Literary fiction
Too Many Magpies by Elizabeth Baines
Becoming a mother brings a whole new world of fear into your life. Suddenly you see the danger in every situation, and fear and trepidation can be become your constant companions. In this novella, we meet a young mother who is married to a logical scientist. They attempt to control their children's futures on a scientific basis, growing their own fruit and vegetables, giving their children nothing sugary, eating no eggs for a whole year until any adverse affects from them were disproved. But after meeting with an enigmatic stranger our young mother begins to struggle as he introduces ideas of freedom into her world. She begins an affair with him, begins to let things slip at home and with the children, yet finds she is still continuously haunted by the sense of an ever-present danger. Full review...
Burning Out by Katherine May
Violet has it all – a well-paid job, and a luxurious apartment all to herself. Everything is catered for; her meals, her clothes, and her health are all how she would like them to be. But the life she is leading is beginning to take its toll. On the verge of snapping, a drained and somewhat out-of-sorts Violet, withdraws back to her home town. There, she meets someone familiar, a ghost reminding her of how she used to be ten years earlier – a young carefree girl, full of life. Only this isn't a ghost, but a girl living the life Violet once lived – exactly the same. Haunted by the past Violet realizes history is repeating itself and is convinced events will happen again. Events that will in turn haunt the girl. Full review...
The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson
Most people of my age will have come across Jansson's work unwittingly, via the televised renditions of the Moomin tales. The readers amongst us would then have been entranced a few years ago to discover that at last Thomas Teal had set about the translation into English, first of The Summer Book and then of a collection of short stories which were published as 'A Winter Book'. Full review...
Me and Kaminski by Daniel Kehlmann
After reviewing several long books, it's been refreshing to read such a fluent yet pared down story as 'Kaminski and Me'. In it, Sebastian Zollner, the obnoxious main character, shoves himself forward in a desperate attempt to research a best seller which will re-ignite his career as an art critic. Kaminski, the proposed subject, was a fashionable painter long ago, but now, ancient and chronically ill, has virtually slid into oblivion. So the second-rate writer is on a loser unless he can dig up some juicy details to hook the art world and general public. Full review...
When Rooks Speak of Love by Hilary Dixon
Arthur Transcombe is a middle-aged, grey-haired, self-effacing poet. Unremarkable really - on the outside. He has, however, managed to achieve some success with his poems. (Being a guest speaker at the Cheltenham Literary Festival is no mean feat). He is also a babe magnet! Full review...
Ransom by David Malouf
Taking his theme from a small part of Homer's Iliad, Malouf tells the story of the king of Troy, Priam's grief-stricken voyage into the Greek camp to ransom Troy's wealth for the body of his fallen son, Hector, killed by the equally grief-stricken Achilles whose great friend Hector had killed in battle before Achilles took his cruel revenge. Malouf tells the story in sparse, yet lyrical and poetic fashion suggesting the personal stories behind the epic themes that Homer related. It is an exquisitely written piece managing to be both deeply moving as well as a great piece of story telling. Full review...
Legend of a Suicide by David Vann
Some books defy categorisation and that's the case with Legend of a Suicide. Is it Literary Fiction? Is it a series of short stories linked by a common theme, or a novella with supporting pieces? Is it fiction with a strong autobiographical thread running through it? The simple answer to all these questions is yes – for the book is all that and more. It's also a compelling page-turner – I began reading at ten o'clock last night and finished it at three thirty this morning, resenting every moment away from the book. Full review...
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
It's with a somehow guilty feeling that I admit that I have never been particularly fond of Milan Kundera. He's certainly a very good writer and undoubtedly a very intelligent man capable of interesting philosophical insights. All those qualities contributed to a cult status accorded to Kundera, compounded by the frisson of political subversion – never a harmful thing for a writer from what used to be known as Eastern Europe (but which returned to its status as Middle (or Central) Europe with the fall of the Iron Curtain). Full review...
One Morning Like A Bird by Andrew Miller
Tokyo in 1940 is a place that we British tend not to give a great deal of thought to. Japan entered the war, we say, with the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, completely forgetting that Japan, like most of the rest of the world, was already a country at war. She had been fighting in China since 1937 and was making in-roads into European colonial territory in the area as well. Full review...
