Literary fiction
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...
This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You by Jon McGregor
The clue is in the Christopher Brookmyre-styled title. If the events, characters and circumstances in these stories are known to you, then you have my sympathies. A man causes an embarrassment trying to watch his daughter's first school nativity play. Another has a phobia of eggs containing an avian foetus when he puts knife and fork to them. There's a car crash here - and there, a drowning, some arson, some theft... and a lot of clues that point to some national disaster. Take all those clues as one and you eventually see this is more than just a collection of disparate short stories, but a very fractured, obfuscated novel. Full review...
The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals by Wendy Jones
It's Spring 1924 in South Wales, and young undertaker Wilfred is going to learn the hard way how serious the trivial can be. Fascinated by a girl's dress - worn very seductively by Grace, who he has met but twice as an adult - he blurts out a marriage proposal. As much as wants to take it back, she won't let him. He tries to move on, leaving her disappointed, especially when he falls for the daughter of a man he buries, but... There are things dangerously spoken, dangerously left unsaid, and a complex web of divided loyalties and enforced connections, in this brilliant debut novel. Full review...
Sarmada by Fadi Azzam and Adam Talib (Translator)
'Sarmada' is small and remote village in the Northern hills of Syria, close to the Turkish border. And for much of Azzam's novel it seems a forgotten village, lost in the rituals and mysticism of ancient Druze belief and folk tales that inform the collective consciousness of the place. For the novel weaves the tales of three Syrian women and their relationships with each other, the men of their lives and the fabric of a life almost caught in the timeless past of the Middle East. Full review...
The Man Who Rained by Ali Shaw
Do you remember being a child who had only just learned how to read? Do you remember the very first time you read a fairy story that no-one had told you before? Can you recapture the joy of entering a truly magical land and (for a time) believing it was real?
No? Then I recommend that you read Ali Shaw's second novel 'The Man Who Rained'. Full review...
Noah's Child by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
Joseph, a young Belgian Jew, is sent away by his parents when they grow nervous about the treatment of Jews during World War Two. He is taken in by a village priest, Father Pons, and given a new identity and a place in Father Pons' school along with an assortment of other children, some of whom are genuine pupils and others who are, like Joseph, seeking sanctuary. Full review...
A Kind Man by Susan Hill
Meet Eve, and her husband, the title character, Tommy. She's at a bit of a sticky wicket in life, for however much they want a baby, her sister and his feckless husband churn out son after son after son, and go no lengths at all to love them. So when Eve and Tommy do at last have a child, it's a tragedy for it to die when only three years old. But in this plot, which you'll thank me for not going into further, there will be a lot more swings and roundabouts, of torment and ecstasy, doldrums and delights, hell and heaven, to come. Full review...
Bereft by Chris Womersley
Quinn Walker, a young Australian man fresh from fighting on the European front in World War One, returns to the very town he was drummed out of ten years before, after being accused of raping and killing his own younger sister. Two things have beaten him to the small settlement - one, the global flu pandemic; two a telegram saying he died bravely in action earlier in the war. And the less you know of what he meets and does back in Flint the better, the more to keep this fresh and brilliant book's many intrigues as secret as they were for me. Full review...
The Indies Enterprise by Eric Orsenna
As soon as you pick up a novel about Columbus's discovery of the Americas, certain expectations come to mind. Orsenna however is much more than your average writer and he manages to subvert almost all of these by delivering a quiet, scholarly account of what seems at first a diversion, the art of map making. But this book is not about Columbus himself, but rather his brother Bartholomew, and how he is swept into the excitement and ambition of his older sibling. Full review...
The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi
The novel opens at dead of night in a house in Rasht in Gilan province, Iran. It is pouring with rain and the colonel of the title is in the grip of extreme melancholia. Two policemen are knocking on the door. They are bringing news of his youngest daughter. This triggers a night of misery in which the colonel recalls his own past, and the tragic lives of his five children. Full review...
