==General fiction==
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{newreview
|author=Guy Fraser
|title=Avenging the Dead
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=It's 1863 and the Superintendent covering the inner city area of Glasgow has his hands full. First off an alarming forgery scandal has just been discovered and no sooner has he drawn breath than one, two and counting suspicious deaths occur. Instinctively, I want to say that it's all good, clean fun. Because it is. The language Fraser uses is very much of that era which lends the book a particular old-fashioned and rather twee, charm. It's all over the book in spades. On almost every page. Let me give you just one endearing example of the flavour of the book 'None of Mrs Maitland's four regulars at her superior guest house for single gentlemen would even dream of taking another's seat ...'
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0709090684</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jodi Compton
|summary=You will have to go a long way to find a more magical and quirky novella than ‘Light Boxes’. Set in a far off land, as all good fairy stories should be, the balloon-loving residents suffer a ban on all forms of flight. But the culprit is not some unpronounceable Icelandic volcano, but rather February. And this February - who takes both the form of a person and a season - has lasted for more than three hundred days. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he has also started making children disappear. One man, Thaddeus Lowe, is determined to do something about it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241144957</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tom Shone
|title=In The Rooms
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The book jacket for this novel is of New York by night, a cityscape par excellence. It also boasts Toby Young's comment as ''laugh-out-loud funny.'' I have a lot of time for Toby Young. I find him witty and entertaining. But I usually approach claims such as this with a healthy dose of 'we'll-wait-and-see' scepticism. However, he was right. And I am truly impressed with Shone's ability to make me laugh out loud and at the very beginning of the novel too. A very good sign of delights to come, I thought.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099534061</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Rachel DeWoskin
|title=Repeat After Me
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=September 1989: It is a few months after the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China. Aysha is teaching English at a private language school in New York City. She makes friends with some of her students. Da Ge is angry and disruptive yet attractive and interesting at the same time, and they quickly become involved, although his interest in her is not as romantic as, perhaps, she would like it to be. He asks her to marry him so he can stay in the country. Aysha agrees, although there is still a lot she does not know about the mysterious, unstable Da Ge.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0715638998</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jonathan Coe
|title=The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Meet Maxwell Sim. Actually, perhaps I should rephrase that so that it doesn't sound like an imperative instruction - for if you do meet him, you might not like the experience. An ex-salesman, he's now in after sales (ie he's stuck on a customer returns counter in a department store); however he is completely awful with regards to other people. His wife has run off with their daughter, all his few friends have forsaken him (and his Facebook wall). We start the book with him trying to patch things up with his father, who's safely in Australia. He finds all those who know of him are already aware he's depressed. Those who don't know him can find him painfully shy, or able to talk away their will to live, gabbling on and on about Watford. But a lot is about to change. He's about to be combined with some people excited about green toothbrushes.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670917389</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Amanda Sington-Williams
|title=The Eloquence of Desire
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The novel starts in the post-war austerity years in England and centres around a middle-class, traditional family unit. Sington-Williams gives the reader a detailed description of that period - the bland food, the monotony of commuting to London (some things don't change) and of course, the rain. George, his wife Dorothy and their teenage daughter Susan don't really talk to each other. They tend to skirt round issues and walk on eggshells. Appearances are everything. So a suitably fabricated story is told to their small, family circle of George's company move. George has no choice in the matter. So he does what he always has done up till now, he puts a brave face on for the world and grins and bears it. It's a huge change in their domestic situation. Uprooted to a strange, foreign, tropical country they've only glimpsed in National Geographic.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907230114</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nikki Dudley
|title=Ellipsis
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Both the title and book cover are slick and glossy. Can the contents live up to this positive image? Straight away the reader is drawn into Daniel's life ... but the clock is ticking. He will soon be spoken about in the past tense. He dies and leaves many, many questions that his immediate family struggle to answer. But as the story progresses we discover that secrets have been kept for a long time. Why? Too disturbing to reveal?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907230106</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Austin Wright
|title=Tony and Susan
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Edward Sheffield hadn't exactly been Susan's childhood sweetheart, but after a family tragedy left him homeless he came to live with Susan and her parents for a year so that he could finish school. Susan didn't particularly want him there but accepted that it was the right thing to do. Years later they met at university when Edward was studying law and after a short relationship they married. The marriage wasn't entirely successful; Edward gave up law to become a writer, relying on Susan's teaching income to support them, but whilst he spent a month away in a remote cabin 'to find himself' Susan found Arnold instead. Many years – and three children – later Susan receives a manuscript from Edward. She was, he said, always his best critic and he would like her opinion.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848870205</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jess Walter
|title=The Financial Lives of the Poets
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=There is a certain type of modern fiction I just cannot get along with. It's a narrative that features a concentration on a main character that goes through his plot with unhappiness, making wrong decisions perhaps, getting crapped on by life, and discussing his woes with the reader. I get to the end and think nothing of it, until I read the blurb, where I find the book was supposed to be hilariously funny, the character an insincere cypher for our lives and times, and the whole thing an ironic masterpiece - I should have been disbelieving, disagreeing and dis-everything else with the hapless hero. I hate such books - I always only see the sincerity in the narrative, and never the comedy. Thankfully, such is never the case with this book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141049138</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Carlos Ruiz Zafon
|title=The Prince of Mist
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=During World War Two, Max's father decides to move the whole family to a seaside retreat he knows of - a wooden house far away from the city he's grown his family up in. Nobody seems too keen on the idea, neither of Max's sisters, his mother, nor he - and Max is gifted a pocket watch by his loving, talented mechanic cum engineer cum watchmaker of a father, enscribed as "Max's Time Machine". But the house they move to, and its surroundings, are full of more successful time machines - a stash of early home videos, a public clock that runs backwards, a sunken shipwreck, a yard full of statues of a stone circus... And let's not forget the mysterious, spider-eating cat that joins in with proceedings.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0297856421</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Danielle Trussoni
|title=Angelology
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The Nephilim have lived among the human race since before the days of the Great Flood. Horrific creatures, the hybrid children of humans and angels, their strength, beauty and cruelty are unmatched, and they have infiltrated human society completely. For centuries, a secret society, students in a branch of theology known as 'Angelology', have studied the ways of the heavens and the Nephilim, and waged a secret war against them – a war that has spanned every continent. But the Nephilim grow weak, their blood contaminated by the blood of their human ancestors.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0718155580</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Joanne Harris
|title=Blueeyedboy
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=BB - or ''blueyedboy'' in his online persona - is a middle-aged man who lives with his mother in the Yorkshire town of Malbry. He has a dead-end job in a hospital although his mother would have it that he's of some importance. BB has a way of escaping his rather boring life; he writes murderous fantasies on his website in company with other misfits, some of whom he knows in real life. It might be fiction on ''badguysrock'' but he and Albertine share a troubled history and BB's manipulation of friends and enemies causes his past to unravel.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0385609507</amazonuk>
}}