Small Wars by Sadie Jones
Even though our world is ostensibly at peace, hundreds of localized, unwinnable conflicts continue to grumble on. Mostly, we only hear and care about the ones involving 'our boys', as if war was some giant game of football. But it isn't, and Small Wars reflects on the casualties of war in a story set in Cyprus in the Two-Way Family Favourites era of the nineteen-fifties. It may turn out to be an important book as the public mood turns against the 'war on terror' in Afghanistan. It's certainly a prescient one. Full review...
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
A complex class society which evolved into a highly sophisticated culture is invariably a fertile ground for development of social satire, and British literature would have been hugely depleted if all novels that can be regarded as such were suddenly to disappear. Evelyn Waugh made the genre his own, and A Handful of Dust is a sublime example of his mastery of it. Full review...
Love and Summer by William Trevor
Love and Summer is set in the small town of Rathmoye in a rural Ireland 'some years after the middle of the last century'. The novel charts the doomed love affair between Ellie, a young farmer's wife, and Florian, the Irish-Italian son of two artists, but it as much about the place and time in which it is set. Full review...
The China Bird by Bryony Doran
Edward is a sad and solitary figure. Late middle-aged, twisted-spined and hump-backed, a loner who works in the archive basement of the library, lodges with Mrs Ingrams who makes his tea and ruins his laundry, and hoards letters from his mother.
Like many an unmarried man with an aging, widowed mother, Edward finds his relationship with her somewhat strained. Unlike many of those men, his relationship was always that way.
She is rude and demanding, and he either doesn't have the strength or the inclination to force the issue with her. Apart from an occasion half-hearted reprimand, he stands back, ignores, makes excuses. Full review...
The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan
The children were born in Thornton, a suburb of Bradford, and compared with where they were to go it was a soft living. Howarth was high up on the Yorkshire Moors, industrialised and with weather which chilled to the bone. The parsonage was four-square but draughty and not exactly welcoming. They, of course, were the Brontë family. The father was the impoverished curate and his six children had somehow to be cared for after his wife's death from cancer. Full review...
The Complete Novellas by Agnes Owens
Who is Agnes Owens? A Scottish author who portrays working class life from the nineteen forties and fifties. Now an octogenarian, apparently Agnes Owens started writing at the age of 58. Here are five previously published stories collected into one new edition, a companion volume to her short stories, published in 2008. I don't think you'll be disappointed. Full review...
Summertime by J M Coetzee
Summertime is the third of a series of fictionalised autobiographies by J M Coetzee, following on from Boyhood and Youth. There, that sounds straightforward enough, doesn't it? Except, in this 'autobiography' (or 'autrebiography' as one critic described the earlier volumes) the subject is dead. So, clearly, this story isn't 'true'. But then, how true is an ordinary autobiography? And to what extent is it a function of the novel to use fiction to reveal truth? So many questions, and I haven't even begun. Full review...
Me Cheeta by James Lever
Straight out of the golden age of Hollywood comes the bitchiest, most revealing memoir from one of its stars. There are scores to be settled, stars to be insulted, secrets to be hinted at none too subtley, and lost opportunities to be longed for. Oh, and the star telling all? Well, for those of you who can't tell from the title (or even the picture on the front cover) it's Cheeta - chimpanzee star of the Tarzan films. Full review...
Of Bees and Mist by Erick Setiawan
The first few chapters of this amazing work, had me scratching my head, and pondering, 'what on earth is this about, and where is it going?' It struck me as simply bizarre. However, I was quickly reeled in, and the initially disparate cast of characters, who seemed more like caricatures, soon had lives of their own - and fascinating ones at that! Full review...
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
A revisionist look at Henry VIII's minister, Thomas Cromwell. Rich, absorbing and intelligent, it's a beautiful, beautiful book. Full review...
The Children's Book by A S Byatt
Antonia Byatt's Booker-nominated The Children's Book (her first novel for seven years) is a staggering, complex and multi-layered book, set between the last years of Victoria's reign and the end of the First World War. Although this is undoubtedly an intelligent book, full of learning and ideas, ranging from class, early feminism, Fabianism and anarchism, it is highly readable and accessible. The author's stance is that this was a unique time for children in the UK, freed from the 'be seen and not heard' of the early Victorian age, but before the 'treat them like adults' of the post war loss of innocence. It was a time when children, at least rich children, were allowed to be free and adult authors like JM Barrie wrote both about and for children and was also widely read by adults. Full review...