Married Love by Tessa Hadley
Married Love is Tessa Hadley’s second collection, containing twelve short stories looking at (mostly) modern relationships and family dynamics – many are about parents and their grown up children and in-laws, others are about couples. Flicking through the book to choose some of the best and/or most interesting stories to mention, I have found a difficulty. Almost all of these incisive, witty stories reveal an interesting group of characters I would like to know more about after the end, sometimes from several different viewpoints, and it is hard to pick out just a few. Full review...
My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young
It takes a while for the full power of Louisa Young's remarkable My Dear I Wanted To Tell You to become apparent, but when it does, it can hardly fail to move you. Set just before and during World War One, it's a story of love and human spirit against the odds. The impact of the book is in what happens to the characters, so I don't want to give too much away, but it's worth pointing out that it's not for the overly squeamish reader particularly in some of the descriptions of surgical procedures, which have clearly been meticulously researched by Young. The title itself it taken from the opening words of the standard letters that the wounded were given to send to loved ones back home. The wounded were required to fill in the blanks. Full review...
West of Here by Jonathan Evison
The town of Port Bonita, located on the Pacific coast of Washington State, is the setting – and almost a character itself, such is its importance – of Jonathan Evison’s newest novel. In a massively ambitious narrative, we start at the Elwha River Dam in 2006, before just two pages later being transported back into the 1880’s, to see the town’s founding. A hundred pages or so later, we’re brought back to the 21st century, then returned to the 19th, and the cuts between scenes get faster and more furious as we seem to flip forwards and backwards in time without giving us much time to catch our breath. By 2006, the Dam is about to be destroyed, and we see the effect its construction has had on the local community and how the descendants of the original characters have turned out. Full review...
Little Bones by Janette Jenkins
While this might sound like the afterlife of a brilliant and unlikely cabaret mimic, it's not. It's a rich, evocative and engaging novel set in the last years of Victoria's reign, in the depths of her darkest London. Fate - and being abandoned by, in turn, her mother and older sister - leaves Jane Stretch living with and working for a doctor and his lumpen, housebound wife. Jane is alternatively called an 'unfortunate' and a 'cripple' for her disabilities and distorted frame, but she has enough bookish intelligence to pass herself off as an assistant to the doctor, who only ever does one operation - abortions, for music hall artistes. The plot is evidently gearing up to reveal how dangerous such a criminal business might be, for the both of them. Full review...
In Darkness by Nick Lake
Shorty is lying in the rubble of the great Haitian earthquake of 2010. If he's not rescued soon, he will die. Shorty is from Site Soley, the sprawling slum of Port-au-Prince. After the murder of his father and abduction of his twin sister, Shorty has allowed himself to fall further and further into the slum's gang culture. But Route 9 isn't all about drug-dealing and gun-running - it's also about feeding the poor and educating the children. And Shorty has a great deal to teach his readers, as he recounts his life while waiting to die. Full review...
A Summer of Drowning by John Burnside
A Summer of Drowning is a book in which for much of the time not a lot happens - but always spookily. Set on the Norwegian island of Kvaløya in the Arctic Circle, the story is narrated by Liv who is now 28 but who recalls events of a summer when she was 18. Liv resides with her artist mother in, if not isolation, then certainly seclusion. The book makes much of the midsummer madness that 24 hour daylight induces and in that respect it is wholly successful. It aims for a dream-like and timeless quality which it largely achieves. Full review...
Interpreters by Sue Eckstein
Julia Rosenthal whilst visiting her childhood haunts, is invited to go around what used to be her family home. As she wanders around the rooms, she relives her past and seeks to understand why her parents (particularly her mother) were as they were. Julia also desperately seeks reassurance that she has not, in turn, damaged her own daughter, Susanna. Meanwhile the reader is given the privilege of knowledge unavailable to Julia. Via transcriptions of discussions with counsellor, the reader learns about Julia's mother first hand. Slowly, in alternating chapters, whilst Julia goes over her far from normal 1970s upbringing, her mother haltingly and touchingly reveals the secret life which almost destroyed her. Full review...
