'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Anne Tyler
|title=Noah's Compass
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=It's always a red letter day to sit down to an unread Anne Tyler. This is her eighteenth published novel. For any readers not already fans of her books, this American writer observes the ordinary in order to excel at 'making the familiar, strange'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099539586</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
|summary=After years of wondering if their twin were still alive, Romulus and Fabiola happen to catch sight of each other on the docks at Alexandria. Their meeting isn't to last long, as Fabiola is being rushed to safety by her lover, Brutus, one of Caesar's most trusted generals and Romulus has just been press-ganged into an army about to go into battle. However, this chance meeting gives them additional strength, which they are certainly going to need to survive the struggles ahead.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848090153</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nicholson Baker
|title=The Anthologist
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Readers who know of Nicholson Baker don't go to his work expecting convoluted plot, fast-paced action or non-stop drama. His novels at their best, dissect, in minute detail, the most intimate thoughts and daily doings, usually of a single character. They are revealing and surprising, and revel in language itself, like poetry. In other ways they are unlike poetry, which deals in suggestion and compression. And Baker's novels generally deal in the opposite.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847397824</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Malla Nunn
|title=Let the Dead Lie
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=In early June 1953 most of the world was waiting for the coronation of Princess Elizabeth, but in South Africa the rigid and rigorously-applied race laws have split the country. Those to whom the land once belonged are now part of an underclass with many living in gruelling poverty. Even some white people struggled to make a living and when ex-Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper came across the body of a white child in the Durban docks he has no idea where the tragedy will end. It's not long before he's the chief suspect for Jolly Marks' murder and two others as well.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330519778</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Laura Elliot
|title=Stolen Child
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The title of the book leaves us in no doubt as to what it's all about. It does exactly what it says on the tin. But those two, small words are wrapped up in plenty of emotions for the characters involved. In some ways, it's worse than a death. With death, there's closure but with a baby being stolen there's living hell. And, as you would expect, some characters cope with all of this better than others.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847561462</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alan Wright
|title=Act of Murder
|rating=4
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=In 1894 Wigan was having a feast of cultural entertainment. The Morgan-Drew players from London were presenting a celebrated Victorian melodrama, but nearby the Richard Throstle Magic Lantern Company was presenting a ghoulish extravaganza called ''Phantasmagoria''. They're at opposite ends of the cultural scale but the town was just recovering from the recent miners' strike and it seemed that happily there might be something for everyone. It wasn't to last though as the town is soon in turmoil after a gruesome murder. Detective Sergeant Samuel Slevin of the Wigan Borough Police is called in to investigate and soon discovers that much is not as it seems.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846971675</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Robert Masello
|title=Blood and Ice
|rating=4
|genre=Horror
|summary=Journalist Michael Wilde cannot pass the opportunity of spending some time at a research station in Antarctica. His girlfriend is in what could be a permanent coma following a trip that they both made together and he needs to get away. Expecting to see some amazing sights, he is not disappointed. What he was not expecting, however, was to find a block of ice during a diving expedition in which the bodies of a man a woman, perfectly preserved, were chained together. By their side were several bottles of what appeared to be wine. However, once the bodies are brought to the surface and defrost, strange things start to happen and before long, everyone at the research station is fighting for their lives. Will Michael ever manage to return home safely?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099523876</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=A L Kennedy
|title=What Becomes
|rating=4
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=You're three stories into this collection and two people have cut their hands open preparing food - a man with love drooping away from his marriage, making soup, and another, a greengrocer, preparing stock and thinking about his own relationship. But there is no pattern to that. Four stories in and there have been two bursts of non-sequitur comedy. Why your fruit might be ruined by stray fingers, and the thoughts of a woman in a flotation tank, remembering Doctor Who, locked parental doors - and the urban myths of gerbils. But there's still no pattern - and that's the point of these combined stories. Life and all of its emotions does not live to rule.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>009949406X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sharon Dogar
|title=Annexed
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=There's been a bit of a kerfuffle over ''Annexed'' - the story of Peter van Pels, who shared the Amsterdam annexe with Anne Frank during World War II, who fell in love with the teenaged diarist, and who perished in a Nazi death camp called Munthausen in 1945. Sharon Dogar has been accused of sexing it up, disrespecting the too-recently deceased, and thrusting twenty-first century sexualised mores into a time where this sort of thing just didn't go on. So, on the one hand, I was very keen to read it and see what I thought.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849391246</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Adam Thirlwell
|title=The Escape
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=When we first meet seventy-eight year-old Raphael Haffner, he is hiding in a spa hotel closet watching a twenty-something year-old yoga instructor (who knows he's there) having sex with her boyfriend (who doesn't). Haffner is a British, Jewish former banker who is staying at the spa in Central Europe while on a mission to reclaim his dead wife's villa that was confiscated by the Nazis in the war. Thirlwell's narrator, some fifty years younger than Haffner (ie the age of the author), describes the aging libertine Haffner as ''lustful, selfish, vain - an entirely commonplace man''. Charming.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099539837</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Adrian Hyland
|title=Gunshot Road (Emily Tempest)
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Straight away the humour is apparent in this book, mainly coming from the mouth of Emily Tempest. And we're also hurled into Aboriginal country with lots of unforgettable characters with equally unforgettable names. Hyland has a lovely, flowing style with a strong Australian flavour. Tempest has the unenviable job of trying to keep law and order. She's travelled the world and has now returned to her roots. She seems to have a bit of an advantage in that she's of mixed race, so can understand both white folks and black folks. She certainly has her work cut out. Most of the locals see her job as a joke, not to be taken too seriously, until someone dies in suspicious circumstances.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184916214X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alexander McCall Smith
|title=The Importance of Being Seven (44 Scotland Street)
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Evereyone's favourite, Bertie, is still struggling with his over-protective, over-zealous mother Irene. Poor Bertie. He still has yoga class, saxophone lessons, Italian lessons, and he longs to go away to Scout camp, but really doesn't want his mum to come along as a helper. And, as the title suggests, he is looking forward to being seven. His little brother, Ulysses, is getting bigger and has developed an interesting reaction to their mother, whilst Irene herself goes missing in a rather mysterious manner...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846971454</amazonuk>
}}