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{{newreview
|author=Robert Goolrick
|title=Heading Out to Wonderful
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Charlie Beale returned from the war in Europe and 1948 found him in Brownsburg, Virginia. He'd been driving around looking for somewhere to settle and all he had with him were two suitcases. One contained an excellent set of butchers' knives - and the other was full of money. Brownsburg seemed like a fine place to stay and before long he had a job with Will Haislett and the Haislett family became ''his'' family. He'd never hankered after children but their five-year-old son, Sam found a place in his heart. Life might have been good if it had continued in this vein, but Charlie Beale met Sylvan Glass.s
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091953677</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|summary=Eleanor Henderson's debut novel ''Ten Thousand Saints'' is set in late 1980s Vermont and, more memorably, New York. Opening in 1987 we discover in the second sentence that one of the two boys hiding under the stands to the Vermont school football field on match day will die that night. It's a powerful opening. From then on, the book deals first with Teddy's death and then with the life he has left behind in the form of his friend Jude, Jude's sort of step sister Eliza and Teddy's older brother Johnny. It's a world of broken homes and the trinity of sex and drugs and rock and roll, or more specifically punk. Henderson is particularly good at evoking the underground scene in New York at the time before the unlikely combination of AIDS and mayoral intervention combined to clean up the city.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780872194</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Michele Roberts
|title=Ignorance
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=
Michèle Roberts's ''Ignorance'' is a beautifully written, lyrical story about life in wartime France. Narrated mainly by two characters, Jeanne and Marie-Angèle, it jumps back and forward in time and is an enthralling mixture of guilt, faith, and survival. The two girls could not be more different. Marie-Angèle is the grocer's daughter while Jeanne is the daughter of a Jewish mother who washes clothes for a living. The two girls together go to the village convent for their education but come from different ends of the social spectrum. When the German occupation arrives, the two girls' experiences are very different but both are 'ignorant' of each others plight and their judgements are repeatedly shown to be wide of the mark. In fact the book could just as well have been titled 'Judgement'. Just when you think you know one through the eyes of the other, you get the opposite view of things.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408831155</amazonuk>
}}