Newest Literary Fiction Reviews
The Best Book in the World by Peter Stjernstrom and Rod Bradbury (translator)
Titus Jensen may not have written many great novels for a while (if ever) but his festival readings of others' works are renowned. Why, his rendition of The Diseases of the Swedish Monarchs from Gustavas Vasa to Gustav V has been compared favourably to his offerings from Handbook for Volvo 245. However, one drunken night he and romantic poet Eddie X agree that their fame on the festival circuit would be insignificant by comparison if they could write the best book in the world; a combination of all genres, appealing to all tastes and making all the best seller categories. They start work on it the next day but, rather than collaborate, each wants the lone glory. The race (or should that be battle?) to the publishing date is on! Full review...
Betrayal by Adriaan van Dis
Dutchman Mulder renews his acquaintance with his old friend Donald as he returns to South Africa, a land he knew well in the days of apartheid. Life may have moved on and apartheid ceased but some things have worsened. Have Mulder and Donald made any difference at all? As they recall their shadier youth, they have one more chance to struggle for someone's freedom against all odds and a violent society. Full review...
Her Privates We by Frederic Manning
Ernest Hemingway called Frederic Manning's Her Privates We 'The finest and noblest book of men in war' he had ever read. But Hemingway wasn't a very trustworthy man, so we tend to defer judgement. He is, however, useful for contrast. Hemingway's tales of war (such as A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls) usually involve macho misfits and trite love stories, feats of derring-do and filmic dialogue; all the things, in fact, that have no place in Manning's First World War novel. Why is this? Well, by the time Hemingway started driving a Red Cross ambulance on the Italian front (1918), Manning's service was already over. Nevertheless, unlike the illustrious (and self-mythologising) Hemingway, Manning spent his war deep in the trenches of the Somme, mixing it with the proletarian soldiery. As such, Her Privates We is a brutal novel concerning the 'subterranean, furtive, twilight life' of the average Tommy, a work of startling power, and one that completely eclipses the war novels of the romantic Hemingway. Full review...
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Ruth finds a 'Hello Kitty' bag washed up on the shore of Whaletown, the small Canadian island that she and her husband Oliver call home. As Ruth opens it and begins reading the diary safely protected inside, she learns about Nao, a teenager in Japan. Through her writing Nao becomes real and the tales of her varied life, struggles at school and fascinating relatives compels Ruth to search for her, or at least to discover her fate. Full review...
A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks
Geoffrey swaps a career as a public school master for an existence as an English officer behind German lines during WWII, an experience that will take a lifetime to expunge. Billy is a child sent to the workhouse to give his family a chance of survival. Elena has to come to terms with an adopted brother, Jeanne the French nursemaid lives in the shadow of a one-off encounter and Jack? He bears the indelible heart print of a girl who travels with a guitar. Five lives, five stories, one human, emotional thread. Full review...
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw
China is a booming economy for people in a position to take advantage; people like Gary the pop star who once won a talent show, Yinghui the lingerie magnate or her childhood friend and property developer Justin who feels the weight of his family's expectations. Then there's Phoebe, moving to Shanghai from the country on a promise and a belief that to attract success one must act as if one already has it. Life will bring them into each other's orbit but it won't leave any of them the same as when they started. Full review...
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
Subhash and Udayan Mitra are brothers growing up in an India growing into its post-independence status. Subhash goes along with Udayan's ideas but it's Udayan who's the radical, fighting against the injustices of an elitism that remains once the British have left India. Eventually they go their separate ways, one studying abroad to avoid conflict and the other becoming more deeply embroiled. Life can't go on like this forever and it doesn't but the reverberations seem to, affecting generation after generation as Subhash realises that the search for peace isn't always an external thing. Full review...
TransAtlantic by Colum McCann
In 1845 ex-slave, black American Frederick Douglass visits Ireland for a lecture tour about freedom and emancipation only to discover he's not preaching to the converted after all. In 1919 Alcock and Brown climb into a rickety aircraft to fly the Atlantic and land in Limerick. In 1994 Senator George Mitchell also travels to Ireland watched by a world that's about to see a miracle of negotiation. Meanwhile through it all Lily and her descendants are also there, not only watching history but living it on both sides of the Atlantic. Full review...
