'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Elyne Mitchell
|title=The Silver Brumby
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=When Bel Bel's foal was born she called him Thowra, which meant 'wind'. Like her he was a creamy, silver brumby. They're the wild horses of Southern Australia and Bel Bel knew that her foal would not have an easy life. As a stallion he would have to fight to keep his own herd of mares and foals but his main enemy would be man. The brumbies were regularly captured and herded away but the creamy, silver brumbies were the biggest prizes of all. 'The Silver Brumby' is Thowra's story as he matures from young foal to adult stallion.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007425201</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kit Berry
|summary=Liz Stephens accompanies a couple of friends to a GI social occasion. She's content and already 'spoken for' so she wouldn't normally be here where essentially most people are foot-loose and fancy-free. But she's promised her good friend Betty to come along. As the evening progresses with lots of singing and dancing, things become both interesting and just a little dangerous. But for whom? Who are we talking about here? Liz bumps into one of the many GIs present. His name's Morgan. An instant spark is there - or so someone believes. But they both end the evening on a less-than-satisfactory note. Liz returns to her life with her soon-to-be-fiance and Morgan goes off to war.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847562418</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Roger Smith
|title=Mixed Blood
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=I reviewed Smith's [[Wake Up Dead by Roger Smith|Wake Up Dead]] and after reading the blurb on the back cover, this book would appear to be in a similar style. We meet Jack, his heavily-pregnant wife Susan and their young son as they relax in their smart suburban home. Smith paints a lovely picture: the setting sun, drinks on the balcony and views to die for (no pun intended here) over Table Mountain. What's not to like? But this idyll is about to take a nasty and unexpected turn for the worse as a couple of no-users, high on drugs, take their chance and break in to the Burns' home. And all this action is seen by a security guard nearby.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687586</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sam Baker
|title=To My Best Friends
|rating=4
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=Nicci Morrison had always been the first of the four friends to do everything: fall in love, marry, have children (and twins at that) and develop a successful business. Then, at thirty six, she was the first to die – of cancer. Nicci was an organiser and she couldn't let the opportunity pass to dress her friends for her funeral and to bequeath into their care her most treasured possessions. You're probably thinking in terms of jewellery, or something similar, but Nicci left her friends her garden, her three-year-old daughters and her husband. I mean – just how much more difficult than that can you get?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007305540</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jussi Adler-Olsen
|title=Mercy
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=The Prologue intends to grab the reader's attention right from the first word. I liked that. A girl, or perhaps a woman (we don't know yet) is imprisoned somewhere, barely kept alive in some sort of dark, airless and smelly makeshift prison - but why? And by whom exactly? The story opens in 2007 and we learn that Copenhagen detective Carl is recovering from a near-death experience in the line of police duty. His colleagues were not so lucky. So we see a broken and rather vulnerable man trying to claw his way back to a normal life. Guilt, revenge, anger are perhaps some of the emotions coursing through his veins. His senior colleagues are at a loss as to what to do with him - he's a good copper, after all. The solution is that a fancy new title is invented along with a fancy new department, all for Carl. But will he cope?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141399961</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Hilary Spurling
|title=Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Peal Buck, the 5th of 7 children, was born in 1892 to American missionary parents working in China, where she was then brought up. She learned Chinese before she learned English, and only realised that she was considered a foreigner when anti foreigner riots known to as the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 forced the family out of her childhood home. Later she became famous for her novels and short stories set in China, especially The Good Earth. She won America's most famous literary prize, the Pulitzer, in 1932, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Yet her work is mostly forgotten in the US and Europe, and in the country she loved, her books were banned by Mao's regime after they came to power in 1949.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1861978529</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Steve Hely
|title=How I Became a Famous Novelist
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=With an uncompromising title like 'How I Became a Famous Novelist', this clearly isn't intended to be a subtle book. So I can hardly complain when a cynical look at the writing industry swings raw punches in every direction. It just isn't my sort of humour, but equally, if you rave about 'The Office' you will likely enjoy this book far more than I have done.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849015724</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Bezmozgis
|title=The Free World
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It's the late 1970's and a family of Latvian Jews, the Krasnanskys, are emigrating from the Soviet Union. They're made to stay in Rome whilst they apply to live in the States and they find themselves trapped in a strange migratory limbo, belonging nowhere and tied to no-one but each other.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670920053</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Paul Bress
|title=The Dysfunctional Family
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Societies are constantly changing and sociology students are presented with theories to help them to comprehend what's happening. Here we have a different approach: a family has been paid a small amount of money to write diaries which they would keep secret from other members of the family and which would be available for publication. This book is the result and we follow Phil and Sue Brown and their two sons, Jack and Theo though a traumatic period which lasts for just over two months. The entries in the diaries are made daily and we read what has happened to each member of the 'dysfunctional family'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>B0048ELN32</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Philip Caveney
|title=Night on Terror Island
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Kip is a real film buff, and because his dad runs the local independent cinema he gets to see all the latest films as a reward for making the popcorn and generally helping out each evening. But this happy state cannot continue for much longer: the big multiplexes on the edge of town are taking all their clients, and the Paramount Picture Palace may soon have to close for good. Things start to look up when the eccentric Mr Lazarus arrives, but Kip is suspicious: the new projectionist may have a gift for raising the quality of the films he shows to enviable standards, but he knows far more than he should about everyone who works at the cinema. And he talks about stars, films and cinemas of the past as if he had actually been there.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849392706</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Hilary Freeman
|title=Piccadilly Love Stories: Don't Ask
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Lily thinks of herself as being about a 6 out of 10 on the scale of 'hideous gargoyle to Brad Pitt' and she knows her boyfriend Jack is an 8. So why would he want to be with her? Despite him seeming to be the perfect boy she's convinced there's something in his past and only gets more suspicious when he keeps clamming up about it. So when she finds his ex-girlfriend on a social networking site it seems like a great idea to create a fake profile and make friends with her. Is it worth telling this many lies just to find the truth?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1853409979</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jennifer Egan
|title=A Visit From the Goon Squad
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Apparently there's a saying that 'time's a goon' - no, I'd never heard of it and to be fair, neither had the first character to whom it is said in Jennifer Egan's 'A Visit from the Goon Squad', but together with a pair of epigraphs from Proust, it's clear that time is very definitely what is being explored here. Egan's subject area is all loosely based around the music world. Her central character, if one can be said to exist, is Bennie Salazar, a music mogul who we encounter both directly and tangentially at various stages of his up and down career. ''Goon Squad'' is also the title of an Elvis Costello track, continuing the music theme as Egan uses the music industry as a lens to examine time.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849010331</amazonuk>
}}