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[[Category:New Reviews|General Fiction]]
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{{newreview
|title=The Luminaries
|author=Eleanor Catton
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Eleanor Catton's ''The Luminaries'' is set in the New Zealand gold rush of the late 1860s. It's a story about greed, power, gold, dreams, opium, secrets, betrayal and identity, but most of all, it's a celebration of the art of story telling, both in terms of Catton's book and the stories her characters have to tell. It's the kind of book that is perfect escapism and which wraps you up in its world. If you like big, chunky books that you can get lost in for hours, then this is one for you.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847084311</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=David Canning
|summary=He may now be 81, but there are no signs that Tom Wolfe is mellowing. Is his latest ''Back to Blood'' another magnificent addition to the Wolfe hall or is he merely bringing up the bodies? Well for me, it's a little of both. The book's great strength and also its main weakness are in the similarities between this Miami-set story of racial and cultural tension and his New York-set classic [[The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe|The Bonfire of the Vanities]]. There are familiar themes: newspapers, racial tension, the super-rich behaving disgracefully and lost in their own ego-mania, and a lively writing style shot through with angry humour, all of which bring to mind ''The Bonfire of the Vanities''. As there, he takes several characters from different worlds whose lives intersect in unexpected ways. But while taking those ingredients might seem a very welcome thing, the end result suffers in comparison.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099578530</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|title=Unfaithfully Yours
|author=Nigel Williams
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=When Nigel Williams first really burst on to the best-seller list, a couple of decades ago, it was with a book set in Wimbledon that really quite tickled a younger me – and my mother. But then he produced two more in the same series, and we soon decided he was a bit of a one-trick pony, and could never be sure how much of the trilogy we'd read, or be too eager to read more. Flash forward, and Williams has certainly branched out – his setting this time is Putney. Wimbledon Common is now Putney Heath, and so on. But here he provides an epistolatory novel – and if there's one kind of novel to make me prick up my ears it is one built from letters. It is the blatant two-and-fro timing of the narrative, and the succinctness that characters are formed with, that strike me as obvious benefits of such a book – and Unfaithfully Yours has those and many more.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1472106741</amazonuk>
}}

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