Newest Literary Fiction Reviews
Literary fiction
Every Contact Leaves a Trace by Elanor Dymott
We learn from the prologue that the narrator, Oxford educated lawyer, Alex's wife has been murdered. We also know that Alex knew little of his wife, Rachel's past, particularly of the time that they spent together at Worcester College. This is critical in understanding who may have killed her, and why. What follows is Alex learning about this hidden past. Every Contact Leaves a Trace is partly a thriller and partly a whodunnit although the structure adopted by Elanor Dymott is somewhat unusual. Full review...
Silver: Return to Treasure Island by Andrew Motion
Even if you have not read Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 classic Treasure Island, or you have read it a long time ago, the chances are that you will be broadly familiar with the story and in particular some of the rich characters he created because they have entered into the culture of our image of pirates. Before Johnny Depp convinced us that pirates looked like Keith Richards, it was the terrifying image of Long John Silver and his parrot, squawking 'pieces of eight', double dealing his way to buried treasure and the innocence of young narrator Jim Hawkins that conjures up what we think of in terms of pirate adventure. But Stevenson left some tantalizing threads to his tale, not least the fact that Silver made off with only the majority of the treasure and left the remaining silver behind together with three marooned pirates to fend for themselves. Setting the story 40 years after these events, Andrew Motion picks up the tale and has the offspring of Hawkins, in the form of his son also called Jim and Long John Silver's daughter Natty returning to collect the remaining bounty. Of course, it's never going to be that simple. Full review...
The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones
On a spring evening in 1912 preparations were being made for a supper party to celebrate the twentieth birthday of Emerald Torrington. It was taking place at Sterne, the much-loved home of the family, although finances were uncertain and no one was quite sure how much longer they would be able to stay in the house. Emerald's mother had hopes that she would be able to marry Emerald off to John Buchanan, a local entrepreneur, but Emerald was far from convinced. Her step-father was in Manchester trying to raise the funds to keep the house going but Emerald and her brother Clovis, Patience Sutton and her brother Ernest along with Buchanan and the household staff prepared for what they hoped would be a delightful evening. Full review...
Suddenly, a Knock on the Door by Etgar Keret
In the opening, titular story, Keret is forced by several people to create, and alter, a short short story. It's a plain metaphor for the history of Israel, but it proves that this modern Scheherazade is not too far removed geographically from the original. And what follows are probably the sort of short, tantalising, open-ended, rough-round-the-edges and surreal results of being compelled to carry on telling tall tales on a nightly basis. Full review...
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
Harold and Maureen Fry were unremarkable: one long marriage, one adult offspring and a long retirement stretching out in front of them like a prison sentence. One morning everything changed. The catalyst was a letter from Queenie, an ex-colleague of Harold's. He knew he needed to respond and thought that posting a letter would suffice. However, a chat with a girl at the local petrol station made him realise that a letter couldn't be enough. He had to provide Queenie with hope... he had to walk. Full review...
Capital by John Lanchester
With a gentle nod to the great commentator of London life of the past, John Lanchester sets his wonderfully entertaining state of the nation book around Pepys Road. With a huge cast of characters, he looks as a cross section of London life and while in some ways not quite perfect, it comes pretty darn close. Full review...
Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks
Some readers may understandably be deterred from reading Russell Banks's Lost Memory of Skin due to its controversial subject matter and there's no doubt that it's a morally complex read. The main character, known only to us at 'the Kid' is a young man who is a convicted sex offender. Set in south Florida, he is forced to reside, with other offenders and his pet Iguana, under a causeway. While living here, he encounters a huge and enigmatic man, known only as 'the Professor' from the local university who is apparently studying homelessness amongst sex offenders and the two form an uneasy friendship. Full review...
