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{{newreview
|author=Sam Usher
|title=Sun
|rating=4
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=It was the hottest day of the year. Hotter, if such a thing is possible, than broccoli soup, the Atacama Desert and the surface of the sun. Grandad decreed that it was the perfect day for an adventure and began packing the picnic basket with all sorts of useful things: water, biscuits, a telescope, camera, sun protection, fruit, sandwiches, toys and lots, lots more. How are a boy and his grandad to know what they're going to need? Grandad was the navigator and the boy was the lookout.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>178370795X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Stephen Moss
|summary= If you find the techniques used by Rembrandt and Vermeer fascinating, ''The Last Painting of Sara de Vos'' provides a masterclass in how to work up a canvas in stages. Framing the novel as the story of a seventeenth century Dutch painting, Dominic Smith vividly sketches out the main contours of his characters and the three time periods they inhabit before we are even one fifth of the way through. Sara is one of the few women artists of the period and her painting is of children skating on a frozen canal, her now dead daughter its central figure. The painting has been in Marty de Groot's family since before Isaac Newton was born and he is the patent lawyer from whom it is stolen in 1950s Manhattan. Ellie Shipley forged a copy of the painting in her postgraduate student years and in 2000 finds herself at the centre of a gathering storm which threatens to destroy her reputation as one of Sydney's foremost fine art academics. Satisfying though those first descriptions are, we then understand these are merely the author's equivalent of the delicate chalk lines used by painters of the Dutch Golden Age to mark out the composition which will follow.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>192526680X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Deirdre Osborne (Editor)
|title=The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010)
|rating=5
|genre=Reference
|summary=This literary companion offers fifteen essays addressing the contribution of black and Asian authors to the British literary canon since 1945. It covers not just fiction, but also poetry, plays and performance works. It sits as a kind of joyful cuckoo in the nest, interrupting the usual narratives of literary waves and movements in Britain that take little notice of any perspective other than the dominant white - and posh! - direction of travel. It's a disparate, varied collection of essays, covering spoken word performance poetry, black British urban fiction, LGBTQ writing, liberationist writing and much more. I was really happy to see children's authors such as Malorie Blackman, Jamila Gavin and Catherine Johnson discussed and respected.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1316504808</amazonuk>
}}