==Literary fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Barbara Kingsolver
|title=The Lacuna
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ten years ago, Barbara Kingsolver's [[The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver|Poisonwood Bible]] revealed the grim politics in the Congo. The Lacuna has a similarly political theme, this time turning her focus on Mexico and the USA in the 1940s and 1950s.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>057125263X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Eagleman
|summary=I would not normally start a review with the biography of the author, but The Unspoken Truth is presented as autobiographical fiction by a child of the Bloomsbury Group – in fact the subtitle is 'A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories'. The blurb on the inside cover even identifies which character is based on the author in each of the four stories, just in case we are not sure.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184353</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Amos Oz
|title=Rhyming Life and Death
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Rhyming Love and Death is a kind of philosophical love letter to literature, or perhaps more so to fiction. It is a book about how to write, about the compulsion to write, and about the strange world that the writer of fiction must live in.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099521024</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=Tom Wolfe
|title=The Bonfire of the Vanities
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In his own mind, bond trader Sherman McCoy is a 'Master of the Universe'. He has a pleasant wife, a beautiful mistress, and a sweet six year old daughter. Henry Lamb is a black student from the projects. Under normal circumstances, it's clear that McCoy's world and Lamb's world would never overlap. But when McCoy and his mistress Maria Ruskin end up lost in the Bronx, and an accident leads to Lamb being hit by McCoy's Mercedes, a chain of events start which will lead to his downfall.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548798</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kate Cole-Adams
|title=Walking to the Moon
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=We meet the main character Jessica, or Jess as she is usually called, deep in an emotional black hole. She can see no light at the end of the tunnel. And right from the start, right from page one, we have a sense of the beautiful and poetic language of Cole-Adams. 'Time and I have a new arrangement. We leave each other alone.' And indeed time is not important in this novel. We have all the time in the world would probably be the motto of the medical staff - if they had one.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849161348</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=Simon Robson
|title=Catch
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Catharine's husband Tom is away on business in Birmingham, and so Catharine awakes alone for the first time in their little cottage at the end of their lane. They moved there a few months previously, and since then Catharine has spent her days quietly awaiting her husband's return from work. She is sure that she will figure out, some day, what her purpose in life is. She thought it might be to have a baby, but they have been trying for some time and it hasn't happened as yet. Meanwhile she waits, and thinks, and waits. In the lounge stands her piano, a stark reminder of the life she didn't manage to realise because although she studied music she found, quite quickly, that in spite of being passionate she lacked any kind of talent for it whatsoever. So, on this day, alone at home, Catharine finds herself tormented by the piano's presence and over-thinking every second of the day. She worries away at who she is, and what her life is, as her loneliness and the day itself unravel around her.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224090232</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Joe Meno
|title=The Great Perhaps
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Jonathan Casper faints when he sees clouds. His wife Madeline worries about everything, not least the way the pigeons that she is studying are murdering each other. Their seventeen year old daughter Amelia wants to overthrow the evil empire of capitalism and is making her own bomb, while fourteen year old Thisbe is looking for God and praying to him. Jonathan's father, seventy six year old Henry, is planning his disappearance. Jonathan and Madeline may be on the verge of splitting up, to the dismay of both daughters.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330512471</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Elizabeth Kostova
|title=The Swan Thieves
|rating=2
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=1999 – A renowned painter, Robert Oliver, goes mad, attacking a painting with a knife. He's arrested, and sent to a psychiatrist who is also an artist. The psychiatrist, Andrew Marlowe, can't get his patient to talk to him, but tries to investigate what drove him to this by talking to his wife and his girlfriend, and reading some letters Oliver seems obsessed with.
1879 – Beatrice de Clerval, aspiring artist, corresponds with her uncle-by-marriage Olivier Vignot, a more experienced painter. Their letters will be found by Robert Oliver, 120 years later, and will lead to his loss of sanity.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847442404</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Atiq Rahimi
|title=The Patience Stone
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Set in Afghanistan, ''The Patience Stone'' is a partly allegorical tale of a Muslim wife tending to her comatose soldier husband who has been shot in the neck. As she cares for him, for the first time ever she is able to speak to him without fear of censorship and he becomes, for her, like the mythical Patience Stone to which you tell your troubles and when the stone finally bursts, you are free from your torments. But also this might mean the Apocalypse.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184167</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Joyce Carol Oates
|title=A Fair Maiden
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I've recently read the terrific short story collection ''The Female Of The Species'' also by Oates and couldn't wait to start her latest book. I felt sure that I was in for a literary treat - and I was. Firstly, the book itself, a hardback with a beautifully nostalgic cover is a book lover's delight.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847248586</amazonuk>
}}
