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Newest General Fiction Reviews (view source)
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===[[One Clear Ice-Cold January Morning at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century by Roland Schimmelpfennig and Jamie Bulloch (translator)]]===
[[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction
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First, forgive me if I don't refer to this book with its full title often. It's pointedly precise, accurate, and rather ungainly – when in fact the book it describes has only the former two attributes in any quantity. What happens in January is that a wild wolf walks across the frozen river separating Poland and eastern Germany. Which means that, when the book starts properly, mid-February, it has had time to get a lot closer to Berlin – within 80 kilometres, to be precise, for that is the road marker where one of our main characters sees it. He is trying to get back to work in Berlin for the first time in a month, and to be with his girlfriend, not knowing she has had an infidelity while he was away. Also fancying the bright lights and big city are a teenaged pair of love-birds, the boy and girl next door to each other in an eastern village, who flee an unhappy lot on the off-chance of a better one. You just know there is a chance that these characters – human and lupine alike – are sucked into one combined narrative, but you won't know quite what that will entail…
[[One Clear Ice-Cold January Morning at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century by Roland Schimmelpfennig and Jamie Bulloch (translator)|Full Review]]
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|summary=If you've never read an Alexander McCall Smith novel, but have always thought you might like to try, one day then this might be the book to start with. Rather than face the daunting task of leaping into one of his now very long-running series, this is a standalone novel, and it gives a good flavour of AMS's style, the way he can write to evoke a feeling of time and place, and the warm optimism underlying his words that is so very reassuring and comforting to read. It calls itself 'a wartime romance', which it is, and yet it is much more than that besides. Focussing mainly on Val, a young woman working as a Land Girl, we see her falling in love with an American pilot, Mike Rogers. Thanks to a sheepdog on Val's farm (the Peter Woodhouse from the title) their lives become entwined with that of a German soldier, and the book shows us a variety of friendships as they grow and develop over the years.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846974097</amazonuk>
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