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==General fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Billy Hopkins
|title=Tommy's World
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Tommy Hopkins was born in October 1886 in Collyhurst, one of the poorer, inner-city suburbs of Manchester. His father had quite a good job and there wasn't a lot of money to spare but Tommy remembered the home as being filled with love and laughter. He was an only child but thought that he was spoilt in terms of affection rather than in the form of worldly goods. All that was to change when his father died of spinal meningitis and he and his mother had to move into cheaper lodgings. Even that tenuous security wasn't to last for long – his mother died of a heart attack in her thirties, leaving Tommy an orphan before he was eight years old.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755359585</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Diane Chamberlain
|summary=The close of the '60s, the dawn of the '70s. San Francisco. Some people say the most influential people are Nixon and his cronies. Some people say they're Charlie Manson and his cronies. Some people call the smog surrounding everyone in the Bay Area air pollution, others a drug haze. Doc, the sole proprietor of LSD Investigations, is approached by different people, requesting two jobs of him, which both point to the same bigwig property developer. One of these is from his ex, now with said mogul, another is from a man whose prime interest immediately dies. How will this escalate into a manic mystery, hitting on mysterious yachts taking odd journeys, missing people, Nixon, dead people coming back to life, unusual retreats, and a host more?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>022408948X</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Charlie Williams
|title=Stairway to Hell
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=This is looking like a bad night for Rick Suntan, club singer. He's merely trying to put some Doctor Who into his Cliff Richard renditions (don't ask), when he gets bottled off the stage. Oh, and sacked. Oh, and his girlfriend changes the locks on him. Oh, and he gets shot. From this mess of a life comes an even more unusual thread, courtesy of his small-scale manager. Is the latter, we feel, some Mephisto to Rick's Faust - or just a saddened alcoholic? Neither, in fact - he's a messenger, with the news that Rick is actually David Bowie's soul, inverted into the body of a nonentity. Courtesy of Jimmy Page.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184668689X</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Alex Kava
|title=Black Friday
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=There is no reason to be suspicious of the college kids wandering around ''Mall of America'' on the busiest shopping day of the year. They look just like everyone else. But in fact these kids are actually up to serious mischief: they think the jamming devices they are carrying in their identical red backpacks will disrupt the greedy capitalist stores' computer systems, causing delays and a big dip in sales. The truth is, if they had been aware that said identical red backpacks were actually stuffed with enough explosives to knock the Earth off its axis and that in fact, a remote control device would turn them each into suicide bombers, perhaps they would not have got out of bed that day?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0778303322</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Joseph Finder
|title=Vanished
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=In the wake of a ferocious attack, Lauren Heller finds herself in a hospital bed, groggy from 24 hours of oblivion. Her head is bandaged and throbbing and her husband, Roger, is not only missing – he has vanished without a trace.
 
Enter Roger's brother Nick Heller, the pre-eminent investigator at Stoddard Associates with a cv that includes a spell as ex-Army Special Forces. Nick is a man who does not take orders from anyone and a man for whom family is of the ultimate importance. As Stoddard's finest, most inventive and successful operator, Nick Heller is used to getting results but this time, the case is personal.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755342089</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Neil Forsyth
|title=Let Them Come Through
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Nick Santini spent most of his childhood conning the drunken patrons of his father's bar out of their beer money and spending it on cider. With patchy schooling, an abusive father and no real talents beyond his ability to lie, career choices for Nick were few and far between, so when a friend gives him some money to break free, Nick spends it on an office in Soviet Street, hires a secretary, and advertises his services as a medium.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846686989</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Henry Porter
|title=The Dying Light
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=We're a little way into the future: the Prime Minister followed two whom you might recognise. The first was so dangerously casual that members of cabinet only realised what decisions had been taken when they read the papers the next day. ''His'' successor was prone to childish tantrums. The Olympics are spoken of in the past tense and John Temple's government is well-established under his seemingly calm leadership. It hasn't been without its glitches though.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0752874845</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Sam Savage
|title=The Cry of the Sloth
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Meet Andrew Whittaker. In some untold time of recent American history, he is forced through a failed marriage and an artistic temperament at odds with so many other people, to let properties to tenants he does not like, for $120 a month. The lodgers might not like the state of the buildings - ceilings falling through and so on - but that's another matter. He would much prefer to be left alone in front of his little Olivetti typewriter and create art. He runs a literary journal, of a kind, called "Soap", which no-one likes, no-one reads (and often, with dodgy, cheap printing, no-one could physically read it anyway), and which makes him poorer in time, money and spirit.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0297856499</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Chris Cleave
|title=Incendiary
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=When the Book Reviewing Gods first suggested I re-read this book (the first time they have asked such a repeat of me) I felt like writing them a letter. But soon any draft I might have made would have referred not so much to the duplicated experience, but the joys of rediscovered depths, characters lost and found again, and a plot to be experienced once more.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340998482</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Patrick Neate
|title=Jerusalem
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=With cricket's so-called Barmy Army and their murderously boorish renditions of Jerusalem, the rise of the BNP and the renewed media focus on immigration, the question of British national identity has rarely been more in the spotlight. Patrick Neate's timely new novel Jerusalem, the third in a loosely fitting trilogy, tackles the spiky issues of identity, race and the impact of colonialism in this entertaining yet in some ways frustrating book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905490410</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Penelope Lively
|title=Family Album
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=''Family Album''is the sixteenth novel Penelope Lively has written for adults. As the title suggests, it is a series of snapshots, episodes from the life of an upper middle class family. Charles, the father, is a writer who, it seems, never wanted marriage and children and who spends the majority of his time hidden away in his study, working on his next book. His wife, Alison, was the original 1960s Earth Mother whose whole life revolved around having and bringing up children. The children have all, unfortunately for Alison, now grown up. And then there's Ingrid, the Scandinavian au pair, still there after all these years. One wonders why.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905490453</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Catherine Ryan Hyde
|title=When I Found You
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=''Lost and insecure, you found me, you found me...''
 
It's 1960, and on the morning when Nathan McCann sets off on a pre-dawn duck hunting trip, he hasn't the faintest inkling that the day will turn out to be anything other than ordinary. He just wants to enjoy being out in the crisp autumn air with Sadie, his loyal retriever, and maybe bring home a few birds for dinner. But this is no normal day, and before he even gets to the lake, Nathan's life changes forever with the discovery of a newborn baby, barely alive having been abandoned in the woods. A few days later as he reluctantly relinquishes control of the boy to its maternal grandmother, he asks the woman to promise him one thing: that at some point in the future, when she feels the time is right, she will facilitate a meeting between the two, finder and the found. Time passes and life moves on, but years later the two do cross paths again, with rather unexpected consequences.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>055277572X</amazonuk>
}}

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