==General fiction==
__NOTOC__
{{newreview
|author=Christine Dwyer Hickey
|title=Last Train From Liguria
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The heroine in this novel is Bella. She's a rather unassuming young woman who has had a rather unassuming childhood - save for the fact that she was motherless at an early age and her relationship with the father is a little strained, to say the least. Bella needs to breathe. So she leaves the drizzle of England for the blue skies and heat of Italy. Her father has propelled her into ''gentle'' employment there. She's tentative about the whole thing but warms to it by degrees.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1843549883</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Eagleman
|summary=The central theme in this book is sex - and lots of it. We're introduced to a group of mainly twentysomethings and thirtysomethings. Men and women. Most of them are attractive and hold down glamorous jobs and careers. All in rude health, with wonderful social lives and trendy homes. They all appear, on the surface, to be a bunch of shiny, happy people. What on earth could be missing?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905614721</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Anthony Quinn
|title=The Rescue Man
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=This love affair tale with the city of Liverpool is mostly told through the eyes of architect Tom Baines. With the Second World War looming, Baines is desperately working on a book to capture the memory of buildings that are at risk, and appears a man more in love with the past and solid, cold structures than mankind.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099531933</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Paul Murray
|title=Skippy Dies
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Life in Seabrook College is a mess. Some of the staff are young enough to remember their own school days there, but many are certainly too old for that. A lot of the boys are victims of ragging and bullying for being too chunky, or too smart - but some are so chunky and smart there's a certain kudos to them. The female of the species is a thing only spied from their own school next door, and only met by selling them ritalin as a weight-control pill, or meeting them at the very rare combined school disco.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241141826</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sapphire
|title=Precious
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Precious Jones is a sixteen year old black girl from Harlem – well she's never actually been out of Harlem – and when we meet her she's pregnant by her own father for the second time. Her first child was a girl and she was born with Down's Syndrome. With unconscious irony Precious calls her ''Little Mongo'' and leaves her to live with her grandmother. When her second pregnancy becomes obvious she's expelled from school and joins an alternative education programme. Precious really wants to learn and the book is the story of her journey from illiteracy to maturity.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548720</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ru Freeman
|title=A Disobedient Girl
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=
''A Disobedient Girl'' follows two women struggling to retain control of their lives in the face of servitude. Latha is a servant girl to the affluent Vithanage family, whose daughter, Thara, is Latha's age. As children, the girls are the best of friends, but they are destined to be separated by class, which is made painfully obvious when boys come into the picture. Meanwhile, Biso serves a cruel and drunken husband who beats her and terrorises her children, one of whom is another man's love child. Biso's husband murdered her lover in a hateful rage when he uncovered her affair and she realises that she must escape his house if she and her children are to live. Latha too seeks escape, but she finds it in the arms of Thara's boyfriend and this sets off a chain of events that will echo far into her future.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670917958</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Panos Karnezis
|title=The Convent
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Our Lady of Mercy is a small convent on the Spanish sierra made up of a handful of devoted nuns who live their lives simply, carrying out their daily duties like clockwork. However things change when a suitcase containing a newborn baby is left mysteriously outside the convent doors. The Mother Superior, Sister Maria Ines, believes the baby to be a miracle and plans to keep him in the convent, but the other sisters do not agree. During the events that follow the true characters of the nuns inside the convent are revealed and the peace that the sisters enjoy is stripped away to show the tension that has been bubbling away under the surface.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224079344</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Glenn Cooper
|title=Book of Souls
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Area 51 is not what you think it is. No - all that UFO kerfuffle is a smokescreen for the powers that be to hide even better the most unusual manuscript known to (a handful of) mankind - the most unearthly, singular, and unsettling book, in thousands and thousands of volumes. All except one, which is about to come under the hammer in a London auction house. Our hero Will Piper must go very reluctantly on the trail of it and its secrets, a trail which will force him and others to become entangled with shadowy agents, who in turn know the very day of all their enemy's deaths.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099534479</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=P Robert Smith
|title=Sunday Daffodil and Other Happy Endings
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=''Sunday Daffodil and Other Happy Endings'' is the sort of book you finish with the feeling that you've just read something with a million different meanings. Don't be surprised if you feel like you should start the whole thing again but with your brain more fully engaged, and perhaps that's the whole point.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099535238</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Isabel Ashdown
|title=Glasshopper
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Thirteen-year-old Jake is just like any other boy on the cusp of puberty: new music and Saturday jobs are at the top of his agenda, while girls are the strange exotic creatures that must be looked at but not touched (particularly his pretty Classics teacher). But behind closed doors, Jake struggles to cope with his mother's ongoing battle with depression and alcoholism. His father moved out a few weeks ago. So has his older brother, Matthew. That leaves Jake as the man of the house: the one who must remember to get him and little brother, Andy, up in time for school in the morning; the one making toast for dinner; and the one keeping a watchful eye over his mother to make sure she doesn't get herself into any serious trouble.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0954930975</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Keith Colquhoun
|title=Beyond Reason
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=''Beyond Reason'' is a deceptively complex novel - a black comedy about the conflicts within religion. The main focus of the plot, Edward Bunyan, is a radical within the Church of England who is trying to take religion in a new (and rather amusing) direction in order to get the public interested in it again. Bunyan claims to have a direct link with God as well as spiritual powers, such as being able to levitate and read minds, which leave his colleague and old college friend, Reverend Ralph 'Marmy' Marmaduke, unsure about both his friendship with Bunyan and his own religious beliefs.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904529348</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jonathan Buckley
|title=Contact
|rating=2.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Dominic Pattison's life began to veer off course badly on a Tuesday in May. It's a fairly banal Tuesday. The kind of Tuesday that Dominic probably experiences quite frequently. He feels the need to tell us about it.
In detail.
And, sadly, not in a particularly engaging style.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956003869</amazonuk>
}}
