==Literary fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Karen Russell
|title=Swamplandia!
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ava Bigtree is a teenage alligator wrestler. Her older sister Ossie is in love with a ghost. They have grown up on a Florida island theme park with their parents, their grandfather and their big brother Kiwi. Now though, all they have known is threatened. Their mother Hilola was the star attraction, but she died a few months before, not in the jaws of an alligator but of ovarian cancer. As well as being the glamorous figure on billboards who everyone came to see, she ran the show and did all the jobs that needed to be done, and the family is lost without her.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>070118602X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Allen Ginsberg
|summary=Erika is a single woman in her thirties, who, despite the best efforts of her mother, did not succeed as a concert musician, but instead works as a teacher at the Vienna Conservatory. I say best efforts, I mean outright pressure. Erika and her mother make for an unusual relationship - the older relying on the glory, company and complete obedience of the younger, the daughter sharing a bed with her mother even at this stage of her life. All this is until a young student at the school decides he will be a younger lover for Erika, and forces his will into the household. But who, should such a relationship actually form, is going to be the power-maker?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687373</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Maria Angels Anglada
|title=The Auschwitz Violin
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=In Poland in the early 1990s, a violin sings. The maestro who owns it produces such a music from it, people are forced to take note. They'd be even more amazed if she could bring herself to state exactly how the instrument came to be. For this was the work of Daniel, suffering in a subsidiary camp to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Stumbles, chances, half-lies, all conspire to allow Daniel to take time off his enforced labour and engage in his real-world career. But is there a price to pay in doing something you love, just for a man you can only hate?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849016437</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Antonio Tabucchi
|title=Pereira Maintains
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The summer of 1938 was particularly hot and oppressive in Lisbon and Dr Pereira was suffering. He was overweight to start with and the situation wasn't helped by the amount of sugary lemonade which he drank. He was the cultural editor of an undistinguished newspaper and felt over-burdened by the amount of content he had to produce but this was better than the political side of the paper as he was sure that he wanted nothing to do with European politics. Something of a recluse, his closest, indeed only, confidante was a picture of his dead wife. All that was about to change when he met Francesco Monteiro Rossi - a strangely charismatic young man who would bring Pereira to the point of committing an act of reckless rebellion.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847675719</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chloe Aridjis
|title=Book of Clouds
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=We first meet the main character (she's mentioned on almost every page) Tatiana as a newish resident of Berlin. She's Mexican so quite a difference in cultures for her to deal with, as well as the weather aspect. Many episodes in her life seem to take place in a Berlin which is bitterly cold. Aridjis chooses the first person for her novel, so we hear everything from Tatiana's perspective.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099539594</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Horace McCoy
|title=They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Many of us will know of the release of the film of the same title back in the 1960s. I haven't seen the film so I started reading with no ready-made opinions about the book. Likewise, I had no idea how the attention-grabbing title bore any relation to a book about dance. I was about to find out. It's both arresting and simple. The book cover and also the inside front cover are littered with praise for this book. 'The first existentialist novel to have appeared in America' says one writer. 'Takes the reader into one of America's darkest corners ...' from another source. So, I was expecting a terrific read. But did I get it?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184668739X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Vann
|title=Caribou Island
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Irene and Gary went to Alaska many years ago and somehow they stayed there, probably through inertia, and they raised two children. Rhoda loves animals and is keen that her boyfriend, Jim the dentist, should marry her. She half knows that he's not that reliable but it's what she's set on. Irene and Gary's son, Mark, lives with his girlfriend, Karen and it seems that the only thing they're serious about is not taking life too seriously. It's probably understandable when you look at Gary. He's self-involved, selfish and dishonest with himself. Irene has her problems too. She's never really got over going home when she was ten years old and finding her mother hanging from the rafters.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>067091844X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Lloyd Jones
|title=Hand Me Down World
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ines – although it's a little while before we know her by that name – has quite a story to tell, but we don't hear it from her. We listen to the stories told by people who knew her. They might have worked with her at a hotel on the Arabian Sea or in Tunisia. They might have known her name, but nothing quite so personal as her birthday. She was a good worker, used to anticipating what the guests would need but otherwise being invisible. This might have gone on indefinitely, but she met Jermayne, black like Ines, who taught her to swim. He also gave her what she thought was love and a child, which he then abducted. Ines' story is her journey to Berlin to retrieve her son.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848544782</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Peter Carey
|title=Parrot and Olivier in America
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Olivier de Garmont is a young, French aristocrat who is drugged by the enigmatic Marquis de Tilbot, a close friend of Olivier's monarchist mother, and dispatched to the safety of the emerging United States to avoid the 1830 July Revolution, and the threat of the dreaded guillotine, in his native France. At least nominally his task while there is to prepare a report on the American penal system on behalf of the French government, a task for which he has little interest or indeed talent. Tilbot also dispatches his servant, an older British man, John Larrit, known to everyone as Parrot, to act as Oliver's secretary, servant, translator and to spy on Olivier for both his mother and Tilbot. They are an ill-matched pair, from opposite sides of the social spectrum but in democratic America, this relationship develops in ways that neither of them would expect. The story is told in alternating voices of these two main characters.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571253296</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Emmanuel Carrere
|title=A Russian Novel
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=We meet Carrere as part of a small film crew. One minute they're in France, the next they're in the midst of poverty, freezing temperatures and the utter desolation of a Russian town, miles from anywhere. Carrere back-pedals for the sake of his readers, explaining that he has family connections with Russia. But, as an intelligent and educated man, he also wonders what the hell he's doing here. He's relinquished the comforts of his life in France for what - grey sheets and terrible food. He must be mad.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846680859</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=Raymond Carver
|title=Beginners
|rating=4.5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary= One thing you soon surmise from reading Raymond Carver is that he was an alcoholic. Carver's characters tend to drink excessively, and his stories often examine the negative impact of drinking on his central character's relationships. But nowadays, what we talk about when we talk about Carver is the role of his editor, Gordon Lish.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099540320</amazonuk>
}}
