==Literary fiction==
__NOTOC__
{{newreview
|author=Amy Waldman
|title=The Submission
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The front cover of the book that I received for review is subtle (as befitting the sensitive contents) and I can see the two twin towers (as was) depicted in grey in the title word submission. The back cover announces that this novel will be ''Published in time for the 10th anniversary of 9/11.'' No pressure then. I open the book with a certain amount of trepidation, I have to admit and feel slightly as if I'm about to tread on (literary) eggshells. Heavens - what if I don't like the book?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0434019321</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|summary=''Cold Light'' is the story of three teenage girls who become involved in a predatory adult world. As the story opens we're looking back on what happened from a decade later and we know that one of the girls, Chloë, died in a Valentine's Day suicide pact. The town council has finally decided on a memorial to Chloë – it's to be a summerhouse at the side of the pond where she drowned, although it's difficult to understand quite why anyone would want to sit there. The ground-breaking ceremony is being televised when it becomes obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. But Lola, our narrator, knows that they've found a body. She also knows who it is.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444721445</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alain Mabanckou
|title=Broken Glass
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In the Congolese bar of Credit Gone West, the owner Stubborn Snail wants a record of the lives of those who drink there. The man he chooses to write it? Disgraced schoolteacher Broken Glass, who fills up a notebook with the stories of the bar’s patrons – or at least their versions of those tales.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184668675X</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=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>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Lauren Liebenberg
|title=The West Rand Jive Cats Boxing Club
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Best friends Tommy and Chris are 12 years old. It is 1958 and they are growing up in a small mining town near Johannesburg, South Africa. They are learning to box and to dance to rock and roll music.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844084892</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=James Frey
|title=The Final Testament of the Holy Bible
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The Rabbis say that all the signs are there from the birth of Ben Zion Avrohom that he is the Messiah. That's a lot of anyone to cope with and, like Jesus, there's much of Ben's early life that is untold here. When he is involved in an horrific accident on a building site that he miraculously survives, albeit with terrible scaring, the prophecies appear to be true. He develops a form of epilepsy during which he appears to speak to God. He is fluent in ancient languages despite never learning them, knows all the Holy books by heart and yet distains all forms of religion, instead spreading his message of love to all who meet him in modern day New York.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848543174</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mirza Waheed
|title=The Collaborator
|rating=3
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The Collaborator of the title is our narrator, a sensitive bookish young man. He is the son of the headman of a small village in a side valley of the Kashmir. The heritage of the people is that of nomads. The village has been settled for less than a generation. Everything they have has been built by the sheer hard graft of the people themselves… including the recently completed mosque.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918954</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alan Warner
|title=The Stars in the Bright Sky
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In 1999, Alan Warner introduced us to a wonderful set of characters in 'The Sopranos' when a school choir from a backwater town in Scotland went on a trip to the big city. Much debauchery ensued. 'The Stars in the Bright Sky' once again reunites most of the original gang and there is no need to have read the first book to pick up on the diverse characters. Now though, they've grown up (or at least got older!) and are gathered at Gatwick Airport to set off on a girls' holiday.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>009946182X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Elia Barcelo and David Frye (Translator)
|title=The Goldsmith's Secret
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary='The Goldsmith's Secret' has a wonderfully romantic beginning; alone on a snowy night in New York, the craftsman is puzzling over how to tell his story, and how to separate reality from the overwhelming memories in his mind.
The romance continues as the story unfolds, with the goldsmith taking us back to the town and time of his youth, and the chance meeting that led him to find the love of his life. Telling the tale of romance from many perspectives, we learn the town of Villasanta has labelled his love, the mysterious Celia, as 'a marked woman' and the 'black widow'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857050052</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Peter Salmon
|title=The Coffee Story
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Teddy Everett, head of Everett and Sons Coffee is dying, slowly and painfully, of cancer. The Coffee Story is his story, told in his own (very descriptive) words. It goes from (although not necessarily in this order) his childhood in England, his adolescence in Ethiopia and then his life in the USA and Cuba. It's his time in Cuba which has put him where he is now – in prison. For his crimes he would normally have suffered the death penalty, but his sentence was commuted because of his illness and now the doctors try to save him. Or perhaps it's that they're trying to persuade Teddy that they're trying to save him – whether he wants to be saved or not.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444724703</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Andrew Miller
|title=Pure
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I've read Miller's ''Oxygen'' and ''The Optimists'' so I was looking forward to reading this novel. The story opens in the opulence of the Palace of Versailles. We are given vivid descriptions of both the scale of the palace and its grandeur. Jean-Baptiste Baratte, the young engineer, seems completely over-awed by the whole occasion. Even although he's not entirely sure what is expected of him in Paris, he accepts. He needs to eat, after all.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444724258</amazonuk>
}}