==Literary fiction==
__NOTOC__
{{newreview
|author=Anthony Quinn
|title=Half of the Human Race
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=At heart, 'Half of the Human Race' is a 'will they, won't they' love story featuring an upper class, emerging county cricketer, Will Maitland, and a middle class strong, educated, cricket-loving woman, Constance Callaway. But this is so much more than a question of will the cricketer bowl a maiden over? It's a novel about friendship, love, fighting for what you believe in and, also, surprisingly, about celebrity.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224087290</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=William Styron
|summary=Closeted away in the opulence of his parents' Madison Avenue apartment, Ed, bound to a wheel-chair because muscular dystrophy has laid claim to his body, spends his days veiled from the outside world. Ed's sadness manifests itself in curious ways, though largely, via spectacular, spoiled-brattish outbursts designed to get the parental attention he craves but that is palpably absent from his confined life. Then he meets Trevor.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1933372842</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=William Gibson
|title=Zero History
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It's almost obligatory when writing anything about William Gibson to recall that in an earlier short story, he invented the term 'cyberspace'. Gibson remains at the cutting edge of what is 'cool'. Like most of his books, Zero History is a thriller, but at its core are issues surrounding technology, how we interact with it, branding and marketing. It would be easy to criticise much of his content as being too shallow and concerned with 'nothing' - but then that's part of his point.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670919527</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Buchan
|title=The Island of Sheep (John Hannay)
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Richard Hannay is feeling old. He looks at himself and his contemporaries and sees a spread of complacency. Luckily - or perhaps very unluckily - an old pledge will come to haunt him. His earlier career in Africa saw Hannay and his friends swear to protect a man from others - and now a second generation of animosity is ripe for Hannay to step in and be a protective detective. Add in a supposed treasure hoard, and who knows where his last journey might end up?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184697156X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Elizabeth Jolley
|title=The Vera Wright Trilogy
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''The Vera Wright Trilogy'' contains three novels – ''My Father's Moon'', ''Cabin Fever'' and ''The Georges' Wife'' - in one beautifully presented edition. First published about 20 years ago, they are apparently partly autobiographical, telling the story of a woman's life from the 1940s onwards – work, children, parents, romantic and sexual relationships and friendships.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0892553529</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Grossman
|title=To the End of the Land
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This is a sweeping narrative about one Jewish family and how the various members deal with the ongoing Arab-Israeli war. The mother, Ora, is the lynch-pin of the family, but her resolve is tested to the limit when her younger son is about to be released from his stint in the army.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224089994</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jon Kalman Stefansson
|title=Heaven and Hell
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Iceland, somewhen about a century ago. Five men and a young lad set out in their tiny oar- and sail-powered fishing boat, for cod. On board are people with the strength to take part in a solid twelve-hour shift - rowing four hours to the fishing banks, staying there stably for the lines, then hauling them in and rowing home. And that's not to factor in any temperament of the weather. Unfortunately it's not only knowledge of fishing these people have taken on board, for Icelandic men still like to dream of love, gaze nightly at the moon at the same time as their belles, and read stories of gods, romance and legend. It's a pity then these distractions will be fatal for one of the boy's five companions...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906694532</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Christos Tsiolkas
|title=The Slap
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Slapping your own child is bad. Slapping someone else's child is worse. This is the event at the heart of Christos Tsiolkas' Man Booker-nominated novel, set in Melbourne, Australia, when at a barbeque for friends and family, the host's cousin slaps the child of the best friend of the host's wife.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848873557</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jacqueline Yallop
|title=Kissing Alice
|rating=3
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Arthur Claythorne, a decorator by trade finds himself out of work and back home in Plymouth as the First World War begins, along with a stolen copy of William Blake's ''Songs of Innocence and Experience'', a book full of powerful imagery. After being injured in the war Arthur returns home to his wife Queenie May and two daughters, Florrie and Alice, a changed man, deeply affected by his experiences in the trenches and desperate to find religion. Despite Florrie's interest in following her father into Catholicism, it is Alice who suddenly finds herself the object of her father's unusual and inappropriate attention.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848870345</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Emma Donoghue
|title=Room
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It's the morning of Jack's fifth birthday, but Jack is no ordinary boy. He and his Ma have been imprisoned by the character known only as 'Old Nick' in a single room for all Jack's life. True he has a television, but his mother has convinced him that those people are not real. The room is all Jack has ever known - and in it he has developed his own attachment to things like Bed, Rug, Table, Skylight and Wardrobe where he sleeps. The first victim of incarceration, it seems, is the definite article.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330519018</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Andrey Kurkov and Andrew Bromfield
|title=The Good Angel of Death
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Kolya cannot possibly expect what the act of moving flat, and finding a book among what the old folks who move out leave behind, might lead to. I can hint that it involves a trip of several hundreds of miles, involves a couple of pieces of anatomy the average man does not fancy leaving behind, a chameleon, Kolya being given as a husband-cum-present to a lovely young lady, and a lot more. The find involves Ukraine's national author, Taras Shevchenko, and a hunt for something he might have left behind in a desert abutting the Caspian Sea.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099513498</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Geoff Dyer
|title=Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
|rating=3
|genre=Literary Fiction
|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>
}}