Shadowstory by Jennifer Johnston
Polly grows up in an Anglo-Irish family in the years following World War II. Her father died in the war. Her mother sends her off to spend school holidays with her grandparents at Kildarragh, a great house in the countryside, far away from Dublin. Full review...
The Origin of Violence by Fabrice Humbert
Fabrice Humbert's French Orange Prize winning 'The Origin of Violence' has a young French teacher as a narrator who, while leading a school trip to Buchenwald concentration camp, sees a photograph of a Jewish prisoner taken in 1941 and is struck by the similarity in appearance of the man to his own father. However, he discovers that not only does the man in the photo have a different name to his, but the man died in 1942. Clearly there are dark family secrets afoot that he sets about discovering. Full review...
Landfall by Helen Gordon
'Most people at one time or another of their lives get a feeling that they must kill themselves; as a rule they get over it in a day or two' ('How Girls Can Build Up The Empire: the handbook for Girl Guides' 1912)
Excerpts from the handbook precede each section of Landfall and it is hard to know what to make of them – other than to take on board that women are not, by any stretch, the weaker sex, just the more emotional one 'They can even…shoot tigers, if they can keep cool'. Full review...
The Cocaine Salesman by Conny Braam
Picture a world of hellish exclusion, nightmarish noise and images, and horrid violence. Picture one person trying to live through the sleepless nights, the isolation among his peers, the permanent sense of dreadful threat. Picture him needing drugs. His best friend might even be called Charlie. But don't picture an inner city slum, 2012, but a man on the front in World War One. Full review...
Disaster was my God by Bruce Duffy
The life of Arthur Rimbaud must be one of the most outrageous in literary history, more scandalous than Wilde, more self-destructive than Malcolm Lowery, Rimbaud was the boy poet and iconoclast who took on the literary establishment at end of the nineteenth century and won. So Duffy's fictional account, based closely around the actual facts of Rimbaud's life, was bound to be an exciting and furious, and he doesn't disappoint. This is a difficult book to put down. Full review...
The Berlin Crossing by Kevin Brophy
It's the 1990s and Herr Doktor Ritter - to give Michael his full title - is about to lose his teaching job. Although a German national, he teaches English. Apparently the Social Review Committee has been doing some 'reviewing' lately and it doesn't look good for Michael. Full review...
I Am A Chechen! by German Sadulaev
That exclamation mark in the title says a lot. It says that, in spite of everything, in spite of Sadulaev leaving his homeland, it still tugs at his heartstrings - and will probably do so throughout the rest of his life. The short author's note at the beginning ends with the arresting sentence - Sadulaev's work has unleashed heated debate in Russia. And I'm thinking, brave author indeed and I also couldn't wait to find out what all the fuss was about. Full review...
The Gendarme by Mark Mustian
There are times when you will want to shut 'The Gendarme' and just walk away from the despair and disgust that this account of genocide engenders. Don't. Ultimately this tale of an old Turk revisiting his terrible past is both touching and important - an exploration of memory and forgiveness that shouldn't be missed. Full review...
Julia by Otto de Kat
The book opens with Chris as an elderly man who is nearing the end of his life. Turn a page or two and he is, in fact, dead. Suicide apparently. It's all very sad. He lived alone and a paid employee, his young driver, found him in his study. 'Suicide for the posh' his driver thinks looking at the corpse. But we have to travel back down the decades to find out why. Full review...
The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling by Howard J Booth (editor)
Rudyard Kipling, born in India in 1865, is still the youngest ever Nobel literature laureate. He was a prolific author and at the turn of the century up to the first World War an immensely popular one. Even now he remains the most frequently quoted of all English authors (with the possible exception of Shakespeare) – albeit often taken out of context. Full review...
