==General fiction==
__NOTOC__
{{newreview
|author=Nicholas Hogg
|title=The Hummingbird and the Bear
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Sam Taylor seems to have a charmed life – a City job that brings him wealth and prestige, a wonderful fiancée and a lovely London home. But all this can't compensate for a childhood that contained great sorrow; he is haunted by a sense of being somehow incomplete. When a chance encounter at a wedding brings a new woman into this life, he begins to hope that he has found everything he really needs.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184901647X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Lisa Jewell
|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=Ed Siegle
|title=Invisibles
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The closest Brighton usually gets to Brazil is in the pages of a dictionary, but in ''Invisibles'' the two are drawn together in the life of Joel Burns, a thirty-five year old dentist who lives in Brighton as does his mother, Jackie, and partner Debbie from whom he is separated. When Joel sees a news clip of a bus hijack in Rio de Janeiro, where Joel and Jackie lived until Joel was ten, he is convinced that one of the bystanders is his Brazilian father. What makes this more unusual is that Jackie has always told Joel that his father is dead, although Joel has never quite bought into this story which is at least part of the cause of his problems with Debbie. The solution? Head off to Rio and see if he can track down this person.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956559913</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Michael Dhillon
|title=The Cuckoo Parchment and the Dyke
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Tristan Jarry is the world's most famous artist but he's rather moved on from selling his work for millions and has just kidnapped Angelique Burr, the step-daughter of the President of the United States. She's not an innocent child but an abused and abusing woman, now a journalist and at times well able to hold her own with Jarry. He's got helpers though - and forward planning - and it's not long before Angelique finds herself involved in a trail of destruction and death as Jarry works towards his purpose. He intends to resurrect Dada, the iconic movement founded in 1916 in Zurich with the intention of protesting against the war. He'll tell Angelique so much – but not what he finally intends to do.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849235104</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Leo Benedictus
|title=The Afterparty
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=I opened the front cover and was confronted with the lines 'This book is different. You've really never read a book like this before.' Confident words, I thought but will the book live up to this lofty expectation I now had? And when I got round to reading the notes at the end of the novel, I was pleasantly surprised and also rather taken aback, I have to say. So, a refreshing take on the modern work of fiction, I thought, as I started on Chapter One.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>022409114X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Baddiel
|title=The Death of Eli Gold
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Eli Gold is recognized as the 'the greatest living writer' - although his claim to this is slipping by by the day as he is on his death bed. He's not a nice character - his attitudes to his five wives and his children are deplorable and he has been bound up in his own 'genius'. He's a bit like the best and the worst of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Norman Mailer combined. Now dying in hospital in New York, the book explores this event from the perceptive of four people in his life; his eight year old, precocious daughter by his current wife; his first wife watching on the news from an old people's home in England; the angst-ridden son of his third marriage, himself a pale imitation of the author that his father is; and a mysterious fourth character who appears to have a very different motive for seeing Gold snr and who may be linked to Gold's fourth wife who died in a mutual suicide pact with her then-husband, from which Eli survived. (In fact his identity is revealed in the publisher's blurb on the jacket, but I'll let you decide if you want to know this or to let the story unfold as I did).
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007270836</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alma Katsu
|title=The Taker
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=When Dr Luke Findley begins his nightshift at Aroostook County Hospital in St Andrews, Maine, things are quiet until Lanny McIlvrae is brought in by the police. Lanny is covered in blood and claims she has killed a man and left him in the woods. Desperate to escape, Lanny quickly asks for Luke's help, but he is not sure at first, so Lanny decides to tell Luke her life story, a story that begins in the early Puritan settlement of St Andrews in 1809 and spans nearly two hundred years, taking Lanny from her home to Boston and beyond. A story that is rich, imaginative and entirely authentic, filling the majority of the novel, and there wasn't a moment when I questioned her reliability as she tells Luke everything, chapter by chapter, as he helps her to escape, slowly drawing him and the reader into her world.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846058171</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Aimee Bender
|title=The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The title of this novel first caught my eye. How can food feel emotions?
Actually, it is Rose who discovers that when she is eating she can taste the feelings of the person who cooked or prepared the food. I was a bit worried that this initial gimmick of the book from which the title is taken would become annoying, but really this is another very well-written and readable novel about growing up in a dysfunctional family. Rose is about to turn 9 at the beginning, and comes home to find her mother making her birthday cake. She can't resist tasting the cake, and at first it is delicious: 'Warm citrus-baked batter lightness enfolded by cool deep dark swirled sugar'. But then she has 'the sensation of shrinking, of upset, tasting a distance I somehow knew was connected to my mother'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>009953827X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Guillaume Musso
|title=Where Would I Be Without You?
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=I love the cover, which I think angles this book firmly towards women. With that old Beach Boys hit from the Sixties as the title, it encapsulates everything you need to know when choosing this book. It's not really crime fiction, in that it lacks a whodunnit aspect in favour of following the protagonists, a French cop and a Scottish master criminal, through a romantic entanglement and into the jaws of death. The interest is in which of the two men will gain command of the other – and who is really driving the action – when both their attentions are focused on the same girl.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906040346</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mischa Hiller
|title=Shake Off
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=''Shake Off'' is the latest from the pen of Mischa Heller, a student of the John Le Carre universe where the Spies had to Come In From The Cold. Set in the 80s against a backdrop of daggers and cloaks, wests and easts and defectors and double agents, Heller's protagonist, Michel Khoury, hooked on pain killers and posing as a student, has been tasked with the unlikely mission of scouting for a Cambridge location in which to host secret talks between those Palestinians and Israelis who seek a 'secular democratic state for Jews, Christians and Muslims'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846590884</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sarah Winman
|title=When God Was A Rabbit
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=When God Was a Rabbit is a book that tugs at the emotions in a sweet but uncompromising way. It's in no way a RomCom but if you are a fan of that genre of film, I would suggest that you might too enjoy this book as it shares many of the traits if not the storyline. The analogy to a movie is apposite too as first time author Sarah Winman's 'day job' is as an actor - she has appeared recently in Holby City, for example.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755379284</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sam Meekings
|title=The Book of Crows
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Having lived in China for a substantial period of time, Sam Meekings has clearly soaked up a great deal of the culture; something he has already put to great effect in his first book, [[Under Fishbone Clouds by Sam Meekings|Under Fishbone Clouds]]. In The Book of Crows, his third book, he continues to show his talent as a non-Chinese raconteur of Chinese culture, but goes one step further by telling a story that spans several periods of Chinese history, thereby giving the reader a glimpse into different people's lives.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846971721</amazonuk>
}}
