated, Copt Egyptian of aristocratic background, but his side of the family are penniless and dependent on the good will of manipulative, rich aunts. Ram and his best friend Font (who works in the eponymous snooker club) struggle to come to terms with this emerging Egypt. These are the facts of the plot, such as it is, but in reality this book is as ambiguous as the situation in which Ram finds himself. The book is like a delicate soufflé; it appears light on the surface but is deeply measured and brings out a myriad of conflicting views.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184668756X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chester Himes
|summary=Meet Jeff. He's a journalist living in London, with a fine line in delaying his work effort and a keen eye for detail. He can see how the world is made better by a smile from a random shopkeeper - yet seems too grumpy to try it himself. Instead he suspects his habit of walking round, mouthing or speaking out his own inner thoughts is making him seem a scary old man. He can partly address this, by dying his hair. And he can stop walking round London when he gets commissions to report back from the modern arts Biennale in Venice. Soon, however, the only work of art he's at all worried about goes by the name of Laura...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184767271X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Elia Barcelo and David Frye
|title=Heart of Tango
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Although less than 200 pages in length, this short novel encompasses a great deal, both in the storyline, and the development of the characters. The plot itself is simple. Young Natalia has been betrothed to the much older Berstein, a German sailor known for some time to Natalia’s father. He appears as a kindly character, and clearly in love/enamoured of Natalia. But the marriage is no love match, but one done instead for expediency, and although prepared to go through with it, Natalia is like any other young girl, and wishes she was marrying the love of her life. Her mother died when she was a baby so she has had a lonely childhood, yearning for female company and guidance - but the reality of the situation has meant that other than an elderly, kindly neighbour who has tried to help support and advise her, she is irrevocably alone - seeming to have very few friends even of her own age.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906694605</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Harper Lee
|title=To Kill A Mockingbird
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Fifty years after its first release, readers are once again getting the chance to acquaint themselves with Harper Lee's classic tale of growing up in the Deep South during the depression. After five decades, ''To Kill a Mockingbird'' still hasn't lost its charm. Even new readers can expect a classic tale full of elements still relevant to this day.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099549484</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sebastian Faulks
|title=A Week in December
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It's Sunday, nine days before Christmas in 2007 and we meet a disparate group of people in London, who are doing what they normally do. There's a hedge fund manager who's trying to pull off the biggest trade of his career. A professional footballer from Poland has just arrived in the country and is disappointed with his small German car, but it will have to do until his large German car arrives. A barrister has far too little work and too much time on his hands. There's the student searching for something in which to believe who's led astray by the more extreme Islamic fundamentalists – and another student who's addicted to drugs and reality television. A devious book reviewer struggles to like anything written after the nineteenth century – and a chutney magnate from Havering-atte-Bower wants to learn how to discuss books with the Queen. Looping all these people together is a Tube driver on the Circle Line.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099458284</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Anne Tyler
|title=Noah's Compass
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=It's always a red letter day to sit down to an unread Anne Tyler. This is her eighteenth published novel. For any readers not already fans of her books, this American writer observes the ordinary in order to excel at 'making the familiar, strange'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099539586</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Simon Rich
|title=Elliot Allagash
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Meet thirteen year-old Seymor Herson, he's one of life's losers, the least popular boy at Glendale a second rate private school in New York. He has made a virtue of mediocrity and is happy to simply survive his time at Glendale rather than try and excel at anything.
Meet thirteen year-old Elliot Allagash heir to one of the largest fortunes in America. Elliot who makes a habit of being thrown out of exclusive private schools has finally ended up at Glendale whose reliance on his family's funding means that he cannot be expelled despite his various misdemeanours. Expulsion not being an option Elliot embarks on an equally difficult project, to make Seymor into the most popular boy in school and beyond that to turn him into a young prodigy, the talk of the New York elite. Can he achieve this? And at what cost?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687543</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=James Robertson
|title=And The Land Lay Still
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The novel starts ... at the end. We see the fictional character, photographer Mike Pendreich collating many, many photographs which his late father took with his trusty camera. His father is generally acknowledged as the better of the two at the craft; he simply had the knack. And what his son is now in charge of are black and white photographs charting a social history at that time. And we all know that a picture is worth a thousand words.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>024114356X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Damon Galgut
|title=In a Strange Room
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary='In A Strange Room' follows the actions of one man as he travels across three different countries, with three sets of companions, playing three separate roles. Never settled in one place, narrator Damon continually hops from one country to another collecting more stamps in his passport than he does friends.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848873220</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nicholson Baker
|title=The Anthologist
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Readers who know of Nicholson Baker don't go to his work expecting convoluted plot, fast-paced action or non-stop drama. His novels at their best, dissect, in minute detail, the most intimate thoughts and daily doings, usually of a single character. They are revealing and surprising, and revel in language itself, like poetry. In other ways they are unlike poetry, which deals in suggestion and compression. And Baker's novels generally deal in the opposite.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847397824</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=A L Kennedy
|title=What Becomes
|rating=4
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=You're three stories into this collection and two people have cut their hands open preparing food - a man with love drooping away from his marriage, making soup, and another, a greengrocer, preparing stock and thinking about his own relationship. But there is no pattern to that. Four stories in and there have been two bursts of non-sequitur comedy. Why your fruit might be ruined by stray fingers, and the thoughts of a woman in a flotation tank, remembering Doctor Who, locked parental doors - and the urban myths of gerbils. But there's still no pattern - and that's the point of these combined stories. Life and all of its emotions does not live to rule.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>009949406X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Adam Thirlwell
|title=The Escape
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=When we first meet seventy-eight year-old Raphael Haffner, he is hiding in a spa hotel closet watching a twenty-something year-old yoga instructor (who knows he's there) having sex with her boyfriend (who doesn't). Haffner is a British, Jewish former banker who is staying at the spa in Central Europe while on a mission to reclaim his dead wife's villa that was confiscated by the Nazis in the war. Thirlwell's narrator, some fifty years younger than Haffner (ie the age of the author), describes the aging libertine Haffner as ''lustful, selfish, vain - an entirely commonplace man''. Charming.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099539837</amazonuk>
}}