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
Colm Tóibín's quietly powerful new novel, Brooklyn, opens in the author's own home town of Enniscorthy, County Wexford in the 1950s. We are sitting with his conscientiously introverted heroine, Eilis Lacey, as she watches through the upstairs living room window as her more glamorous older sister Rose walks briskly home from work. Rose is popular at the local golf club, with many male admirers. Meanwhile, Eilis' three brothers have all gone to England where there is work to be had. There are few opportunities in Enniscorthy, for employment or anything else. Eilis is lucky to be offered a Sunday job in Miss Kelly's grocery shop, a shop Eilis' widowed mother will not enter. Later, Eilis will entertain her mother and sister with imitations of Miss Kelly's voice. Showing everything only through Eilis' eyes, Tóibín brilliantly evokes life in the claustrophobically tight-knit town. Full review...
Under This Unbroken Sky by Shandi Mitchell
A photograph opens the story. A black and white picture of a family, husband, wife and their three children, smiling for the camera. Thin, underfed, in their summer clothes despite the four inches of snow, they smile. Partly they smile because they do not know what is to come.
A page and five years later we catch up with the Mykolayenkos. In the Spring of 1938 Ivan and his cousin are catching mice in the barn and taking bets on which of the farm cats will pounce on the individually released rodents first. The game is interrupted by a man with a loaded .22 rifle. It takes a while for it to sink in, that this is Ivan's father, Teodor, free after a prison sentence for stealing his own grain. Full review...
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
I'm kind of a reverse literary snob, in that I tend to avoid books that win awards. I've found that such books are often very well written, but they're not always good reading. As shameful as it is to admit, I would much rather read for story as for fancy words. Clearly I'm not alone, as in 1993, the year Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the Booker Prize, the bestseller lists contained John Grisham, Sue Townsend and Jeffrey Archer. Full review...
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
When was the last time you couldn't put a Booker nominated novel down? Sarah Waters, author of acclaimed novels Fingersmith and The Night Watch has written a chilling psychological ghost story that kept me guessing until the very last page. Full review...
How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman
Sammy has just woken up outside in what looks likes a park after a heavy night of drinking. He can't remember much – how he got there, or why he is wearing some old trainers and not his new shoes. He doesn't know what's happened to his wallet or why people are staring at him. He does remember some things – one being a row of some sorts he'd had with Helen, his girlfriend. Now he has been arrested, beaten up by the police, and released back onto the street again. He needs to find a way to get home, the only problem is; he has just gone blind. Full review...
Generation A by Douglas Coupland
I think with Douglas Coupland you either love him or hate him. So I suppose I should probably say straight off that he's one of my favourite writers. I've read all his fiction, and I just about peed my pants with excitement at getting to review this latest offering, Generation A. Those in the know will see that he is jumping off from his earlier novel, Generation X, that dealt with three disillusioned twenty-somethings who seem to have opted out of life, working 'Mcjobs' in the Californian desert and telling each other stories to pass the time. Here, with this new generation, there's storytelling again, this time amongst five characters, all from different places in the world, and different ages, who are brought together through one singular event in each of their lives - they are each stung by a bee. Full review...
The Cry of the Sloth by Sam Savage
Meet Andrew Whittaker. In some untold time of recent American history, he is forced through a failed marriage and an artistic temperament at odds with so many other people, to let properties to tenants he does not like, for $120 a month. The lodgers might not like the state of the buildings - ceilings falling through and so on - but that's another matter. He would much prefer to be left alone in front of his little Olivetti typewriter and create art. He runs a literary journal, of a kind, called "Soap", which no-one likes, no-one reads (and often, with dodgy, cheap printing, no-one could physically read it anyway), and which makes him poorer in time, money and spirit. Full review...
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
In 1801 Lockwood, one of our narrators, arrived at Wuthering Heights on the Yorkshire moors. He was renting nearby Thrushcross Grange from the rude and surly Heathcliff, but when one of Heathcliff's dogs attacked him and the weather turned against him he was forced to stay overnight. In his room he found a diary written by a young girl by the name of Catherine Earnshaw, who was close to Heathcliff as a child and it was this which caused Lockwood to have a terrifying dream in which Catherine's ghost fought to get into the room through the window. His screams of fear brought Heathcliff to the room and when Lockwood told him what he had seen Heathcliff asked him to leave the room and then sobbed as be begged Cathy to come in. Lockwood persuades the housekeeper, Nelly Dean (our other narrator), to tell him the story behind what has happened. Full review...
