==Literary fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Douglas Kennedy
|title=The Moment
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=After I'd read the blurb on the back cover I gave a bit of a shrug as if to say, well, I've read quite a number of books recently where undying love has been found in war-torn Europe, so was this book going to be different, or better? Thomas Nesbitt, middle-aged, disillusioned with love and more than a tad world-weary is trying to move on in his life. His marriage of more than twenty years is dissolving before his very eyes. But rather than being upset, he's feeling as if a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. He and his wife were never really ''in love'' in the true sense of the phrase, despite having a daughter together. And there's a very good reason as to why Thomas is like this and the rest of the book tells us why, warts and all.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091795842</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Aminatta Forna
|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>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Martin Amis
|title=The Pregnant Widow
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The bulk of ''The Pregnant Widow'' is set in the summer of 1970 in a beautiful Italian castle where the almost 21 year old Keith Nearing, an English Literature student, has come to spend the summer with his on/off girlfriend Lily and her more physically attractive best friend Scheherazade. Amongst the other attendees are a gay couple, a short Italian suitor to the ample chested Scheherezade who is waiting for the arrival of her boyfriend and, critically for the story the ample bottomed Gloria and eventually her rich boyfriend. If this all sounds like one of those enviously indulgent, middle class, sex filled summer of love stories, then partly it is, but this being Martin Amis, there's a lot more depth and sadness attached to the story. It's an investigation into the changing roles of females and particularly their attitudes to sex, and for Keith in particular, the long term implications of this idyllic vacation are not going to be happy and Amis provides a 'what happened next' to bring each of his characters up to present day.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099488736</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Louise Welsh
|title=Naming the Bones
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Murray Watson is a Doctor of English Literature embarking on a year-long sabbatical to pursue his long-held dream of writing the definitive biography of Archie Lunan and, as a specifically intended by-product, restore Lunan's poetry to its rightful place in the high canon of Scots creativity.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847672566</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nicole Krauss
|title=Great House
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''Great House'' is unashamedly literary in style and while undoubtedly not everyone's cup of tea, it's hard not to admire the cleverness of Krauss. It also covers such broad issues that it's not the easiest of books to sum up in a few words. Certainly, to enjoy this book you will need to have a tolerance for cerebral fiction. You will also need to appreciate the role of the book in commenting on aspects of the human condition rather than just telling a good story. This is most certainly not a plot driven book. You should also be prepared that the stories told are unremittingly dark, sad, and almost oppressively depressing. But while all of this sounds negative, the payoff is a book of exceptional cleverness and shot through with lovely and often beautifully observed writing about the human condition and in particular about memory. It would be wrong to say that it's cerebral with no heart: there's plenty of emotional heart here, but unless you buy into the cerebral game, then it's a book that will infuriate you before you reach it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670919322</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ruta Sepetys
|title=Between Shades of Gray
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The central character, a teenage girl called Lina: her younger brother and mother are being forced from their home. All is confusion, suspicion and fear but they obey orders anyway. To disobey would be to lose their lives. Torture or murder - or both. Unthinkable. The small family unit of three mix with many other families caught up in this situation. They collect in the streets and are rounded up - like sheep. It will be some time before any of them feel remotely like human beings. Their names are on some sort of 'list'. Even a young mother who has just given birth, is manhandled on to the waiting transport.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141335882</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Gail Jones
|title=Five Bells
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It is a lovely sunny day in Circular Quay, a tourist hotspot in Sydney, Australia. This novel is about the thoughts and memories of four people, three women and a man who visit the place that day. None are locals. Ellie and James were teenage lovers in Western Australia, and are meeting up again after not seeing each other for years. Catherine has recently come to the city from Ireland. Pei Xing is a Chinese immigrant, now settled in Sydney. The novel is full of descriptive visual imagery from the first page onwards, and it is significant that three of the four characters are seeing Circular Quay for the first time.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846554020</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Philippe Claudel and Euan Cameron
|title=Monsieur Linh and His Child
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=From a war-ravaged country a bit like a Vietnam or a Cambodia an old man carries the fragile frame of his granddaughter aboard a refugee's ship, staring at the receding horizon all the weeks it takes to arrive at a city a bit like a Seattle or a New York. He and she are given the basics of a new life together but it's up to him, Monsieur Linh, to find friendship, which he does, accepting uncomprehendingly the chatty company of a fellow mourner called Bark.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906694990</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kathleen Winter
|title=Annabel
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The back cover blurb has praise for this debut novel from two of my favourite authors: [[:Category:Joseph O'Connor|Joseph O'Connor]] and [[:Category:A L Kennedy|A L Kennedy]] so things were definitely off to a good start. The front cover is rather unsettling (as it's meant to be) - some may say disturbing: it's of an adolescent, but neither male nor female but rather a fusion of the two sexes. And the question is right up there before I've even opened the book - how would such an individual (and family members and society as a whole) deal and interact with such a person. It's not an easy question to answer, if I'm honest.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224091271</amazonuk>
}}
{{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
|title=Howl: A Graphic Novel
|rating=4.5
|genre=Graphic Novels
|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>
}}
