==Literary fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Andrew Kaufman
|title=The Tiny Wife
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It all begins with a bank robbery. Only this isn't your typical sort of bank robbery since the robber demands not money but instead each person in the bank must give him the item of most sentimental value that they have with them. These range from photographs and a key through to a calculator...and on taking these items he says he is also taking fifty percent of their souls, and it is up to the victims to find the way to get their souls back, or to die trying.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007429258</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|summary=Ari is just nineteen, of Greek descent but living in Melbourne with his family. He's gay, unemployed and not in education. He wants to get away from the traditional Greek life of his parents and their friends but has no idea how to do it. He falls back on the only life that he knows: clubs, parties, anonymous sex, a cocktail of drugs and alcohol. But will even this be enough to dull the pain? Told vividly in the first person and sexually explicit it's a short book – a novella – which grabs you and has no intention of letting you go until it spits you out at the other end.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099757710</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alain Mabanckou
|title=Memoirs of a Porcupine
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The protagonist of this novel is an ordinary Congolese porcupine until Papa Kibandi performs an ancient ritual involving a hallucinogenic cocktail called ''mayamvumbi'', and transforms him into his son's harmful double. The insecure younger Kibandi becomes more and more embittered as his life goes on, and sends his porcupine to 'eat' anybody he feels the least bit threatened by, a process whereby that person's life essence is sucked out, killing them instantly. Over one hundred victims later and following his master's death at the hands of a vengeful baby, our narrator retires to the hollow of a baobab tree where he writes this confessional.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687675</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Julie Myerson
|title=Then
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The front cover is graphic and telling. A frozen London with its skyscrapers emitting black smoke and random fires across a desolate landscape. As early as the second paragraph we see that something is wrong, something cataclysmic has happened with the lines ''People are eating the birds ... fighting over a handful of scorched sparrows.'' The story is told in the first person by the central character which gives it immediacy and draws the reader straight in.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224093754</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|title=Whatever
|author=Michel Houellebecq
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Interviewed by BBC film critic Mark Kermode shortly before his 60th birthday, Woody Allen gave the bequiffed one this somewhat startling piece of advice, ''You get to my age, you realise that when you die you're really not losing that much.'' Those words sprang to mind while reading ''Whatever'', first novel by Michel Houellebecq. The main protagonist in ''Whatever'' may be only half the age of the film director, but the outlook on life shared by both men seems strikingly similar.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687845</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|title=Sag Harbor
|author=Colson Whitehead
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Colson Whitehead wanted to write something personal for his fourth book, so he chose an autobiographical novel, based on his experiences as a vacationing youngster. Sag Harbor really does exist - at the far end of Long Island and next to the up-market Hamptons. It has a history of whaling and an association with John Steinbeck. Within easy reach of New York, in 1985 it was an affluent black enclave within a large, white middle-class holiday area.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099531887</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Carlos Alba
|title=The Songs of Manolo Escobar
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Antonio is the second-born son to Spanish parents, living in Glasgow. He's embarrassed to be anything other than Scottish, and he tries everything to hide his family background from friends at school, refusing to speak Spanish with his parents and struggling to forge his own identity in life. In his middle age, he suddenly finds his life falling apart around him as his marriage begins to fail and his increasingly frail father becomes obsessed with the proper burial of his parents back in Spain. Antonio continues to play a rather emotionally distant part in his parents' lives, but then finds himself drawn further and further into the truth about his father's past which, ultimately, leads him to question his own past and the path his future might take.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184697173X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ann Patchett
|title=State of Wonder
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Anders Eckman is dead. The news has been delivered in the form an aerogram – remember those blue paper-cum-envelope things we used to use to write to foreign pen-pals when the notion of befriending a person you'd never met in a foreign country still seemed exotic?
This flimsy piece of paper was delivered to Eckman's employers. After all it was them that had sent him down to the Brazilian Amazon to find the enigmatic and evasive Dr Annik Swenson, and more precisely find out exactly how she was getting on with developing the drug that was costing the firm so much of their research budget.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408818590</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jean Rhys
|title=Wide Sargasso Sea
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In the late eighteen thirties the father of an English gentleman conspires to marry him off to a landed Jamaican Creole as a means of giving his second son an estate and stopping him being a burden on the family. Written in the nineteen sixties, 'Wide Sargasso Sea' was inspired by Rochester's first wife in ''Jane Eyre'', and is an impressionistic, hallucinatory account of that woman's alienation and subsequent descent into madness that can be read as a prequel to the Bronte novel. The book covers Antoinette's childhood in Jamaica and her honeymoon on a small Caribbean island with her new husband and their domestic servants, and the point of view shifts between Antoinette and her husband.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241951550</amazonuk>
}}
{{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
|title=The Memory of Love
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The setting for this story is a hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, soon after the government has declared an end to an 11 year civil war. How can people come to terms with the terrible things that have happened? Actually, can they come to terms with those things?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408809656</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jenn Ashworth
|title=Cold Light
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''Cold Light'' is the story of three teenage girls who become involved in a predatory adult world. As the story opens we're looking back on what happened from a decade later and we know that one of the girls, Chloë, died in a Valentine's Day suicide pact. The town council has finally decided on a memorial to Chloë – it's to be a summerhouse at the side of the pond where she drowned, although it's difficult to understand quite why anyone would want to sit there. The ground-breaking ceremony is being televised when it becomes obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. But Lola, our narrator, knows that they've found a body. She also knows who it is.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444721445</amazonuk>
}}