The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler
Aaron's wife, Dorothy, was killed in an accident. An oak tree fell on their home, demolishing the sun porch where Dorothy happened to be at the time. He worried that if he had done things differently (a matter of some biscuits and a television set) Dorothy might not have been where she was and might still be alive and for a while he camped out in the wrecked house until further damage forced him to move in with his sister. It was then that he realised that Dorothy wasn't really dead - well, not dead as we understand it - as she materialised in odd places, wearing the clothes she used to wear and eventually staying with Aaron for longer periods of time. And gradually they began to bicker, just like a long-married couple... Full review...
A Division of the Light by Christopher Burns
Gregory Pharoah is a professional photographer whose genre is sometimes photojournalism, but more commonly portraiture or nudes. Like his job, his nature is towards the superficial. One day, returning from photographing a bishop (for clarity, this is a portrait assignment and not a nude!) he is the only witness to a street robbery where Alice Fell is the victim. Alice is a fatalist who believes in some kind of divine plan that means there is a reason for everything. She's enigmatic, by nature and by design as this is a quality that she enjoys cultivating. Thus these two different characters become part of the same story and what happens in the following six months is ultimately surprising and even shocking. Full review...
The Third Day by Chochana Boukhobza
Set in Jerusalem in the late 1980s, an elderly, Jewish, celebrated cellist Elisheva is visiting Israel with her protégé, Rachel, ostensibly to give a concert performance. It quickly becomes apparent that Elisheva survived the Nazi camps by playing her music for the feared camp commander, known as the Butcher of Majdanek, and while on the surface she survived this ordeal well, it is clear that she has a darker intent with her three day visit. Through an underground network of Nazi hunters, she has managed to lure the Butcher from his home in Venezuela to visit Israel. Will they meet and what will happen when they do? Full review...
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
Malay Chinese Teoh Yun Ling travels to the Cameron Highlands of Malaya to meet the legendary Japanese garden designer and expert, Nakamura Aritomo. As the sole survivor of a World War II Japanese slave labour camp, Yun Ling has many reasons to hate the Japanese but some things are stronger than hatred. For, whilst in the camp, she promised her sister a Japanese garden. When life became difficult during interment, the sisters discussed and visualised the finished result to keep them hanging on. Ling's sister perished but the dream of a memorial garden drives her on. Nothing is that straightforward, though. The designer refuses the commission. Instead he suggests that she stays, as his apprentice, learning the art in order to become her own designer. Yun Ling agrees and discovers more than horticultural finesse. Full review...
Sanctuary Line by Jane Urquhart
Entomologist Liz Crane has returned to her family's property on the Canadian shores of Lake Erie where she's studying the migratory patterns of the monarch butterfly, which flies south, reproduces, dies, repeats this and a further generation returns to Lake Erie and the process begins again. As Liz works she reminisces about the family of which she's a part - almost incidentally - and how they have migrated. Foremost in her mind is her cousin, Amanda Butler, a gifted military strategist, who came home from Afghanistan is a flag-covered coffin, but moves on to her uncle who disappeared a decade or so before, the Mexican workers who came each year for the harvest and those members of the Butler family who came Ireland - some to grow fruit and others to become lighthouse keepers. Full review...
Rocks in the Belly by Jon Bauer
Jon Bauer's first novel, Rocks in the Belly, is an emotional journey. The narrator is a man in his late 20s who has returned from Canada to visit his mother who has cancer of the brain. The narrator himself is emotionally damaged from the relationship that he had with his mother from childhood when she and her husband fostered children and, interspersed with the narrative, is the voice of narrator at eight years old and in particular telling the experience of one foster boy, Robert, who we know from early on in the book suffered a significant tragedy while in their care. What that event was will be revealed in due course, but it is clear that the young boy suffered hugely from jealousy of his mother's love for these foster children. Full review...
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
The Orphan Master's Son follows the adventures of Jun Do who has been born without any say in his future. For this is North Korea, where all is organised for the good of the state or at the whim of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il.
Jun Do starts his adult life as a member of a state-sanctioned kidnap squad before joining a fishing boat as a 'listener', basically a spy monitoring and translating foreign radio traffic. His troubles start when he discovers that being a good citizen isn't enough and sometimes a person needs something else to believe in and fight for.
