|summary=Helene adores her father but hates her mother, who neglects her and sees her as nothing more than an inconvenience. She grows up with the realisation that the only way that her mother can hurt her is to sack her French governess – the only person who has ever tried to give Helene a stable upbringing. The winds of war blow them all from a fictional Kiev, to a harsh St Petersburg and on to a snowy Finland to end up – finally – in France at the end of the First World War. Helene's father has made a lot of money from mining in Siberia but whilst the family might have money – ridiculous amounts of it – they have nothing else.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701185570</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Per Petterson
|title=It's Fine By Me
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=We see Audun start his new school in Oslo. The building, the classrooms, the teachers, even the other pupils all seem to scare him. He refuses to conform and insists on wearing his sunglasses - indoors. It's not an affectation though, apparently he has some facial scarring around his eyes.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846553695</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John O'Connell
|title=The Baskerville Legacy: A Novel
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=
1900, and a man on a ship coming back from the Boer War to edit the Daily Express meets one of his heroes in the form of Arthur Conan Doyle. With similar experiences and interests yet different enough to bounce off each other they take up the idea of collaborating on a plot. When they do fix on time to do so, it leads to literary prospects, which lead to a week's research together on Dartmoor, which leads to ''The Hound of the Baskervilles''. But perhaps in a way that only one of them intended.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907595465</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kenzaburo Oe
|title=The Silent Cry
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Featuring rioting and looting of corporate supermarkets and anger against immigrants, this is a timely re-issue of Nobel Prize for Literature winner’s Kenzaburo Óe’s 1967 classic ''The Silent Cry'' which was cited by the Nobel committee as his key work.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846688078</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Hector Tobar
|title=The Barbarian Nurseries
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The Torres-Thompsons seem to have it all. A beautiful home, two healthy boys and enough money not to have to worry about practical matters. The cherry on the cake is their employment of their maid Araceli. She works like a trouper and keeps the large house spick and span. She is lucky enough to have her own private quarters (if small and rather basic) in the back garden area. She knows within herself that she should be grateful, should really be jumping up and down with glee and thanking her lucky stars to have this job. She's managed to escape the poverty and violence of Mexico after all. But as she goes about her daily housekeeping duties she feels like some alien living on another plant. Planet America. Araceli is young, single and childless and at times she misses the hustle and bustle of her old life. And here Tobar gives an excellent account of the affluent part of LA where the Torres-Thompson's live - ' ... in this house on a hill high above the ocean, on a cul-de-sac absent of pedestrians or playing children, absent of traffic ...'
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444726757</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alistair MacLeod
|title=No Great Mischief
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=No Great Mischief is a novel which captures the essence of belonging and the need to be a part of one's history. This is the story of a small part of Clann Calum Ruadh, the people of Red Calum, emigrants to Canada. It sweeps from contemporary Toronto to evoke Cape Breton in the fifties and back to the clearances of Scottish history. MacLeod tells the tale with the dignity and stature of an ancient myth, holding up to our gaze what it means to be a part of a race, a family and a place.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099283921</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=William Giraldi
|title=Busy Monsters
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=
Charles Homar loves his Gillian. He's proved it to us, if not to her, by going after her possessive, jealous state trooper of an ex with the intent to kill - if only ended up rescuing a cat instead. But lo and behold, she's declared she's off to discover the real love of her life - the giant squid. Failing to stop this, Charlie spends too long with a Nessie obsessive, then goes on a hunt of his own - for Bigfoot, all the while, chapter by chapter, sending his narrative of the same to a magazine as essays for one of those autobiographical, frivolous columns.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0393079627</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Colson Whitehead
|title=Zone One
|rating=4
|genre=Horror
|summary=To start, for once, with the book's style - this has probably the least dialogue of any book you'll read this year. There are some comments from characters, but they're few and far between - as are those characters that can actually speak. For we're in a devastated New York, later this century, and our three main protagonists are cleaning up after a worldwide plague of zombies. The active ones have mostly been gunned down by the military, but there are a few still locked away in hidden corners - as well as inactive ones, called stragglers, who seem stuck in one instant, whether finishing off their last office job for the millionth time, or like a ghost haunting a place relevant to them.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846555981</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Michela Murgia and Silvester Mazzarella (Translator)
