==Literary fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Howard Jacobson
|title=The Finkler Question
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Julian Treslove is a middle aged former BBC radio producer now working as a professional look alike but quite who he looks like varies. Although never married, he has fathered two sons, neither of whom he sees regularly. Dismissed from the BBC for being too morbid on his late night Radio 3 programme, he is given to depressing levels of self-analysis in his small flat that's not quite in Hampstead. What Treslove lacks is a sense of belonging and this, he notes his Jewish friends have in spades, particularly his old school friend and rival, the best-selling philosopher and TV personality, Sam Finkler. Treslove, by contrast, always feels on the outside of life.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408808870</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alison Wong
|summary=This literary novel is a slow burner. But the very first page gives an insight into the beautiful language used throughout such as 'Medical people rarely used adjectives. They don't need to.' And later on there's another lovely sentence loaded with meaning and originality - 'Blood is a terrible gossip, it tells everything, as any laboratory technician knows.' The opening chapter is located in a consulting room where a rather tense conversation is taking place. The answer is extremely important to one man.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906694508</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Maureen Gibbon
|title=Thief
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It’s summer, and school teacher Suzanne is renting a cabin by a lake. Spending her days reading and swimming, she also finds time to engage in some old fashioned letter writing with a stranger who responded to a personal ad she placed. He’s currently an inmate at the state penitentiary, but Suzanne’s not one to judge, and agrees to give their correspondence a shot. Then she finds out what he’s in for – and it’s not pretty. Breville is a convicted thief and rapist, and Suzanne herself was raped as a teenager, by a friend’s brother. That should be the end of it: any sensible person would cut off all communication and turn their back on the situation. But Suzanne is different and though she’s acknowledges that it might not be the healthiest of relationships, she maintains the back and forth with Breville.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848871821</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Julia Franck
|title=The Blind Side of the Heart
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=When I read ''the international bestseller'' on the front cover, as in this novel, my expectations are raised a notch or two. So, would this book meet those expectations? Franck gives the reader a short prologue and we see Helene, the main character of the novel, living in her middle-years. We know she has a husband who is carrying out some very important and crucial work for his country; his beloved Germany. The book is set in 1945 and Germany is in chaos. And Helen's young son has seen sights no 7 year old should witness. It's the stuff of nightmares. Their lives are also in chaos not to mention extreme danger and as a single parent who's at her wit's end she makes a monumental decision.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099524236</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Irene Nemirovsky
|title=Jezebel
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Gladys Eysenach stands in the dock accused of murdering her young lover. She apparently took a gun from her handbag and shot him in the early hours of Christmas Day in her own home. What happened is clear – Gladys makes no attempt to deny it – but why it happened is less obvious, and Gladys doesn't seem inclined to offer much in the way of explanation. But gradually, oh so teasingly, we find out what really happened and why.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099520389</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Louise Doughty
|title=Whatever You Love
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Two police officers knock on Laura's door. They break the news to her that her 9 year old daughter Betty has been run over and killed. Betty's friend Willow is in hospital. Immediately, I was drawn into this story of a mother's worst nightmare coming true.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571254756</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=DO Dodd
|title=Jew
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=A man regains consciousness to find himself stifled. Pushing and pulling at the weight on top of him, he gradually realises the horrific truth. He's in a mass grave and he's covered with bodies. He has no memory of who he is or how he came to be there. He struggles out. He finds a uniform and he puts it on. He takes a gun and he buckles on its holster. He finds a man and a woman, naked on a bed. He shoots the man. He gets into a car and he drives into town, where he's greeted as the man in charge.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1842433512</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Maria Edgeworth
|title=Helen
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Sweet-tempered Helen Stanley has been left penniless and homeless after her uncle's death. Soon her best friend Cecilia writes to encourage Helen to come and live with her and her new husband, General Clarendon at Clarendon Park. Helen soon finds herself settled in to Clarendon Park and reacquaints herself with Cecilia and more importantly with Cecilia's mother, Lady Davenant, who considers Helen a daughter, and even prefers her to Cecilia.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956003893</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Zachary Mason
|title=The Lost Books of the Odyssey
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Zachary Mason suggests that Homer's ''Odyssey'' was merely one particular ordering of the events of Odysseus' return to Ithaca after the Trojan War. 'Echoes of other Odysseys', he suggests exist, including a forty four-episode variation in a 'pre-Ptolomeic papyrus excavated from the desiccated rubbish mounds of Oxyrhnchus' and this is what is 'translated' here. So we are presented with these forty four often very short stories that reconstruct elements of the Odyssey in a kind of alternate reality, asking 'what if it were slightly different', and what emerges is a non-linear, mosaic of stories. If Homer had decided to present his book in DVD format, these would be in the 'extras' of alternative 'takes' on things. The result is like a jazz riff on the original stories.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224090224</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Joseph Smith
|title=Taurus
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=As the bull goes from paddock to stall in the searing heat of the farm, he feels strangely disembodied - and yet all he feels is his body: his huge bulk; the angles at which he must hold up his heavy head to see what he needs to see; the strange latency that fills him. He watches the skittish grey horse, transfixed and yet repulsed by its grace and fluidity. He observes his captors, the girl and boy siblings and their father, and he allows their goadings to gradually wake him from stuporous apathy.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224089978</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Juan Gabriel Vasquez
|title=The Secret History of Costaguana
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In 1904 Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad wrote his novel about a self-publicising Italian expatriate by the name of ''Nostromo'', set in the fictitious South American republic of Costaguana. Columbian writer, Juan Gabriel Vásquez imagines that the fictitious José Altamirano has assisted Conrad in his research by telling him his own story, only to find that the British novelist has subsequently inexcusably omitted him from his book. Now, he is seeking to set the record straight by telling the reader, who he imagines in the role of a jury, as well as someone named Eloísa (who we later find out about) the same story to pass judgement on if this was fair.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408800187</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kenzaburo Oe
|title=The Changeling
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The novel starts at the end. Therefore we know that one of the two principal characters, namely Goro, appears to have committed suicide. The question is why. And the whole novel is an attempt to provide that elusive answer. Goro was an extremely successful film director of international repute. He was based in his native Japan but travelled extensively with his work. And you have to ask yourself why would a man such as this decide to end his life?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1843547341</amazonuk>
}}