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries is set in the New Zealand gold rush of the late 1860s. It's a story about greed, power, gold, dreams, opium, secrets, betrayal and identity, but most of all, it's a celebration of the art of story telling, both in terms of Catton's book and the stories her characters have to tell. It's the kind of book that is perfect escapism and which wraps you up in its world. If you like big, chunky books that you can get lost in for hours, then this is one for you. Full review...
Four New Words for Love by Michael Cannon
Christopher meets Gina on Waterloo Bridge. He is newly widowed, she is newly homeless; he's an elderly Londoner, she's a young Glaswegian. It is a defining event in both their lives, but that only becomes clear in the future. Of pressing concern in the present is the rather rude policeman looking to move Gina on. The situation is nearing crisis. Sensing her desperation, Christopher impulsively asks her to come home with him, a proposal she tentatively accepts. Yet it is this one benevolent act that gives birth to an odd and platonic friendship, a relationship based on silences and lacunas, and one which Michael Cannon's fourth novel, Four New Words for Love, looks to delicately unravel. Full review...
The Marrying of Chani Kaufman by Eve Harris
After waiting till all her elder sisters' weddings were done and dusted in true ultra-orthodox Jewish style, it's now 19-year-old Chani's turn. She's only met Baruch, her fiancé, four times and he hasn't even seen her elbows but the match is made and the day eventually arrives. Baruch secretly studies forbidden gentile literature and Chani has an inquisitive streak often perceived as rebellious so God knows what the future holds. Perhaps they should take the Rabbi's marriage as an example? Or perhaps not… Full review...
Unexploded by Alison MacLeod
It's 1940 and Britain lives in fear of a Nazi invasion that could happen any day. In case the worst happens, Evelyn's husband Geoffrey has buried a little something for her and their young son Philip in the garden. He tells her the tin contains a bit of money and his favourite photo of them. As she digs it up from impulse rather than necessity, she discovers that there's no photo but what there is instead makes Evelyn doubt that she knows the man she married. The events that follow make Evelyn realise that indeed she doesn't. Meanwhile the war continues and a German does invade their lives, but not in the way that either of them could envisage. Full review...
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
Fridrik, Agnes and Sigridur are accused of murdering two men one Icelandic night in 1829 before setting fire to their home. Now Agnes awaits execution, imprisoned in the farm of a lowly local family who, rumour has it, wouldn't be too great a loss if the prisoner becomes dangerous. Margrit Jonsdottir (the farmer's wife) doesn't feel threatened and sets the shocked, malnourished Agnes to work. Gradually Agnes reveals the events of that night to Margrit and Toti, a young priest. Her version seems to be a little different from what everyone else concluded, predictably… Or perhaps not so predictably. Full review...
Harvest by Jim Crace
As harvest comes in, a village finds itself under threat. Invaded by a series of unfamiliar visitors, it will find itself utterly transformed over a short but apocalyptic seven days. We watch through the eyes of Walter Thirsk as three vagabonds escaping the enclosure of their fields are blamed for the trangressions of others, as the chartmaker Mr Quill enumerates the common land, and as Master Kent's benevolent rule is overtaken by a new owner, who comes with enforcers in the name of profit, progress and enterprise - or sheep farming as Walter quickly realises. Full review...
The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
Back in 1974 six teenagers met at summer camp and did all those things which you get to do when your parents are not around to stop you. They smoked pot, drank vodka and Tangs - and talked way into the night about anything and everything. Plays were put on, animations were perfected, but most importantly friendships were made that would last for years - for some it would be a lifetime. Back in 1974, as Nixon left the White House under a particularly heavy cloud, 'The Interestings', as one of their number called them, knew that they could achieve anything they set their minds to. For three summers they returned to Spirit-in-the-Woods and then they faced the real world. Full review...
Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson
In the late nineteen eighties sixteen year old Marina is a border at Combe school, destined - as she and all about her know - for Cambridge and the medical profession. After her first term she's wonders if she's made a mistake as it's definitely not like it was at Ealing Girls. There, a girl whose mother is emotionally fragile doesn't stand out, even if the mother gets to sleep on the sofa in her in-laws' flat because their son - her husband - upped and left her and their daughter. You would still fit in even if the family you're living with is Hungarian and hasn't entirely left the ways of the old country behind. At Combe there's too much about Marina that she could be mocked for - or could get her a cruel nickname. Marina simply doesn't fit in, but the family have sacrificed everything so that she can go there. Full review...
1Q84: The Complete Trilogy by Haruki Murakami
The 1Q84 trilogy is, without doubt, an impressive book. In many ways, the trilogy almost has to be read in this way as the three component books make little sense on their own. The first book in the series in particular is almost completely baffling if taken in isolation. It does, though, demand a degree of dedication, and if the prospect of a 1300 page novel in which not a huge amount happens in terms of plot and in which there is a significant level of repetition leaves you cold, then this might not be the best entry point into the wonderful world of Haruki Murakami. As often with Murakami though, it's possible to read this book at a number of levels. On the surface it's a love story set in a slightly fantastical setting with a little bit of crime thrown in. At a deeper level, he explores the thin lines between imagination and reality, life and death and what you might call yin and yang. It's a novel where balance and vacuums play a big part. It seems counter-intuitive to call a book of this magnitude 'delicate', but that's just how the story appears. Full review...
A Kind of Eden by Amanda Smyth
Martin Rawlinson has escaped from the cold dreary English weather to the exotic heat and exotic women of Trinidad. He might have a wife and a daughter back home, but home is a long way away and here is the young and beautiful Safiya. She's a journalist and could easily have just dismissed him as some sad old white guy, but somehow she didn't. Somehow they talked, and walked, and she showed him the real Trinidad and he fell in love with her, and with her home. Full review...
A Marker to Measure Drift by Alexander Maksik
Jacqueline roams the beaches of the Greek islands offering massages for money to ward off starvation. It helps but hunger is always with her, lurking alongside the memory of a former life in Liberia and the mind's ear voice of her mother. Jacqueline is at least alive and existing, but at what cost? Full review...
Familiar by J Robert Lennon
Is there a greater change in the life of a middle-aged woman than the death of her teenage son? Elisa might have thought not, having been forced to bury fifteen year old Silas, and try and move on with her husband Derek and the year-older son, Sam. But a greater change occurs on the way back from her annual, solo pilgrimage to his grave – something very weird happens to the universe. She pops from one car to another, from under a cloudless sky to a slightly greyer one – and from her self as Elisa to a world where people call her Lisa, where she is plumper, in a different job, stiil married to Derek in the same home – but still the mother of two young men… Full review...
The Sorrow of Angels by Jon Kalman Stefansson
Our decidedly unheroic main character has been at the café for three weeks now, so we are following on very closely from Heaven and Hell. After the tragedy and soul-searching of that first book, he seems settled in the ridiculous family that has formed around him there, finding employment, enjoying the literature, yet being very intrigued by the female body. The man who is still young enough to be known only as the boy might have latched on to stability for once, and replaced the family and best friend he had lost. But everything is restless in this environment, and once again he might just be tempted to go on a journey, with another male companion, despite the harshness of the surrounds. Full review...
Heaven and Hell by Jon Kalman Stefansson
Iceland, a hundred years ago. From a place that is the very definition of rural and remote, a small fishing boat leaves for four hours' hard row to a profitable bank. It carries six men on the way out, and five on the way back. The deceased is the best friend – or perhaps only friend – of the main character, who is still young enough to merely be known as boy. When he returns to port he enters an almost Camus-like semi-existence, wondering just how much life is an answer, and for what, after the tragedy he has witnessed. Full review...
The Son by Philipp Meyer
Philipp Meyer's second novel, The Son, is an epic, multi-generational saga of Texas life. Tracing the McCullough family from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present day, Meyer joins those writing today's masterpieces of American 'dirty realism': Ron Rash, David Vann, Richard Ford and especially Cormac McCarthy. Like McCarthy's Blood Meridian, The Son is a gory Western that transcends a simplistic cowboys-versus-Indians dichotomy to draw broader conclusions about the universality of violence in a nihilistic world. Full review...