Amulet by Roberto Bolano
The novel is set in the late 1960s, a time of political unrest and tension in Mexico. The narrator and protagonist seek refuge when the army invades the university. Ensconced in a fourth floor w.c., she commences to recollect her earlier life and experiences amongst the literati of Mexico, and the world of academia. She frequently refers to herself as the mother of Mexican poetry, and this is indeed an apt, if somewhat generous, description, as she does emerge as a maternal figure. She is an engaging character, tolerated, rather than liked by her acquaintances, and it's her very lack of sophistication which makes her such a real and believable narrator. Poetry is her main love in life - she lives and breathes it, and all else fades into insignificance for her. Full review...
A Winding Road by Jonathan Tulloch
A Winding Road is an unusual novel comprised of three separate (though structurally interspersed) narratives. The main one, which is set in the present and binds the other two together, follows the sordid escapades of one Piers Guest, art dealer, or, as he prefers, art advisor. Piers swans about London meeting clients, having affairs and generally doing just whatever he pleases with little thought for the consequences. The second narrative is (mostly) set in Nazi Germany and its main concern is a folklorist, Ernst Mann, and how he is viewed by his family after he joins the SS. His actions and motivations are questioned and obsessed about. The third narrative, set in Auvers-Sur-Oise in 1890, is a fictional account of the last days of Van Gogh's life, when he painted some of his most famous work. It features Dr. Gachet who famously treated the artist plus some of Dr. Gachet's other patients of Tulloch's own invention. Piers is alerted to the existence of a lost painting by Van Gogh which has been discovered in the archives of Ernst Mann. Full review...
Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann
This was one of those books where, after I closed it, I sat very quietly, just breathing out and breathing in, holding onto the last moments of a good story. Although it was a little slow to start, I found myself more and more caught up in the characters' lives, how they were all so cleverly interlinked, woven together. The core of the story takes place on the 7th of August, 1974, the day that Philippe Petit walked on a high wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, and we begin with his high wire walk. Petit is never directly named, and although there are flashes back to his training for the event, and his feelings and experience at the time, his is not the focus of the story, but merely the hook upon which all the other characters hang together. Full review...
Possession by A S Byatt
A S Byatt won the Booker Prize for Possession in 1990 and this new edition of the novel is part of a celebration of Booker winners produced by Vintage Books. Presumably in an attempt to make these literary prize-winners more accessible, Vintage has published the series in mass market format. This edition of Possession is therefore similar in size and appearance to an airport lounge blockbuster. More on that later. Full review...
The Ghosts of Eden by Andrew J H Sharp
1983: Michael Lacey, a consultant surgeon is flying into Uganda to attend a medical conference. On the plane he struggles against his memories of a child buried in Africa, against his claustrophobia, and against the unwelcome conversation of his neighbouring passenger: a passenger apparently afflicted by a native curse. Full review...
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
What an egoist I must seem in the preceding pages Charles Arrowby reflects towards the end of the book. An aging celebrity, he is certainly that – vain, self-regarding and obsessive. But he is one of the most engaging literary characters I have ever come across, and this tale of his withdrawal to a remote coastal cottage is a tour de force. Full review...
The Infinities by John Banville
Adam is being watched over by a god. No, not that Adam - this one is a young man, in his twenties, staring out the window at the midsummer's dawn breaking, in his old family home, where his father - Adam senior - lies comatose, dying from a stroke. And not that god, either - this is Hermes, who will be our narrator as the family (Adam's wife, mother, younger sister) wake up to the new day, and have cause to remember other times. We'll see also that Zeus, too, is one of the household gods - and is still doing his old, randy, visitation tricks. Full review...
The Famished Road by Ben Okri
After eternities in the ever beautiful and kind spirits world, Azaro the spirit child decides to be born, and to be born for good - not wander between the world of spirits and the living, as he used to, not pain his parents by the sudden deaths time after time, but to break an oath to his fellow spirits and settle. His parents are happy, he is content and curious, but the spirit world does not let Azaro go easily. Azaro is haunted by ghosts, while his parents are haunted by poverty, and both struggle for survival and relative security. Full review...