==General fiction==
__NOTOC__
{{newreview
|author=Philip Wilding
|title=Cross Country Murder Song
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The novel opens with the (unnamed) central character in a therapy session in downtown New York. The air is charged and tension is present, big-time. This is one troubled human being. And of course, childhood issues and experiences are dominant in this question and answer session. We soon find out that this individual has secrets in his basement. It all becomes too much, he packs a bag and hits the road and so the story starts proper.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099539934</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Asa Jones
|summary=The book opens with Carrie Kent. Successful television presenter and mother of teenager, Max. Ms Kent immediately comes across as hard-headed, business-like, aloof and rather distant but that's the whole point, of course. Very good at her day job. But as a mother? Her television show is a reality programme, dealing with well, basically the dregs of society: single, young mums, drug addicts etc. Carrie knows that these people keep her in designer shoes and bags but she keeps them at arm's length. She wouldn't want to catch something. Carrie sails through her life with a self-satisfied smile on her face. You can just tell.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755349873</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Brooke Morgan
|title=Trapped
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Ellie Walters is 36, divorced and keen to start a new life away from her cheating and control-freak ex-husband. Fulfilling a life-long dream, she decides to take her 15-year-old son, Tim, to live with her in the small town of Bourne. As she soon becomes good friends with her next-door neighbour, Louisa Amory, Ellie finally feels she is making a life of her own. She begins to feel a sense of freedom and independence but for how long? When strange events start occurring Ellie is forced to face some painful and guilty memories connected to a tragic accident nineteen years ago; memories which she would rather forget. It is clear that someone has discovered her well-kept secret and is reluctant to let her forget about it. As a campaign of terror against Ellie unfolds she must come to terms with what happened all those years ago and try to discover who her tormentor is. Vulnerable and afraid, she relies on Louisa's friendship to help her through the ordeal. However, when a misunderstanding causes a rift between Ellie and Louisa's son, Joe, the women's friendship is threatened. Alone and afraid, she suddenly finds herself trapped in a nightmare from which she must do all she can to escape.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099536285</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Margaret Atwood
|title=The Handmaid's Tale
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=In the near-future USA that they call Gilead, society has changed. For the worse, of course. The population is dying out, and people who are capable of breeding the next generation are given a cherished status of Handmaid - gifted to any male of enough esteem, called a Commander, who balances the household with his wife and what is practically a walking womb. Other women get drudge work, or run horrid finishing schools for the Handmaids, or are packed off to what are reported to be polluted hellholes abroad, for laborious work for life. Men are restricted too - Handmaids are off-limits to everybody but their Commander, and those households are patrolled carefully by other eunuch types. It's up to our nameless narrator and main character, however, to show us just how cherished the status of Handmaid feels.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099511665</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Carmine Abate
|title=The Homecoming Party
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Every year young Marco eagerly awaits his father's return, when he can for a few months spend precious time with him before he leaves again. Marco's father Tullio is a migrant worker forced through poverty to work in Northern France doing hard manual work. In this way he manages to earn enough to help his family have a decent living. The family, his eldest daughter Elise now at college, Marco his only son and a younger sister known only as 'la piccola' along with his wife and elderly mother live in Calabria, an economically depressed area of southern Italy. They belong to the minority Arberesh community, descended from Albanian immigrants settling small villages in the mountainous regions of La Sila. Just as the Calabrian people are looked down upon by other Italians the Arberesh people are even looked down upon by the Calabrians.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1933372834</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chris Kuzneski
|title=The Secret Crown
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The riddle is the whole crux of the book. So we're taken right back, albeit briefly, to Bavaria in the year 1886, via the Prologue. So, the scene is now set, foul play is most definitely afoot and lots of questions should pop into the reader's mind. Such as who? Why? etc. So far, so good, I thought. We then fast-forward straight to present-day Germany and due to an unfortunate hunting accident, something which was a secret, is no longer.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241952123</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Padgett Powell
|title=The Interrogative Mood
|rating=2.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=So, what is a novel? Does it need a plot, climax and resolution? Characters who grow? A setting? Themes which explore the human condition? And must it entertain? Padgett Powell challenges our perceptions of fiction with a book that explores what it is to be a novel, but without any preconditions. How far he succeeds is down to the individual reader. But I thought I'd give it a go.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846683661</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ken Follett
|title=Fall of Giants
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=This is a thumping, great read at 850 pages. We meet a clutch of families who are all vastly different in terms of class, outlook, values etc. I have to admit at the outset that this is the first Ken Follett book I've read even although two of his previous books are in my ever-growing 'to read' pile. So although I know of him, my reading expectations were wide-open.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0230710077</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Linda Sargent
|title=Paper Wings
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=In a wood in Kent two children played happily and as is the way with children they sometimes went where they shouldn't, but it was the nineteen fifties and the worry was more about whether they would injure themselves by falling down an abandoned well than the problems which we worry over half a century later. It was a place for plans and games, projects they didn't always tell their parents about and generally growing up. Ruby loved climbing trees and longed to fly. Peter was more sensible but the pair were inseparable.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956483305</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Michelle Paver
|title=Dark Matter
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=It's January 1937 and dark clouds of impending war are gathering over Europe. Jack Miller is in London, working as a clerk and living in one lonely room. He should probably think himself lucky because many people have neither job nor home in this Great Depression, but he doesn't. He feels lonely and isolated and angry that a career in research physics was snatched away from him by economic circumstance. So when the chance of becoming the wireless operator for an Arctic expedition comes along, he jumps at it - even though the team comprises of the exact privileged young men he most resents.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1409123782</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Janet Evanovich
|title=Wicked Appetite
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Take one rather ditzy girl. Add a funny, extrovert friend, and another, more sensible one. Stir in two seriously attractive men, an unhinged pet or two, a slapstick plot and an unending series of cars. What have you got? A Janet Evanovich novel! This has been the formula for the winning 'Stephanie Plum' series for years, about a hopelessly incompetent bounty hunter who never quite manages to choose between the two hunks in her life, and it has given much pleasure and amusement. But even the best formulas get stale, so this year Ms Evanovich has branched out into something new. Well, almost.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755352769</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alan Hamilton
|title=Two Unknown
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The story is based 'between the wars', the 1920s to be exact. We're introduced to the main characters: a small family unit of mother, father and two children. On the surface this normal, middle-class set-up all appears fine - but underneath, things are far from fine. The father, Ian is actually the step-father to the twins. And through various detailed and sometimes unusually lengthy parent-child conversations and chats the reader is filled in with the background story. A bit staccato in places, I have to admit.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907230130</amazonuk>
}}