The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan
'My father still lives back the road past the weir in the cottage I was reared in. I go there every day to see is he dead and every day he lets me down. He hasn't yet missed a day of letting me down.'
This is how we meet Bobby - Bobby Mahon, as we'll learn - and he's brutally honest about his feelings for his father, who has deliberately drunk away the farm he inherited from his father. But Frank Mahon isn't Bobby's only, or even main, problem. He's been earning big money as Pokey Burke's foreman but the financial crash has hit and Pokey has done a runner. An investment in a fake island off Dubai finished him and now he's disappeared. On the estate of forty houses he was building, just two are occupied and the rutted roads are nothing more than a racetrack for the joyriders. Full review...
The Gallery of Vanished Husbands by Natasha Solomons
On her thirtieth birthday Juliet Montague went out to buy a fridge for the princely sum of twenty-one guineas. She'd saved hard for it - and her parents had given her the final few pounds - but then Juliet did something impulsive. Instead of buying a fridge she commissioned a portrait of herself and so began her involvement in the post-war art scene. Juliet wasn't - by any stretch of the imagination - an artist, but she had a startling ability to spot a good picture. It was simply something which she knew, much as she had known for certain that her husband had left for good on the day he didn't return home as expected. Full review...
Indiscretion by Charles Dubow
Charles Dubow's debut novel promises to be a modern day Great Gatsby. It too is set amongst the rich and famous outside New York, it too is narrated by a character seemingly on the outside, Maddy's childhood friend Walter. Full review...
Unfaithfully Yours by Nigel Williams
When Nigel Williams first really burst on to the best-seller list, a couple of decades ago, it was with a book set in Wimbledon that really quite tickled a younger me – and my mother. But then he produced two more in the same series, and we soon decided he was a bit of a one-trick pony, and could never be sure how much of the trilogy we'd read, or be too eager to read more. Flash forward, and Williams has certainly branched out – his setting this time is Putney. Wimbledon Common is now Putney Heath, and so on. But here he provides an epistolatory novel – and if there's one kind of novel to make me prick up my ears it is one built from letters. It is the blatant two-and-fro timing of the narrative, and the succinctness that characters are formed with, that strike me as obvious benefits of such a book – and Unfaithfully Yours has those and many more. Full review...
Russian Stories by Francesc Seres
This brilliant and varied collection of short stories is the product of a current academic interest in cross-cultural translation. Francisco Guillen Serés is a Catalan professor of Art History from Aragon. A Russophile, he has travelled widely to collect stories from those writing during the past hundred years of Russian history. These have been translated into Catalan and then into English. These unusual and delightful stories, some twenty one of them written by five writers read fluently and engagingly. They form an informative tapestry of Soviet and post-Soviet life, moving back in time with the older, earlier writers like Bergchenko, who died in the siege of Stalingrad, at the end. Ranging over mythic and symbolic tales to realistic portrayals of personal relationships; love trysts in St Petersburg, ferocious bears in the deep heart of the Taiga to the perils of becoming lost in continuous orbit in space. All aspects are impressively recounted. Full review...
The Parrots by Filippo Bologna
When confronted with the topic of parrots, most people would describe them as tamed tropical birds that are taught to repeat simple phrases, having no particular intelligence to engender an originality of their own. Filippo Bologna has not in fact written a book about birds, but about writers - in fact, three writers. Just as the Neo-Pagans have a liking of the Triple Goddesses of The Maiden, The Mother and The Crone, our three writers are similarly split into The Beginner, The Writer, and The Master. All three of these novelists are battling it out for The Prize, a prestigious award that would revitalise the career of The Master, legitimize the efforts of The Beginner and assure The Writer a place in the annals of history. The setting of Rome is utilised to provide both a stunning backdrop and one that is sympathetic to the mood of our characters. The stories of our three protagonists are interwoven in a delightfully clear fashion; Bologna's prose is delicate and descriptive, but not at the sacrifice of pacing. The stage is set; the characters have learned their lines. There is just one problem... out of the three writers, none of them deserves to win The Prize. Full review...
