==Literary fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Andrew Miller
|title=Pure
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I've read Miller's ''Oxygen'' and ''The Optimists'' so I was looking forward to reading this novel. The story opens in the opulence of the Palace of Versailles. We are given vivid descriptions of both the scale of the palace and its grandeur. Jean-Baptiste Baratte, the young engineer, seems completely over-awed by the whole occasion. Even although he's not entirely sure what is expected of him in Paris, he accepts. He needs to eat, after all.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444724258</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Anne Enright
|summary=I first came across Howl as a short film animating one of Ginsberg's own recordings of it. If memory serves, it was a scratchy, jazzy piece, full of spiky, spunky shapes and movements, and low on colour. Now for 2011 and for Penguin Modern Classics' first ever 'graphic novel' comes a very different animation. OK, the real moving animation is only to be seen in the movie Howl, but to call this merely an illustrated companion to the film is to be very unflattering.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141195703</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tim Pears
|title=Disputed Land
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In this engaging novel, Tim Pears tackles many challenging themes: sibling rivalry, time and change in the countryside, facing terminal illness, reflections on the isolation of academic life and undertaking risky financial investment. This is not a portrayal of a rural idyll although much of the most lyrical writing concerns the colours of the Shropshire countryside and this is strengthened by reference to the layers of the archaic past that underlies this disputed borderland territory. In attempting such a multi-layered narrative in a relatively short novel, it is not surprising that for instance, the traumatic shocks in the epic tale are diminished by random, experimental shifts in the tone of the narrative.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0434020818</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Denis Kehoe
|title=Walking on Dry Land
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ana has grown up mostly in Portugal, but now lives in Dublin where she teaches film studies and is writing her PHD. However, she was born in Anglola (then a Portuguese colony), the result of an extra-marital relationship of her father, who then adopted her with his wife. When her adopted mother, Helena, dies, she decides to trace her birth mother in Angola, where her brother now lives, but has nothing much to go on but a photocopy of a photograph of two Angolan girls, one of which may, or may not, be her mother, and a name: Solange Mendes. We follow Ana as she attempts to trace her real mother while in alternating chapters exploring her parents' developing relationship and ultimately how her unusual past evolved.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687810</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Camilla Gibb
|title=The Beauty of Humanity Movement
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The novel opens with an elderly man as he scrapes a meagre living in Vietnam. He is really dirt-poor but I could tell that he still had his pride. He's not afraid of hard work. In fact, gruelling days of labour and very early risings have been the norm for him since he was a young boy. His passion is cooking. Nothing is too much trouble in order to create his famous Vietnamese noodle soup. And there's a terrific line on the back cover which says 'They say that the history of Vietnam can be found in a bowl of pho and Old Man Hu'ng makes the best in all Hanoi'. We get some background on Hu'ng and discover that his life has been hard, very hard. But he doesn't complain, it's simply not in his nature. Such is the pull and the draw of Gibb's lovely, lyrical writing that I was drawn right into the life of this enchanting elderly man right from the start of the book. Gibb feeds us tiny morsels about Vietnam on a regular basis: the culture, the people, the troubled history for example, but it's written in such effortless prose that it's a joy to read. And her descriptions are so apt, so poetic and so original (but without being in your face) that it all shines on the page. I gobbled it all up.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848877935</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Szalay
|title=Spring
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Narrated from a variety of points of view, ''Spring'' relates the relationship of James and Katherine. He is an often failed entrepreneurial character who falls for the charms of Katherine, currently working in a London luxury hotel as an interim job, and separated from her photographer-husband. The problem for James is that Katherine is only interested in the pursuit of that perfect happiness scenario and so analyses her feelings constantly - much to the distress of James. But this is a lot more than a 'males don't understand females' tale.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224091263</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Manuel Rivas
|title=Books Burn Badly
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I normally start with a brief summary of the novel I’m reviewing, but Rivas’ sprawling epic is close to impossible to do anything ‘brief’ with. While it starts in 1881, it’s the book burning witnessed by Hercules the boxer during the Spanish Civil War in 1936 which gives this novel its title and it floats through several other eras, eventually finishing more than a century after it started. Along the way, we meet a young washerwoman who sees souls in the river, Olinda the matchgirl, Gabriel the stammerer, and the Judge of Oklahoma, star of a series of Western novels Gabriel’s father reads.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099520338</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Edward Hogan
|title=The Hunger Trace
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=We're plunged into a crisis straight away. Some of the animals from the wildlife park have escaped and are now running amok. They are Maggie's responsibility and she has to try to round them up without danger to either human or themselves. It's a tough, physical duty so it's a good job she can rely on her neighbour Louisa as an extra pair of hands. Christopher is unreliable to say the least, he's never there when you need him. But is Louisa any better?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847371248</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Stephen Kelman
|title=Pigeon English
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Eleven-year-old Harri is the fastest boy in Year 7. It's true. He won the race and everything. Harri is quite new to London. He, his mother and his big sister Lydia have come from Ghana to make a new life and live on the ninth floor of a tower block on a sink estate. Harri's father and little sister Agnes are still in Ghana, saving up the air fare, which is taking quite a long time. Agnes is beginning to talk already.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408810638</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Linden MacIntyre
|title=The Bishop's Man
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Duncan MacAskill (he eschews the title ''Father'' whenever he can get away with it) is ostensibly dean of a Catholic university in Nova Scotia. It's a job he enjoys. Approaching fifty years of age, he is, in general, happy with his life.
But the Catholic Church is strong on history and MacAskill cannot escape his own. The son of a bastard father and a foreign mother, he was lucky even to be able to follow his vocation and enter the church at all. For most of his career he has been "The Bishop's Man".
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224089722</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Aamer Hussein
|title=The Cloud Messenger
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Mehran, growing up in Karachi, hears his father and sister speaking about London all the time, as if it were an exotic location. He ends up living there as an adult, but in the rainy, dreary climate he turns back to the poetry of his homeland, dreaming of other places. As he travels between Italy, India, Pakistan and London we watch his relationships grow and die and wonder if he will ever truly find a place where he'll feel that he belongs.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846590892</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=P G Wodehouse
|title=The Crime Wave at Blandings
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=There's a crime wave at Blandings Castle and bumbling Lord Emsworth is right at its centre. This is somewhat surprising as Emsworth (or 'Clarence!' to his sister Constance) is really only happy when he's reading his favourite book, Whiffle's 'The Care of the Pig'. It frequently soothes where other restoratives fail. The problem began with an air rifle and an unwanted tutor, but before the afternoon was out most of the inhabitants of Blandings Castle seemed to have shot, been shot at or left. If it hadn't been written by P G Wodehouse it would all be most confusing.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141196289</amazonuk>
}}