You and I by Padgett Powell
I've often wondered how men and women of letters can pack it all in. People churn out a career of fiction, as well as reading all the classics, and offering pages and pages of diaries and letters on their death. Padgett Powell can get to be a professor of books, and therefore I assume is duty-bound to read and write lots, but still find time to knock out novels, however short. It was only a few months ago I was reading The Interrogative Mood for a review elsewhere, and here is another new release from him. Serpent's Tail will cheat in 2012 by giving the British audience Powell's debut novel, almost two decades old. Full review...
MetaMAUS by Art Spiegelman
Before the Holocaust was turned into a child-like near-fable for all, and before it was the focus of superb history books such as this, it became a family saga of a father relating his experiences to a son, who then drew it all - featuring animals not humans - Maus. To celebrate the twenty-five years since then, we have this brilliant look back at the creation of an equally brilliant volume. Full review...
While the Women are Sleeping by Javier Marias
The first thing the trivially minded will note is that this is not the complete edition of While the Women are Sleeping, for not all the stories in the original Spanish volume are here. You might think that's because some have been hived off for a future 'best of' compilation. But if this isn't the best of Javier Marias, then I don't know what is. Full review...
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
At the heart of the very black comedy that is Catch 22 is Captain Yossarian, a World War II American bombardier, who wants to survive the war. Flying repeated combat missions is undermining his sanity, and surely a mad man should be grounded? But if he asks to be grounded, he demonstrates an absolutely sane concern for his own safety. If he is sane, he can't be grounded. This, his doctor tells him, is catch 22. Full review...
Falling Sideways by Thomas E Kennedy
Kennedy, although a New Yorker, has lived in Copenhagen for over twenty years so he'll have a good feel for the European slant on the novel, I would think. It is one of four called the Copenhagen Quartet. The top brass, the movers and the shakers at the 'Tank' are introduced to the reader one by one and have a whole chapter devoted to their individual lives, both professional and private. So we get a very good idea indeed of their homes, their neighbourhoods, their families and perhaps more importantly, their thoughts on the Tank and of their colleagues. Full review...
Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru
Quite literally at the heart of Hari Kunzru's latest novel stands not a person, but strange geographical feature in the California desert - three large rocks known as 'The Pinnacles'. If you've ever looked at a feature of the landscape and wonder what it has meant to those who have gone before, then you will find a similar stance here. Kunzru's episodic narrative takes in various points in time from 1775 to 2009 all of which centre around this rock structure which has had different meanings for different generations. There are echoes of the past in each new version, but no more than that. Full review...
The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman
Set in the last desperate days before the Roman siege on Masada (70CE), the lives of four women collide and merge. They are Yael, the daughter of a Sicarii assassin; Revka, the wife of a gentle baker who witnessed her daughters' rape and murder; Aziza, raised as a boy with the skills of a great warrior and Shirah, born in Alexandria to a mother well versed in ancient magic. All four have crossed the heartless desert on separate journeys to arrive at the last outpost against the Roman Legion, where 900 Jews held out for many, many months. Here they have little power and less hope, but each refuses to be a victim. All are harbouring deep secrets about their pasts, as they become the Masada's dovekeepers. With supplies dwindling and certain death drawing near, their uneasy bonds to each other strengthen as their truths are unveiled. They find an uneasy comfort that becomes true loyalty and empowerment. While few in their company survive to recount the tale, their story has lived on to haunt the deepest of memories. Full review...
The Wine of Solitude by Irene Nemirovsky
Helene adores her father but hates her mother, who neglects her and sees her as nothing more than an inconvenience. She grows up with the realisation that the only way that her mother can hurt her is to sack her French governess – the only person who has ever tried to give Helene a stable upbringing. The winds of war blow them all from a fictional Kiev, to a harsh St Petersburg and on to a snowy Finland to end up – finally – in France at the end of the First World War. Helene's father has made a lot of money from mining in Siberia but whilst the family might have money – ridiculous amounts of it – they have nothing else. Full review...