'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
__NOTOC__
{{newreview
|author=Vivian French and Selina Young
|title=The Kitten With No Name
|rating=4
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=''The Kitten With No Name'' lives under a hedge with his mummy. It's a very big hedge but it's very cosy and The Kitten's mummy has told him that one day, they will all go and live in a new home with someone who will love them both and hug them just the right amount.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444000780</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Rachel Hawkins
|summary=Four billion years after our Sun has become a red giant and died, taking all life with it, there are still humans in the universe. How so? By man-made panspermia. When Earth's civilisation realised it couldn't master long distance space travel in sufficient time to avoid annihilation, it sent out DNA probes filled with bacteria far out into space, to planets in the temperate zones of solar systems; planets that could potentially sustain life. And on eight planets, sustain life they did.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956202713</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Elizabeth Speller
|title=The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton
|rating=4.5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=I reviewed and thoroughly enjoyed Speller's [[The Return of Captain John Emmett by Elizabeth Speller|The Return Of Captain John Emmett]] so I was really keen to get stuck into the follow-up. The main character, officer Laurence Bartram is also an important character in the previous book, but both are stand-alone novels in their own right. The front cover is evocative and is also as pretty as a picture - literally. With its intriguing title which had me asking all sorts of questions before I'd even opened the book, it was a good start.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844086313</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Delphine de Vigan
|title=Underground Time
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Mathilde is unhappy at work. More than just unhappy actually, because after expressing an opinion different to her boss he has frozen her out of the team and bullied her mentally and emotionally for months. Mathilde is a woman on the edge of breaking point, feeling increasingly brow-beaten by both the demands of city life and her awful boss. Meanwhile Thibault is an emergency on-call doctor, racing from one district to another through the nightmares of Parisian traffic, unhappy in his relationship and also struggling, mentally, to survive. Will today be the day that changes everything?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408811111</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Annette Hart
|title=Blood and Allegiance
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Bryony was orphaned when she was very young and since then has lived in the Abbey at Ambleton, but once she reached her fourteenth birthday her cousin, Unwin, King of Athlandia, required that she join him at court. She lost the only friends she had known, her clothes were replaced with much grander garments and she became a part of the inner circle of the court. It wasn't long before she realised that her cousin was far from benevolent – but he was fighting an uprising and perhaps what he was doing was necessary. Then Milly, her maid, is punished for stepping slightly out of line and Bryony realises how little she knows of other people in Kynbury and even of the history of her own family.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1903491797</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Quintin Jardine
|title=The Loner
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Jardine starts with some background on Xavier Aislado. Even at school in Edinburgh, his bulk and rather serious manner ensures that he sails through his academic courses. This is against the odds of a chaotic life at home. His Spanish father's a bit of a cold fish, his Scottish mother is as meek as a church mouse so Xavier (or Xavi) is really guided and nurtured by his rather ferocious grandmother, Paloma. Even I was afraid of her. She takes no prisoners, wears the trousers in the Aislado household (in both Spain and Scotland) and speaks her mind every time. Although there are certain areas which are out of bounds. But I also loved her too. Jardine has created a terrific character in Paloma, in particular.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755357167</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jenny Nimmo
|title=The Secret Kingdom
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Protected by a moon cloak, a ring, and three mysteriously powerful leopards, Timoken the magician and his camel Gabar seek a new home after the boy is forced to flee the secret kingdom. But will they ever find peace with the vicious viradees on their trail? This prequel to the Charlie Bone series contains new and old characters, including a couple of brief cameos from Charlie himself, but is well worth reading as a stand-alone or introduction to the series if you've never heard of it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1405257326</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Siri Hustvedt
|title=The Summer Without Men
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Sometime after Mia's husband of thirty years, Boris, suggests a marriage 'pause', Mia goes mad and finds herself in a psychiatric hospital. Although this Brief Psychotic Disorder does not last long, she remains fragile and retreats to the town in Minnesota where she was brought up and where her elderly mother still lives. While Boris cavorts with the Pause, she struggles through the summer, learning to live without him. She builds relationships with her mother's friends, with her neighbours and with a group of teenage girls who form her creative writing class. Written in the first person, the book catalogues her progress using these friendships, her past, her reading and her shrink, Dr S.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444710524</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Edward Docx
|title=The Devil's Garden
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Set on a research station in an unnamed Amazonian country (although by the indigenous tribes mentioned, this is probably Peru), this first person narrative story is told by Dr Forle, who has come to the area to study ants - specifically the strange phenomenon of a type of ant that appear to destroy their own environment. It's sort of ants on the deck in the jungle, if you like. However the scientific study is interrupted by the arrival of an army colonel and a judge, who at least on the surface of things is there to organize the registration of the local tribes. However when the doctor witnesses a clear act of violence by the soldiers accompanying the colonel, he becomes more engaged with the local goings on.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330463500</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mary Horlock
|title=The Book of Lies
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Catherine Rozier is fifteen years old and she has a secret.
Secrets are a big thing on Guernsey, the small Channel Isle that is only three miles across at one point with a population a little over 65,000 i.e. somewhat more than Hereford, considerably less than Lincoln, or about half that of Norwich or Preston. Unlike any of those towns, Guernsey is an island. It is self-contained. It isn't just that everyone knows everyone else; they're almost certainly, quite closely, related.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847678858</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alexi Zentner
|title=Touch
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Stephen, an Anglican priest is writing a story of three generations, a haunting tale of his childhood set in Sawgamet, an isolated clearing in the snowy forest expanse of North West Canada. It is the evening before his mother's funeral. One loss brings up earlier losses; relating this deeply poignant tale he relates the disastrous event of his father's attempts to rescue his sister, Marie, when on a skating expedition she falls through a dark hole in the thin ice at the turbulent confluence of two rivers. His terrified sister looks towards her father who plunges into the water and both perish in a catastrophe. Consequently, Stephen is to struggle with for many years to in some way to come to terms with this severe trauma. His grandfather, Jeannot, a resilient settler is a stalwart figure who keeps returning protectively into Stephen's life in order to resurrect his own lost love, Martine from the hereafter. This love between Jeannot and Stephen's grandmother, Martine, and also that between Jeannot's brother and future wife blossom through magical events involving the metamorphosis of gold, trees and mountains which move, and malevolent 'qualuplillumits' ogres from a richly various panoply of magical realism.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701185465</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Yoko Ogawa
|title=Hotel Iris
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=When I read [[The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa|The Housekeeper and the Professor]] by Ogawa I fell completely in love with the book. It was gentle, and beautifully written. ''Hotel Iris'' is very, very different and really ought to have a warning label on the cover for those who simply recognise the author's name and pick it up hoping for more! This is the story of a seventeen year old girl who is seduced by an old man in a sadistic, distressing manner.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548992</amazonuk>
}}
