==Literary fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Elizabeth Baines
|title=Too Many Magpies
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Becoming a mother brings a whole new world of fear into your life. Suddenly you see the danger in every situation, and fear and trepidation can be become your constant companions. In this novella, we meet a young mother who is married to a logical scientist. They attempt to control their children's futures on a scientific basis, growing their own fruit and vegetables, giving their children nothing sugary, eating no eggs for a whole year until any adverse affects from them were disproved. But after meeting with an enigmatic stranger our young mother begins to struggle as he introduces ideas of freedom into her world. She begins an affair with him, begins to let things slip at home and with the children, yet finds she is still continuously haunted by the sense of an ever-present danger.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844717216</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|summary=After eternities in the ever beautiful and kind spirits world, Azaro the spirit child decides to be born, and to be born for good - not wander between the world of spirits and the living, as he used to, not pain his parents by the sudden deaths time after time, but to break an oath to his fellow spirits and settle. His parents are happy, he is content and curious, but the spirit world does not let Azaro go easily. Azaro is haunted by ghosts, while his parents are haunted by poverty, and both struggle for survival and relative security.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099535122</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Roma Tearne
|title=Brixton Beach
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=When the terrorist bombs bring London to a standstill in July 2005, a doctor heads out in frantic search. He can't find her, and he knows she can't call him.
This image opens ''Brixton Beach'' and hangs over it as a threat and a hope.
London's woes are immediately left hanging as we're transported back thirty years to an island still called Ceylon, where a young half-Tamil, half-Singhalese girl called Alice is learning to ride a bicycle.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007301545</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=James Palumbo
|title=Tomas
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Tomas has had enough of the unthinking excess and greed of modern society. He despises the men declaring themselves film producers to impress women wheeling around their breasts on trolleys. So he kills them. The chief of police doesn't pay much attention until he makes his favourite hotel disappear, obviously.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0704371588</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Peter Ferry
|title=None of This Ever Really Happened
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Peter Ferry is driving home one evening when he sees a woman driving erratically. He follows her cautiously, captivated by her beauty and concerned for her safety, and then at a stop light is torn as to whether to get out and try to stop her driving any further. Before he can do anything, however, her car has lurched forward and crashes into a tree, killing her. This is the story that Peter, an English teacher, tells his pupils. Yet is it a story, or did it really happen? Or did some of it happen and some of it he made up? And is the Peter Ferry of the story, a teacher and travel writer, the same as Peter Ferry, the author of the book who is also, funnily enough, a teacher and travel writer?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099516489</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Aleksandar Hemon
|title=Love and Obstacles
|rating=4
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=We start with the young narrator away from home, and in Africa, due to his diplomat father. He's left behind home, a potential girlfriend, and more, but finds company with an older, chancer character and his junkie girlfriend, and their pot, drinks and 70s rock. Closer to his roots, but still a young man abroad, the second story sees him travelling across his homeland on an errand - to deliver payment for the biggest chest freezer his father could find. But poems, losing his virginity, keeping his money, and various other fantasies might just put a cooler on that unusual task...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330464434</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Anne Berry
|title=The Hungry Ghosts
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''All children have nightmares. The fisherman's daughter I used to be was no exception.'' Lin Shui, the hungry ghost of the title, knows what she is talking about. When she latches on to her 'host' Alice Safford, the disturbed 12 year old daughter of an important government official in Hong Kong, she brings her nothing but trouble. For poor Alice, Lin Shui is just the beginning, and she struggles through the tragedies of her life acquiring ghosts as she goes until she too wonders whether this life is worth living.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007303408</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Shahriar Mandanipour
|title=Censoring an Iranian Love Story
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This is no ordinary love story. How could it be, with the protagonists Sara and Dara living in contemporary Iran where two unmarried, unrelated members of the opposite sex meeting one another without a chaperon is considered a deadly sin by society, the family and the law? Dara falls in love with Sara from afar, and conducts his initial courtship of her through books – he writes to her by placing dots under letters in The Blind Owl, a book he has overheard her requesting at the library. Such ingenuity continues when they actually meet and speak, a crime punishable by imprisonment by the patrols of the Campaign Against Social Corruption. So Dara takes the unusual step of suggesting the A & E Department of the hospital as their meeting place, somewhere no-one would question their conversation. This plan backfires, but that does not denigrate its cunning. That their story exists at all is a testament to the strength and endurance of love to overcome obstacles, and it is a charming and at times moving story.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>140870160X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Irène Némirovsky
|title=All Our Worldly Goods
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Pierre Hardelot and Agnes Florent were in love and had been since they were children, but there were problems - not the least of which was that Pierre was engaged to marry Simone Renaudin. Simone was an appropriate match for the grandson of a mill owner and member of the bourgeoisie, but Agnes was descended from brewers and lower middle class. In northern France, just before the outbreak of the First World War, such distinctions mattered. But Pierre and Agnes meet alone and rather than ruin her reputation Pierre proposes. In doing so he alienates his grandfather and the wealthy Renaudins. Pierre and Agnes' marriage and its consequences would reverberate for decades.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099520443</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Glen David Gold
|title=Sunnyside
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=On November 12th 1916 Charlie Chaplin died – seen by lighthouse keeper Leland Wheeler as his dinghy sinks beneath the waters off Northern California. Wheeler can't quite believe his eyes, but he's sure that it was the Little Tramp in full costume, but all that's left is the battered black derby. On the same day the townspeople of Beaumont, Texas are waiting for the arrival of a train which will bring Charlie Chaplin to the town, but when it arrives there's no Charlie – only Hugo Black, an unprepossessing railway engineer. The disappointed townsfolk respond by setting fire to the train and leaving Black unconscious.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340995637</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Matthew Pearl
|title=The Last Dickens
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=In Bengal, India on a June day in 1870 two young mounted policemen are hot on the trail of dacoit suspected of the recent daylight robbery of a train of bullock carts. The chests taken from the carts were full of Opium.
Meanwhile a few thousand miles away in Boston, USA, a young office boy is chased through the docks by a dark stranger of ''Hindoo'' appearance wielding a walking stick topped by a ferociously fanged idol.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184655084X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Salman Rushdie
|title=Midnight's Children
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=At midnight on August 15th 1947, Saleem Sinai is born. At midnight on August 15th 1947, so is an independent India. As Saleem grows up, so does India. The life of a nation, of one of its inhabitants, and all of midnight's children are inextricably linked.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099535092</amazonuk>
}}