This is an incredibly hard book to sum up, but I also realise this will be an awfully short review if I don't try, so here goes... Full review...
The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker
Gerbrand Bakker's Dutch novel, The Detour translated by David Colmer, is a very odd story indeed. Mostly set in Snowdonia, the book tells the story of a Dutch woman, who gives her name as Emilie, who rents a remote farm. She's clearly on the run from something, perhaps an affair with a student at the university where she was researching the works of Emily Dickinson, but it increasingly becomes clear that this is only part of the story. Certainly her husband and parents back in the Netherlands have no clue where she has gone - or why. Once these details are established, the book takes a turn to the seriously odd which is more of a full blooded journey rather than a mere 'detour'. Full review...
Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter
'Burning your Boats' brings together Carter's early works and her uncollected short stories, alongside the collections 'Fireworks', 'The Bloody Chamber', 'Black Venus' and 'American Ghosts'. Carter's ability to take the everyday and transform it into the fantastic is evident in stories that range from a cautionary tale of a musician in love with his instrument to a lost motorist whose journey ends in nightmarish circumstances in the Snow Pavilion. Full review...
Red Army Faction Blues by Ada Wilson
Ada Wilson admits that his fascination with the period is what drove his work on this novel, and it is the wealth of detail and background that strikes one when reading his account of Peter Urbach, the undercover agent whose role was to act as an agent provocateur to the Red Brigade. Urbach is revealed from the outset as a plant, an undercover operative who needs to keep all events of the group 'noted and filed' for his masters. And throughout the first half of the novel we see Urbach recording the changes and developments, the complex web of political ideology, naivety and the pure egocentricity of youth which created the happening of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Full review...
Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend by Matthew Green
Max is 8 years old. He likes Lego and Star Wars and playing with toy soldiers. He can tell you 102 words that rhyme with tree. He scarfs down grilled cheese sandwiches and chicken and rice. He does not like physical contact. He lives with his mum and dad who argue about what is best for him and why he’s not normal like other boys and girls. Full review...
Hope: a Tragedy by Shalom Auslander
Meet Solomon Kugel, who is almost universally known by his surname. He is about to join the list of kvetching Jewish heroes of comedy fiction, and at a very esteemed position in that list. He's a man who worries that by having had a kid he's betraying the boy's soul by bringing it into a world such as this. He's forced to live with his mother, who continually expects a second Holocaust and complains about suffering from the first, although she was not born then. He's faced with the eternal dilemma of not finding gluten-free matzo bread for his observances. He's moved to a rural location, and found houses like his are on the hit-list of an arsonist, but his new home has an even more unusual secret... Full review...
The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen
Grace McCleen's debut novel, The Land of Decoration paints an original, unsettling, sometimes dark and generally rather wonderful picture. Narrated by ten year old Judith, raised by her father who is a fundamental religious follower of the end of the world is nigh variety, it looks at bullying, both at school and in more general society, faith and the possible rejection thereof and the strength of childhood imagination. Full review...
Trieste by Dasa Drndic and Ellen Elias-Bursac (translator)
Haya Tedeschi, an 82 year old woman, sits alone in Italy, waiting. She waits for the adult son she hasn't seen since he was a baby. As Haya waits, she goes through her red basket of photographs and memorabilia, hanging out her life on an imaginary washing line. She then takes the reader back in time, back to her life as a Catholicised Jew, before, during and after World War II in an area called Trieste. Full review...
The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
If you have never come across 'Drood' before, there are certain significant factors which make this a 'must read'. It is Dickens' last work, and he died without completing it. Given that this is a detective story, one of the very first in that tradition, it is doubly intriguing, because although we are clearly being fed clues and hints throughout, at the point where the text ends we aren't even fully sure even if a crime has been committed. So as the basis for endless speculation about what really happens this novel could hardly be bettered. We certainly have potential villains and victims, but we also have a number of likely red herrings; complex threads of romantic interest, but again it is by no means clear exactly which way these will resolve; and a shadowy detective figure, whose speculations certainly have no sense of conclusion. Full review...
Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod
Short stories may not be everyone's cup of tea. Sometimes, particularly with first time authors, there is an annoying tendency to be overly experimental. Not so with Alexander MacLeod's stunningly assured debut. True he has genetic 'form' in that he is the son of novelist and short story writer Alistair MacLeod, but even so, the quality of this collection, is remarkable. The collection of seven stories is not overly themed, although certain issues and concerns do reappear, but what binds the stories together is a very human approach to adversity. Full review...
Standing Water by Terri Armstrong
Dom has made the long flight from London to Australia and he's shattered, physically and emotionally. He's been busy getting on with his shiny new life in cosmopolitan London and has barely spared a thought for the folks back home. He's not relishing meeting up again with his brother Neal. Neal took over the family farm and land when their father died. The two brothers are like chalk and cheese. They had nothing in common as young boys growing up and when Dom left for Europe, Neal was relieved. But there is still an unsolved issue between them and it's a biggy. Now that they're older and hopefully wiser, will they manage to talk about it and even resolve it. Time will tell. Full review...
The White Lie by Andrea Gillies
One scorching hot summer's afternoon Ursula Salter hurls herself into the drawing room of her parents' house and delivers the devastating news that she's killed her nephew, Michael, and that he's in the loch. But is this what's happened? Ursula might be in her late twenties but she has the mind and understanding of a child and – crucially – there's no body to be found. There are contradictions and inconsistencies in what Ursula says – and evidence from someone else who might have this own agenda – all of which allows the Salters to close ranks and construct a version of what happened designed to protect Ursula and allow themselves to avoid the truth. Full review...
Absolution by Patrick Flanery
If Patrick Flanery's South African-set debut novel Absolution is anything to go by, he could well be one of the next big names in literary fiction. It's complex and at times challenging, but ultimately an extremely rewarding reading experience. Full review...
Wise Children by Angela Carter
Dora and Nora Chance are the twin daughters of Shakespearean actor Melchior Hazard and Pretty Kitty, the chambermaid at the theatrical boarding house where he was lodging in the First World War. Kitty died in childbirth and the girls were brought up by the woman they knew as Grandma. As for Melchior, he preferred that it be thought that his twin brother Peregrine was responsible and Perry was not unhappy to bear the burden. What Melchior didn't know was that the twin daughters which his first wife produced were actually sired by Perry. If you're getting confused, then bear in mind that there are more sets of twins to appear and that this is comedy, not of the cheap canned laughter variety, but of the type written by the bard himself. Full review...
Amelia and the Virgin by Nicky Harlow
Amelia is 13 years old and lives with her mother, brother and extended family in 1980s Liverpool. Con, her great-uncle, is a psychiatrist with prestigious patients and a bit of a drink problem, Great-Aunt Edith is a devout Catholic with an inclination towards eccentricity and her brother, Julian, is a junky. Amelia's mother tries to hold everyone together but becomes slightly distracted when she inherits a convent in Ireland, complete with nuns. Amelia has her own problems, though. She sees visions of the Goddess Irena and is pregnant with the next Messiah. (A girl this time as the original male Messiah didn't have much luck.) Full review...
The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore
Set in 1952 in Yorkshire, a young couple move into a rented flat. Philip is the new, young doctor while his new wife Isabel struggles with the isolated life with no friends or family and Philip's frequent absence due to the demands of his job. Things take a turn to the spooky when, waking from under the warmth of the old greatcoat Isabel finds in the flat, she hears a tapping at the window and finds there an RAF pilot, Alec, who appears to know Isabel intimately. Full review...
Hinterland by Caroline Brothers
Aryan (14) and his brother Kabir (aged 8) are refugees, fleeing the horrors of their homeland, Afghanistan. Equipped only with some money sewn into a belt and stories of a promised land called England, they learn about desperation, misplaced trust and other lessons normally kept from children. Full review...