|title=Accabadora
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This beautiful, slim volume has won no less than six literary prizes. Murgia paints an early and evocative picture of the young central character, Maria as she makes mud tarts. But this innocent activity is about to come to an abrupt halt. Her birth mother struggles to feed and clothe all her children (Maria is the fourth child and is really a nuisance) so when an opportunity arises which 'solves the problem of Maria' if you like, then she grabs it with both hands. Maria is quickly and rather unceremoniously adopted by an older woman who just happens to be a widow. She has no children of her own and seems to lead a rather lonely, insular life. She is old enough to be a grandmother, let alone a mother. Will she be able to cope with a noisy youngster under her roof? You wonder why she'd want to take in a raggedy child, or any child for that matter, in the first place.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857050451</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Khaled Hosseini
|title=The Kite Runner (Graphic Novel)
|rating=4
|genre=Graphic Novels
|summary=A confession. If there's one book I'm not likely to read, it's that which everyone else is reading. If it turns into a hugely popular film for all the left-wing chattering classes to rave over, then that's just more grist to my mill – I'll always have a chance to catch up on it later on, even if I never take that opportunity. I'm not alone in acting like this – see a friend and colleague's similar admission when reviewing [[White Teeth by Zadie Smith]]. But at least, through the medium of the graphic novel, the book reviewing gods have conspired to let me see just what I'm missing, with this adaptation, by Italian artists, of a hugely successful – and therefore delayable – novel.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408815257</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jaimy Gordon
|title=Lord of Misrule
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=West Virginia, 1970. We're at a rundown race track, of the dusty kind rundown horses and their rundown owner/trainers fetch up living in, with the occasional race to interrupt the boredom. Into things comes a young upstart hoping to surprise all with his four unknown quantities and make a packet before fleeing. His girlfriend is here too to help out, and naively eager for success and knowledge, but old hands like Medicine Ed have seen it all before. Also in the background are some small-time gangsters who are not too keen at for once not knowing who is doing what and how races are going to be run and won.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857386697</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Joan Leegant
|title=Wherever You Go
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Religion kicks off this book, even before the first page. The title is from a passage from the Book of Ruth. The only female central character, Yona is travelling from her home in America to visit her sister and large family. She's not really looking forward to it. She's nervous. The two sisters live very different lives and haven't seen each other for a decade. Leegant tells us all about the massive rift in their relationship.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0393339890</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Charles Frazier
|title=Nightwoods
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=If you have read Charles Frazier's 'Cold Mountain', or indeed seen the film, then you'll have a fair idea what to expect from his latest offering - 'Nightwoods'. As with 'Cold Mountain', the landscape of the Appalachians is the dominant character, this time set in the 1950s. He even manages to get his requisite bear into the story although thankfully it fares rather better than the unfortunate beast in his first book. The dark, oppressing majesty and beauty of the mountains and woods pervades the whole story.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444731246</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Shuichi Yoshida
|title=Villain
|rating=3.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Well, I suppose I'd better begin with the bad which was there were moments at the start of this novel when I thought I couldn't possibly read it right to the end. It's written in such a stilted, factual style with details about the road networks of the local area and exactly how much anyone pays for anything they eat or buy or rent! Faced, for example, with the paragraph ''cars setting out from Nagasaki that take the pass road to save money take the Nagasaki Expressway from Nagasaki to Omura, then to Higashi-Sonogi and Takeo, and get off at the Saga Yamato interchange. Intersecting this east-west Nagasaki Expressway at the interchange is Route 263'' I thought I'd never manage to read more than a couple of lines before falling asleep! Still, I persisted and actually, I'm glad I did.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099526654</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mike French
|title=The Ascent of Isaac Steward
|rating=3
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Isaac is married to Rebekah. They have sons, Esau and Jacob, naturally. There is a half-brother Ishmael and a back-story of marital betrayal and the out-casting of sons.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956881017</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=A Portsmouth
|title=The Beautiful Torment of a Dream
|rating=3
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This is a beautifully presented book with its enigmatic front cover and equally enigmatic title. After reading the blurb on the back cover I was left with a feeling of wishy-washiness however, as regards the storyline. Unfortunately, the contents confirmed this for me.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956493602</amazonuk>
}}